It is so easy to start a fight. Anyone can do it. We see it on TV all the time. A hockey game without a fight is a rare event. Basketball, baseball, hockey -- someone makes one of these "action heroes" mad and he hits out. Seems like most of the role models our young people see are spoiling for a fight. Perhaps our President grew up with them too.

We're all angry about 9/11. We should be able to get somebody back for that heinous attack on innocent people. But the terrorists are hard to find, even though there are more of them every day. So President Bush has decided to pick on a convenient substitute target -- Iraq. Behavioral psychologists would call this displacement activity.

Now we all know that Saddam Hussein is a bad guy. We are told that Iraq is threatening us, but I'm not sure how. They have no borders with us. They have no air force to speak of and their missiles only go a few hundred miles at best. They are on the other side of the world from us.

Israel is the only country in the area that they are likely to strike at. But Israel is not without defense. Israel has a huge nuclear capability. Attacking Israel would be suicidal for Iraq. So it would seem that except for having a very unpleasant leader, Iraq is little problem for us. None of the 9/11 terrorists came from there. Compared to Saudi Arabia, Iraq is very enlightened, western attire, more liberated women. But still President Bush persists in threatening to attack them.

Does President Bush realize that all this bellicose posturing is filling the terrorist training camps with more and more fanatics, all anxious to blow themselves up in order to somehow cause damage to the United States of America and its citizens? So by threatening Iraq, he is strengthening our real enemies, the Islamic terrorists. An actual attack on Iraq will not only cost thousands of lives on both sides, but will also cause our shadow enemies to be stronger and more dedicated.

Within the last month, former President Jimmy Carter received the Nobel Peace Prize "For his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts." President Carter joined other Nobel Peace Prize laureates such as Albert Schweitzer, Dag Hammarskjöld, Martin Luther King, and Mother Teresa, to name a few, but the event was pretty much ignored by the media here in the U.S. It seems that our press finds peace boring and not worth mentioning. Good news never makes a paper sell, they say.

But what a contrast there is between Jimmy Carter and our current President. I've been taught to despise bullies. Yet, now our President is making other nations feel that the U.S. is a bully nation.

If you feel attacking Iraq is the wrong thing to do, please come and join the Peace Vigil in front of the Federal Street Post Office at noon on Saturday, January the 11^th.

Sincerely,

Kenneth Turner Blackshaw

Captain, United States Air Force (Ret.)