Category: Peace and War

By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, Peace and War, Politics

While I was still feeling nauseous after the smug hypocrisy and misleading statements that filled last night’s State of the Union address, I followed a link to a study released this week by the well-respected Center for Public Integrity.

That study documents 935 false statements by the Bush administration just about Iraq, counting only the two years beginning 9/11/01. 259 of these lies were straight from the lips of George W. Bush. That means Bush lied about Iraq (either about WMDs or the imaginary Al Qaida connection) once every 2.8 days–and his administration lied more than once a day.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t the last president impeached for telling one single lie, about a personal matter that affected only his immediate family and a few others. Yes, that was wrong. But how much worse is it to tell almost a thousand lies on just this one topic (who knows how many others?), and have on your conscience some 4000 dead Americans, hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis, that country in ruins and our own a rogue state that can’t meet its own people’s basic needs, and our reputation as a great nation in tatters.

Madame Speaker Nancy Pelosi, what will it take to convince you that the time is long past to put impeachment back on the table?

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By Posted on Posted in Ethics-International, Peace and War, People Helping People, Shel's Personal Life, Social and Economic Justice

Throughout history, far more lasting, positive social change has been accomplished through

nonviolent (though often massive) organizing than through coups, violence, military dictatorships of the left or the right.

Need examples? Just in my own lifetime, there are many. A few to tickle your memory:

  • The US Civil Rights movement
  • Abolition of apartheid in South Africa
  • The Solidarity movement and the dismantling of the entire Soviet empire
  • Getting the US out of Vietnam

    The skills involved in this kind of organizing are not necessarily intuitive, and if you only look at traditional history sources, they aren’t well documented. However, plenty of people’s history exists, and numerous courageous individuals have spent their lives studying these skills, and building them in others.

    I didn’t know Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Nelson Mandela, or Dorothy Day–but I have been fortunate to know personally some of the leaders of this movement. The late Dave Dellinger was a personal friend for a few years. And I knew George Lakey and Stephen Zunes when I lived in a nonviolent study and action community in Philadelphia. Stephen and I even collaborated as the principal authors of a paper on future directions for the peace movement.

    I bring this up not to name-drop but to be able to speak from personal experience that these are people of very high integrity.

    So I was a bit shocked to get an e-mail from Stephen calling attention to criticism he and Gene Sharp (author of the definitive analysis of nonviolent social change, The Politics of Nonviolent Action), and others. Apparently, they are being targeted by certain elements of the left who sees them as tools of imperialism–including Hugo chavez of Venezuela.

    Stephen has posted a long rebuttal to this absurd claim on the Foreign Policy in Focus website.

    Stephen points out that the consulting he and other nonviolent activists do focuses on helping democratic opposition to totalitarian groups favored by US government interests, and not on destabilizing governments the US doesn’t like. In fact,

    …The only visit to Venezuela that has taken place on behalf of any of these non-profit groups engaged in educational efforts on strategic nonviolence was in early 2006 when I – along with David Hartsough, the radical pacifist director of Peaceworkers – led a series of workshops at the World Social Forum in Caracas. There we lectured and led discussions on the power of nonviolent resistance as well as offered a series of screenings of a film ICNC helped develop on the pro-democracy movement in Chile against the former U.S.-backed dictator Augusto Pinochet. The only reference to Venezuela during those workshops was how massive nonviolent action could be used to resist a possible coup against Chavez, not foment one. In fact, Hartsough and I met with some Venezuelan officials regarding proposals that the government train the population in various methods of nonviolent civil defense to resist any possible future attempts to overthrow Chavez.

    • I very much like Stephen’s analogy of nonviolence training and the appropriate technology/green development movement:

    Just as sustainable agricultural technologies and methods are more effective in meeting human needs and preserving the planet than the conventional development strategies promoted by Western governments, nonviolent action has been shown to be more effective in advancing democratic change than threats of foreign military intervention, backing coup plotters, imposing punitive sanctions, supporting armed rebel groups, and other methods traditionally instigated by the United States and its allies. And just as the application of appropriate technologies can also be a means of countering the damage caused by unsustainable neo-liberal economic models pushed by Western governments and international financial institutions, the use of massive nonviolent action can counter some of the damage resulting from the arms trade, military intervention, and other harmful manifestations of Western militarism.

    Apparently, there will be some kind of action campaign in support of Gene Sharp and others. I Not in the article but in the letter, Zunes writes,

    I’ve recently posted an article which critically examines these claims that popular indigenous pro-democracy struggles and Western nonviolent activists who support them are somehow collaborators with U.S. imperialism… Among the things I address is the irony that so many on the authoritarian left ˆ after years of romanticizing armed struggle as the only way to defeat dictatorships, disparaging the potential of nonviolent action to overthrow repressive governments, and dismissing the notion of a nonviolent revolution — are now expressing their alarm at how successful popular nonviolent insurrections can be, even to the point of naively thinking that they are so easy to pull off that it could somehow be organized from foreign capitals. (One would think that Marxists would recognize that revolutions grow out of objective social conditions…)

    Anyway, I will shortly be sending all of you an open letter in support of Gene Sharp and other folks who do this kind of work I hope you will consider signing on to.

    When I get the link, I’ll post it here.

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    By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, Media Ethics, Peace and War, Politics

    Facing a tough race for his own seat in Congress, Dennis Kucinich is ending his presidential campaign.

    This is very unfortunate. I heard Kucinich speak during the 2004 campaign, happily voted for him in the primary, and was appalled to see the way mainstream media refused to acknowledge his candidacy.

    In fact, Kucinich and the similarly ignored Ron Paul are the only ones to raise any truly visionary ideas in this campaign (unless you count Huckabee’s idea to rewrite the Constitution as a Christian fundamentalist document–ugh!). Kucinich’s platform included single-payer health care, a dramatic shift toward renewable energy, and many other things we progressives have advocated for years–and which the mainstream media cloaks in invisibility, so candidates with something fresh to bring to the table get no coverage, and people have to hear about them through their own personal networks and brave media outlets like Democracy Now.

    I question the ethics of a media empire that decides which candidates we should listen to, sanitizes those remaining, and ducks out on intelligent coverage of real issues. The whole system is deeply broken.

    To me, Kucinich was the first person since George McGovern and Shirley Chisolm that I could vote for with a smile and a light heart, as someone who actually represents my views, and I wasn’t old enough to vote for McGovern.

    He and Ron Paul have been the only ones willing to speak truth to power. Gravel has good politics but he’s been reaaaaly quiet!

    The country is poorer for him being forced out.

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    By Posted on Posted in General Commentary, Peace and War, Shel's Personal Life

    When Richard Nixon’s secret list of “enemies” (very broadly defined) became public knowledge, I was much too young and unimportant to be included–and I confess I was a bit jealous of some of my older friends who made the list. And a few years later when I lived with a paid staffer for a leftist peace magazine, we were pretty sure our phone was tapped.

    But I discovered today that I have made it onto at least one more recent enemies list, put out by a Jewish right-wing hate site. 7000 of us, in fact, described by these modern-day McCarthyists as self-hating Jews. The language they use is racist, homophobic, and “my way or the highway.” The list includes celebrities like Woody Allen, most of the famous progressive rabbis I’m aware of, and even the very pro-Israel pundit Christopher Hitchens. My wife, who’s written an award-winning book whose protagonist is a Jewish teen who flees the ghetto of World War II to go live in a forest camp with partisans, makes the list by being married to me.

    I’m rather amazed. I get a whole paragraph about me, while my friend Stephen Zunes, who has published probably hundreds of articles opposing Israel, gets only his name. Stephen and I collaborated back in 1981 on a white paper outlining strategies for the US peace movement. It was never published, but I’m very glad to have gotten a chance to work with him.

    My crime? Saying publicly that I don’t necessarily think the “security fence” Israel is building is such a good idea. Just for the record, this is accurate. I’ve also said that I don’t think much of the similar fence the US is trying to erect to close off Mexico.

    If they’d dug a bit deeper, they might have found out that I spent much of my 20s writing and organizing around Middle East peace issues and have published articles about the Israeli peace movement, and that one of my websites contains several pro-peace articles.

    Fortunately, these people don’t run the wonderfully pluralistic societies of either Israel or the U.S. I shudder to think of what they’d do if they were in power.

    I thought about linking to their site, but I decided that I would not be benefiting the causes I support by giving them an undeserved link from a well-ranked site. Nor do I want Google’s computers to think that I endorse them in any way.

    Speaking of endorsements and link love–I was amused to see that my wife’s mention was linked to the Amazon page for one of my books (I presume it’s an affiliate link)–so these people are not above making a few shekels off the people they despise, although the book they chose to link to is actually out of print.

    I guess I’ll have to start blogging more on Middle East peace issues, in order to properly earn my place on the list (wink)

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    By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, Peace and War, Politics

    By now, everyone’s probably heard the news earlier in the week: not only did Iran stop pursuing its nuclear weapons program in 2003, but Bush knew this as far back as August–even though he was still claiming otherwise as recently as Tuesday

    ABC put it like this:

    “I was made aware of the NIE last week,” Bush said Tuesday. “In August, I think it was [Director of National Intelligence] Mike McConnell came in and said, we have some new information. He didn’t tell me what the information was; he did tell me it was going to take a while to analyze.”

    However today the White House is saying the President was told much more…

    [White House press secretary Dana] Perino stated Bush had been told in August that Iran suspended it’s covert nuclear weapons program.

    Meanwhile, Bush, Cheney et al. are still beating the drums of war against Iran. Isn’t it time to beat the drums for impeachment, instead?

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    By Posted on Posted in Peace and War, People Helping People

    Bassam Aramin lost his daughter in January. Bassam is Palestinian; his daughter was killed by the Israeli army.

    Most people would seek revenge–especially someone with Bassam’s background. He spent seven years in an Israeli jail, for terrorism.

    But Bassam, and the small group of people he works with on Israeli-Palestinian relations, understands that more violence doesn’t bring his daughter back.

    Bassam is a co-founder of Combatants for Peace, a remarkable group that brings people together on both sides–not just bystanders or even activists, but people who formerly participated directly in continuing the violence.

    Bassam has a beautiful essay in the Jewish Daily Forward: “A Plea for Peace From a Bereaved Palestinian Father.” I urge you to read it.

    Here’s a little piece:

    I will not rest until the soldier responsible for my daughter’s death is put on trial, and made to face what he has done. I will see to it that the world does not forget my daughter, my lovely Abir.

    But I will not seek vengeance. No, I will continue the work I have undertaken with my Israeli brothers. I will fight with all I have within me to see that Abir’s name, Abir’s blood, becomes the bridge that finally closes the gap between us, the bridge that allows Israelis and Palestinians to finally, inshallah, live in peace.

    I heard some members of Bassam’s group, a former Israeli soldier and a former Arab terrorist (not Bassam) just days after Abir Aramin was killed, and I was deeply moved by their story of seeking peace even as their own hands had built the violence. Here’s the report on that event.

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    By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, Peace and War, Politics

    Astounding! In a speech made in 1992, Dick Cheney, then Secretary of Defense under the first George Bush, outlined all the reasons why a ground war in Iraq to force out Saddam would be a really dumb idea.

    Sadly, all his predictions came true in the present war. I am once again grateful to Democracy Now for digging this up. And if you go to the link above, you can actually hear Cheney say this.

    AMY GOODMAN: As we talk about how President Bush and Vice President Cheney made the case for war in Iraq, I want to turn to comments made by Dick Cheney in September of 1992. At the time, he was President George H.W. Bush’s Secretary of Defense. During an address at the Economic Club of Detroit, Cheney was asked why the United States didn’t bury Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War. This is how he responded close to fifteen years ago.

    DICK CHENEY: At the end of the war in the Gulf, when we made the decision to stop, we did so because we had achieved our military objectives — that is, when we decided to halt military operations. Those objectives were twofold: to liberate Kuwait and, secondly, to strip Saddam Hussein of his offensive military capability, of his capacity to threaten his neighbors. And we had done that.

    There is no doubt in my mind, but what we could have gone on to Baghdad and taken Baghdad, occupied the whole country. We had the 101st Airborne up on the Euphrates River Valley about halfway between Kuwait and Baghdad. And I don’t think, from a military perspective, that it would have been an impossible task. Clearly, it wouldn’t, given the forces that we had there.

    But we made a very conscious decision not to proceed for several reasons, in part because as soon as you go to Baghdad to get Saddam Hussein, you have to recognize that you’re undertaking a fairly complex operation. It’s not the kind of situation where we could have pulled up in front of the presidential palace in Baghdad and said, “Come on, Saddam. You’re going to the slammer.” We would have had to run him to ground. A lot of places he could have gone to hide out or to resist. It would have required extensive military forces to achieve that.

    But let’s assume for the moment that we would have been able to do it, we got Saddam now and maybe we put him down there in Miami with Noriega. Then the question comes, putting a government in place of the one you’ve just gotten rid of. You can’t just sort of turn around and away; you’ve now accepted the responsibility for what happens in Iraq. What kind of government do you want us to create in place of the old Saddam Hussein government? You want a Sunni government or a Shia government, or maybe it ought to be a Kurdish government, or maybe one based on the Baath Party, or maybe some combination of all of those.

    How long is that government likely to survive without US military forces there to keep it propped up? If you get into the business of committing US forces on the ground in Iraq to occupy the place, my guess is I’d probably still have people there today, instead of having been able to bring them home.

    We would have been in a situation, once we went into Baghdad, where we would have engaged in the kind of street-by-street, house-to-house fighting in an urban setting that would have been dramatically different from what we were able to do in the Gulf, in Kuwait in the desert, where our precision-guided munitions and our long-range artillery and tanks were so devastating against those Iraqi forces. You would have been fighting in a built-up urban area, large civilian population, and much heavier prospects for casualties.

    You would have found, as well, I think, probably the disintegration of the Arab coalition that signed on to support us in our efforts to eject the Iraqis from Kuwait, but never signed on for the proposition that the United States would become some kind of quasi-permanent occupier of a major Middle Eastern nation.

    And the final point, with respect to casualties, everybody, of course, was tremendously impressed with the fact that we were able to prevail at such a low cost, given the predictions with respect to casualties in major modern warfare. But for the 146 Americans who were killed in action and for their families, it was not a cheap or a low-cost conflict. The bottom-line question for me was: How many additional American lives is Saddam Hussein worth? The answer: Not very damn many. I think the President got it right both times, both when he decided to use military force to defeat Saddam Hussein’s aggression, but also when he made what I think was a very wise decision to stop military operations when we did.

    So why, knowing exactly how things were going down, did Cheney push this idiotic war?

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    By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, Peace and War, Politics

    Not a good day for news.

    In Pakistan, Musharaf has declared a “state of emergency” akin to martial law, apparently because he’s worried that the courts would rule he was not a qualified candidate in the recent presidential election because he kept his post as head of the military.

    In Venezuela, Hugo Chavez–who can sometimes be a very class act, as when he offered heating assistance to Boston’s poor a few years ago–is also trying to grab more power. I don’t like it when the culprit is on the left any more than when it comes from the right.

    Meanwhile, the Mexican state of Tabasco is appealing for aid after massive flooding that left 500,000 homeless and 80,000 trapped.

    And two key liberal democratic US Senators, Feinstein and Schumer, say they’ll support Mukasey’s nomination as Attorney General even though he wont repudiate waterboarding (and then the Democrats wonder why I turn down their fund appeals). Leahy at least is strong enough to say he will vote no.

    About the only bright spot is Guatemala’s surprise rejection of the military strongman who was expected to win the presidency.

    All this in today’s five minutes of news headlines from Democracy Now. And where is the mainstream US news?

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    By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, General Commentary, Peace and War, Politics, Social and Economic Justice

    Forgive me if I can’t work up too much sympathy for Justice Clarence Thomas. I didn’t find him credible during his confirmation hearings with his “poor, pitiful me” bit, and I don’t find him credible now, as I read about his new book.

    And I always found it incredibly distasteful that he had the chutzpah to claim that being asked some questions about allegations of grossly unsuitable behavior–sexual harassment of an employee, in fact–was in the same category as a lynching. Just because you’re black doesn’t mean you get lynched if people ask you some tough questions. Questions that you still haven’t really ever answered in a meaningful way.

    Thurgood Marshall, a man who truly deserved the term “Honorable” in front of his name, with a distinguished career not only as a jurist but earlier, as a lawyer, must be throwing up. (Marshall, you may not know, was one of the attorneys who argued the landmark desegregation case Brown v. Board of Education before the Supreme Court. And Thomas inherited his seat on the Court.)

    Ruth Marcus in the Washington Post cites a large pile of evidence that Thomas does not have clean hands in the Anita Hill matter–and cites his own words from the book to prove that he’s still just as angry, arrogant, and completely clueless as ever.

    This is his own words about actually getting confirmed:

    “Mere confirmation, even to the Supreme Court, seemed pitifully small compensation for what had been done to me.”

    Sorry, Clarence, but you’re way off base. The Senate had the right and the duty to ask questions, and should have asked a lot harder ones about your views of the Constitution. Maybe if they had, we wouldn’t have been stuck with an extremist like you.

    And if today’s Congress was more willing to ask similarly hard questions, we might not be fighting an illegal and unprovoked war in Iraq, we might still have some standing in a world community that increasingly sees the U.S. as a “rogue state,” and we might have found out who actually won the last two Presidential elections, both of which are shrouded in a veil of mystery and deceit.

    If Clarence Thomas wants to take his toys and go home, fine. But don’t look to me to agree that he’s been done wrong.

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    By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Frugality/Frugal Fun, Peace and War, People Helping People, Shel's Personal Life

    I’ve had the good fortune to meet many people over the years who’ve truly made a difference in the world. I met another one today, in a nursing home in Bellingham, Washington.

    Bob Luitweiler is 87 and ill with cancer–but he still talks about the alternative school he’d like to start. He demands a lot from his visitors: hearty, probing conversation that goes deep about personal lives and about the state of the world, punctuated by references to various books and magazines that surround his sickbed. He sprinkles his conversation with several snippets of other languages, and we have a long talk about whether to be optimistic that people will come out of their self-centered cocoons in time to avert the coming environmental crisis (I’m more optimistic than he is)–and about life in the post-Word War II, pre-NATO Denmark of alternative folk schools, peace, community, and an excellent safety net.

    Bob is the founder of Servas, an international traveler/host network that fosters peace through international communication. As a member of this organization since 1983, I have enjoyed fabulous times both as a traveler and a host–and when our host offered to bring us over, I was delighted. It has made traveling not only much more affordable, but also much more of an experience of abundance (I strongly recommend this organization–here’s an article I wrote about the basic concept, and another describing ten of my favorite homestay moments–scroll down past the response to 9/11 article). Servas was started as a peace organization after Bob (who has been to 53 countries and speaks something like seven languages) experienced that remarkable culture of Denmark in the days following World War II, and now offers no-cost homestays in over 140 countries. We’ve enjoyed this very special way of travel in four different continents so far, including stays in Paris, London, Prague, Athens, Jerusalem, Mexico City, Los Angeles, Chicago, and numerous small towns, backwoods cabins, and more.

    Knowing that he was ill, I expected we’d visit for 20 or 30 minutes–but Bob didn’t want to let us go. He seemed thrilled to have a deep conversation, and when we finally excused ourselves after an hour and a half, he was deeply disappointed. He said he wanted to know us better and asked if we could come back another time before we leave the area. (Postscript: he called the following morning to tell us that our visit had been “the greatest gift of the last six months.”)

    Clearly, this man who has accomplished so much has a lot more he’d like to do before his time is up.

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