In my letterpublished in today's New York Times, written in response to Sunday's lengthy editorial calling for immediate withdrawal from Iraq -- out of 12 letters, mine was the only one by a military parent -- I called George W. Bush "feckless."
No doubt there are many who could think of another "F" word to describe Bush's incompetence, but The Times remains adamant in its refusal to publish certain expletives.
Letter and additional comments below the fold.
July 10, 2007
To the Editor:
As the mother of an active-duty United States marine, I am conflicted by your editorial. While I applaud your bold stance — "It is time for the United States to leave Iraq" — it is clearly too little, too late.
You admit to putting off this conclusion, hoping against hope that the feckless George W. Bush would have the vision or means to pull off a miracle in Iraq, while much of your reality-based readership foresaw the disaster, having already discounted the war-mongering propaganda well before the ill-fated invasion four years ago.
My son is scheduled to return to the lost cause of Iraq next February. It will take much more than a lengthy editorial in The Times to bring the troops home by then, or any time in the foreseeable future. Lives, limbs and treasure will continue to be lost and spent in this endless quagmire, this nightmare of Kafkaesque proportions.
I might add that while The Times has generously published five other letters of mine in the last year regarding Iraq, many of them well over 150 words -- in two other letters I also called Bush "megalomaniacal" and "bizarre," which they let stand -- in today's letter the editors deleted the following paragraph:
I have been a devoted reader of The Times for over 25 years, and will remain so, but with diminished respect. Your weakness in confronting the megalomaniacal Bush-Cheney administration is a far cry from the courage you showed in publishing the Pentagon Papers in 1971. In fact, it is the collective feebleness and gullibility of the post-9/11 media that contributed to your sickening realisation that "Mr. Bush’s plan is to stay the course as long as he is president and dump the mess on his successor. Whatever his cause was, it is lost."
What is equally distressing is looking back on my other published letters and rereading the one from last August, published under the heading "The Relentless Tragedy Called Iraq":
To the Editor:
Re "Insurgent Bombs Directed at G.I.'s Increase in Iraq" (front page, Aug. 17):
I can't help but compare your headline with President Bush's bizarre remarks on Wednesday: "There's some good people in our country who believe we should cut and run. They're not bad people when they say that, they're decent people" ("President Joins in G.O.P. Attacks on Democrats About Terrorism," news article, Aug. 17).
You better believe I'm a decent person -- and a decent mother whose 19-year-old United States Marine son is being deployed to Iraq next month to face a deadly, targeted anti-American insurgency that has nothing to do with the "war on terror."
Why should my son, or any other mother's son, be sacrificed in a mounting civil war because it's not politically advantageous for the Bush administration to admit that its Iraq policy has failed?
My decency is suffused with bitterness.
It's a year later and not much has changed except some rumblings in Congress. As I said in today's letter, it's going to take a lot more than a Times editorial to bring home the troops, particularly with billions of dollars invested by the military-industrial-political-petrochemical complex, at a current cost of over $1 trillion to U.S. taxpayers.
There are too many stakeholders who stand to profit from continued war, and too many countries interested in Iraqi oil. This is quite aside from the ruthless Bush-Cheney administration enacting desperate face-saving measures to buy time until the next election.
Well, for now, thank the gods for the outlet of dKos.