Let's Remember ALL Victims of September 11th

Thanks Mom, for forwarding John Desmond's letter to the editor, from the Walla Walla Union Bulletin.

On Sept. 11 the nation will commemorate the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attack on the United States.
We will remember and honor the victims of those attacks on New York City, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania,
and we will rightly honor all the heroes of that day, living and dead, and their surviving families and loved ones.

At the same time, we do well also to remember the other victims who have suffered, and continue to suffer, as a consequence of our response to the 9/11 attack. I refer specifically to the thousands of non-combatant Iraqi and Afghan citizens who have been killed or maimed as a result of our pre-emptive, illegal war and the thousands of Iraqi Christians who have been killed or driven from their homeland by our fundamentalist Sunni and Shiite "partners in democracy".

We do well also to remember the countless number of American and allied families whose lives have been forever shattered by the death or injury of our servicemen and women, and the alarming increase in suicides by our military personnel forced into repeated tours of duty in these wars.

All of these broader consequences are a result of actions done in our name, and for which we share responsibility.

The retaliatory actions were started and have been continued by two presidents (and Congress)--the current president who inherited the wars and seems unable to extricate us from them, and the former president, George W. Bush, who now enjoys a leisurely retirement and seems to sleep just as peacefully as he did when he was in the White House, starting wars.

John F. Desmond, Walla Walla, WA