Former Marine speaks
Promotes book and criticizes War on Terror
By Victoria Shelor & Kelly Mason, staff writer & contributing writer
Posted on October 12, 2006

Mike Tucker, former Marine and JMU alumnus, said President George W. Bush needs “balls, backbone and brains” to tell the American people to come together to win the war on terrorism.

Monday night Tucker spoke at Memorial Hall, outlining a strategy for victory on the war in Iraq and on global terrorism.

“We are trying to create a political landscape in Iraq that is alien,” Tucker said. “Not only alien to the people, but to the history of the country as well.”

“The Bush administration ignores that Iraq is not all one people,” he said. Tucker emphasized how the different cultures of America and Iraq plays a major part in why he believes the current war strategy is not effective. Tucker also said Bush is the worst president since Millard Fillmore.

During the speech he gave Monday night entitled, “The War is in the Mosques.” Tucker said the mosques are often used as a place of attack.

America’s long-held separation of church and state has prevented us from considering religion as a factor when looking at politics, Tucker said. 

“In America, people don’t talk about politics, religion or sex,” he said.  “This is the root of everything.”

“We have a government that thinks of things in the short term. We haven’t fully learned the lessons of the Vietnam War. We can’t learn about politics if we don’t talk about it,” he said. Tucker added that the people who have seen war first-hand talk about politics freely because they know war.

Political science professor Anthony Eksterowicz said mosques have to be infiltrated by using the native population. It cannot be done with 10,000 Marines, he said.

Reducing the number of American troops and letting the Kurds be the ones to go into the mosques and resolve issues is what needs to be done as a strategy in Iraq, Tucker said.

“There’s no such thing as a small firefight,” Tucker said. “If Bush ever served, he would know that and it would have helped him in April 2003.  All combat is major — it’s all war.”

To fight this war, Tucker thinks full mobilization of the nation is needed — all men 18 to 30-years-old should be drafted for four years, he said.

“There is no reason why we cannot stand together, work together, bleed together as a nation on both sides of the aisle for what needs to be done,” he said. “A nation that stands together, bleeds together, wins together,” he said.

Tucker has been composing poems since age 15 and knew his calling was writing, but the only way he was going to get his master’s in English would.