RE-POST from October 2009, The Seminal (Firedoglake):
“6 Powerful Arguments Against War from Martin Luther King, Mark Twain, Ron Paul, Tom Engelhardt, The Brussels Tribunal, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad” libbyliberal Saturday October 31, 2009 1:53 am
I have a sense of doom that our President will escalate the war in the Middle East. It won’t be as much as General MacChrystal is asking. This strategy goes along with Obama’s modus operandi of cautious and thoughtful faux-deliberating that ultimately aligns in substance if not degree with the corporate and military status quo. From the very beginning of his term, Obama has seemed lost to the matrix of this status quo, while periodically extending some eloquent and promising rhetoric of change.
As long as the mainstream media has no sense of urgency about ending the war, in fact, clearly promotes the attitude of the military and Beltway establishments, just as it has a corporatist-echoing diffidence for "robust" health care reform, Obama is horrifyingly comfortable taking his cues from it and staying the corporate course. The formidable power of the media (including a mighty dose of the Oprah factor) and the corporate elite behind it, brought him to the highest political office in the land. Yes, over 70 million citizens responded to his media campaign and rallied for him with hearts filled with hope for humane reforms — an end to war, affordable and just health care, transparency, accountability, etc. But they … we … do not motivate him.
Next week there will air an HBO special on Obama’s election campaign, conveniently coinciding with the Afghanistan War decision deliberations. There will be much media hype around disclosures from this documentary, re-romanticizing Obama, the person. Or rather, the projected personality. The excitement and titillation will distract from the more substantial but less engaging, for many, issue of war. Personality will prevail over principle.
I am beginning to understand why Obama is a great admirer of Ronald Reagan. Reagan was able, as Obama is now, to use his charisma to reduce demands for accountability on policies. The ability to engender trust through celebrity. No wonder he puts such a high value on the media. It is his instrument. An enormous channel for his eloquence and that engaging smile. There is still such willful denial among many patiently waiting for the changes Obama has promised. Especially during this upcoming week, the media will reinforce the Obama brand. It will revitalize the afterglow of Obama’s dramatic election win. Sadly and conveniently the fate of the Afghanistan War will be eclipsed.
Norman Solomon chose a very chilling and cynical title for a piece in the Huffington Post about the administration’s current Afghanistan War deliberations: "When in Doubt, Keep Killing." He writes:
The "new course" will be a permutation of the present course.
While certainty is lacking, steely resolve is evident. An unspoken mantra remains in effect: When in doubt, keep killing. The knotty question is: Exactly who and how?
News accounts are filled with stories about options that mix "counterinsurgency" with "counterterrorism." The thicker the jargon in Washington, the louder the erudite tunes from the latest best and brightest — whistling past graveyards, to be filled by people far away.
Don Hazen reports that Jodie Evans, founder of CodePink, recently visited Afghanistan and described the humanitarian crisis there:
"The United States has spent a quarter of a trillion dollars in eight years of military action: what have we achieved? Most of the country is in worse condition, the bordering countries are less stable and death fills the air. According to the United Nations, Afghanistan is ranked 181 out of 182 countries for human development indices. Life expectancy has fallen to 43 years since the U.S. invasion. Forty percent of the population is unemployed, and 42 percent live on less than $1 a day."
And according to Marc W. Herold, "The U.S. war in Afghanistan is currently costing $5 billion a month, or $115,740 a minute!"
In the following six passages arguing against war (I am finally getting to), it is not the incredible financial cost of war that is addressed, but the compelling, to some, moral one.
SIX POWERFUL ARGUMENTS AGAINST WAR:
1) MARTIN LUTHER KING (April 4, 1967)
The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.
2) MARK TWAIN, The War Prayer
The stranger touched his arm, motioned him to step aside -- which the startled minister did -- and took his place. During some moments he surveyed the spellbound audience with solemn eyes, in which burned an uncanny light; then in a deep voice he said:
"God’s servant and yours has prayed his prayer. Has he paused and taken thought? Is it one prayer? No, it is two — one uttered, the other not. Both have reached the ear of Him Who heareth all supplications, the spoken and the unspoken. Ponder this — keep it in mind. If you would beseech a blessing upon yourself, beware! lest without intent you invoke a curse upon a neighbor at the same time.
[snip]
"O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle — be Thou near them! With them — in spirit — we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it — for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.
(*After a pause.*) "Ye have prayed it; if ye still desire it, speak! The messenger of the Most High waits!"
It was believed afterward that the man was a lunatic, because there was no sense in what he said.
3) RON PAUL
What if tomorrow morning you woke up to headlines that yet another Chinese drone bombing on U.S. soil killed several dozen ranchers in a rural community while they were sleeping? That a drone aircraft had come across the Canadian border in the middle of the night and carried out the latest of many attacks? What if it was claimed that many of the victims harbored anti-Chinese sentiments, but most of the dead were innocent women and children? And what if the Chinese administration, in an effort to improve its public image in the U.S., had approved an aid package to send funds to help with American roads and schools and promote Chinese values here? Most Americans would not stand for it. Yet the above hypothetical events are similar to what our government is doing in Pakistan. Last week, Congress did approve an aid package for Pakistan for the stated purposes of improving our image and promoting democracy... What if this happened on U.S. soil? What if innocent Americans were being killed in repeated drone attacks carried out by some foreign force who was trying to fix our problems for us? Would sending money help their image?
The intended destruction — or genocide — of Iraq as a state and nation has been ongoing for 19 years, combining the imposition of the most draconian sanctions regime ever designed and that led to 1.5 million Iraqi deaths, including 500,000 children, with a war of aggression that led to the violent deaths of over one million more.
Destroying Iraq included the purposeful targeting of its water and sanitation system, attacking the health of the civilian population. Since 1990, thousands of tons of depleted uranium have been dropped on Iraq, leading in some places to a 600 per cent rise in cancer and leukaemia cases, especially among children. In both the first Gulf War and “Shock and Awe” in 2003, an air campaign that openly threatened “total destruction”, waves of disproportionate bombing made no distinction between military and civilian targets, with schools, hospitals, mosques, churches, shelters, residential areas, and historical sites all destroyed.
Destroying Iraq included promoting, funding and organizing sectarian and ethnic groups bent on dividing Iraq into three or more sectarian or ethnic entities, backed by armed militias that would terrorize the Iraqi people. Since 2003, some 4.7 million Iraqis — one fifth of the population — have been forcibly displaced. Under occupation, kidnappings, killings, extortion and mutilation became endemic, targeting men, women and even children and the elderly.
Destroying Iraq included purposefully dismantling the state by refusing to stop or stem or by instigating mass looting, and by engaging in ideological persecution, entailing “manhunting”, extrajudicial assassinations, mass imprisonment and torture, of Baathists, the entire educated class of the state apparatus, religious and linguistic minorities and Arab Sunnis, resulting in the total collapse of all public services and other economic functions and promoting civil strife and systematic corruption.
In parallel, Iraq’s rich heritage and unique cultural and archaeological patrimony has been wantonly destroyed.
In order to render Iraq dependent on US and UK strategic designs, successive US and UK governments have attempted to partition Iraq and to establish by military force a pro-occupation Iraqi government and political system. They have promoted and engaged in the massive plunder of Iraqi natural resources, attempting to privatize this property and wealth of the Iraqi nation.
[snip]
This is but the barest summary of the horrors Iraq has endured, based on lies that nobody but cowed governments and complicit media believed. In 2003, millions worldwide were mobilized in opposition to US/UK plans. In going ahead, the US and UK launched an illegal war of aggression. Accountability has not been established.
In other words, 30 years after we launched our jihad against the Soviets by arming the Afghans, we are now fighting almost all the people we once armed [Taliban] and arming a whole new crew. All sides in the debate in Washington find this perfectly sensible.
Then, of course, no one should forget al-Qaeda itself, which emerged from the same anti-Soviet struggle in Afghanistan in the late 1980s — Osama bin Laden first arrived there to fight and fund in 1982 — part of the nexus of Islamist forces on which the U.S. bet at the time.
Above all, let’s not forget Iraq. Indeed — not that anyone mentions it these days — back in the early 1980s, the Reagan administration threw its support behind the Sunni dictator Saddam Hussein against the hated Iranian Shiite regime of Ayatollah Khomeini …:
[snip]
In a region where the law of unintended consequences seems to go into overdrive, you choose and arm your allies at your peril. In the past, whatever the U.S. did had an uncanny propensity for blowing back in our direction — something the Israelis also experienced when, in the 1980s, they chose to support an embryonic fundamentalist Islamist organization we now know as Hamas as a way of containing their then dreaded enemy Fatah. …
[snip]
We now tend to think of blowback as something in our past, something that ended with the attacks of 9/11. But in the Greater Middle East, one lesson seems clear enough: for 30 years we’ve been deeply involved in creating, financing, and sometimes arming a blowback world.
[snip]
Someone should take it into account before we plunge in and arm our future enemies one more time.
6) MAHMOUD AHMADINEJAD (related by Paul Craig Roberts)
Why, Ahmadinejad asked the UN General Assembly, do the countries of the world sit there while Israel murders and dispossesses the Palestinian people?
Why, asked Ahmadinejad, do the countries of the world sit there while the US, from thousands of miles away, sends troops to the Middle East, “spreading war, bloodshed, aggression, terror and intimidation in the whole region,” while blaming the countries that are suffering the West’s naked aggression?
Ahmadinejad told the General Assembly what most of the UN representatives already know, that “selfishness and insatiable greed have taken the place of such humanitarian concepts as love, sacrifice, dignity, and justice. . . . Lies have taken the place of honesty; hypocrisy has replaced integrity, and selfishness has taken the place of sacrifice. Deception in foreign affairs is called foresight and statesmanship, looting the wealth of other nations is called development efforts; occupation is said to be a gift that promotes freedom and democracy; and defenseless nations are subjected to repression in the name of defending human rights.”[cross-posted on correntewire]
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Comments
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kosh will twist himself into a pretzel explaining that: " . . Jill Stein, as much as her issue stands are far closer to mine than Obama's . . . ," but he'll be preoccupied in finding his conscience, which has found refuge in fRANK's empty cranial cavity; and
cordle with simply suffice by calling the other candidate a " . . .bottom feeding scum sucking liar."
The latter two will get EPs for their "efforts, while the former will content himself, thinking EP stands for eggplant parmesan.
-R-
It also made me cry a little.
I don't think he will. I am predicted an extremely low turn-out this election - 49% - that's what Clinton got in 1996. By that time, most of the swing voters who voted for him figured out he was even more pro-corporate than Bush senior.
Clinton, by some miracle, survived a 49% turnout, but he lost the Senate and House. I suspect this may be relate to his being extremely personable. People don't like Obama because they see him as a narcissist and egotist.
Hi,
I have been trying up to ten times to reply to your PM message and failing through the Open Salon PM system. It simply doesn't work for me anymore. So I am sending this as an open comment. If I get spam on my e-mail, so be it. I can kick it out.
I am already participating in the alternate Our Salon but the company, to say the least, is not particularly lively there. My e-mail, which is simple, quick and clear is [email address deleted] and much preferable to the dumb frustrations at Open Salon.
I grew up in New York City in he 30's during the depression but we always ate well and usually had enough coal to keep the house warm.My father was well aware of the vicious capitalist ferocity to control and destroy the bulk of the population. Both my parents were artists and that's a tough life under any circumstances but we got by and brains are a good substitute for money. My father never joined any political movement but the possibilities of communism at that time, when the realities of the thugs who controlled the USSR were not realized just as our people now cannot accept that thugs in the USA are in total control and when things get desperate, as they seem to be moving in that direction, the total phoniness of American freedom will become apparent. I expect a flood of refugees out of the USA when the police and military state throws off the velvet gloves and that will be a really terrible time. Obama has already accorded himself dictatorial powers and it is amazing to me that most people seem totally blind to that. I am happy to be out of that, at least until things break down here in Finland as well - as they well might. There is a slight smell of fascism here in one of the political parties.
Jan
jan, thanks. yes, I guess the mafiaso-like and cronied with said "mafia(s)" no doubt political elite have been oppressing people since the get go in all nations! nothing "personal" is right, everything sociopathic!
mark, thanks for supporting me. eggplant parmesan.! i wish the third party presidential debate would get an EP so it could be there for people to watch on open salon at their convenience for a sustained time but upstairs salon is pro-Obama so what are you gonna do, huh? Sigh.
chicken maaan! thanks again for commenting. David Brooks believe it or not said "We live in Post-Morality America." It breaks my heart.
Gerald, thanks for stopping by. Twain quote went unpublished for years. It certainly speaks to the surreal casualness and desensitization of non-participants of wars about war.
jmac, thanks for commenting, my friend. Mark Twain, such a human's human, and such a gift to humankind with his sense of reality and human foibles! Thanks for sharing that!
Poor Woman, so love seeing you again. Thanks for visiting and FEELING this blog!
Stuart, I don't know what will happen. Obama seems to be being successfully re-romanticized for those who are still not still stuck in the bargaining phase of his first victory and their enchantment. Sigh. When I watched the third party debate I felt like I was in a pleasant dream of what democracy should be. How corporate bully walls have separated all of us from a representative democracy and worse than being walled in is that so much of the population with me refuse to acknowledge how serious it all is!
best, libby
Joe, do you think all million dead Iraqis and 3 million displaced Iraqis and all the other dead and maimed and displaced since those statistics got used already years ago -- do you think all those people were responsible for 9/11 and deserve to die or have their lives so colossally and negatively damaged as collateral damage in the name of US "national security"? national security? The monster of the military industrial security prison complex is so very evil at this point. EVIL. All caught up with corruption and cronyism and profitmaking and lying lying lying to justify the most vile things.
I know we had enemies, far fewer, and now have enemies -- and not forgiving those dark intentions of said enemies -- we are earning over and over again with our droning and insane and inhumane military policies. The very al Qaeda fighters who killed our soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq we paid off and armed in Syria and Libya. WTF???? Joe, some of them are the EXACT SAME PEOPLE!!!! What kind of freakshow is this? We need the terrorists to terrorize the country so that Assad will lose power and we plunge the country into failed statehood which is good for the banksters and corporatists and the hell with humanity.
Out homeland security? I think it is more interested in getting ready to control the citizenry and especially dissenters and to instill fear in the population and to keep it as anti-Muslim as possible.
Where is diplomacy? Obama gave a speech in Cairo that brought hope and that was the end of it. Rhetorical insincere razzle dazzle for his short term needs and to buy time.
Bush's daddy's macho brought us the first gulf war and I was against that one. Norman Mailer shamed Bush into going into that. It is praised cuz it was short. Do you know how many thousands of Iraqis died in that short time? Never brought up on the news since they are unpeople to US media and most of the citizens. And Bush Jr.'s macho? God, those terrorists on the plane weren't from Iraq. But Bush family BFF with Saudi Arabia.
Joe, the bullshit on Iran. We have 2000 nukes is it and Israel has 400 and Iran doesn't have any but we are ready to bomb the shit out of those people because they MIGHT be interested in building one?
Sorry got to go. Sorry I missed this on first go round. I know this is inadequate and shot from hip due to time. Best I can say for now. I hope other minds get to address it for you, too.
best, libby
Once in, we had few good options, and they are still pretty narrow. However, since I opposed entering the war I still feel okay about saying we should just pull out unilaterally (our ISAF allies preceding us by miles) and let the chips fall where they may because they are not falling where we want them, nor will they ever. The political situation (Pakistan's internal stew and fear of Indian power and Karzai's corruption) is stacked against "victory". But, Libby, what would I (and especially you) have to offer those innocent constituencies of non-ending war in AfPak, the families of firefighters and WTC workers who died, and those who believe that Afghan girls should have the right to attend school and avoid child marriage? You would have mass protests by women's groups in the US, and I'm sure you also know that not all New Yorkers are limousine liberals. No, there's a problem here that casting blame and shame on Big Oil and the Pentagon/contractor complex won't solve, regardless of how satisfying it feels.