Letter: Please, McCain, no more of same

To the Editor:

I was recently discouraged to hear what John McCain imagines will happen during his first four years in office. He foresees us winning the war in Iraq and most of the soldiers coming home. I wonder if he also is thinking of going back to win the war in Vietnam. But if all that happens I hope he then takes us all to Disney World to celebrate.

I hope he shares his secret of how he’s going to do it with Israel. The Jew’s have been fighting Muslim extremists for about 60 years and they’ve had about as much success as President Bush has had in his war for the last six years. Do he and McCain think the insurgents will say “OK, we give up, you win” and it’s over?

This is not the type of war to fight with a conventional army. Plus, the army, in both men and equipment, is so worn down it can’t maintain much longer.

There’s an amazing video on the Internet of Dick Cheney in 1994 speaking about why the first Bush administration didn’t go on into Baghdad and take out Saddam. He says it would have been a quagmire, that it would have started a civil war between the Shiites and Sunnis, that Turkey would probably have come in after the Kurds; he even said, “How many dead American soldiers is Saddam Hussein worth?” He said, “I think we got it right.”

I guess he forgot seven years later. If you do a search — Dick Cheney: Quagmire Video, you can see it. The idea of a democracy is a foreign concept to most people of that region. They’re loyal to their local tribes and sects, not to a central government.

I hope I don’t have to watch McCain for the next four years doing the same thing Bush has been doing for too long now: wearing his rose-colored glasses, whistling a happy tune and telling us how well the war is going and all the progress the Iraqi government is making. Just because our country made a terrible blunder doesn’t mean we have to continue making it.

LaVoie House

Red Wing

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