Mr. President: We can’t let you do this

Mr. President:

Three years ago you declared “Mission Accomplished.”

Two years ago we were in “the final throes of the insurgency.”

Last year we “re-deployed to secure Baghdad.”

None of these proclamations proved to be true. None of these efforts proved to be effective.

Now, we are told, you are proposing we escalate this war that you committed us to enter under the false assertion (supported with manufactured and manipulated evidence) that Saddam Hussein was hoarding weapons of mass destruction that he might provide to terrorists.

You made that claim and offered that rationale even though the world community told you that you didn’t have the goods, hadn’t made the case. You made that claim and offered that rationale despite the thorough and diligent work of United Nations weapons inspectors who reported that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction.

Your spokespeople rejected the weapons inspectors’ report. Your people told us, “We know where he’s hiding the WMD.”

Four years later you have not found a single weapon of mass destruction in Iraq.

And the Iraqis who your spokespeople proclaimed would welcome us as liberators have suffered more than 600,000 deaths as a result of their “liberation,” according to well-documented Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health research published in The Lancet.

You told us this war would last at the most a few months.

You told us this war would not cost more than $50 to $60 billion, as though that were not a lot of money. Now we’re told the real cost may top $1 trillion.

Mr. President, nothing you have told us about this war so far has been right.

Why, oh why should we believe that now you have suddenly acquired some immense wisdom and extraordinary ability to develop competent military strategies and predictions?

Mr. President, you were warned that invading Iraq would fuel anti-American fervor throughout the Middle East; would spawn a whole new generation of jihadists. And those predictions were correct.

Mr. President, I know you are concerned that your legacy is caught between Iraq and a hard place.

But Mr. President, this is not about you, your pride and your legacy. You have us all caught between Iraq and a hard place.

You have squandered America’s goodwill and credibility in the world and have dealt damage to our reputation and influence that it will take generations to repair.

You have funded this war by writing rubber checks while ramming through tax cuts for the privileged and big business. You will hand off to the next administration a badly battered economy and record debt. We will be paying for your mistakes for years.

You have stretched our military thin almost to the breaking point. To the point that we are not capable of rapidly responding in any large way to a real crisis elsewhere in the world.

You have refused to allow the U.S. to engage in talks with the leaders of nations in the Middle East who could influence and broker a real solution in Iraq.

Escalating U.S. military involvement does not reverse or solve any of these massive misjudgments.

In fact it would only mire us more deeply in this mess of your making.

Tomorrow, according to the reports I am hearing on the radio, you are going to address the nation and announce that you are sending 20,000 additional troops to Iraq and that you will do this without offering any timetable for bringing our troops home.

Again you will ask us to trust you; to trust that you know best how to manage this apparent war without end.

I trust the country, and the Congress and Senate we have elected, will find a way to keep you from making this horrendous mistake.

– ken winston caine