Tough Time to Love War(Making)

January 23, 2003

01/23/200310/14/2010 · Martin Kelley

This just isn’t a good time to be George W. Bush. United Nations inspectors combing Iraq for weapons of mass destruction have come up empty handed. Saddam Hussein has allowing them relatively unfettered access but all they’ve uncovered is a few unused shells.

Bush is nothing if not persistent when it comes to perceived world bad guys. Just yesterday he told an audience in St. Louis that Hussein is “a dangerous, dangerous man with dangerous, dangerous weapons.” Despite the repeated use dangerous, the rest of the world is unconvinced. German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder still talks about “peaceful solutions” and Germany and France is putting the brakes on war in the U.N. Security Council, waiting for evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction to turn up.

It must frustrate our president to see that all these years of military sanctions against Iraq have been working. All the evidence uncovered by the U.N. inspectors prove that we can “win without war,” as one current slogan goes, and that we have in fact been winning. We’ve kept Saddam Hussein from rebuilding his military after the Gulf War. U.S. isolation of Iraq has been successful despite its numerous flaws. Saddam is not a threat.

Which brings us to real threats and to North Korea. President Bush and his team of war mongerers have been so busy looking at Iraq that they’ve given North Korea just sporadic attention. Recently-declassified reports show that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency has known much more about North Korea’s nuclear bomb making over the last dozen years than anyone’s been admitting.

The C.I.A. has known that North Korea and Pakistan have been trading nuclear secrets. Pakistan has been showing its ally of convenience how to build the centrifuges that process weapons-grade uranium. North Korea in return has provided the missile technology that gives Pakistan the nuclear reach to destroy arch-rival India. Now that we know President Bush knew all about this history of what we might call “dangerous, dangerous” technology trade, why did he cozy up to Pakistan following September 11th? He so wanted wars with Afghanistan and Iraq that he normalized relations with a country far more dangerous. If a Pakistani or North Korean nuclear weapon goes off in New York City it will kill a whole lot more people than Osama bin Laden’s four hijacked airplanes. What happened on September 11th was terrible but it’s nothing compared to what a enemy with resources could do.

There are real threats to world peace, far more “dangerous, dangerous” than Iraq. The United States needs to drop its president’s obsessions and look squarely at the world and who we’re allied with. And when we reset our policies we wqcan use Iraq as our model. For as the U.N. inspectors have proven, we can create peace through diplomacy and we can isolate troublemakers through smart sanctions.

What a tough lesson for U.S. leaders bent on war.

Dick Cheney’s Rambo Complex

March 12, 2002

03/12/200203/21/2016 · Martin Kelley

U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney is touring England this week, trying to find co-producers on Gulf War II, the sequel to the disappointing minor hit of 1991. You remember the original: it was briefly popular until Bill Clinton’s “Peace and Properity” broke all previous records for an unprecedented run.
In Gulf War II, Dick Cheney is playing Rambo. It’s twelve years later and he and his sidekick George Bush Jr. are going to re-fight the war against Iraq singlehandedly. No other countries will join them this time in their fight for justice.

Like all shot-em-up movies, this one needs a convincing villain. There’s no connection between Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden but so what? They’re both shifty Arabs with facial hair. Throw in a spicy subplot if you want – “Dashing American pilots secretly held prisoner since 1991.” Americans barely notice plot and motivations. After 9/11 the White House is betting that the audience wants more war and retribution.

Unfortunately, this isn’t a Hollywood movie. Dick Cheney and the second President Bush are indeed trying to start a second war against Iraq. There’s no new provocation from Saddam Hussein. There’s no connection between him and Osama bin Laden or the 9/11 terrorist attacks. None of our allies from the first Gulf War want to join us in a second.

But Cheney and Bush want a fight anyway. It’s hard not to conclude this is some sort of “Rambo Complex.” The U.S. is led by two men fighting legacies that won’t let them put 1991 behind them. One is the son of the president accused of prematurely stopping the 1991 war before U.S. troops got to Baghdad. The other is the dying aide to both father and son, who has waited almost twelve years for a chance to prove he was right.

This week rumors of an American pilot supposedly held for eleven years have appeared out of nowhere. President Bush has been diverting attention to Saddam Hussein even while Osama bin Laden runs free. And Dick Cheney is indeed in England trying to drum up support for a new Gulf War.

While the Vice President is off wandering the margins of stage right, real tragedy and drama are holding the world’s attention center stage. Palestine and Israel are close to an all-out war. The mounting violence has worried important countries like Saudi Arabia and Syria so much that they’re proposing new peace plans. So much of the Mideast’s anger against the U.S. revolves around the Palestinian question. A war there could topple friendly Muslim governments and rip apart our current alliances.

This is where the world’s attention is focused. But President Bush and Cheney are ignoring the situation. They have not followed past Presidents’ lead in leading peace negotiations. American pressure and involvement is certainly needed to craft real peace between Palestine and Israel.

But Bush and Cheney are snoring in the bleacher seats when it comes to the world’s most pressing and intractable conflict. They’re dreaming of cinematic glory. It’s 2002 and two lone G.I.‘s are paratrooping into Iraq, knives clenched in teeth, machine guns at the ready. One dreams of avenging the cowardice and failure of his father. The other of winning just one more war before the curtains close in on him.

Stopping the Next War Now: More Victims Won’t Stop the Terror

October 7, 2001

10/07/200103/03/2016 · Martin Kelley

Originally published at Nonviolence.org

The United States has today begun its war against terrorism in a very familiar way: by use of terror. Ignorant of thousands of years of violence in the Middle East, President George W. Bush thinks that the horror of September 11th can be exorcised and prevented by bombs and missiles. Today we can add more names to the long list of victims of the terrorist airplane attacks. Because today Afghanis have died in terror.

The deaths in New York City, Washington and Pennsylvania have shocked Americans and rightly so. We are all scared of our sudden vulnerability. We are all shocked at the level of anger that led nineteen suicide bombers to give up precious life to start such a literal and symbolic conflagration. What they did was horrible and without justification. But that is not to say that they didn’t have reasons.

The terrorists committed their atrocities because of a long list of grievances. They were shedding blood for blood, and we must understand that. Because to understand that is to understand that President Bush is unleashing his own terror campaign: that he is shedding more blood for more blood.

The United States has been sponsoring violence in Afghanistan for over a generation. Even before the Soviet invasion of that country, the U.S. was supporting radical Mujahadeen forces. We thought then that sponsorship of violence would lead to some sort of peace. As we all know now, it did not. We’ve been experimenting with violence in the region for many years. Our foreign policy has been a mish-mash of supporting one despotic regime after another against a shifting array of perceived enemies.

The Afghani forces the United States now bomb were once our allies, as was Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. We have rarely if ever acted on behalf of liberty and democracy in the region. We have time and again sold out our values and thrown our support behind the most heinous of despots. We have time and again thought that military adventurism in the region could keep terrorism and anti-Americanism in check. And each time we’ve only bred a new generation of radicals, bent on revenge.

There are those who have angrily denounced pacifists in the weeks since September 11th, angrily asking how peace can deal with terrorists. What these critics don’t understand is that wars don’t start when the bombs begin to explode. They begin years before, when the seeds of hatred are sewn. The times to stop this new war was ten and twenty years ago, when the U.S. broke it’s promises for democracy, and acted in its own self-interest (and often on behalf of the interests of our oil companies) to keep the cycles of violence going. The United States made choices that helped keep the peoples of the Middle East enslaved in despotism and poverty.

And so we come to 2001. And it’s time to stop a war. But it’s not necessarily this war that we can stop. It’s the next one. And the ones after that. It’s time to stop combat terrorism with terror. In the last few weeks the United States has been making new alliances with countries whose leaders subvert democracy. We are giving them free rein to continue to subject their people. Every weapon we sell these tyrants only kills and destabilizes more, just as every bomb we drop on Kabul feeds terror more.

And most of all: we are making new victims. Another generation of children are seeing their parents die, are seeing the rain of bombs fall on their cities from an uncaring America. They cry out to us in the name of peace and democracy and hear nothing but hatred and blood. And some of them will respond by turning against us in hatred. And will fight us in anger. They will learn our lesson of terror and use it against us. They cycle will repeat. History will continue to turn, with blood as it’s Middle Eastern lubricant. Unless we act. Unless we can stop the next war.

American Spies and Blood for Oil

January 15, 1999

01/15/199910/14/2010 · Martin Kelley

Saddam Hussein was right: the U.N. teams inspecting Iraq did contain U.S. spies. His expulsion of the teams was legitimate, and the U.S. bombing that followed was farce.

Karl Marx once wrote: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.” We’re seeing that today, with each successive military action by the U.S. against Iraq becoming ever more transparent and ridiculous.

Perhaps you haven’t heard the news. It was conveniently released the day before President Clinton’s Senate impeachment trial was to begin and the major American news networks didn’t give it much attention. They were too busy with segments on how the U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice designed his own robes. With hooks like fashion and sex attending the impeachment trial, how could they be blamed for under-reporting more Iraq news.

But on January 7th, the New York Times confirmed rumors that United States planted spies on the United Nations: “United States officials said on Wednesday that American spies had worked undercover on teams of United Nations arms inspectors ferreting out secret Iraqi weapons programs.” The Washington Post and Boston Globe further reported that the operation was aimed at Saddam Hussein himself. NBC News reported that U.N. communication equipment was used by U.S. intelligence to pass along intercepted Iraqi messages.

This is exactly what Saddam Hussein has been charging the U.N. teams with. He has long claimed that the teams, run by the United Nations Special Commission or UNSCOM, were full of “American spies and agents.” It was for this reason that he denied the inspectors access to sensitive sites. And it was this refusal that prompted President Clinton to attack Iraq last month.

So what’s going on here? Senior U.S. officials told NBC News that the main targets of last month’s attack weren’t military but economic. The cruise missiles weren’t aimed at any alleged nuclear or biological weapons factories but instead at the oil fields. Specifically, one of the main targets was the Basra oil refining facilities in southern Iraq.

In a separate article, NBC quoted Fadhil Chalabi, an oil industry analyst at the Center for Global Energy Studies in London, as saying Iraq’s oil producing neightbors are “hoping that Iraq’s oil installations will be destroyed as a result of American air strikes. Then the [U.N.-mandated] oil-for food program would be paralyzed and the market would improve by the disappearance of Iraqi oil altogether.”

Since the start of the Gulf War, Iraq has produced relatively-little oil because of a combination of the U.N. sanctions and an infrastructure destroyed by years of war. A report by the United States Energy Information Administration back in the summer of 1997 stated Iraq’s per capital Gross National Product was at levels not seen since the 1940s.

Saudi Arabia and Kuwait have picked up this slack in production and made out like bandits. Before the Gulf War, Saudi Arabia was only allowed to pump 5.4 millions barrels a day under it’s OPEC quota. Today it produces 8 million barrels a day, a fifty percent increase that translates into billions of dollars a year in profit. If the sanctions against Iraq were lifted, Saudi production would once more have to be limited and the Anglo-American oil companies running the fields would lose ten billion dollars a year in revenue.

t’s time to stop kidding ourselves. This is a war over money. The U.S. and Britain are getting rich off of Saudi Arabia’s increased oil production and don’t want anyone muscling in on their oil profits. It is in the economic interest of the U.S. and Britain to maintain Iraqi sanctions indefinitely and their foreign policy seems to be to set off periodic crises with Iraq. France and Russia meanwhile both stand to get lucrative oil contracts with a post-sanctions Iraq so they routinely denounce any bombing raids and just as routinely call for a lifting of sanctions.

Saddam Hussein is also making out in the current state of affairs. A economically-healthy Iraqi population wouldn’t put up with his tyranny. He currently rules Iraq like a mob boss, siphoning off what oil profits there are to pay for fancy cars and presidential palaces. He gets to look tough in front of the TV cameras and then retreats to safe underground bunkers when the bombs start falling on the Iraqi people.

It is time to stop all of the hypocrisy. It is estimated that over a million Iraqis have died as a results of the post-Gulf War sanctions. These oil profits are blood money and it is long past time that they end.

Why We Mourn and Protest

December 19, 1998

12/19/199810/14/2010 · Martin Kelley

Many of the this week’s critics of the Nonviolence Web are insisting that the U.S. needs to bomb Iraq in order to secure a future world of peace: “Are you an idiot? We needed to bomb them.

Otherwise, many more INNOCENT will eventually die at the hands of Saddam Hussein. Sometimes force is necessary in order to prevent much greater violence later.”

This is the logic that has brought us to most violent century in human existence. War is always fought for peace. Acts of violence are always justified with the argument that they’re preventing acts of violence later. We kill for peace. And they kill for peace. And as the death count rises we build even bigger and smarter bombs. And they build even bigger and smarter bombs.

The million-dollar cruise missiles going into Iraq aren’t go to hurt Saddam Hussein. He’s safely ensconced in one of his presidential palaces watching CNN (meanwhile, President Clinton sits in the White House watching CNN as well). All the cruise missiles in the U.S. Navy won’t bring Hussein from power.

It is the people of Iraq who feel the sting of these bombings. Just as it is them who have born the brunt of eight years of brutal sanctions. It is the mothers who suffer as they watch their children die because even the most basic medical supplies are non-existent. It is the little ones themselves suffering as yet another wave of bombs come raining down on their world from that abstract entity called the “U.S.”

American policy is wrong precisely because we are at war not with Saddam Hussein, but with the people of Iraq-the citizens, the poor and meek, the downtrodden and hurting.

The nation of Iraq will always have the technical know-how to build weapons of mass destruction. Because the fact is that we live in a world where every industrialized nation with a couple of smart chemistry Ph.D.‘s can build these bombs. India and Pakistan just a few months ago set off nuclear weapons, we know Israel has a stockpile. We can’t just bomb every country with a weapon of mass destruction or with the capacity to produce such a weapon.

We need to build a world of real peace, of peace between nations built on the rule of law, yes, but also on reconciliation. We need foreign policy that recognizes that it is the rulers and the policies of other nations with which we disagree. That recognizes that it is wrong to ever condemn a whole people for the excesses of their leaders.

A number of U.S. peace groups have called for today to be a day of National Mourning and Protest. Let us gather to remember that we stand together in solidarity with those suffering in Iraq. Let us vigil quietly and then yell out loudly that war to end war is wrong.

End the Sanctions. Stop the Bombing. Declare peace with the Iraqi People.

No More Coincidences: Big Bill’s Zipper Strikes Again

December 16, 1998

12/16/199805/26/2016 · Martin Kelley

Back in February, I concluded my “Stop the Zipper War Before it Starts” with the following:

Nothing’s really changed now except U.S. political interests. Hussein is still a tyrant. He’s still stockpiling chemical weapons. Why are U.S. political interests different now? Why does Bill Clinton want U.S. media attention focused on Iraq? Look no further than Big Bill’s zipper. Stop the next war before it starts. Abolish everyone’s weapons of mass destruction and let’s get a President who doesn’t need a war to clear his name.

I put this at the bottom of the piece because then the idea that Clinton might have done this was still way out there.

Since then most every major turning point in the President’s scandals has been echoed by military maneuverings.

On August 17th Clinton gave a televised address which was widely criticized as being “too little, too late” and non-repentant enough. Public opinion turned sharply against him. Three days later Big Bill sent 100 cruise missiles into Afghanistan and Sudan in order to assassinate Osama bin Laden, the previously unknown archenemy of the United States.

And now, on the afternoon before the House of Representatives was scheduled to begin proceedings on his Impeachment, Clinton has ordered an attack on Iraq. Congress will of course delay the vote. Rumors are that this new bombing campaign might last more than a few days, and come January’s new Congressional term there will be five less Republicans.

Each time these coincidences happen, a few pundits that mutter about “Wag the Dog” scenarios before assuring the audience that Clinton would never do that. Everyone talks about coincidence and then moves on.

But coincidence has been Clinton’s friend throughout his scandals. Remember the long-lost Whitewater documents that mysteriously appeared on Hillary Clinton’s coffee-table when investigators were threatening to issue here a subpoena? Remember the job offers that Clinton cronies arranged for key witnesses just before they either recanted their stories or lied under oath? All of Clinton’s scandals have been of the “who cares” variety-shady land dealings twenty years ago in Arkansas, his having sex with an intern in the Oval Office. They displayed a lack of judgment and character, but were not Impeachable. But his scandals have grown and taken a life of their own as Clinton and his wife have been visited by an ever-growing amount of coincidences.

Enough is enough. How much more are we to believe? As I write this the missiles are screaming over Baghdad and Iraqis are dying horrible deaths. This is real. This is not some political game. It is time for Americans to stop denying that these coincidences are really coincidental.

It is time to demand Clinton’s resignation.

And if he refuses, then it is time to subpoena White House records on the last year of military actions. If they show that Clinton has murdered in his desperate attempt to save his Presidency, then it is time not only to impeach him but to put him into jail.

A Terrorist Bombing by Any Other Name

August 20, 1998

08/20/199810/14/2010 · Martin Kelley

What if in the weeks following the bombing of the federal courthouse in Oklahoma City, the FBI had launched dozens of cruise missiles at the Michigan town where Timothy McVeigh had built his bomb? What if it had done so even when evidence was still meager, when accounts were still contradictory? What if it did so without looking for less dramatic ways of serving justice? What if the missiles just killed and enraged more innocents?

Earlier today the United States attacked two nations accused of harboring the terrorist team responsible for the recent bombings in East Africa. Telling the world that “our target was terror,” U.S. naval ships fired seventy-five to one hundred cruise missiles into a busy urban neighborhood of the Sudanese capital of Khartoum, a city of 2.3 million people, and at a lightly-populated target in Afghanistan.

It is a solid principle of both international diplomacy and nonviolent action that the more peaceful options are exhausted first. No significant diplomatic efforts have been made with the Taliban government in Afghanistan to extradite reputed ringleader Osama bin Laden. No United Nations resolutions have been passed for inspection of the reputed chemical weapons factory in Sudan (local officials say it’s a factory for medical drugs).

If the chemical plant had been in a European capital, it is all but certain that the U.S. would not have fired dozens of cruise missiles with scant evidence and no preliminary diplomatic effort. But Khartoum is the capital of a militarily weak African nation. While Clinton claims to be saddened at all the African lives lost in the bombing at the embassy in Kenya, yet he has little regard for the lives of Africans in the neighboring Sudan.

Justice takes time. It needs the careful weighing of evidence by neutral parties. It took over a year for investigators to collect the evidence surrounding the Oklahoma City bombing and for Timothy McVeigh to be convicted of the crime. But while justice might take time, politics requires immediacy, drama. Clinton is a politician and he knows that tough military adventures against pip-squeak countries is the fastest way to rally bipartisan domestic support in times of trouble. Conservative politicians have stopped the ever-louder calls for his impeachment over the sex and perjury scandal to rally behind him and mutter the familiar imperialistic clichés about politics stopping at the water’s edge. But it is time to stop playing politics with Third World lives.

“Our target was terror” said President Clinton, but so was his solution. The only way America knows to respond to two bombs is to set off seventy-five bombs. The only way it know to avenge the death of hundreds of innocent Africans is by threatening the lives of hundreds of other Africans. Terrorist bombing by any other delivery method is just as deadly and it is just as disruptive to international world order.

As citizens, Americans have grown too complacent about these missile launches against unarmed cities. These attacks have become too familiar a part of U.S. policy. Too few questions are asked, either immediately following the bombing or in the years afterward. Terrorist missiles are not effective means of apprehending criminals or serving justice. Early reports from Afghanistan are that bin Laden is safe and continuing to plan further attacks against Americans. In the last decade, missile attacks have been used against Libya, Lebanon and Iraq but in no case have they damaged the enemy and have in fact only strengthened the anger and the resolve of their supporters.

As before, the missiles were launched by computer from ships hundreds of miles away. We never see the smoke and the fire, we never smell the blood, we never see the terror in the eyes of the children. Children whose nightmares will now featured screaming missiles from unseen terrorists known only as Americans. Children whose dreams will be the taste of revenge.

Osama bin Laden has won. He won by provoking the U.S. to shun it’s ideals of democracy and justice to wallow with him in the mud of organized international terror. Two hundred and fifty million Americans have now joined bin Laden’s crusade to avenge terrorist violence with more terrrorist violence. It is time to stop all terror, it is time to speak out against all violence.

Ohio Protests Open National Debate on War

February 19, 1998

02/19/199810/14/2010 · Martin Kelley

Protesters in Columbus, Ohio upset a pro-war program with top Clinton Administration officials Wednesday afternoon, asking them tough questions at a live CNN “Town Hall” meeting and giving the antiwar movement its first serious national publicity.

Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright and Defense Secretary William S. Cohen were in Columbus to gain popular support for the war and to build the myth of a national consensus for a U.S. attack on Iraq. They were both surprised and embarrassed by the jeers and tough questions they received from audience members. Some audience members held up signs and chanted “We Don’t Want Your Racist War” while one questioner asked why the U.S. wasn’t considering force against other countries violating human rights such as Indonesia in it’s slaughter of East Timorese (when Albright started hemming and hawing, her accuser shot back “You’re not answering my question, Madame Albright.”)

The Columbus dissenters are the top story in the major newspapers and media pundits are starting to publicly doubt polls showing overwhelming support for military action.

Sample Letter to Media

To the Editors,

With today’s story about an Ohio audience jeering Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, it’s time for MS-NBC to give some coverage to the groundswell of grassroots opposition to another Gulf War. If you had been monitoring the “Iraq Crisis Antiwar Homepage,” the events in Columbus would not have been a surprise. In fact, 82 other demonstrations are currently listed here.

In addition to events listings, the Antiwar Homepage has analysis, action alerts, ideas for organizing and links to major nonviolence groups. A project of the Nonviolence Web, home to dozens of U.S.-based peace groups, it is a central source for antiwar organizing.

Please consider profiling all the great work being done around the country to stop another senseless war.

In peace,
Martin Kelley
Nonviolence Web

Reporters visiting the “Iraq Crisis Antiwar Homepage” would not have been surprised by the turnout in Columbus. A huge grassroots antiwar movement has grown in the past month. The Nonviolence Web’s email box is being flooded with great statements, letters to Clinton, action ideas and just plain worry about another war. The Antiwar Homepage’s list of upcoming protests spans the world, listing the Columbus event along with over seventy others.

But little of this organizing has gotten the national media. Most of the online media have put together sections promising “complete coverage,” and sporting bravura titles like “Showdown with Saddam.” But look at the coverage and you’ll see only fluff pieces about the brave boys on the aircraft carriers or furrow-browed analysis of U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan’s doomed search for a diplomatic settlement.

fter Ohio, the national media will have to start recognizing the widespread dissent among Americans. Some progress is being made. YAHOO, the most popular site on the net, has listed the Antiwar Homepage in its list of Iraq Crisis resources. And a top news organization is working on a profile of the Nonviolence Web to appear within a few days (keeping looking for an announcement).

But we must all do more. Write and email the national media to include coverage of antiwar actions. Demand that a link to the Iraq Crisis Antiwar Homepage be included in their “Complete Coverage” of the crisis. A sample letter to MS-NBC is included here, but please write your own and show them that dissent has spread past the Columbus auditorium and is following them across the internet!

Quaker Ranter

A Weekly Newsletter and Blog from Martin Kelley

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