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About The North Coast times-eagle. (Wheeler, Oregon) 1971-2007 | View Entire Issue (July 1, 2003)
PAGE 2 CYNDYLEE I’d like to be embedded with MSNBC’s Dana Lewis. TV reception was better than '91 but producers neglected to add a rousingly schmaltzy musical soundtrack. The Iraqi minister of information will take the Emmy away from Ari Fleisher. I would have appreciated live feed of U.S. troops showering in Saddam’s bathroom. The looting segments made me nostalgic for the garage sales in Southern California — but that's another war far, far away sean mcmullin I don’t understand why people are so surprised the war in Iraq is happening. It seems that all the signs of its coming have been around for quite awhile. It’s not the beginning or the end of this conflict. This is just the imperialists coming out into the open. They’re not hiding like they did before because their strength has grown and they don’t have as much to fear. They have figured out it's easier when people support you rather than having them fight you all the way. I think we have been pacified We don’t even perceive we have to change things in this country anymore — we don’t even perceive we have to. That is what happens when all our information comes from the imperialist media. Why should they want to tell us the truth? On a slightly different subject: Is there someone in charge? Someone head of this? When we speak of empire it’s as much us as it is our leaders. The conspiracy side of me says someone is manipulating all of this. The other side says no one is in control — we are all involved. This is neo-imperialism, which can’t exist without our participation. And as I always say, George Bush is only one person and we can all remove him SARAH CHRYSTAL It makes me sad. BUCKY BARNETT EDWARD SOREL WHY IRAQ? FROM PAGE 1 citizens believing that “supporting the troops” means “supporting the war.* I see mass marketing, monopoly, deregulation, stratifi cation, people saying the governments should live within their means while they themselves continue to rack up debt on their plastic cards, driving huge vehicles over once-pristine land. I see prisons going up and schools closing down and a voluntary military composed mainly of the poorest in our land because it’s the only way out of poverty. I see regimes all over the world whose brutality makes Saddam's look pale, ‘good friends and allies* in countries where people are still punished by limb and head-severing, where “suspects’" bones are routinely broken and children throwing rocks are killed almost daily by soldiers. I see a New World Order taking place, led by an usurped government, apparently hell-bent upon plunder while my fellow citizens seem more concerned with basketball scores. I see complacency. I'm concerned. When I was a child I saw holocaust films and I could not begin to understand why the people of Germany allowed such horrendous, inhuman things to happen. What really disturbs me now, some 50 years later, is that I’m beginning to understand it as I look around. I'm hoping there will be another election and that there will be someone for whom to cast my vote. War? There was no war. JODY G. GRAMSON I don't think we had any business doing what we did. The only reason we did was because of Iraq’s oil. If they hadn’t any oil, we wouldn't have been there. We didn't stay to fix Afghanistan. We destroyed it and left. You notice that oil prices went down since the war. CHRISTIAN GRAMSON (Age 8) Lord knows if Saddam Hussein is in Iraq — so why are we attacking Iraq? I think he's alive. : » i » » R iver S ea > GALLERY »'III Ml'ORARY WORKS C)i ARI UNTIL JULY 16 MARION HANEY OMAN A JENNIFER WILLIAMS I JULY 26 - AUGUST 28 JACK GUYOT, EVELYN TOWNSEND A TIM DALRYMPLE RECEPTION 5-8 11M COMMERCIAL STREET, ASTORIA What I think about the war in Iraq is that organized religion is pretty much the root of all evil'. In this country, I resent the waste of resources that has increased during the war — cutting funding for research, budget cuts in parks and wildlife management, trying to exploit more resources (ANWR, USFS plan revisions, etc. etc.) just to support our fat silly lifestyle. In the Middle East one hardly ever hears a voice for whatever life is left over there. I’m pissed at their moron extremists for stirring up our moron extremists, and pissed at our 'opposition forces’ (Demo crats, etc.) for floundering around without any sense of righteous outrage. The only optimistic comment I have is that perhaps since the fools running this country are demonstrating such a flaming bad example of how to do almost everything that even the slowest witted members of the voting public will surely realize that things must change. JIM HEDFORD V. O. BLUM Having no reliable source of information regarding the war in Iraq “the sequel", my only hope is the Freedom of Information Act is still intact 25 years from now so that we can find the true perpetrators of the war crimes committed against the people of Iraq Portable nuclear weapons are not merely Pentagon paranoia — sometime in the coming decades they may very well become accessible to NGO cells and a chaotic threat to legalist civilization. I do not, however, currently support serial U.S./U.K. invasion and occupation of rogue states (Iraq, Syria, DPR Korea, etc.) for the same reason one might have opposed Augustian empire in ancient Rome: remote garrisons, no matter how initially reassuring, in time corrode the republic internally — legally, economically, strategically. Because there is no uniform genetic basis for the U.S. polity, its rationale has always been its domestic and global respect for law, inducing it last century to campaign against Hitlerist and Stalinist imperialism. But if the republic proves flagrantly unable or unwilling to uphold consti tutional and international norms in a WMD context, its raison d’être becomes questionable. TOM DUNCAN War in Iraq? Makes no sense now. Made no sense before they started. — Unless the purpose is something different than what is advertised. Iraq has no capacity to threaten the U.S., militarily or economically. Iraq has no WMDs — and hasn’t for years. Iraq does have a lot of oil, and a strategic position geo graphically. Obvious control of Iraq is key to breaking OPEC and to containing a united Europe. Chaos in Iraq is necessary to provide an excuse for U.S. to control Europe, East Asia and Oceania. Perpetual war for perpetual peace. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. Of course the real power is global corporations using national governments to fight their proxy wars. PARADOXICAL FEELINGS OF A PEACENIK I don’t believe in killing even mass murderers — the bastard in the White House even though life is too good for him. I will impeach the world’s most dangerous bushwhacker, the enemy of humanity, the illegal usurper of executive power aka KGB (King George Bush), currently the most destructive life form known to humankind. the one who prays for war everyday, the one who glorifies military might and calls it right in the name of God to subjugate the rest of existence unto his control. I don’t need a gun. The law the way it stands now gives us the power of impeachment, the power to prosecute our national tyrants as unjust lawbreakers and war criminals! -ARTHUR HONEYMAN VALERIE LINDHOUT On reflection I think there was no possibility there would not be war. There is an antidote factor to war-thinking, which is nurture. But whoever heard of running for office as a nurture candidate? Whoever heard of a nurture budget? That’s a stupid joke, right? Even the word nurture is dismissed as nuisance intrusion into serious discussion. The nurture party? Ho, ho, ho. Bob Dylan absolutely speaks for my feelings in his ‘Masters of War’, but sadly now I would say to him, it is still we who totally deride and omit nurture as a valid subject, study and 50% value from our systems. Instead we still assent to the 100% way of maximum competition in adversarial systems and vote purely viscerally for fighters, for winners, for charisma, and for the top-gun excess testosterone Masters (male or female). We vote for nature's own uninterrupted most savage way, call ourselves sophisticated superpower and our minds
