By M. STEVEN KENNISTON and JANICE  BARRETT
Writers The Modern Tribune
March 16, 2003

Silence  Is  Unacceptable

By M. STEVEN KENNISTON
Writers The Modern Tribune
March 30, 2003

War is a horrible, ugly, barbaric business.  It is violence on a scale almost incomprehensible to individual human sensibilities and experience.  It rends the social fabric of the countries which engage in it in ways that take generations, or even centuries, to heal.  This is why civilized nations regard war as the political tool of last resort, to be used only in self-defense when the very existence of the nation itself or its constitutional ideology is directly threatened.  At least, to my mind, that is the only rationale justifying the violence of war.

And yet, once again, as we have for every year since World War II, we find ourselves at war.

Now that the fighting has begun in earnest, and soldiers and civilians are dying by the score every day,

I am told by my government, its politicians, and a host of jingoistic flag wavers that the time for debate is over, that I must rally behind the President who has decided that this war shall be, that I must silence my dissent and support this violence.

What debate?  In the months preceding war our President flatly refused to grant an audience to any anti-war organization, including Veterans for Common Sense, Veterans for Peace, and Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.  Many of the men and women in these groups have experienced the horror of war first-hand and have commanded troops and served their country with dedication and valor.  Yet when they sought to voice their concerns that the terrible costs of this war and its potentially disastrous consequences were not justified, they were rebuffed.  Our President chose instead to listen to the counsel of a group of reactionary ideologues recruited from neo-conservative think tanks, such as the American Enterprise Institute and the Project for the New American Century.  These arrogant and authoritative men advocate the use of military force as an acceptable political tool to achieve their goal of a new world order dominated by American military and economic interests.  They identified Iraq as a military target with the goal of regime change years before the 9/11 terrorist attacks.  These men crafted the foreign policy behind the President’s belligerent rhetoric, which sabotaged any hope of a diplomatic solution or possibility of building a broad coalition of nations.  Saying that you’re either with us or you’re against us and that we are prepared to act unilaterally and preemptively doesn’t leave much room for debate.

If I am silent, who will speak for the innocent men, women, and children vaporized, incinerated, dismembered, and otherwise killed and maimed in this horror?  And for the thousands who will suffer privation, starvation, disease, and death in the months to come because their homes, their water supplies, their very cities have been demolished in the conflagration?  The U.S. Defense Department has tried to sanitize the image of war by strictly controlling the journalists who report on the war and by the use of costly, high tech weapons, such as “smart” bombs and laser guided missiles, which supposedly reduce the need for troops.  These weapons are as horrible as anything men have ever devised to kill other human beings.  Imagine hundreds of cruise and hellfire missiles and 4700 pound “bunker buster” bombs raining down on a city of 4.5 million people, every one of them erupting in an explosion like a WTC tower collapsing.

Who will speak for the brave and dedicated men and women of our Armed Forces sent to fight a war which violates the very Constitution they have sworn to uphold?  These soldiers, many of whom will make the ultimate sacrifice, have been led by our politicians to believe that this a just and noble cause.  Yet, while these courageous soldiers fight and die, these same politicians have passed a budget which will cut veterans’ compensation and benefits by $25 billion over the next ten years.  The backlog of unsettled claims before the Veterans Administration now stands at almost half a million.  It seems our government can afford to wage this war but not to compensate those who are sent to fight.  Who will speak for their families when the focus of their hopes and dreams for the future comes home to them in pieces in a body bag?

Who will speak for the dispossessed of our own nation, the children, the poor, the elderly?  The social programs on which they depend for food and shelter, medicine, and education are facing drastic budget cuts.  Teacher layoffs and school closings nationwide and 50 million Americans without health insurance are very telling of the financial crisis we now face.  And yet, the US defense budget has burgeoned to an obscene $400 billion annually, more than the next eleven nations combined, while our government maintains a military presence in 130 nations worldwide.  Add to that the cost of this war, not allowing any money for rebuilding the Iraq that is being bombed into the Stone Age, and half a trillion taxpayer dollars will be spent this year on our military, while the basic needs of a large number of our citizens and the quality of education for our children are neglected.

If I am silent, who will speak for peace?  How many more innocent people must die to avenge the terrorist attacks of 9/11?  More innocent civilians were killed in Afghanistan in bringing down the regime of the Taliban than the number of innocent Americans killed on that fateful day in September 2001.  How many will have to die to avenge those deaths and the civilian deaths now occurring in Iraq?  And on and on in an endless cycle of violence.  “An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind,” said Mohandas Gandhi.  War is not the answer.  We must demand a government that actively seeks peaceful solutions to international conflicts and builds strong international coalitions, which can use overwhelming force with the sanction of the United Nations to discipline oppressive regimes that do not respond to diplomacy.

It is all too obvious that this war was a foregone conclusion to our President before he ever approached Congress or the United Nations.  He attempted to sell it first with falsified evidence and unsubstantiated allegations concerning Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction.  And while we go to war to disarm Iraq, the US arms industry, with Congressional approval, continues to flood the world with the weapons of war at the rate of $800 billion dollars worth per year.  How many of these weapons will eventually be used against American troops?  Where do you suppose Saddam got the building blocks for his biological weapons programs, chiefly the anthrax and botulinum toxin?  Why, from the United States, of course, a fact well documented by the US Commerce Dept.  Add to our government’s support of conventional weapons proliferation President Bush’s threat to use nuclear weapons in preemptive military action if necessary, as well as his withdrawal of the US from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, and the result is that a new nuclear arms race has been instigated, which threatens the very existence of the world as we know it.

The President continues to try to sell this war by invoking the terrible images of 9/11, with the fear and anger those images engender, suggesting that this war will prevent such terrorist acts from happening again and somehow make us all safer.  This suggestion defies rational analysis.  There has been absolutely no proof offered that Iraq had anything to do with the 9/11 attacks.  Both our government and the mainstream media are complicit in perpetrating this ruse upon the American people.  The main factor fueling the terrorist rage which motivated the 9/11 attacks was the US military presence in Saudi Arabia, which the fundamentalist Islamic militants behind the attacks perceived as a violation of their national sovereignty and an affront to their religious beliefs.  This war and subsequent military occupation, as well as the publicly stated intention by Bush’s neo-conservative policy makers to expand this military strategy into Iran and Syria, will only provoke more terrorism and insure steady recruitment of terrorists for generations to come.  By this fact alone, this war poses a dire threat to our national security.

The aforementioned strategies having failed, the Bush Administration’s rationale for justifying this war has morphed into presenting it as a liberation of the Iraqi people.  In light of the fierce resistance being met by the invading force so far, it seems a large number of the people of Iraq do not subscribe to this viewpoint.  To assume that a democratic government can be militarily forced upon this ethnically and religiously diverse country of 23 million people is presumptuous indeed.  The conflicts and social divisions embedded in the social fabric of Iraq go back thousands of years.  This area of the world is the birthplace of human civilization, and the country of Iraq is an artificial construct held together only by the brute force of its dictatorship.  Historically, the US government has a poor track record in nation building.  Of the eighteen regime changes in which the US has participated over the last hundred years, only five have produced democratic governments.

The only conclusion an informed and concerned citizen can draw from all of this is that there exists no compelling rationale to justify this war.  Indeed, much of what I have learned has led me to believe that it is a violation of the US Constitution, a violation of International Law, and a type of military aggression specifically prohibited by the charter of the United Nations, a document in whose crafting and ratification the US was instrumental.  None of this seems to matter to Bush’s neo-cons, who, while they envision the role of the US military as the world’s policeman, place the US above international law.  This is hypocrisy of the most brutish sort.  Our leaders have lost their moral compass, and in their fear and anger and need for control, have become the terrorists they wish to eradicate.  Their vision of the future has been corrupted by a desire for wealth and power.  I believe that the American people are essentially a good people, and that if they knew the truth, they would not support a global empire paid for with the national treasury and American blood.

With the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, there emerged a great opportunity for building a new world order based upon peace and cooperation.  Yet the architects of our current National Security Strategy and belligerent foreign policy have seen it as an opportunity to remake the world in the image of America using military force, and they have set the stage for a century of war.  The war on terrorism is ill-conceived, misguided, and doomed to failure.  Killing the terrorists and destroying their infrastructure only perpetuates the cycle of violence.  Any effective campaign against terrorism must address the social, political, and economic injustices which give rise to terrorist rage in the first place.   Only peaceful solutions, which focus on respect for and understanding of all peoples, which foster trust and communication, and which are attentive to basic human physical, psychological, and emotional needs will end terrorism and build a world emancipated from violence.  

I believe this with every fiber of my being, and I will not be silent. 
 

Adjustable  Fear

The Bush Administration has taken the manipulation of the public through the politics of fear to a new level.  Not satisfied to just push our fear button, Bush and his neo-conservative minions have installed a fear rheostat, with which they can finely tune our fear.  To distract the public from one of the stealth policy decisions or appointments for which he is becoming well-known, to rally public support for an outrageous executive decision, or to draw public attention away from a lack of evidence to support his case for war, President Bush simply has the Department of Homeland Security raise the terrorist alert status a level or two.
        It’s not a particularly sophisticated device.  Its beauty is in its simplicity and the fact that it works.  Witness the succession of events on the evening of March 17:

--George Bush delivers Saddam ultimatum while parroting the same old unsubstantiated evidence  justifying war. 
  
--Homeland Security Department raises the alert status for the risk of terrorist attacks to the HIGH, or orange, level.
  
--Support for the Administration’s position on Iraq spikes to a level not seen since Bush started bullying Congress and the international community over this months ago.

You see how it works?   You ratchet up the fear level a notch or two, and the frightened public falls into line behind big daddy government to be protected by its $400 billion/year military machine.

Granted, some of the rise in public approval Monday evening was engendered by support for our fighting forces placed in harm’s way by our President.  That support is well placed, for we need a competent and committed military for our national defense.  But it was Bush’s manipulation of the public’s fear factor that allowed him the support to place 250,000 troops at risk in the Mideast in the first place.  And he will continue to twist his fear rheostat as long as it works and whenever he needs it, until such time as the American public decides it has had enough of being jerked around and pulls the plug on fear.
 

Fear Can be a Powerful Motivator

Fear can be a powerful motivator, but decisions motivated by fear rarely serve our highest good.  In fact, intense fear, or panic, can result in actions which bring about the very thing we seek to escape.  In our panic to save ourselves from a perceived threat, we charge over a precipice to our deaths, like a horde of lemmings.

The most frequent argument that I hear from people who believe that it is necessary at this time to undertake the grave risks and terrible destruction of war in order to neutralize the perceived threat of Saddam  Hussein is based in fear.  Remember 9/11, they tell me; if we don't want to see that happen again, we have to get him out of there.  We have to kill the terrorists before they kill us.  Fear.  All that these frightened people see is the object of their fear.

They don't see the tens of thousands of innocent people who will suffer  and die in this war, as we lash out in fear.  Our own government speaks of  the Iraqi people in words like "collateral damage," as if they are expendable pawns in some huge global chess match.

They don't see the most likely result of their fearful response.  Going to war against a country which is predominantly Muslim, killing tens of  thousands of their innocent citizens, will be viewed by many as a hideous crime deserving of violent retribution.  In trying to prevent another 9/11 from happening, acting out of fear makes it more likely it will happen again.  We live in a free society, in which our infrastructure, our water and sewer systems, our transportation and communications grids, our energy supplies, are largely unprotected and vulnerable.  We are not made less vulnerable by perpetrating injustice in the Muslim world.

War will not bring peace.  There MUST be alternatives.  In order to find them, we must illuminate our fear with logic and compassion and creativity, shining those lights into all the dark corners of our fear, driving it out.  Only then can we hope to find the solutions that foster peace and justice in the world, and keep us from hurtling over the precipice.