from Jeff Melton

Dear Baron,

Thank you for visiting with us January 23. We look forward to more opportunities to publicly voice our concerns and views in future town hall meetings here in Bloomington. FYI, this is an open letter that I am submitting to several media outlets and e-mail lists in addition to sending to you.

It is by now abundantly clear that opposition to the looming war against Iraq is more widespread than to any U.S. military action since the Vietnam War (and, unlike in the case of Vietnam, has arisen before it has even begun). There is no better indication of the breadth of this opposition than the recent admission by New York Times columnist and ardent hawk Thomas Friedman that in his frequent travels around the country he has yet to speak to an audience where a majority seemed to support war with Iraq.

Even Republican businessmen are running ads in major newspapers opposing this war. Even many of those who commanded the first Gulf War do not favor this one, at least not in the present circumstances. Thus far, nearly 90 City Councils, including Bloomington's, have passed resolutions opposing the war, usually by wide margins.

The breadth and depth of this opposition exists for a reason: Even though many Americans believe the misinformation foisted on them by the Bush Administration and uncritically reported by the mass media, they still do not believe the extreme step of engaging in an unprovoked attack against a country that has not threatened anyone for 12 years is justified or sensible. Many people understandably have the baffled reaction: "Why now?" They are puzzled by the sudden rush to war against Iraq, the sudden and unexplained shift in media and Administration focus from Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda (who were not even mentioned in Bush's recent State of the Union speech) to Saddam Hussein and Iraq, when there is no evidence that anything has changed in Iraq over the last several years. Such an unexplained shift in policy naturally creates suspicion of a hidden agenda, suspicion that the Bush Administration is not leveling with the American people.

Such suspicion is justified by history. There is a long tradition of U.S. administrations misinforming the public and/or Congress in order to justify war or military action. Harry Truman justified Hiroshima after the fact, telling the outrageous lie that: "The first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, in so far as possible, the killing of civilians." Kennedy flat-out denied U.S. intentions prior to the Bay of Pigs, claiming: "I have previously stated and I repeat now that the United States intends no military intervention in Cuba." The most famous whopper of all was Lyndon Johnson's: "As President and Commander in Chief it is my duty to the American people to report that renewed hostile actions against United States ships on the high seas in the Gulf of Tonkin have today required me to order the military forces of the United States to take action in reply." No such Vietnamese attack is believed to have ever taken place, but this fabrication was used to justify a massive escalation in Vietnam. (Incidentally, the aforementioned conservative columnist Thomas Friedman recently said that every time he heard Colin Powell say there's a link between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein and the bin Laden tape proves it, he thinks of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.) In 1990, we had the tall tale of the Iraqi soldiers removing Kuwaiti babies from incubators, the fake satellite photos of Iraqi troops amassing on the Saudi Arabian border, and the ludicrous comparisons of Saddam Hussein to Hitler. Nobody ever mentioned that "Hitler" was a U.S. ally shortly before that when he was using largely U.S.-supplied poison gas to attack Kurds and Iranians. The media plays right along with these lies, only questioning what they are told months or years too late, and never with the same level of coverage as the lies are reported in the first place. (Sometimes, the media creates the lie in the first place, as in 1898 when American papers were full of stories falsely blaming Spain for the explosion that sank the battleship Maine in Havana Harbor. Nobody ever asked what the Maine was doing there in the first place!)

History has, unfortunately, repeated itself. The Bush Administration has repeatedly insisted, contrary to all logic and without any convincing evidence, that Iraq's secular government is allied with al-Qaeda, a fundamentalist religious cult, and was involved in the September 11 terrorist attacks. Both British intelligence and our own CIA have repeatedly insisted that they have no evidence of such a link, and it has often been pointed out that Iraq and al-Qaeda have always been bitter enemies. Indeed, in Osama Bin Laden's recent videotape he calls Saddam Hussein an "infidel" and calls on the Iraqi people to overthrow their government. And these are allies? I wonder what Bin Laden would have said if they were enemies? The camp in Northern Iraq that supposedly has links to al-Qaeda and supposedly manufactures chemical weapons 1) is in an area outside Iraqi government control (but under constant U.S. surveillance), 2) does not have running water, or electricity except from an old generator, and 3) has no connection to al-Qaeda anyway, according to the leader (Mullah Krekar) of the organization that set it up, Ansar al-Islam. Like al-Qaeda, Ansar al-Islam (a small Kurdish nationalist group) is hostile to Saddam Hussein anyway. Unfortunately, the adage that a lie repeated often enough comes to be seen as true has been proven again by the Bush Administration's propaganda barrage concerning Iraq: recent polls find that half of the American people mistakenly believe the September 11 hijackers included one or more Iraqis, and over 2/3 believe the Iraqi government was involved in 9/11 despite the complete lack of evidence for such a conclusion.

You said yourself when you visited Bloomington that there was no evidence in your view that Iraq possessed either nuclear weapons or the technology necessary to produce them. Yet the Bush Administration continues to claim otherwise, still insisting that aluminum tubes that are completely the wrong design for use in a nuclear weapons program, but exactly the right design for use with ordinary rockets Iraq already has, are evidence that Iraq is pursuing nuclear weapons. Powell, Bush, and others are still making this claim even though it has been publicly contradicted by the IAEA's report on Jan. 8, Hans Blix's recent official report on behalf of the inspections team, and on numerous previous occasions by those with expertise in the matter. Again, these lies are typically reported uncritically in the major media, resulting in an astonishing recent poll finding that 41% of the American people incorrectly believed Iraq had nuclear weapons!

U.N. weapons inspectors (whom the Bush Administration falsely claims were "kicked out by Iraq" in 1998 continue to maintain that they have so far found no evidence that Iraq possesses chemical or biological "weapons of mass destruction," despite more extensive inspections than those undertaken in the 1990s which were believed to have resulted in the destruction of the vast majority of Iraq's arsenal (which, to repeat, was initially obtained largely from the U.S. in the 1980s). Chemical and biological weapons have a short shelf life, so Iraq would have had to have manufactured them fairly recently for them to be available. The Bush Administration claims to have evidence of mobile labs for manufacturing such devices, based on "evidence" consisting of allegations from three Iraqi defectors and blurry satellite photos. These claims are flatly contradicted by Blix, who in his most recent presentation to the U.N. directly rebutted some of the claims made by Powell in his recent U.N. speech, but that doesn't stop the Bush Administration from continuing to present increasingly specious evidence of Iraqi possession of these weapons and, bizarrely, insisting that Iraq had to prove that they didn't have weapons of mass destruction, as if that were really possible. Even the revelation that the British dossier on Iraqi weapons praised by Powell during his U.N. speech was plagiarized from sources published in the early 1990s has not stopped the shameless ballyhooing of the Iraqi "threat" by the Blair and Bush governments. The inspections have been quite extensive and the inspectors say that although Iraq has not cooperated in every respect, it has allowed unimpeded and impromptu access to every site. Surely if Iraq had sigificant quantities of these sorts of weapons they would have been found by now - they were in past inspections! It is increasingly clear that the Bush and Blair Administrations have little interest in whether or not the inspectors find anything, that no matter what the outcome they will still invade Iraq. Indeed, White House Security Advisor Richard Perle shocked and angered members of the British Parliament by essentially telling them that recently. And now British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw has echoed Perle's remarks, saying that Iraq isn't entitled to a presumption of innocence, and that an attack on Iraqis still justified even if the inspectors find nothing.

Even the term "weapons of mass destruction" seems deliberately designed to mislead the American people. Chemical and biological weapons are lumped into the same category ("weapons of mass destruction") as incomparably more destructive nuclear weapons. Although the former are deadly at close range, it is well-known among those with expertise in the matter that chemical and biological weapons are difficult to disperse, resulting in limited military effectiveness. Combine that with the likelihood that Iraq possesses at most a small number of such weapons, and has a military that is at best a pale shadow of the military the U.S. easily destroyed in Gulf War #1 (let alone the military of the Soviet Union, the threat that you and I grew up with), and it is clear that the vaunted Iraqi threat is trivial. Ironically, the U.S. is threatening to use nuclear weapons against Iraq, and says it fully intends to use chemical weapons, on the grounds that Iraq possesses such weapons or is trying to produce them!

And then there is the preposterous claim that the U.S. is planning to wage war against Iraq out of concern for the suffering of the Iraqi people under the brutal tyranny of Saddam Hussein. This is from an administration whose Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, made a friendly visit to Iraq at the height of the Iran-Iraq war, when Hussein was ruthlessly gassing Iranians with U.S.-supplied mustard gas. This is from an administration that, last summer, bombed an Afghan wedding party (mistaking it for a group affiliated with al Qaeda), killing dozens of civilians, and never apologized. This is from a government that has killed twice as many Iraqi civilians from bombing since the Persian Gulf War as al-Qaeda killed in New York on 9/11. This is from a government that recklessly exposed not only Iraqis (and, we are now learning, Afghanis as well) but its own troops to radiation from depleted uranium munitions. This is from a government that deliberately targeted Iraq's water purification capacity during the Gulf War, which along with the sanctions since then is probably the major reason why so many Iraqi children have died the past 12 years. This is an administration that supports dictatorships in Saudi Arabia, Colombia, and many other countries. This is an administration that has announced its intention to use chemical and possibly nuclear weapons in the impending war, as well as its intention to impose U.S. military rule on Iraq for an indefinite period of time. And this is a government that wants to help Iraqis? This is a government that wants to bring democracy to Iraq?

All the specific distortions are part of an overall pattern of greatly exaggerating the Iraqi threat. Saddam Hussein was mentioned 18 times in Bush's State of the Union speech; Osama bin Laden was not mentioned once. Hussein is continually compared to Adolph Hitler, as if the ruler of the most militarily powerful nation in the world of 1939 and the ruler of one of the militarily weakest nations in the world of 2003 have anything in common other than being dictators. As military analyst Anthony Cordesman noted, "Iraq's military machine may retain a massive order of battle, but Iraq's lack of arms imports means that its military readiness and sustainability is only a fraction of what it was in 1990" And not only is it assumed and asserted that Hussein's government has large amounts of chemical or biological weapons when in fact so far weapons inspectors have not found any, but it is continually implied that Hussein is suicidal, that he is willing and plans to use these weapons in an unprovoked attack when Iraq is surrounded by hostile, militarily superior powers. Deterrence worked for decades with the Soviet Union. There is no evidence whatsoever that Saddam Hussein's Iraq is any less deterred by the threat of attack against it than was the Soviet Union. Iraq has not so much as sneezed in the direction of another nation in 12 years. Yet somehow the "Iraqi threat" is so imminent that Iraq must be attacked immediately? This is absolute nonsense!

This is certainly not to diminish the threat that Hussein's government poses to its own people. Amnesty International and other human rights organizations document the Hussein regime's crimes year after year, and Hussein's willingness to use horrendous chemical weapons against his enemies is of course well-known. But, given that Iraq has been surrounded and half its airspace controlled by the most powerful military in history for the past 12 years, and given the extent of previous weapons inspections and the success of inspectors' efforts to destroy Iraq's existing chemical and biological weapons stocks, the claim that Saddam Hussein even poses a significant threat to neighboring countries is questionable. To claim that it poses a threat to the U.S, which has an enormous nuclear arsenal and a military budget more than 100 times as large, is preposterous. Iraq is a nation that has suffered much under Saddam Hussein, and it would be better off without him. But the Iraqi people have suffered even more as a result of the Persian Gulf War and the Draconian sanctions imposed on Iraq since then. That suffering would be further compounded by yet another U.S.-led war of mass destruction against Iraq.

Most people in the world, as well as the growing number of Americans who can tear themselves away from Fox News and CNN long enough to find out what is really going in the world, see through all these obfuscations. It isn't really that hard to figure out what's going on. When you put together the pieces - the war in Afghanistan, the military bases subsequently established throughout the natural gas and oil-rich Central Asian republics, large amounts of military aid to the Colombian dictatorship, probable U.S. involvement in the recent coup attempt in Venezuela, the installation of the Shah 50 years ago in Iran (and subsequent close U.S. relationship with one of the world's worst dictators), the longstanding close U.S. relationship with the Saudi Arabian dictatorship - it's hard to avoid the conclusion that the U.S.'s preoccupation with Iraq and Saddam Hussein when there are so many countries that routinely violate human rights and international law just can't be a coincidence. Clearly it has something to do with Iraq's hugeoil reserves, to which U.S. and British companies currently don't have access. At times, U.S. officials have made clear how important oil has been as a driving force both in U.S. foreign policy in general and in U.S. policy toward Iraq in particular. In testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee in 1990, following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, defence secretary (now vice-president) Cheney set out the issues involved in the US-led war:

"Iraq controlled 10 percent of the world's reserves prior to the invasion of Kuwait. Once Saddam Hussein took Kuwait, he doubled that to approximately 20 percent of the world's known oil reserves ... Once he acquired Kuwait ... he was clearly in a position to dictate the future of worldwide energy policy, and that gave him a stranglehold on our economy and on that of most of the other nations of the world as well."

A few days after the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait, an even more blunt assessment was delivered by a senior American official (believed to be Secretary of State James Baker) in a comment to the New York Times: "We are talking about oil. Got it? Oil, vital American interests." In a similar vein, former Reagan Administration official Lawrence Korb said: "If Kuwait grew carrots, we wouldn't give a damn." In short, the conclusion is inescapable that this war is very much about oil, despite it both being technologically feasible and environmentally and otherwise desirable for our society to greatly reduce its consumption of oil rather than fighting wars over it.

The possible results of this war are frightening to contemplate. Further destruction of Iraq's civilian infrastructure as well as the direct results of bombing will likely kill tens if not hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians, and wound a great many more. It is estimated that well over 1 million people will become refugees. American soldiers, of course, will also needlessly die, although likely in far fewer numbers than Iraqi soldiers and civilians. The U.S. will also continue to use "depleted uranium" munitions, as it has done in every recent military conflict. These weapons have wreaked havoc on the health of both the people of Iraq and Gulf War veterans. They are clearly "weapons of mass destruction." There is also, of course, the virtual certainty that this unprovoked attack on Iraq will lead to more terrorist actions against the U.S. Who does George Bush think he's kidding to claim that attacking Iraq is a productive step in the "war on terrorism" when 1) there is no proven link between Iraqi leaders and terrorist groups and 2) previous U.S. policy toward Iraq is likely one of the major reasons why the people who committed Sept. 11 became angry and hateful enough to fly airliners into the World Trade Center and Pentagon in the first place? Then there is the political and economic chaos that is already happening, and will only be magnified if this attack takes place. This war will also be very costly.

Indeed, it is already very costly that the U.S. is on a permanent war footing, spending more than six times as much as any other nation on "defense" while simultaneously cutting taxes, resulting in enormous budget deficits, as well as less money for important social services such as schools, health care, and environmental protection. Indeed, you yourself expressed concern about this very situation when you were here. However, you have voted for every military budget increase that has been proposed during your terms in office. And although you voted against the Bush tax cut bill (but couldn't bring yourself to criticize it during your campaign), you supported an equally fiscally irresponsible Democratic tax cut bill that was only somewhat less skewed toward granting the majority of the tax cuts to those who don't need them, the rich and big corporations. When do you plan to start taking your own expressed concerns about fiscal responsibility seriously when it comes time to vote on budgets?

This war will make a mockery of both the Constitution and international law. First of all, Bush and colleagues claim alleged Iraqi violations of U.N. resolution 1441 as justification for going to war. Yet, Bush Administration officials freely admit that U.S. troops are currently already in northern Iraq, itself a violation of resolution 1441! The "no-fly zones" that the U.S. and Britain have imposed, without U.N. authorization, on Iraqi airspace since 1991 are also obvious violations of international law. Then there is the matter of the Congressional resolution in October that unconstitutionally gave Bush the authority to wage war any time, anywhere, anyhow. You avoided someone's question about that when you were here with the dodge "I'm not a lawyer." Well, you don't need to be a lawyer to read the Constitution and see in plain English that it is Congress, not the President, which has the power to declare war.

Should the U.S., or the U.S. and some of its allies, attack Iraq without Security Council authorization, they will be in violation of Article 51 of the U.N. Charter, which states that nations may only attack another nation in the course of defending themselves against armed attack. Even with Security Council authorization, an attack on Iraq would likely be conducted illegally. In previous military actions, the U.S. has routinely violated numerous articles of the Geneva Conventions; for example, in the Gulf War the U.S. deliberately targeted and destroyed facilities necessary for providing Iraqis with clean water, a violation of articles prohibiting destruction of facilities necessary for the survival of civilian populations (e.g., Article 54 of Geneva Protocol 1, 1977). This act alone, combined with the sanctions that have made it so difficult for Iraq to repair the damage, is probably responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis. Use of depleted uranium weapons is also clearly a violation of articles pertaining to protection of civilians as well as the environment. In short, the Bush Administration is on the verge of engaging in military actions that will constitute egregious war crimes.

Do you intend to be an accomplice to these war crimes, or will you do everything in your power to oppose them? Will you support calls for a second Congressional resolution that specifically authorizes war before Mr. Bush is allowed to wage it, as the Constitution requires? If such a resolution is put before Congress, will you, for a change, vote against a war that is fiscally, politically, ethically, and more than likely legally, unjustifiable? And relatedly, will you continue to support Draconian attacks on our precious Constitutional rights such as the USA Patriot Act and the Homeland Security Act, or will you for a change stand up for our freedom? The voters of the 9th Congressional District are paying attention to your decisions on this matter.

Sincerely,
Jeff Melton

P.S. Most of the people George Bush and his cronies intend to kill are children, as the following speech by 12-year-old Maine resident Charlotte Aldebron at a recent anti-war protest makes clear:

When people think about bombing Iraq, they see a picture in their heads of Saddam Hussein in a military uniform, or maybe soldiers with big black mustaches carrying guns, or the mosaic of George Bush Sr. on the lobby floor of the Al-Rashid Hotel with the word "criminal". But guess what? More than half of Iraq's 24 million people are children under the age of 15. That's 12 million kids. Kids like me. Well, I'm almost 13, so some are a little older, and some a lot younger, some boys instead of girls, some with brown hair, not red. But kids who are pretty much like me just the same. So take a look at me, a good long look. Because I am what you should see in your head when you think about bombing Iraq. I am what you are going to destroy.

If I am lucky, I will be killed instantly, like the three hundred children murdered by your "smart" bombs in a Baghdad bomb shelter on February 16, 1991. The blast caused a fire so intense that it flash-burned outlines of those children and their mothers on the walls; you can still peel strips of blackened skin "souvenirs of your victory" from the stones.

But maybe I won't be lucky and I'll die slowly, like 14-year-old Ali Faisal, who right now is on the "death ward" of the Baghdad children's hospital. He has malignant lymphoma - cancer -- caused by the depleted uranium in your Gulf War missiles. Or maybe I will die painfully and needlessly like18-month-old Mustafa, whose vital organs are being devoured by sand fly parasites. I know it's hard to believe, but Mustafa could be totally cured with just $25 worth of medicine, but there is none of this medicine because of your sanctions.

Or maybe I won't die at all but will live for years with the psychological damage that you can't see from the outside, like Salman Mohammed, who even now can't forget the terror he lived through with his little sisters when you bombed Iraq in 1991. Salman's father made the whole family sleep in the same room so that they would all survive together, or die together. He still has nightmares about the air raid sirens.

Or maybe I will be orphaned like Ali, who was three when you killed his father in the Gulf War. Ali scraped at the dirt covering his father's grave every day for three years calling out to him, "It's all right Daddy, you can come out now, the men who put you here have gone away." Well, Ali, you're wrong. It looks like those men are coming back. Or I maybe I will make it in one piece, like Luay Majed, who remembers that the Gulf War meant he didn't have to go to school and could stay up as late as he wanted. But today, with no education, he tries to live by selling newspapers on the street.

Imagine that these are your children or nieces or nephews or neighbors. Imagine your son screaming from the agony of a severed limb, but you can't do anything to ease the pain or comfort him. Imagine your daughter crying out from under the rubble of a collapsed building, but you can't get to her. Imagine your children wandering the streets, hungry and alone, after having watched you die before their eyes.

This is not an adventure movie or a fantasy or a video game. This is reality for children in Iraq. Recently, an international group of researchers went to Iraq to find out how children there are being affected by the possibility of war. Half the children they talked to said they saw no point in living any more. Even really young kids knew about war and worried about it. One 5-year-old, Assem, described it as "guns and bombs and the air will be cold and hot and we will burn very much." Ten-year-old Aesar had a message for President Bush: he wanted him to know that "A lot of Iraqi children will die. You will see it on TV and then you will regret."

Back in elementary school I was taught to solve problems with other kids not by hitting or name-calling, but by talking and using "I" messages. The idea of an "I" message was to make the other person understand how bad his or her actions made you feel, so that the person would sympathize with you and stop it. Now I am going to give you an "I" message. Only it's going to be a "We" message. "We" as in all the children in Iraq who are waiting helplessly for something bad to happen. "We" as in the children of the world who don't make any of the decisions but have to suffer all the consequences. "We" as in those whose voices are too small and too far away to be heard.

* We feel scared when we don't know if we'll live another day.

* We feel angry when people want to kill us or injure us or steal our future.

* We feel sad because all we want is a mom and a dad who we know will be there the next day. And, finally, we feel confused -- because we don't even know what we did wrong.

Charlotte Aldebron, 12, attends Cunningham Middle School in Presque Isle, Maine. Comments may be sent to her mom, Jillian Aldebron: aldebron@ainop.com

Jeff Melton is a member of the Bloomington Peace Action Coalition and the Monroe County Green Party, and was the 2002 Green Party candidate for Congress in Indiana's 9th District.