Two Letters from the Unsilent Majority

To: President Bush and Senator Kerry

Join Danny Glover, Susan Sarandon, Howard Zinn, and United for Peace and Justice in signing on to these letters—go to http://www.unitedforpeace.org/UnsilentMajority

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Dear Senator Kerry,

"How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"

This is a question you asked the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 22, 1971, testifying against the Vietnam War. If you are elected President of the United States, you will have to answer it. Surely, the war against Iraq, and the escalating disaster of our military occupation, qualify as some of the worst "mistakes" in the history of our nation.

In fact, the invasion of Iraq is the most dangerous and immoral action taken by the U.S. government since the devastation and atrocity in Vietnam. This is a subject you know more about than most, because you were there. Having served, you came home to denounce the evil of that war in language that many still admire for its unsparing honesty.

"How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?" you asked in your testimony to the Senate in 1971. Representing one thousand veterans, you spoke plainly about your "determination to undertake one last mission-to search out and destroy the last vestige of this barbaric war, to pacify our own hearts, to conquer the hate and fear that has driven this country the last ten years or more, so from when 30 years from now our brothers go down a street without a leg, without an arm, or a face, and small boys ask why, we will be able to say `Vietnam' and not mean a desert, not a filthy obscene memory, but mean instead the place where America finally turned and where soldiers like us helped it in the turning." Now your opponents use these words to pillory you, as they try to justify another barbaric war with more "lies and garbage," in the words of General Anthony Zinni, another Vietnam veteran.

In 1971, you showed courage. But now, in 2004, we wait, and the world waits, to see if you will denounce the grave damage that the occupation of Iraq is doing to the United States and the world: the thousands of young men and women in our Armed Forces killed and wounded, the much larger number of dead and injured Iraqis, all caught in a vicious cycle of popular resistance and intensifying repression. Just as in Vietnam, there is no way out of this swamp of violence other than to renounce it. So far, all we have heard from you are politically-calibrated platitudes about staying the course. This is caution, not courage; calculation, not leadership. To our dismay, you have even suggested sending more troops to Iraq, a policy that may require the reinstatement of the draft to sustain.

Senator Kerry, we call on you to show the same courage now that you did in 1971. Tell the people of this country the war was wrong, the occupation is disaster, and that we can have no future as a colonial power. Speak up for what's right, right now. Otherwise, if you are elected, you will have to tell some family, years from now, that their daughter or son was the last one to die defending not simply a "mistake," but a series of lies. You will be known as the president who dragged the U.S. further into a quagmire of countless needless deaths.

We urge you to speak as a winter soldier, not a summer patriot. As you know, a war begun for the wrong reasons cannot be made right. The only way forward is to end this war now.

Sincerely,

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Dear President Bush,

In sending our young men and women to fight, to kill, and to die in Iraq, you have committed a grievous wrong and trampled international law. People from small towns and inner cities, for whom military service was a desperately-needed form of economic mobility, now suffer for your imperial fantasies. We know why you will not be seen in public with the coffins of our war-dead, with the grieving families: you cannot face them.

Instead of bringing freedom to the Iraqi people, you have imposed a colonial occupation. Thousands of Iraqis have lost their lives as "collateral damage" in this war built on lies. Do you think that Iraqi mothers and fathers care any less for their children than you do for yours? When their homes or mosques are rocketed or shelled, do you imagine they thank you? You call them "terrorists" for defending their country, but our troops know better. They understand this is a war of resistance, and that every day the occupation continues they will face more and more Iraqis united in their opposition to foreign domination. Our troops have committed war crimes inside the very prisons where Saddam Hussein tortured his prisoners. How long will it be before our Armed Forces are torn apart by an unjust war, as they were in Vietnam?

You claimed that this war was necessary to avert immediate threats from the government of Saddam Hussein. Now that government is gone, but we are more at risk than before. This war has done nothing to make the United States safer. It has made the world more dangerous. You lied to us and to the world.

The war against Iraq and the corrupt occupation have ruined our standing internationally. Evidently, that matters little to you or your small circle of advisors, but it matters greatly to the rest of us. We cannot function as a healthy democracy, we cannot contribute to peace, we cannot be safe from terrorism in a world community that regards the United States as an outlaw nation.

You have asserted that history does not matter, and that God wanted you to be President. We urge you, as people from every religious and ethical tradition who share a deep faith in democracy, to end this barbarism. Bring our troops home now, end the occupation, and give up your fantasy of permanent domination over the world.

Sincerely,


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Initiated By:United for Peace and Justice,

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