"LIKE WATCHING THE REPLAY OF A BAD MOVIE"

This is what President George Bush said about what Saddam is doing. For me, it describes what our president is doing. Watching our leader’s saber rattling is like watching an instant replay of what was happening in the early 1960’s when I was in high school and Lyndon Johnson was getting us into trouble in Vietnam.

What Bush is doing and the way he’s doing it reminds me of the "troublemaker" in class at the beginning of the year in junior high school. There’s a new teacher and the kid tests the teacher’s patience to see how much he can get away with.

This scenario might seem funny to me if I hadn’t been through Vietnam and experienced how deadly it was. Our situation, at the moment, seems to me to be far more serious than George Bush and his administration can imagine right now. I wonder how it is that they can be sanely contemplating what appears to be a full-scale build up of troops in the Middle East. The situation—the crazed dictator of a relatively small country threatening the United States of America—just doesn’t seem to warrant the amount of death and destruction that is likely to ensue if we follow Bush’s current course.

There must be a simpler, less lethal way. If many of the intelligent people of America will put our heads together now—before it’s too late—I’ll bet we can come up with another solution to contain Saddam Hussein that does not include sending our young men and women off to fight in the desert. What is unfortunate is that we, the people, have elected a President who appears to have a personal vendetta of some sort.

I was a soldier once—I have the Bronze Star to prove it—but what is going on now with my country is turning me into a pacifist. I will go on record right here, that I do not support the war in the Middle East—not given the way it is happening now—which seems to stem more from our President’s anger than from a genuine concern for the safety of our country.

It seems to me that the "bad movie being made right now" is one being written and directed by George Bush.