President George W. Bush has been re-elected for four more years. The man who led the United States to “two wars in four years”:http://www.nonviolence.org/articles/cat_iraq_antiwar.php and whose policies in Afghanistan and iraq continue to create chaos in both countries will get four more years to pursue his war of terrorism against the world. Americans will not sleep any safer but will dream ever more of conquering and killing enemies. We’ll continue to sow the seeds of wars for generations to come.
I was worried when Senator John Kerry unexpectedly picked up in the primaries to become the Democratic presidential candidate. In his patrician upbringing he was very much like President Bush, and they actually agreed on many of the big issues — war, gay marriage, stem cell research. But in his personality, style and temperament Kerry was too much like former Vice President Al Gore.
Yes, I know Gore won the popular vote in the 2000 election and that his loss was declared by mysterious chads and a handful of senior citizen judges in Washington, D.C. But an election as close as that one should have been seen as a resounding loss, no matter what the Supreme Court verdict. As Vice President, Gore had helped lead the nation to one of its greatest economic recovers in our lifetimes. He was also clearly smarter in the President, more knowledgeable and farsighted, with more carefully articulated visions of the future. But he barely won the popular vote, making the electoral college vote close enough to be debated.
Kerry is intellectual and aloof in the same way that Gore was. And clearly there are a number of American voters who don’t want that. They want a candidate who can speak from the heart, who isn’t afraid to talk about faith. They also want a candidate who can talk in simple, morally unambiguous ways about war.
And what about war? Would a President Kerry have really pulled out troops sooner than President Bush will? Who knows: Democratic Presidents have pursued plenty of wars over the last century and when Kerry proclaimed he would hunt down and kill the enemy, he spoke as the only one of the four men on the major tickets who actually has hunted down and killed fellow humans in wartime.
We can make an educated guess that a Kerry-led America would leave iraq in better shape than a Bush-led America will. Kerry has the patience and the planning foresight to do the hard coalition-building work in iraq and in the world that is necessary if U.S. military power will translate to a real peace. But a Kerry plan for pacification and rebuilding of iraq could easily have followed the path that Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson’s did in Vietnam: an unending, constantly-escalating war.
Did Americans officially approve the country’s past two wars yesterday? It’s hard to conclude otherwise. Despite the lies of mass destruction and despite the “willful misleading of the American people”:http://www.nonviolence.org/articles/000194.php that Saddam Hussein was somehow involved in the 9/11 attacks and “possessed weapons of mass destruction”:http://www.nonviolence.org/articles/cat_iraq_weapons_of_mass_destruction_scandal.php, something over 50% of Americans thought the Bush/Cheney Presidency was worth keeping for another four years.
But there’s nothing to say a popular vote grants wisdom. In the next four years, those of us wanting an alternative will probably have many “teachable moments” to talk with our neighbors and friends about the deteriorating situation in iraq and Afghanistan. Maybe those of us whose “pacifism is informed by religious understandings”:www.nonviolence.org/martink/archives/000462.php can cross the intellectual divide some more and talk about how our faith gives us a simple, morally unambiguous way to argue against war. The country needs “strong pacifist voices”:http://www.nonviolence.org/issues/philosophy-nonviolence.php now more than ever. Let’s get talking.
ps: …and donating. Nonviolence.org is a nine years old peace resource guide and blog. It’s time it gets regular funding from its million annual readers. “Please give generously and help us expand this work”:http://www.nonviolence.org/support/. We have a lot to do in the next four years!
Quaker Ranter
A Weekly Newsletter and Blog from Martin Kelley
Tag Archives ⇒ afghanistan
Vote for War (Or Else)
September 8, 2004
On Tuesday Vice President Dick Cheney told an Iowa audience that there would be more terrorism in the U.S. if he wasn’t re-elected Vice President:
bq. “It’s absolutely essential that eight weeks from today, on Nov. 2, we make the right choice,” Mr. Cheney told a crowd of 350 people in Des Moines, “because if we make the wrong choice then the danger is that we’ll get hit again and we’ll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States.”
His words underscore just how much the Bush/Cheney Administration have relied on the 9/11 terrorist attacks for their political legitimacy. Terror breeds terror and fear, anger and violence escalates in its wake. The wars in Afghanistan and iraq are shaping a new generation of America haters, as much because the post-war rebuilding has been so careless and self-serving to American economic interests. War-mongerers in one country support the war-mongerers in another by providing each another with targets and arguments. The cycle goes on.
War Resisters League’s Military Spending “Pie Chart”
February 16, 2004
The War Resisters League has issued its famous “Pie Chart” flyer showing “Where Your Income Tax Money Really Goes”:http://warresisters.org/piechart.htm. An annual tradition, this flyer breaks down U.S. government spending.
This year 49% of income-tax generated federal spending is going to the military. That’s $536 billion for current military spending, $349 billion to pay for past military spending and a projected $50 billion that the President will ask Congress for after the elections.
There’s just so much wrong with this amount of miliary spending. This is money that could be going into job creation, into supporting affordable health care for Americans, into giving our kids better education. The strongest defense a country could ever have is investing in its people, but that’s impossible if we’re spending half of our taxes on bombs. And having all these bombs around makes us itchy to use them and gives us the ability to fight wars largely by ourselves.
The WRL flyer always goes beyond mere number crunching, however, to show some of the human impact of this inbalanced spending. This time we have listings of “lives lost in Afghanistan & iraq,” lives lost due to poor health standards around the world, the lost freedom of prisoners being held by the U.S. against the Geneva Accords, and the friends “lost and found” by the U.S.‘s unilateralist war.
Blueprint for a Mess, the planning behind the U.S. occupation
November 3, 2003
For those asleep for the past two years, the _New York Times Magazine_ has a long article by David Rieff, “Blueprint for a Mess”:www.nytimes.com/2003/11/02/magazine/02iraq.html, that looks at ongoing problems with the U.S. occupation of iraq:
bq. Historically, it is rare that a warm welcome is extended to an occupying military force for very long, unless, that is, the postwar goes very smoothly. And in iraq, the postwar occupation has not gone smoothly.
The article looks at the ideological roots of the post-war plan of occupation. A number of key decisions were made in the Pentagon’s war room with little input from the State Department. Much of the planning revolved around Ahmad Chalabi, the two-bit, self-proclaimed iraqi opposition party leader during the last decade of Saddam Hussein’s reign. Chalabi spent most of the 90s in London and Washington, where he became the darling of the Republican policy hawks who were also sidelined from political power. Together Chalabi and Washington figures like Donald Rumsfeld spent the 90s hatching up war plans if they ever took power again. Unfortunately Rumsfeld’s plans didn’t have the widespread support of the U.S. diplomatic and military establishment and Chalabi has had virtually no support inside iraq. But the conversations and decisions between the token iraqi opposition and the out-of-power Republican hawks has driven the occupation:
bq. The lack of security and order on the ground in iraq today is in large measure a result of decisions made and not made in Washington before the war started, and of the specific approaches toward coping with postwar iraq undertaken by American civilian officials and military commanders in the immediate aftermath of the war.
Rieff is pessimistic but he backs up his claims. The article is long but it’s a must-read. The postwar occupations of iraq and Afghanistan will almost certainly be the defining foreign policy issue of this generation, and pacifists must look beyond ideology and rhetoric to understand what’s happening in iraq.
Pacifism and the Congo Dilemma
August 25, 2003
From the War Resisters League’s Judith Mahoney Pasternak, “an honest look at the challenge pacifism faces in places like the Congo”:www.warresisters.org/nva0703‑1.htm:
bq. There are those who challenge the pacifist position with such questions as, “A man with a gun is aiming it at your mother. You have a gun in your hand. What nonviolent action do you take?” Our usual answer is, “I’m a pacifist. I don’t have a gun in my hand. Next question.” But at least once in every generation — more frequently, alas, in these violence-ridden years — the challenge is a harder one to shrug off with a flip answer.
The answer of course is to stop wars before they start, by stopping the arms trade, the dictatorships, and the crushing economic reforms demanded by Western banks _before_ these forces all combine and erupt into war. Pasternak outlines four parts to a blueprint that could end much of the violence in the Congo.
I’ve always been impressed that the folks at War Resisters are willing to talk about the limits of nonviolence (see David McReynolds seven-part “Philosophy of Nonviolence”:www.nonviolence.org/issues/philosophy-nonviolence.php). While war is never the only option (and arguably never the best one), it’s much more effective to stop wars ten years before the bullets start flying. In each of the wars the U.S. has fought recently, we can see past U.S. policies setting up the conflict ten, twenty and thirty years ago.
The largest peace marches in the world can rarely prevent a war once the troops ships have set sail. If U.S. policy and aid hadn’t supported the “wrong” side in Iraq and Afghanistan twenty years ago, I don’t think we would have fought these current wars. Pacifists and their kin need to start asking the tough questions about the current repressive regimes the U.S. is supporting – places like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan – and we need to demand that building democracy is our country’s number one goal in the Iraq and Afghanistan occupations (yes, prioritize it _over_ security, so that we “don’t replace Saddam Hussein with equally repressive thugs”:www.nonviolence.org/articles/000130.php.
Proposal: Armed Forces Pledge to Support Dissent
August 5, 2003
By Martin Kelley. Should armed forces personnel threaten dissenters by telling them to leave the country? Here’s my proposal for an Armed Forces pledge to support dissent.
It’s hard not to make the connection
June 21, 2003
In Iraq, U.S. soldiers are blaring the soundtract to ‘Apocalypse Now’ to psych themselves up to war:
“With Wagner’s ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ still ringing in their ears and the clatter of helicopters overhead, soldiers rammed vehicles into metal gates and hundreds of troops raided houses in the western city of Ramadi”
Meanwhile in my hometown of Philadelphia four teenagers listened to the Beatles’ ‘Helter Skelter’ over forty times before attacking and beating to death one of their friends.
Horrific as both stories are, what strikes me is the choice of music. ‘Helter Skelter’ and most of the music on ‘Apocalpse Now’ were written in the late 1960 and early 70s (the movie itself came out in 1979). Why are today’s teenagers picking the music of their parents to plan their attacks? Can’t you kill to Radiohead or Linkin Park? Couldn’t the Philly kids have shown some hometown pride and picked Pink? Why the Oldies Music? Seriously, there have been some topsy-turvy generational surprises in the support and opposition to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Is there some sort of strange fetish for all things 70s going on here?
It’s hard not to make the connection.
June 21, 2003
In Iraq, U.S. soldiers are blaring the soundtract to ‘Apocalypse Now’ to psych themselves up to war:
“With Wagner’s ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ still ringing in their ears and the clatter of helicopters overhead, soldiers rammed vehicles into metal gates and hundreds of troops raided houses in the western city of Ramadi”
Meanwhile in my hometown of Philadelphia four teenagers listened to the Beatles’ ‘Helter Skelter’ over forty times before attacking and beating to death one of their friends.
Horrific as both stories are, what strikes me is the choice of music. ‘Helter Skelter’ and most of the music on ‘Apocalpse Now’ were written in the late 1960 and early 70s (the movie itself came out in 1979). Why are today’s teenagers picking the music of their parents to plan their attacks? Can’t you kill to Radiohead or Linkin Park? Couldn’t the Philly kids have shown some hometown pride and picked Pink? Why the Oldies Music? Seriously, there have been some topsy-turvy generational surprises in the support and opposition to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Is there some sort of strange fetish for all things 70s going on here?