Yellow Dog

In today's New York Times:

To the Editor:

I am a Vietnam infantry veteran. I recently woke up to the reality of being a pawn.

War is not glorious. If it were, the children of our leaders would be there.

War does not bring peace. If it did, after all these thousands of years, we would live in a peaceful world.

At best, war is the failure of leaders to solve problems. At worst, war is a vast money-generating machine that has no regard for life.

The military does what it is told to do by politicians. The only protection it has is "we the people."

Let's protect our troops. Our politicians have failed.

Arnold Stieber
Grass Lake, Mich.

This letter is especially meaningful in light of the recent news bulletin that no weapons of mass destruction, the justification of our war in Iraq, were found:

"What all our loss and pain and expense in the Iraqi invasion has actually proved is that the weapons inspections worked, that international sanctions - deeply, deeply messy as they turned out to be - worked, and that in the case of Saddam Hussein, the United Nations worked. Whatever the Hussein regime once had is gone because the international community insisted. It was all destroyed a decade ago, under world pressure.

This is not a lesson that many people in power in Washington are prepared to carry away, but it is what the national adventure in the reckless doctrine of preventive warfare has to teach us.

Bush lied. Our soldiers died.

TJan. 10, 2005The New York Times > Opinion > Editorial: Bulletin: No W.M.D. Found