[Peace] President's speech in Saudi Arabia

[C. G. Estabrook]

To the editor, Champaign-Urbana News-Gazette:

The US launched an aggressive war against Iraq in 2003 and killed 
perhaps a million people - but then lost the war to the Iraqi Shia, 
allied with Iran.

The US has been torturing Iran since the CIA overthrew a democratic 
government there in 1953, but Iran has now largely freed itself of US 
control. On his visit to Saudi Arabia, President Trump announced a new 
crusade against Iran - a second round of the Iraq debacle - but the 
matter is complicated now (as it wasn't in 2003) by the Mideast presence 
of Russia (and China).

Of course US war-making is illegal under the UN charter (and the US 
Constitution), while Russia's presence - at the invitation of the 
legitimate governments of Syria and Iran - is legal. But that doesn't 
stop the US from fomenting war by means of its clients in the KSA and 
the GCC, in order to continue its generations-long control of oil from 
the region - to the profits on the US 1%.

American leaders of this and earlier administrations are liable for 
prosecution as the German leaders were at Nuremberg, for initiating “a 
war of aggression ... the supreme international crime...”

The Clinton administration admitted its sanctions killed a half million 
children in Iraq in the 1990s; the Obama and Trump administrations have 
placed similar sanctions on Iran.

We must demand that the government for which we are responsible stop 
killing men, women, and children in the Mideast and bring all US troops 
(and weapons) home.

--C. G. Estabrook