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Since you now have to register to get into the actual stories/LOTEs, I am copying this LOTE to show here. Somehow, I don't think that the writer will object. The other letter writers preceeding her might want to say something about "freedom of -----", so why make you sit through their pukefest?
Regarding something I've been saying lately:
"A word about the ``unfazed Arabs'' and four civilians whose bodies were mutilated in Iraq (``Barbarity in Iraq,'' Beacon Journal, April 1): If Iraq declared war and invaded America, do you think we might have a few citizens capable of doing the same? And let's remember, as tragic as this incident is, these civilians weren't over there on spring break. They were well-paid mercenaries providing services for even better-paid American corporations, all profiting by war.
But let's talk about some true civilians. We have disrupted, maimed, mutilated and taken the lives of countless innocent civilians in Iraq, and this seems the real crime. War is a crime in itself. Our arrogant belief that no other life on the planet has as much value as an American life is preposterous -- as if we had some unalienable right (perhaps a new constitutional amendment) to kill undesirables without being killed ourselves. Since we were the ones declaring war and invading a country, do we really think it so incomprehensible that we now reap such consequence?
George W. Bush has stirred up a complex, hideous hornet's nest, and we will continue to see the repercussions of that stirring for years to come. War is not some tidy, processed, packaged, homogenized product with a pre-November expiration date.
And as for patriotism, do we have to check our brains at the door in order to be counted patriotic?"
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