Dear Representative Larsen...
Friends,
We are asking individuals, organizations and congregations to sign on to this letter to Congressperson Rick Larsen. Simply add your name to the form below. If your have the permission of the organization you belong to, please include it. Our intention is to hand deliver this letter to Representative Larsen in our next FCNL Legislative Advocacy Team meeting.
Best,
Janet Marino
Whatcom Peace & Justice Center
*With great thanks to the author of the letter, Ginny Herrick.
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Dear Representative Larsen,
We, the undersigned, urge you to take a leadership role in creating sunset legislation for the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force. As you noted in your September 2014 open letter to President Obama, the 2001 AUMF – passed after the September 11 Al-Qaeda attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon – is badly outdated and has been exercised by successive administrations far beyond Congressional intent. Moreover, the use of military force is a blunt instrument that fouls America's international reputation and is less effective against terrorism than more peaceful policies.
The RAND Corporation's 2008 report, “How Terrorist Groups End,” studied 648 such groups that existed between 1968 and 2006. Their results are important for shaping U.S. strategies regarding Al-Qaeda and the so-called Islamic State. Most ended because either they joined the political process (43 percent) or local police and intelligence agencies arrested or killed leaders (40 percent). Only 7 percent ended as a result of military intervention.
“The use of substantial U.S. military power against terrorist groups also runs a significant risk of turning the local population against the government by killing civilians,” the report points out.
In the years of endless, fruitless war since 9/11, Americans have tested the limits of military force to combat terrorism. Sending U.S. troops to achieve ends better suited to local police and intelligence or to diplomacy, is a betrayal of our men and women in uniform. Corruption by military contractors and the difficulty of policing them shows that our military is fighting unwinnable wars under untenable circumstances.
We urge you, as a member of the Armed Services Committee, to propose the repeal of the 2001 AUMF with no more than a 12-month sunset, allowing time to create a comprehensive political strategy. Instead of calling on U.S. troops to sacrifice life and limb to the failed policies of warfare, we must have the courage to pivot to peace.
Signed,
Janet Marino
Virginia Herrick
Lynne Lohr
Gene Marx
Allen Stockbridge
Micki Jackson
Jamie K. Donaldson
James E. Hansen
Margaret L Kriger
Kerry Johnson
Carolyn DeSilva
Judith Green
Stephanie Trasoff
Lucinda Pfeiffer-Hoyt
Victoria Marx
Keith Fredrikson
Dan Hanks
Neah Monteiro
Junga Subedar
Edward Alexander
Linda Newton
Richard Newton
Terrye Rubens-Sheets
Kathleen Keegahn
George Keegahn
Patricia Rathbun
Mark F. Herrick
David Hopkinson
Katherine Finks
John Hatten
Wendy Courtmanche
Jeanine Hart-Horner
Stephanie Manzo
Mary Ann Percy
Joanne Cowan
Karen Steen
Nanette Macy
Judy Hopkinson
Lorina Hall
Patricia King
J. Kaye Faulkner
Kira Derhgawer
Sandra Gottschalk
Don Duffy, Jr.
Deborah Lee
Stan Parker
Alice Robb
James F. Cool
Hue Beattie
Jack Miller
Martina Boyd
Richard Brummett
Bill Distler
Michael Jacobsen
Tara Reynolds
Organizations:
Veterans For Peace Chapter 111
Whatcom Peace & Justice Center
Whatcom Civil Rights Project
To add your name or organization to this letter go to the link in the introduction above.
The Guardian
Chilcot report – from a veteran
The war was not a 'mistake' or an 'accident'. It was calculated and intentional.
By Joe Glenton
July 6, 2016 11:25 BST
A 105mm gun is dropped by a Chinook helicopter to British 29 Commando Regiment Royal Artillery on the Fao Peninsula in southern Iraq. March, 2003. (Getty)
Regardless, here are four lessons we must learn from Iraq:
1. We already know what happened, Chilcot is just an establishment take on events.
All the evidence discouraged an attack on Iraq yet it looks like Tony Blair and his close allies lied to take Britain to war. It cost the lives of 179 soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. In the end the war also gave us Islamic State (Isis/Daesh) and so the horror slithers on.
In recent and coming weeks the real issue – why we went, the deadly deception – will be blurred by references to peripheral issues about the conduct of the war. Let's be clear. Bad equipment, for example, is secondary in the big scheme of things.
Nor was the war a "mistake" or "accident". Tripping and falling is an accident, getting drunk and trolling your boss at the Christmas party is a mistake. Iraq was neither. It was calculated and intentional.
Going to war with Iraq required careful planning and deep forethought. I would call that premeditated murder.
Read complete article on ibtimes
Tell Congress to Repeal the AUMF
"In the the wake of 9/11 and tremendous pressure to support war, I stood up and cast the lone 'no' vote against the AUMF. Now, 14 years later, we’re still using it to wage endless war in the Middle East. It's clear there are many real threats to the region, but continuing to use the AUMF to deploy troops is wrong." Representative Barbara Lee of California
Tell Congress: We must repeal the AUMF in 2016.
Sign the Stop Endless War petition http://stopendlesswar.com/
An EA-18G Growler lands on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier. (US Navy / Scott Fenaroli)
Monday, 26 October 2015 00:00
By Dahr Jamail, Truthout | Report
The US Navy aims to begin conducting electromagnetic warfare training across much of Washington State's Olympic Peninsula soon.
Meanwhile, it is being accused of breaking federal laws in order to secure the permits necessary to move forward with its training operations.
Karen Sullivan worked for the US Fish and Wildlife Service for 15 and a half years, and is an expert in the bureaucratic procedures the Navy is supposed to be following.
She is now part of the West Coast Action Alliance, one of two large multi-state and international citizen groups who have tasked themselves with watch-dogging the Navy, due to what they believe are ongoing violations of the law, blatant acts of disrespect toward human and environmental health, and ongoing bellicose behavior by the military branch in their areas.
"Ethical and legal questions about the Navy's conduct abound: hidden notices, comment periods that have been shortened or wholly eliminated, and last-minute publication of key documents coupled with total disregard for NEPA's [National Environmental Policy Act] prohibitions on segmentation present a clear and present danger that the Navy is hastily proceeding with plans regardless and in defiance of federally mandated processes," Sullivan's organization wrote recently in a memorandum to the Navy.
"The Navy has an astonishing sense of entitlement to public lands and waters."
Some of the points of concern about the Navy's actions include: failure to provide reasonable notice to the public about their planned war games, failure to provide adequate comment process, failure to address functionally connected activities and their cumulative impacts, and failure to adequately consider impacts to Olympic National Park's World Heritage designation, among others.
Sullivan, who worked for over 15 years in the US Fish and Wildlife Service's Division of Endangered Species and External Affairs, told Truthout she believes the Navy's final environmental impact statement (EIS) about their upcoming warfare training is "unlawful and fatally flawed."
"The Navy has an astonishing sense of entitlement to public lands and waters," Sullivan said about how the Navy has approached the public's concerns over its operations. "Northwest Training and testing range manager Kent Mathes told me last year after a public meeting, 'We own the airspace and there's nothing anyone can do about it.'"
Read entire article article on Truthout
West Coast Action Alliance, September 19, 2015 (including update)
Although the Navy has made changes to its web site since the Open Letter to the U.S. Navy was written, none of those changes reflect any public requests to improve communications with the public. How hard can it be, in an age of mass surveillance, for the government to actually listen to the citizens it is supposed to serve?
Much is happening, the pattern being a doubling down of military encroachment on western Washington’s lands, waters and airspace, along with rapidly growing public opposition. The Navy wants the Olympic Peninsula and the Olympic National Marine Sanctuary. The Army wants the Cascades, southwest Washington, and south Puget Sound (see West Coast Action Alliance July 20 and August 6 posts). They want to bomb, fire rockets, land attack helicopters, install 720 sonobuoys, conduct electronic warfare over our heads, and use sonar that is orders of magnitude louder than the loudest Navy jets. They have confused the public with multiple separate processes for geographically and functionally related actions. At risk are a World Heritage site, a marine sanctuary rich in marine life, Wilderness areas, a piece of the Pacific Crest Trail, the most important nesting habitat for threatened marbled murrelets, and the peace and quiet of a region famous for it. The military already owns hundreds of thousands of square miles to practice in (see this map file). Why is that not enough?
The Olympic National Park is a World Heritage Site and Biosphere Reserve. It is also the quietest place in America. Fighter jets don’t belong here.
Much is happening to feel encouraged about, too. The West Coast Action Alliance is in contact with senior officials at UNESCO who are concerned about the threat to Olympic National Park’s World Heritage status. A briefing paper prepared by a committee of concerned citizens is being circulated through multiple channels at UNESCO. It is the public’s intent to raise awareness in not just our own region, but the entire world.
The US Forest Service is due to publish its final Notice of Decision in late September or early October, on whether to issue the permit to the Navy to drive mobile emitters around Olympic National Forest roads so they can practice electronic warfare. We should probably brace ourselves, because the Forest Service has not indicated it is going to deny that permit. When the notice comes out, we will have a 30-day comment period to object, but here’s the hitch: in order to have your comments accepted, you have to be one of the 4,000 people who wrote comments to the Forest Service back in autumn 2014, about the same issue. Back then it was all draft; this time it’ll be their final decision. Comment again and you will have the standing to participate in legal remedies. We will announce this.
The US Fish and Wildlife Service’s latest Biological Opinion, a document evaluating impacts to threatened and endangered species posed by the Navy’s proposed actions, is due in October. The Navy cannot legally proceed without it; therefore, it deserves our utmost attention and scrutiny. We will post it on this web site.
The Army’s comment period on landing combat helicopters in pristine wilderness beloved by many has been extended to November 3, 2015. If you haven’t written them a letter, feel free to borrow language from these talking points or this joint comment letter from 25 organizations.
To keep up with media coverage of events, it’s a good idea to periodically check News Stories page.
UPDATE (October 8):
- Final Navy Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) endorsing Northwest Testing and Training (NWTT), updating its earlier controversial EA, due out this month; essentially an end around NEPA reporting requirements with no comment period.
- West Coast Action Alliance is connecting with Congressional senior leadership this week to protest the Navy's segmentation notification processes, side-stepping NEPA reporting requirements, as well as Endangered Species Act violations.
- The US Forest Service plans to issue the necessary permit for testing and training and war games over the Olympic Peninsula next month (November).
Documents Show Navy's Electromagnetic Warfare Training Would Harm Humans and Wildlife
Monday, 15 December 2014 10:59
By DAHR JAMAIL, Truthout | Report
A shooter signals an EA-18G Growler aboard USS Carl Vinson. (Photo: Matt Buck)
If the US Navy gets its way, it will begin flying Growler supersonic warplanes over Olympic National Forest and wilderness areas of the Western Olympic Peninsula next September in order to conduct electromagnetic warfare training exercises.
As Truthout previously reported, this would entail flying 36 jets down to 1,200 feet above ground in some areas, in 2,900 training exercises lasting up to 16 hours per day, 260 days per year, with the war-gaming going on indefinitely into the future. The Navy's plans also include having 15 mobile units on the ground with towers emitting electromagnetic radiation signals for the planes to locate as part of their exercises.
Navy personnel have been met with outrage, anger and a growing concern from the public about the negative health impacts to humans and wildlife in the areas where their war games are planned.
The Navy appeared to attempt to slide their plans by the public by choosing not to advertise public comment periods and meetings in the local media of the areas where their war games would be taking place. However, word got out and the Navy has had to extend public comment periods and hold more public meetings.
Navy personnel have been met with outrage, anger and a growing concern from the public about the negative health impacts to humans and wildlife in the areas where their war games are planned.
The Navy's response has been to point people toward their own so-called environmental assessment (EA), and claim that "no significant impacts" will occur to wildlife or humans from their electromagnetic war games.
However, Truthout has acquired several documents from the Navy, Air Force and even NASA that directly contradict the Navy's claims that their exercises pose no threat to wildlife and humans, and spoke with an expert on the human impact of electromagnetic radiation fields who also refutes the Navy's claims.
Dr. Martin Pall, a professor emeritus of biochemistry and medical sciences with Washington State University, has written several peer-reviewed papers on the subject of how electromagnetic radiation of various levels impacts human beings, as well as given international lectures on the subject.
The health impacts of even the Navy's lowest levels of electromagnetic radiation emissions are shocking.
Pall told Truthout that these claims by the Navy are "untrue," and provided reams of evidence, including his own scientific reports, that document, in detail, the extremely dangerous impacts of even very low levels of the microwave and electromagnetic radiation that the Navy would be emitting during their war games.
Pall's paper, titled "Electromagnetic fields act via activation of voltage-gated calcium channels to produce beneficial or adverse effects," outlines the impact of electromagnetic radiation on biological organisms, and was given the honor of being posted on the "Global Medical Discovery" site as one of the top medical papers of 2013.
Pall told Truthout that the Navy has not provided "any evidence" to support their claims that electromagnetic frequencies (EMF) do not impact wildlife and humans deleteriously.
According to Pall, a NASA study, and more then 1,000 other scientific reports and studies, the health impacts of even the Navy's lowest levels of electromagnetic radiation emissions are shocking.
Read complete article on Truthout
Merriman Falls
Coming to a National Forest Near You?
by ROBBIE ROBERTS
It is a dense, ancient landscape of crystal-clear waterfalls and pristine rivers; of trees alive when John Adams was elected the second President of these United Stated. Standing well over 100-feet tall, their broad, moss-covered branches shelter a stunning array of creatures: some endangered species, some endemic and found only in the forests of the Olympic Mountains. Over 300 species of bird are to be found here and an estimated billion birds fly their migratory routes annually along the coastline. Where the forest ends and the great Pacific begins, once locally extinct sea otters frolic in a forest of kelp, and only slightly farther offshore, the once nearly extinct gray whale may be glimpsed from March to May. In 2013, over 3 million visitors from around the world came to the Olympic National Park and National Forest to experience the unique environment of the only temperate rain forest in the continental United States, and the peace, solitude and sanctity it offers.
Today, the United States Forest Service is poised to grant the Navy their request for a special-use permit for war exercises in and above the Olympic National Forest of Washington state in their squadrons of EA-18G ‘Growler’ supersonic warplanes for approximately 260-days-per-year, 16-hours-per-day, flying as low as 1,200-feet above the ground, and working in conjunction with three RV-sized mobile electromagnetic radiation emitters on the forest floor.
While the legal process of application, public notification and deliberation required by the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) has been flawed by inadequate, inept and often contradictory communication from the USFS and the Navy–when news of the proposal finally trickled out, the public responded in overwhelming opposition.
Both principals seemed surprised, but unwavering. In Forks, Washington, USFS Ranger Dean Millett, who will make final decision, said, “The project seemed relatively benign and safe to me. I didn’t think anyone would care.” The Navy grasped at an old cliche and said, “They’re making a mountain out of a molehill.”
Is it a benign, fully disclosed project, as Millett believes? Or is the Navy’s Environmental Assessment lacking in scope and simply wrong in its conclusions, as the opposition believes? Is it legal? And more broadly, is this a new use of the people’s national forest that will set precedent across the country, introducing an increasing, intrusive militarism into our unique and often fragile national parks and national forests where the public seeks peace?
We’ll examine the facts, offer links to important documents and hear from both sides. Then, you decide.
The History as We Know It
In or around 2011, Ranger Millet granted the Navy a one-year, special-use permit in the Olympic National Forest. “They wanted to see if the sites they’d selected to broadcast from worked,” he said, somewhat fuzzy on his recollections. “And I might have renewed it.”
The Naval Air Station on Whidbey Island, currently home to over 80 Growlers, is potentially adding 36 more, according to U.S. Fleet Forces Command spokesman, Ted Brown.
During the electromagnetic warfare training, trios of jets working together will depart NAS Whidbey, fly over the Olympic National Park and the Olympic National Forest in the Olympic Military Operation Area (MOA) airspace lanes at not less than 6,000-feet Mean Sea Level–which actually translates to 1,200-feet (Actual Ground Level) above the ground. In the MOA there are no speed restrictions on these supersonic aircraft.
The Navy has selected 12 sites in the Olympic National Forest to station their three RV-sized mobile emitters, which will generate electromagnetic radiation beams of various power at 18-GHz frequency. An additional three sites are located on land administered by the Washington state Department of Natural Resources, but to date the Navy has not applied for permission to use them.
In August 2014, Ranger Millett signed a draft decision notice to approve the Navy’s request and announced a 30-day comment period on the Navy’s Environmental Assessment in a newspaper in Aberdeen, Washington. No notices were placed in media in nearby Forks, Port Angeles, Sequim or Port Townsend, the communities beneath the flight path and adjacent to the Olympic National Forest. The Navy published notices in Seattle, Montesano and Olympia newspapers, but also neglected to inform the impacted Clallam and Jefferson County populations, who had no idea what was transpiring.
By September 2014 the Navy’s report, titled ‘Pacific Northwest Electronic Warfare Range Final Environmental Assessment’ was submitted. Because the Navy concluded there was a ‘finding of no significant impact’ (FONSI) on people or the environment by their warfare exercises, they were not compelled to produce a complete Environmental Impact Statement. Millett’s pen was poised to sign off on the project.
Then, someone eyeballed the USFS notice describing the Navy’s proposal tacked to a wall in the little Forks’ post office. All hell broke loose.
In short order, Millett canceled his preliminary approval and extended the comment period until October 10th, due to “renewed interest.” The comment period was extended again, until October 31st and then again, to the current end-date of November 28th. Informational meetings were held in Forks, Port Angeles and Pacific Beach.
The Honorable Opposition
Almost without fail, people voicing opposition to the Navy’s plans have noted that their stance is not against the Navy in general–far from it–but against naval warfare in the people’s national forest. Few epitomize this more than numerous veterans who have spoken eloquently in passionate opposition, including former Naval Aviator Gene Marx. He trained as an Airborne Electronic Warfare Officer, flew sorties in Vietnam and eventually went to work for the Federal Aviation Administration. His son did tours in Iraq. Recently, Marx served on the Board of Directors of Veterans For Peace, a global organization with a permanent seat at the United Nations. “When I was a young flyer in the 1970s, we were well aware of the potential damage to the environment,” he said. “We flew over the desert near Fallon, Nevada, for good reason. The Navy’s EA is sorely lacking new science regarding possible adverse effects on the environment–this is the noisiest, most polluting aircraft in their inventory. The noise alone at low altitudes would be devastating to wildlife. The Growlers have a lot of juice and are so sophisticated–they can shut down a city. These are electromagnetic war games on steroids above the Northwest’s most pristine wilderness. “Here’s what they won’t tell you: all of this can be done on simulators, and for much less money and without all the environmental damage that will be done. But the Growler is a cash cow for Boeing and businesses in 44 states. Once the Navy has the aircraft, they’ll say have to use it. But I say: use a simulator!”
Shannon Petitjean remembered her grandfather A.L. Petitjean. “He became a Naval Aviator in 1939 and flew missions in WWII. In 1979 he held the rank of Captain, USNR, when he fell to his death, climbing in the Olympic Mountains. “He loved the mountains and the peacefulness of the forests. I want the Navy to know that I’m grateful for the men and women who serve, as my grandfather did, but that we also need to protect our national forest for generations to come. If this warfare harms small animals, flora and fungal systems–they aren’t in the Navy’s report–once the damage is done, it’s too late! “My grandfather would roll over in his grave at the thought.”
And About the Noise …
Aircraft noise is not mentioned in the Navy’s EA. Yet the infamously noisy Growlers will fly in groups of three, often as low as 1,200-feet above the ground. They have no muffling system.
Recently, Whidbey Island residents filed a lawsuit after registering noise consistently above 110 decibels, the level where the National Institutes of Health believe permanent hearing damage begins. Realtors in the area must add noise disclosure statements to every real estate transaction. The Seattle Times reported that a Navy 2005 EA made island residents promises they didn’t keep.
At the Port Angeles informational meeting, when asked why aircraft noise wasn’t addressed, Ranger Millett replied it was “not within the USFS’ jurisdiction.” But is that true when activity permitted by USFS on the ground results in the noise? These jets will be interacting with large Navy emitter vehicles stationed on national forest land.
Peter Larson, a private pilot who owns and operates Larson’s Timber Resource Management, said, “Using the working forest, I deal professionally with many governmental organizations and the USFS has absolutely the most stringent noise restrictions of all. Sometimes they’ll shut my operations down for months because they’ve deemed an area habitat–or potential or adjoining habitat–for certain species. Almost every unit of timber has some noise restriction. When I’m at a job site and those jets fly real low overhead, not only can’t I hear my machinery, I can’t hear what someone next to me is saying! “So, why the double standard? The Navy’s permit opens the door to more flights and much more noise.”
The Fine Print
The Navy’s EA 2-7 states, “The activities of the Proposed Action center on two divisions of the EW, known as electronic warfare support (ES) and electronic attack (EA).” Former Clallam County Commissioner Ron Richards, both an attorney and commercial fisherman, finds numerous deficiencies with the Navy’s EA, none less pertinent that the electronic attack training mentioned in the Navy’s proposal.
“The EA considers only radiation transmitted upward from their emitters, while the ‘electronic attack’ aspect included in their proposal would probably entail much more radiation directed downward towards the emitters, and thus people, wildlife and any living thing in their path. It’s folly to suggest they won’t test the attack capabilities of the Growlers–and this important issue needs to be addressed.”
At public meetings, the Navy stated that the emitters weren’t currently equipped to receive. However when pressed about future expansion of their project, they stated it was always possible. In their EA conclusions of ‘so significance’ the Navy also ignored a 1994 US Air Force report, on Radiofrequency and Microwave Radiation Biological Effects … which on pg. 18 states that “…nonthermal disruptions have been observed to occur at power densities that are much lower than necessary to induce thermal effects… [including] alterations in the central nervous system and the cardiovascular system … exposure to low intensity radiation can have a profound effect on biological processes.” As any ‘google search’ can confirm, there are thousands of published scientific studies examining the negative impacts of electromagnetic radiation on life.
Additionally, at the Pacific Beach meeting, a Navy representative disclosed new information: the emitters will not be manned by Navy crew, instead, they will be operated by two defense contract employees. The employees would drive the vehicle from the Navy base at Pacific Beach, station it at a site in national forest, construct a perimeter barrier and operate the complicated technology, including the electromagnetic radiation high frequency beam that is deadly if aimed at any living thing. These non-Navy personnel–presumed armed–are tasked with watching the forest for large animal intrusion (small animals, birds, etc are not included). They will also confront hikers, hunters or anyone visiting the national forest to ‘persuade’ them to leave the area.
The Navy EA 3.1-2 states, “The mobile emitters (MEWTS) have controlled and action level environments in which personnel and the public must not be allowed to loiter, while outside a controlled or action level environment, personnel and the public would receive no harmful levels of electromagnetic radiation … Public safety or health concerns are minimized as the result of Navy precautions and because the general public normally does not have access to Navy-controlled areas.”
“It’s unbelievable that with planes in the air, these hired hands would halt a test and move an emitter elsewhere because a mushroom picker, for instance, wanted to remain,” Richards says. “More likely they’ll say, ‘Do you want to be arrested for interfering with a legally permitted naval activity?’ There’s great likelihood that the Navy’s proposal will effectively close large areas of the national forest to public use. “I believe the public has been intentionally deceived on this project by both the USFS and the Navy.”
Richards is planning to create a coalition to fight the project–among them, recreational users, realtors and land owners who face loss of land value and the many businesses that rely on tourists who visit the area.
Is it Legal?
For a quarter century the Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics (FSEEE) has worked for responsible stewardship of public land and a future that is both economically and ecologically sustainable. Executive Director Andy Stahl believes the naval warfare training is an illegal use of national forest land.
“It’s completely inconsistent with the USFS National Forest Management Act, which is a legally binding document. The Memo of Understanding between the Dept. of Agriculture and the Dept. of Defense that Millett uses to support permission is subordinate to the management plan and it also states that if there are other military or private lands available for these exercises, the USFS must refuse. The Navy has not said that other lands are ‘unsuitable or unavailable’ only that it takes a bit more fuel to get there.
“Furthermore, Congress has never authorized the USFS to permit military use of national forests. Millett should deny the permit because it’s inconsistent with the forest plan and not a congressionally authorized national forest purpose, but will he? No.” How will the FSEEE respond? “Sue.”
Impacts? Let Us Count the Ways
Karen Sullivan, a retired US Fish and Wildlife Service employee, has articulated many concerns.
“The Navy failed to fully analyze and disclose all potential impacts–direct, indirect and cumulative–on the public and the environment. There have been many violations of the NEPA procedure, beginning with lack of public notice to the entire Olympic Peninsula. The Navy also based their ‘no significant’ impact conclusions on old science, when many recent studies addressed the effects of electromagnetic radiation beams on everything from flora and fauna to migratory birds in flight. It’s a violation of NEPA for the Navy to dismiss environmental considerations it considers not meaningful or foreseeable during a NEPA process.”
Sullivan’s list of possible effects include socioeconomic impacts to communities from increased jet noise and air pollution, impacts to wilderness values in nearby Olympic National Park, analysis of multiple stressors on humans, endangered species, and other wildlife and analysis of chronic radiation effects on humans, wildlife and habitats.
The local Sierra Club and the Admiralty Audubon Society have both issued statements finding the Navy’s EA deficient and disagreeing strongly with their environmental impact ‘findings of no significance.’ At this date, there are 2440+ letters on the USFS NEPA comment website, almost all voicing opposition. Comments will be accepted through the 28th November.
Shawn Mcallister has lived on Lake Quinault for nearly two decades and works at a nearby resort. “People come from all over the world to experience our beautiful rain forest, to hike here–and to allow the peace and quiet surround them. Our ecosystem is unique and fragile. “We won’t have jobs if people think this is a war zone. What about the resort owners, fishing and hunting guides and businesses that depend on tourism? This could change our lives forever. I just cannot understand why the USFS would allow it.”
And the Final Word
Our national forests are the people’s lands, set aside by Congressional Act for their benefit and recreation, for water, timber and other itemized uses, but Congress never authorized military use.
And while the Navy has sought to minimize the public’s perception of this project, their own EA tells another story about the scope of their intent. Once they’re on the ground with men and machinery, what precedent will this set for national forest lands across the country? Thousands of letters on the NEPA comment website testify to the passion the public feels. Millett said he’s never seen anything like it. The public is speaking, but will the USFS listen?
At the Pacific Beach meeting, someone stood and said, “I guess we need to decide if we want our national park or we want another military training ground. Don’t they have enough? Do they really need this, too?”
Copyright Robbie Roberts 2014
The only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history.
Steve Chapman | June 26, 2014
A corrupt government that has alienated many of its people finds itself unable to overcome a growing insurgency in an endless civil war and expects a superpower on the other side of the globe to come to its rescue. That's the story in Iraq today—which carries eerie echoes of the not-so-distant past.
In June of 1964, as conditions deteriorated in South Vietnam, President Lyndon Johnson assured a journalist he was not about to get too far in or stay too far out. "We won't abandon Saigon, and we don't intend to send in U.S. troops," he insisted. He was betting that U.S. military advisers would be enough to head off defeat.
Half a century later, President Barack Obama has adopted a similar policy, dispatching some 300 advisers to Iraq in an effort to keep its military from being routed. Once again, the fervent hope in the White House is that a small commitment will suffice.
The difference is that Obama's decision comes in the aftermath of a catastrophic American intervention, following our departure, rather than at the beginning of one, as we're about to plunge in. It's an epilogue, not a foreword.
Read complete article on reason.com
by BILL DISTLER June 17, 2014
In August 1968 my company surrounded a Vietnamese village so that the "lerps" could search it. (from LRRP, long range reconnaissance patrol.) Five soldiers appeared carrying M-16 carbines with silencers. Why would they need silencers?
When it was dark, they went into the village. When morning came, they were gone.
Carlotta Gall's book about Afghanistan, "The Wrong Enemy," tells a similar story. An Afghan translator said he accompanied a U.S. team on a night raid. They carried "American assault weapons with silencers attached." They kicked in the door of a house and, without saying a word, killed the three adults and left the children orphaned. The translator "was never asked to translate anything."
Our military thinkers still don't know right from wrong, but they have learned something from Vietnam and El Salvador ~ how to keep wars quiet and, to paraphrase Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero's letter to Jimmy Carter, how to become more efficient at murder.
"The Wrong Enemy" should cause us to reflect on Afghanistan's future. Our taxes have paid for war in Afghanistan for years. Isn't it time to shift our spending and our creative thinking to peacemaking?
In Afghanistan, over the last 35 years of war, there was one constant: the Pakistani military armed the most extreme fundamentalists. During 23 of those years our government took sides and paid for these wars.
During the 1980s our government paid Pakistan to arm Afghan guerrillas (the mujahideen) as they fought the Soviet army. Since 2001 our government has sent our military to fight the Taliban but kept silent while the Pakistani military continued to arm the Taliban. A Pentagon assessment from July 2013 said, "so long as the Taliban can find haven in Pakistan, defeating them on the battlefield will be difficult if not impossible."
We have spent more than $1 trillion on the Afghan war. Of that, about $100 billion went to "reconstruction," but almost all of that went to prop up the Afghan government, National Army and Police. Kathy Kelly of Voices for Creative Nonviolence wrote that only $3 billion of that $1 trillion (one third of 1 percent) has gone to aid the average Afghan.
The anti-corruption group Transparency International ranks Afghanistan as one of the three most corrupt nations on earth, yet our government continues to give contracts to corporations with long records of fraudulent practices. (See "Windfalls of War" from The Center for Public Integrity)
Nation-building didn't fail in Afghanistan; it never started. Corrupt contractors took huge payments, sub-contractors took theirs, and on down the line until there was very little left ~ the trickle-down theory in action.
Before September 11, 2001, Iran opposed the Taliban while Pakistan armed and supported the Taliban. After September 11 our government illogically designated Iran as our enemy and Pakistan as our ally. This only makes sense if we see that our government follows a logic of its own, based on profit and control of other nation's resources. Iran was already on the list of countries whose oil and natural gas was to be stolen in the future, so they couldn't be our ally.
With Iran off-limits, Pakistan became the only route from Afghanistan to the sea. Our geniuses of foreign policy may not have realized that they gave Pakistan veto power over any U.S. corporate get-rich-quick schemes. The root problem of our continuous war is that U.S. soldiers are caught in a war of attrition over how much control the U.S. and Pakistan will allow each other over Afghanistan.
If we care about the soul of our nation, we must question the official story. Why does our government support an illogical policy? Why do we enrich a few well-connected Americans and Afghans while pushing the average American and Afghan even deeper into poverty? And why does our government remain silent while Pakistan still provides the weapons that have killed 3,400 U.S. and NATO soldiers, hundreds of civilian contractors and aid workers, and tens of thousands of Afghans?
It appears that our government values profits over lives. Corporations will profit enormously from building infrastructure and exporting trillions of dollars worth of minerals from Central Asia and Afghanistan to seaports in Pakistan. More profits will come from supplying arms to those who will guard the transportation routes. If we don't demand that Congress change course, a coalition of the greedy will continue to shape our policies.
After 33 years in the U.S. Marine Corps, General Smedley Butler described himself as "a gangster for capitalism." Writing in 1935, General Butler titled his book "War Is a Racket."
Ann Jones, in her book "They Were Soldiers," says "a clever person just needs to find the right racket to profit endlessly from America's endless wars." The war in Afghanistan is a racket, and those who promote it for personal gain are gangsters for capitalism.
We can still heal the wounds of war. We should: speak the truth about war, as we understand it, to our fellow citizens; identify the Pakistani military as the problem and withdraw all support from them; test a new alliance with Iran to break Pakistan's economic stranglehold; and shift our spending to projects chosen and directed by Afghan civic groups.
We owe a debt to the broken families of Iraq and Afghanistan and to our morally and physically wounded soldiers. We can start repaying that debt by spending whatever is needed to repair the damage.
This article first appeared in the summer 2014 issue of the War Crimes Times.
Bill Distler was a fire team leader and squad leader in the 101st Airborne Division in Vietnam from December 1967 to September 1968. He is a member of the CPL Jonathan J. Santos Memorial Chapter of Veterans For Peace in Bellingham, WA. He spends his spare time thinking about Vietnam, El Salvador, and Afghanistan. He believes they are all one long war driven by greed, ignorance, and arrogance.
Bill's email: peacevet47@gmail.com.
Deepest,
Darkest, Open Secrets
A
disturbing narrative from a US soldier in Afghanistan aired on “This American Life”
on January 10, 2014.
By Gene Marx
Almost fifteen years have passed since the ink had dried on the pages of the Good Friday peace accords, when saner minds actually prevailed to end The Troubles. The Celtic Tiger was restless then, but nonetheless it could have hardly been argued that if peace was a place, it was here, in Ireland.
Since then the world lost its way. In spite of grass so green it’s said you can see the blue, and red deer, spring lambs and border collies still setting the pace in the meadows of County Clare, there can be no doubt that the bloodied, ragged edges of empire had spread like a cancer, enveloping even the proud heritage of Irish neutrality.
This month marks ten years since the start of the illegal war and occupation in Iraq, but more notably the beginning of Irish complicity in the inevitable bloodshed by cowed politicians allowing Irish airspace to be used to
transport US troops and munitions, ultimately selling out their constitution by disavowing its "devotion to the ideals of peace... adherence to the pacific settlement of international disputes...and the recognised principles of international law" all for the sake of war-profiteering.
On March 20, 2003, the day after the US invasion of Iraq, continuing through the US-led war and occupation in Afghanistan, over 2 million armed US troops have been allowed to transit through Shannon Airport on their way to the United States’ illegal wars of choice in the Middle East and Asia.
To make it worse, a blind eye was turned by the Irish lower House, Dail Eirann, to the transportation of munitions cargoes, including depleted uranium, as well as suspected rendition flights, in total disregard of calls for inspection of these aircraft.
This year Veterans For Peace decided to get actively involved by supporting the efforts of the Irish anti-war activists of Shannon Watch, the Peace and Neutrality Alliance, and the Irish Anti-War Movement, to end the US military invasion of Shannon. On March 10, US Veterans For Peace members Barry Ladendorf from San Diego, California, and Gene Marx from Bellingham, Washington, joined forces with Irish VFP recruits and organizers, Ed Horgan, Tim Hourigan, John Lannon, and Dolan Roche, along with VFP London's Ben Griffin, to stand united with Shannon Watch.
In spite of attempts by dozens of airport police and Ireland's National police An Garda to intimidate the visiting VFP delegates on the airport confines with credential checks and vehicle tails, the new Shannon Watch allies from VFP
successfully joined the ranks of our cold and wet, yet enthusiastic Irish hosts at the airport perimeter for a two-long demonstration. A non-stop chorus of car honking, with waves of peace signs from supporters and commuters, saw the new coalition out to a successful conclusion.
VFP Membership Committee members Marx and Ladendorf were invited to speak at the University of Limerick the following day before returning home.
While the numbers of anti-war activists have declined in Ireland since Shannon’s peace camp days and direct actions of the Pit Stop Ploughshares, current Irish core-groups and activists are no less deterred by Obama militarists than they were with the Bush cabal and more dogged than ever in their determination to restore Irish neutrality and end the US occupation of Shannon Airport.
Read complete article in Veterans For Peace
Originally published Sunday, February 24, 2013 at 4:00 PM
Op-ed: Drone attacks are not precise weapons
Missiles and bombs, even when dispatched by drones, are not precise weapons, writes guest columnist Bill Distler.
By Bill Distler
Special to The Times
The Associated Press
A U.S. Predator drone flies over the moon above Kandahar Air Field, southern Afghanistan.
John Brennan, Obama’s nominee for CIA director, says that missiles and bombs from drones are the most “effective” weapon against terrorists. He calls them “precise,” claiming they minimize civilian casualties.
Brennan often uses the word “effective,” a soft and soothing sound.
But the main product of missiles and bombs is shrapnel, a sharp and ugly word. Shrapnel is the jagged bits of metal formed from the casing of an explosive.
I have some experience with shrapnel. My unit in Vietnam was hit at night by shrapnel from our own artillery. The shrapnel killed two and wounded about twelve. The injured moaned and screamed like wounded animals.
As medics stumbled around in the dark, giving morphine to those who were hurt, the screaming subsided.
Medevac helicopters came immediately to carry away the wounded.
I was hit by shrapnel twice. Both times it came from our own side. The first time, I thought my finger had been torn off. The second time, I thought my throat was ripped open and that I was dying. Another time, I was bumped by a piece of shrapnel that landed against my hip. When I tried to pick it up, it burned me.
It came from our own artillery, exploding about 700 meters away, supposedly a safe distance.
I saw three of our men killed by shrapnel from hand grenades and a land mine.
My brother Ken was in the 4th Infantry Division. His left leg was broken by a bullet during a firefight in May, 1969. While he lay there, unable to move, our own artillery landed too close and shrapnel broke his right foot.
When I hear Brennan painting a reassuring picture of precision missiles and bombs, and when I hear the president’s spokesman, Jay Carney, describe the drone program as “wise,” I ask myself, “Are they ignorant? Or are they liars?”
The Hellfire missile used by our Predator drones weighs 100 pounds, roughly 80 pounds of which becomes shrapnel, plus whatever gravel, rocks and glass are thrown out by the blast.
The 500-pound bombs carried by Reaper drones are even more destructive. (By the way, what mad scientist names these things?)
How many children are maimed by this shrapnel? There are no medics to help them, there is no morphine to ease their pain, and there are no medevacs waiting to rescue them. As their parents look on helplessly and curse the United States, we should ask ourselves: Is this the most effective way to fight terrorism, or are we creating terror? This is neither precise nor wise.
This is the reality of war as I have seen it, as opposed to the reassuring but false picture painted by our morally hollow politicians. Here at home, we don’t hear the missiles exploding or see the pain and fear on the faces of the wounded children.
Our politicians like it that way. They want to make silent war, using drones, to maintain our silent consent. We should not give it to them.
Our government’s policies in Afghanistan and Pakistan are neither wise nor just. We should speak out against them.
We can start by contacting our U.S. Sens. Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell, both D-Wash. Ask them to vote against Brennan’s nomination to head the CIA and to speak out against never-ending war.
As citizens of the United States we have a responsibility to call on our senators and representatives to help us to, as it says in the Constitution, “establish justice.”
Bill Distler was a fire-team and squad leader in Delta Company, 2/506th (Airborne Infantry Regiment), 101st Airborne Division, in Vietnam from 1967 to 1968. He is a member of Veterans For Peace.
Read complete article in the Seattle Times
Whatcom Watch Online
February 2013
Drone Strikes
Assassins Aren’t What They Used to Be
by Ellen Murphy
Assassination has changed. Those often politically motivated murders of prominent persons or public figures by surprise attack are less common. They used to be considered horrific crimes, committed by psychopathic and highly paid professional killers, people who suffered for their art by living loveless lives, totally alone, or if military, alone in their own way, communicating in code. But now assassinations are an every day thing. Assassins aren’t aberrant creatures any more. You can be normal and do it. And to be a target you don’t have to be an Archduke Ferdinand, a President Kennedy or martyrs such as Martin Luther King, Archbishop Romero or George Tiller. No, you can be just about anyone. Thank heaven, there are some limitations to the drone kill list. No one under 16 seems to have been targeted yet.
From Hollywood’s point of view, as in Scarface’s attempted assassination of the Pope in “Foul Play,” assassins were cold blooded with nerves of steel. In the movies I grew up on, they were portrayed as having a certain brilliance, a cunning and stealth not to be equaled by ordinary hunters. In their world they were respected for their skill and single-mindedness. And too, they had a certain code of honor. A class unto themselves, they took pride in one shot, one hit, one kill—no collateral damage for these guys. I desperately wanted them to get caught in time, before the crosshairs scene, but they seldom were.
But now, assassins are not even highly paid. They’ve gotten to be commonplace. For the drone kills, ready? Click. Then take a bite of your sandwich. Was it the right subject? Sheesh, I think so. There was some collateral, but what were they doing with that ----er anyway! One was his son? What you get for having a father like that. And the collateral abounds. And the side-effects—more sign-ups.
Oh, and one more thing. Assassinations aren’t even illegal any more. They don’t take a year to plan. They happen all the time, and no one goes to jail. The assassins I grew up with had to have an escape plan as complicated and clever as the hit plan had been, and if caught, severe consequences would be their fate, unless the boss who hired them got there first. And who was he? It wasn’t necessarily who it seemed to be. Now, you’re really nothing that special, not necessarily taking any risk, and you’re not facing time. It’s sort of all the rage. Without the rage.
Things have changed. Assassination used to be murder. But somewhere (in Virginia?) there is a lexicographer who defines the extrajudicial targeting of someone with a hellfire missile not as assassination but as—well, combat. Congress and the people be damned, we’re at war. Then too, you can strike with a Reaper when you’re not sure if this is the right group or individual. That’s when you call it a signature killing. A pilot thinks this house, car, or person somehow bears the signature of a bad guy. And unfortunately, there is no sign in Waziristan that says “Caution-Children Gathering Firewood.” Would it matter if there were?
That isn’t the problem. The problem is we are running out of pilots. The Air Force Developmental Engineers web site says we only have 450 and we need 1,110. Applicants will be under 30, and need no previous military pilot experience to fly heavily armed Predators and Reapers “far from the battlefield, with the advantage that a pilot at war can fly a mission and go home to dinner.” Absent from the job description for mouse-clicking drone pilots in Nevada, is that they, after a while, after a few years even, may begin to become aberrant, and find themselves living alone, leading loveless lives. Traumatized. Unable even to kill time by trying to watch a movie on a harmless screen.
Journalist Sierra Adamson posted this WeAreChange.org interview with former White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs on October 25, 2012:
Sierra Adamson “Do you think that the killing of Anwar al Awlaki’s 16 year-old son, who was an American citizen, is justifiable?”
Robert Gibbs “I’m not going to get into Anwar al Awlaki’s son. I know that Anwar al Awlaki renounced his citizenship.”
Sierra Adamson “His son was still an American citizen.”
Robert Gibbs “Did great harm to people in this country and was a regional Al Qaeda commander hoping to inflict harm and destruction on people that share his religion and others in this country. And...”
Sierra Adamson “That’s an American citizen that’s being targeted without due process of law, without trial. And he’s underage. He’s a minor.”
Robert Gibbs “I would suggest that you should have a far more responsible father. If they’re truly concerned about the well-being of their children, I don’t think becoming an Al Qaeda jihadist terrorist is the best way to go about doing your business.”
Whatcom Watch Online
October-November 2012
Is America Losing Its Soul in Afghanistan?
by Bill Distler
Bill Distler is a Vietnam veteran and a member of Veterans For Peace.
Our war in Afghanistan is immoral and dishonest. Every day in Afghanistan lives are destroyed, homes and communities are blown apart, and US soldiers and Afghan children are psychologically ruined. Meanwhile, war profiteers, ours and theirs, continue to enrich themselves.
This war had a false beginning and, unless we act, it will have a false end. We were given false reasons to justify this war: going after bin Laden and al Qaeda; helping women; stability, democracy, reconstruction. But these stated goals did not receive serious priority or funding. Instead, military spending was the only option taken seriously by our government. If anything, this war has had a negative effect on all our stated goals. The illogical explanations for our actions (see “A few of the biggest lies...” below) can only be explained by the logic of greed. Our government has spent thousands of Afghan and American lives and hundreds of billions of our tax dollars not to bring peace to Afghanistan, but to give tens of billions in profits to their corporate buddies in the mining, natural gas pipeline, military contracting, base construction, and weapons industries. Unless we act to change this, the lives that were sacrificed will have been for a false ending.
The war in Afghanistan has been a murderous hoax, started by George Bush and continued and, in the case of drones, made worse by Barack Obama. But the American people have learned to tolerate murder by our presidents because it has been given another name. When presidents murder, it is called foreign policy, and only “experts” are asked for their opinion.
As citizens, I believe we are called on to be experts on our own beliefs and opinions. I know that I am the world’s greatest expert on what happened to me in Vietnam and how it made me feel. I am also the world’s greatest expert on what I believe and why I believe it. This leads me to have opinions, which every American is supposed to have. It also leads me to attempt to express my opinions, which every American is supposed to have the right to do. My opinion on war is that all wars include a moment when we sense a betrayal of everything we have been taught to believe. It is such a shock to the system that most of us can never come to grips with what we have seen. It defies our understanding of how life is supposed to work. For me that moment came when we were hit by our own artillery during my second month in Vietnam.
Innocent children are killed by war and that is not God’s work. That is the work of men who ignore God’s commandments. We should not follow these people but, because they are given endless air time as “experts”, we are, in the words of the poet Wendell Berry, forced to take seriously what we don’t really respect. We hear insane and soulless verbal formulations such as: “We do everything possible to minimize civilian casualties,” usually said after a “precision-guided munition” hits the wrong house. (God help me. I just unconsciously bought into half of the insanity. In a world guided by God’s word, all bombs would be said to have fallen on the wrong house.)
Read complete article in Whatcom Watch Online
Thank You, VFP
Dear Veterans for Peace,
The honor of receiving, as an associate member, your Howard Zinn Lifetime Achievement Award, accepted for me by Gene Marx at the 2012 Miami convention, was so humbling and so overwhelming that a recovery period was required. I think I might be ready now to thank you.
The closest I ever came to meeting Howard Zinn was that in my friendship with Fr. Dan Berrigan in the Ithaca 60s, I was acutely aware of their trip together to Hanoi in 1968 to bring three imprisoned U.S. flyers home. By doing that, I believe Howard was bringing himself home too. To finally meet Howard, I went into my heart of hearts to have a talk with him about this award. I told him that I was just a mother and grandmother doing what seemed to me to be motherly and grandmotherly things about fairness, and that all I could do was to think about the people who really deserved this. Then, because I once heard Alice Walker in an interview say that as her teacher at Spelman College, he was extremely funny, I imagined Howard’s reply to be something like, “Well, then, this is just one injustice you’ll have to accept!”
Over and over again through the years we have heard recordings of Howard’s remarks about being a bombardier in WWII, about how unthinkingly he participated in unthinkable bombings, how he thought he was one of the good guys, and how it wasn’t until he read John Hersey’s book “Hiroshima,” that he understood that “Wars don’t solve any fundamental problems. They poison the minds and souls of everyone involved.”
I have sometimes wondered why I feel so close to and so dedicated to veterans, when there are no vets in my near family. I thought it started when I met up with so many Atomic Vets and their children during my years of actions at the Nuclear Test Site in Nevada. But then I realized my connection began before that, and how many, many veterans, in my decades of work as a chemical dependency counselor, I had been down on the floor with as they sobbed through detox—not from their drugs and alcohol--- that had already taken place, but from that poisoning Howard Zinn described.
I am grateful for these years of solidarity with veterans, such as meeting Anthony Guarisco, of the Atomic Vets, at the Test site, and my dear brothers and sisters here in the Pacific Northwest, who, like Howard and like Anthony, have committed the courageous act of letting themselves feel, and have dedicated their lives to solving in a better way, a sane way, what Howard called “the fundamental problems,” by not being “neutral,” and by giving to their country and the world, their best and truest service.
Thank you, brothers and sisters in peace, for smiling at me in this way. I will cherish the certificate that bears my name under that of Howard Zinn, and I will pledge to use it, for as long as I live, for strength to carry on with all of you, to bring more flyers, to bring more troops, to bring everybody, home.
With love,
Ellen Murphy
March 24, 2012
Stop Me if You've Heard This One, John Henry
By Gene Marx
A human act once set in motion flows on forever to the great account.
Our deathlessness is in what we do, not in what we are."
George Meredith
As if the winds of war weren't already approaching gale force in the wrong direction for the US and its NATO counterparts in Afghanistan, contrary to Administration talking points designed to polish this turd of an Occupation, Army Staff SGT Robert Bales went on a village-to-village, house-to-house killing spree. With whatever thought process he had at his disposal after three combat tours in Iraq, he permanently liberated by summary execution 17 Afghan villagers from the Taliban. To make matters worse for embattled US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, Bales admitted it. Not even a shot, excuse the double entendre, at an effective cover-up.
Before the cordite -- or more accurately, smoke from the charred remains of victims, including pre-teens and toddlers - had even settled in the villages of Balandi and Alkozai in Kandahar province, stock apologies began to roll out from NATO heavy weights, followed by new song and dances from Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai. Familiar outcries of recrimination laced with demands for answers and the removal of ISAF security forces from every Afghan village outposts are making those villas in Dubai look better with every massacre.
As if synchronized, and against a backdrop of an early cherry blossom bloom, atonement echoed from the White House Rose Garden. After all, with more than ten years in southern Asia and almost as many end states for victory, apologies are now Commander-in-Chief stock-in-trade. Once again our latest war president pledged a thorough investigation, and then followed up with a very Presidential, in fact rhetorically perfect, act of contrition.
"We're heartbroken over the loss of innocent life. The killing of innocent civilians is outrageous and it's unacceptable. It's not who we are as a country, and it does not represent our military."
The only thing missing, besides a rubber-stamped "hearts and prayers" sign off -- was the unlikely absolution.
But there was something else.
Read complete article in OpEd News
Veterans for Peace See Costs of War Continuing
Friday, January 6, 2012 by The Bellingham Herald
MIchael Jacobsen, Evan Knappenberger, and Carole Edrehi
One decade ago, as the United States was ramping up the rhetoric against Saddam Hussein and his mythic weapons of mass destruction, nobody could have imagined our present situation.
Not only did we find no weapons of mass destruction, but the "quick and decisive" action that Bush administration officials promised turned out to be much bloodier, longer and darker: a military action on a scale that can only be compared to the U.S. occupation of Vietnam half a century ago.
Now that we are being told that the conflict is over (for the second unforgettable time) we might take a page from that older war that defined an entire generation. The words of singer Steve Goodman can be equally applied to either Iraq or Vietnam: "Now they say the war is over, but I think it's just begun."
Is the war in Iraq really over?
Certainly it is not over for the hundreds of thousands of veterans who still suffer from psychological and physical wounds they incurred in Iraq. Nor is it over for the families of those who have died in the war, such as the family of Jonathan J. Santos of Bellingham, who was killed in 2004 in western Iraq.
Certainly the war is not over for the Iraqi dead and displaced. Apparently it is not over even for the Iraqi government, which issued a warrant for the arrest of Iraqi Vice President Tariq Al-Hashimi the day after the American withdrawal. Lastly, it will not be over for the American economy or the taxpayer deficit for the foreseeable future.
Consider the numbers - there are roughly 32,000 physically injured troops, hundreds of thousands psychologically injured service members. Nearly 5,000 men and women were killed in battle, while many more, such as Tim Nelson of Bellingham, killed themselves after returning from combat.
The most conservative estimate of Iraqi civilian deaths is 104,000. In 2006, the British medical journal Lancet estimated 600,000 Iraqis had already been killed. Other studies put the death toll over one million.
According to the United Nations, there are 3.5 million war refugees - 1.8 million fleeing Iraq to other countries and 1.7 million displaced within the country - due to the war. Most of those who could afford to flee the country were middle class professionals (doctors, engineers, educators and lawyers) whose absence has gutted Iraq, leaving it a hovel of poverty and illiteracy and now the most illiterate country in the Arab world.
The war will not end for the Iraqis struggling to return home. The women and children are the biggest losers - over 1 million widows are attempting to survive in a hostile environment.
Nor is the war over for the estimated 16,000 "private contractors" paid an estimated $6 billion annually to perform security, diplomatic and "public relations" duties in place of soldiers. Nor is the war over for defense contractors that feed on taxpayer dollars, preparing for the next unhappy war; the largest being Halliburton, now based in Dubai, paying no taxes to the government that creates and maintains the industry.
The war for democracy has only just begun.
Thousands of armed militiamen are currently keeping the peace; less peace than grudging stalemate between rival factions. Huge waves of protest have rolled through the country following every election since 2005, a sign of the likely corruption, fraud and disenfranchisement of large swaths of the Iraqi population. It bears noting that sectarian violence didn't start until late in the term of Paul Bremer, the Bush appointee who acted as supreme authority in Iraq.
Lastly, according to The Bellingham Herald (Aug. 19, 2011, "Cost of War") the cost of the wars in Asia stands at more than $3 trillion - a figure we haven't even started to understand in context of joblessness and poverty.
Veterans for Peace Chapter 111 stands in stark opposition to the official narrative being spun by politicians of triumphant militarism.
As combat and non-combat veterans, we hate war and the cult of war as only those who have been part of the horror could.
Some of our local members were deployed to Iraq and many of our friends and family have been there.
We want to correct the collective notion of war. War is not clean or neat; it begins at a definite point but does not end definitively.
War is not a political game where numbers of dead and wounded are traded for points at the polls.
What is war? "War is Hell," according to iconic U.S. General W.T. Sherman. "War is a racket," said the highest-decorated marine in U.S. history, Smedley Butler, "where the few profit and the many pay."
We believe that the war is not ending - it is only shifting from the streets to the hospitals, the cemeteries, the community and our homes.
Michael Jacobsen, Vietnam War veteran; Evan Knappenberger, Iraq War veteran; and Carole Edrehi, Vietnam War Red Cross worker, are members of Veterans For Peace, Jonathan J. Santos Memorial Chapter 111, Bellingham.
© 2012 Bellingham Herald
Whatcom Watch Online
December 2011
Reflections on the Meaning of November 11th
By Bill Distler
Bill Distler is a Vietnam veteran and member of Whatcom County’s Veterans For Peace, Jonathan J. Santos Memorial Chapter 111.
Veterans Day has always been difficult for me. Most of us who have been in war don’t get pleasure from talking about it. It’s different in that way from most human activities.
In order to tell a complete and true war story you have to include the fear and confusion, the unfairness of who lives and who dies, and the mistakes that cost people their lives. Most people don’t want to hear about that. They want to hear something soothing so that they don’t have to think too much. That’s where politicians come in. Many politicians are willing to tell untruths about veterans and war. They thank us for our service. This makes me cringe. I know that everyone reaches different conclusions about their actions, but in my judgment, my time in Vietnam did not provide a service to my country. I’ve tried in my own way over the years to make up for the shortsightedness of my youth by working for peace with groups like Veterans For Peace.
I don’t want anyone to thank me for being in Vietnam because they don’t know what I did. Only I know that, and if anyone asks, I’ll try to describe it as honestly as I can. You probably won’t like what you hear, but the truth about war should be hard, if not impossible to listen to without being moved to work for peace.
Veterans Day used to be called Armistice Day. Armistice Day marked the end of the slaughter of 15 million soldiers and civilians in World War I. It was also a day set aside to pray for world peace. There was a recognition that the suffering caused by war descended mainly on the children of the countries where wars were fought.
Veterans Day puts the focus on soldiers. But an honest accounting would put the focus on all victims of war, especially children. Children don’t start wars, but they are the ones who lose the most. They lose their homes, communities, and often, their entire towns. They lose their parents and siblings, they lose their limbs, and they lose their trust in the ability of adults to keep them safe.
Today, many of our younger veterans are hurting. Words of thanks may help, but jobs, housing, and health care for veterans and their families would help even more. We should also fulfill our responsibility to the wounded and homeless children of Iraq and Afghanistan. In fact, if we paid to repair all the human damage that war causes, we wouldn’t have enough money left to fight the next war, and that would be good.
But where can we get the money needed to repair the damage? Here is a very modest proposal. Victims of war don’t profit from war, but our weapons makers do. Why don’t we ask our large weapons-making corporations to turn over their profits from war to a “Returning Soldiers and Children’s Fund”? Private charity is good, but it can barely make a dent in this problem. Our weapons makers should welcome the opportunity to demonstrate their patriotism by using their war profits to help repair the damage that their products have caused.
Read article in Whatcom Watch Online
November 20, 2011
The Way It Is
By Gene Marx
Mic check...MIC CHECK!
There are only two choices...THERE ARE ONLY TWO CHOICES!
A police state in which...A POLICE STATE IN WHICH!
All dissent is suppressed...ALL DISSENT IS SUPPRESSED!
Or rigidly controlled...OR RIDGIDLY CONTROLLED!
Or a society where...OR A SOCIETY WHERE!
Law is responsive...LAW IS RESPONSIVE!
To human needs...TO HUMAN NEEDS!
William O. Douglas...WILLIAM O. DOUGLAS!
Back in the day a friend of ours, Patrick, the maintenance supervisor of our local art museum, was getting it from all sides. Docents, office workers, even patrons were complaining that a nest of starlings had occupied an exterior wall of the attic of the century-old structure. The pressure was mounting with the incessant cheeping. The museum director wanted them gone.
What's a guy supposed to do anyway? He loved his job, he was the man, and working for the city had its perks, a real future. So the chicks would soon be history...maybe tomorrow, maybe.
Long story short, Patrick chose to throw in his lot with the fledglings. He ignored direct orders, the grumblings of staff, censure, or worse. And why"because the man simply couldn't ignore the daily entreaty from another fledgling, his 6-year-old daughter: "What did you do at work today, daddy?"
"What was I supposed to tell her, that I whacked a nest of baby birds?"
How do suppose the NYPD or Seattle's finest answer that same question this week as they walk through their own front doors?
As the news accounts were coming in on Wednesday of excessive force being used against Occupy Seattle demonstrators, I thought about Patrick. If he was wearing a badge and helmet, facing a group of kettled protesters, could he have pepper-sprayed a priest, a 10-year-old, a grandmother? Seriously?
"Daddy had no choice, kiddo. The demonstrators were chanting on Pine St."
With less than a week to go before Black Friday, when the holiday season becomes official, nothing brings out the kid in each of us this time of year quite like an Occupation Wall Street crackdown, a police cordon, or a baton wielding SWAT team. What's next, tanks?
We've all seen the news coverage, at least through social media. Now the whole world's watching, intently, as our sleeping giant of informed ignorance and apathy is finally starting to stir from a decades-long, debt driven coma, but it will be a longer time yet before this sleep stink subsides -- if ever. Not since the streets and jails were filling up with anti-war demonstrators protesting another hell, in another Asian occupation, have we witnessed such fervor, now with government and corporate hubris morphing into angst.
Much of the demographic on the receiving end of 2011's blunt force remains the same -- students, jobless graduates, the impoverished and middle class -- and the elders are still there, once again looking to reap justice. After all, it was they who learned that by stepping into the streets, the impossible becomes the probable, like ending the Vietnam slaughter and reclaiming their lives and futures. They kept showing up, again and again, in spite of the cops, in spite of the tear gas, in spite of Kent State. And they won.
Today's multitudes are showing up everywhere, and occupying, growing with each setback and still coming back. The cuts and contusions from the nightsticks, the smell of the gas -- everything's the same, and yet somehow so different.
Corporate malfeasance with Congressional complicity has replaced the draft board and the Red Scare. Another endless war, this time with hydra repercussions far beyond the casualty count of the latest province to be stabilized, has created collateral damage of epic proportions at home. Joblessness, legions of homeless, economic collapse, a crumbling infrastructure, and meaningless elections of disaffected legislators by all counts should numb surrendering inhabitants into a total immersion of complacency or realty TV.
Singer/songwriter Joe Paquin once sang, "The way it is, the way it was back then ... the way is was is the way it is again."
But it's not, now with a burgeoning police state rearing its many heads.
21st Century so-called crowd control tactics now include arresting journalists, beating legal observers, bludgeoning pregnant women in Portland, Berkeley and Seattle, manhandling wheelchair bound demonstrators, the use of flash grenades and rubber bullets, now stock and trade for suppressing peaceable assembly.
"What did you do at work today daddy -- or mommy?"
Rambo wannabes in Oakland went so far as to fire a projectile canister into a crowd of occupiers and into the skull of 24-year-old Iraq veteran Scott Olsen, inflicting the damage he managed to avoid in combat, traumatic brain injury. With another projectile they dispersed a group that came to his aid.
"Who did you spray today daddy?"
After being corralled by a police squad on bicycles in downtown Seattle, 84-year-old Veterans For Peace activist Dorli Rainey took a direct shot of pepper spray while standing in solidarity with Occupy protestors, or in the words of a police spokesperson, refusing to "disperse or engaging in assaultive behavior toward officers." Well, who can blame the police? How else is a cop expected to subdue all 4'10" of Dorli?
Fortunately, as the attacks on civil liberties continue to mount unabated by hapless mayors and their shock troops, now choreographed by Homeland Security, freedom "insurgency" is on the rise. As history has proven, movements like the Occupy Movement are the beneficiaries of misguided brute force, and empires never learn from history.
Historian and social activist Howard Zinn once said, "Civil disobedience can arouse people and provoke us to think, and when we organize with one another, when we get involved, when we stand up and speak out together, we can create a power no government can suppress." This time around we have the numbers.
And who knows, these goons and thugs who call themselves police officers, the right wing of the 99%, might even start protecting the real victims -- not minding at all the queries of the innocents at their doorsteps.
June 17, 2011
The U.S. In Afghanistan: Meaningless Military Success, Profound Moral Failure
By Bill Distler
Forty-three years ago in Vietnam, I was one of the grunts who watched the high sounding theories of counterinsurgency turn into the ugly reality on the ground. Although counterinsurgency has been given an update, one thing hasn't changed: we still think we can decide the fate of other countries. This attitude explains why we think we can tell the story of Afghanistan without including the Afghans.
Many think-tankers, generals, and politicians favor endless war. U.S. peace activists are rarely asked their opinion. But the group asked their opinion the least are the people with the most at stake, the Afghan people.
Through their personal histories, Afghans know the story of this war in a way that no American does. But a true picture of the human cost of this war might make it harder to sell.
U.S. policy in Afghanistan has been both a success and a failure. One success has been the ability of the military to control the message. Instead of asking the first question: "Is the war right or wrong?", we have been led to debate less important questions, such as: "Are we winning?"
There are two answers to this question about winning. If "we" means generals, weapons makers, mineral and natural gas thieves, fraudulent contractors, war-promoting politicians, and columnists who call for war, then yes, "we" are winning. If "we" means the decent people of Afghanistan and America, then "we" are losing.
General Petraeus, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan and proponent of counterinsurgency, laid out guidelines for "success". The population must be protected and brought to the government side with good governance and services.
When the general accepted this assignment he must have known that success was impossible because:
1) he can not protect the population when there is no plan to stop the guerrillas from using sanctuaries in Pakistan;
2) the government he is offering the Afghans is considered the third most corrupt government in the world by Transparency International;
3) he works with U .S. contractors who are accused by the U.S. Senate's Commission on Wartime Contracting of stealing "tens of billions" of dollars;
4) he violates his own guidelines for protecting civilians by increasing air strikes and night raids;
5) he weakens the health of the population by leaving thousands of untreated amputees and wounded children as a burden on their families;
6) he makes no honest effort to empower Afghan women. Like the wounded, they are left to fend for themselves.
From the beginning our government has supported the corrupt and casually brutal Karzai regime against the fundamentalist brutality of the Taliban. The U.S. now offers the Afghan people a coalition of the most corrupt and the most brutal groups in Afghanistan. Have so many civilians and soldiers died for this pitiful result?
Why would U.S. policy deliberately undermine democracy? A recent news article offers a clue. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, perhaps the most brutal and woman-hating mujahideen warlord in Afghanistan, will be allowed to participate in peace negotiations with the Karzai government. But he must agree not to attack the proposed Turkmenistan to India natural gas pipeline (TAPI) that will pass through his territory.
If the profits from mineral extraction are to go to corporations and not the people, it is necessary to have a corrupt central government and a weak and disorganized population. General Petraeus' methods are certainly accomplishing that.
Before we close the debate on "progress", we should at least examine the living conditions of those we claim to be helping. In the last few months, organizations that actually care about the people of Afghanistan have painted a disturbing picture.
Oxfam and 16 other development organizations reported that the security situation for the Afghan people was the worst it had been since 2001. The ICRC (International Committee of the Red Cross) reported that "Life for ordinary Afghans has become untenable." The ICRC reports that in 2010, the seven prosthetic centers they run had to fit 4,000 new patients with prosthetic devices.
The Afghan people are reaching a breaking point after 32 years of war. But instead of reporting on the full costs of war, our media continues to give us smiley face reporting about "progress". General Petraeus once told an interviewer that counterinsurgency is "a growth industry". The general's career may be growing, but many of the children of Afghanistan are not.
The National Council of Churches, Sojourners, and the Network of Spiritual Progressives, among others, have made proposals for peace in Afghanistan. If we join them we will have something we have never had: a peace plan that includes the people of Afghanistan and America.
May 4, 2011
Hate for Hate: Joystick Justice
By Gene Marx
Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars.
Dr. Martin Luther King
Last May Day weekend, with the 24/7 news cycle still squeezing the life out of the first royal kiss and “NATO’s” targeted assassination attempt of Muammar Gaddafi, killing his youngest son Saif Al-Arab and three young grandchildren, a mainstream media feeding frenzy was provoked, like none we've seen since Balloon Boy. The President would soon announce - within minutes, it was leaked - to a grateful, fearful, xenophobic nation that Osama Bin Laden had been taken out, double-whacked, by an elite team of American assassins in Pakistan.
As a jubilant mob of flag wavers on Pennsylvania Avenue were gathering within earshot, a somber Obama took the mike and delivered the goods, short on details, long on rhetoric.
“No Americans were harmed. They took care to avoid civilian casualties.”
AP reports disputed casualty counts at Bin Laden’s compound from the start, but let’s give Obama the benefit of the doubt. Let’s say a Special Forces sniper or two surgically removed the devil incarnate from North Waziristan with a head shot, a pink mist burst clearly visible, without additional “bug splat,” another one of the Pentagon’s more compassionate references for civilian casualties, as if pink mist wasn’t dehumanizing enough. Real Xbox Call of Duty: Black Ops stuff. A military recruiter’s wet dream.
And when did Obama start worrying about civilian casualties or collateral damage estimates anyway? His Hellfire missiles have been raining down on al Qaeda operative suspects since the first Afghan or Pakistani wedding parties were taken out within weeks of his Inauguration.
"And yet we know that the worst images are those that were unseen to the world. The empty seat at the dinner table.”
The “empty seat at the dinner table?” With Drone kill rate estimates of 10-14 to 1 - innocent civilians to possible combatants - there have been hundreds of empty seats created by the CIA each week. And make no mistake, the whole world is watching. Of course, the US Air Force console ace in Nevada with the joystick could care less.
“Children who were forced to grow up without their mother or their father. Parents who would never know the feeling of their child’s embrace. Nearly 3,000 citizens taken from us, leaving a gaping hole in our hearts.”
Iraq war casualty figures released by WikiLeaks in October 2010 revealed more than 285,000 killed and wounded, with dead locals guilty only of proximity, comprising 63% of the toll - ninety per cent of these women and children.
Afghanistan by contrast, well there is no contrast actually. The civilian casualty counts continue to soar, with countless lost embraces, from the elders and the young, receding to wisps of recollection. According to the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan by at least 15% each year through 2010, nearly 2,800 in 2010 and 8,832 killed since 2006.
“On September 11, 2001, in our time of grief, the American people came together… We reaffirmed our ties to each other, and our love of community and country.”
Like the reveling going on in Benghazi earlier in the weekend, with news of the NATO near-miss on Muammar Gadhafi and the collateral damage done to the Colonel’s immediate family, an orgy of spontaneous celebrations spread from the White House fence, an epicenter for peace movement arrests,through the Heartland to the Left Coast. This time a different sort of exuberant intransigence garnered hugs, with a cordon of police protection, replacing indifference and zip cuffs reserved for anti-war resisters.
“The American people did not choose this fight. It came to our shores, and started with the senseless slaughter of our citizens. After nearly 10 years of service, struggle, and sacrifice, we know well the costs of war.”
One could argue this point, in spite of poll ratings of seventy percent or higher in 2003, but the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts are currently being waged by choice. The senseless slaughter of civilians will no doubt continue, but the vast majority of Americans will never know wartime service, struggle, and sacrifice – and the true costs of war is another issue. However, many will, if they don’t already, suffer the consequences of a war economy long before they can spell Afghanistan or even point it out on a map.
“Justice has been done.”
Operation Geronimo and Bin Laden’s demise was preordained long before 9/11, and if anyone needed to be served up some frontier justice it was the neocons’ anti-Christ that lived long enough to realize his long war strategy come true – to bleed America to the point of bankruptcy. So excuse me if I don’t wave a flag and join a crowd of discordant revelers in an off-key chorus of the Star Spangled Banner.
So where do we go from here.
First of all, the war is not over, even if we want it. Somewhere elite teams within the US Special Operations Forces are planning another predawn raid to mete out Pax Americana justice, streamlining otherwise cumbersome adjudications in the face of international scrutiny. Virtual reality or not, another high-value target’s days are numbered and after all, the International Criminal Court is so passé.
Somewhere a suspected low-level operative is being stalked by a Predator or Reaper Drone, targeted for killing by a US foreign policy gone postal and willing to relinquish hearts and minds and international law for - or in spite of - collateral damage estimates. Unmanned Aerial Vehicle research and development has expanded the range of killer Drones to 40,000 miles, rewriting asymmetric warfare in response to real or imaginary bogeymen. Targeted assassinations and joystick justice, beginning in Yemen in 2002, now have a global reach.
So where were you the night Osama answered for 9/11 the easy way, and what were you thinking while Americans “reaffirmed their ties”, reclaiming another much needed phantom victory with howls of “USA, USA” and suppressing any meaningful reflection on how we got to this point in history?
As the revelers paraded through my own neighborhood, thousands of miles from Ground Zero, and the reports of sporadic fireworks could still be heard, I thought of Martin Luther King Jr. We would have been reminded by King that while Osama bin Laden is no longer taking up useful space, the menace of his sway on global terrorism is alive and well; that “darkness cannot drive out darkness.”
Somehow I miss Dr. King now more than ever.
Whatcom Watch Online
May 2010
Waging Peace, One Mind at a Time
by Gene Marx
Gene Marx is a Vietnam Veteran and former Naval Aviator. Currently, he is a member of the Veterans For Peace National Board of Directors and Communications Coordinator of the local VFP chapter in Bellingham (Chapter 111 www.vfp111.org). Additionally, Gene is a retired Federal Aviation Administration employee and father of two sons. One son is a nurse in Bellingham and the younger son is a train master for Burlington Northern and two-tour Iraq War Veteran. Gene became politically active following his younger son’s first deployment.
Editor’s Note: In Dec. 2010, Bellingham resident Gene Marx was arrested and held along with several activists in Wash, D.C. while protesting the wars as part of the “Stop These Wars” veteran-led civil resistance action organized by Veterans For Peace, the largest of its kind since the Great Depression Bonus Marchers of 1932. In in this piece, Marx begins by sharing an experience participating in non-violent protesting.
On the eve of the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York City, two occupations and three wars ago, my wife Victoria and I stepped off Seventh Avenue and headed toward Madison Square Garden with more than 500,000 marchers protesting the war in Iraq. As our vast river of peaceful protesters, which included students, teachers, clergy, parents and grandparents gained momentum, snaking its way toward the Garden, the “belly of the beast,” I caught sight of a contingency of demonstrators flying flags bearing the now all too familiar logo of a military helmet flanked by a dove and olive branch.
After side-stepping through and around various peace partisans and labor groups, we came within earshot of the unmistakable rhythm of military cadence calls. Only on this day they were a far cry from the Jody calls of my military basic training, raucous obscenities our grandkids should never hear. Instead, as the surge of marchers passed a brigade of police surrounding Fox-TV and then the Garden, this call and response set the tone for an entirely different call to arms:
“We Don’t Want Another War Peace Is What We’re Marchin’ For Am I Right Or Wrong? (You’re Right!) Am I Right Or Wrong (You’re Right!)”
Still reeling from our youngest son’s recent second deployment to Iraq, and knowing we were now within blocks of the old men and women and oligarchs that sent him there under the false guise of national security, his parents joined in loudly and proudly as then President of Veterans For Peace, David Cline, hoarsely called cadence for our brand new family of dissidents:
“Lift Your Head And Hold It High Veterans Are Passing By Tell Them What We’re Marching For Freedom, Justice, No More War!”
The cadence calls rebounding from familiar facades, skyscraper to skyscraper, all the way down Broadway to Union Square said it all. An abridged version of the mission statement of Veterans For Peace, the emphasis on “For” Peace, with a capital F, encapsulated with drill order precision what these veterans stood for, and not against, on that sultry summer afternoon in Manhattan. A higher call to duty than their brothers and sisters in arms could have ever imagined? embodied in the VFP statement of purpose:
“We, having dutifully served our nation…do hereby affirm… to serve the cause of world peace. To this end we will work, with others
(a) To increase public awareness of the costs of war
(b) To restrain our government from intervening, overtly and covertly, in the internal affairs of other nations
(c) To end the arms race and to reduce and eventually eliminate nuclear weapons
(d) To seek justice for veterans and victims of war
(e) To abolish war as an instrument of national policy.
To achieve these goals, members of Veterans For Peace pledge to use non-violent means and to maintain an organization that is both democratic and open with the understanding that all members are trusted to act in the best interests of the group for the larger purpose of world peace.”
VFP Background
Founded in Portland, Maine in 1985, with headquarters now in St. Louis, Mo., Veterans For Peace has been a refuge for former military men and women who learned the hard way, that wars are very easy to start and almost impossible to stop, with the innocent, usually women and children, hurt most often and paying the biggest price for government failures to consider alternatives to violence.
VFP’s list of notable members is formidable, including the likes of political analyst and anti-war activist Daniel Ellsberg, American historian and political activist Howard Zinn, former CIA analyst and activist Ray McGovern, and retired Army Colonel and diplomat, now anti-war activist Ann Wright. In over 25 years of activism, VFP has grown to more than 7,000 members in more than 120 chapters nationwide. Bellingham’s Chapter 111, the CPL Jonathan Santos Memorial Chapter, named in honor of Whatcom County’s Iraq War KIA, was founded in 2003 at the height of the invasion of Iraq.
During the eight long years of the Bush Administration’s preemptive “War on the World,” Veterans For Peace joined forces with other major players in the peace movement, staying on the cutting edge of efforts to organize, educate and demonstrate nationally and locally to end the so-called global war on terror.
Bellingham’s reputation grew as well with Chapter 111 projects and lobbying campaigns resulting in Washington State’s first “Troops Home Now” and “Hands Off of Iran” resolutions, passed by the Bellingham City Council in 2006 and 2007. Additionally, on Memorial Day, the Arlington Northwest display of the more than 4,400 Iraq US military war dead has been commonly displayed, if not at Blaine’s Peace Arch Park then at Sunnyland’s Memorial Park.
Recruitment and enthusiasm was high. VFP, along with peace coalition allies, were making a difference. After all, weren’t the Democrats swept into Congress in 2006 on a promise to end the wars and occupations? VFP had worked tirelessly to throw wrenches into that machinery. In the words of Howard Zinn, “Anyone can throw a wrench into the machinery…not quite, of course — because only a few people have wrenches.” The Veterans’ wrenches: hard-earned credibility, from first-hand experience. Few knew the horrors of war as we did, and someone was finally listening. Or so we thought.
New Tactic
But that was then — one fiscal disaster stoked by a war economy and two new wars ago. With the anti-war movement in disarray, wounded by the lethargy fueled by dubious expectations and a new War President, Veterans For Peace was not willing to give this new Democratic change agent a chance in Afghanistan. With soaring civilian casualties, along with military suicides and PTSD victims, and drone attacks on suspected insurgents killing hundreds more than during the Bush administration, a new tactic was necessary to combat the Obama “machinery.”
In November 2010, the VFP action planning teams turned from the numbers game of demonstrations and lobbying efforts to non-violent civil disobedience — and resistance. The first such action took place in Wash., DC on Dec. 16, amid snow and sub-zero temperatures. More than 130 Veterans and their supporters, including Ellsberg, McGovern, war journalist Christopher Hedges and healthcare activist Dr. Margaret Flowers, as well as two activists from Bellingham, were led away in handcuffs to jail for refusing to leave the White House fence. Nationwide solidarity actions resulted in numerous detentions.
To build on December’s momentum, Veterans For Peace and the “Stop These Wars” coalition again continued to energize the peace movement this year on March 19 with nearly 150 arrests at the White House and Marine Corps Base Quantico, protesting not only our escalating wars and the Libyan intervention, but also the Bradley Manning’s incarceration and treatment. Thousands marched and demonstrated in solidarity, now with labor factions, in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, New York, and, of course, Bellingham.
More Action Planned
The pump had been successfully primed, with more actions planned this summer and beyond. Bellingham’s VFP Chapter 111 has been recently seen on the streets, bannering in support of the Veterans For Peace campaign: “How’s The War Economy Working for You?,” and hosting speaking venues for anti-war heavyweights like Gold Star Mother and activist Cindy Sheehan and former Afghanistan parliament member Malalai Joya. More importantly, Chapter representatives are invited to Whatcom and Skagit county schools in an effort by like-minded teachers to inform their students on the realities and failures of war. One changed mind is a victory to savor.
And now, with each new capitulation to the military-industrial-congressional complex by Capitol Hill, against the seemingly insurmountable obstacles of corporate and media power brokers setting the agenda and filtering the message, members of Veterans For Peace are retooling, setting a new pace for the next quarter century. Many burnt out supporters continue to ask why, many now ready to understandably give up. Nothing seems to work. Perhaps journalist Chris Hedges said it best in a recent interview, after his first arrest at the White House in Dec. 2010:
“I don’t do it because it’s practical, or even because I necessarily think it’s going to work. I do it because it’s a moral imperative.” Hedges goes on to say that acts of civil disobedience are all we have left, that “resistance is important because it keeps alive another narrative.”
One Mind at a Time
But most of all we’re hopeful. And to be hopeful in bad times is still a good thing. We still hope to change minds, even if it’s the one high school senior that opts for trade school over an enlistment bonus after a VFP visit. Or the Army Specialist that refuses to return to his theater of operation after rest and recuperation leave because he read “War Is a Lie.” Or the middle school student who picks up “War Is a Racket,” written by two-time Medal of Honor recipient General Smedley Butler, to bring home to his brother. One mind at a time, one day at a time, there is another way to keep the peace narrative alive.
This month, the United States will once again honor our fallen on Memorial Day, a day of commemoration, draped in nationalistic pride, to reflect on servicemen and women who paid the ultimate price for the failed policies of leaders unwilling to give peace a chance. But before the last note of Taps fades to somber silence, each Veteran For Peace will wonder what could have been.
Thankfully, long-time VFP member and author of “A People’s History of the United States” Howard Zinn gave us all one more remembrance, maybe even a reason to be hopeful on the final Monday in May and beyond.
“If we remember those times and places, and there are so many where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act. Hope is the energy for change. The future is an infinite succession of presents and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of the worst of everything around us, is a marvelous victory.”
Join us as we change history.
Read article in Whatcom Watch Online
April 2, 2011
Rethinking Afghanistan, America, and Americans
By Dana Visalli
School is held outdoors in the dirt for many Afghan children by Dana Visalli
I visited a small Afghan village of about 350 people today located at the end of a rutted dirt track about five miles from Bagram Air Force Base, just north of Kabul. As is the case with most rural Afghan communities, there was no electricity, no running water, and the houses were all made of pounded clay soil. Due to the proximity to Bagram, Blackhawk helicopters flitted overhead like dragonflies on their mysterious missions. Down on the ground, school was in session, outdoors under the mulberry trees. 100 children were crowded onto four large mats in the courtyard of the village mosque, each mat delineating a grade level, one through four. The children sat attentively with flimsy notebooks in hand, while instructors wrote on battered chalkboards at the front of each class. Because there is no lavatory at the mosque, the children have to use the adjacent farm fields for a toilet when nature calls. The lack of a bathroom, not to mention a school building, the lack of teachers, and the fact that the courtyard is already crammed with young children precludes adding further classes for older children.
One might wonder why the villagers don't just build a lavatory, or even a school. The answer lies in the circumstances of the village, shared by many in Afghanistan. The area's homes and fields were badly damaged in the Afghan civil war that raged from 1992-1996; in the following years under the Taliban this area north of Kabul saw continued conflict with the Northern Alliance. Most of the villagers fled to Pakistan, where they lived in refugee camps for many years. Upon their return after the U.S. invasion, they found their homes in ruins and the Afghan economy in shambles. Today, eleven years after the U.S. first occupied the country, the economy remains in ruins, except for the sale of opium and heroin. In spite of the incessant helicopter patrols, opium production has expanded greatly during the American occupation (Afghanistan today supplies about 90% of the world's heroin).
On the way into the village, my guide pointed out two large mansions, surrounded by extensive high walls, in the otherwise war-shattered landscape. He informed me that these belonged to "Taliban warlords," who had come to power back in the time of the war with the Russians. In that war, the U.S.and Saudi Arabia funded the fundamentalist mujehadeen (who fought the Russians) to the tune of 40 billion dollars.1 In fact "Al Qaeda' translates from Arabic as "the list;' it was originally the CIA's list of America's paid mujehadeen commanders. With billions of U.S. dollars at their disposal and a steady supply of high-tech American weapons, some of these commanders became feudal warlords, and it is they hold the real power in the Afghan countryside today. Warlords destroyed Kabul in the 1990s during internecine fighting after the Russians withdrew, and they now reign supreme as local land barons. Some are Taliban and some are not. Many of them are members of the U.S.-funded Afghan government. Each warlord has his own militia, controls the local police force, and is greatly feared by the common people.2
I was invited into the home of one of the local farmers, Najibullah, for several cups of tea and then a noon meal. Outside the clay-walled enclosure, small fields of wheat were greening, and the grapes were just beginning to bloom. Helicopters continued to regularly pass overhead. Somehow in the course of his difficult life, Najibullah had become a humanist philosopher. "What is important to me," he said through his sixteen year-old son, Abdullah, who is fluent in English (and also speaks Dari, Pashto, Arabic and Urdu), "is humanity. I feel the world is my village, and you are all members of this village. For this I love you. I like it very much that you are in my house."
Abdullah, the son, added, "My father always tells me that the world is divided into two groups, those who build and those who destroy. The world is a village, and if you are destroying the village you are destroying the world. The military forces are always destroying. My father is always telling me to be part of the first group, the one that is building the world." And so Abdullah's goal is to become a doctor and help his people. "I must become a doctor," he said, "or my life is nothing."
Abdullah just took the national college placement exam, which determines what course of studies a student will be permitted to pursue. It is an unfortunate artifact of the moribund Afghan economy that of the 140,000 students who took the exam this year, only 40,000 will find a place in college, because there are so few schools. The rest will be discharged into a society in which there are almost no jobs for young people. Abdullah himself is so bright that he got the highest possible score on the placement exam, but because even the educational system is corrupt in Afghanistan, he was assigned to become a literacy instructor. Prospective doctors must buy their way into medical school.
Abdullah has seen the helicopters flying over his farm for all of the eight years that they have been back home. "What are they for, what are they doing?" he asked me. Given that the U.S. has now spent 500 billion dollars in Afghanistan and violence is getting worse annually, the only honest reply was, "Nothing, they are going nowhere." Each Blackhawk helicopter costs approximately $10 million dollars. The Pentagon has purchased 2600 of them, or $26 billion dollars worth of just this one type of helicopter; there are many others. It costs approximately $4000 an hour to fly each of them.3 Thus ten minutes worth of flight time would build a lavatory or composting toilet for the village schoolyard; an hour's worth would build an entire school building. But no funds are available for lavatories, schools, villages or people.
What's wrong with this picture? Two things. One, the United States is acting as a destroyer of the global village instead of one the builders. And two, you are paying the bill for the destruction wrought by the U.S. government. You were born free--free to lead an ethical life--and you have become slave to your own government. Almost all of America's discretionary financial resources go to war. The U.S. military budget for 2012, when all hidden costs are included, is $1.2 trillion dollars, as much as the rest of the world's military expenditures combined.4 Meanwhile, global petroleum production is peaking, per capita grain production is falling, the world's population grows by 80 million a year, and there are no jobs and no future for most of the children of the global family. The real issues of humanity are ignored while the military-industrial complex runs rampant. The destroyers will fall from their pedestal the moment you stop propping them up and paying their bills.
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron." Dwight Eisenhower, 1960
References
1.'The Cost of an Afghan Victory,' The Nation, http://www.thenation.com/article/cost-afghan-victory?page=0,1
2. "The Warlords of Afghanistan,' Time Magazine http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1879167,00.html
3. http://www.defensenews.com/story.php?i=4508376 Cost estimates for operating a UH-60 Blackhawk helicopter are $4,600 per hour and up. The total depends on what is counted, such as maintenance costs, crew pay, fuel and other expenses.
4. See pie chart of 2012 budget here: http://www.warresisters.org/federalpiechart and military expenses contrasted with what the world needs here: http://www.methownaturalist.com/34-What%20the%20World%20Needs.pdf
Author's Website: www.methownaturalist.com
Author's Bio: Dana Visalli is a professional botanist and organic market gardener living in Washington State.
Read complete piece in OpEd News
Lucky #65 - Bill Makes the NYT
And What Is the State of Our Democracy?
February 14, 2011
To the Editor:
Bob Herbert continues his prophetic witness to the ailments of our democracy and his call to us, the citizens, to stop the slide toward plutocracy (“When Democracy Weakens,” column, Feb. 12).
Another prophet, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., said, “The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.”
Do the brave Egyptian people have something to teach us? They risked their lives for the possibility of creating a democracy.
To restore our democracy, all we have to do is speak out: contact government officials and peacefully protest in the way that suits us best. We should hold on to our democracy with at least as much tenacity as the Egyptian people showed the world when they struggled to create theirs.
Bill Distler
Bellingham, Wash., Feb. 12, 2011
Read Complete Article in New York Times
Whatcom Watch Online
December 2010
A Proposal for a WikiPlay
by Ellen Murphy
Veterans For Peace, Chapter 111
Ellen Murphy has lived in Bellingham for 15 years, is a retired licensed counselor, a writer and poet and lifelong activist for peace and justice. She identifies mainly as a grandmother.
Editor’s note: The following is a piece of creative writing designed to be satirical, comedic and ironic. The column does not necessarily reflect the opinions of Whatcom Watch.
The curtain rises on a world-spanning morality play/tragedy complete with chorus, play-within-a-play, and deus-ex-machina. It has an indeterminate number of characters, an interactive cast and audience, and no speaking parts, save for the chorus, audience deliberation, and the judgment rendered by their spokesperson. The play is performed in mime.
The plot revolves around a delusionally narcissistic Empire which has been covertly and overtly thrashing about the world killing and maiming for the sake of peace and good order, and possibly some geological assets. It is currently played by a black guy who may or may not be in on it.
A genius programmer kid (possibly played by the young Ron Howard) escapes the car he’s been living in ever since his dad found out about his possible sexual orientation, by joining the Army, becoming a Private First Class Intel Specialist and receiving Top Security Clearance.
The Intel that he processes could be getting to him, and may have long since felt like agency in a cover-up, so he or someone else has already taken great risks by doing some asking and telling. He’s allegedly released a war-crime type video to a Secrets of the Empire Leaking and Intervention website. (At a shock point in the play, the backdrop is used for the screening of the tape, i.e. the play-within-the-play).
He instant-messages his agony to a seemingly sympathetic possible ex-amphetamine addict who was once convicted of hacking The New York Times. The addict, who may now prefer ecstasy to speed, may once have been court-restrained from his ex-girlfriend for tasering her, and has either tweaked his principles or is a government informant, turns the kid in, but not before the kid, or someone, shoots some 200,000 other pieces of evidence downloaded onto a Lady Gaga album, to the Lead Leaker, an itinerant Australian and the human manifestation of the prophetic albino animal phenomenon, who helps whistle blowers hack alibi systems and crack codes of denial from a bunker in Iceland, with the aid of one thousand nine-hundred and eighty-four people all named Emmanuel Goldstein. They leak the docs to some places, including the same New York Times.
The kid is arrested and the Empire has plans for him.
Again, this is an audience-participation play. The audience, and its machine-hoisted representative, play the deus-ex-machina.
The audience elects someone to ride out over the stage on a pulley to state conclusions, cast judgments and decide on sentences or treatment plans for everyone, but not before the audience has unraveled the tangled web. While it deliberates, a chorus of astonished Vietnam Era Activists and Dumbfounded Nice People who have been waiting for 35 years for the next generation to take over, chants, “So THAT’S where they’ve been; So THAT’s what they do!”
In its deliberations and decisions, the audience must abide by only four Rules:
• Rule # 1: You can’t frame the Albino.
• Rule # 2: You can’t scapegoat the Kid.
• Rule # 3: You may get the Informer into Rehab, and
• Rule # 4: You may have the Empire disarmed, de-toxified, and enrolled in an exchange program in Cochabamba or North Waziristan.
Oh, one more thing. It’s not really against the rules, but you can’t just blame the black guy.
To the chorus’s “Get started. Time is of the essence. Good luck!” the denouement begins.
Possible title for the play: “Son of Pogo: We Have Met the Empire and He is Us.”
• A Narcissistic Empire: No speaking or miming part; character is illustrated in props.
• Deus-Ex-Machina: In Greek tragedy, a mechanized god that comes out at the end of the play to decide on all the issues. In this play, the D.E.M. is the machine-transported “foreman” of the audience, who articulates their decisions from above the stage.
• The Chorus: Groups of volunteers, to chant as needed.
• The Kid: Specialist Bradley Manning is being held in solitary confinement for allegedly whistleblowing thousands of documents, including atrocities from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, to the WikiLeaks web site. He is said to resemble the young Ron Howard.
• The Albino: Julian Assange, the young co-founder of the pro-transparency web site WikiLeaks, is a fair-skinned Australian who, until he recently dyed his hair brown to escape harm, had whitish hair.
• The Informer: Adrian Lamo, a convicted hacker, maybe an addict and a man with a new conscience or a new wad of money. Might be seen on stage receiving and making phone calls.
• The Emmanuel Goldsteins: In Orwell’s “1984,” the original Emmanuel Goldstein is the enemy of the state.
• Albino Animal Prophecy: In 1994, the white buffalo, Miracle, was born in Janesville, Wisconsin. Since then, at least 15 to 20 more white buffalo have been born. Many indigenous spiritual leaders have visited them from all over the world as signs of prophecies being fulfilled.
• Pogo: The legendary Walt Kelly comic strip. Pogo famously said, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
The Peace Bonus: Nothing to Kill
or Die For
By Gene Marx
You either get tired of fighting for peace,
or you die.
John Lennon
Has it really been 30 years? I remember the date well enough, but the three decades kind of caught me more than a little off guard.
Those of us old enough to remember how we were crushed by the shooting death of John Lennon outside of his Manhattan apartment on the evening of December 8, 1980, have likely been distracted on this somber anniversary by what might have been. At the time I thought, "Well, it took them 20 years but they finally killed them all."
Who were they exactly, government conspirators? Probably not, but certainly a fair share of bigots, crackpots, and assassins. But them, they were the heroes I grew to revere as I literally survived what I had thought, until more recently, were the most tumultuous decades ever thrust upon a generation - JFK, MLK, RFK, and finally John Lennon, and I was brash enough to claim them all. But especially John.
John Lennon was special. It took me a while to let him off the hook him for abdicating Beatledom for Yoko, but I came around. Ultimately, he never hesitated to stand and be counted when it came to the peace movement --" unless he and Yoko Ono were in the middle of a bed-in, when the prone position was more appropriate, holding press conferences in their honeymoon suite in 1969 to promote world peace.
The newspapers said
say what're you doing in bed
I said we're only trying to get us some peace.
Not exactly a quick study, and in spite of the message of The Ballad of John and Yoko, whilethey were handing out fifty acorns tied in a sack I was in training to counter the domino effect in Southeast Asia. And by the time Imagine was released in 1971, I was waging war in a lost cause, losing friends and wondering why my country hadn't given peace a chance.
But I got to come home, and most of my heroes and anti-heroes were gone, except for John. As most of what was left of the counterculture willingly succumbed to family and career, fearing only the aftermath of a newly elected Ronald Reagan in December 1980, Power to the People, Working Class Hero, and Whatever Gets You Thru the Night continued to serve as anthems.
As it turns out, we should have been paying more attention to the adage from Lennon's Happy Xmas, "War is over, if you want it, war is over, now!" Thirty years later and most Americans cannot list the conflicts waged in their name for Empire, much less find the theatres of operation on a map.
Questioning authority is a start, in fact it's patriotic. But resisting is the key.
Recently an octogenarian and life-long Veterans for Peace anti-war activist was asked by a visiting academic at a local peace coalition gathering just how he's been able to keep up the struggle, seemingly without a victory all these years. His reply came without a hint of hesitation, "It's not about the struggle, it's the resistance."
John sang of resistance, but he's gone. Many of us do what we can do, short of self-immolation or even arrest. We carry on. In the words of war correspondent Chris Hedges "If we resist and carry out acts, no matter how small, of open defiance, hope will not be extinguished."
While hope doesn't exactly run deep, we continue to resist. And like Lennon, as disclosed in the last interview of his life to Rolling Stone, not one of us is "interested in becoming a dead (expletive) hero." But we speak out --" after all silence is complicity. We vote our consciences. Dozens vigil in the rain, many travel to demonstrations numbering in the hundreds of thousands, chanting, what else, Give Peace a Chance.
On Thursday afternoon, December 16, Veterans For Peace members from every part of the country, along with anti-war supporters, will lead a civil resistance at the gate of the White House, refusing to leave, to be dragged away if necessary, to protest Obama's seemingly unending wars. Using as a model the WWI bonus marchers of the 1930's, they plan to demand their bonus. "The bonus for our service and the many sacrifices of our comrades is peace," wrote Veterans for Peace President Mike Ferner, in a recent letter to President Barack Obama.
So I plan to join my comrades in peace in Lafayette Park, other veterans that have heard Administration distortions of mock optimism, lights at the end of the tunnel, sham progress, and winning hearts and minds, in spite of the killing, for too long. Each of us has had more than enough time to learn that "raising the spirit of peace and love, not war" is always the answer. And no one sang such resistance like John Lennon.
Shine on, John.
Read complete piece in OpEd News
The next three letters were submitted to the New York Times and are rejections #60, #61 and #62. This has got to be a record, and if not, certainly sets a new standard for tenacity.
Thank you, Bill Distler.
Letter to the Editor
Submitted to
The New York Times October 19, 2009
When the Pentagon hands out press releases, the press would do well to do a credibility check. In "U.S. Uses Attacks to Nudge Taliban Toward a Deal" (Friday, October 15, page A6) our Air Force says we have used 700 bombs or missiles in Afghanistan in September as part of an escalation of air strikes. It does not mention rockets or cannon shells from AC-130s, A-10s, or Apache helicopters.
We also learn from NATO statistics that less civilians are being injured by air strikes now than were being injured two years ago. American officers said that better intelligence "enables pilots to be more precise in their attacks. Much of that better intelligence, the officer said, is being supplied by remotely piloted aircraft, like the Predator drones..." So, do drones piloted from Nevada supply enough clarity to human pilots in Afghanistan for a decision on who dies?
Well, excuse me, but having seen in Vietnam how the best laid plans for bombing and strafing often go awry, I find this version of events to be unbelievable. It is more than unvarnished spin, it is a wagon load of unadulterated hooey. The Times needs to ask harder questions when being briefed by the military.
Bill Distler
Letter to the Editor
Submitted
The New York Times October 4, 2010
The female Marines in your report on Afghanistan have a sincere desire to help the Afghan people, but their good intentions are being misused. Their meetings with villagers cannot overcome the destruction caused by the 98% of our spending in Afghanistan that goes to the U.S. and Afghan military effort. ("For Female Marines, Tea Comes With Bullets", by Elisabeth Bumiller, Sun., Oct. 3, page 1)
The consensus growing in Washington is that the war will end with a negotiated solution between Karzai and the Taliban. In other words, the two most misogynist forces are the only ones taken seriously by our government. We have empowered the worst forces in Afghanistan and disempowered the rest of the population. Unless the Times asks deeper questions about our government's goals, the tragic beginning of this war under George Bush will reach a tragic and destructive ending under Barack Obama.
Bill Distler
Letter to the Editor
Submitted to
The New York Times September 13, 2010
[Note to Editor: This replaces a letter of about 250 words, sent yesterday. This has 143 words]
Michael E. O'Hanlon's "Op-Chart. States of Conflict: An Update" says that in Afghanistan "the situation on the ground is actually slightly better than is commonly assumed." (Sunday, Week in Review) But better for whom?
The chart ignores basic needs: food, clothing, shelter, drinking water, and health care. Afghanistan, under Karzai, has become the second most corrupt government in the world, according to Transparency International. Their Sept. 23, 2008 press release states: "In the poorest countries, corruption levels can mean the difference between life and death, when money for hospitals or clean water is in play."
U.S. policy may produce a settlement that leaves Karzai and the Taliban in charge of Afghanistan's future. That does not constitute "winning" by any decent definition. If we start supporting honest Afghans who work for a livable country, then we might end up on the winning side.
Bill Distler
U.S. Rep. Rick Larsen is wrong on Afghanistan
LETTER - THE BELLINGHAM HERALD
POSTED: Saturday, Sep. 11, 2010
The longer Congressman Rick Larsen agrees to fund the Afghanistan war, the longer the children of Afghanistan will suffer and die. Rep. Larsen may be kind to the people around him but, like many Americans, when it comes to foreign policy he speaks deadly words and he votes for war without taking responsibility for the killing and wounding that he causes.
Larsen met with Hamid Karzai, the man the Obama administration accepts as the president of Afghanistan - even after he reportedly stole the 2009 election with one million fraudulent votes. I believe Karzai runs the second most corrupt government in the world (after Somalia) and Larsen "cautions Karzai on corruption," according to the headline.
I believe U.S. policy toward Afghanistan is corrupt and so it requires Karzai as its corrupt partner.
There are about 33 million people in Afghanistan. Three-quarters of the population are women and children. They have no voice in the U.S. media. After 32 years of war they deserve our help in finding peace. If Larsen continues to side with the generals and corporate war makers, he will be killing more children in Afghanistan.
Bill Distler
Bellingham
Read lletter in Bellingham Herald online
Thanks from Immaculate Conception School, July 2010
COIN: A Good Business Opportunity?
By Bill Distler
VFP-111
July 12, 2010
Day after day we are told that in Afghanistan only counterinsurgency (or COIN, as the Pentagon calls it) has a chance of success. And day after day we see evidence that the guidelines for success are not being followed.
The central principle of COIN is said to be to get the population on our side. Two ways of doing this are to protect the population from the Taliban and to provide effective government and public services. But as long as our government supports Hamid Karzai, both of these ideas are doomed to failure.
Transparency International, a business risk assessment group, lists Afghanistan as the second most corrupt country in the world, slipping from fifth most corrupt in 2005. Only U.S. Ambassador Eikenberry, for a moment, seemed willing to speak the truth about this.
It seems that COIN, instead of being a military strategy, is more of a public relations campaign with a soothing acronym designed to mislead the American people into accepting a state of continuous war. The war started with an honest rationale, to bring justice to bin Laden, al Qaida, the Taliban leadership, and anyone who aided or sheltered them. But it has been turned into a war for control of Afghanistan.
Recent news stories show that there are cracks in the COIN story big enough for a whole country to fall through. The Afghan police are corrupt and abusive. The Afghan National Army doesn't want to fight for Karzai. U.S. tax money finds its way to the Taliban for protection money.to avoid attacks on supply convoys, which means that we are paying for bullets for both sides. The Pakistani intelligence service (ISI) continues to advise and supply the Taliban. We spend 90% of our Afghanistan funding on the military side and most of the 10% left for reconstruction is stolen or badly spent.
The 2009 election in Afghanistan gave our government an opportunity to support one of the candidates who actually cared about the Afghan people. Instead, President Obama chose to support Karzai, with his proven record of corruption, even after it became obvious that he had stolen the election. And to top it all off, bin Laden is still free.
General David Petraeus, the new commander in Afghanistan, is the principal author of the new counterinsurgency strategy. General Petraeus has been in the Army since he started at West Point in 1970. That's 40 years. You would think he would have learned by now.
Two of our greatest anti-war warriors, General Smedley Butler and General David Shoup, only needed 33 and 37 years in the military, respectively, to figure out what was going on. General Butler, Vice Commandant of the Marine Corps from 1928 to 1931, entitled his post-retirement book "War Is a Racket."
General Shoup, Commandant of the Marine Corps from 1960 to 1963, said in a speech at Pierce College in 1966 that he was against our involvement in Vietnam, and then he went further: "I believe that if we had and would keep our dirty, bloody, dollar-crooked fingers out of the business of these nations, so full of depressed, exploited people, they will arrive at a solution of their own they design and want, that they fight and work for. And if, unfortunately, their revolution must be of the violent type...at least what they get will be their own and not the American style, which they don't want... crammed down their throat." (from "David M. Shoup: A Warrior Against War", by Howard Jablon, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, page 101).
Read complete article in OpEdNews
Independence Day 2010: Happy Birthday, Pop
By Gene Marx
July 4, 2010
Happy Birthday, Pop. Today’s really your day, after all.
I’ve been thinking about you a lot lately, since the day after Memorial Day actually. That holiday weekend was especially tough. It finished up with a memorial service for another county boy killed in Afghanistan – a kid from the county with a “brown paper bag, garden-variety” lineage; in his father’s words, a young guy with big dreams - like you - when you left for the Pacific.
Afghanistan, you heard me right, Dad - kind of like Bougainville without the humidity and vegetation; fewer casualties, so far, but countless more amputees.
As I stood with other aging Veteran survivors, between color guard protocols and bagpipe solos of “Minstrel Boy” and “Amazing Grace”, State and local politicos wasted no time and covered a lot of ground. From the State Governor, “another true hero that willingly risked his life to protect those ideals that define us as Americans” is gone.
Yes, I’d say so. Just ask his two younger brothers in the front row.
Well, news flash, Dad. It’s the 21st Century and well-meaning sentiment has long ago given way to cut-and-paste ritual, as easily as clear blue Manhattan skies can be swallowed by charred detritus and smoldering jet fuel. But I’m not telling you anything you don’t know.
Testimonials droned on, barely competing with an uptick in downtown traffic in front of the courthouse wall of heroes. Another fallen warrior that worked “to keep peace, protect democracy, and defend our country” has “made the ultimate sacrifice” – sound familiar?
I was just a kid myself in 1953, but I remember when the chaplain said those things about you at Holy Cross Cemetery. After all, Peace was your Product, as a command pilot for the Strategic Air Command in the early Fifties. And before the 21-gun salute stopped resonating through mausoleums, from monument to monument, and the clouds of rifle discharge had drifted away, another seed was planted.
For your sake, Dad, I’m not going to call it blind patriotism. I knew better – I just wanted to be a hero like you. But I’ve learned a lot since then, since my best friend was obliterated in Vietnam and your grandson was permanently traumatized in Iraq – both wars of choice.
Another would-be hero, Army Air Corps veteran, Howard Zinn said it best, “They tell me I am a member of the greatest generation…because I saw combat duty as a bombardier in World War Two. But I refuse to celebrate the greatest generation because in so doing we are celebrating courage and sacrifice in the cause of war. And we are miseducating the young to believe that military heroism is the noblest form of heroism, when it should be remembered only as the tragic accompaniment of horrendous policies driven by power and profit.”
OK, OK. General Smedley Butler might have grown on you. And now we both know better. Not exactly quick studies, but we know better.
The gathering of mourners last month – like sixty-one others taking place all over the country – is etched in my core, not because of empty sentiment, or genuine concern for that matter, but for another seed of legacy being planted in the words spoken by a new Gold Star father. His son, after all, was lauded as “another volunteer that wanted to protect America and his family, and stand in the gap for us.”
Happy Fourth, Pop, and happy birthday. And I’m sorry you never had a chance.
Gene Marx is a Vietnam Vet and member of Veterans For Peace. He lives in Bellingham, Washington. His father Major Gene Marx, a WWII and Korean War Veteran, was born on July 4th, and killed in a USAF aircraft accident in 1953.
Read complete article in OpEdNews
The competition for Afghanistan's natural resources
Seattle Times: Letters to the Editor
Bill Distler, VFP-111
June 23, 2010
Claim jumping?
David Sirota in his column on Afghanistan identifies a serious concern: What if they started a war to steal the minerals of one of the most impoverished, war-ravaged countries on Earth, and not enough people cared? ["Justifying war as way to protect - or exploit - a nation's resources," Opinion, June 21].
The 1982 edition of the U.S. Geological Survey's (USGS) Minerals Yearbook says of the Hajigak iron ore deposit in Afghanistan's Bamiyan Province: "A 1977 independent survey concluded that the deposit was large enough and of a sufficient grade to support a major iron and steel industry." The 1982 report also mentions a natural-gas pipeline from northern Afghanistan into the Soviet Union (now Uzbekistan) and the "Ainak" copper mine.
Mineral riches in Afghanistan are not news to the USGS. Stealing other people's mineral claims used to be called "claim jumping" and was the theme of many Hollywood Westerns. (Note: the claim jumpers were the bad guys.) Back then claim jumping was considered to be theft and murder. I hope we can still recognize it for what it is.
Bill Distler, Bellingham
Copyright © 2010 The Seattle Times Company
May 4, 2010
Richard Wilson
VFP Chapter 111
Bellingham, WA
I was raised in the military industrial complex. My father was a participant in the Manhattan Project while serving in the Army Corps of Engineers. He was employed by The Dow Chemical Company while Dow was the administrator of the Atomic Energy Commission's Rocky Flats Plant in Colorado. Dad had retired from G.E. in Pinellas, Florida while under the contract of the Atomic Energy Commission. I also worked for Dow at Rocky Flats. Additionally I spent 11 years in the United States Air Force and nearly three years in Vietnam and Thailand.
After graduating from high school in 1962 and facing a draft with no possibility of additional education, I chose the Air Force. The military offered some of the best technical schools and vocational training of the time and many of us who had no real financial means depended on that opportunity to prepare us for life.
The choice to join the military was not a difficult one. I had no reason in my life's experience at that point to doubt the honor of such a decision. The opportunities available were limited with the draft looming over my head.
After serving for six years, I was married, became the father of a wonderful daughter, and had spent 22 months in Vietnam, Thailand and the Philippines. I was discharged "honorably" at McChord Air Force Base and returned to Arvada, Colorado where I attempted to survive civilian life.
My son was born and fortunately I found employment in the general aviation industry. Income was critical as usual for a family so I applied for an instrument technician position at the Rocky Flats Atomic Energy Commission facility managed by The Dow Chemical Company. The Rocky Flats Plant site was responsible for the manufacture of "pits" or the plutonium triggers used in nuclear weapons.
After being unable to adapt to the corporate "cog in the machine" imprisonment I found in the everyday life at that time, I found it necessary to return to the Air Force two years later.
Four more years in the Air Force found me back in Southeast Asia and struggling with marriage and separation from my family. I was again discharged from the Air Force "honorably" and worked several jobs while trying to piece a living together.
Unfortunately during this return experience, my marriage collapsed in divorce. After several years, I found an opportunity to be employed by Lockheed Aircraft Service Company, a defense c
ontractor operating out of Ontario, California.
At that time, my idea of successful employment included wages, benefits, a title and retirement, so this seemed like the American Dream! I made it! I was even flying as a crew member training Air Force personnel. Flying was a lifelong dream. What more could I ask?
After accepting a position to serve as a Technical Representative for Lockheed, training Air Force and supporting their flight operations in Europe, my new friend and wife and I moved to Germany.
Read complete article in OpEdNews
Dear Bros and Sis's in 111,
Have I ever thanked you for the beautiful Hawaiian Christmas plant you sent me after my heart attack on December 16 2009? Yes I have! But many times, in my own mind and heart, and not on paper until now.
Delivered by Brother John Chadwick with an uplifting note, it still sits, bright, green and happy even though its blossoms are gone, on my table.
And, since the episode, as I prefer to call it, occurred during my dear friend Joe's funeral, and even though he was the first C.O. to the Vietnam War in Whatcom County, and not a vet, I think he signed off on the flowers too, to reassure me that I had not messed up too badly. Anyway, we know that veterans of war and veterans between wars and veterans of peace actions are all brothers and sisters in our struggle for a loving, cooperative, ingeniously creatively conflict-resolving world!
Thank you. I love you,
Ellen
February 24, 2010
A Thousand Nightmares and Still No Name
By Henry Porter
One thousand dead soldiers
And the only flag lowered to half-staff
is the one you are looking at here.
That's no surprise.
We don't even have a name for the war we are fighting.
It used to be called the Global War on Terror.
They retired the label, but kept the war going.
It was briefly replaced with The Long Slog.
That didn't test well with focus groups
so they dropped names altogether
and just kept the war.
At first I thought it was odd
the war of many fronts had no popular name.
How do you market a product with no name?
Then something occurred to me.
The Hundred Years War.
It wasn't called the "Hundred Years War"
when they were fighting it.
Word on the street is
they are going to rebrand it
and try calling it New Dawn.
That's a hell of a name
for a never-ending nightmare.
George would be proud. George Orwell, that is.
But now it makes perfect sense
why the wars we are fighting
have no names.
They are not wars.
Wars end.
One thousand bodies.
Each one another nightmare.
When will we wake up?
January 13, 2010
Less money should be spent on wars, defense
MARIE MARCHAND / THE BELLINGHAM HERALD
As a member of the House Budget Committee, U.S. Representative Rick Larsen sets priorities for federal spending. He is entrusted with the task of creating a budget that promotes national security and the well-being of American families.
I do not envy this responsibility. Legislators realize that every competing line item represents people with different needs. They are under dual pressure to cut discretionary funds that support vulnerable social programs and to increase funding for the U.S. military.
Congress and Larsen recently approved a 2010 Fiscal Year defense budget of $687 billion for war, nuclear weapons, and Pentagon operations. In addition, it is estimated that the cost of sending 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan will exceed $30 billion in 2010. Citizens in Larsen's district are concerned about the Pentagon's command of our fiscal resources. Our political leadership must see beyond military might as its comprehensive solution to 21st century challenges.
Martin Luther King, Jr. warned us about this trajectory: "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death." Instead of spending another $2.3 trillion on war over the next 10 years, our political leaders should invest in a security strategy that is diversified and centered on human health and flourishing.
In King's absence, it falls on us to teach Larsen and his colleagues how to take our nation back from the brink of impending spiritual death.
The disparity between military and social spending is in itself a defeat for our nation. For example, the Army spends $1 million to send one soldier to Iraq or Afghanistan for a single year. Yet when a soldier returns to civilian society, he is lucky to get a minimum wage job with health benefits. While taxpayers continue to spend billions on war, nearly 50 million people are not getting enough to eat.
Furthermore, excessive defense spending undermines our elected officials' important work. Larsen's recent partnership with U.S. Sen. Patty Murray successfully resulted in a much-needed veterans' healthcare clinic here in Northwest Washington. Providing such vital services would be easier if federal money were refocused on meeting human needs.
As it stands, our nation's spending priorities are antithetical to American values. To remedy this, Larsen must lead the effort to divert a significant portion of U.S. military spending to programs of social uplift.
However, it takes more than one person to re-imagine and innovate long-standing systems of injustice. Therefore, as part of a coordinated campaign, constituents across the country are asking each of our nation's senators and representatives to reexamine budget priorities. Specifically, we are asking members of the House Budget Committee to hold a set of hearings on how our government can fund non-military security solutions. These hearings should address diplomacy and development, human needs, and the environment.
Military force should not be the default approach on Capitol Hill. Long-term security cannot come from militarism anymore than household serenity can come from a handgun on the nightstand. With the Pentagon budget expected to increase by 25 per cent in the next decade, it is vital for Congress to begin reshaping our nation within a framework of social justice as King envisioned decades ago. It is time to stem our reliance on military force and to expand the methodologies we use in our pursuit of human security.
Dwight D. Eisenhower lamented: "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed."
It is within Larsen's power to adjust this misalignment of priorities. At this historical juncture, every moment presents a critical choice for us and our leaders: Do we, as a nation, continue to formulate military responses that lead to unending war, or do we instead take a risk and invest in human development that leads to peace?
Marie Marchand is executive director of the Whatcom Peace & Justice Center and a member of "Our Nation's Checkbook" campaign.
Published on Monday, January 4, 2010 by TruthDig.com
The Pictures of War You Aren’t Supposed to See
by Chris Hedges
War is brutal and impersonal. It mocks the fantasy of individual heroism and the absurdity of utopian goals like democracy. In an instant, industrial warfare can kill dozens, even hundreds of people, who never see their attackers. The power of these industrial weapons is indiscriminate and staggering. They can take down apartment blocks in seconds, burying and crushing everyone inside. They can demolish villages and send tanks, planes and ships up in fiery blasts. The wounds, for those who survive, result in terrible burns, blindness, amputation and lifelong pain and trauma. No one returns the same from such warfare. And once these weapons are employed all talk of human rights is a farce.
In Peter van Agtmael's "2nd Tour Hope I don't Die" and Lori Grinker's "Afterwar: Veterans From a World in Conflict," two haunting books of war photographs, we see pictures of war which are almost always hidden from public view. These pictures are shadows, for only those who go to and suffer from war can fully confront the visceral horror of it, but they are at least an attempt to unmask war's savagery.
"Over ninety percent of this soldier's body was burned when a roadside bomb hit his vehicle, igniting the fuel tank and burning two other soldiers to death," reads the caption in Agtmael's book next to a photograph of the bloodied body of a soldier in an operating room. "His camouflage uniform dangled over the bed, ripped open by the medics who had treated him on the helicopter. Clumps of his skin had peeled away, and what was left of it was translucent. He was in and out of consciousness, his eyes stabbing open for a few seconds. As he was lifted from the stretcher to the ER bed, he screamed ‘Daddy, Daddy, Daddy, Daddy,' then ‘Put me to sleep, please put me to sleep.' There was another photographer in the ER, and he leaned his camera over the heads of the medical staff to get an overhead shot. The soldier yelled, ‘Get that fucking camera out of my face.' Those were his last words. I visited his grave one winter afternoon six months later," Agtmael writes, "and the scene of his death is never far from my thoughts."
"There were three of us inside, and the jeep caught fire," Israeli soldier Yossi Arditi, quoted in Grinker's book, says of the moment when a Molotov cocktail exploded in his vehicle. "The fuel tank was full and it was about to explode, my skin was hanging from my arms and face-but I didn't lose my head. I knew nobody could get inside to help me, that my only way out was through the fire to the doors. I wanted to take my gun, but I couldn't touch it because my hands were burning." [To see long excerpts from "Afterwar" and to read an introduction written by Chris Hedges, click here.]
Read complete article in commondreams
Obama's Afghanistan's Speech
Statement in Response
Jozef Hand-Boniakowski
December 2, 2009, Volume 17 Nr. 3, Issue 255
The time for debate on the merits of the war in Afghanistan is past. The war has been debated for the last seven years and has been shown to be without merit from the standpoint of American security and national interest.
By the time of the 2008 election, only 11 months ago, Mr. Obama seemed to have accepted the war's futility even though he assured us that mission completion is "at hand". The president himself told the American public and the world in a national broadcast on December 1, 2009: Let me tell you this on Afghanistan -- when I tell you that I am completely confident that we are going to complete the mission, you can bank on it. On election eve, November 3, 2008, candidate Obama assured the American people, that despite remaining "details": I can say to you with complete confidence tonight that we will with additional troops soon complete the mission and bring this long and difficult war to an end. Once again Mr. Obama has betrayed the promise of peace, just as he betrayed it after his election in November 2008.
Owing to the secretiveness of the Administration, we do not know exactly what went wrong between candidate Obama and his campaign and Obama the president. But by available evidence the President, after the election, shed his progressive faux persona, and acted upon exactly what he said he would do though those who embraced "Change we can count on" refused to see it. Further supporting the corrupt Karzai government would require Obama to abandon the indigenous Afghani people. That indeed is what the war is all about. That and the pipeline.
In order to compel the enemy in Afghanistan to acquiesce, Mr. Obama has launched a troop surge of many tens of thousands of U.S. forces. In so doing, he will take the lives hundreds, more likely thousands, of Afghani civilians, and create many new American prisoners-of-war, while our men and women lose their limbs and their sanity at a prodigal rate. Obama has urged the Congress to remain silent, uncomplaining and has urged the support of the American people.
The time for debate -- and for delay -- is past. The administration promised an end to the war and is failing to produce it. It is the responsibility of Congress to end the war to take immediate action by cutting off funds for its prosecution. It is Congress's responsibility to deliver on the electoral promise which Mr. Obama seems now, to be betraying. That, indeed is the consensus of the majority of the people in the United States. If that does not happen by the State of the Union 2010, it will then become the people's duty to employ Constitutional means processes to bring the war to an immediate end.
Congress has the authority and the responsibility to bring the war to an end. At the same time that the American people gave the President a decisive mandate for ending the war in Afghanistan along the lines that he promised it, they also gave a decisive vote of confidence to the Democratic Party in Congress and in the state houses. The Democratic majority has been increased in the Senate, indicating the people's intent and expectation that Congress will exercise its constitutional authority with energy and independence.
The matter in any case is not partisan. The opposition to the war was initiated eight years ago by an appallingly too few Democratic Congressmen and Senators against a Republican Administration. Unfortunately, many Republicans have actively accepted their own Administration's policy of continuing the war. Now, more than ever, it is the responsibility of members of both parties in Congress to use the legislature's power to cut off funds and end the war in Afghanistan.
Read complete article in Metaphoria
General McChrystal has Plans for Afghanistan
by Bill Distler
VFP Chapter 111
Bellingham, WA
November 24, 2009
Obama and McChrystal on Air Force One, 11/2/2009. (Official White House photo by Pete Souza)
The New York Times Magazine recently had a long article about General Stanley McChrystal, commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan. The article examined the general’s counterinsurgency plan for “success”. The Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer recently claimed that General McChrystal is the world’s foremost counterterrorism expert because in Iraq he led a program “killing thousands of bad guys.” Mr. Krauthammer’s intended compliment turns out to be proof of General McChrystal’s unfitness to represent the United States.
A picture in the Times article showed the general with Ranger and Special Forces patches on his sleeve. He must be strong and brave, and that’s fine. But for our country, the more important questions are: is he compassionate and is he wise? Because strength and bravery without compassion and wisdom are worse than useless, they are destructive.
What comes across most strongly in the Times article is that the general wants to win. He says he wants to win the military struggle by protecting the civilian population from the Taliban, by building up the Afghan Army and Police so that they can take over from our soldiers, and by convincing Taliban fighters to come over to the government side. The government side today is dominated by the same corrupt, murderous warlords that Afghans were originally glad to be rid of when the Taliban forced them out in the mid-1990’s. General McChrystal’s plan creates a choice between two evils. With either choice, the Afghan people lose.
If the main U.S. goal is to get the population on our side, why have we waited eight years to start? General McChrystal’s request for 40,000 – 85,000 more troops shows that winning over the people is just a sound bite for him. The plan offers nothing to the Afghan people except more fighting and dying. Is General McChrystal wise enough to use the power of life and death he has over millions of Afghans? The answer appears to be “No”.
Read complete article in Tikkun
By Mick Youther
November 19, 2009
Did you know:
"[In Afghanistan], Taliban attacks are up; deadly roadside bombs or IEDs are fast on the rise (a 350% jump since 2007); U.S. deaths are at a record high and the numbers of wounded are rising rapidly; European allies are ever less willing to send more troops; and Taliban raids in the capital, Kabul, are on the increase.”-- Tom Engelhardt, author of The End of Victory Culture, tomdispatch.com, 11/1/09
Did you know that we didn't need to invade Afghanistan to get Osama Bin Laden?
“The Taliban's ambassador to Pakistan, Abdul Salam Zaeef...said the Taliban would detain bin Laden and try him under Islamic law if the United States makes a formal request and presents them with evidence.” (you know--what was once known as “probable cause” in the pre-Bush world)--CNN, 10/7/01
Okay--No trial in Afghanistan--How about a neutral third country?
"Haji Abdul Kabir - the third most powerful figure in the ruling Taliban regime--told reporters that the Taliban would require evidence that Bin Laden was behind the September 11 terrorist attacks in the US, but added: ‘we would be ready to hand him over to a third country'”.--The Guardian, 10/14/01
There they go again--insisting on evidence. Don't they understand? That is not the way things work in Bu$hWorld:
"We know he's guilty. Turn him over.”--George W. Bush, explaining the finer points of the American judicial system, The Washington Post, 10/29/01
Unsurprisingly, the Bush Administration rejected all offers to have Osama bin Laden arrested and tried. George W. Bush came into office determined to be a “war President”, and he was not going to let a bunch of Islamic fundamentalists spoil his big chance by arresting his “boogie man” and beheading him in the public square.
READ Complete Article in OpEdNews
Bring Back the Draft
BILL MOYERS JOURNAL | Bill Moyers Essay: Restoring Accountability for Washington's Wars
PBS October 30, 2009
Transcript
Reporting on the attacks that killed eight Americans, CBS turned to animation to depict what no journalists were around to witness. This is about as close to real war as most of us ever get, safely removed from the blood, the mangled bodies, the screams and shouts.
October, as you know, was the bloodiest month for our troops in all eight years of the war. And beyond the human loss, the United States has spent more than 223 billion dollars there. In 2010 we will be spending roughly 65 billion dollars every year. 65 billion dollars a year.
The President is just about ready to send more troops. Maybe 44 thousand, that's the number General McChrystal wants, bringing the total to over 100 thousand. When I read speculation last weekend that the actual number needed might be 600 thousand, I winced.
I can still see President Lyndon Johnson's face when he asked his generals how many years and how many troops it would take to win in Vietnam. One of them answered, "Ten years and one million." He was right on the time and wrong on the number-- two and a half million American soldiers would serve in Vietnam, and we still lost.
Whatever the total for Afghanistan, every additional thousand troops will cost us about a billion dollars a year. At a time when foreclosures are rising, benefits for the unemployed are running out, cities are firing teachers, closing libraries and cutting essential maintenance and services. That sound you hear is the ripping of our social fabric.
Which makes even more perplexing an editorial in THE WASHINGTON POST last week. You'll remember the "Post" was a cheerleader for the invasion of Iraq, often sounding like a megaphone for the Bush-Cheney propaganda machine. Now it's calling for escalating the war in Afghanistan. In a time of historic budget deficits, the paper said, Afghanistan has to take priority over universal health care for Americans. Fixing Afghanistan, it seems, is "a 'necessity'"; fixing America's social contract is not.
But listen to what an Afghan villager recently told a correspondent for the "Economist:" "We need security. But the Americans are just making trouble for us. They cannot bring peace, not if they stay for 50 years."
Listen, too, to Andrew Bacevich, the long-time professional soldier, graduate of West Point, veteran of Vietnam, and now a respected scholar of military and foreign affairs, who was on this program a year ago. He recently told "The Christian Science Monitor," "The notion that fixing Afghanistan will somehow drive a stake through the heart of jihadism is wrong. …If we give General McChrystal everything he wants, the jihadist threat will still exist."
This from a warrior who lost his own soldier son in Iraq, and who doesn't need animated graphics to know what the rest of us never see.
So here's a suggestion. In a week or so, when the president announces he is escalating the war, let's not hide the reality behind eloquence or animation. No more soaring rhetoric, please. No more video games. If our governing class wants more war, let's not allow them to fight it with young men and women who sign up because they don't have jobs here at home, or can't afford college or health care for their families.
Let's share the sacrifice. Spread the suffering. Let's bring back the draft.
Yes, bring back the draft -- for as long as it takes our politicians and pundits to "fix" Afghanistan to their satisfaction.
Bring back the draft, and then watch them dive for cover on Capitol Hill, in the watering holes and think tanks of the Beltway, and in the quiet little offices where editorial writers spin clever phrases justifying other people's sacrifice. Let's insist our governing class show the courage to make this long and dirty war our war, or the guts to end it.
Our friend Bill Distler, a Vietnam veteran on disability in Washington state working with Iraq vets and others against the current wars, wrote this op-ed hoping to get it in the Seattle Times before the anniversary of the bombing of Afghanistan on Oct. 7th, 2001. They didn’t print it so we are presenting it here.
Afghanistan: Success Means Ending the War
by Bill Distler
Protesters on last weekend's National Equality March in Washington, DC. Which war? Both, I'm sure.
We are now in the ninth year of our war against Afghanistan. The conversation about Afghanistan centers on the concept of “success”. Success is described as defeating the Taliban and al Qaeda and “stabilizing ” Afghanistan. This is a vision of success defined in military terms. This will be good for General David Petraeus, head of U.S. Central Command, and General Stanley McChrystal, commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan. They will win new medals and their careers will be crowned with “victory”. But who else will it be good for?
In moral terms, which are the only terms that really count, we are suffering a monumental failure. We are asked to think of war only in terms of winning and losing. This makes the lives of Afghans less important than our pride. This is the same moral failure that we suffered in Vietnam. We could have won militarily in Vietnam and still have lost morally.
George Bush failed us by not seeking justice against the perpetrators of 9/11. Instead, he brought the injustice of war to the entire population of Afghanistan. President Obama has so far failed to do the right thing by seeking a cease-fire and negotiations to end the war. Those of us who want peace have failed to build a large enough movement to make demands on him.
Starting the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq was a moral failure. Continuing the wars is a moral failure. Winning the wars will be a moral failure. Ending the wars will be a moral success.
Our present policy in Afghanistan supports Karzai’s gang of corrupt officials, drug runners, and woman-haters against the similar Taliban gang. If General McChrystal succeeds in stabilizing Afghanistan, he will only be stabilizing injustice. How can the Afghan people win anything from that?
We have spent close to $200 billion in Afghanistan but we haven’t even seen fit to care for the children that have been wounded. If we had spent half of that money on food, clothes, shelter, schoolbooks, and medicine, and even if half of that was stolen, the other half would still have supported life instead of death and we would have friends instead of enemies.
When General Petraeus was a Major in the U.S. Southern Command in Panama he told the Wall Street Journal that, “LIC is a growth industry.” (”Latin Lesson: US Effort to Win ‘Hearts and Minds’ Gains in El Salvador”, Wall St. Journal, Sept. 8, 1986, p.1) LIC stands for Low Intensity Conflict. General Petraeus seems to have put himself on a career path that helped make his prophecy come true. But this is not just about his “success,” it is about other people’s lives.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said in his prophetic 1967 speech “Beyond Vietnam” that: “The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve.” We have had 42 years since then to learn and grow but we are approaching the question of Afghanistan with the same immature attitude, namely: How will this affect us? When I went to Vietnam my only question was: How will this affect me? By the time I left, I realized that my actions had life or death consequences for other people.
A mature vision should recognize that the consequences of our actions in Afghanistan fall mainly on the Afghan people. Perhaps we can also recognize that Afghans may understand their country better than we do. Isn’t it possible that if all their voices were heard, they might come up with a better path to peace than our fixation on “winning”?
It is time to replace the military solution with a moral solution.
Bill Distler This article appeared in the October 19, 2009 edition of The Nation. Mr. President, don't derail your presidency by bungling Afghanistan. Although we were separated by more than a decade, we lived a few steps apart in Hyde Park and were both professors at the University of Chicago. There I established the Center for Middle Eastern Studies and was also president of the Adlai Stevenson Institute of International Affairs. Before going to Chicago, during the Kennedy administration I was the member of the Policy Planning Council responsible for the Middle East and Central Asia. A Democrat, I was an early supporter of yours. So I hope you will accept the following analysis and proposals as being from a friend as well as a person with considerable experience on Afghanistan and Pakistan. In recent events I see an opportunity to accomplish American objectives while avoiding a course of action that could derail plans for your presidency, just as the Vietnam War ruined the presidency of Lyndon Johnson.
According to press accounts, you are being told that America can win the war against the Taliban by employing overwhelming military power. Just like President Johnson's generals, yours keep asking for more troops. You are also being told that we can multiply our power with counterinsurgency tactics. Having made a detailed study (laid out in my book Violent Politics) of a dozen insurgencies, ranging from the American Revolution to Afghanistan, and fought by the British, French, Germans and Russians in America, Europe, Africa and Asia, I doubt that you are being well advised. When I was in government, we were told we could achieve victory in Vietnam by the same combination of force and counterinsurgency recommended by your advisers in Afghanistan. But as the editors of the Pentagon Papers concluded, the "attempt to translate the newly articulated theory of counter-insurgency into operational reality.... [through] a mixture of military, social, psychological, economic and political measures.... [were] marked by consistency in results as well as in techniques: all failed dismally." What actually brought all the insurgencies, including the one in Vietnam, to a halt was the withdrawal of the foreigners. Some foreigners left in defeat, but others left in ways that achieved their most important objectives. I believe you have an opportunity to achieve America's important objectives in Afghanistan. In Vietnam we never understood the Vietnamese and were defeated; so here I lay out the essential features of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Kashmir and then show how they set the context for a successful policy. I begin with Pakistan. READ Complete Article in thenation
Letter to the Editor Letter to the Editor August 21, 2009
By Gene Marx
"Betting and raising with an incomplete hand is called "betting on the come." Henry Stephenson in his book Real Poker Night
OK. I've had it.
I'm up to here with toxic town hall rants, Tea Bag activists advocating revolution, and raucous protests from both sides of the health care issue, grassroots activists and Astroturf pawns all demanding their country back. I have never seen so many outraged Right and Left wing populists galvanized in opposition to a single Administration policy. Well, it's been a few decades anyway. And demanding their country back! Who gave it away in the first place? We all did, wittingly, piece by piece, from the time George Bush closed "My Pet Goat" until now. It's too late for histrionics. It's time to get truly hysterical. While a submissive Democratic majority has been pummeled on so-called health insurance reform during the summer recess, the rest of the country's attention has been successfully diverted from real trouble - again - in Afghanistan and now Iraq. Breaking news of Michael Jackson's overdose and Sarah Palin's Facebook posts, along with the distortions of the birthers and deathers, have edged out sharp spikes in violence and casualty counts in both theaters of operation. These Schiavo-like deflections are starting to stink like red herrings. The shell game has gone on long enough. US and NATO troops have been dropping like flies, with IEDs making a comeback as the weapons of choice. And still under the radar the numbers on desertions and Army suicides stateside are skyrocketing this year, underscored by PTSD-related mental illness and multiple deployments. Ninety-nine percent of us are still willing to sit back and hope - there's that word again - that the military will sort things out. Well, this Progressive Vietnam veteran sorted things out long before my own son's first deployment to Iraq, and now I'll just go ahead and say it - the unthinkable. If we really want to live up to the shabby magnetic ribbon sentiment proudly displayed on the rear of many SUVs and family sedans, we need to redistribute a shared responsibility for this country's misadventures in the Middle East. Put simply, bring back the draft. There, I feel so much better. Hear me out choir. This is a win-win. At last count the US military is deployed in more than 150 countries, over 750 bases. America the Beautiful has moved beyond mere hegemony to empire, that cannot be denied, and it could be argued that two US occupations are in big trouble. Clearly, Pax Americana does not have enough boots on the ground to remain sustainable. And while a failing economy has resulted in a modest boost to recruitment efforts, there still are no where near enough video gamers in the training pipeline to meet the long term troop commitments established during the 43's Long War. To make matters worse, according to Gold Star father Andrew J. Bacevich in The Limits of Power, the events of 9/11 "reaffirmed a widespread popular preference for hiring someone else's kid to chase terrorists, spread democracy, and ensure access to the world's energy reserves." Supporting the troops is one thing, just let us know how it turns out. The solution: Bulk mail those induction notices. Revisiting the Selective Service System, or the more egalitarian 21st Century version National Service, could be the answer. You know, The Draft. It feels so good not to mutter it to myself anymore. For starters, ever since the United States embarked on its Crusade, or more correctly Obama's Overseas Contingency Operation, the military has committed hundreds of millions of dollars each year to less reluctant, at times more gullible recruits as they raised their right hands. These incentives would be history, with draftees even freeing up professional soldiers for longer dwell times at home or rotations in Armed Forces Career Centers, instead of hot zones in Southwest Asia. Add to this a gradual phasing out of over 250,000 costly mercenaries with draftees, and the Defense Department would be talking real money over the long haul. According to May 2009 Pentagon numbers, DoD contractor personnel account for at least 50% of the Iraq, Afghanistan, and US Central Command area of responsibility, and a recent Commission on Wartime Contracting report to Congress reveals "there is still no clear picture of who the contractors in theater are, what services they provide, which contracts they perform, and what their support costs are." And it's one, two, three, What are we fighting for? Don't ask me, I don't give a damn" Sound familiar? While some of Country Joe's I'm-Fixin'-to-Die-Rag lyrics remain unprintable, the sentiment remains the same on Woodstock's 40th anniversary. War correspondent Michael Herr once said, "All the wrong people remember Vietnam." Oh, I remember it all right. Vietnam and Afghanistan comparisons are hardly a stretch for a veteran that grew up on LBJ's back door escalations. But for Walter Cronkite and real news, it would be difficult not to draw policy parallels in either campaign, with progress on the ground a hard sell or timelines a definite nonstarter. On top of this, a phantom Afghan exit strategy would inevitably lead to another war of attrition requiring nothing short of a steady stream of conscripts to fuel it. As Americans wave flags and root on pundits, 1% of us fights our fights and copes with casualties, while the war market booms. More than 55% of our tax dollars go to our most lucrative exports, war and weapons, and many of us sit by, no questions asked. The "99 percenters" are long overdue shouldering more responsibility for this country's war economy. One way to make this happen is to bring back compulsory military service or national service, a common practice worldwide among many of our staunchest allies. US Representative Charles Rangle, a Korean War veteran, and sponsor of the Universal National Service Act of 2007, puts it simply, "Those who love this country have a patriotic obligation to defend this country. For those who say the poor fight better, I say give the rich a chance." A universal national service act, what could be more even-handed? And in Rangle's bill, a random selection to require all persons - men and women - in the United States between the ages of 18 and 42 to perform national service, either as a member of the uniformed services or in civilian service in furtherance of the national defense and homeland security, to authorize the induction of persons in the uniformed services during wartime to meet end-strength requirements of the uniformed services. I sense General Lewis B. Hershey rolling over in his Arlington plot right now at the mere mention of random. The longest serving director of the Selective Service held as much sway over able-bodied high school and college age males, as any counselor, coach, or steady girl, from 1941 until his dismissal in 1970, and fed the Vietnam grinder with a steady stream of 1-A conscripts, accounting for 20,000 of the 58,000 deaths. But I said win-win didn't I? While I was boring holes in the sky over the Gulf of Tonkin, questioning my own involvement in another seemingly endless conflict, hundreds of thousands of people back home were doing something about it. Americans representing every demographic, but mostly draft-age students with their futures on the line had finally had it. National sentiment toward ending the war would not have happened without the 1967 march on the Pentagon, the Chicago Eight police protests, the Kent State killings, the Madison antiwar demonstrations, and National Moratorium days involving hundreds of thousands united in solidarity. They too wanted their country back, and they knew they had to take to the streets to make it happen. Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger knew they had to change their chosen course and shift the burden. That impetus would not have been there with an all-volunteer military, there needed to be more skin on the line. Old men may dream up ways for young men to fight and die, but not with their own sons and daughters on point. None of this would matter if, as journalist James Fallows once wrote in The Atlantic Monthly almost three decades ago, the troops were "not sent into action for any cause less urgent than absolute survival." Of course, Vietnam War resisters argued that no one should go to war, echoing the late Edwin Starr's anthem by the same name, What is it good for/ absolutely nothing"/ Lord knows there's got to be a better way. At least, according to Fallows, they paid lip service to the idea of the "categorical imperative," that they should not expect others to bear a burden they considered unacceptable for themselves. I know, more of a gamble than win-win, and I'm probably betting on the come. Inexplicable end states and open-ended commitments are no guarantees that American silence and complacency on now and future wars won't continue to carry this day and future days. Consumption is still battling sustainability, with policy maintaining a death grip on global resources. A swap of national service for resistance? Could be a sucker bet. Besides, our troops gambled when they signed on the dotted line, right? Too bad it all comes back to reading the fine print. STROTHER MARTIN NAILED IT “You gotta get your mind right!” by Mike Ferner In Paul Newman’s 1967 classic, “Cool Hand Luke,” the prison boss in the white suit, played memorably by Strother Martin, repeatedly tells Luke to “get your mind right.” That turned out to be literally a grave warning for Luke, but it’s exactly what we need to hear today. We open the VFP 24th annual convention today against a backdrop of a crippled economy, sweeping foreclosures, widespread unemployment, millions without medical benefits, wars that now exceed a trillion dollars and have killed over a million people.
It’s a fair question to ask, that with a name like Veterans For Peace, should we be concerned with issues that go so far beyond opposing war? The answer is “yes,” because war and our economic calamities are not only connected, one is the dominant cause of all the others, and VFP is well positioned to make this argument. As we open our convention I’d like to open a discussion on something even more fundamental than war and economic calamity. As is true so many times when talking about fundamentals, we can refer to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The same year “Cool Hand Luke,” played in theaters, Dr. King spoke at Riverside Church in New York, giving what many believe was his greatest speech, “Beyond Vietnam.” In it, he called the United States “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” “Time” magazine called King’s speech “demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi.” But every word in King’s speech was true – and timeless. Here are a couple gems. “…what we are submitting our troops to is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war…We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for (our soldiers) must know after a short period there, that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Americans, who calculate so carefully…military victory, do not realize that in the process they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat.” Then, 42 years ago, he spoke words that could’ve been addressed to us here today: “This war is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this…reality we will find ourselves organizing clergy-and-laymen-concerned committees for the next generation. They will be concerned about Guatemala…Cambodia… South Africa. We will be marching for these and a dozen other names and attending rallies without end unless there is a significant and profound change in American life…” My daughter brought this home to me right after the invasion of Iraq, when she said, “This is my generation’s war, just like Vietnam was yours, isn’t it?” So here we are, organizing another generation of anti-war committees, attending rallies without end. It’s still necessary, We’ll keep doing it, but I’m sick of it. I’m tired of being that Vet for Peace guy who makes history dance at another rally by revealing what Smedley Butler had to say. I long for the time when Veterans For Peace can build its membership on a reputation for creating a peaceful world and its practical nonviolence skills, not just because we leapt to the front ranks against yet another war. Chris Hedges wrote “war is a force that gives us meaning.” Could it also be true that anti-war is a force that gives us meaning? If we are content to be an anti-war movement or peace movement in name only, we’ll have work that will give us plenty of meaning for this generation, our children’s generation, and the one after that if the planet is still breathing. No, what we need is a peace movement that is true to our chant in the streets: “No justice, no peace!” Peace with justice means stopping the few from making policy for the many; from robbing us blind; denying our right to health care; destroying Earth’s life support systems; as well as sending us to war. Peace with justice needs a foundation. That foundation is democracy. Not democracy “as advertised on TV,” or bandied about during elections, but the real thing. We must govern ourselves, for we have seen what happens when we don’t. Imagine a peace movement that is part of a larger democracy movement. We talk about “outreach” to other groups. We talk about defunding the war to fund human needs. But brothers and sisters, what is our vision? Stopping the F-22 or trading an aircraft carrier for a housing program? It has to be more than that! What we need is to govern ourselves so we can create the kind of life we have an indisputable, inalienable right to. But we aren’t going to gain the power needed to govern ourselves if we expend our precious time toiling in an isolated peace movement that merely wants to get our troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan, just as we won’t become self-governing with an environmental movement that aims only for more solar panels and cars with better mileage. We need to get our minds right so we can see ourselves not as mere workers and consumers but as human beings with an absolute right to define what kind of life we need – and then take it! We need to create a culture of democracy from the bottom-up, to replace our culture of death. We need to change our government from what it is today – a huge roadblock, guarded round the clock by greed and private interests, into a vehicle that nourishes the public interest; that helps us express our love for each other and our planet. I believe there is a hunger for self-governance and democracy in America and that hunger is the fundamental link between the peace movement and every other movement working to address human needs. I don’t need to remind this audience of war’s real cost. We can’t even identify all the categories into which we pour war’s staggering sums. Less than 5% of what we’ve spent in Iraq and Afghanistan would pay the tuition of every student attending public university this year in the U.S. Beyond dollars, we know war’s human toll on individuals, families and whole communities is as impossible to quantify as the heartache of a single loved one; as impossible to calculate as the multiples of misery endured by those under our bombs. If we experienced casualties in our country comparable to those just in Iraq it would mean – listen for where you live – that every person in Baltimore, Boston, Dallas, Philadelphia, San Diego, San Francisco and Seattle would be dead. Every. Single. Person. Everyone in Delaware, Idaho, Nebraska, Nevada, New York and Oregon: wounded. Every. Single. Person. The entire populations of Ohio and New Jersey: homeless. Everyone in Michigan, Indiana and Kentucky: refugees in Canada or Mexico. What’s astounding is that so many insist this kind of madness is practical, is realistic…..and yet would look at VFP’s bottom line, “To abolish war as an instrument of national policy” and say “now, that’s crazy!” How can this be? Well, think how much we pay this system every year to produce this culture of death, and then define it as normal, in fact as the only way to live unless we want to freeze to death in the dark. There is one good thing about all this – when we realize what a constant, herculean effort the system must make to construct such a massive delusion and maintain it in the face of everything rational, we can sense how fragile the empire really is. If you doubt that, recall the statues of Lenin toppling all across Russia in 1990, when just two years before such a thing was unthinkable. And so we’ve come full circle, back to Strother Martin’s demand to get your mind right! We can either do that, or stand dumbfounded on the side of the road, waiting in awe for the Imperial Oz to give us direction. Well, we’re here to tell the nation that Veterans For Peace knows what we see today is not the only way forward. War is not an unavoidable absolute. Human beings decide to create injustice, to promote empire, to whip up public fears. But veterans know human beings can make different decisions. We can create better outcomes. We can build a just society. We can create a culture of democracy. We can abolish war. We can, and we are! But remember this other passage from that great speech of King’s. “We may cry out desperately for time to pause…but time is deaf to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residue of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words, ‘too late.’” Sisters and brothers, let us begin! With two ongoing wars and the Military-Industrial (Congressional) complex jonesing for more, a Vietnam Veteran and the father of a two-tour Iraq Vet reminisces on just how simple times were in retrospect, when our days were filled merely with Iraq angst. (A recent visit to Bellingham, Washington by Cindy Sheehan, hosted by VFP Chapter 111, was the incentive for this article.)
Keeping it Simple: G before H
By Gene Marx
Can it be that it was all so simple then? Or has time re-written every line? Can anybody remember when all we had to worry about was one Occupation of a sovereign nation at a time? And it was easy to find it on a map at least for some of us. It didn't seem that long ago. Remember We're comin' to get you Saddam? Anbar Province, Sadr City, Mosul, Fallujah, WMD we could even spell the bogey men and fields of fire for the most part. OK, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was an exception, but Kurds, Sunni and Shia made up for that phonetic challenge. Iraq 2003. It was all so simple then. (Remember when we couldn't spell Baghdad? G before h...g before h.) And the casualty counts were far less complicated; one thousand, two thousand, three thousand KIAs and counting - a little over 2 a day for the first four years. As long as we didn't concern ourselves with Iraqi civilians and we didn't as it turns out we were OK. After all, it took The Decider almost 3 years to even hazard a guess on collateral damage "30,000, more or less". Now there's a bogey man that fit easily on a picket sign. But we were still shopping...good times. It got really uncomfortable for the White House toadies when Gold Star Mother Cindy Sheehan tried to nail Bush on his "Noble Cause" talking point, the one he touted as the troops were rolling into Baghdad. Many of us stood with this California mom, if only vicariously, as she camped in a ditch in Crawford, Texas daring Dubya to quit hunkering down in Prairie Chapel and meet with her. But noble causes were at a premium, unlike lies and rhetoric. Just where exactly was the nobility in letting the blood of her son Casey, as well as the blood of thousands of our sons and daughters, seep into the sands of Iraq with no end in sight. The War President never came out of hiding and Cindy never got her answer. We're all still waiting; only this time around it's Obama trying to conjure up a noble cause for his dumb war and dumber escalations. Now, more than six years after Shock and Awe it's gotten a whole lot more complicated. Afghanistan (g before h...g before h); Jalalabad; Kandahar; Islamabad, Pakistan. Hamid Karzai and Asif Ali Zardari (25 cents off your next espresso if you can identify both of these guys and whose side they're on today). Just who are the evil doers now? Al-Qaida? They could care less, although smoking out Osama Bin Laden in 2001 elevated the Afghan debacle to "good war" status. This time around US forces are dealing with a Gordian Knot of Taliban Pashtuns, opium traffickers, criminal gangs, Tajik and Uzbek militias of the Northern Alliance, kidnapping rings; Gulbuddin Hekmatayar; Mohammed Omar; Siraj Haqqani. Simple enough? Maybe we should mandate that our leaders and the flag wavers are able to spell the locales we invade, the terrorists we fight, and the despots we prop up before the next Humvee rolls. And where are US and NATO forces fighting and dying? Helmand Province, Kandu, Nerkh, Bagram, Zabul Province; in terrain as impassable as the Hindu Kush range and as sandy and arid as the Registan plateau; where phantom militants disappear into the hills or melt into the population until the next skirmish. Almost makes you miss Anbar Province And why are we there, in this "graveyard of empires"? After almost eight long years, isn't it about time we get an answer? Drudging up another noble cause won't help. After a million dead Afghans, 5 million refugees and over 14,000 dead soldiers the Soviets never came up with a rationale beyond stabilizing an unpopular regime leading to further destabilization and crippling their economy as a result. Sound familiar? Well, the US casualty count should, with 43 US soldiers killed in Afghanistan last month, more parents will be looking for answers, maybe that illusive noble cause worth clutching with a folded flag. Has time re-written every line? Perhaps, but maybe there is still enough hope to go around to learn from history. Deep in the Heart of Texas: Dear Cindy, No one can blame you, the mother of a fallen soldier, for wanting answers. Recent polls back your inquiry. The American public wants answers, too. Just what is Bush's "noble cause?" What is noble about the occupation of Iraq and its resulting charnel? Was it clear to Army Specialist Casey Austin Sheehan when he was gunned down in a Sadr City firefight? Was it clear to all 1,872 US soldiers who have died so far in this war? As Veterans, we support the seriousness of your inquiry. Not surprisingly, George Bush has circled the wagons, taking time out for occasional fundraising forays and a bike ride with Lance Armstrong. God forbid he actually invites a Gold Star mom in for a cup of coffee or a bourbon and branch water to talk about why her son died. Do you think Casey is surprised that his mother has taken it upon herself to, in her own words, become the spark that "lit this fire," a fire that continues to burn unabatedly? Not if you take a look at how this mom has channeled her grief into action, until finally this: mothers exercising their moral authority deep in the heart of Texas. The president's stammering attempt to work the latest casualty count into a VFW speech might have been a nice touch if he hadn't been two Gold Star families behind. It's hard to keep up, however, at almost three KIAs a day. In fact, the number of US soldiers killed in Iraq has surpassed the number of US killed during the first three years of the Vietnam War. And with the US recently committing troops to Iraq through the year 2009, it is becoming clear that this quagmire will result in an intolerable increase in war dead and, consequently, more Gold Star moms. Sooner or later, George Bush will have to answer for his mistakes. How would he confront a grieving mother at this late date anyway? In your case, Cindy, he would have to come up with a cooler nickname. "Mom" did not work in your first meeting, and it surely will not work now. The War President is probably wishing he could remember Casey's name. If he had a conscience, he would be afraid of looking into your eyes. That gaze, that grief, will first transfix and then drag a kicking and screaming psyche into a deepening malaise of "Why?" Take heart, Cindy. You are our tipping point, our spine. You may never get your meeting, but you don't need it now. You have galvanized millions in a movement that has ushered in long overdue dissent. This is one unjust conflict that Bush will finally have to answer for in this world and, as a so-called "man of faith," in the next. The boots have hit the ground and won't stop now. Casey must be so proud of you. Veterans for Peace, Chapter 111 Op-Ed Editor DICK CHENEY: The Evil in his Soul is Written on his Face Bill Distler Letters to the Editor By GENE MARX You just never know how your day is gonna go; like last Monday, at o-dark-thirty, cruising down the interstate, straight into the belly of the beast. And that was just the start. Bill Distler's Open Letter to Obama A Letter from the Grunts March 6, 2009
Dave Belden
Maybe the best line in it is this one: We are at a historic moment very much like the moment when President Johnson was escalating the Vietnam War and Dr. King asked him to stop and think. President Johnson missed his opportunity... Or maybe it's this: We might try using our resources to empower women instead of killing men. Here's the full letter: An Open Letter to President Obama. Feb. 24, 2009. Dear President Obama, While you are reviewing U.S. policy toward Afghanistan, we ask that you include a perspective that has been lacking in the national conversation since Sept. 11, 2001. You have received much advice, whether sought or unsought, from political and military experts. We ask that you give even greater consideration to seeking out spiritual guidance. There is no shortage of people seeking to advise you on how to win a war. But there is a critical shortage of people around you who might ask a more important question: How can we make peace? Since Sept.11 our national conversation has been lacking a spiritual perspective. When Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his great "Beyond Vietnam" speech at Riverside Church, the event was organized by Clergy and Laity Concerned About Vietnam. Perhaps the religious community has not been as organized during these last few years as it should have been, and perhaps no one can take Dr. King's place, but we can still take advantage of the wisdom he revealed in that speech. There is no shortage of deep spiritual thinkers in our country today, but there is a shortage of leaders willing to seek their guidance. We are asking you to be that leader. If we really want peace in Afghanistan, we should start with an offer of a cease-fire. That is the most immediate concern, to stop the killing of the innocent. Then comes the hard part, negotiating for justice. Everyone has a viewpoint in Afghanistan, but instead of encouraging a dialogue to seek common ground, we have focused on a military solution to the problem of injustice. The Taliban's idea of justice may be light years away from ours, but we are not going to solve the problem of male injustice to women in Afghanistan by killing all the men. And if we did, there are another 10 million men on the Pakistani side of the border with the same anti-woman attitude. In fact, it is a planet-wide problem that cannot be fixed by war. We might try using our resources to empower women instead of killing men. We are at a historic moment very much like the moment when President Johnson was escalating the Vietnam War and Dr. King asked him to stop and think. President Johnson missed his opportunity to be one of our greatest presidents because he let the military/political dimension overrule the spiritual dimension. George Bush called himself a war president. He was misguided. We voted for you, President Obama, because we believed that you would seek the path of peace. We believe you can make us proud again. War is the worst way to solve problems. Peace is the best way. We believe our country can become a leader in peacemaking. You can start to lead us along that path. With best wishes to you and your family, and for peace for everybody, no exceptions. If you agree with this letter, you can have your family sign it and mail it to the Obama Family at: The White House I called Bill Distler, who sent me the letter. He said that Veterans for Peace in Bellingham, WA has an active core of about twenty. Most are Vietnam vets, only one is an Iraq vet.
Bill says the Iraq vets mostly don't want to talk about it yet. It's way too much to lay on 19 and 20 year olds," he says; it took him many years before he could see clearly how wrong his war was, the Vietnam War, and how the mess he got into wasn't his own fault. Bill is receiving 100% disability for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, but he says his war was in the jungle, in forests. The Iraq War vets' traumas have been and still are in buildings, highways, city streets. He can stay out of forests, but every plastic bag on the highway, every window, every street corner can trigger an Iraq vets' PTSD. "The psych trouble for these guys will be way more," he concludes, and adds: "The people who talk about war are either those who didn't go, or they're the officers, who have a different perspective. To know about war, ask the grunts." "I wandered for years after Vietnam," Bill tells me. "Settled in Bellingham in 1985 and worked in an organic flour mill... My beautiful daughter Lily is 8 years old. My beautiful wife Lisa and I have been married since 2000, my first marriage at 52 years old." It's only in recent years he started to organize against war, appalled at what Bush had done. "My brother Ken was in the 4th Infantry Division in the Central Highlands from Jan. to May '69 when he was wounded in a huge firefight that left about half of his company killed or wounded. He killed himself in 1994. I still feel that he is watching me from heaven and encouraging me to keep going. If I accomplish anything good, I feel that I share that with him." If I have one comment about his letter it's this: let's not imagine that all the men in Afghanistan are anti-woman. That would be as false as imagining that all the soldiers serving the American empire are pro-war. We ran a terrific article in Tikkun by Wil Morat about Afghan men, all Muslims of course, who are risking their lives to support women's rights. (Our website just crashed and we haven't got a lot of it back yet, but you can get Wil's article here). Greater than Ourselves Brother and Sister Veterans for Peace, How long has it been? Only eight years? And how long have we been gazing at those enticing numerals, the simple 1.20.09 on picket signs and bumper stickers, serving as both a cruel portend and a light at the end of a tunnel? Too long. While it was a relief to see Bush and Vice-President Strangelove not actually leave the slime trails we expected on their way out of the Capitol, it was far better just to see them go. So much for Step One. Now comes the hard work – and we are once again up to the task. Our new President Barack Obama eloquently praised our service men and women in his Inaugural address for embodying “the spirit of service…a willingness to find meaning in something greater than themselves.” No one feels this more than VFP peace wagers. Perhaps Director Michael Moore said it better while extolling the anti-war movement, “To all of you who have spoken up and spoken out, who have written letters and marched for peace, for all of you who never gave up, you are the true heroes today.” David Cline would have liked that.
We know what we’re in for and optimism is no substitute for naiveté. It’s up to us now to force the issue, to move mountains. Obama must be convinced to do the right thing and stop the bleeding at home and abroad. Getting to the mountaintop is not enough anymore. I know like me you’re hopeful today. Hope’s a good thing and an essential ingredient for an arduous Step Two. And ultimately, people with hope get things done. (Thanks, Studs.) Gene Marx September 8, 2008 LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Support military and face reality of war
I went to the Northwest Washington Fair to see my granddaughter show her bunnies and saw the gigantic interactive Army recruiting center there. The contrast between animals, quilts and jellies and the military scene was disturbing. It's hard for us humans to come to terms with shades of gray and apparent contradictions. We tend to make things black or white, wrong or right. But until we can uphold our military, and at the same time fully face that some wars are wrong, we will continue to stifle that real conversation about just what our brave and beautiful children are being recruited to do, what will happen to them while they are doing it, and how they will be cared for if and when they get home. I think that deep down, we all know we can't do anything like this Iraq thing again. We must keep talking and find a way to come together. It's now or never. Ellen Murphy
VFP Chapter 111
Bellingham, WA
An Open Letter to President Obama
By William R. Polk
September 30, 2009
Submitted to
The New York Times August 22, 2009
Your headlines about the election in Afghanistan say that it is "called a success". (Friday, August 21, 2009, pp A1 & A8) The question is: a success for whom?
The Obama administration may have a very different definition of success than the people, especially the women, of Afghanistan may have. If the U.S. goal is stability then that is at odds with the goals of the Afghan people. Every voter interviewed in your story said they hoped for "change".
If the U.S. succeeds in stabilizing Afghanistan it will be stabilizing injustice toward women. Much was made of Taliban intimidation of potential voters. Nothing was made of the daily intimidation that Afghan women must face. How can an election be successful when women, more than half the population, are afraid to vote?
What are our soldiers dying for in Afghanistan? Are they being used to support one group of fundamentalists over another? Shouldn't our focus be on helping Afghan women, the most oppressed group in the country? Wouldn't that make our country and our world more secure?
Bill Distler
VFP-111
Bellingham, WA
Submitted to
The New York Times August 10, 2009.
Elizabeth Rubin reports in "Karzai In His Labyrinth: (Sunday Magazine, 8-9-09) that a recent campaign event for President Karzai was organized by " Sher Muhammad Akhundzada,,,probably the country's most infamous drug trafficker." On Monday, James Risen reports that "Fifty suspected drug traffickers believed to have ties to the Taliban have been placed on a Pentagon target list..." ("Drug Chieftains Tied To Taliban Are U.S. Targets" 8-10-09). Are there good drug traffickers and bad drug traffickers? U.S. policy seems to support the largest group of drug dealers, murderers, and woman-haters in Afghanistan (the warlords who surround Karzai) against a smaller, similar group (the Taliban).
Many have pointed out that Karzai is isolated, unpopular, and dependent on U.S. and warlord support. He looks increasingly like Vietnam's Diem in 1963. And the rationale is the same: He's the only option we have. That may satisfy U.S. policymakers, but does it satisfy the Afghan people? What do they want?
We are repeating the arrogance of our Vietnam policy by making this about us instead of them.
Bill Distler
VFP-111
Bellingham, WA
Draft Redux:
Betting on the Come
August 2, 2009
(Marvin Hamlisch/ Alan Bergman/ Marilyn Bergman)
An Open Letter to Cindy Sheehan
Reprinted from Cascadia Weekly and Truthout 2005
Casey must be so proud of you. His mother is taking on the most powerful war machine in the history of mankind. A war machine led, or misled, by the most distrusted leader in our country's history. What makes your effort even more unique is that you decided to bring it directly to George Bush's doorstep: Crawford, Texas ("Prairie Chapel" no less).
In gratitude,
Bellingham, Washington
The Seattle Times
Submitted June 23, 2009
The poet and farmer Wendell Berry once wrote about Richard Nixon and his aides: "They force us to take seriously what we don't really respect." I feel the same way about Dick Cheney.
Cheney received five deferments to stay out of Vietnam. I went in his place. I was drafted at nineteen and left Vietnam when I was twenty-one. Since then I've tried to be a peacemaker. Cheney had "other priorities"- power and self-enrichment.
As a Congressman (1979-89), Cheney voted YES 36 times on veteran's benefits and NO only three times. Curiously, those three NO votes were the only ones that singled out Vietnam veterans for extra help. Did Vietnam veterans hurt Dick's feelings ?
People try to help veterans by being respectful. I have been thanked for being in Vietnam but I always say "Thanks, but I don't think I served our country by going to Vietnam. I think I've served since then by trying to stop wars." People usually accept this, even thiugh it might be a new idea for them. By thanking us they are defining what we did as good. I'd rather define that myself. If citizens would stop telling veterans about war and instead ask us about it, they might begin to understand the depth of the pain they are approving when they agree to send their loved ones to war.
Before Sept. 11, Bush appointed Cheney to head two Task Forces- Energy and Counter Terrorism. Apparently, the Counter Terrorism Task Force held no meetings. Did Bush call his highest ranking counter terrorism officer, Dick Cheney, to discuss the Aug. 6, 2001, CIA briefing entitled "Bin Laden determined to strike in U.S.", or did they have "other priorities"?
Cheney insists that classified memos prove that torture saved American lives. Perhaps he should release all the memos of his Counter Terrorism Task Force (if any) so we can learn what he did to keep us safe before Sept. 11. If Dick would also release his Energy Task Force records, we could compare how much time he spent on his two main responsibilities.
On Oct. 14, 2001, the Taliban offered to turn over bin Laden to a neutral country for trial if Bush would halt the bombing and show them some evidence of bin Laden's guilt. Bush said no. He must have had a better plan to catch The World's Most Wanted Man. .
In early Dec., 2001, bin Laden was trapped in the Tora Bora mountains. A CIA agent requested that 800 Army Rangers be brought in to block his escape into Pakistan. The request was denied and bin Laden escaped. Was there another plan?.
In his American Enterprise Institute speech, Cheney claimed, "...we moved decisively against the terrorists in their hideouts and sanctuaries,...We decided, as well, to confront the regimes that sponsored terrorists, and to go after those who provide sanctuary, funding, and weapons to enemies of the United States."
A logical first step in pursuing bin Laden would have been to follow him into Pakistan. But Pakistan's dictator, General Musharraf, said no. Bush and Cheney said okay. So much for moving decisively against terrorist sanctuaries.
Instead of confronting General Musharraf's regime for providing sanctuary to bin Laden, our government and media declared General Musharraf "our key ally in the war on terror". He received $10 billion in U.S. aid over the next six years. Was this his reward for leaving bin Laden alone? So much for going after "those who provide sanctuary, funding, and weapons to enemies of the United States."
The Pakistani people should not suffer for the crimes of their dictator. We need a full understanding of the situation in Pakistan so that we can resolve any conflicts peacefully.
In his speech, Cheney claimed that "our Administration gave intelligence officers the tools and lawful authority they needed to gain vital information. We didn't invent that authority. It is drawn from Article Two of the Constitution."
Article II states: "The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States." But Article I states: "The Congress shall have Power To.....make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water." The Congress is specifically given this power, not the President. Cheney is claiming Constitutional powers that he didn't have. He ignored another line from Article II: "he shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed."
Cheney gave himself the power to make his own laws. But Article I, Section 1,states that "All legislative Powers" are granted to Congress. Cheney violated his oath to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."
Cheney proudly admits to ordering torture (he prefers "enhanced interrogation techniques"). He lied to get us into two wars. He has killed approximately 1.5 million people (he might prefer "enhanced life-shortening experience").. God only knows how many children have suffered wounds and traumatic amputations. If we gave our veterans and the wounded of Iraq and Afghanistan the medical and mental health care they deserve, we would find that there isn't enough money in the world to repair the damage Cheney has done.
What should we do if we firmly believe that Cheney is a criminal and the Congress and the media are corrupt? I'm preparing once again for civil disobedience if he comes near here, maybe sitting in his path and "arresting" his progress to the next LieFest. I'm thinking of a sign:
CHENEY
The Evil In Your Soul
Is Written On Your Face
Bellingham, WA
The Bellingham Herald
Submitted June 20, 2009
DO REAL MEN FOLLOW ORDERS?
About the Bellingham GI Sanctuary Movement.
Within two weeks of returning from Vietnam, I decided that the war was wrong. Nixon and Humphrey both said they wanted to end the war, but I believed Humphrey was sincere, so I voted for him.
If I had been ordered back to Vietnam, should I have obeyed and done what I thought was wrong? Or should I have been brave and refused to go?
I was brave twice in Vietnam and cowardly about twenty times. I was a coward whenever I obeyed bad orders. I endlessly replay those moments, but I can't change them. I can only try to do better.
Some who oppose Sanctuary are quick to judge other people as cowards. But aren't those of us who followed bad orders the ones who should be questioning ourselves? Who did right in Germany during World War II, the obedient soldiers, or the soldiers who deserted after deciding the war was wrong?
The hard questions belong not on the shoulders of 19-year old men and women, but on the leaders who broke their contract with America by starting a war of aggression.
Let's stop picking on 19-year olds and start picking on the rich men who start wars. That would be brave.
Bill Distler
Bellingham, WA
All Day Long in the Belly of the Beast
How Fox News is Helping to Nationalize the GI Sanctuary Movement
It all started with a weekend call from Fox News, asking if I’d take the liberal side in a debate on their morning show Fox and Friends. Innocent enough, except that the producer was looking to serve me up to their cave dwelling demographic as red meat, a Veterans for Peace member and co-sponsor of Bellingham, Washington’s GI Sanctuary City Movement.
It’s just good clean fun, you see, to gang up on a lefty over coffee. Taking the other side of the issue, our county GOP Chairwoman and Anne Coulter BFF – who ended up being a no-show, by the way.
I should have known better, but when the producer said they were going to pick me up in a limo and drive me to their Seattle studio, ninety minutes away, for a 3 minute gig – well – that sealed the deal.
My driver Mark showed up 15 minutes early and paid little attention to me at first. After all he had just taken a Seahawk home from the airport, and just who was this schmuck anyway? But he was curious, and cordial.
“What’ll you be doing at Fox?”
Managing Editor, Tikkun Magazine
Posted March 5, 2009 | 01:23 PM (EST)
1600 Pennsylvania Ave. NW
Washington, DC 20500
Chapter 111
THE BELLINGHAM HERALD
Veterans For Peace
CPL Jonathan Santos Chapter 111
Bellingham, WA
Aug. 31, 2008
THE BELLINGHAM HERALD
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Military not only way to serve country
Several letter writers recently claimed that we owe all our freedoms to the military. Thursday, Aug. 28 was the anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech. Didn't he play a role in expanding our freedoms?
Some of our wars can be said to have protected our freedoms, but I believe most were wars of aggression. Look up what General Smedley Butler, vice-commandant of the Marine Corps from 1928 to 1931, said about his 33 years in the Marines.
Our military did not give voting rights to women, people of color and landless, poor, white men. They had to organize and sacrifice to get those rights.
When people thank me for being in Vietnam, I tell them gently that I can't accept. I can't take credit for something I don't believe I deserve. I believe I have served my country better by questioning the lies that lead us into war. There are many ways to serve.
Honest leaders will use our military to defend us. Dishonest leaders, as I believe we now have, misuse our military to steal resources. If we, soldiers and citizens, decide we've been misled, it leads to disillusionment. That doesn't strenghten us, it weakens us.
Bill Distler
VFP-111
Afghanistan - "Right War"?
Letter to the Editor
The New York Times
August 7, 2008
Concerning Afghanistan, you say the Bush administration demanded the surrender of bin Laden and that "The Taliban's refusal prompted the start of the American bombing campaign on Oct. 7" (500: Deadly U.S. Milestone in Afghan War, NY Times page A1,www.nytimes.com/2008/08/07/us/07afghan.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss).
There is more to the story. On October 14, 2001, George Bush was asked about the Taliban offer to surrender bin Laden to a neutral country. Your inside headline on October 15 says: "Bush Rejects Taliban Offer to Discuss bin Laden Surrender".
Iraq is seen as Bush's war of choice while Afghanistan is the "right war", but Bush's failure to go after bin Laden shows that his wars are all wrong.
Millions of grieving parents and orphaned children testify to the failure of George Bush's stated policy. This September 11th presents an opportunity to count the successes (if any) and the failures (and there are many) of George Bush's presidency.
Bill Distler
VFP-111
Do the Numbers
Letter to the Editor
The New York Times August 6, 2008
Your editorial on opium production in Afghanistan repeats parts of the official story. (Guns and Poppies, NY Times, Tuesday, August 5, page A18 www.nytimes.com/2008/08/05/opinion/05tue1.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss ), but the story does not add up.
If opium production has been growing steadily, then why, after more than six years, does the Bush administration have no plan in place? If the opium trade takes in $4 billion a year, what is the farmers' share, what is the Taliban share, and who gets the rest? If the Taliban are financed through the opium trade, why is the American military reluctant to take on counternarcotics as a military problem? If the farmers' share of this trade is, let's say, $1 billion, why don't American and European governments pay them an equal amount to grow nothing?
If the details of the official story do not make sense, then what is the real story?
Bill Distler
VFP-111
The NY Times and the Company Line
Letter to the Editor
The New York Times August 2, 2008
Is it possible that after all this time, the Bush administration is only now discovering that the Pakistani intelligence services are helping the Taliban? (Pakistanis Aided Attack in Kabul, U.S. Officials Say, NY Times, Aug. 1, '08, page A1 www.nytimes.com/2008/08/01/world/asia/01pstan.html). Afghan government officials, U.S. military field commanders, and Pakistani journalists have known this for years. Soon the Bush administration may find out that Osama bin Laden has been given refuge in Pakistan for the last seven years. They will be appropriately shocked! Shocked!
With all your sources speaking anonymously, and spokesmen for the White House and CIA declining to comment, it looks like The Times is being used again to feed a story to the public. The timing of this story suggests that it has more to do with changing the "war on terrorism" storyline for election purposes than with a sudden discovery by the White House that their "Pakistan Is Our Strong Ally" story never made any sense at all.
Bill Distler
VFP 111
Place on the Wall
Posted August 1, 2008
Veterans’ groups and families who have lost loved ones say the number of returning service men and women struggling with PTSD and other mental health issues is escalating dramatically, with not nearly enough help being provided by the DoD or VA once veterans come home.
It has been only recently that suicide attempts resulting from insufficient follow-up or empathy have gained any media, and to some extent official, attention at all. Local newspapers in most cases are the only conduits for shining any light at all on a successful self-inflicted conclusion to a combat veteran ’s anguish.
VFP Chapter member Ellen Murphy knew such a veteran and his story and submitted this testimonial.
"Tim had made his home in Bellingham. He had filled his newly married life with school, work at the Vet Center, and service to veterans groups. I only met him once, when I went to a meeting of one such non-activist support group. It was a little awkward, with us being VFP and IVAW, but he welcomed us. He made an impression on me such that I often thought about him. Now, how I wish I had acted on that instinct to re-connect. Not that it would necessarily have mattered to Tim that I did. But it would have mattered to me.
On Saturday, Tim took his own life.
At least it must be said that he did, in the physical sense. But I'm not seeing it that way. The way I see it is that George W. Bush and his criminal gang of masterminding thugs killed Tim. Thieves they are too--they robbed him of his dreams and his ability to progress along the path with some semblance of inner peace. I do not want to desecrate this time of mourning with hate and anger, but as I try to contain those emotions, I do hope and pray that those thieves and killers are brought to justice, and brought there soon.
But now that I've gotten that off my chest, I see a better way to view Tim's death, a truer way, because even though it's a fact on one level, I don't want Tim to have died by murder. No, I want Tim to have died in combat. Have his place on the wall. Have his heroic struggle recognized and honored. Does anyone dare say Tim was not in combat when he died? I want him to be counted. Tim was wounded in Iraq. He died of his wounds.
Tim, yes, we hardly knew you, but what I'm left wondering is: Do we know each other?"
Ellen
July 26, 2008
Bellingham Herald
Supports city no-war resolution about Iran
At the City Council meeting Monday night about the resolution against war with Iran, I saw one mother of a soldier who died in Iraq, one Iraq veteran, one World War II veteran, and three Vietnam combat vaterans, including myself. All those who spoke supported the resolution.Any veteran of war knows more about the consequences of war than Bush, Cheney, and all the warmongering chickenhawks in Washington, D.C. put together. Chickenhawks say they believed in the Vietnam War but sent someone else in their place. Maybe they’ve seen “Patton” several times so now they think they know war, but their continuous warmongering proves they don’t.
War is not about handing out socccer balls to happy children. Good things can be done better in peacetime. War is about a license to kill and wound innocent people. Two reliable studies say that over one million people have died in the Iraq war. That means about three milllion wounded, one million of whom are children. And George Bush wants to bring this “liberation” to Iran next?
You don’t need to be a veteran to know the injustice of war. You just need something that warmongers don’t have— a heart.
Bill Distler
Veterans For Peace
CPL Jonathan Santos Chapter 111
Bellingham, WA
July 9, 2008
WHATCOM VIEW
Why Bellingham City Council should take position on Iran
MARIE MARCHAND AND GENE MARXNot again.
On June 23, Bellingham City Councilperson Terry Bornemann introduced a resolution urging a diplomatic surge toward Iran and opposing military intervention in that country without Congressional approval. Why should the Bellingham City Council divert its attention away from important local matters to address yet another foreign policy issue? Didn’t it take enough flack for the Troops Home Now! Resolution in 2006?
Could it be the same reason that our National Guard is being diverted from its intended role in state emergency response? Perhaps it is the same reason that school administrators are diverting their time away from teacher development and curriculum improvement. Could it be the same reason governors are diverting their attention away from crumbling infrastructure to ward off financial ruin?
It doesn’t take a four star general to see the common denominator underlying these quandaries.
Our occupation of Iraq continues unabated, with a taxpayer price tag of $270 million a day. It has already cost the City of Bellingham $98 million. And the human costs to the United States are staggering with over 40,000 casualties, including 4,100 troops killed. Bellingham is home to some of these families.
So why, you ask, is the city council stepping in once again to consider another resolution, this time opposing U.S. military intervention in Iran?
Simple. If our local elected officials won’t, then who will?
Lawmakers responsible for spending on war
April 21, 2008
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Bellingham Herald
More whining from U.S. Rep. Rick Larsen (The Bellingham Herald, April 10) following the Petraeus report this month. But what else did you expect?
“Any change in the conduct of the war will have to come from the next administration.”
What a firm grasp of the obvious.
“I doubt the votes are there this year.”
What a whiner. He could at least fake some outrage for a change.
Please, how about giving longsuffering constituents a little credit. Let’s revisit high school civics, OK? The U.S. Constitution, Article 1, Section 9, states, “No money shall be drawn from the treasury, but in consequence of appropriations made by law.”
Rep. Larsen, you are not an innocent bystander. You are directly responsible.
The last time I checked, a simple majority in the House was all that was needed to pass HR 5507, the “Fully-Funded Redeployment and Sovereignty of Iraq Restoration Act of 2008.” Look it up — www.washingtonwatch.com/bills/show/110 HR 5507.html. And this is just this year’s legislative tourniquet. Co-sponsor it or quit whining.
And Rep. Larsen, don’t get me started on the Senate.
Gene Marx
Bellingham
http://www.bellinghamherald.com/letterstotheeditor/story/386590.html
Urge Democrats to limit Iraq funding
April 19, 2008
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Bellingham Herald
The headline on your recent interview with U.S. Rep. Rick Larsen says: “Larsen: Dems lack votes to change war policy” (Herald, April 10, 2008, Page A4). I believe this is misleading. The Democrats don’t have enough votes to override Bush’s veto, but they don’t need to.
The Constitution says: “All bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives; ...” (Article I, Section 7). George Bush can request billions for war, but the Congress can ignore him.
The Democrats could support HR 5507. It provides only enough money to safely withdraw the troops. There are now 234 Democrats and 198 Republicans in the House. The Democrats, voting together, can send HR 5507 to the Senate. Senate Democrats can send the bill to Bush. He can veto it, but they can keep sending it back until he has to accept it, or he gets nothing.
The real question is: Do the Democrats want to end the war? They seem to agree with the Republicans that Iraqi oil belongs to Exxon, and they will spend our money, our lives, and the lives of uncounted Iraqis to get it.
We can call the Congressional switchboard at (800) 614-2803. Ask for Rick Larsen’s office, and ask them to support HR 5507.
Bill Distler
Bellingham
http://www.bellinghamherald.com/letterstotheeditor/story/385312.html
Where the Nuclear Cycle Begins
By Ellen Murphy, GFP
Grandmother Donna Dillman has ended her fast. She refused food for 63 days to back up her demand for a moratorium on uranium exploration and mining near her home in the pristine Algonquin Territory of Ontario.
In Canada, when a non-tribal citizen lives in unceded First Nations territories, that person identifies as a settler, and is still referred to as one. When the Ardoch and Shaabat Algonquins at Sharbot Lake began their blockade of the 36,000 acres coveted by uranium exploration and mining company Frontenac Ventures, Donna and other settlers joined them. Despite land differences, allied Mohawks came to the barricades.
Donna’s hunger strike gained her an audience with Premiere McGinty, who told her he needed the uranium for electricity. She promptly let him know that over 80% of Canada’s uranium is exported.
Back in 1989, when the Energy Free Trade Agreement was signed between Canada and the U.S., the U.S. BusinessNet entry was “This has important implications ... two thirds of Canadian uranium is exported to the U.S.”
So that’s where it goes! Hundreds and hundreds of new claims have been opened in Canada and the U.S., and the price of uranium is skyrocketing.
Alfred Webre, International Director of the Institute for Cooperation in Space, writes in a recent issue of Commonground: “It is likely the DU used by U.S. and U.K. in Iraq and Afghanistan comes from Canadian uranium.”
Dr. Gordon Edwards, President of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility, said in a radio interview, “The Canadian government is taking directions and orders from the nuclear industry.”
He talked about the uranium industry needing to turn its waste into profit and not just left in storage. “That’s why some of Canada’s DU ends up in weapons. The Canadian government can’t even think for themselves,” said Edwards. Webre concludes that “The government of Canada seems to have strayed into aiding and abetting the war crimes of the DU genocide in Iraq and crimes against humanity.”
Presently, the Sharbot Lake standoff has led to mediation meetings among the Algonquins, the downstream Mohawks, the Crown, Ontario and agents. Frontenac Ventures hasn’t shown up. The First Nations, and allies like Gramma Donna, have a different take on the “implications” of uranium mining from that of BusinessNet. They have vowed to continue the blockade to keep their land from being turned into a tailings dump.
When grandmother Kahentinetha Horn, a Mohawk elder and writer for the Mohawk Nation News, stood up to open the mediation meeting by speaking in Mohawk according to Ongwehoneh custom, she was ignored; then when First Nations representatives asked uncomfortable questions, reports Dru Oja Jay in her blog, the meeting was derailed.
Even though the term depleted uranium or DU is still in usage, we know that the U238 is not depleted. We also know that grandmothers and all people who seek balance for the benefit of our earth and future generations will instinctively understand the ancient instructions of the Dine people, a people who have suffered untold injury from uranium mining on their land in the U.S. Southwest. They were told that there were two yellow powders: corn pollen and yellow cake (uranium). The first was to be cared for in sacred way; the second was to be left forever in the ground.
The proposed Frontenac County uranium exploration area continues to be occupied by First Nations and allies like Donna Dillman. It’s too late for the millions of Afghans and Iraqis and the thousands of American soldiers, but maybe the deadliest mineral on earth will remain in the ground at Sharbot Lake forever.
Published in the Grandmothers for Peace International newsletter, Spring 2008.
Ellen Murphy is a member of Veterans
for Peace, Corporal Jonathan Santos
Chapter 111, Bellingham, WA
WHATCOM VIEW Too few in county recognize war rages daily March 16, 2008 DORIS KENT You can’t tell that we are at war. It is now five years since our country declared war on and invaded the country of Iraq. But you can’t tell driving through downtown Bellingham. People are having a latte with their laptops propped open or reading a book. Across the street others are being served hot, delicious meals. The Mount Baker Theatre is showing… You just can’t tell we are at war and have been for five years. There are no signs of war downtown. I walk through Bellis Fair mall and you can’t tell we are at war. There are no yellow ribbons or T-shirts saying “I Support Our Troops.” People are shopping and carrying bags full of the things they just purchased, oblivious to Americans and Iraqis fighting for their lives. I ask people if their congregations prayed for the troops or the Iraqi people and there are blank looks on their faces. The silence is killing our troops and countless Iraqi people. The war our nation has raged on Iraq is five years old this week. Yes, there is a war going on and on. I pay attention because I have to. My life has been intertwined with this war from day one, March 19, 2003. I cried desperately on that day and I will cry desperately five years later on March 19, 2008. When my son was deployed with the U.S. Army as part of a peace-keeping force to Haiti in March of 2004 I was relieved, grateful even. That relief and gratitude would be short-lived because he called in May to tell me his unit was leaving Haiti because they received orders to go to Iraq. He said, “Mom, I don’t get it. They are taking us from a country that desperately needs us and wants us here and sending us to a country where they desperately want to kill us. I don’t get it.” My son, Cpl. Jonathan Santos arrived in Iraq with his unit on Sept. 11, 2004. Five weeks later, while returning from a mission, he and three of his team were killed by an explosion from a suicide car bomb. A fifth soldier, Specialist Matthew Drake suffers with severe traumatic brain injuries. His mother and I talk and cry together for our sons and for each other. It is now five years we have been at war but living here in beautiful Bellingham, you can’t tell. The silence is killing us. Bellingham is the most beautiful place to live. Most of the people I talk to want to do something. For many, they just don’t know what that is. Let your voices be heard. Bring up the discussions of the impact of the war. Find out how we are at taking care of our veterans and give voice to your concerns or comments by consistently contacting our representatives in Congress. There are many local organizations that sponsor activities, events and have volunteer opportunities that give support to our troops and efforts to begin an end to the war in Iraq, because eventually there will be an end. There are local organizations that have been giving voice to the injustice of this war on Iraq. Some organizations evolved just to address the impact of this war on our community, on our nation and the world. These citizens inspire us to do more. A Leadership Whatcom Team has taken on the challenge of helping citizens to share their voices in a poster exhibit that will be held the night of the Gallery Walk on March 28 at the Whatcom Peace and Justice Center. Hundreds of posters will be on display — they are voices expressing how “Whatcom Visualizes Peace.” Attend the event. Let us hear your voices and there will be no silence. Doris Kent is a Bellingham resident. Her son, Jonathan Santos, died in Iraq while serving in the U.S. Army. ‘Blood and Treasure’ March 11, 2008 GENE MARX On October 5th, 2002, I watched my youngest son recede into the Dulles Airport backdrop as I drove away. This deployment was particularly hard with the feeling that I had somehow let him down. And soon he’d be hunkering down in the sand with thousands of other sons and daughters, paying a terrible price for a misguided military action and neocon capstone that I should have seen coming decades ago. Two deployments later, on a battleground many flag-wavers still can’t find on a map, my son is back. Our country though is still running up a tab that scions and CPAs will be sorting out generations from now, a war tab with liabilities politicians prefer to label “blood and treasure’. A reference to dead soldiers and money after all is less palatable. Bush’s heirs apparent refer to Iraq’s costly toll time and again as “blood and treasure”. Thomas Jefferson might have heard it from John Adams who might have lifted it from Cromwell, but at least he knew to strike this cognate fluff from the original draft of the Declaration of Independence and tell it like it was. After five long years, and immersed in a week of commemorative vigils, let’s look at the tally and provide the texture that Presidential candidacy wordsmiths would rather sidestep. Four thousand dead and at least thirty thousand wounded service men and women. This one is tough, and if more Americans were up close and personal with the sorrow devastating so many military families, the outlook would be less bleak and Iraq withdrawal timetables would be superfluous. But they’re not. One dead or wounded American, using what economists term, according to Joseph E.Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes in The Three Trillion Dollar War, the “value of statistical life” (VSL) equates to $7.2 million, less the government’s $500,000 pay out. The true economic loss is far greater, taking into account the age and peak physical condition and future earning capacities of average combatants. So much for “blood”, unless we include dead Iraqis. In five years, the U.S. invasion “liberated” more than a million Iraq citizens – men, women, and children dying violently from the time the tanks rolled into Baghdad. For a local perspective, that estimate by the British polling agency ORB exceeds the visitor totals for Bellingham’s libraries, the Whatcom Museum, and the Mount Baker Theater for all of 2007. The “treasure”, first in terms of direct military action, $500 billion and counting, surpasses all of our wars but World War II. The cost of one day of combat operations in Iraq would provide enough revenue to run Bellingham for a year. DOD appropriations and future Iraq “emergency” wartime supplemental spending will push operational totals to nearly a trillion dollars before Inauguration Day 2009, closing out the Bush legacy with a whimper, and not a shared sacrifice to pay for it. According to Stiglitz and Bilmes, the total budgetary and economic costs will dwarf combat spending numbers, with a low-ball estimate through 2017 of nearly $5 trillion in total economic costs. Veteran medical care and disability pay, lost economic potential, higher energy prices, larger deficits, diverted government expenditures from school and infrastructure will make our grandkids pine for $4 a gallon fill-ups. Bellingham City Councilmember Terry Bornemann is under no delusions as to the prime source of most fiscal obstacles to community development. “It’s the war economy stupid …that should be the catchphrase for campaign year 2008. You can see it everywhere – school levy issues, housing shortages for low and very-low income people, law enforcement and emergency service cuts.” Not exactly harbingers of blue skies, and add to these a predicted rise in home foreclosures, according to the Bellingham Business Journal and the Center for Responsible Lending; the highest gas prices in the State; and Community Development Block Grant money dwindling for local projects in 2008 and 2009 due to Federal cuts. After crunching these numbers, I still choose to believe that the only thing we cannot change is the inevitable. Try believing in the inevitability of peace. It was Dwight Eisenhower who said that a world at war is spending not only money, but “the hopes of its children.” That should be motivation enough. Gene Marx is a member of Veterans A Modest Proposal
Letter to the Editor War profiteers will be happy. There's no need for expensive marketing strategies- just imagine - a whole nation of new customers! New sizes will be needed, from newborns, infants, and toddlers, to teens and adults. Can you smell the profits? Bleeding -heart liberals like me will be happier. It will mean fewer babies killed at night by that crazy shrapnel from our precision-guided bombs. Haven't you ever heard of "Bullet-proof baby sleepwear"? (Golly, do I have to come up with all the ideas around here?) How would we pay for this, you might ask? Simple. Take the money from the precision bomb-dropping fund. This would also mean less dead people, which is good! That translates to more live customers! But if everyone is wearing body armor, how do we tell good guys from bad? Simple. During "The Big Hand-Out", just ask them. Good guys get white, bad guys get black. Problem solved. Or, since the majority of Iraqis want us out, we could just come home. That would save money AND lives.
Bill Distler Also Speaks to the P-I Letter to the Editor George Bush's perverted priorities represent the spiritual death that we were warned about. Bush, and his cruel accomplice Cheney, purposely allowed a terrorist haven to grow in Pakistan so that they could use fear to scare us into supporting their twisted agenda.
Only impeachment will redeem us. If the Democratic Party won't bring up impeachment, then they will show themselves to be as morally corrupt as the Bush administration.
Letter to the Editor George Bush's tour of Africa is designed to highlight his successes. But as he flies across Africa, he should look down and acknowledge one of his greatest failures as president. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo a war has been raging since 1998. It has been the deadliest war since World War II. Estimates of deaths are up to 5.4 million people. Just as Bill Clinton did nothing to stop the Rwandan genocide, and George Bush has done nothing to stop the genocide in Darfur, both of them did next to nothing to help stop the killing in the Congo. Congo is rich in minerals, including cobalt, coltan, and copper. Coltan is essential to the manufacture of cell phones. Does the constant turmoil make it easier to smuggle out minerals that eventually make their way to Europe and the United States? Some important questions need to be answered. Who supplies the weapons and ammunition that keep this turmoil going? What countries are involved? Would 5.4 million Europeans killed in a war be considered newsworthy? And how can the world's deadliest war be of so little interest to our president and the media? Bill Distler
Op-Ed Editor
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Arlington Northwest
Border demonstration focuses attention on Iraq IF YOU believe the constant stream of pundit chatter or any Republican presidential candidate with the possible exception of
Congressman Ron Paul—go figure—the “surge” and General Petraeus must be given a chance to work their magic in Iraq, with an
increase in troop casualties a regrettable byproduct and necessary evil. What you won’t hear anytime soon is that our forces in Iraq are on track to lose more troops this month than in any period since November 2004. More heartbreak for hundreds of families while flag-draped coffins stay out of camera range. The underreporting of U.S. losses since the invasion of Iraq will more than likely continue until the last soldier dies for this ghastly mistake, particularly since our corporate media gatekeepers have been in lockstep with the Pentagon, and virtually no one else has any skin on the line. As long as this trend continues, the peace coalition has to take advantage of a captive audience every chance it gets to force-feed an anti-war message. For the third year in a row, such an opportunity will take place on the tail end of this holiday weekend just south of the 49th Parallel. Each Memorial Day since 2005, the north and southbound lanes flanking the border crossing at Peace Arch Park in Blaine have been subjected to a stark reminder—in fact thousands of stark reminders—of the ongoing consequences of Bush’s failed Iraq policy. And once more, bumper-to-bumper traffic will be traversing I-5 and confronting the markers, arrayed in plain sight, of the nearly 3,500 killed in action since March 2003. The aptly named Arlington Northwest display, sponsored by Seattle’s Evergreen Peace and Justice Community and the Veterans for Peace Chapters 111 (Bellingham) and 92 (Seattle), will once again be in clear view of thousands of holiday travelers from early morning until sunset. In full support of this year’s memorial, Garett Reppenhagen, Iraq Veterans Against the Wars chairperson and Unlike previous nonpartisan sponsorship years, Bellingham’s Corporal Jonathan Santos Memorial VFP Chapter—named for this city’s first soldier lost in Operation Iraqi Freedom—sought and received an endorsement by IVAW for Arlington Northwest’s efforts in bringing, according to Reppenhagen, “awareness and exposure to the price our country has paid and a chance to reflect upon the roles we all have in the U.S. military aggression in Iraq.” Bellingham VFP planners felt the time was right to support this shared sentiment. A table with casualty information and the names of all U.S. servicepersons who have lost their lives in
this conflict accompanies each Arlington Northwest venue. At each site, visitors can stop by to choose a name and write it on a card, along Wenatchee’s Memorial Park is the next scheduled stop on Saturday and Sunday of the following weekend. Taking full advantage of delays at times averaging 45 minutes at the Blaine border crossing, the Veterans for Peace message should hit home by the time the four lanes of traffic reach the south portal of the Peace Arch. nd if a carload of passengers is lucky enough to be in sight of the memorial ceremony at 2pm, the haunting strains of a bagpiper’s “Amazing Grace” and a bugler’s “Taps” should finish you off, regardless of your media preference or political persuasion. Gene Marx is a member of Veterans
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We Can’t Win An Immoral War by Bill Distler George W. Bush and Gen. David Petraeus, the new commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, both want U.S. forces to stay in Iraq, but for different reasons. Bush wants to turn the oil and natural gas resources of Iraq over to his corporate sponsors. Mission Accomplished! Petraeus is another story. His entire career has led up to this chance to show that he can win a counterinsurgency war. During the ’80s, Maj. David Petraeus was an adviser to Gen. John Galvin of the U.S. Southern Command. Speaking of “Low Intensity Conflict,” Petraeus told The Wall Street Journal in 1986 that “LIC is a growth industry.” Low intensity conflict is the U.S. military term for “small wars.” These wars are fought in such places as El Salvador, Angola and Afghanistan. Low intensity conflict planners emphasize the importance of controlling the news (”the information dimension,” according to Gen. Wallace Nutting). That keeps Americans from being too concerned. But the term is misleading. For the people where those “small wars” are fought, it is just as intense as World War II, but in a smaller place. When then-Major Petraeus referred to a growth industry he must have expected future economic opportunities for arms makers, counterinsurgency experts such as himself, and all those who profit from war. There are some interesting parallels between Petraeus as a general and Gen. William Westmoreland, the commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam. Both seem to be honest military men. Both commanded the 101st Airborne Division (to which I was assigned in Vietnam in 1968). And both men agreed to lead U.S. forces in wars that were started and maintained by lies told by civilian leaders. Like most of us, Petraeus suffers from self-delusion. For most of us, self-delusion is a defense against some uncomfortable truth. But for ambitious men such as Petraeus, self-delusion can have severe consequences for other people. Petraeus appears to be an honest man. But he was given a tempting offer by the president to fulfill his lifelong goal, and he accepted. To do the job, he must convince himself what he is doing is right. It is not. The general is trying to do an honest job in a dishonest situation. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have disastrous effects on the people of those countries and on our own country. I’m rooting for Petraeus; not for him to win this war, but to do what is right and to end his career with integrity. He should not try to achieve his life goal of winning a counterinsurgency war when it causes so much suffering for other people. There is no way to truly win an immoral war. Petraeus does not have to end up like Westmoreland, whose fixation on defeating the “enemy” at tremendous cost to the civilian population led to his nickname, “General Waste More Land.” The real enemies we face are lies and self-delusion. Those are the enemies that Petraeus, like the rest of us, must struggle against. Bill Distler lives in Bellingham. |
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