I just posted the letter I wrote to my two Senators and my House Representative in

my Kuro5hin diary.

Another Update

mglazer,
of course I don't support tyrants. I know very well that Iraq would be better off without Saddam. But he's not going to be the one to die if the U.S. invades, it will be a great many innocent Iraqis. And do you harbor any illusions that Iraq would become a democratic country after the U.S. leaves?

I feel it is much more effective to fight tyranny at home. That way I can make more of a difference.

For example, the U.S. has become a place where people disappear without a trace and are held without charge or bail - at the hands of our very own tyrants. Why do you think the
American Civil Liberties Union has been

suing to force the government to reveal the names of those arrested in secret?

Even the Nazis only kept allied prisoners in P.O.W. camps, and did not subject them to punishment for making war against them. But the administration plans unconstitutional "military tribunals" for the Afghani P.O.W.'s. Rather than being returned home when the war ends, many may be subjected to the death penalty! I thought that extrajudicial execution was the hallmark of a repressive dictatorship, not a democracy.

mglazer, please read my essay

Is This the America I Love? and maybe your eyes will be opened as mine have been.

I Called My Representatives, Why Don't You?

President Bush has submitted to Congress his proposal for a resolution that would authorize him to use force in Iraq. Read about it at
Yahoo and
CNN.
In addition, the Secretary of Defense testified to Congress that they should not wait for a vote on any possible new resolutions by the U.N. Security Council before authorizing force.

Why not? Doesn't the administration want even the pretense of legitimacy?

I called my two Senators and my House Representative just now to urge them to vote against the resolution. If you're a U.S. citizen, I urge you to do the same. You can find your representatives' phone numbers at
www.congress.org - enter your zip code in the search box.

If you're not a U.S. citizen, I urge you to contact your representatives in your own government to ask them to oppose war in Iraq in the U.N.

I am very strongly of the opinion, as are many others (including some in Congress) that Bush is trying to make war in Iraq to deflect the public's attention from the faltering economy - and Bush' duplicity in it.

When George Bush was on the board at a Texas oil company, he took loans from the company under extremely favorable and questionable terms, just like the loans the Rigas family took from Adelphia, which ultimately resulted in Adelphia's bankrupcy and the indictment of several Rigas family members.

He also participated in a scheme to inflate the earnings of the company, and when the Securities and Exchange Commission caught them and forced them to restate their reported profit as a loss, Bush sold his stock just before the resulting plummet in stock price, for which the SEC investigated him for insider trading.

However, Dubya's father was President at the time so no action was taken against him. The White House has forbidden the SEC from releasing its records of the SEC's investigation of his insider trading to Congress.

Vice President Dick Cheney has been sued for similar financial irregularities while he was a senior executive at Halliburton. Try a

Google search for "halliburton cheney lawsuit".

Congress recently passed, and the President signed, a "corporate responsibility act" which makes the kind of behaviour the President and Vice President indulged in illegal. Had this law been passed in 1990, Bush and Cheney wouldn't be sitting in the White House, they'd be sitting in Federal prison.

Ken Lay, the disgraced CEO of Enron, was Bush' best buddy before Enron's bankrupcy, and I believe Bush' most generous contributor.

Bush was elected by a minority of the voters. His approval rating was very low before the September 11th attack, but making war in Afghanistan made him very popular in the U.S. But he's not able to milk Afghanistan for popularity very much anymore, and the mid-term elections are coming up, with Congress very nearly equally divided between the two major parties.

It could take only a small percentage of the voters to install a Congress that will oppose Bush' every move, and he knows he's very unlikely to get re-elected in 2004. That's why Bush needs this war.

My friend Dave Johnson keeps a weblog where he discusses Bush' corporate malfeasance, and has lots of links to other sites that expand on it. Go read it.

There is some hope that Congress will vote down the resolution. In
Bush Sends Iraq Text to Congress, the Associated Press reports:

On Capitol Hill Thursday, a group of House Democrats condemned the move toward military action, with Rep. Dennis Kucinich , D-Ohio, calling it "unjustified, unwarranted and illegal."

Rep. Barbara Lee , D-Calif., said she was introducing a resolution with 20 cosponsors calling on the United States to work with the U.N. to carry out weapons inspections in Iraq. "A preemptive, unilateral first strike would set a terrible international precedent," she said.

If Bush attacks, it's not going to be Saddam who dies. It's going to be tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of Iraqi soldiers. Most of these are conscripts. We have no quarrel with them. Also to perish will be many civilians, men, women and children.

Remember, even one Iraqi life is too dear a price to pay to keep Bush in power.

Thank you for your attention.

Now I'm going to follow-up my phone calls with letters to both my Senators and my Representative.