Fort Worth Star-Telegram

Letters to the editor

Sunday, March 11, 2007

“Nearly Four Years Later”

There it was, the newsprint now yellowed with time: my letter of March 29, 2003, against our invasion of Iraq. I was called un-American, anti-Christian and unpatriotic. I was called everything but right!

Some startling changes have taken place. Saddam Hussein, his sons and their brutal regime are gone, replaced by an even worse civil war, a smattering of al Qaeda terrorists but mostly young Iraqis fighting us not as liberators but as occupiers in a broken Iraq.

Around the world, "America the beautiful" is no more. We'll take our place alongside Japan and Germany in having to explain our military aggression far into the future.

George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Donald Rumsfeld, I. Lewis Libby, Condoleezza Rice and even Colin Powell are names that will go down in American history as architects of the worst foreign policy blunder in a century.

Most important, I hope, is that we've learned as a nation that pre-emptive warfare, when our leaders cite the fear of terrorists causing mushroom clouds over American cities, is a lie.

So they took us there against the cry of a lot of voices like mine. What do you do when you find yourself someplace where you shouldn't have been in the first place? You leave.

It's too late now to gracefully leave. Bush and the conservatives have seen to that. You just leave the March madness and welcome your weary warriors home to the heroes' welcome they deserve.

David Perkins, Fort Worth