3. The war on Iraq was bad because it wasn't being won. This of course contributed to escalating the war in hopes of winning it, whatever that would have meant.
4. The war on Iraq was bad because it was a Republican Party war. This wasn't entirely true. It was also a position destined to create support for wars whenever a Democrat moved into the White House.
The argument for opposing little bits of militarism rather than the whole thing is that more people are likely to quickly join you. If you appeal to their patriotism or partisanship or religion or militarism but nudge them toward opposing one particular war for some tangential reason, well then maybe they'll be ever so slightly more likely to oppose the next war and the next war. I don't accept that argument.
For one thing, ill-informed as I think people are, I don't think they're stupid enough not to notice when I'm telling the truth and when I'm not -- when I'm actually making up excuses for a position that I hold for a different reason. I actually want wars ended because they kill people. If I claim to oppose just the Iraq War but not the Afghanistan War, what happens when the Iraq War ends and I shift to opposing the Afghanistan War? Who will take me seriously?
Also, if we don't tell the truth then people never find out how bad the wars are. But if they do find out how bad the wars are, then they oppose them along with us for all the right reasons, reasons that carry over to counter-recruitment and conversion -- that is, to keeping our kids from becoming cannon-fodder and converting our war industries to peace industries, which -- by the way -- produces more and better paying jobs for the same investment, not to mention greater happiness with one's career.
It's not easy to tell people how our wars really look while telling them that you support the troops and want to see wars waged with better strategies. Our wars are one-sided slaughters. U.S. deaths in Iraq were 0.3% of the deaths. Iraq lost a greater number of people and a greater percentage of its people than the U.S. lost in its civil war or World War II, or than Japan or France or England lost in World War II. Iraq lost millions of refugees, its education system, its health system, its entire society. The nation was destroyed. And a majority of Americans believe Iraq benefitted from the war while the United States suffered. We were happy year after year to see a majority of Americans say they wanted the war ended, but many of them were saying they wanted an act of generosity ended, not the war as it actually existed.
The trillions of dollars spent destroying Iraq and not rebuilding it could have been put to other uses. It could have eliminated world hunger. It could have saved many times the lives it was used to kill. But that would require real generosity, not just frustration that a war wasn't being managed well.
I was involved in working hard to make sure people knew Bush lied about Iraq. I'm pleased that a slim majority still says it knows that. I don't know how long that will last. But an overwhelming majority still believes some other war could be a good war.
Sitting on a train recently, I spoke to a young woman who told me she was studying dentistry and would be in the Air Force. Couldn't she be a dentist without the military, I asked? No, she answered, not without $200,000 in debt. Yes, I replied, but without the Air Force, we could have free colleges and no debts. No, she replied . . .
And, if you think for a moment, I know you'll know what she said next. It had nothing to do with the lies about Iraq, the financial cost of Iraq, the number of U.S. troops killed in Iraq, or what war mongers the Republicans are. It had nothing to do with any of that. Think for a second, and you'll know.
Any guesses?
She replied: if we didn't have the Air Force, North Korea would kill us.
Now, if you have a little education you probably realize that North Korea spends less than 1% of what the United States does on war preparations, that North Korea couldn't attack the United States without being completely obliterated, and that any nation on earth would scream angry threats if we pretended to drop nuclear bombs on it after having destroyed all of its cities, killed millions of its people, and threatened and antagonized it for over half a century through control of the military belonging to its former other half.
But if you'd just learned that the war on Iraq was a dumb war that cost too much, that nothing is more heroic than militarism, that even the peace movement should be led by soldiers, and that waving flags and valuing a particular 5% of humanity to a special degree are admirable values, where would you be?
There will always, always, always be another North Korea that's supposedly about to kill us. We don't need rapid-response fact corrections. We need citizens with some understanding of history, with knowledge of the Other 95%, with the capacity to resist terrorism-by-television, and capable of independent thought. To get there, we need a peace movement that moves us, at whatever pace it can, toward peace -- toward the popular demand for the absolute abolition of all war. And to get there we need to stop behaving like politicians.
Legislators have to compromise, and would have to compromise even if our government weren't so corrupted by money. We don't. Our unions and activist groups didn't have to ban the words "single payer" from rallies for the so-called "public option," thus pre-compromising and predictably ending up with nothing. We can let Congress do the compromising, but it will do it from where we begin. If we begin with self-censorship, we lose.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
2
2
1
