The latest polls show that most Americans are critical of the war in Iraq. But the option of swiftly withdrawing all U.S. troops from that country gets little media attention.

So far this year, many news outlets have lapsed into conjecture on what George W. Bush has in mind for the Iraq war. At the end of a recent lengthy editorial, the New York Times noted that “there’s speculation about whether President Bush intends to use the arrival of a new elected government [in Baghdad] as an occasion to declare victory and begin pulling out American troops.”

Right now, that kind of speculation amounts to a smokescreen for a war-crazed administration. Its evident intention is for large numbers of U.S. troops to stay in Iraq for a long time.

Predictably, as Seymour Hersh reports in the Jan. 24 edition of the New Yorker, “Bush’s re-election is regarded within the administration as evidence of America’s support for his decision to go to war. It has reaffirmed the position of the neoconservatives in the Pentagon’s civilian leadership who advocated the invasion.” According to one of

If you live outside the DC metropolitan area, you likely heard little about a man who parked his van in front of the White House this past Tuesday, threatening to blow it up if his political demands were not met.

There was never any need to worry. The FBI quickly assured the media, and therefore the public, that this is not an act of terrorism. After all, how could it be? The man in the van was white.

But wait. White males can be terrorists, too. Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols became terrorists when they blew up a moving van full of explosives outside a federal building.

Perhaps there were other criteria that led the FBI to quickly discount a man parking his van claiming to be full of explosives outside the White House and threatening to blow it up if his demands were not met as not an act of terrorism. Reviewing what the government considers terrorism should bring some light on this subject.

Over 1500 men, all Muslim, were rounded up after 9/11 under the guise of fighting terrorism - making all 1500 suspected terrorists. How many were charged or convicted? None.

January 20, 2005

The Hon. Jim Petro
Attorney General
State of Ohio
State Office Tower
30 E. Broad St, 17th Floor
Columbus, OH 43215

Dear Attorney General Petro:

If, as Hillary Clinton suggests, it takes a village to raise a child, then it is equally true that it takes a Bush to destroy that village, and kill that child. And I am not speaking of all those children slaughtered in their beds in Mosul, Fallujah and Baghdad during this President’s murderous invasion and occupation of Iraq.

No, on this occasion I am condemning, in advance, the upcoming invasions of Malaysia, Syria, Yemen, Algeria and Sudan, in addition of course to the first target, Iran, for which extremely detailed plans for strikes and invasion have already been drawn up. The New Yorker article by Seymour Hersh documents in exquisitely painful detail just what the Bush White House has planned as its next steps to extend the American Empire. Anyone who like myself wants to tell the President and his legions, “This far, but no further”, had best write, call, e-mail and visit their representatives in the U.S. House and the Senate and protest strongly against such an obviously criminal and immoral extension of American power.

It takes a nation to stop a Caesar.