Letter: We should be focusing energy elsewhere

Wednesday, June 6, 2007 | 7:10 a.m.

For this administration to say we're going to defeat terrorism - a strategy, not a people - is naive in the extreme. Terrorism enables the weak to confront much stronger opponents with great effectiveness and, therefore, appeals to the alienated and the disenfranchised (what we should be ameliorating instead of exacerbating). Moreover, terrorist strategies cost pennies to conduct while offering vast payoffs.

Our wrongfully directed and irrational response to 9/11 has shown average Americans how we're not the democracy we pretend to be - that we are, instead, very much an oligarchy with a rich and powerful ruling class whose corruption, self-interest, hunger for oil and desire for empire is now increasingly transparent to us and to much of the world.

As this administration pumps out propaganda about the absolute necessity of winning this war to save our (whose?) way of life, it also calls for more tax breaks to a ruling class , which occupies a separate America as distant from the norm as were Washington and Jefferson's plantation lives in the big house from the lives of their brutalized slaves.

No sacrifice has been asked of America's wealthiest citizens, which in itself is a crime.

What should make us cry is the "opportunity cost" of this administration's egregious actions. Instead of war in Iraq, we could have worked to lower world tensions and win friends by aggressive actions in Darfur and New Orleans, by pursuing Osama bin Laden relentlessly, by working serious ly without bias to resolve the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, by helping rebuild lives in Pakistan and Afghanistan, by stepping up diplomacy with all nations and by saving lives instead of taking them.

David Fredericks, Las Vegas