Dear Editor:I want to respond to Seth Bartee’s article on the “uninformed left.” While I readily admit that there may be a case for war in Iraq, I find attacking the left’s weakest links and basically accusing ‘the left’ of being dumb and opportunistic, hardly a justification for risking millions of young Americans’ lives by sending them into the cities of Iraq to fight a potentially long, bloody and costly war.
I’ll concede that maybe Barbara Streisand is just a staunch partisan who doesn’t happen to be the world’s greatest speller, and maybe Robert Torricelli did engage in campaign finance abuses, but in no way, does this somehow translate into the entire left being “uninformed” and “opportunistic” when it comes to a war that seemingly has no purpose, or at least, none that we have heard of as of yet.
Why are we going to war? I have quite a few friends in the army and must admit, if I lose them for these unknown reasons for going to war, then I’m going to be fairly angry.
The real question is not why Barbara Streisand, who Bartee wishes to establish as dumb and opportunistic, opposes war, but why we are thinking of invading a nation halfway across the world right now without any apparent provocation.
The fact of the matter is no evidence from the Sept. 11 attacks is linked to Saddam Hussein. He seems to pose no direct threat to us, and with the exception of Israel and the United Kingdom, the entire international community is totally opposed to a war.
I’m also getting sick of hearing the hypothetical “Hussein may be able to do this and that in five years” arguments. There is no proof that Hussein has the capability or even the desire to launch an attack on the United States or even on his neighbors in the Middle Eastern region.
In 1990, Saddam Hussein was the warmonger in the Middle East. Who’s the warmonger now? If we go to war with Iraq, most of the world is going to perceive us as the warmonger. We will have no support from the international community that we have been increasingly isolating ourselves from.
Right now, the administration has a lot of speculation to blabber about and no hard facts! The Bush administration wants to fight a war which seems to have no benefit to the average American.
The real question is not whether the Democrats are being politically opportunistic; it is whether they have the guts to challenge the administration’s plans to invade a nation halfway around the globe for no apparent reason.
Jakob Huneycutt

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