Dear Mr. Bush:
In your news conference a few minutes ago you said that Iraq "would require difficult choices and additional sacrifices because the enemy is merciless and violent."
With all due disrespect, what is this crap?
You’ve already admitted that your difficult choices aren’t losing you any sleep. And what additional sacrifices are you making? Your own twins seem a bit busy partying (clearly a genetic trait) to roll bandages, not that they even have a draft to dodge like their old man.
My 20-year-old son and only child is a U.S. Marine stationed in Iraq. Instead of going straight to university, he enlisted in the Corps in response to your post-9/11 propaganda that terrorism was not a noun but a tangible enemy that could not only be vanquished but would then thank us for doing so.
But my son hasn’t been trained as a counterinsurgent.
He didn’t enlist to become a lab rat for bigger and better roadside bombs.
He didn’t enlist to join an occupying force of a country whose basic needs — jobs and security — are beyond his brief.
He did enlist to defend the United States of America, not the divided state of Iraq, which isn’t the least bit grateful to see him.
In fact, not once in three months has he been greeted as a liberator (unless being shot at is an Iraqi term of endearment).
You decided to wage this war based on the worst possible information at your fingertips, in defiance of all the rational advice given to you. You have already sacrificed nearly 3,000 young American servicemen and women and devastated their families for life.
I would say that you, Mr. Bush, who didn’t even give a grieving military mother like Cindy Sheehan the time of day, are the one being merciless in every regard, making further bad decisions leading to unnecessary deaths and destruction within the bubble of your outsized ego, which has earned the disrespect of most thinking persons on this planet.
Or as historian Timothy Garton Ash recently wrote about your policy towards the Middle East: "Never in the field of human conflict was so little achieved by so great a country at such vast expense."
Hasn't the world sacrificed enough?
Most sincerely,
A Marine Mom