It’s a beautiful day in this neighborhood. I want to go out and take a walk. But I check my email first and start checking out the sites that my anti-war email pals are telling me about. I should get out and get some fresh air. But this stupid war…the stupidity of the stupid men waging this stupid war — holds me here at the keyboard, seething instead of sunning.
The truth is, I don’t want to hide in the sun. I want to keep shouting into the wind — which is what this blogging is, I know. But it’s war. It’s a war against everything I hope for and believe in. I’m not going to hide.
What I’m going to do is point you to some truths that need to be more broadly known, and they’re not being broadcast, at least not the way they should be.
Example 1:
Yesterday, Lawrence Eagleburger, who was US Secretary of State under George Bush Sr., told the BBC:
“If George Bush [Jr.] decided he was going to turn the troops loose on Syria and Iran after that he would last in office for about 15 minutes. In fact if President Bush were to try that now even I would think that he ought to be impeached. You can’t get away with that sort of thing in this democracy.”
The above quote is taken from a report on BBC television, but has so far not appeared on their Website. The quote is mentioned near the bottom of an article in today’s Independent. It is also referenced in today’s Mirror and Pakistan Tribune.
Example 2:
In the second of his dispatches from the million-dollar media centre at Qatar, Michael Wolff recounts how he angered the US right
Wolff:
But I was not a war reporter. I did not have to observe war-time propriety, or cool. I was free to ask publicly (on international television, at that) the question everyone was asking of each other: “I mean no disrespect, but what is the value proposition of these briefings. Why are we here? Why should we stay? What’s the value of what we’re learning at this million dollar press centre?”
What happens to him could have been taken right out of a movie script (except is was for real), including:
The next person to buttonhole me was the Centcom uber-civilian, a thirty-ish Republican operative. He was more full-metal-jacket in his approach (although he was a civilian he was, inexplicably, in uniform – making him, I suppose a sort of para-military figure): “I have a brother who is in a Hummer at the front, so don’t talk to me about too much fucking air-conditioning.” And: “A lot of people don’t like you.” And then: “Don’t fuck with things you don’t understand.” And too: “This is fucking war, asshole.” And finally: “No more questions for you.”
Example 3:
An emailed essay from a Daniel Patrick Welch, who points to this site, is a lengthy piece that pretty much covers everything I believe, but stated in a much more reader-friendly prose than mine usually is, including this:
And what is all this focus on civilian dead? I mean it’s horrific, of course–it’s the whole ball of wax, really. But soldiers aren’t people? When the tables are turned, the U.S. screams bloody murder if one of our boys is killed, TV up close and personals, etc. Enemy soldiers don’t have mothers? They can be blithely incinerated from 40,000 feet by fuel-air bombs and other weapons more horrific than anything currently banned–international law, thankfully for the Americans, hasn’t had time to catch up to the technology. I guess that undermining, bribing, and threatening pays off. Bush and Rumsfeld (dubbed Chemical Donald by a British columnist) even insist that we have the right to use nuclear weapons, or other gases only allowed for domestic crowd control.
and this:
The Stupidity Factor doesn’t appear to be evaporating any time soon. Many Americans are perfectly happy to have a “president” who is no smarter than they are–it’s not threatening unless you get on his bad side. …. I used to think that the monopoly corporations who funded Bush’s rise to power had picked wrong–and it may still be shown that they overplayed their hand. But my cynicism and despair have deepened in the past few months. What a coup (pun intended) to have picked a true idiot, a mean, drunken frat boy who does what he’s told and then some, sticking to it like a rabid pit bull.
And then there’s this eloquent and moving right-on-the-money piece by a mom whose daughter was arrrested for protesting:
Don’t all parents want the world for their children? Fellow parents, tell me, wouldn’t we do anything for them? To give them big houses, we will cut ancient forests. To give them the best education, we will invest in companies that profit from death.
To keep them safe, we will deny them the right to privacy, to travel unimpeded, to peacefully assemble. And to give them peace, we will kill other people’s children or send them to be killed and amass enough weapons to kill the children again, kill them 20 times if necessary.
We would do anything for our children but the one big thing: Stop and ask ourselves, what are we doing and allowing to be done? Frank and I go busily about, buying this or that, voting or not — on a small scale, in the short term, making things work for our children — forgetting that whatever is left of the world is the place where they will have to live.
What will our grandchildren say? I think I can guess:
How could you not have known? What more evidence did you need that your lives, your comfortable lives, would do so much damage to ours?
Did you think you could wage war against nations without waging war against people and against the land? Didn’t you wonder what we would drink, once you poisoned the aquifers? Didn’t you wonder what we would breathe, once you poisoned the air? Did you stop to ask how we would be safe, in a world poisoned by war?
I’m thinking about how I will answer those questions when my grandson is old enough to ask me. I will think about that as I go outside to walk among the long afternoon shadows.