The hawks in Washington and
elsewhere are willfully ignoring that we are a nation that sprayed tons of
Agent Orange over Vietnam, killing and maiming hundreds of thousands of
Vietnamese civilians and soldiers, as well as many American troops, and causing
birth defects among many of those caught in our years of chemical warfare.
We, of all countries in the
world, should not be threatening death to those who, maybe, have committed a
similar crime.
Our actions in Vietnam began
less than two decades after we dropped two atomic bombs on civilian targets,
murdering hundreds of thousands of people.
Syria is led by an evil
dictator who may or may not have used chemical weapons. And why is this
particular accusation, after years of Bashar Assad’s brutal attacks on his own
people, suddenly a “red line”?
American foreign policy has
always been very selective in whether we treat evil heads of state as friends
or foes. And, we kill democratically elected Lumumbas and Allendes and
willingly support the wicked Mobutus and Pinochets who follow them.
It is long past time for the
Unites States to cease to be the world’s policeman, or, more aptly put, the
world’s biggest and most harmful bully. Let us stop killing horrendous numbers
of civilians and soldiers in countries where we do not belong.
The sanctimonious attitude of
the Obama administration, insisting on the use of chemical weapons by Syria,
sounds sadly and eerily similar to the claims of “weapons of mass destruction”
by the Bush administration in Iraq.
Stop the carnage. Stop using
our people as cannon fodder. Stop killing innocents, thus creating martyrs
determined to cause harm to equally innocent persons on our soil. Let us draw a
“red line” against yet another illegal and immoral act.
Never has it seemed more apt
to recall that, because we are not without sin, we must not cast stones.
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