September 8, 2003 - When a navigator charts a course to lead the ship safely to a port he relies upon the information recorded on his chart. The course he charts only avoids dangerous reefs and shoals if the chart accurately reflects positions and soundings that have been accurately collected. When the evidence of his eyes and ears demonstrate that the chart is faulty then the course must be altered to skirt the newly discovered hazards of the sea. Only a fool insists on staying the course despite the danger to the ship.

President Bush asks that we borrow an additional 87 Billion Dollars on the credit of the United States and give it to him to spend on our armies in Iraq and Afghanistan and on our spies around the world. With that installment on the ultimate cost of the adventure he resolves to continue on the same course. It is a course without a destination save his vague and illusive reference to final victory.

We may have driven our adversaries from the halls of power that they previously occupied in Kabul and Baghdad; we may have dissolved the Iraqi and Afghan armies that opposed us until they were overrun; but we are no closer to a “final victory” that creates stable and responsive governments in either of our theatres than we were on the 12th day of September, 2001. Indeed the steps we have taken, dismantling our own stable and responsive system of ordered liberty; discarding the rule of law as our democratic touchstone; imposing the arbitrary rule of an alien occupation on two sovereign nations has brought us no closer to a peaceful and secure nation than we were when the course was determined and the charts adjusted to fit that course.

Our eyes can see clearly the dangers evidenced by the flooding tide of the dead, dying and wounded coming home or resting in Iraqi graves. Our ears can hear the voices of an increasingly hostile Iraqi population and an international community learning the difference between the rhetoric of liberation and the reality of occupation. The course we are on will put the ship irrevocably on the rocks. We ignore our eyes and ears only to our peril.

Neither the 87 billion that is requested nor any amount of money spent on soldiers and spies will remove the rocks from the path. It will only make the losses in the inevitable shipwreck that much dearer. The President has insisted that we will stay the course in our wars in the Middle East no matter what the cost and no matter what the duration of the voyage. He insists that we must stay the course despite the rocks that even a blind man can see and the crash of the surf breaking on them that even the deaf can hear. He must either shape a new course for the Ship of State or we must find a new navigator lest we drive upon the reef and be cast away.

We must be willing to turn away from the reef and place our reliance on the international community, ceding political authority in Iraq and Afghanistan to the United Nations and giving that body the duty to develop and provide security for responsive and stable governments.

We claim that we did not come to Iraq as conquerors. We need to abandon the fruits of conquest for they have proven to be bitter indeed. It is time to bring the legions home for we are America and not Imperial Rome

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