(from Barbieux.net)

The following is a letter to the editor in today's[Tuesday, April 8] Tennessean. It is both well written, receiving the Tennesseans 3-star award, and it speaks so much truth that I felt it necessary to reprint it here:

Only myth justifies this organized violence

When Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was asked if this war was going ''according to schedule,'' he retorted, ''I didn't know wars had a schedule.'' Of course, the question was inane and Rumsfeld's jab at the press, one of his favorite pastimes, was well-placed.

Although wars seldom go according to a set schedule, they always go according to a predetermined myth. Because war is the ultimate acting-out of organized violence, there must be a set of beliefs underlying a nation's felt need to kill people and break things.

The myth of war is that set of beliefs, often unconscious, that imbues a people with the illusion of righteousness, that divides the world into distinct realms of good and evil. The enemy is always the embodiment of evil and we are the essence of goodness and light. Without this absolute conviction of heart, mind and spirit, it is difficult to rouse a people's passion long enough to sustain cooperation.

Our administration has successfully evangelized America with this myth of grandiosity. Associating Iraq with the horrors of 9/11, which is easy to imagine but hard to prove, our myth-makers have elevated preemptive aggression into a preordained mission. And as we gather in houses of worship our priests, ministers and rabbis are constrained to pray for the success of this war.

In fact, we must cloak the myth of war with the blessing of our respective traditions, knowing all along that the prophets and Jesus lived, and thus died, to expose this myth as the very lie that perpetuates humankind's senseless folly.

Mark Forrester

Nashville 37216