Stop war

On Sept. 12th in the Spokesman’s guest opinion (“Veteran suicide leaves many questions unanswered”), Wesley Anderson asked how we can prevent veterans’ suicide.

The answer seemed so obvious to me: Stop war.

It’s the very best answer, and yet nobody has tried it. I guess the only president who actually kept us out of a war was Jimmy Carter, a man with a conscience and a faith that tells him that killing is wrong, and systematic killing is even more wrong.

So many of our wars have been unnecessary and even illegal. Remember Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that Pres. George W. Bush floated before the American people? There were no weapons of mass destruction and Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with al-Qaida, which was responsible for the 9/11 attack. But attack Iraq we did, and we killed a lot of people, mostly civilian Iraqis who were going about their lives in peace, until the US of A interfered.

Kofi Annan, the UN secretary-general at the time, called the invasion of Iraq illegal under international law. And what about the people in Korea, Viet Nam, Cambodia and Afghanistan? We don’t help other countries by dropping bombs on them and killing their civilians.

We changed the name of the War Department to the Department of Defense in 1949. We should revisit that name. Our wars are not defensive. They are imperialistic, and our veterans suffer from suicide and PTSD because of them. And those wars should never have happened.

Linda Greene

Spokane