So-called foreign intervention in civil wars around the world is, according to comprehensive studies, 100 times more likely -- not where there is suffering, not where there is cruelty, not where there is a threat to the world, but where the country at war has large reserves of oil or the intervener has a high demand for oil.
The U.S. military is the top consumer of petroleum around, burning more of it than most entire countries, and burning much of it in routine preparations for more wars. There are military planes that can cause more damage with jet fuel in 10 minutes than you can with gasoline driving your car for a year.
All such calculations omit the environmental destruction done by private weapons makers and by their weapons. The U.S. is the leading exporter of war weapons to the rest of the world.
All such calculations also omit much of the damage and all of the details of the human suffering. The U.S. military burns toxic waste in the open, near its own troops in places like Iraq, near the homes of the people who live in the countries it has invaded, and within the United States in many -- often poor and minority -- communities such as Colfax, Louisiana, and at Dahlgren on the Potomac.
Much of the damage is essentially permanent, such as the poison of depleted uranium, used in places like Syria and Iraq. But this is true in locations all around the United States as well. Near St. Louis, Missouri, an underground fire is moving ever closer to an underground pile of radioactive waste.
And then there is the Potomac River. It flows south between the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials in Washington, D.C. on the east, and Arlington, Virginia, on the west, where the Pentagon Lagoon brings the water up to the headquarters of world militarism.
Not only does the home of war making sit near rising waters -- rising first and foremost because of the effects of war making, but those particular waters -- the waters of the Potomac and of the Chesapeake Bay into which it flows, and the tides of which raise and lower the waters of the Pentagon Lagoon each day -- are heavily polluted by war preparations.
This is why we are planning and invite you to join in a kayactivist flotilla to the Pentagon on September 16th. We need to bring the demand of No More Oil for Wars to the doorstep of our leading destroyer of the environment.
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