Linda Wetherby regretfully withdraws

[Michael Eisenstadt]

I regretfully withdraw my endorsement of Kucinich in 2004 as my friend 
Terry has informed me he is a rabid anti-abortionist.  
Apparently he plays this card close to his chest as he knows he will 
alienate many potential supporters like moi with this
stance.   Sigh.   x L:inda

This is excerpted.
The complete article can found on the web at
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030421&s=mcgovern

"...This President and his advisers know well how to get us involved in 
imperial crusades abroad while pillaging the
ordinary American at home. The same families who are exploited by a rich 
man's government find their sons and
daughters being called to war, as they were in Vietnam--but not the sons 
of the rich and well connected..."


The Reason Why
by GEORGE MCGOVERN
[from the April 21, 2003 issue]

Thanks to the most crudely partisan decision in the history of the 
Supreme Court, the nation has been given a
President of painfully limited wisdom and compassion and lacking any 
sense of the nation's true greatness.
Appearing to enjoy hi! s role as Commander in Chief of the armed forces 
above all other functions of his office,
and unchecked by a seemingly timid Congress, a compliant Supreme Court, 
a largely subservient press and a
corrupt corporate plutocracy, George W. Bush has set the nation on a 
course for one-man rule.
He treads carelessly on the Bill of Rights, the United Nations and 
international law while creating a costly but
largely useless new federal bureaucracy loosely called "Homeland 
Security." Meanwhile, such fundamental
building blocks of national security as full employment and a strong 
labor movement are of no concern.
The nearly $1.5 trillion tax giveaway, largely for the further 
enrichment of those already rich, will have to be made up by cutting
government services and shifting a larger share of the tax burden to 
workers and the elderly. This President and his
advisers know well how to get us involved in imperial crusades abroad 
while pillaging the ordinary American at
hom! e. The same families who are exploited by a rich man's governme nt 
find their sons and daughters being
called to war, as they were in Vietnam--but not the sons of the rich and 
well connected. (Let me note that the son of
South Dakota Senator Tim Johnson is now on duty in the Persian Gulf. He 
did not use his obvious political connections to
avoid military service, nor did his father seek exemptions for his son. 
That goes well with me, with my fellow South Dakotans
and with every fair-minded American.)
The invasion of Iraq and other costly wars now being planned in secret 
are fattening the ever-growing
military-industrial complex of which President Eisenhower warned in his 
great farewell address. War profits are booming,
as is the case in all wars. While young Americans die, profits go up. 
But our economy is not booming, and our stock market is
not booming. Our wages and incomes are not booming. While waging a war 
against Iraq, the Bush Administration is
waging another war against the well-being of America.
Following ! the 9/11 tragedy at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, 
the entire world was united in sympathy
and support for America. But thanks to the arrogant unilateralism, the 
bullying and the clumsy, unimaginative
diplomacy of Washington, Bush converted a world of support into a world 
united against us, with the exception of
Tony Blair and one or two others...As I have watched America's moral and 
political standing in the world fade as the globe's
inhabitants view the senseless and immoral bombing of ancient, historic 
Baghdad, I think often of another Jefferson observation
during an earlier bad time in the nation's history: "I tremble for my 
country when I reflect that God is just."
The President frequently confides to individuals and friendly audiences 
that he is guided by God's hand. But if God guided him
into an invasion of Iraq, He sent a different message to the Pope, the 
Conference of Catholic Bishops, the mainline Protestant
National Council of Churches a! nd many distinguished rabbis--all of 
whom believe the invasion and bom bardment of Iraq is
against God's will. In all due respect, I suspect that Karl Rove, 
Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld and
Condoleezza Rice--and other sideline warriors--are the gods (or 
goddesses) reaching the ear of our President...
...So President Bush, forgive me if I've been too tough on you. But I 
must tell you, Mr. President, you are the
greatest threat to American troops. Only you can put our young people in 
harm's way in a needless war. Only you can
weaken America's good name and influence in world affairs.
We hear much talk these days, as we did during the Vietnam War, of 
"supporting our troops." Like most Americans, I have
always supported our troops, and I have always believed we had the best 
fighting forces in the world--with the possible
exception of the Vietnamese, who were fortified by their hunger for 
national independence, whereas we placed our troops in
the impossible position of opposing an independent Vietnam, albeit a 
Commun! ist one. But I believed then as I do now
that the best way to support our troops is to avoid sending them on 
mistaken military campaigns that needlessly
endanger their lives and limbs. That is what went on in Vietnam for 
nearly thirty years--first as we financed the French in
their failing effort to regain control of their colonial empire in 
Southeast Asia, 1946-54, and then for the next twenty years as
we sought unsuccessfully to stop the Vietnamese independence struggle 
led by Ho Chi Minh and Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap--two
great men whom we should have accepted as the legitimate leaders of 
Vietnam at the end of World War II. I should add that
Ho and his men were our allies against the Japanese in World War II. 
Some of my fellow pilots who were shot down by
Japanese gunners over Vietnam were brought safely back to American lines 
by Ho's guerrilla forces.
During the long years of my opposition to that war, including a 
presidential campaign dedicated to ending the Am!
erican involvement, I said in a moment of disgust: "I'm sick and tired 
of old men dreaming up wars in which young
men do the dying." That terrible American blunder, in which 58,000 of 
our bravest young men died, and many times that
number were crippled physically or psychologically, also cost the lives 
of some 2 million Vietnamese as well as a similar
number of Cambodians and Laotians, in addition to laying waste most of 
Indochina--its villages, fields, trees and waterways;
its schools, churches, markets and hospitals.
I had thought after that horrible tragedy--sold to the American people 
by our policy-makers as a mission of
freedom and mercy--that we never again would carry out a needless, 
ill-conceived invasion of another country that
had done us no harm and posed no threat to our security. I was wrong in 
that assumption.
The President and his team, building on the trauma of 9/11, have falsely 
linked Saddam Hussein's Iraq to that tragedy and then
falsely built him up as a deadly threat to America and to world peace. 
These ! falsehoods are rejected by the UN and nearly all
of the world's people. We will, of course, win the war with Iraq. But 
what of the question raised in the Bible that both George
Bush and I read: "What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and 
lose his own soul," or the soul of his nation?

It has been argued that the Iraqi leader is hiding a few weapons of mass 
destruction, which we and eight other countries have
long held. But can it be assumed that he would insure his incineration 
by attacking the United States? Can it be assumed that if
we are to save ourselves we must strike Iraq before Iraq strikes us? 
This same reasoning was frequently employed during the
half-century of cold war by hotheads recommending that we atomize the 
Soviet Union and China before they atomize us.
Courtesy of The New Yorker, we are reminded of Tolstoy's observation: 
"What an immense mass of evil must
result...from allowing men to assume the right of anticipating what ma! 
y happen." Or again, consider the words of
Lord Stanmore, who conc luded after the suicidal charge of the Light 
Brigade that it was "undertaken to resist an attack that
was never threatened and probably never contemplated." The symphony of 
falsehood orchestrated by the Bush team
has been de-vised to defeat an Iraqi onslaught that "was never 
threatened and probably never contemplated."
I'm grateful to The Nation, as I was to Harper's, for giving me 
opportunities to write about these matters. Major newspapers,
especially the Washington Post, haven't been nearly as receptive.
The destruction of Baghdad has a special poignancy for many of us. In my 
fourth-grade geography class under a superb
teacher, Miss Wagner, I was first introduced to the Tigris and Euphrates 
rivers, the palm trees and dates, the kayaks plying the
rivers, camel caravans and desert oases, the Arabian Nights, Aladdin and 
His Wonderful Lamp (my first movie), the ancient
city of Baghdad, Mesopotamia, the Fertile Crescent. This was the ! first 
class in elementary school that fired my imagination.
Those wondrous images have stayed with me for more than seventy years. 
And it now troubles me to hear of America's
bombs, missiles and military machines ravishing the cradle of civilization.
But in God's good time, perhaps this most ancient of civilizations can 
be redeemed. My prayer is that most of our soldiers and
most of the long-suffering people of Iraq will survive this war after it 
has joined the historical march of folly that is man's
inhumanity to man.