Progressives Should Vote Kucinich
by RONNIE DUGGER
(posted online on February 17, 2004)
Dennis Kucinich is the one candidate for President whose vision, eloquence and commitments on the issues can lead us to rise to and surmount the worldwide crises precipitated by the Bush Administration.
First and foremost, Kucinich is inviting us to stop being aggressive nationalists and start being brothers and sisters with the entire human race. It's a euphemism to call Bush's war on Iraq "a war of choice"; it was a classic unprovoked war of aggression. Kucinich is the only member of Congress running for President who voted against the resolution authorizing Bush to attack Iraq. Kerry, Edwards, Gephardt and Lieberman all voted for it, while Kucinich led almost two-thirds of the Democrats in the House of Representatives to repudiate their own party leader on it. In the national disgrace of our war on Iraq, the public figure who did the most to uphold American honor is Dennis Kucinich.
Late last month the top general of the Army said we may have to keep troops in Iraq another three years. One hears no talk of withdrawal from Edwards, and in Des Moines on February 14, Kerry said that during his first 100 days as President he would send over 40,000 more US troops. Kucinich demands that we turn the situation in Iraq over to the UN and get our 130,000 soldiers back home in ninety days. Otherwise, he forecasts that the $155 billion war we didn't have to fight will cost us a trillion dollars, and the 550 dead Americans will become thousands--not to speak, as usual, of the tens of thousands of Iraqi casualties.
Under President Kucinich, the Bush Doctrine of first-strike wars would be junked--we would work with other nations and the UN "instead of acting like an empire," waging a permanent war and undermining the ABM, biological weapons, chemical weapons, small arms, International Criminal Court and Kyoto treaties. Kucinich would create a Cabinet-level Department of Peace to rank alongside the Departments of State and Defense and to "establish nonviolence as an organizing principle" in domestic and world affairs. His space preservation treaty would ban weapons in space.
Where else would Kucinich lead us as President?
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