LETTER: Too much risk to avoid war

Editor,

I am writing in response to Ted Pease’s article on Wednesday.

“The threat of [terrorism] against the U.S. homeland is serious enough for former president Bill Clinton to have stated that there is a 100 percent likelihood of a biological or chemical terrorist attack on U.S. soil in the next 10 years.”

-Richard Clark, national coordinator for security, Counter-Terrorism and Infrastructure Protection, 60 MINUTES, Oct. 22, 2000.

If we think we are safe from more terrorist attacks, we are probably thinking wrong. Actually, drop the “probably.” There will be more terrorist attacks.

Now, who do these terrorists target? Innocent people. They are who the terrorists target and kill. If we go to war, we are sending those who voluntarily signed up to fight for our freedom. Even if the draft is started up again, those unwilling to die for our country can still get out of it. And although we may be a “generation that seems to be just dying to – well – die” as Mr. Pease said, we know what we are dying for. We would be dying to have terrorism halted, to stop Sept. 11s, but most importantly we would be dying to save innocent lives. If we just sit back and let terrorists get away with their dark plans now, they will get more publicity and, therefore, more recruits for later, so not only would we be letting ourselves be murdered, we would also be letting our children be targeted as well.

Ted Pease said war “seems to be the inevitable,” so why wait for another Sept. 11 before we get our act together and attack? Or, we can just sit around and let horrible, horrible men like Hussein continue in their secret acts of darkness. The choice is ours, and unless “we think of some other option” (which would be really nice, because it is easy to say “I’ll die” but hard actually to do), sadly, war is really the only way.

M. “Craig” Larson