Pantagraph.com | Letters | Another example of war for poor reason

Pantagraph.com Letters Another example of war for poor reason: "In our comparatively short national history, we have gone to war on many pretexts: to evade taxes; to protect seaborne capitalism, to filch Mexican land, ``... to make men free,'' to exterminate Indians, because they ``... sank our battleship,'' to field-test Krag-Jorgensen rifles, to ``... make the world safe for democracy,'' for sugar and fruit and baseballs, to collect debts, because we were attacked, to contain communism and for nutmeg.

But this has to be the first time that we have asked our youth to die, to be maimed and to be traumatized to resolve one man's Oedipal conflicts to outdo, and thereby figuratively kill, his own father.

Of course, other men had even darker reasons to entangle us in this wretched war. However, in order to bring our Mama's-Boy-in-Chief along, it was only necessary to whisper in his ear, ``Your daddy couldn't do it, but you can!''"