 VOXPAX OPINION - ROADMAP PLANS Dear President Bush: These are troublesome times. Everyone (including you) wants peace. As President of the United States, you are perhaps the one person most able to do anything about it. Recently your administration put out a “RoadMap Plan” which shows great promise for ending the hostilities in Israel and Palestine and restoring peace in that region. The world praises you for that. We have just finished a crushing war that leaves Iraq in much the same condition as Israel and Palestine. In Iraq we’re the “occupying nation” and the indigenous populations of Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds who (as expected) are contentious with each other, and (contrary to expectations) are not overjoyed with the American occupation. Daily we hear of military clashes with Iraqi loyalists and killings aimed at disrupting our occupation of Iraq. You have told us that it is not our intention to create an American Empire - or to form a puppet government in Iraq. You have told us that all America wants to do is help Iraq be free and able to govern itself - democratically we hope - and finance its own prosperity by means of its oil supply. You’ve proposed that as soon as this is accomplished (in five years maybe) America will remove its military forces from Iraq. That, of course, seems a little disingenuous in that most of your advisors insist that America must keep control of Iraq militarily (particularly the Baghdad Airports) long into the foreseeable future. No one doubts that the United States, having started the War, is morally and economically responsible for ending the War - and you have asked the Coalition of the Willing, NATO, the European Union and United Nations to help bear the financial burden of rebuilding the economy of Iraq. It’s been strongly suggested that the United Nations should have an important role in rebuilding the peace - and yet, having bypassed U.N.at the start of the war, we won’t have much traction asking the U.N. for help at this stage. Pentagon hawks will insist that we preserve our military presence in Iraq “if for no other reason than to protect the oil fields”. So where are we? The Iraq War has seriously compromised our global security, and left the entire Middle East smoking in its wake. Cautiously the world still looks to you for leadership. It can’t, however, stand by indefinitely while you look behind every bush for weapons of mass destruction, and cadavers with DNA matching that of Saddam Hussein. What we need (what the world needs) is a “RoadMap Plan for Peace in Iraq” - and we need it now - or the rest of the world will move on without us. Yours in Peace
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