Tumacacori Highlands deserve protection

Avid hikers, my husband and I belong to groups that repair trails around Arizona and love our state.

We want to preserve wilderness in the Tumacacori Highlands area because everyone deserves places such as this to escape to.

People in populated areas are bombarded daily with pollution, noise and people. Wilderness areas are places to recharge, reflect and slow down.

This area is valuable for its diverse plant and animal species, many of which can’t be found anywhere else in the United States.

I say we protect this area as wilderness, not for me or for today, but for the kids who will need it just as much, if not more.

JEANIE WATKINS

Phoenix

What can be expected if we surrender Iraq

Anti-war people claim they can “stop the war.” They may be able to exert pressure to effect U.S. surrender and withdrawal from Iraq, but they cannot end the war.

Only Osama bin Laden and other jihadists can do that.

As they have been at war for some 1,400 years, I do not see peace in the offing.

If we lose the battle for Iraq, the Democratic Party will permanently own the title of the party of defeat and surrender.

Our allies probably will leave us forever; the jihadists will be emboldened beyond measure; hundreds of thousands of Iraqis will die; oil will be almost impossible to obtain in the quantity needed to keep our factories running and our people employed; the U.S. military will go into a swoon from which it may never recover; and the American casualty rate will go up exponentially in the U.S. and the rest of the world.

And that will only be the beginning.

LOUIS A. FANNING

This entry was posted on Monday, March 5th, 2007 at 12:00 am and is filed under Opinion. Tags for this post: Editorials, Opinion-Editorials, page-a08. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.