An invitation

With the support of MoveOn.org and others, Cindy Sheehan has been demanding that the President meet with her to explain,

"I want to ask the president, why did he kill my son?" Sheehan told reporters. "He said my son died in a noble cause, and I want to ask him what that noble cause is."

Clifford May has an invitation for Cindy Sheehan that was run as a full page ad in Sunday's Waco Tribune-Herald.

...let me suggest an alternative: Come visit with me. Our meeting probably won't get much publicity, but I can promise you an interesting discussion. I'll invite to join us some of the many Iraqi freedom fighters with whom I've been working for the past several years – many of them women -- as well as democracy and human rights activists from Syria, Iran, Libya, Egypt, Lebanon and other countries.

You say you want to know, “What is the noble cause that my son died for?” They would answer: Your son died fighting a war against an extremist movement intent on destroying free societies and replacing them with racist dictatorships.

The Iraqis will want to tell you what life was like under Saddam Hussein – the mass murders of hundreds of thousands, the women and girls who were gang-raped by Saddam's cronies, the creative forms of torture that were ignored by the “international community.”

I know several Baghdadi businessmen whom Saddam suspected of disloyalty. He had their right hands amputated. Want to meet them? The doctors who were forced to perform these amputations are worth chatting with as well. 

It's true, as you and others have pointed out, that we did not find Saddam's Weapons of Mass Destruction. But don't be misled into believing that Saddam never had any. Indeed, he used chemical weapons against the Kurds, slaughtering thousands in villages like Halabja, where mothers laid down in the streets and embraced their children in their final moments. We can show you pictures. We can introduce you to survivors.

Like you, I wish America's intelligence agencies had known more than they did about Saddam's capabilities. But Saddam's intentions were never in doubt.

I rate the chances of her accepting his invitation somewhere between slim and none.

Comments

[patriot actor]

"Your son died fighting a war against an extremist movement intent on destroying free societies and replacing them with racist dictatorships"

I don't support Cindy Sheehan's quest to have a sit-down with Howdy Doody - our form of democracy (Republic) is set up so that the representatives of the people are accountable qyuid pro quo to their constituents via the checks and balances within the republic themselves - the only time a rep is truly held accountable by his/her constituents is during the elections.

But I digress...

As to the quote - if that is the reason behind this war than God Bless we will be fighting wars on every continent in just about every 3rd world country that exists on earth. Please... refute Sheehan with real reasons not contrived heart-string b.s. rhetoric.

[patriot actor]

To further add... In the past decade, it has been estimated that over 3.5 million Congolese/Rwandans have been killed in a war that is neither civil nor domestic - it can be best be described as regional but even then that oversimplifies.

Don't you think their stories are just as horrific, just as insane, just as numbing, as any Iraqi doctor or Peruvian minister or Tamilian surgeon's? Thier is injustice and great depravity everywhere in the world. Always has been always will be. I don't mean to be callous but I am not naive either. This war is for oil - every other reason is just rhetoric.

[Tom Bowler]

You bring up interesting points. At the time we began thinking about intervention in Kosovo to put a stop to the ethnic cleansing, there was an argument against going in because there was no overriding national interest to justify it. We went in anyway on humanitarian grounds. At the same time, just as you observe, ethnic cleansing was going on in Rwanda as the Hutus set about exterminating the Tutsis, and somehow we didn't find the humanitarian grounds to intervene. There was no overriding national interest either.

Republican that I am, I was torn. The Republican side was opposing intervention in Kosovo because there was no overriding national interest, but I finally concluded that the right thing to do was to go in and put a stop to the murder and rape that was going on. When I did, I also concluded that we should have done the same in Rwanda. To cut to the chase, I believe humanitarian interests can justify military action. There were humanitarian benefits to be had by taking out Saddam Hussein, but I view those as a byproduct, or a side benefit -- not the real reason for going in.

The real reason for going in was to eliminate a threat. Saddam was not an imminent threat, but he was an ultimate threat and an inescapable threat. (He was not an imminent threat to us, but he might have been to Turkey.) He represented state sponsorship of terrorism by his well documented harboring of terrorists and his financial support for Palestinian terrorism. On top of that, the Dulfer report made very clear that his weapons programs were temporarily shut down waiting only for UN sanctions to be lifted.

A free Iraq will not be a danger to the world. An Iraq under the leadership of the Hussein boys
would be another world war waiting to happen.

Finally, to say this war is for oil is not even close to credible. If it were about the oil we would have winked at Saddam, conferred Most Favored Nation status on Iraq, and bought all the oil we wanted. Real cheap.