While we’re bringing the soldiers home, we have to do something about the mercenaries, also known as “contractors.” Raise the shout for them to be sent home if they’re foreigners (like South Africans or Americans) or for their former employers to find them honest work if they’re locals. Mercenaries are a threat to peace and democracy because their job is to do the dirty work of the highest bidder, the good of the people be damned. Japanese banks in the U.S. don’t have the right to private mini-armies to guard their facilities and drive their executives around in armed convoys. Perhaps if American oil corporation executives don’t feel safe among the people in Iraq, it’s time to get the message.
Speaking of the highest bidder, the U.S. is giving a lot of military aid to countries throughout the Middle East, including Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iraq, and Israel. What is the purpose of all these guns and warplanes? Are we preparing the region for Armageddon? Let’s support the ordinary citizens of the Middle East—and save ourselves billions of dollars a year—by demanding that our tax money be spent only for peaceful purposes.
Iran and Syria have called for the Middle East to be a nuclear free zone. Why doesn’t the peace movement in the USA take them up on it?
5. Start a truth and reconciliation process for the Middle East. Where more than in the Middle East is there such a great need to clear the air, end the cycle of revenge, and bring a genuine consensus for peace? We who have paid for so much of the violence must now pay for a Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
What would it look like? Not like Shimon Perez saying, about Israel’s use of cluster bombs against Lebanese civilians, “We committed a mistake.” Talk about a Freudian slip! Ordinary mortals “make” mistakes; what they “commit” are sins or crimes. “Mistake” is also the consensus word for what the U.S. did to the people of Vietnam and now of Iraq. Maybe we all need to ask the lawyers to leave the room so we can speak honestly with each other.
There comes a time when you just have to say you’re sorry for what you did and the pain you caused, a time when you must accept the apology of the other, a time to finally shake hands and try to make it up somehow.
As Americans face the fact that there were no WMD in Iraq and that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, many of us—including some of the soldiers—are feeling really awful. We will be better off as a democracy and a people if we are able to face the truth and restore our sense of morality. Denial isn’t the answer. Look what happened after the Vietnam War. We never paid the reparations we owed and we have been in denial for 30 years. So there was nothing to stop us from doing it again, most notably in Iraq. Denial about the 1953 CIA-organized coup d’etat against the democratic government of Iran and Washington’s support for the Shah’s dictatorship has resulted in Americans completely misunderstanding a whole nation of peace-loving people who genuinely want to be our friends in spite of it all.
Truth and reconciliation will help Israel to recognize Palestine, and vice versa, and will help them to work out a mutually acceptable deal. What will they do about all the war crimes that have been committed? How will they heal all the broken hearts? What will justice look like? Where will the refugees live and how will they make a living? If I know my fellow Americans, most of us are ready to support the process that will find solutions. Most of us are tired of throwing our weight around and stoking the flames.
Most of the Middle East has had an ugly, greedy, violent history in the last century, with millions of families affected by war, exile, torture, disappearances. Rather than supporting those who would add more families to the list of victims, Americans could set our intention now to let the healing begin.
6. Build support for international law among Americans and hold our government responsible to abide by it. Americans know little of international law, and some seem fearful that international law is a threat to our citizens, our soldiers or our sovereignty. But in the Middle East, international law is widely respected. A few days ago, a Palestinian leader pledged to abide by international law and avoid the slaying of civilians. He called on Israel to do the same. (No one claims that abiding by international law is easy.) Mahmoud Ahmedinejad frequently refers to Iran’s rights under international law, and on that point I’ve yet to hear any Iranian disagree with him. The civil society movement is growing in the Middle East. It calls for the rule of law within countries and in the international arena.
The current U.S. administration is not part of the civil society movement. It is perceived as holding international law in disdain, picking and choosing only specific items that suit their purposes. Bush administration officials go on TV and quote specific resolutions that they have managed to push through the UN Security Council over intense opposition. At the same time, they ignore the UN resolutions and international treaties that they don’t like, refuse to meet their obligations to disarm under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, and disregard the fundamental principles of international law and the UN charter on issues such as preemptive invasions and torture. When has an American reporter been savvy enough about international law to call them on this? Building the consensus in the U.S. about international law should be a top item on the agenda of the peace and justice movement.
The basic message being sent to the world by the Bush administration is “might makes right.” That undermines hope for peace-justice-democracy in smaller countries and leaves Americans as unwilling accomplices to empire. Bush's vision of "Pax Americana" has nothing to do with democracy as we, and people in other countries, wish to live it.
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