My letter to the Deseret News:


Every once in awhile, your letters page has a whole bunch of short ones that call out for response. Saturday's issue is particularly inviting.

Wendy Bagley: Mayor Rocky Anderson demonstrates he has a heart, a brain and courage when it comes to expressing his opinions about the United States going to war against Iraq.

Mayor Anderson may have a heart, a brain and courage, but using an elected local office as a platform for setting national foreign policy, especially to oppose the liberation of the Iraqi people, doesn't demonstrate any of the three. What it does demonstrate is ego.

Adrian Arp: We are rapidly losing our freedom on two fronts. The domestic one is the rapidly rising federal police state. The foreign one is our loss of independence to the United Nations.

Mr. Arp, if this were a police state they'd have already been at your door to carry you off, torture you and send you to the gulag without a trial. Your letter wouldn't have been published. And if we were losing our independence to the U.N., the forces of the Coaltiion of the Willing wouldn't be on Saddam's doorstep.

Sidney Smith: The wars of World War II, Korea, Vietnam and the Gulf War contained lessons for humanity. The populace, and especially the military complex, should have learned that humanity cannot withstand the savagery of modern day warfare and continue to exist.

Where did you learn history? World War II? How about the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union? The failures of Korea, Viet Nam and the Gulf War were due to our failure to press them further and win them. We do that when we give our enemies a safe retreat, and settle for anything less than victory. If we had treated our enemies in those conflicts the way we did Hitler and Tojo, their lands would all be free today, and we wouldn't be hearing about hundreds of thousands of death of their own people at their hands.

Nicholas Norman: It makes my skin crawl to think of clone births.

Really? Have you ever heard of identical twins?

Lincoln Graves: But when you decide you're the only one who is right and you are unwilling to compromise, you become dangerous.

Mr. Graves, sometimes you get to compromises by organizing and making your arguments and being active in civic affairs. I've received a lot of Eagle alerts, and they have never said anything but "Call your legislators and let them know what you think." Maybe if more of us did that, we wouldn't be complaining all the time about those who do.