LPA: When President Bush defends his violations of our basic freedoms because of this "War on Terror" that the administration has deftly manufactured, he also brings up the fact that this "War" will be a long and costly one. He also uses the argument that presidents in time of war have suspended Habeas Corpus and violated the Fourth Amendment. This is not a valid argument and
LPA would like to point out that:
1. This is not a war that has been declared and legitimatized by the Congress of the United States according to the law of the land under the Constitution.
2. The forces of Iraq did not pose a "Clear and Present Danger" to the United States or its citizens.
3. The proper protocol involving international disputes as provided for in the United Nations Charter and UN Security Council Resolutions were ignored.
4. The United States has no right to unilaterally intervene in the affairs of other sovereign nations, whether to “democratize” them or not. Indeed, as a signatory of the UN Charter, the United States is legally bound to respect the territorial integrity of all Member-States of the United Nations. Ironically, the administration wishes to “export democracy”, when in fact it seeks to dismantle the fundamentals of our own representative democracy and our republic’s constitutional form of government.
LPA also stresses the point that we are not including the Afghanistan conflict in this article. These are two very different conflicts. The Taliban and Al-Qaeda and other Islamist terror groups did pose a “Clear and Present Danger” to the United States and its people. If the President and his administration wanted to do things correctly, they could have gone to the UN after 9/11, when there was great sympathy and respect for the people of the United States. At that pivotal time, the President could have easily won a formal Declaration of War against the nation of Afghanistan.
We have seen this administration take us down the road of international intervention in that is unprecedented in the post-war history of the United States. The war in Vietnam was also unlawful, but the government of South Vietnam although a pawn of the West, did invite the United States and other countries to help them to fight a communist insurrection that was aided and abetted by the Soviet Union, the Peoples Republic of China, the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong. There was no such call for intervention from anyone in Iraq. What is more, there were no links between Iraq and Al-Qaeda and far more reason to pressure countries like Saudi Arabia for their financial and moral support of radical Islamist terrorism.
The Liberal Party of America believes that the Bush administration has manipulated the facts and that a war of aggression was instigated by this government and is illegal under the Constitution, and binding International Law. We call for an immediate cessation of hostilities and urge that this conflict be turned over to the United Nations before it evolves into an Iraqi civil war that will have been caused by United States intervention and its faulty (or consciously manipulated) intelligence. The so-called facts and premise for the war in Iraq has been repeatedly refuted by senior intelligence, diplomatic and administration officials.
In order for the United States to avoid being seen by the rest of the world as an international criminal state, this matter must be relegated to the Security Council of the United Nations.
The reason for this is clear. Since our incursion into Iraq, no matter which side you believe or what you may think about the morality or legality of it, it has brought that country to almost complete devastation. The crumbled infrastructure, and now the attacks on Sunnis by the Shia and vice-versa have brought the nation to ruin. The bloodshed and the tens of thousands of lives lost in this escapade now threaten to surpass even the ruinous rule of Sadaam Hussein. This is not what the people of the United States of America wanted when we sent our troops into that country. The time to stop the death and destruction is now.
This is the policy of the Liberal Party of America and we believe that all Americans need to write to their legislators and demand that the situation in Iraq be brought to the UN Security Council immediately, to stop the needless bloodshed which tarnishes the image of our country, our core values, and daily destroys innocent life.