To American eyes the news of the escalating war in the Caucasus nation of Georgia almost reads as farce: a breakaway region of a breakaway region, tanks rolling to maintain control of… well, not that much really. We wonder how it could be in either Russia or Georgia’s interests to pick a fight over all this? Why does it seem like Russia’s de facto leader-for-life Vladimir Putin is still fighting the Cold War? And what must be going through the mind of Georgia’s President Mikheil Saakashvili to be taunting the giant to its north?
But the farce turns to weariness as we realize just how familiar this all is. Tiny ethnic enclaves with centuries of animosities and well rehearsed stories of atrocities committed by the other set fighting by the breakdown of an empire that had uneasily united them in repression. Change a few details and we could be talking recent conflicts in Bosnia, Afghanistan, Rwanda, the Sudan, Palestine/Israel and Iraq. Blood money from the drug trade, from oil billions and human trafficking add fuel to the fire. We’ve been fighting these same wars since at least 1914. Why haven’t we learned how to stop them?
Seriously: otherwise strong economies collapse under the chaos that these territorial wars bring. Most of the wars seem to be fought in marginal areas and all sides would be better off if the politicians stopped worrying about these contested territories and just focused on building a economy attractive to international trade.
Why hasn’t the world learned the mechanisms to end these conflicts before they erupt into open warfare? Where is the political will to end this class of war once and for all? Disease and terrorism are the invariable fruits of these conflicts and strike us all across national boundaries. The “international community” needs to be mean more than impressive choreography and a few thousand athletes in Beijing. This week’s real gold metal will go to the leaders that can transcend macho posturing and weak-willed apologizing and get those Russian tanks out of Georgia.
Quaker Ranter
A Weekly Newsletter and Blog from Martin Kelley
Tag Archives ⇒ Sudan
Cindy Sheehan “resigns”: It’s up to us now
May 29, 2007
Poor Cindy Sheehan, the famous anti-war mom who camped outside Bush’s Crawford Texas home following the death of her son in Iraq. News comes today that she’s all but “resigned from the protest movement”:http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070529/ap_on_re_us/cindy_sheehan. She posted the following “on her Daily Kos blog”:http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/5/28/12530/1525
bq. The first conclusion is that I was the darling of the so-called left as long as I limited my protests to George Bush and the Republican Party. Of course, I was slandered and libeled by the right as a “tool” of the Democratic Party… However, when I started to hold the Democratic Party to the same standards that I held the Republican Party, support for my cause started to erode and the “left” started labeling me with the same slurs that the right used. I guess no one paid attention to me when I said that the issue of peace and people dying for no reason is not a matter of “right or left”, but “right and wrong.”
The sad truth is that she was used. Much of the power and money in the anti-war movement comes from Democratic Party connections. Her tragic story, soccer mom looks and articulate idealism made her a natural poster girl for an anti-Bush movement that has never really been as anti-war as it’s claimed.
Congressional Democrats had all the information they needed in 2002 to expose President Bush’s outlandish claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. But they “authorized his war of aggression anyway”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_Resolution. More recently, Americans gave them a landslide vote of confidence in last November’s elections but still they step back from insisting on an Iraq pull-out. The Nonviolence.org archives are full of denunciations of President Clinton’s repeated missile attacks on places like the Sudan and Afghanistan; before reinventing himself as a earth-toned eco candidate, Al Gore positioned himself as the pro-war hawk of the Democratic Party.
Anti-war activists need to build alliances and real change will need to involve insiders of both major American political parties. But as long as the movement is fueled with political money it will be beholden to those interests and will ultimately defer to back-room Capital Hill deal-making.
I feel for Cindy. She’s been on a publicity roller coaster these past few years. I hope she finds the rest she needs to re-ground herself. Defeating war is the work of a lifetime and it’s the work of a movement. Sheehan’s witness has touched people she’ll never meet. It’s made a difference. She’s a woman of remarkable courage who’s pointing out the puppet strings she’s cutting as she steps off the stage. Hats off to you Cindy.
Nonviolence.org’s fundraising campaign ends in a few hours. In four months we’ve raised $150 which doesn’t even cover that period’s server costs. This project celebrates its twelfth year this fall and accurately “exposed the weapons of mass destruction hoaxes”:http://www.nonviolence.org/weapons_of_mass_destruction/ in real time as they were being thrust on a gullible Congress. Cindy signed off:
bq. Good-bye America …you are not the country that I love and I finally realized no matter how much I sacrifice, I can’t make you be that country unless you want it. It’s up to you now.
Sometimes I really have to unite with that sentiment.
No More Coincidences: Big Bill’s Zipper Strikes Again
December 16, 1998
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
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.