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The White House Oct. 20, 2001 Dear President Bush, We support your call, in your Oct. 11 address to the nation, to engage the youth of America in support of a Red Cross fund to benefit the children of Afghanistan. However, we do not believe your characterization of the terrorists who attacked our country as hoping to frighten us into inaction is plausible. It seems far more likely to us that what they hoped for was the kind of massive military over-reaction which has gained us so many enemies in the past. For 3 weeks we watched with growing hope as you appeared to follow a course of military restraint combined with patient diplomatic efforts to build a worldwide coalition of nations against terrorism. This kind of international cooperation is essential. We need the support of the eyes and ears of people on the ground in all the countries infected by this plague. Your current extended bombing campaign has dimmed our hope. We seem to be slipping back into the kind of mistakes of the past that, while perhaps taking us one step forward (winning a short term military goal), have ultimately taken us two steps backward (losing the battle for the hearts and minds of the people we claim to be helping). We call on you to make it clear to those directing our military strategy in Afghanistan that, just as we seek to protect our own civilian population here at home, we must commit to protecting the civilian population there by choosing military tactics that do not put them in harm's way. We must never let our military leaders proceed on the assumption that it is more important to protect our trained fighting men than it is to protect the unarmed noncombatants who may be caught in the middle when we act. As we do our part in the necessary task of rooting out terrorist networks, let us do it in a way that shows the world that we are not a callous swaggering bully that is easy to hate, but a gentle giant that should be, if not loved, at least genuinely respected. Prairie Unitarian Universalist Society Social Action
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