Democracy is Failing Us When We Urgently Need It to Work

On viewing photos of Iraqis mutilating the corpses of 4 western non-combatants killed in an insurgent attack near Fallujah today, I am more saddened than ever by the fact that the only way to dissent from the foreign policy of George W. Bush, come election time, will be to cast a vote for John Kerry or Ralph Nader. The United States needs to declare independence from Arab oil and leave people in that part of the world to work out their own destiny. Absent intervention from outside the region, it seems to me that Israel has sufficient military capability to defend itself, so why not let our principled support of Israel take the form of a guarantee to directly counter any such intervention from outside the region? I believe that one motive for our current policy of intensive middle eastern involvement was to discourage Israel from developing nuclear weapons and setting off a nuclear arms race in the region. That cat, unfortunately, has already escaped the bag, and if anyone who defends current policies knows what to do about it, they're not letting on.

One American life was infinitely too precious a price to squander on the revisionist objective of Bush's war, that is, the "liberation" of the Iraqi people from the despotism of Saddam Hussein. Unfortunately, there is no way to make that statement in the voting booth without at the same time seeming to call for abortion on demand in a way that entails a legal right to use abortion as a means of birth control even with an unborn child capable of living outside the womb, and for social policies which hold that there is no difference which ought to concern the public between long-term homosexual relationships and traditional families in terms of their suitability as contexts for child rearing.