• Shoreline Homepage

Letter to the Editor

Editor’s ‘evidence-based writing’ lauded

Dear Ebbtide Editor:

I applaud Ebbtide Managing Editor Chris Jones for his opinion piece, “A War on Two Fronts” (Sept. 22). Jones is dead-on in cataloguing the long string of lies and the mountains of propaganda that have resulted in an Iraq that is, despite what Bush, Powell, Rice and all those bizarre neo-cons claim about “liberation,” worse off now than it was under Saddam Hussein.

Shockingly, current opinion polls reveal that just under 70 percent of Americans believe Saddam was behind 9/11. Even Bush now says it isn’t so. But the damage has been done. It is too late for the thousands of Iraqi civilians killed and maimed in the ironically named Operation Iraqi Freedom. What those poll numbers suggest is that millions of Americans can no longer tell the difference between truth and lies, fact and fiction.

As an English teacher at Shoreline, I instruct students in “evidence-based writing.” “When you make a claim or assertion,” I tell them at the start of every term, “you must back up that claim with facts, details, evidence, illustrations and, of course, sound reasoning.” In prosecuting the war in Iraq, our government never once backed up any of its claims with hard evidence. And what “facts” Americans were given turned out to be, one after another, simply untrue. And for those lies the suffering people of Iraq are paying the price. Likewise, U.S. soldiers continue to be killed and wounded in what has quickly evolved into an organized guerilla resistance.

Thank you, Chris Jones, for your strong dose of truth. We all need it. Perhaps Ebbtide readers who pay attention to your editorial will not be among those Americans who believe whatever the government says or accept uncritically what they see on government-cheerleading Fox News or CNN. The war in Iraq happened because too many of our citizens believed the government fabrication that Iraq posed an imminent threat to America. It was never true. We’ve been had.

Ed Harkness
Professor of English