‘Stop the war on
the American mind’

One of the people marching in Honesdale against a war in Iraq carried a sign, a photograph of which appears in this week’s paper, calling for an end of the war on the American mind.

The war on terrorism that our country has taken on since last September’s attack on the World Trade Center has been unlike any other that I’ve experienced as an adult.

I’ve lived through several incidents where American military forces have been involved. Other than Vietnam, most of them were relatively short.

But they were also different because they were fought in somebody else’s backyard.

Before September 11, we hadn’t had a wartime blow struck against the continental United States since the War of 1812.

Suddenly, we discovered we were not really as safe as we had thought ourselves to be. We found that it didn’t take an intercontinental missile or a huge standing army to provide a real threat. Threats could come from suicidal airplane hijackers or even one or two sociopaths with a high-powered rifle.

For most Americans, this past year has been one of the most disturbing and uncomfortable years in our collective experience. Many of us are still suffering the aftereffects of World Trade Center attack. We’re more careful about where we go and examine strange faces in crowds.

The September 11 attack and the recent sniper shootings in Maryland and Virginia were physical terrorism, random murder. By themselves they raise stress levels, but they haven’t been all that we’ve been subjected to.

Aside from the physical attacks, the last year has contained a cavalcade of warnings and threats passed on by our own government, all for own good. I wonder.

We’ve got color codes for threat levels.

We’ve had intermittent vaguely worded high alerts for attacks on unnamed infrastructure, in unknown parts of the country. Bridges, airlines, and most recently railroads have all been listed as threatened. None of these threats, thankfully, has materialized.

So, here’s a question: how much do we really need to know about these shadowy, unsubstantiated threats?

You know there is a possibility of being in an accident every time you get in your car, but is dwelling on it going to make you safer? Probably not.

Still, a lot of spies, law enforcement people, military and other intelligence gathering agencies who deal with threats against our country on a regular basis, wound up looking bad after last September. Lots of people said, “Why didn’t you tell us what you knew?” So now they do. After all, it’s wartime now and that’s their job.

Now that we’re doing high tension, high alert, for a war on terrorism, what does the President decide to do? He wants to go to war to replace Saddam Hussein, who according to Representative Maurice Hinchey’s information (TRR 10/24) from domestic and foreign intelligence agencies, had nothing to do with last September.

Saddam Hussein probably should be replaced. Most everything the President says about him is true. He’s developing weapons of mass destruction like the North Koreans. Are we going to war with them?

He’s killed thousands of his own people. But some of our country’s closest allies in past have been regimes that killed their own people. We were tight with Joe Stalin during World War II and he killed millions in the Soviet Union. We were even buddies with Saddam when we were worried about neighboring Iran.

Now is not the time to replace Saddam. We’ve got troops in Afghanistan and we’re hunting bin Laden and al Qaida all over the world. War in Iraq will almost certainly expand throughout the Middle East. Even its advocates don’t deny that. The U.S. military and the American people have enough to deal with already.

Hinchey says Saddam is a “fixation” with the Bush Administration. We’re inclined to agree. We wonder if President Bush would be so bent on this conflict if Saddam had escaped some other American president ten years ago or if he wasn’t sitting on one of the largest pools of oil in the world.

People and groups often employ the havoc of wartime to settle feuds and grudges. Lines get blurred and the goals get changed. When a nation is angry enough to fight, as we have reason to be, and fearful of unknown threats, as we’ve been told we should be, its much easier to expand a war.

The guy with sign in Honesdale was right. The war that needs to be dealt with, before Iraq, is the war on the American mind.

David Hulse, News Editor