If our engagement is limited to opposing every proposed war and demanding that each current war end, we may prevent or shorten some wars, but more wars will be coming right behind. Crimes must be deterred, but war is currently rewarded.
Punishing war should not mean punishing an entire people, as was done to Germany after World War I and to Iraq after the Gulf War. Nor should we pick out a few low-ranking committers of colorful atrocities, label them "bad apples," and prosecute their crimes while pretending that the war itself was acceptable. Accountability must start at the top.
This means pressuring the first branch of our government to assert its existence. If you aren't sure what the first branch of our government is, get a copy of the U.S. Constitution and read what Article I is about. The whole Constitution fits on a single piece of paper, so this should not be a lengthy assignment.
This also means pursuing possible civil and criminal court actions at the local, state, federal, foreign, and international levels. It means sharing resources with our friends in other countries who are actively investigating their governments' complicity in our government's crimes or pursuing charges against our criminals under universal jurisdiction.
It means joining the International Criminal Court, making clear that we are subject to its rulings, and supporting the prosecution of others who there is probable cause to believe have committed war crimes.
And it means ceasing to arm and support murderous dictatorships in Bahrain, Yemen, Saudi Arabia and the rest of Western Asia, while pretending to "intervene" whenever turning against one of our puppets. The United States' military and weapons industry is already intervened everywhere, and its first moral and legal duty is to un-intervene.
There are those among us who invent and promote war lies, those who give deference to authority and believe whatever they are told to believe, those who are fooled, and those who go along because it's easier. There are government liars and volunteer liars helping out in the public relations industry or the news reportainment industry. And there are the great many of us who try our best to understand what is going on and to speak up when we need to.
We have to speak up a hell of a lot more, educate those who have been fooled, empower those who have kept quiet, and hold accountable those who create war lies.
DEMOCRATIZING WAR POWERS
The Ludlow Amendment was a proposed amendment to the U.S. Constitution requiring a vote by the American people before the United States could go to war. In 1938, this amendment appeared likely to pass in Congress. Then President Franklin Roosevelt sent a letter to the Speaker of the House claiming that a president would be unable to conduct an effective foreign policy if it passed, after which the amendment failed 209-188. The Constitution from its inception and still today requires a vote in Congress before the United States can go to war. What Roosevelt was telling Congress was either that presidents needed to be free to violate the existing Constitution or that a public referendum might reject a war whereas Congress, in contrast, could be counted on to do as it was told. Of course, the public was indeed more likely to reject wars than Congress, and a public referendum could not have been held on a moment's notice. Congress declared war on Japan the first day after Pearl Harbor. The public would at least have been given a week to hold a referendum, during which time any sort of accurate knowledge might have been spread about by the sort of people White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs in 2010 scornfully derided as "the professional left."
The public could conceivably vote for an illegal war, however. Then we would have a war approved by the true sovereigns of the nation, even though that war would have been banned by laws previously enacted through a process presumed to represent the public's wishes. But that wouldn't put us in any worse position than we are in now, with the people cut out of the loop and congress members answering to their funders, their parties, and the corporate media. If we amended the Constitution, through Congress or through a convention called by the states, we could also take the money out of the electoral system and recover the possibility of being listened to in Washington.
If we were listened to in Washington, a lot of changes would be made. Having Congress listen to us wouldn't get us very far unless Congress took back some of the powers it has given to the White House over the centuries. We will need to abolish the CIA and all secret agencies and budgets for war, and to create real congressional oversight for the entire military. We will need to create in Congress the understanding that it can choose whether or not to fund wars, and that it must act in accordance with the public will. It wouldn't hurt to strengthen the War Powers Act to eliminate exceptions and add time limits and penalties. It would also help to make aggressive war and war profiteering felonies in the U.S. Code, ban the use of mercenaries and private contractors in the military, get the recruiters out of schools, forbid involuntary extensions of military contracts, and various other reforms.
And then we'll need to move on to reforming, democratizing, and funding the United Nations, with which -- by the way -- most Americans ultimately agreed about Iraq. The U.N. was correct when it mattered; a lot of Americans came around to believing the war was a bad idea years later. The U.N. authorization of war on Libya was not the result of a democratic process.
NO MILITARIZATION
WITHOUT REPRESENTATION
Compelling governmental reforms requires a great deal of organizing and risk taking beyond education and persuasion. The peace movement can demand huge sacrifices. The experience of being a peace activist is a little bit like the thrill of going off to war, the main difference being that rich people don't support you.
The military reform being promoted with the most heavily funded campaign as I write is the effort to allow gay and lesbian Americans equal rights to participate in war crimes. Heterosexuals should be demanding equal rights to be excluded. The second biggest reform push at the moment is to allow immigrants to become citizens by joining the military, without offering them any non-violent alternative other than college, which most immigrants cannot afford. We should be ashamed.
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