Letter to the Editor

Submitted to Asheville Citizen Times on 12/17/17, published on 12/21/17:

In today’s wars, about one quarter of fatalities happen to children under the age of eighteen. Therefore, all wars are wars against children.

We will not win a war by bombing other people’s homes and villages. We will not win by killing their children, nearly all of whom were born after 9-11-01. It seems now that war is a permanent state for the USA, not something to be won or even ended. And while the costs to us are high, the costs paid by the poor people of Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Syria are vastly higher. They have died by the hundreds of thousands and have fled by the millions from their homelands. Those five countries are the ones that President Trump has continued bombing when he came into office. President Obama also bombed Libya and Pakistan, and there is a high likelihood Obama also bombed the Philippines and Sudan. Trump is continuing Obama’s wars, and may follow Obama’s example of starting new ones. I see very little outrage from the US American people to these ongoing atrocities. As Albert Einstein said: “War cannot be humanized. It can only be abolished.”