Why have our leaders changed their focus?

In 1964, I took a full year off from running my rapidly growing company, Arrowhead Mills in Texas, to campaign against LBJ, as I firmly believed that he would expand our no-win war in Vietnam. Over 58,000 dead and thousands of severely injured troops later, we all know the extent of that tragedy.

My wife and I moved to California in 1996 at the request of Dr. Bill Bright of Campus Crusade for Christ, with whom I had been working for ten years in Texas. I loved my work with athletes in action and the Jesus film project.

However, when Cheney and Bush were nominated in 2000, I took the rest of the year off and campaigned against them almost every day in the streets of Irvine and at UCI. As a former Republican Chairman in Texas and a personal friend of Bush’s, it hurt to have to do this.

But in all good conscience, I told many hundreds of people that Cheney and Bush would get us into another war in Iraq, in the process lose many innocent lives, create more terrorism and double our national debt. With increasing deaths and injuries to our great troops, we know the result.

My question is this: If I could figure these things out in advance, how could members of both parties in Congress, with access to much secret intelligence, vote to break our focus of getting Bin Laden in Afghanistan and go into Iraq with its very predictable result?

Jesse Frank Ford