Question Number Four: Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry said on Aug. 9 that he would have voted for the congressional resolution authorizing force against Iraq even if he had known then no weapons of mass destruction would be found. How does this affect the way you view his credibility on the issue of national security?

Because I don't believe the use of force in Iraq had anything to do with our national security, it is difficult to answer this question as stated, but here goes.

On many news programs on and after Aug. 9, President Bush repeated that "Kerry said he would have gone into Iraq!"

To me, any credibility that President Bush and supporters had was ruined by their statements regarding this matter. Kerry's actual words and deeds were far different from what was attributed to him. Voting to give a president the authority to do something, should he feel the absolute necessity of doing it, is not the same as saying that you agree that the president, so authorized, did the right thing later, or that you would have done as he did. Kerry might have thought it important to show unity and strength as a threat - not realizing that the President would then choose to use his authorization when it was not necessary to protect the American people.

I must say that I do not agree that Kerry or the Congress as a whole should have voted to give the President authority to use force on that day in October 2002. Since the authorization vote, we've learned that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction (which we also have learned had the United Nations inspectors been permitted by our country to continue their work). We have also learned that Iraq was not linked to Sept. 11 or to al-Qaeda. Even before the vote, there was already plenty of information available that indicated that the President, along with Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Secretary of Defense paul Wolfowitz, and others had been looking for an excuse to invade Iraq since long before Sept. 11, 2001. Why? The most brilliant analysis I have seen so far appears in an article titled "Baghdad Year Zero" by Naomi Klein in the September 2004 issue of Harpers Magazine.

Many have said that the problem with the Iraq war is that President Bush did not have a postwar plan. Klein argues that there was and is a plan; the problem is that the plan is wrong. She refers to a statement by Sen. John McCain (R., Ariz.) that Iraq is "a huge pot of honey that's attracting a lot of flies." The honey is oil wealth, no-bid contracts, and enormous investment opportunities created by the lifting of sanctions and privatizing of formerly government-owned enterprises. The flies are the Halliburtons, Bechtels, Unocals, and venture capitalists. Simply put, the plan is to lay out as much honey as possible, then sit back and wait for the flies. This theory comes from the most cherished of conservative beliefs - that greed is good. With this view, the role of good government is to create best possible conditions for corporations to pursue their bottomless greed. Anything promoting corporate profits is then defined as the "national interest" and in the interest of "national security."

The toll on our stance in the world. Because of that worldview, our foreign and military policy has too often fought against liberty, justice, and freedom throughout much of the world for more than 100 years (http://www.worldzone.net/famil/johnanderson/warisaracket.shtml). The totally undemocratic actions of American corporate and military interests have turned many people in other countries against U.S. institutions. Around the world, people from mature democratic nations have favored legislation that counteracts unbridled greed. When most people are free, they want restrictions on greed. Most free people want to join together and laws enforcing health and safety standards, environmental regulations, living wages, etc. This type of freedom inhibits the freedom of corporations to pursue their bottomless greed. The U.S.-backed governement has repressed Iraqi trade unions.

The toll on Americans. To date, almost 1,000 Americans have been killed in this war, and many times that have been injured. How many more will die, become injured, or suffer the multiple effects from depleted uranium poisoning? How many trillions of tax dollars will be diverted? There is no end in sight. In addition, our status in the world again has been tarnished. We are seen as occupiers, not liberators.

The Iraqi Toll. The U.S. military refuses to make public its own estimates of how many Iraqi civilians have been killed during the war. Approximately 12,000 Iraqi civilians have been reported killed (http://www.iraqbodycount.net), and many experts agree that the majority of civilian deaths do not get reported. An Iraqi organization, the People's Kifah, undertook a survey that documented more than 37,000 civilian deaths in just the first seven months of the war (March 20, 2003, through October 2003). In December 2003, the head of statistics for the Iraqi health ministry alleged that a survey it was conducting was ordered shut down by the U.S.-controlled Coalition Provisional Authority. Serious injuries and poisonings from depleted uranium add to the toll.

Regardless of who wins the election, we need to have a serious, uncensored national discussion about the phrases national interest and national security. Should we continue to allow our tax dollars and young people to be used for corporate freedom? Do we need to go through a national 12-step program, admitting that we have a long-term problem that has hurt ourselves and others - and making amends to those we have hurt? (Just because one group of people has hurt us does not give us the right to go out and hurt others who were not responsible.)

Will a Kerry victory allow for such a discussion? My hope is that it would.