Letter to MN Congress members
Progressives, Libertarians, Greens, Conservatives, Independents and Other Persuasions Agree! Launching War on Syria Would Be Unethical, Illegal and Pragmatically Unwise!
Strange political bedfellows seem to be aligning together in the Minnesota congressional delegation on the topic of the upcoming vote whether to authorize Obama to launch war on Syria.
As of this writing:
"Progressives" Keith Ellison, Betty McCollum and Al Franken as well as Republican warhawk John Kline are all strongly in favor of giving President Barack Obama the authority to bomb Syria.
Democrats Colin Peterson and Rick Nolan and Republicans Michele Bachmann and Erik Paulsen have, so far, all indicated that they lean towards opposing authorizing Obama to bomb.
Democrats Amy Klobuchar and Tim Walz are apparently asking for further input but otherwise keeping mum.
Public opinion polls, however, show that large majorities of ordinary U.S. citizens of all political persuasions do not think, for a variety of reasons, that this new war should be launched at all!
There is a strong bipartisan (and also non-partisan) consensus that nothing good can come of bombing Syria.
Calls from the public to elected representatives nationally are reportedly running 100 to 1 against giving Obama new war authority.
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(draft of letter to be sent to our legislatures, would you want to sign onto it?)
We agree that war and use of military force should only be carried out by nations as a last resort, in self defense or when confronted with imminent life-threatening danger, and certainly only when Congress declares war according to the U.S. Constitution.
We support those Minnesota elected Congresspersons and Senators who will listen to their constituents and not vote to endorse the U.S. entering into another terrible, costly war, and one with inherent, dangerous "mission creep" that risks spreading to other countries, as occurred with the wars on Afghanistan and Iraq. Furthermore, a war launched in violation of the U.N. Charter is not only an illegal war of aggression, but is considered the "supreme crime" under international law that carries the seeds of other war crimes. What good will it do to commit such a serious war crime under the pretense of punishing a prior war crime? The whole notion of "humanitarian war" is like the old "bomb the village to save it" notion uttered during the Vietnam War. We thought more U.S. politicians would have learned by now, as the military has, that wars are never "cake walks." And wars are never humanitarian.
Yes, our hearts go out to the Syrian civilian victims. These war crimes are deplorable and must be adjudicated and punished but evidence must first be produced for international judicial process and the International Criminal Court. The United States simply does not have "policeman of the world" authority to act unilaterally on its own secret, disputed evidence which is increasingly seen as flimsy and coming from biased sources. (There is at least some evidence that the attack may not even have been by the Assad government but could have been caused, accidentally or not, by the rebels themselves, some of whom are associated with al Qaeda.) If the U.S. Government does possess sufficient evidence, however, it needs to present this evidence to the United Nations Security Council, the International Criminal Court and/or other international bodies as soon as possible.
= new reply since forum marked as read
