Memorial To Something Worthwhile

Today we are seeing all sorts of messages about the troops, and I keep hearing about those 'who made the ultimate sacrifice', and I want to know, for what? In my lifetime, the WWII in Europe ended, those troops came home who hadn't died, and back home they found a lot of gratitude.

They built up a country that was the strongest economy for the workers that ever existed. It was a country that was worth the struggle to maintain it. Since that time, policies that fought against living wage and adequate benefits for workers has turned it around, and we have economic disaster. The social security and unemployment programs to keep us through hard time, plans we have paid into, have been borrowed practically out of existence while we bail out the financial industry that has squandered what we earn.

In my lifetime, the wars have been diminishing into policy squabbles. Vietnam was about 'domino theory' and draftees encountered the realities that denied political dogma and turned the public into a war machine; the machine that ended an unproductive war.

Those who died in Vietnam, whose names adorn that dark solemn wall on the mall in D.C. are not claimed to have died to save liberty, or the country, or truth, justice and the American way of life. They died for a mistake. That mistake, and their deaths, would be worth a great deal if they have ended the warmaking push that followed, but they didn't.

We are extricating ourselves now from the War on Iraq, a.k.a. The Great War on Terror, that is a disgrace to our democracy. Lies were used to get a vote from Congress to authorize the ex-cretin in chief to use military power, votes given on the assumption that no one raised to the presidency would stoop to using troops' lives when the simple constraint on trade which was traditional in these events would suffice. The congress was wrong. We had in place as commander in chief some one whose ambitions were purely political, and a war was the way to get where he wanted to go.

When our troops died in Iraq, it achieved nothing for the country, but, rather, worked against it. Our obscene expenditures were death to the economy here at home, and did nothing for the working people here or in Iraq. Contractors reaped fortunes, while the troops received laggard assistance and inadequate arms, provisions, and equipment. Those who died because of these obscene misalocations certainly should be honored by an end to these practices. Yet there are many of the right wing shouting that we have to make sure they didn't die in vain. As that argument goes, we have to keep killing off the troops until we can declare victory. Victory is the establishment of a government in Iraq that represents our own puppet, a government that the Iraqis will never allow. This rorschach model of Iraqi government is a figment of the imagination, and would mean fighting and dying for troops who cannot give the wingnuts what they want without turning against the existing government that we have put in.

On Memorial Day, I would like to see us turn to a profitable use of troops for this country. We need to convert the wasted funds now being lost to public works here, and in service in countries that need assistance such as the Peace Corps represents. We need a commander in chief who will use our government and its forces for the good of this country. That has happened before. The CCC and WPA gave us roads, bridges, Riverwalk, the Providence Zoo: they trained workers to farm and feed themselves, to build their own farms and to sustain their lives. Peace Corps familiarized our own people with places and peoples that they learned to respect, whose institutions they bolstered, to our great credit. Troops do not have to destroy.

We lost few of the work trainees in the works programs of FDR's "New Deal", or in the Peace Corps. Their lives were enhanced, not lost or forever harmed by injuries. Our society gained, and our place in the world was raised.

There is no reason we have to continue a dishonor, a warring tradition that has led to nothing but loss. The powers that keep wars going are harmful to our world and its people.

For Memorial Day, we should dedicate our resources, and particularly human resources, to constructive works. We can be better, and we should start now.

Teach The Children Well

It's all over but the shouting, at least that is what the media and Israeli PR flacks would have you believe. Gaza is quiet now. There are no bombs falling on mosques, schools, and houses. There are no tanks rumbling through the streets. It's over.

Or is it.

Mosques, schools, and houses can be rebuilt. Streets can be repaired. Food and medical supplies can be trucked in. Reliable electricity and safe water can be turned back on, sooner or later. The generosity of the rest of the world can see to that.

Unfortunately, more will be needed. Much more. From today's NY Times:

The boys clapped and sang to pulsating music. They played games and shouted. It could have been a group activity at any school in any place, but this was the middle school in the Jabaliya refugee camp in Gaza, near where the United Nations says some 40 people were killed by Israeli mortar fire earlier this month.

Saturday was the first day of school since before the war, and 1,000 homeless people had been removed from the building so that classes could begin.

Even then, normal schoolwork had to wait. A team trained in trauma and group activities was running the assembly, and after the singing and clapping, there was a play devoted to how to handle dangerous materials, like shell parts, still in or near homes. Later, each pupil described what had happened to him and to his friends and family in Israel’s 23-day war aimed at stopping Hamas’s rockets.

“They are not ready to learn yet,” said Asem Bajah, an English teacher, as he watched the singing. “And I am not ready to teach.” [Emphasis added]

Oh, I think they've already learned. I think they have learned lessons no child should ever have to. That's part of the tragedy of armed conflict, the part conveniently overlooked when governments decide they need to get their war on.

Obama's Afghanistan

In the first few days of his administration, President Obama acted decisively on issues close to the hearts of his liberal supporters: he banned the use of torture, he delayed the Military Commission "trials," he ordered the closure of Guantanamo Bay, and he ordered a full review of detention policies and procedures currently in place. Was this a "thank you" bouquet for those of us on the left? Perhaps, but I think it was more of an announcement to the rest of the world that his foreign policy would be markedly different from that of his predecessor. To underscore that announcement, he also selected two special envoys: one to the Middle East and one to Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Unfortunately, for those on the left who believe that the war in Afghanistan (which has been prosecuted longer than the one in Iraq, something we tend to forget) is just as wrong-headed as the one in Iraq, there will be no dramatic change. Candidate Obama promised to shift forces from Iraq to Afghanistan in order to more effectively fight that war. President Obama has made it clear, special envoy or not, that he intends to keep that campaign promise as well. In that regard, he is making the same mistake that President Bush made, namely that the Global War on Terror must be prosecuted as a shooting war. That just might turn out to be his first and most tragic mistake as President.

Former Senator George McGovern had an interesting op-ed piece in, of all places, the Washington Post on Thursday, January 22, 2009. In this column, Sen. McGovern (a World War II veteran) urges President Obama to forget about "winning" in Afghanistan, using history as part of the analysis.

It is logical to conclude that our massive military dominance and supposedly good motives should let us work our will in Afghanistan. But logic does not always prevail in South Asia. With belligerent Afghan warlords sitting atop each mountain glowering at one another, the one factor that could unite them is the invasion of their country by a foreign power, whether British, Russian or American.

The British learned this lesson the hard way, as did the Soviet Union. Are we the next superpower to go down in flames because we expended our fortune and the lives of a generation in search of some kind of illusory victory over the forces of terrorism? Sen. McGovern certainly thinks that a probable outcome, so he urges a real change in approach:

I have believed for some time that military power is no solution to terrorism. The hatred of U.S. policies in the Middle East -- our occupation of Iraq, our backing for repressive regimes such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia, our support of Israel -- that drives the terrorist impulse against us would better be resolved by ending our military presence throughout the arc of conflict. This means a prudent, carefully directed withdrawal of our troops from Iraq, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and elsewhere. We also need to close down the imposing U.S. military bases in this section of the globe, which do so little to expand our security and so much to stoke local resentment. ...

So let me suggest a truly audacious hope for your administration: How about a five-year time-out on war -- unless, of course, there is a genuine threat to the nation?

During that interval, we could work with the U.N. World Food Program, plus the overseas arms of the churches, synagogues, mosques and other volunteer agencies to provide a nutritious lunch every day for every school-age child in Afghanistan and other poor countries. Such a program is now underway in several countries approved by Congress and the United Nations, under the auspices of the George McGovern-Robert Dole International Food for Education and Child Nutrition Act. (Forgive the self-serving title.) Although the measure remains painfully underfunded, with the help of other countries, we are reaching millions of children. We could supplement these efforts with nutritional packages for low-income pregnant and nursing mothers and their infants from birth through the age of 5, as is done here at home by WIC, the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children.

Too expensive a plan during a period of economic difficulty? An extended war in Afghanistan, and it would be extended by all accounts, will be far more expensive, as Iraq should have taught us. Hundreds of billions of dollars expended to fight in Afghanistan will undo every bit of good that President Obama hoped to accomplish with the various changes announced the first few days he was in office. We will, instead, continue to read of civilian casualties caused by errant bombs and murky intelligence (like this one in today's Los Angeles Times).

We don't need another War Time President. We need a President strong enough and wise enough to bring peace to that part of the world. And that means we need to make it clear to President Obama that the war in Afghanistan is not the answer to the question of terrorism.