Kevin Zeese, executive director of “Voters for Peace” (the site is linked to on our blogroll) posted an article last week calling for the peace movement to be kickstarted and envisioning how best to facilitate the process. His piece, subtitled “America Needs a Patriotic, Broad-Based and Politically Independent Opposition to War”, touched on many of the nagging concerns we peace vigilers have been nursing since the euphoric election of November 2008 failed to yield any light at the end of the endless war tunnel.
One of our especially wise and articulate peace vigil members, a retired university professor, spoke to that feeling of stunned disappointment in a letter he circulated in early December of last year about President Obama’s Afghanistan policy. After expressing dismay at the president’s “pursuit of senseless war”, he elaborated:
[Obama's] plan contains, among other problems, the seeds of its own failure. I doubt much can change politically or socially in 18 months when he expects to begin to withdraw troops. We lack a credible partner in the Afghan central government and regional governments are chaotic and ineffective. We now spend on the war in Afghanistan an amount far more than the GDP of that country, most of which is generated by heroin. We hope to build up an ANA of some 170,000 men, an army totally beyond the capacity of the central government to support financially. Obama still blurs the distinction between Taliban and al-Qaeda and misrepresents the composition and political interests of Taliban forces, repeating the hollow warning of great threat if a Taliban dominated government were in control. He speaks as if nothing has changed since 2001, whereas everything has changed.
The most powerful part of the letter is its conclusion, which should be required reading for every American citizen who still believes the $1,000,000,000,000+ war in Afghanistan is “necessary” or “just”:
At 78 years of age, I…have lived through presidential rationalizations of war repeatedly and witnessed the propagandistic power of the military-industrial-congressional complex to encourage and promote war and empire. Make no mistake, there is a permanent war party in washington. For many years, and again now, I have had occasion to recall a quotation (in translation) of Hermann Goering, Hitler’s air marshall during WWII:
“Naturally the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor in Germany. That is understood. But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be
brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”The writers of our Constitution well understood the lessons of war in 18th century Europe and strived to make war difficult to get into and easy to end. In the USA of the 21st century, war power has devolved on one almost imperial person, with the consequence that war is dead easy to launch but nearly impossible to end. How far we have come.
