[Peace] Letter to the editor

[Carl G. Estabrook]

Editor, Champaign-Urbana News-Gazette:

We must demand that our government remove all our troops and weapons from the Mideast.

The recent discussion between presidents Putin and Trump has begun a partial ceasefire in Syria, which should be extended to all of the country. Russian troops are there at the invitation of a legitimate government, while the US had no legal right to invade Syria.  

More than two generations ago, the Kennedy administration illegally invaded South Vietnam and carried on a war in Southeast Asia - Vietnam and environs - and eventually killed perhaps four million people, including more than 50,000 Americans. If American leaders from those days were tried as German leaders were at Nuremberg after WWII, many would have been hanged. 

By 1969, polls showed that 70% of Americans had come to regard the war as “fundamentally wrong and immoral,” not “a mistake.” American public opinion, the brave resistance of the Vietnamese people, and the revolt of the US conscript army in Vietnam, led to the American withdrawal. 

As in Southeast Asia long ago, so in Southwest Asia today: the US must withdraw from what the Pentagon calls ‘MENA’ - the Mideast and North Africa - where we have long been killing people to guarantee control of the energy wealth of the region. Control - not just access - is what the US government demands, because it’s a choke-hold over economies like those of Germany and China that are dependent on Mideast gas and oil; the US in contrast imports very little of either from MENA. 

C. G. Estabrook
Visiting professor (ret.)
UIUC