by James Glaser
May 13, 2002

Desperation sets in, you have no weapons, your friends and family are being killed, and to keep your movement going you must strike back some how. Strapping on a few pounds of explosives is just such a crude way of delivering a blow to the enemy, but you have no other.

Our American President and our Congress think that some how it is wrong to be a suicide bomber, but it is perfectly all right to kill civilians with bombs as long as they drop from a plane or if you fire a missile from a remote controlled plane with the operator hundreds or even thousands of miles away. However if you do not have the equipment that America has then you should sit there and let your enemy destroy you. Sure doesn't take long to figure out that the President and the vast majority in Congress, have never been called on to defend anything except their check book.

Americans have been known for their prowess at killing large groups of civilians for well over fifty years. The fire bombing of Tokyo did in about 100,000 . Who can ever forget how America started the nuclear age with the big drops on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where we killed 210,000 right off the bat in the explosions and another 250,000 with the horrible radiation. Over a million were killed with the saturation bombings of German cities. All of these were terrorist attacks on innocent civilians, but we didn't commit suicide to deliver the weapons to the target so our President and Congress looks at these horrible terrorists attacks by America as good.

In Korea millions of people were killed and more displaced. South East Asia and Vietnam had the "Phoenix Program," the bombing of Hanoi, the nine years of bombing Laos and Cambodia, and then in the 90s we have the killing of 500,000 children in Iraq and on a humanitarian mission to Somalia we managed to kill over 1000 civilians. America is good at doing in civilians, we just can't accept others doing the same

We move forward to 2001 and we see America is still good at killing innocent women and children. This time it is Afghanistan and those deaths were caused by errant bombs meant to kill the enemy. Going in America knows that a certain percentage of bombs and missiles will miss their target and kill innocent people, but because we didn't mean to, it is OK.

Now we come to 2002 and find our President and Congress totally upset with Palestinian suicide bombers. They think that these bombers are just the worst sort of terrorist and the strange thing is that a real effective suicide bomber is lucky to kill twenty people, hardly even in the same league with American Terrorists.

I don't mean to be flippant when I write about the deaths caused by people in any war, but it just makes me feel so bad that the leaders of our country have no idea of what is going on in the Middle East nor do our leaders have any grasp of American history. For our leaders to pass judgment on Palestinian Suicide Bombers is so very wrong, as they really have no idea of what it is like to be in a war for your very survival and that of your family. I have been to war and that was painful enough, but to have my parents and children on that same field of battle would have been unbearable.

Both Israel and Palestine have their families right out on the front lines with those fighting and that is why this war is more intense than any America has fought since our Civil War. If it wasn't so serious, it would be a joke for the President and Congress to go on pretending that they can pass judgment on either of these countries. None of these officials in Washington have any business telling these people how to fight. Not only is America's past filled with the killing of literally millions of civilians, but so very few of the Officials in Washington have any personal involvement in any kind of warfare.

What makes Washington's involvement in this Israeli/ Palestinian conflict so very sick, is the fact that we only want to get it over so we can attack Iraq. Iraq is a country that we have admitted to have caused the deaths of over 500,000 children and now we want to kill more.