Dear editor

Can anybody answer some basic questions for a stupid man trying to make sense of current campaign rhetoric?

What is a "war on terror?" Would that be a war on all the things we are afraid of? Like Freddy Kruger? Like the dark? A war on everything unknown and threatening and dangerous in the world? What took us (humankind) so long to take the offensive against these ubiquitous evils? How have the operations conducted to date contributed to progress in this struggle? How will we know when we are winning? Could somebody tell me a little more about these terrorists? Who are they and why are they mad at us and how did they become so evil and why did they come to hate freedom? Are we gradually getting rid of them, or are more of them being made all the time? Do we plan to kill or capture them all until there are none left except people who no longer have issues with us? Will the last ones we kill be people with no friends or family members to take offense? Isn't this like cutting a hole out of a blanket? Whose plan is that? Does the author of that plan have any experience with this sort of thing?

What does "staying the course" mean? What are the intermediate objectives, 1, 2, 3... etc.? What is the goal? Exactly how is this supposed to work? If the reasons for going to Iraq were to depose Saddam Hussein and eliminate the WMDs, then haven't we already won? If we have added the objective of bringing about a democracy in Iraq, how does our continued occupation contribute to that? Isn't our own American democracy something that came about after we had booted out the colonial British occupiers? Aren't the Iraqi insurgents looking for self-determination, just like our minutemen?

How does the shelling and sniping of angry civilian militants contribute to the "spread of liberty?" Doesn't "liberty" mean that people are free and unbullied and unconstrained to recognize an order imposed from the outside? Isn't liberty in fact spread by the act of liberation, by going away and leaving people alone? How do you impose liberty? What does that even mean?

Will we be consistent as well as persevering in our war? If we discover, as we did in Vietnam, that we ourselves are also terrorists, will we kill or capture ourselves?

Isn't the huge puddle of oil underneath Iraq the real reason for all this doubletalk? And aren't we crouched over the top of it like a big spotted hyena over a dead antelope?

Michael Moore
Graphic Designer
Oracle, Arizona

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