[Peace-discuss] An Open Letter to Kerry from UPJ (fwd)

[C. G. Estabrook]

Dear Senator Kerry,

"How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"

This is a question you asked the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on
April 22, 1971, testifying against the Vietnam War. If you are elected
President of the United States, you will have to answer it. Surely, the
war against Iraq, and the escalating disaster of our military occupation,
qualify as some of the worst "mistakes" in the history of our nation.

In fact, the invasion of Iraq is the most dangerous and immoral action
taken by the U.S. government since the devastation and atrocity in
Vietnam. This is a subject you know more about than most, because you were
there. Having served, you came home to denounce the evil of that war in
language that many still admire for its unsparing honesty.

"How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?" you asked
in your testimony to the Senate in 1971. Representing one thousand
veterans, you spoke plainly about your "determination to undertake one
last mission -- to search out and destroy the last vestige of this
barbaric war, to pacify our own hearts, to conquer the hate and fear that
has driven this country the last ten years or more, so from when 30 years
from now our brothers go down a street without a leg, without an arm, or a
face, and small boys ask why, we will be able to say 'Vietnam' and not
mean a desert, not a filthy obscene memory, but mean instead the place
where America finally turned and where soldiers like us helped it in the
turning." Now your opponents use these words to pillory you, as they try
to justify another barbaric war with more "lies and garbage," in the words
of General Anthony Zinni, another Vietnam veteran.

In 1971, you showed courage. But now, in 2004, we wait, and the world
waits, to see if you will denounce the grave damage that the occupation of
Iraq is doing to the United States and the world: the thousands of young
men and women in our Armed Forces killed and wounded, the much larger
number of dead and injured Iraqis, all caught in a vicious cycle of
popular resistance and intensifying repression.

Just as in Vietnam, there is no way out of this swamp of violence other
than to renounce it. So far, all we have heard from you are
politically-calibrated platitudes about staying the course. This is
caution, not courage; calculation, not leadership. To our dismay, you have
even suggested sending more troops to Iraq, a policy that may require the
reinstatement of the draft to sustain.

Senator Kerry, we call on you to show the same courage now that you did in
1971. Tell the people of this country the war was wrong, the occupation is
disaster, and that we can have no future as a colonial power. Speak up for
what's right, right now. Otherwise, if you are elected, you will have to
tell some family, years from now, that their daughter or son was the last
one to die defending not simply a "mistake," but a series of lies. You
will be known as the president who dragged the U.S. further into a
quagmire of countless needless deaths.

We urge you to speak as a winter soldier, not a summer patriot. As you
know, a war begun for the wrong reasons cannot be made right. The only way
forward is to end this war now.

Sincerely,

United for Peace and Justice