yurbud

(1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore

Sun Sep-25-05 02:28 PM
Original message

TO GOP SENATORS: end war or fall with Bush

I'm faxing this to every GOP Senator, and will probably send it to California Republicans in the House too.

I'm going to work up a slight variation for pro-war Dems.

I would encourage people to fax, write, or call people other than their own reps. Nearly all filter emails to make sure they don't read any from outside their state, but they can't filter faxes, letters and calls.

A lot of senators don't have fax numbers on webpages, but some righty was nice enough to put them all in one place:

http://www.conservativeusa.org/mega-cong.htm

This is a good way to get a drumbeat to end the war going. Even if the staffers don't pass it on to the senator, it will begin to create a mood of inevitability about pulling out, and fear of public opinion.

September 21, 2005

Republican Senators
United States Senate
Washington DC 20510

Senator,

The people of the world, the people of Iraq, and increasingly the people of the United States know that the Iraq War is based on lies and the real agenda was control of Iraq’s oil and being in a position to intimidate and invade other oil producing countries.

If you and President Bush had the faith in our democratic system to present the true case for invading Iraq to the American people, continuing the war might have a fig leaf of political legitimacy.

But you did not.

Instead, you willingly and eagerly participated in the lies that got us into war.

You knew that Saddam didn’t have the dreaded WMD’s and even if he did, he would not be stupid enough to use them against us or give them to someone who did and risk the complete destruction of Iraq with a fraction of our thousands of nukes. Saddam was evil but not stupid.

Likewise, even President Bush was forced to admit on at least two occasions, including the 2004 presidential debates that Saddam had NOTHING to do with 9/11.

While the pro-democracy argument is an after-thought at best, opinions of the Iraqis themselves show that it too is a lie. The Bush appointed CPA polled Iraqi’s in the Spring of 2004 and found that 86% wanted us to leave after the January 2004 elections at the latest.

A third of the current Iraqis legislators have signed a letter asking us to withdraw, and one of our favorite whipping boys over there, Muqtada al Sadr, was able to collect a million signatures on a petition asking us to leave. That’s democracy, and you and Bush are ignoring it.

If we truly wanted to spread democracy in the Middle East, we could do it far more cheaply in tax dollars and lives by ending our support of dictatorships in countries like Pakistan, Egypt, and especially Saudi Arabia.

By contrast, the machinations to privatize and steal Iraq’s oil are pretty well-proven, as you can see by the attached timeline.

General Jay Garner, the first colonial governor sent to rule Iraq was fired when he said that trying to privatize the oil would inflame an insurgency, and he was right.

On camera on the BBC, GOP strategist said Grover Norquist that he helped draft the privatization plan and when asked about possible Iraqi opposition said:

The right to trade, property rights, these things are not to be determined by some democratic election.

I am beginning to wonder if Republicans apply that same principle to American politics as well as Iraqi ones.

Senator, the longer you wait to hold president Bush accountable for his lies and end this war, the more likely it is that the public will realize your complicity and hold YOU accountable at the ballot box. If the Republican Party as a whole does not repudiate governing by lies and cronyism, you will quickly go from a lock on all three branches of government to that ash heap where the Whigs ended up in the last century and where the Communists in Russia ended up a decade and half ago—and in Russia, the people didn’t even have the vote, so your fall will be that much swifter than theirs.
If you care about reducing terrorism, end the war, renounce claims to Iraq oil, and renounce claims to those dozen military bases in Iraq.

You still have time to do the right thing.

(attached Greg Palast's Iraq Oil timeline:
http://www.gregpalast.com/iraqmeetingstimeline.html)

TO GOP SENATORS: end war or fall with Bush

The right to trade, property rights, these things are not to be determined by some democratic election.

MEMO