On a Sunday morning more than two weeks after four U.S. soldiers were ambushed and killed in Niger, Rep. Walter Jones sat at the desk in his North Carolina office, doing what he’s done more than 11,000 times in 14 years: signing letters to families of the dead troops.
That is how Martha Waggoner begins her Monday Associated Press article relating the regret United States House of Representatives Member Walter Jones (R-NC) feels for voting in 2002 for the US invasion of Iraq and how he has channeled that regret into actions Jones calls “penance” that include sending letters to families of troops killed in the Iraq War and other US military actions overseas.
Read the complete article here.
In addition to sending these letters, Jones, who is a member of the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity Advisory Board, has pushed for Congress to undertake its constitutional responsibility of debating and voting on the starting or continuing of US military actions overseas, such as the Afghanistan War that Jones has worked hard to end, instead of leaving the decision to use military force to the executive branch.
Reprinted from The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity.
“…sending letters to families of troops killed in the Iraq War and other US military actions overseas.”
Sorry Walter, but that’s not enough. The repercussions of what you signed on to will last several generations and the people who started it all, including yourself, are still in office, getting paid by the taxpayers who include the parents/siblings/children of those who you’ve sent to their premature deaths.
You can’t grow a backbone after the fact.
He has changed not just his mind, but also his convictions. He was rabidly for the war and now he is strongly against it. He has discovered and admitted his mistake and is working hard to let the American people know the truth. This puts him in the one-percent group. All his colleagues would find it impossible for them to admit and work to fix their mistake by educating the American people. We need a man such as this as president.
I would hope that anyone can seek forgiveness for a mistake. Have you, or any of us, never made a mistake which caused harm to someone else? Just as you or I can be forgiven, so can Walter.
This is not about “forgiveness.” It’s about doing something to end the madness. Writing letters to the families of the fallen, while commendable, especially since many of those families are not in his district, are just words. Words, while sometimes difficult to utter, are an easy way to assuage one’s conscience. The intentionally ambiguous (and unconstitutional) AUMF is still being used to wage illegal war – and spreading. He’s had 16 years to kill it. But, he’s a converted Republican (to win the seat) in a conservative but mainly Democratic part of NC. If he goes too far in his opposition to the wars, he’ll be primaried by the establishment Republican leadership – who really don’t like him or his positions on the war.