Yesterday North Korea claimed that it has processed enough plutonium to make six nuclear weapons. I’ve often argued that wars don’t begin when the shooting actually begins, that we need to look at the militaristic decisions made years before to see how they planted the seeds for war. After the First World War, the victorious allies constructed a peace treaty designed to humiliate Germany and keep its economy stagnant. With the onslaught of the Great Depression, the country was ripe for a mad demagogue like Hitler to take over with talk of a Greater Germany.
In his January 2002 State of the Union address, President Bush’s team added North Korea to the “axis of evil” that needed to be challenged. By all accounts it was a last minute addition. The speechwriting team never bothered to consult with the State Department’s east Asia experts. In all likelihood North Korea was added so that the evil three countries wouldn’t all be Muslim (the other two were Iraq and Iran) and the “War on Terror” wouldn’t be seen as a war against Islam.
North Korea saw a bulldog president in the White House and judged that its best chance to stay safe was to make a U.S. attack too dangerous to contemplate. It’s a sound strategy, really only a variation on the Cold War’s “Mutually Assured Destruction” doctrine. When faced with a hostile and militaristically-strong country that wants to overthrow your government, you make yourself too dangerous to take on. Let’s call it the Rattlesnake Defense.
Militarism reinforces itself when countries beef up their militaries to stave off the militaries of other countries. With North Korea going nuclear, pressure will now build on South Korea, China and Japan to defend themselves against possible threat. We might be in for a new east Asian arms race, perhaps an east Asian Cold War. Being a pacifist means stopping not only the current war but the next one and the one after that. In the 1980s activists were speaking out against the brutal regime of Saddam Hussein, an American friend who was gassing his own people. Now we need to speak out against the cowboy politics that is feeding instability on the Korean Peninsula, to prevent the horror and mass death that a Second Korean War would unleash.
Quaker Ranter
A Weekly Newsletter and Blog from Martin Kelley
Tag Archives ⇒ bush
Lots of Blame-Shifting on the Niger/Iraq Forgery
July 11, 2003
The CIA asked Britain to drop it’s Iraq claim while President Bush said that the CIA “I gave a speech to the nation that was cleared by the intelligence services.”
Remember that Bush’s State of the Union address didn’t claim that the US believed that Iraq was buying nuclear material from Niger or other African countries. It said that British intelligence thought Iraq was. Shifting responsibility for the claim gave the Bush team the wiggle room to include an allegation they knew was probably not true. It’s the triumph of politics over truth.
As I’ve written before, there is a political brillance to the Bush Presidency. The Administration knows that it can sway large portions of the American public just by making claims. It doesn’t matter if the claims are wrong –even obviously wrong– as long as they feed into some deep psychic narrative. It’s been awhile since we saw a President that could bully through reality as long as the story sounded good. Ronald Reagan, the ex-actor, was good at it but I’m suspecting our current President is even better. The question is whether enough people will start insisting on the truth and demand investigations into the lies. There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and President Bush knew it. The American people would not have gone to war if we had known that Iraq wasn’t a threat and this too President Bush knew.
Shouting with Anger and Love for America’s True Greatness
March 19, 2003
The horrific events of 9/11 would make any country tremble. But with the right leadership we could have shown the world our steady resolve and courage and we could have celebrated an American love and life and liberty that no airplane could destroy. But President George W. Bush has had uses for terror. For eighteen months he has beaten the drums of revenge till fear has become a second heartbeat in our pysche. Simmer America over a low flame of fear and spice it with contempt for the world and you can bring her and her people to cry hungrily for blood [continued on defunct Nonviolence.org discussion board]
A Look Back at the Peace Movement’s Response to the Gulf War
November 20, 1997
It is safe to say that the peace movement’s largest campaign in the past decade took place around opposition to the military build-up and conflict in the Persian Gulf in 1990 – 1. New people became involved, old peaceniks became reactivated and every peace group in the country went into overdrive to organize and educate about the issues.
Recently I have heard several people bemoan the failure of the peace movement during that period, a failure because the war wasn’t stopped. But there were successes beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. The week the war started saw two massive protests in Washington. It took almost a decade of involvement in Vietnam before protests that large were ever seen. The peace movement mobilized incredibly quickly and (in retrospect) efficiently, and we surely defined the options available to U.S. President Bush.
The aftermath of the war brought a crisis to many organizations. Their fundraising efforts dried up and budget deficits led to cutbacks in staff and program outreach. It was as if a sort of public amnesia set in and no one wanted to think about peace. This is a natural human response perhaps, but it’s reverberations on the infrastructure of the peace movement continue to this day.
Let’s start a dialogue about the peace movements response to the Gulf War. What were it’s effects on your lives and the organizations you were a part of? Was the peace movement a success, a failure, or something in between?