LIBERTARIAN PARTY OF NEW YORK (516) 767-4688
PO BOX 728, BELLPORT, NY 11713
website: http://www.ny.lp.org/
Contact: John Clifton (718) 276-4630 x114 (office) (877)
769-4014 (voicemail); jclifton@spamarrest.com


PARTY CHAIR SPEAKS OUT FOR IRAQ WITHDRAWAL, INVITES SHEEHAN TO
RUN AGAINST HILLARY

Bellport, NY, 10/2/05: John Clifton, a Navy submarine veteran
and Chair of the Libertarian Party of New York (LPNY), has called
for an end to martial law occupation of Iraq, and a no-timetable
withdrawal of military forces from the region. He rejects the
compromise idea of a timetable proposed by his own party's
national organization. He has also just issued an ‘open
invitation’ to activist Cindy Sheehan, a mother whose son died in
the war last year, to consider running as a peace candidate
against Hillary Clinton in the 2006 U.S. Senate race. “The
invasion remains unjustified, so the subsequent occupation has no
underlying moral basis. Thus, neither does a phased withdrawal. If
no one can answer Sheehan’s question, then there’s no ‘noble
cause’ for which American troops or Iraqi civilians should be
dying right now, period.” Sheehan has openly challenged Senator
Clinton to plainly speak out against the war or ‘lose her job.’

Mr. Clifton has invited Sheehan to join others vying for the
Libertarian nomination when the party holds its state convention
next April. He discounts the “we broke it, we must fix it”
rationale offered in support of the occupation, pointing to the
construction of over a dozen permanent U.S. military bases in
Iraq, which he says clearly shows the deployment is anything but
temporary. “It’s about empire-building, plain and simple. The
US-led invasion and occupation of the sovereign nation of Iraq
was and remains unconstitutional, is contrary to the
non-aggression and non-interventionist position of Libertarians,
and to the principles of just war.” He argues that evidence such
as the forged Niger document and the Downing Street memos prove
the Bush and Blair administrations knew the case for Saddam
Hussein having weapons of mass destruction was non-existent, and not merely a mistake or 'intelligence failure' in the run up to the war.

He adds: “An exit plan recently commissioned by National LP does
not conform to the platform position authorized by the party
membership, as it has the appearance of accepting the legitimacy
of the intervention and current occupation. Many New York
Libertarians instead support the party's (and Founding Fathers’)
non-interventionist principles, as well as the will of the
sovereign people of Iraq, most of whom desire the military
presence there to end without a timetable.”

Clifton’s appeal comes in the wake of a longer formal statement
recently considered by LPNY that also called for an immediate
withdrawal of occupying forces from Iraq. The statement was nearly
identical to a resolution passed by the Libertarian Party of
California this August. Recent polls echo this sentiment, such as one showing 52% now in favor of ending U.S. intervention of the country,“with or without a timetable.” Given the near 2,000 U.S. troops now dead and over 100,000 civilians estimated killed in Iraq since 2003, a recent Zogby poll has even indicated 42% agree that
President Bush should be impeached, if it could be shown that he
misled Americans into war. Still, the New York resolution was not approved, with half of the state committee declining to vote on the measure. Mr. Clifton laments the equivocation or ‘pragmatism’ of some members of his party, and notes it is lagging behind the public. “At this point, the majority of Americans are more ‘radical’ in their position than many Libertarians are.”

Mr. Clifton is a black conservative Libertarian who voted for
Reagan in ’84, and he himself ran against Hillary Clinton in 2000
as the LPNY candidate for U.S. Senate. He admires Reagan’s
decision to pullout of Lebanon following the suicide bombing of
the Marine barracks in 1983, saying “the episode teaches us there
are responsible methods to respond to terrorism without
escalating intervention. Then as now, ‘support our troops—send
them home’ is a sound strategy.” Clifton agrees fully with
columnist and former Reagan Assistant Treasury Secretary Paul
Craig Roberts, who has written: “Dead and wounded Americans are
too high a price to pay for a war based on deception. This alone
is reason to end the war, if necessary by impeaching Bush and
Cheney and arresting the neoconservatives for treason. Naked
aggression is a war crime under the Nuremberg standard, and
neoconservatives have brought this shame to America.”

Citing the example of China, Clifton points to the use of trade
and diplomacy to induce un-free regimes into becoming freer, as a
more productive basis for international policy. “Libertarians are
not pacifists” he says, “we’re opposed to introducing aggression
as a means to solve problems, including bad dictator problems.
We’re pro-JUST war, pro-Constitution and opposed to fraud. The
current Gulf conflict fails to make muster on all three fronts.
So I say, no more no-win wars based on lies. Let the globalists
and militarists who backed this carnage and want it to continue,
send their own sons and daughters, and their own dollars to build
up their Empires. Americans should fight no one else’s war,
anymore.”

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/antiwarcom/message/40465