A personal note to Susan Petrarca of Lemont, Illinois

Susan wrote a letter to the editor published in today's Chicago Tribune. She describes how her brother is likely to be deployed to the Middle East in October. She proceeds to rant that "if anything should happen to my brother, I'll blame the Cindy Sheehan contingent. And I'll be more than happy to tell her to her face." She then adds about how she is one of "those of us who support the struggle for a constitutional democracy in Iraq."

Pssst, Susan--that struggle is over. There is no "constitutional democracy" in Iraq. The Iraqi people didn't want it and George W. Bush certainly didn't care about it. Your brother will be supporting the establishment of a fundamentalist Islamic client state of Iran. I applaud his service and hope for his safety, but please know that the "anti-war" left cares far more about your brother and his comrades-in-arms than does your president.

As for dissent, nothing is more fundamentally American. I always think of a young man from Illinois by way of Kentucky and Indiana. While in Congress, he voted for a resolution that said that the war "was unnecessarily and unconstitutionally commenced by the president." He basically called the president a liar, stating that "the result of this examination was to make the impression that, taking for true all the president states as facts, he falls far short of proving his justification and that the president would have gone farther with his proof if it had not been for the small matter that the truth would not permit him." Finally, he even got a bit personal, saying that the president's speech calling for war sounded like "half-insane mumbling."

He says that the president kept changing his reasons for war, as he "first he takes up one, and in attempting to argue us into it he argues himself out of it, then seizes another and goes through the same process, and then, confused at being able to think of nothing new, he snatches up the old one again, which he has some time before cast off." Again, he takes to insulting the intellectual capacity of the president, as he describes how "his mind, taxed beyond its power, is running hither and thither, like some tortured creature on a burning surface, finding no position on which it can settle down and be at ease."

The young man is also concerned about how the president reacts to criticism and won't listen to his generals. He notes that the president fails to state when he "expects the war to terminate." Generals were "by this same president driven into disfavor, if not disgrace, for intimating that peace could not be conquered in less than three or four months...... the president gives us a long message, without showing us that as to the end he himself has even an imaginary conception."

He wraps up with one last insult, as he states that the president "knows not where he is, as he is a bewildered, confounded, and miserably perplexed man."

Downright un-American you say? Well, I wonder what ever became of that young man so critical of the president and war--that Abraham Lincoln fellow.