Dear Mr Rumsfeld: Your Department is proposing to invade Iraq, inflicting casualties on Iraqi troops and civilians which will unavoidably dwarf even the recent carnage at the World Trade Center and in Afghanistan.

Driving your Department’s proposal is the calculation (contrary to the international-law doctrine of self defence) that if the USA does not invade Iraq now, American lives are liable to be lost eventually from Iraqi-sponsored terrorism.

The Department of Defense calculates, in terms worthy of Napoleon Bonaparte, that American and Iraqi lives are of unequal value. It conceives its responsibility to be first and foremost the safety of the American people — the safety of others being, at best, a secondary consideration, at best a balancing or qualifying factor. Rational though this view may have seemed to the dismal French Consul, or to Clausewitz or Bismarck, it was never a morally tenable view. Neither was it a view congenial to the best of the eighteenth- and nineteenth century American governments, who correctly saw themselves as breaking with morally empty traditions in political thought.

Powerful minds in American public life are exposing your Department’s underlying weakness. Notably, for Republican congressional leader Mr Dick Armey, the idea of invading Iraq counters the ideals of the Founding Fathers. For the Founding Fathers, Mr Armey and I would argue, it was not Americans alone, but all persons, even persons like those in Iraq, who were created equal by God. Is America to be kept alive at any cost? Are we to prefer a pre-emptive strike against Iraq to bearing the eventual full, severe risk of living by American principles? Does the clamour for security now trump the need for self-respect? If now a betrayal of America’s core ideals is useful, what further betrayals may we, or the next generation, expect? What is your Department, ostensibly a Department of Defense, in reality defending? The material fabric, perhaps, of the American lifestyle, in your willingness to make principles negotiable? Does the State Department expect other countries, among them my own Canada and Estonia, to be collaborators in such a project?

Mr Rumsfeld, my family have felt the totalitarian lash. Numbers of my relatives were herded into cattle cars for Siberia in 1941, by the semiliterate Stalin, the self-styled “man of steel” who considered Estonian lives expendable for the greater good of the Soviet Communist Party. (That “man of steel” was himself the pupil of V.I. Lenin, who notoriously taught that to make omelettes, eggs must be broken.) We judged the USA, who kept Estonia’s flag in its State Department lobby through the decades of the Cold War, to be our ally and defender. The freedom we, and indeed all the peoples between the Elbe and Vladivostok, secured in 1991 was the outcome of patient endurance. The freedom did not come from cruise missiles, but from our willingness to sit still, to think, to write, to discuss, to wait for decades, to live with risks and fears, to hope. It was as a participant in that nonviolent historical movement that I just stood outside your Toronto consulate, singing an antiwar song, distributing a draft of this letter — aiming a political protest such as I once reserved for the Soviet Union against (improbably, absurdly, incredibly) the United States.

Show us now, Mr Rumsfeld, that you are worthy of the ideals of America’s Founding Fathers.

(The author handed out copies of this letter to the United Startes Consulate staff and passers-by in Toronto on August 13, while singing the Vietnam war protest song by Pete Seeger, “Where Have All The Flowers Gone?”)

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