As someone who has lived in places like Haiti, India, Yemen, Nigeria and Pakistan over the past 20 years, I can say that there are too many places where people are horribly oppressed and badly treated by their governments, by their cultures and even by nature.

The U.S. cannot help all of them and certainly cannot go to war to "liberate" all of their people.

There have been times I wished my government could help the poor and miserable victims I saw on a daily basis.

But one thing I think I am fairly sure about is that the poor Iraqis exploited by the Freepers should realize that the current administration is not going to war in Iraq to help them and their relatives in Iraq. If the U.S. goes to war in Iraq, it will be for an agenda that has little to do with human rights and "saving the Iraqis," no matter how much GW et al. try to hide behind that excuse.

The protesters, of course, had their own agendas and might have been insentive, but at least their agendas did not involve preemptive military strikes and death.

-- Rebecca Louise

I took part in the San Francisco rally, and sure enough, the people running the show were the usual hard-line extremist wackos doing the typical "We don't need your racist war" chants and mindless sloganeering.

But there was also a noticeable number of people in the rally who were like myself: i.e., moderate liberals who ultimately love America even for its faults, remember that Saddam is not exactly an angel himself, and oppose the war not because we hate America but because we feel that it will increase the danger to Americans and to the world. If they're like me, they were probably embarrassed by the mindless knee-jerk sloganeering but also strongly opposed enough to the war that they were willing to endure the sloganeering and tune it out while they were there.

To the antiwar moderates, don't let the wackos drive you away. They'll always be there, and the fact is that they're always the ones to take the lead. Remember, even during Vietnam it wasn't until we'd already gone in and the body bags started coming back that the protests became as broad-based as they did.

-- John Lee

Recent Stories