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As the third anniversary of the Iraq invasion approaches this weekend, I support the immediate withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Iraq.

The Iraq invasion is a stain on the integrity of the United States. It is an illegal and immoral war based on perhaps the most well-known lie in the world. That Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. It is now being justified by an even more ridiculous lie that we are there to bring democracy to Iraq.

Osama bin Laden and the al Qaeda terrorist network responsible for 9/11 are arch enemies of Saddam Hussein. Osama is a pan-Islamic fundamentalist seeking to create a greater Islamic empire. Saddam is a secular pan-Arab nationalist seeking a United States of Arabia.

Now, with the publishing of the Downing Street memos, we know that Bush and Cheney deliberately lied us into war. This violates not only the UN Charter, but the principles we established at Nuremberg. If we are to regain our integrity as a nation, we must seek the impeachment of our president. Read more

As a former international election observer, who co-wrote and edited the 1994 report delivered to the United Nations on the first democratic elections since the peace accords in El Salvador, I saw far worse abuses of the election process in Ohio in the 2004 presidential election than I witnessed in Suchitoto, El Salvador.

The elections in Ohio, run by the highly partisan J. Kenneth Blackwell, Co-Chair of the Bush-Cheney Re-Election Campaign, aided by private partisan voting machine companies that use secret proprietary software, did not meet the minimum international standards for nonpartisanship and transparency. Blackwell banned international observers from Ohio polling stations and threatened them with arrest. He allowed Republican-dominated rural counties to avoid posting the election results at the precinct level and, instead, allowed them to be counted at the county level by suspect central tabulators.

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Only an independent governor associated with a third party movement can root out the fraud and make the rules fair for everyone in Ohio. The wealthy own the Republican Party, and they lease the Democratic Party as needed. The Democratic Party which controlled Ohio in the 1980s did little to rein in special interests and bring clean money into the process.

The Republican Party, which has always been better at corruption than the Democrats, has allowed the state to be systematically looted for political purposes. There’s always an ongoing battle in a democracy between the people’s interests and the wealthy few. Between democracy and oligarchy.

In the case of the Ohio Republicans, the few they want to rule are the rich. The ancient Greeks called this plutocracy. But under Republican governors George Voinovich and Bob Taft, the usual evils of unleased plutocracy have transformed into open kleptocracy — rule by thieves.

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