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-- From "Foreword" by British ambulance driver, Robert Service
And
"If in some smothering dreams you too could
pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the
white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick
of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come
gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as
the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on
innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high
zest
To children ardent for some
desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro
patria mori.
-- From "Dulce et Decorum est" (It is Sweet and Right to Die for Your Country) by British Army Lt. Wilfred Owen, killed a week before the 1918 Armistice.
More than that we cannot say to you, so we will address our former brothers and sisters in arms who are now our brothers and sisters in peace.
To members of Veterans For Peace:
At one time in our lives we bore the hardships and dangers of military service. We were not strangers to privation, or fear, or acts of courage. Although the America of our childhood history books has been shaken and some would say, shattered by what we learned in the military and since, we can still hear the call to service when it is clear and true.
Nothing could be more clear or true today than the need for us to do everything we humanly can to stop the killing. Not just stop the escalation -- stop the killing. Bring all the troops home. Take care of them when they get here. Pay to rebuild what we have destroyed.
It is important for us to rededicate ourselves to the It is important for us to rededicate ourselves tothe resolution we adopted at our 2008 convention: Afghanistan is not "the right war." We must leave as soon as possible.
This is important to repeat because this administration and some in Congress would have us believe that we cannot withdraw immediately from Afghanistan, we must provide some stability and protection from the likes of the Taliban.
So we state without doubt: our occupation of Afghanistan is driving the violent opposition to it. More U.S. troops and more occupation will mean more anger and yet more violent reaction from those whose lands we occupy. We must rededicate ourselves to ending this cycle of violence.
The Taliban recruit from the ranks of the unemployed and the poor. One important way to reduce unemployment, poverty and Taliban recruits is to fund programs that provide work and income. To say that the government of Afghanistan is corrupt and that economic development funds are wasted is to conveniently ignore the real reason we are in Afghanistan.
Throughout Afghanistan, grassroots networks are making a difference at the local and tribal level. This is where we should put our money.
But we are not in Afghanistan to give them democracy, even if that were possible. Neither is our purpose to build up that country's smaller, more democratic institutions that serve the population. We occupy Afghanistan because America the Empire demands control of its resources and to have a strategic locations from which to project military power. As the Secretary-General of NATO said recently, "We need a stable government in Afghanistan, a government that we can deal with."
And no one -- NO one, but us is going to stop the killing; neither the President nor the Congress. We can beseech them, ask them, demand from them that they stop the killing and bring all the troops home. But until we exert the power of massive resistance to the Empire that only we can exert, it will keep rolling over Afghanis, Iraqis, Pakistanis and whoever else that is in its way.
We must continue writing and calling our representatives and demanding peace. If we've done that we must take to the streets. If we've done that we must sit down in the streets. If we've done that we must sit down in Congressional offices and if we've done that we must sit down, clog up, incapacitate, withdraw our consent and generally bring business as usual to a halt wherever we can, with any peaceful means available.
