According to the June 21 edition of the Observer, "A confidential record of a meeting between President (George W.) Bush and (English Prime Minister) Tony Blair before the invasion of Iraq outlining their intention to go to war without a second United Nations resolution, will be an explosive issue for the official inquiry into the United Kingdom's role in toppling Saddam Hussein. Both men became increasingly aware that United Nations' inspectors would fail to find weapons of mass destruction. They had to contemplate alternative scenarios that might trigger a second resolution legitimising military action."

When I was a teenager, no one would have thought that a president of the U.S.A. would lie to the world, would deceitfully and preemptively invade another sovereign nation for his own personal agenda, causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people, the deaths and maiming of thousands of American military personnel and the shattering of their families' lives because their president and military commanders deceived them into believing that their countries' national securities were threatened by Iraq.

And now this evil, murderous, lying ex-president enjoys the perks and frills enjoyed by former American presidents. There is even a George W. Bush library and museum to celebrate his iniquities, instead of a life term in prison for his barbarous deceitful behavior that so many Americans just accept and go about their daily lives, as if nothing much has happened.

When will the sleeping citizens of this nation wake up and stop rewarding with gifts and re-elections the iniquitous, egregious, immoral, heinous, atrocious, vile, foul, abominable, behavior of its elected officials? And then when finally out of office, these criminals are treated with respect and esteem by the same populace they have used and abused.

For any country to be recognized as civilized, that country has to exhibit evidence of moral and intellectual advancement and humane, ethical, and reasonable behavior. That being the definition of being civilized, this country has a long road to travel to earn the righteous descriptive term of being "civilized."

The U.S.A. now rightly stands at the head of the class of those historically iniquitous nations that have been characterized by their gross immorality and injustice. The U.S.A. has legitimately earned the title of the most wicked imperialistic nation on the planet.

And the killing, the destruction and the suffering continues with the same weak lying rationalizations emanating from both political parties. This is not a political issue, but a personal individual moral opportunity for each and every American. How long can the American populace continue to nurture and support the ongoing murder of innocents, the killing of their own young men and women, without the country and each individual losing their souls?

Howard H. Bleicher, DDS, is a 14-year resident of Santa Fe.