Letters to the Editor

The Journal News

letters@thejournalnews.com

June 30, 2004

To the Editor:

Last night my wife Linda and I went to the Jacob Burns Film Center in Pleasantville to see Fahrenheit 9/11. At the end of the sellout performance, Michael Moore’s film was given a standing ovation. Mr. Moore has done a great service to this nation with his powerful cinematic indictment of the Bush administration and its cynical defense of the war in Iraq, its unseemly and duplicitous connections with the Saudi Arabian royal family, its failure to capture Osama Bin Ladin and his Taliban allies, and its payoff to big business at the expense of the average soldier. As Samuel Johnson said, “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” President Bush has wrapped himself in the bloody red flag of patriotism to indulge in foreign adventurism without true regard to the ongoing problem of worldwide terrorism. Moore alerts us to the fact that Bush had exercised little regard for terrorism before 9/11, was unprepared for the possibility of attack, and had Sadaam Hussein in his sights from his first day in office. No one doubts that Sadaam Hussein, and his regime, were a stain on the worldwide body politic. But after years of containment and the attrition of his armed forces, why were we lied to about his power, his weapons of mass destruction and his connection to Al Queda? Why didn’t the Bush Administration level with the American people? Maybe the American people would have felt differently, and thought twice, about sacrificing its sons and daughters for a war fought over oil and the removal of another petty dictator.

Richard J. Garfunkel