No nuclear first use: ask Hillary, Obama, or whomever.(COMMENTARY)(Hillary Clinton; Barack Obama)

Publication: International Journal on World Peace

Publication Date: 01-SEP-07

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COPYRIGHT 2007 Professors World Peace Academy

Questions to Ask the Candidates

We need to ask the 2008 Presidential candidates some questions. We particularly need to ask these questions of the Democratic candidates, because all of them claim to oppose the war in Iraq.

The war in Iraq, initiated by President George Bush in 2003, is widely perceived to have been a preemptive war. The line of reasoning is something like this: 1) Iraq had not attacked us; 2) Bush lied about Iraq having "weapons of mass destruction"; 3) The real reason we had for going to war with Iraq had to do with oil, which was not a legitimate reason for sending U.S. troops to Iraq. Somehow, this gets to be an unnecessary, preemptive war, engaged in by Bush and his neo-con buddies, resulting in the tragic deaths of more than 3,000 U.S. troops.

Hillary Clinton admits she voted for the war but now says she made a mistake and if she had it to do over again, she would not have voted for the war, mea culpa, mea culpa! Obama says he has always opposed the war and would have voted against the war if he had been in the U.S. Senate then, which he wasn't. Whoever takes various positions, depending upon whoever whoever is, but he certainly opposes the war now and would vote to bring our troops back home. Never mind the fact that the reason we have troops is that they can go fight on our behalf when we need for them to do so.

The Republican candidates cringe every time the Iraq topic comes up and they wish, fervently, that the whole Iraq thing would go away so that they could just run for President as if the whole thing hadn't happened. They want to talk about the fair tax, the flat tax, tax cuts, and all of the other great ideas like balanced budgets that Republican candidates love to talk about when they're running for office but never quite get around to doing anything about when they're actually in office.

The Democratic candidates want to forget all about 9/11/2001, as if it hadn't happened. The Republican candidates want us to remember 9/11/2001 but they can't quite conjure up a plausible connection between 9/11 and the 2008 Presidential campaign that they feel they can persuade the voters to buy into, so they just wander, aimlessly, waiting for something to happen, and fearful that it won't.

All right, Presidential candidates. Democrats. And you Republicans, too. Here are the questions that we voters want you to answer:

* Do you believe in preventive war, sometimes referred to as preemptive war, yes or no? (Their answer will be no, or a qualified no.)

* If you don't believe in preventive or preemptive war, what would you do, as President, if the CIA suddenly informed you that Iran was only days away from having a nuclear weapon? (They will do almost anything to avoid giving a direct, honest answer to this question. You must persist in demanding an answer. A claim that they will go...

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