Another unpublished letter

This letter was sent to the Hendersonville News in February.  Never published.

I support cuts to the Pentagon budget.  It has grown way out of proportion to any real risk to our country in the last ten years.  If the proposed $1 trillion in cuts are enacted, the Pentagon budget will still be higher than it was in 2007, when we were still occupying Iraq. 

Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta has called the cuts “horrific” and he has urged Congress to not enact these automatic cuts to Pentagon spending.  I think the amount of money that we are spending on the Pentagon, on wars, on occupations, on drone bombings, and on over 1,000 overseas American bases is way out of line.  We need to be spending money here at home for infrastructure and health care for our citizens, not on wars and occupations overseas.

I cannot see how either our occupation of Iraq (which destroyed that country) or our occupation of Afghanistan (where children are freezing to death in refugee camps this winter) are helpful to the American people.  I cannot see how our drone bombings (that mainly kill civilians) are helpful to the American people either.  All of these actions strike me as totally immoral.