Ohio Valley Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends calls for the end of the U.S. occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. We call on our government to turn over the short-term administration and policing of these nations to the United Nations with the mandate to rapidly restore self-government to these peoples. We are concerned that escalating guerilla warfare will not only needlessly wound and kill Americans but will also inevitable increase the brutality of an already brutal occupation. We call on our fellow Americans to question our nation's motivation for the occupation of these nations and, particularly, to question the extent to which its motivation is the establishment of military bases and the extraction of natural resources. We ask our fellow citizens to search their hearts and to ask how these occupations could be consistent with democratic principles, let alone the spirit of love and compassion that so many of us feel. Last updated: August 20, 2002 Send comments to: Barbarie Hill