Down the road... ZENmud editorial

If Bush the Lesser gets his way anytime this fall, through Senate/ House legislation (tragically to be passed, if at all, before a Democratic majority could kill the proposal) that would redefine the US observance of the Geneva Conventions, and especially Common Article III, which establishes the limits of treatment of prisoners, it would become the latest accelerant to the hostilities and overstressed tensions that are turning the entire Middle Eastern sphere into an apocalyptic bomb.

By altering the laws by which America has taken high moral ground in past conflicts, often protecting enemy combatants to a greater degree than have our opponents' forces, Bush would implicitly be promoting the greater likelihood that foreign soldiers would become more savage in their desires to elude capture...

That war kills, and kills horribly; that soldiers evolve out of their brutal experiences and forevermore live in a different world than those of us who have never fought in one, is simply a part of the false politics of aggressive resolution to conflicts.

If Bush gets his way, how will America ever again publish any form of Human Rights report, as has been done annually by the State Department for years?

The world does not need American leadership, but has gained from it in past Administrations, but it won't stand by, idle, if this current misAdministration deludes itself into thinking that the effects of its pellmell slide down the slippery slope towards emulating Saddam Hussein's worst years, acts and aberrations, towards emulating the worst of Hitler's Gestapo, the worst of the USSR's gulags.

Bush the Lesser must remind himself, that 75 per cent of the world's economy lies outside the US borders...

ZENmud