[Mb-civic] War Resisters

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

Thanks to Ed Pearl for these 3 resonant items......

March, 2006

Dear Friends,

I'm not the president--I just play one on TV! Like many, perhaps
most, of you, I'm a pacifist. If I ran the real West Wing, this great
country would be using all its might to resist war, and we wouldn't need a
War Resisters League. However, with the war in Iraq claiming more than
100,000 (mostly civilian) Iraqi lives so far, the reality is that we do
need the War Resisters League. I am writing you today to ask for your help
for WRL's efforts to end this war and all war.

So far, besides Iraqi casualties, the occupation the Bush
administration calls "Operation Iraqi Freedom" has also claimed
almost 2,300 American lives, with about 16,400 wounded--and most of
them are our youth. Bereaved families have begun to question the real
reasons behind the war. A bereaved mother-turned-activist, Cindy Sheehan,
camped outside the president's Texas Ranch throughout the month of August,
longing to ask Bush, "Why did my son Casey die in Iraq?"

The president has refused to meet with Cindy ever since she began
criticizing his conduct of the war and the U.S. occupation of Iraq. I met
with her outside Bush's ranch on August 28. "At least you've got the
acting president," I told her. However, I couldn't give her what she
really wanted: a satisfactory answer to her terrible questions, "Whose
interests was he protecting?" and "What is the noble cause that he died
for?"

There are many bereaved military families out there asking the same
questions and trying to justify the loss of innocent lives. Some are
grieving privately, but others have turned their grief into
constructive activism, joining organizations like the Gold Star
Families for Peace and Military Families Speak Out.

The War Resisters League believes that there is no satisfactory
answer to those questions. Rather, the war and occupation are serving the
interests of only a narrow group of profiteers. We believe that Iraq and
indeed the world would be better served by the immediate withdrawal of all
U.S. troops from that devastated country. However, it will take more than
one Cindy Sheehan to persuade the Bush administration to change its
policies; it will take hundreds of thousands of people nonviolently
protesting and demanding answers till there is a positive change.

That's where you come in; the War Resisters League is organizing
those thousands. Across the country, its "Stop the Merchants of
Death" campaign is providing people with the real answers to Cindy
Sheehan's question. Its counter-recruitment campaign is exposing the
myths that the military uses to lure youth into the armed forces.

Ambitious and progressive as our goal is, we need the financial and
human resources to get our message out to the hundreds of thousands
who need to hear it.  Watch this! If everyone reading this letter put a
$10 check in the enclosed envelope and dropped it in the mail today, WRL
could bring hundreds of people into the streets to protest these wars. If
half of you mailed a $50 check, we could bring thousands. Whatever you can
afford to send--whether it is $25, $100, $500, or more--will move the
peace project forward at this desperate time. So please: make a
difference. Contribute something by sending a check to WRL, 339 Lafayette
Street, New York, NY 10012, or donating at
<http://www.warresisters.org>www.warresisters.org. And please--do it
today.

Help make this country a little more like the one I'd be president of.

In peace,

Martin Sheen

PS: If you wish your gift to be tax-deductible, make your check of
more than $50 payable to the A.J. Muste Memorial Institute.

Download, print out and send a copy of this letter to your friends and
family http://warresisters.org/MartinSheenletter.pdf

***

http://select.nytimes.com/2006/03/16/opinion/16herbert.html?th&emc=th

Stop Bush's War
By BOB HERBERT
NY Times Op-Ed: March 16, 2006

"By some estimates," according to a recent article in Foreign Affairs,
"the number of Iraqis who have died as a result of the [U.S.] invasion has
reached six figures - vastly more than have been killed by all
international terrorists in all of history. Sanctions on Iraq probably
were a necessary cause of death for an even greater number of Iraqis, most
of them children."

Not everyone agrees that Iraqi deaths have reached six figures. President
Bush gave an estimate of 30,000 not too long ago. That's probably low, but
horrendous nevertheless. In any event, there is broad agreement that the
number of Iraqis slaughtered has reached into the tens of thousands. An
ocean of blood has been shed in Mr. Bush's mindless war, and there is no
end to this tragic flow in sight. Jeffrey Gettleman of The Times gave us
the following chilling paragraphs in Tuesday's paper:

"In Sadr City, the Shiite section in Baghdad where the [four] terrorist
suspects were executed, government forces have vanished. The streets are
ruled by aggressive teenagers with shiny soccer jerseys and machine guns.

"They set up roadblocks and poke their heads into cars and detain whomever
they want. Mosques blare warnings on loudspeakers for American troops to
stay out. Increasingly, the Americans have been doing just that."

Everyone who thought this war was a good idea was wrong and ought to 
admit
it. Those who still think it's a good idea should get therapy.

Last Friday and Saturday, a conference titled "Vietnam and the Presidency"
was held at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston.
Discussions about the lessons we failed to learn from Vietnam, and thus
failed to apply to Iraq, were pervasive.

Some of the lessons seemed embarrassingly basic. Jack Valenti, who served
as a special assistant to Lyndon Johnson, reminded us how difficult it is
to "impress democracy" on other countries. And he noted something that the
public and the politicians seem to forget each time the glow of a
brand-new war is upon us: that wars are "inhumane, brutal, callous and
full of depravity."

Think Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo. Think suicide bombers and death squads
and roadside bombs. Think of the formerly healthy men and women who have
come back to the United States from Iraq paralyzed, or without their arms
or legs or eyes, or the full use of their minds. Think of the many
thousands dead.

Most of the people who thought this war was a good idea also thought that
the best way to fight it was with other people's children. That in itself
is a form of depravity.

Among those who played a key role in the conference was David Halberstam,
the author of "The Best and the Brightest," which is not just the best
book about America's involvement in Vietnam, but a book that grows more
essential with each passing year. If you read it in the 70's or 80's, read
it again. We can all use a refresher course on the link between folly and
madness at the highest levels of government, and the all-but-unimaginable
suffering it can unleash.

In the book's epilogue, Mr. Halberstam wrote that, among other things,
President Johnson "and the men around him wanted to be defined as being
strong and tough; but strength and toughness and courage were exterior
qualities which would be demonstrated by going to a clean and hopefully
antiseptic war with a small nation, rather than the interior and more
lonely kind of strength and courage of telling the truth to America and
perhaps incurring a good deal of domestic political risk."

That latter kind of toughness is what's needed now. Invading Iraq was a
disastrous move by the Bush administration, and there is no satisfactory
solution forthcoming. The White House should be working cooperatively with
members of both parties in Congress to figure out the best way to bring
the curtain down on U.S. involvement.

Before that can begin to happen, the administration will have to rid
itself of the delusion that things are somehow going well in Iraq. The
democracy that was supposed to flower in the Iraqi desert and then spread
throughout the Middle East was as much a mirage as the weapons of mass
destruction.

President Bush continues to assert that our goal in Iraq is "victory."
Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently told Tim
Russert that things were going "very, very well" in Iraq.

They are still crawling toward the mirage. It's time to give reality a
chance.

***

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20060314_molly_ivins_statesman/

 Published on Tuesday, March 14, 2006 by TruthDig
      Bush, the Statesman
      by Molly Ivins

      It's hard to keep up with George W. Bush's shuttles between
internationalism and isolationism. You may recall he first ran for office
declaring he was against nation-building and other such effete,
peacekeeping efforts. None of that do-gooder, building-a-better-world
stuff for him-he couldn't even be bothered to learn the names of the
Grecians and Kosovians.

      Until Sept. 11, except for staring deep into Vlad Putin's ice-blue
eyes and concluding the old KGB shark had soul, Bush evinced little
interest in foreign affairs.

      Then he literally became an internationalist with a vengeance.
Absolutely everybody signed up to help go after al-Qaida in
Afghanistan-offers of help gushed in. Next came the campaign to bring down
Saddam Hussein because he had weapons of mass destruction, including a
nuclear weapons program. Unfortunately, most of the rest of the world
didn't think Iraq had much in the way of WMD, or at least felt the United
Nations inspectors should be given more time to see if they were there.

      The unseemly haste with which Bush pushed toward an unnecessary war
alienated many of our closest allies, and the Bush team could not have
made their contempt for those allies and the United Nations more clear.

      So for a while we were the new imperialists and disdained the rest
      of
the world. We didn't need anyone-we would go our own way, and good
riddance to the United Nations, what a bunch of wusses they were. It was
the season of hubris, arrogance and rudeness.

      In the ultimate "up yours," Bush named John Bolton ambassador to the
United Nations. Bolton is a man so undiplomatic, not to mention so
anti-U.N., that half the administration was appalled by the idea. These
were the days when mental pygmies outside the administration were
dismissed as the "reality-based community." The senior Bush adviser
famously quoted by Ron Suskind explained, "We are an empire now, and 
when
we act, we create our own reality." Gosh, that was an exciting time.

      Unfortunately, reality uncharitably refused to conform to the Bush
administration's demands-in fact, reality kept blowing up in our faces. In
Afghanistan and particularly in Iraq, reality turned out to be downright
ugly about not obliging our blithe president.

      Several months after our invasion of Iraq, it turned out we had
actually invaded in order to bring democracy to that lucky little country.
In the odd, dreamlike way that Bush policy morphs, all the conservatives
began to pretend we had always gone in to create democracy and anyone who
suggested otherwise was misremembering that pesky reality.

      Indeed, so dedicated were we to the promotion of democracy around
      the
world that it was the very first principle of our foreign policy. And if
we still aren't too keen on nation-building-well, we'll just outsource it
to Halliburton and let them worry about it. And what a fine job they're
doing.

      So here we are, internationalists again, and Bush sets off for
      India,
where he promptly reversed decades of American foreign policy to exempt
India from the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty. It had been our policy
since Nixon was president to refuse to share nuclear energy technology
with nations unwilling to agree to the nonproliferation regime. Both India
and its mortal enemy, Pakistan, became nuclear-armed powers in 1998,
leading to the truly horrific possibility of a nuclear arms race on the
subcontinent.

      Having made this lamentable deal, Bush then proceeded to Pakistan,
which naturally feels insulted and slighted at not getting the same deal.
This is particularly unfortunate, as President Pervez Musharraf of
Pakistan is critical to the control and capture of al-Qaida.

      Bush, who dropped the entire subject of Osama bin Laden like a hot
rock in 2003, is now back to saying we want to capture him. Having
offended Pakistan, our critical ally, Bush then returned triumphantly
to-ta-da!-send exactly the wrong message to Iran. Just in time, showing
the Iranians that if they persist in developing nuclear weapons, they,
too, will eventually be rewarded like India. Naturally, this in turn
strengthens the hard-liners in Tehran and undercuts the pro-Western
reformers. What were they thinking? Does anybody here know how to play
this game?

      So far, it looks as though Bush does better on foreign policy when
he's being an isolationist. Maybe he should just stay home and cut taxes
for the rich some more, or go expose some CIA agent for political payback
against her husband, or just spy on a lot of American pacifists.

      When I heard him deploring xenophobia (that's fear of foreigners) on
the Dubai Ports deal, I did a double-take. Michael Chertoff of Homeland
Security again has said the trouble with homeland security is that it
threatens trade-all important, all sacred trade, profits above all. For
the umpteenth time, it is not only possible, but smart to insist on
adjusting free trade for labor standards, for environmental standards and
even so your ports don't get blown up.

      Molly Ivins is the former editor of the liberal monthly The Texas
Observer. She is the bestselling author of several books including Who Let
the Dogs In?

      © 2006 TruthDig, LLC

***

      Saturday, March 18th, March and Rally Commemorating the Third
Anniversary of the U.S. War and Occupation in Iraq. March starts at 12:00
noon at the corner of Hollywood and Vine. Endorsers include all major L.A.
area peace groups as well as rally speakers/endorsers such as State
Assembly Leader Gloria Romero, Gold Star Familes for Peace, Academy 
Award
winner Paul Haggis ("Crash"), peace activist Ron Kovic, actor Maria Bello,
 local labor leaders and clergy. Entertainment by Dwight Tribble and
others.The media sponsor for this event is Air America. For more info:
323/464-1636.

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"A war of aggression is the supreme international crime." -- Robert Jackson,
 former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice and Nuremberg prosecutor

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