An Open Letter to the President:

Not so fast, Mr. President: "Here, take it" is not the way to leaveIraq, no matter what your advisers may be telling you.

Remember that these are the same people who got you into this mess for all the wrong reasons in the first place.

Back on 9/12, when Rumsfeld raised the idea that you "could take advantage of the opportunity offered by the terrorist attacks to go after Saddam immediately,"[1] you should have told him to go write a memo.

Three days later, when your advisors (Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Rice, et al.) realized that "Another risk they faced was getting bogged down in Afghanistan"[2] and " Rice asked whether they could envision a successful campaign beyond Afghanistan, which put Iraq back on the table,"[2] you should have listened to Cheney and Powell, and sent the rest of them back to their caves. [Quotes from Bob Woodward's "Bush At War", pp. 49 (1) and 82-3 (2).]

In an e-mail to a friend last February, I said:

It's not a West Texas bar game that [you] can turn off. It's not going to be: "Attack, get Saddam, clean things up, then leave with no further consequences and everyone living happily ever after."

If Dec. 7th 1941 was "a day of infamy that will live forever" to millions of North Americans, what do you think [your] attack on Islam (their perception) is going to be to billions of Muslims? Bombing an Islamic country isn't going to make them love us, and will inflame even more of them to more terrorism. Look at Kuwait, where the US did save their bacon, but now is the site of regular attacks on Americans by fanatics.

I wasn't alone in thinking a unilateral invasion of Iraq was a really stupid, dangerous idea, of course, but you didn't listen to any of us.

Article Author: Hal Pawluk

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