text:
Can Anne Hathaway Help End the Mindset That Creates Wars?
"If others have their will Ann hath a way. By cock, she was to blame. She put the comether on him, sweet and twentysix. The greyeyed goddess who bends over the boy Adonis, stooping to conquer, as prologue to the swelling act, is a boldfaced Stratford wench who tumbles in a cornfield a lover younger than herself." —James Joyce
Can it matter that a famous actress will play a drone pilot on stage in New York and play it as a troubled murderer with an updated effort to wash out the damn spot of blood on her famous hands?
With permanent war declared the norm and entirely acceptable, only a generation removed from wisdom and understanding, hadn't we better hope so?
April 7 to May 17, Anne Hathaway stars in Grounded. I've read the script, or at least an earlier version of the script, and believe this could make the difference that's needed.
Of course this other movie about a troubled drone pilot has come and gone.
Real life troubled drone pilots have tried to be heard.
The patterns of stress and suicide have been documented. Moral injury and post-traumatic stress plague the desk-bound flight-suited pilots at Creech Air Force Base where the commander told a reporter he was surprised by and unable to meet the demand for counselors and chaplains.
One proposed solution is allowing a drone pilot to instruct a computerized personality, like Siri in iPhones, to do the killing for him or her. A better solution might be to deprive President Obama of that trick. When he goes through his Tuesday list of men, women, and children and picks which ones to have murdered, he doesn't have to do the murdering. Presidents spend countless hours visiting all kinds of workplaces and taking part in all variety of ceremonies; why not require that they take a brief shift at the drone joystick when the victim has been spotted and fire the missile themselves, and watch the body parts scatter themselves, and see the little children who were in the wrong place blown to bits themselves, and feel the sweat and the guilt themselves?
Perhaps the next best thing will be seeing a celebrity, whom people imagine they know, play the role of drone pilot on stage. Anne Hathaway has acted in many films and plays but is familiar even to people who've seen none of them. Seeing her in Grounded has the potential to cause people to engage in the activity that seems the absolute hardest to provoke, namely thinking.
Grounded won't give you the statistics on how most of the people murdered with drones are no threat to the United States at all, or how drone murders are producing more enemies than they kill, or how the idea that a drone war on Yemen is better than another kind of war falls apart when you realize that the drone war replaced no war at all and has now predictably generated a ground war as, in fact, some of us predicted it would.
Grounded won't tell you that most drone victims are traumatized by the constant threat of instant death with no possible defense. But it will show us what that godlike power does to those who use it. The problem with drone murders is not the distance or the lack of bravery and risk; the problem is the murdering of people. Drone pilots see their victims in new ways, via video, and see them for days or weeks before murdering them.
The transition from mass-murderer to civilian living peacefully in a society that forbids murder must happen every single day for a drone pilot who drives home to sleep. One can imagine how disorienting the shift must be. It should become equally jarring for those of us who live peaceful lives and then read about the latest murders in our names by distant flying robot death machines.
Here's one way to help if you're anywhere near New York: attend the play and while you're there, collect signatures on this petition: BanWeaponizedDrones.org.
Yemen News - Mar 27, 2015
Saudi Arabia threatens ground invasion of Yemen - Telegraph
Yemen conflict poised to escalate as Egypt prepares to send in troops - The Guardian
GCC statement: Gulf countries respond to Yemen developments - The National
VIDEO: Saudi Arabia-led coalition strikes at Houthi targets in Yemen - YouTube
Sudan confirms joining Saudi-led Yemen operation providing ground troops as well as warplanes - Yahoo News
Turkey's Erdogan Turkey expresses support for anti-Houthi operation in Yemen, says can't tolerate Iran bid to dominate Middle East - Daily Mail Online
Arab League pledges full support for Saudi-led campaign in Yemen - Yahoo News
Arab foreign ministers agree on joint military force: Arab League chief - Yahoo News
Saudi Ambassador: Iran Revolutionary Guard, Hezbollah Advising Yemen Rebels - ABC News
Yemen Rebels Protest Saudi-led Airstrikes - VOA
VIDEO: Houthi protesters denounce Saudi Arabia over airstrikes - YouTube
Houthi Official: Yemen Strikes By Saudi Arabia Will Set Off 'Wide War' - huffingtonpost.com
VIDEO (English): Houthi spokesman: `This aggression unlawful and unjustifiable` - YouTube
Thousands of Houthis Concentrated Along Yemen-Saudi Border - Sputnik International
Yemen's former president Ali Abdullah Saleh seen pulling strings as rebels advance - Yahoo News
Houthi Leader Abdul Malik Al Houthi: The Shiite Thorn on Yemen's side - albawabaeg.com
Houthi Who?: The History of Houthi Alliances - Foreign Affairs
VIDEO (Documentary): The Rise of the Houthis - journeyman.tv
ARCHIVE: The Huthi Ascent to Power - Middle East Institute
U.S. Backs Saudi-Led Yemeni Bombing With Logistics, Spying - Bloomberg Business
Officials: Saudi-led action in Yemen relied heavily on U.S. intelligence - The Washington Post
US weighs tanker and radar planes for Saudi Yemen op - Business Standard News
Statement by NSC Spokesperson Bernadette Meehan on the Situation in Yemen - The White House
The United States favors a negotiated solution in Yemen but understands Saudi concerns that led to military action: State Dept - yahoo.com
How U.S. weapons will play a huge role in Saudi Arabia's war in Yemen - The Washington Post
Two U.S. Warships Ready to Respond if Needed in Yemen - nationalreview.com
Pentagon loses track of $500 million in weapons, equipment given to Yemen - The Washington Post
Iran-backed rebels loot Yemen files about U.S. spy operations - LA Times
EU's Mogherini says military action not a solution in Yemen - Yahoo News
Statement of the EU High Representative and Vice President Federica Mogherini on the situation in Yemen - European Union
Russia's Putin to Iran: Immediate ceasefire needed in Yemen - Yahoo News
Comment by the Russia Foreign Ministry on the situation in Yemen - MFA of Russia
China urges all Yemeni parties involved to resolve the dispute through political dialogue - Yahoo News
Yemen war clouds raise dangers for top oil shipping route - Reuters
Why Bombing the 39th Biggest Oil Producer Is Roiling Markets - Washington Post
Oil leaps 5 percent, most in a month, on air strikes in Yemen - Reuters
US doesn't want to see a threat to the Bab-el-Mandeb strait that could affect the security of the Suez Canal - The National
U.S. will work to ensure Bab-el-Mandeb strait remains open: U.S. general - Yahoo News
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Hillary As Hawk
By Paul W. Lovinger
In her book Hard Choices, Hillary Clinton admits having wrongly voted as senator to give President George W. Bush a free hand to attack Iraq. But she offers no apology for her many other bellicose choices.
Mrs. Clinton recently rebuked the Senate Republicans who signed an open letter to Iran that belittled President Obama's efforts to negotiate a nuclear agreement with the Iranians. A year earlier, she said the odds of reaching a comprehensive deal were "not good" and, even if it were reached, she was "personally skeptical that the Iranians would follow through and deliver." We can be skeptical that she has really softened her hard line.
During the 2008 presidential campaign, she called Senator Obama "irresponsible and frankly naïve" for promising to talk soon to Iran. Asked later on TV how she would respond to a (hypothetical) Iranian nuclear attack on Israel, she said,"I want the Iranians to know that if I'm president, we will attack Iran…. We would be able to obliterate them." She said nothing about getting Congress's prior approval for her war of obliteration, let alone preventing war by peaceful settlement with Iran.
Obama rejected what he called her "saber-rattling" a la Bush. But once he became president, he appointed her secretary of state.
As secretary, 2009 to 2013, Mrs. Clinton advocated escalating the Afghan war and bombing Syria for its (alleged and unproven) use of chemical weapons. Although unsupported by either the Pentagon or the intelligence community, she pushed intervention in Libya, accusing its leader, Muammar Qaddafi, of (alleged and unproven) murderous intentions toward political opponents. Ultimately he and others were murdered in the wake of an attack by the U.S. and NATO in 2011. In the anarchic conditions that resulted, the U.S. ambassador, John Christopher Stevens, was killed the following year.
The article below appeared on many Internet sites in December 2007.
* * * * *
When Senator Hillary Clinton voted on October 11, 2002, to turn over to President George W. Bush the power that the Constitution vested in her and congressional colleagues to decide whether or not to wage war — or, quoting House Joint Resolution 114, whether an attack on Iraq was "necessary and appropriate" — she appeared to have a conflict of interest:
Her husband, Bill, was of course the former chief of the executive branch. And during her eight years as first lady, Mrs. Clinton never objected to Bill's eight wars, attacks, or interventions: in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Colombia, Haiti, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, and Yugoslavia. He bombed Iraq in 1993 soon after taking office, again in 1996, and from 1998 till he left office. For a time, he was dropping bombs on Iraqis and Yugoslavs simultaneously in 1999.
None of those acts of war were authorized by Congress. The House of Representatives even voted its opposition to the undeclared bombing war on the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, i.e. Serbia and Montenegro (4-28-99). Bill paid no attention and carried on his one-sided warfare for eleven weeks.
Mrs. Clinton had been instrumental in persuading Bill to attack Yugoslavia, according to multiple writers. Biographer Gail Sheehy wrote in "Hillary's Choice" (p. 345): "On March 21, 1999, Hillary expressed her views by phone to the president. 'I urged him to bomb [Yugoslavia].' " Bill was indecisive. She invoked the Holocaust, alluding to claims of mass killings by Milosovic and his men, and asked, "What do we have NATO for if not to defend our way of life?" (Originally it was to defend western Europe against a possible Soviet attack.) Days later the president gave the go-ahead for war, thereby usurping the constitutional prerogative of Congress.
The Milosovic-massacre tale (which Senator Clinton repeated in her 2002 Senate speech) was subsequently debunked by several European pathological teams. The Clinton-NATO air raids, however, killed a couple of thousand civilians. A year later Amnesty International charged that international law was violated by indiscriminate bombings.
Calls aggression defense
Speaking in behalf of the Iraq war resolution Senator Clinton praised her husband's bombing of Iraq and argued that "undisputed" facts linked Saddam Hussein to weapons of mass destruction, including a nuclear weapons program, and to ties to Al-Qaeda. But such a contention was indeed disputed by facts presented by the International Atomic Energy Agency, the Knight Ridder newspaper chain, buried stories in the leading papers, and many Internet sites. She denied that the resolution amounted to a rush to war, though it came from the White House, which had already decided to wage war on Iraq.
When Bush invaded Iraq in March 2003, Senator Clinton called it defense. Even after the supposed facts about WMD and terrorist ties were exposed as monstrous lies, the senator defended her vote for war, never renouncing it. She claimed it was just to support negotiation, but the resolution said nothing about negotiation. And she claimed she had been given incorrect intelligence, but cited no details. She opposed any timetable for withdrawal and advocated more troops and permanent U.S. bases in Iraq.
As of last September [2007], that supposed defensive war was estimated, by the British polling agency Opinion Research Business, to have taken 1.2 million Iraqi lives. [In January 2008, ORB revised its estimate to about 1.03 million Iraqis, both military and civilian.]
Even if the lies she fell for had been proven true, the senator's lack of concern for international law would still stand revealed. The Charter of the United Nations, which as a U.S. treaty has the force of law, says (in Article 2): "All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state...."
The North Atlantic Treaty — the basis for the organization that Bill Clinton, with his wife's encouragement, perverted from a defensive to an aggressive force — echoes that principle (in Article 1): "The Parties undertake ... to refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force in any manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations."
Furthermore, before there was a UN or a NATO, there was the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact of 1928, renouncing war as an instrument of national policy. It was used to convict Nazis of crimes against peace, and it remains in effect as a U.S. treaty.
Threatens Iran and others
Just as Senator Clinton accepted Bush and Cheney's fiction about danger from Iraq and supported the 2003 aggression against that country, she tends to accept their drive for an encore against Iran. At Princeton University in January 2006, she said, "A nuclear Iran is a danger to Israel, its neighbors and beyond. The regime's pro-terrorist, anti-American and anti-Israel rhetoric only underscores the urgency of the threat it poses."
In her own, anti-Iranian rhetoric, she threatened a nation that had not attacked anyone for centuries and that — U.S. intelligence now states — had given up its atomic bomb program three years earlier: "We cannot take any option off the table in sending a clear message to the current leadership of Iran -- that they will not be permitted to acquire nuclear weapons." Three months later, Bush used nearly the same expression when asked if he planned a nuclear attack on that country: "All options are on the table" (AP, 4-8-06).
Last September 26 [2007], Senator Clinton voted for a Senate resolution urging Bush to designate the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a major branch of the Iranian armed forces, as a foreign terrorist organization. She has echoed the proofless Bush charges of support for Iraqi insurgents (mostly Sunni) by Iran (Shiite).
She has refused to rule out presidential use of nuclear weapons, notwithstanding the 1996 World Court ruling that use of the weapons violates international humanitarian law because they blindly strike civilians and military targets alike. And she voted to end restrictions on countries violating the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Senator Clinton has called for more toughness on Syria and leftist regimes in Latin America, supported arms and training for various repressive dictatorships, opposed bans on land mines and cluster-bomb exports, and advocated even more military spending than Bush requested. More contributions from war contractors have reached Hillary for President than any competing campaign.
The senator boasts of her experience. She is indeed experienced in jumping to bellicose conclusions on the basis of meager facts and false information. If she wins, I expect her to follow the pattern of husband Bill in shooting from the hip in actions abroad, to ignore both the Constitution and international law, and to try to prove that a woman president can be just as warlike as any man.
Paul W. Lovinger, of San Francisco, has been a journalist, author, and activist with the War and Law League (http://warandlaw.org). His works include The Penguin Dictionary of American English Usage and Style.
Timeline: U.S. War Crimes & Resistance from People Living in the U.S. 2001–2015
Some of us remember what it was like to mobilize protest against the Bush regime right after 9/11. It's important to remember that even relatively small groups of dedicated people can have a disproportionate impact at times — and that things can change quickly for the better, and for the worse.
U.S. Wars of Aggression and Islamic Jihad:
Raed Jarrar speaking at U.S. Wars of Aggression and Islamic Jihad: What is the Danger, and How Should the Anti-war Movement Respond?
Spring Rising held a six-part Teach-In last week in Washington. Here is a dramatic talk by Raed Jarrar, who is of Iraqi and Palestinian descent, as he says, from Sunni and Shiite parents, making him a "Sushi." Raed works for the American Friends Service Committee as Policy Impact Coordinator.
U.S. Wars of Aggression and Islamic Jihad:
Raed Jarrar speaking at U.S. Wars of Aggression and Islamic Jihad: What is the Danger, and How Should the Anti-war Movement Respond?
Spring Rising held a six-part Teach-In last week in Washington. Here is a dramatic talk by Raed Jarrar, who is of Iraqi and Palestinian descent, as he says, from Sunni and Shiite parents, making him a "Sushi." Raed works for the American Friends Service Committee as Policy Impact Coordinator.
A world gone mad: Fear of Terrorism is Making Us Crazy, Especially in the US
By Dave Lindorff
When I lived in China, there was a story going 'round about a China Airlines flight in which both the pilot and the co-pilot had left the cockpit and then, on their return, found the door locked. They reportedly got a fire ax, and with the whole planeload of freaked out passengers watching, started wailing at the door. The co-pilot then turned, and seeing the panic developing, calmly drew the curtain across the aisle, hiding their work from view. The axe bashing continued until they broke the latch and got back to the controls.
Top 10 Reasons Bill Maher Is Not "Our Best Weapon Against ISIS"
10. This sort of argument for debunking Islam in the media as the best way to "defeat" ISIS/ISIL misses the fact that ISIS recruits from the United States make up almost certainly much less than 1% of recruits, so that 99% of the problem, even on its own terms, remains completely unsolved.
9. Even if failure to expose Islam and other religions as ancient myths lacking basis in reality were a significant cause of people joining ISIS, it would not approach the primary cause without which ISIS would not exist, namely U.S. violence in the Middle East. Explaining to would-be ISIS martyrs that there aren't really 72 virgins and isn't really a heaven couldn't possibly do as much to reduce ISIS recruitment as explaining to active and would-be members of the U.S. military that arming and bombing and drone-striking distant lands doesn't actually protect the United States but rather generates so much hostility against it that groups like ISIS produce full-length films imploring the U.S. military to attack it.
8. Of course religion is often a huge part of what motivates members of the U.S. military as well. Congressman Sam Johnson has introduced the "Preserve and Protect God in Military Oaths Act of 2015," to force cadets at the Air Force Academy to say "so help me God" in their oaths. Ted Cruz just announced his campaign for the U.S. presidency at Liberty University, where students learn to drone-murder for Jesus. What is "our best weapon" against that?
7. U.S. recruits to ISIS enamored of Muslim martyrdom could just as well have risked their lives preaching Islam in Alabama. Why choose to risk their lives attacking U.S. troops? The reason is not simply a variety of Islam. Rather it is alienation from the United States. Anwar Al-Awlaki was plenty Muslim when he supported U.S. wars. It was U.S. racism, bigotry, brutality, and militarism that drove him into opposition to the U.S. -- which tragically took the form of advocating violence.
6. Bill Maher pushes racism and bigotry, even concentration camps. The idea that such attitudes are the best response to Islamic hostility and violence is outrageously naive. Were Maher advocating inclusiveness and community at home and abroad, I might take seriously the idea that he was helping.
5. Who is the group to which "Our" is applied in the phrase "our best weapon"? As a human I want an answer to ISIS that works for people in the United States, Europe, Iraq, Syria, and the rest of that region, including Sunnis, and including members of ISIS. The idea that a new war on ISIS is going to repair the damage of the previous wars, which created ISIS, is sadly delusional (but if it leads President Obama to make peace with Iran, I'll take that result gratefully).
4. What is the "weapon" in "our best weapon"? When speech is understood as a weapon it ceases to be useful as speech. Religion is declining in the West and even in the United States, but thinking of those still clinging to it as wartime enemies is exactly the wrong way to advance that process. Thinking of an actual war that has numerous motivations as a struggle over religious beliefs will, likely as not, cause those sympathetic to one side or the other to adopt those beliefs or to hold them more firmly.
3. Highlighting stories of a small number of would-be U.S. recruits is propaganda aimed at instilling fear and suggesting a local presence and an actual threat from what is after all a small and very distant group of people.
2. Such propaganda hides actual motivations and causes. Causes hidden include: past wars on Iraq, sectarian divisions created by those wars, poverty and desperation, regional power grabs, international power grabs, the flow of weapons into the region (largely from the United States), the brutality and cruelty and incompetence of the government of Iraq, the weapons and trainers provided by the United States to the "moderate" groups that cease to be moderate or that surrender to those that are not. Motivations include: rage, hunger, fear, the desire for revenge, the desire to see the United States leave the region, the desire to achieve power or safety or riches, the profit motives of the weapons sellers and oil barons, and the belief that violence can be used to end violence.
1. Hiding the primary problems keeps us from seeing the primary solutions. Each of these steps would work wonders compared to telling U.S. television viewers that Islam isn't true: Ceasing to ship weapons to the region; urging an arms embargo on all parties; negotiating a ceasefire with all regional parties including Iran and Russia; sending in a major contingent of nonviolent peaceworkers and human shields, independent journalists, aid workers, and nonviolent activist trainers; providing reparations and aid on a Marshall Plan scale; negotiating a WMD-free Middle East. If those steps were being taken well, I'd be all for finding time to critique religions.
New poem by TCBH! poet in residence Gary Lindorff: This is the Planet
By Gary Lindorff
A bear saves a crow from drowning.
A baboon and a dog and a deer frolic in a field.
A little girl feeds the crows
And receives gifts from them in exchange.
This is the planet we are living on,
Not that other one that we are beating up.
Israel/Iran News - Mar 25, 2015
Obama: Recent Remarks by Prime Minister Netanyahu Dim Hope for End to Israeli-Palestinian Conflict - ABC News
VIDEO: Obama: Recent remarks by Prime Minister Netanyahu dim hope for a negotiated two-state solution (Part 1) - POLITICO
VIDEO: Obama: My dispute with Netanyahu is a policy difference that has great consequences for both countries and the region (Part 2) - You Tube
At the J-Street Conference White House Chief of Staff McDonough Says the Israeli Occupation 'Must End' - huffingtonpost.com
VIDEO: Obama's Chief Of Staff McDonough To J-Street Conference: Israel's "Occupation That Has Lasted 50-Years Must End" - YouTube
VIDEO: Obama's Chief Of Staff McDonough: Netanyahu comments 'very troubling' - YouTube
VIDEO: Obama Staff Chief McDonough's Full Speech to J Street's Conference - YouTube
U.S. Ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro Says Obama Administration Reevaluating Policy Toward Israel - huffingtonpost.com
James Baker to J-Street: Netanyahu Wrong on Iran, Palestinians - newsmax.com
Jeb Bush 'disagrees' with James Baker's position on Israel - The Washington Post
Netanyahu's Reelection Pushes J Street to Move the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict to the United Nations - Forward.com
At J-Street conference, chief Palestinian negotiator Erekat rejects Israeli claims that there is no partner for peace - timesofisrael.com
Tensions among U.S. Jews over Israel on display as Hillel leader pulls out of J-Street speech - The Washington Post
J Street U Students March on Hillel - Algemeiner.com
Analysis: Netanyahu may seek unity government as needed cure for a divided Israel - Fox News
Netanyahu Won the Israeli Election by Stealing Conservative Votes from Other Conservative Parties, Not Liberal Ones - huffingtonpost.com
Arab Leaders In Israel Turn Down Netanyahu's Apology - huffingtonpost.com
Abbas meets with Joint Arab List members, praises Arab vote - Israel News, Ynetnews
Gaza women take up arms for next Israel war - The Times
Israeli group's documentary accuses Hamas of training child soldiers - Fox News
Israel reportedly spied on Iran nuclear talks in effort to lobby Congress against deal - Fox News
VIDEO: Obama: U.S. briefs Israel on Iran nuclear talks, there will be "significant transparency" as the U.S. works a deal - Washington Post
Israeli minister warns French against 'bad accord' with Iran - Yahoo Maktoob News
In a letter 367 House members warn Obama on Iran - TheHill
Text of the letter to President Obama signed by 367 members of Congress - House Foreign Affairs Committee Democrats
U.S. Senate will vote on sanctions bill if there is no Iran deal - Reuters
As Cotton speaks, Code Pink activists surround him over Iran letter - arkansasonline.com
VIDEO: Code Pink interrupts Tom Cotton's Iran speech - POLITICO.com
Arab Press Harshly Criticizes Obama Administration On Iran Nuclear Negotiations, Accuses Him Of Turning Its Back On Arab Friends, Leading Region To Disaster - Right Side News
Top Iranians signal support for a nuclear deal - LA Times
Will R&D agreement seal the Iran deal? - Al-Monitor
Iran isn't providing needed access or information, IAEA says - The Washington Post
VIDEO: IAEA chief calls for beefed up verification of Iran's nuclear program - PBS
Iran Criticizes IAEA Snap Inspection Demand - VOA
Oil prices could fall further if Iran nuclear deal is reached - Vox
Progress in Iran talks puts oil traders on edge - FT.com
America and Iran 'taking part in joint military operations in Iraq', US providing intelligence from air to Iran-backed attack on Tikrit - Telegraph
US mulls air strikes for Tikrit offensive in which Iran has played a prominent role: Official - AFP
Iraq request for U.S.-led Tikrit air strikes 'imminent': diplomat - Reuters
Ahead of nuclear deal Iran expands regional 'empire' from Iraq to Lebanon, and Syria to Yemen - Reuters
Yemen is latest in string of victories for Iran - usatoday.com
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Talk Nation Radio: Margaret Flowers on Stopping the Trans-Pacific Partnership
Margaret Flowers is a Maryland pediatrician who currently serves as co-director of PopularResistance.org and is co-host of Clearing the FOG Radio. She has been fighting to stop fast track and the Trans-Pacific Partnership for more than three years. We discuss upcoming efforts to block passage of the TPP.
Total run time: 29:00
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Producer: David Swanson.
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Tsarnaev defense fails to ask hardest questions
Defense team for Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, (L-R) Miriam Conrad, Judy Clarke and Timothy Watkins walk into the federal courthouse.
Making enemies by droning on and on: It's Guilt that has US Military and Embassy Staff Fleeing Yemen Like Scared Rats
By Dave Lindorff
I'm the first to admit that I don't know all that much about Yemen, or about the Houthi rebels who have taken control of Sana'a, the ancient Arab country's capital, leading to the hasty evacuation of all US military forces (some 250 Special Forces personnel and the staff of the US embassy) from that country located at the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula.
A Liberal Lawyer Gives Up on Preventing Murder
Rosa Brooks' article in Foreign Policy is called "There is no such thing as peacetime." Brooks is a law professor who has testified before Congress to the effect that if a drone war is labeled a proper war then blowing children apart with missiles is legal, but that if it's not properly a war then the same action is murder.
Rosa Brooks has apparently come to see the problem with that distinction. How can a secret presidential memo in a drawer somewhere, that she and her colleagues have empowered to determine whether of not an action is part of a war, actually decide on the legitimacy of sending hellfire missiles into houses and restaurants, the behavior of futuristic gangsters on steroids?
But Brooks' solution is not to call murder murder and seek to end it. Rather she proposes to eliminate the distinction between wartime laws and peacetime laws by merging them, so that some of what's illegal in peacetime is just always illegal, and some of what gets a pass in wartime just always gets a pass (she actually only mentions the latter in any specifics). I suppose any simplifying proposal from a lawyer is a noble one, as it does eliminate work for the legal profession. But this is not a proposal to uphold the rule of law or to empower people with legal self-governance. This is a proposal to give up, to throw in the towel on civilization, to accept war as the norm, and to treat murder as a policy in need of constant monitoring and tweaking with reforms around the edges.
"A decade and a half after 9/11," Brooks writes, "the war on terror continues to open new fronts from Syria to Libya to Nigeria. And it's hard to see this changing under a Hillary Clinton or Jeb Bush administration. Perpetual war is unlikely to end in our lifetimes." If that knocked you down, please get back up and consider what's so flooringly awful about it. Because the U.S. government is waging endless war, we shouldn't try to stop it. Because it is proposing for its highest profile office for two years from now various hacks who will continue the permawar, we shouldn't try to stop it for two years or the next four or ever again.
"For much of human history," Brooks claims, "war has been the norm and peace has been the exception, though Americans have been largely blind to this reality. Foreign attacks on U.S. soil have been few and far between, and for most of U.S. history, the country's wars have been fought by a small and highly professionalized military, making them largely invisible to the bulk of the American population. . . . [A]s legal historian Mary Dudziak notes in her fine book War Time, 'It is only through forgetting the small wars that so much of American history is remembered as peacetime.'"
Yes but it is only through shortsightedness that U.S. writers can ignore the other 95 percent of humanity which is represented by governments that do not wage war to anywhere near the extent that Washington does -- as well as ignoring the 95% of human existence that was pre-history and pre-war. War has been sporadic in human existence since its creation, more absent than present. Nations that have known war have abandoned it. Japan is currently trying to maintain its second lengthy period of peace. War is not the norm in most countries. The proliferation of drones may, however, help it become so. That war is becoming the norm is an idea promoted even by the United Nations' reports on drones. The policy of drone murder in the United States has been allowed to remove war from public, legislative, judicial, or international oversight. The choice before us is whether to accept that and attempt the truly quixotic task of mitigating the damage, or whether to reject it as entirely unacceptable.
Brooks presents the contrast between war and peace standards quite well: "The police, for instance, can't just decide to bomb an apartment building in which suspected criminals lie sleeping, and they can't write off the deaths of innocent people as 'collateral damage.' In peacetime, the intentional destruction of private property and severe restrictions on individual liberties are also impermissible. Wartime turns these rules upside down. Actions that are considered both immoral and illegal in peacetime are permissible — even praiseworthy — in wartime."
But isn't it right to consider murder immoral and illegal? When the drone murders are stripped of the protection of "wartime" flags and music, doesn't it become obvious that they are counterproductive on their own terms as well as damaging to their victims, to our civil liberties, to the rule of law? Not to Brooks who wants to "develop better mechanisms to prevent arbitrariness, mistake, and abuse in targeted killings." Listen to that language. Try to distinguish an abusive from a non-abusive targeted killing, I dare you. I don't think it can be done in under 6 years of law school, and even then trouble sleeping at night might result.
Should we do away with the difference between laws of war and peace? Of course we should. But that means that the people in Guantanamo should have rights, not that you should lose yours. That means that people living far away should have rights, not that the local police should get to kill you with their war weapons. That means an end to secret torture prisons abroad, not the opening of new ones in Chicago. There should be one set of laws and it should include the nations' laws against murder. It should include the Kellogg-Briand Pact. It should include the U.N. Charter until a better institution replaces the U.N. It should include universal support for an independent International Court of Justice and International Criminal Court that prosecutes the crime of war, not just "war crimes."
The drones buzzing around the French nuclear plants seem to bother Brooks less than they do me. Perhaps the growing nuclear danger that lies in the proliferation of nuclear energy and weaponry can make the point. The reality is not that there is no such thing as peace time, but rather that there is no such thing as wartime. If permawar is allowed to continue, the human species that dumps $2 trillion into this greatest environmental destroyer every year, rather than into useful protection against real dangers, will cease to exist.
The Russian Military Asked Me to Publish Its Propaganda
On Friday, March 20th, I spoke at the University of the District of Columbia Law School in Washington, D.C., as part of a series of teach-ins about peace organized by SpringRising.org. While there, a young man in a suit with a Russian accent approached me. He gave me his card, which says at the top "Embassy of the Russian Federation." It identifies him as a Major and as The Air Attaché Assistant. His name: Alexsei G. Padalko. The card includes the address of the Russian Embassy in Washington, two phone numbers, a fax number, and a gmail email address. His name appears on lists of diplomats on the websites of the Russian Embassy and the U.S. State Department.
Alexsei bought one of my books, which I signed, but he said he had another he hadn't brought with him and wanted signed, and he wanted to discuss working together for peace. I said I'd meet him the next day at a coffee shop. When we met, he began talking about having information about Ukraine. He wanted to slip me articles already written and pay me to publish them under my name. He claimed a personal interest in peace and a desire to keep this secret from his employers. It was fine to email him, he said, but he'd have to give me the articles in person. I told him that I would not post articles as by me if not by me, and I would not post them with a pseudonym for someone working for the Russian (or American or any other) military, but if he wanted to give me information to report on under my name in articles I researched with multiple sources, I would keep the confidentiality of any source entirely. I, of course, had told him I wouldn't take any money for anything. And he didn't explain where the money would have come from. He said the information was not secret. He had no interest in using secret email. Nothing was less than above board, he said. But then why the secrecy? And who would be writing the articles? (This man's English was not up to the job.) I told him what I considered proper journalistic behavior and he expressed surprise and concern that I would bring up journalism since I was a blogger. Apparently a blogger is someone you can feed propaganda to, while a journalist is someone who's out to get you. I tried to tell him I was actually interested in communicating the facts about Ukraine to the U.S. public and that I thought that doing so would benefit both Russia and peace. We parted with the understanding that I would email him a time to meet in Washington, and that he would give me information that I could use as a reporter.
I gave it some thought. I could not believe that he was acting against the wishes of his employers. Where was the money to have come from? Who was writing the articles? Why so openly give me his card and meet with me? And what would he want known in the interests of peace that his employers wouldn't? No, he was doing his job. I decided that I would avoid any of the secrecy, and if he wanted to tell me anything that I could report he could do that openly. I would, of course, seek to confirm it with other sources, give the State Department its chance to comment, and report it.
Later that same day I emailed him this:
"I'd like to write an article on Ukraine that includes Russian points of view, regarding any of the following: the history of NATO expansion, the coup, Malaysian Flight 17, Crimea, recent conflict, U.S. and NATO allegations, possible peaceful resolution.
"If you or anyone you know can provide any perspective on the matter, please just email or call."
He replied:
"No problem, deal"
Late that night, I wrote:
"Also, would Ambassador Kislyak like to explain Russia's view of Ukraine on a radio show that airs on lots of stations? See http://TalkNationRadio.org I'm the host, and the shows are pre-recorded by telephone at the guest's convenience. An interview can be anywhere from 1 to 28 minutes. I recommend 28 minutes. I would simply ask him for his view of the situation in Ukraine and let him talk. You can just let me know a day and a time and a phone number."
Alexsei has not yet replied to that offer.
Now, I'd like to call the Russian Embassy's main number and ask to be connected to Alexsei and make sure it's the same person. But a friend warns me that doing so produces "meta-data" to be used in framing people with crimes. And I don't seriously doubt the man's identity.
I write this in order to protect myself from any misunderstanding or frame-up, and in order to offer my unsolicited advice to the Russian government: My friends, independent media and small media outlets that are interested in the truth and in considering your points of view are in that position because of their honesty. When you approach them with secrecy and money you ruin the opportunity to have information shared in a credible and effective way. I and countless other bloggers and freelancers who could never bring ourselves to write the Pentagon propaganda that passes for journalism in major U.S. newspapers are not on your team. We're on the side of truth and the side of peace.
Many of us are well aware of the lie that NATO and the U.S. told Russia upon the reunification of Germany to the effect that NATO would not expand eastward. We're outraged by the expansion to your borders. We condemn the U.S.-backed violent coup in Kiev. We denounce the Nazi and foreign-imposed government of Ukraine. We oppose the U.S. arms shipments, the U.S. "National Guard" now guarding the wrong nation, the war games, the baseless characterizations of Russia's behavior, the lies about your aggression.
But you can't fix lies about your aggression by behaving aggressively. If the truth is on your side, don't imagine that it can't be reported and understood at least by some.
I'm aware that most of the military commentators in U.S. media outlets are in the pay of the U.S. military or its private contractors or their think tanks. I'm aware that matters of life and death cause rash decisions. But I encourage you to openly publish your views and to send them to me and anyone else open to them. I encourage you to place guests on my and other radio shows. Don't give those who have twisted reality beyond recognition an excuse to accuse you of the same.
Iran News - Mar 23, 2015
Obama said Iranian negotiators have made concessions in nuclear talks, though not enough to seal an agreement - Bloomberg
In Video, Obama Address Iranian Youth in Celebration of the Persian New Year - NYTimes.com
VIDEO (Persian subtitles): Obama's address to the Iranian people in celebration of the Persian New Year - YouTube
Obama urges release of US prisoners in Iran - TheHill
Kerry to Iran: It's Time for Tough Decisions on Nuclear Program - VOA
CIA head: U.S. intel has 'robust' knowledge of Iran nuclear capabilities, Warns of 'tremendous' consequences if it decides to develop nuclear weapons - CNN.com
Lawmakers on Both Sides Push to Cut Funding for Iran Nuclear Deal - newsmax.com
AIPAC, Netanyahu Sabotaging Iran Deal - American Free Press
Text of Nuclear Weapon Free Iran Act of 2015 Approved by the Senate Committee - GovTrack.us
Iran President Rouhani says all nuclear issues can be resolved - kashmirmonitor.in
As crowd chants 'Death to America,' Khamenei backs nuclear talks - LA Times
UN sanctions emerge as possible Iran talks 'deal breaker' - Yahoo News
Draft Nuclear Agreement To Cut Iran's Centrifuges By 40%, At 6,000 For Decade - AP
France balks at the US-Iranian deal on five counts – not least with an eye on its Gulf ties - DEBKAfile
Israel reaches out to France about preventing what it considers an unfavourable nuclear deal with Iran - Reuters
Netanyahu: Israel May Accept Some Iran Centrifuges - Arutz Sheva
Saudi Arabia Says It Will Want Same Enrichment Rights as Iran if Nuclear Deal is Done - VICE News
Covert sabotage of Iran unlikely to end with nuclear deal - NYTimes.com
How a Nuclear Deal With Iran Could Affect Gas Prices - Boston.com
Tikrit assault stalls as Obama withholds U.S. airstrikes to avoid Iran ties, analysts say - Washington Times
CIA Director: Iran general 'destabilizing' efforts in Iraq as he advises Shiite militias battling Islamic State in the Tikrit offensive - ABC News
Iran general in Iraq 'whenever we need': Shiite militia chief - THE DAILY STAR
VIDEO: Iran Military & Iraq battle for Tikrit - PBS
US trains Iraqi forces as battle for Tikrit continues - Fox News
Petraeus: Iran, Not ISIS, Poses Most Significant Threat to Iraq - breitbart.com
The Iran-Saudi Arabia proxy war is heating up in Yemen - Business Insider
Pakistan Declines to Join Saudi Arabia's Anti-Iran Alliance - US News
U.N. Monitor Says Iran Is Worsening on Rights, Executions on the Rise - NYTimes.com
Saudi Arabia: Unprecedented spike in death penalty, half of the executions carried out so far this year were for drug-related offences - Amnesty International
Learn 10 brutal facts about Saudi Arabia's appalling human rights record - Amnesty International
A rare look inside a Saudi prison that showers terrorists with perks - The Washington Post
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Focus: Hillary Clinton - Mar 21, 2015
Trey Gowdy to Hillary Clinton lawyer: Turn over server to third party - POLITICO
Trey Gowdy Threatens Possible House Action if Hillary Clinton Doesn't Hand Over Her Server - TheBlaze.com
Text of the letter Select Committee on Benghazi Chairman Gowdy sent to Clinton's attorney - benghazi.house.gov
VIDEO: Chairman Of Benghazi Committee Ask Hillary Clinton To Release Servers Or Else - YouTube
State Department: No record of Clinton signing 'separation' form stating she turned over all official documents upon leaving office - Fox News
Emails sought of nearly a dozen U.S. State Department workers under Clinton - Reuters
U.S. State Dept. archives fewer emails than previously disclosed - Reuters
Hillary Clinton's State Department wanted to cut back on email saving duties - POLITICO
National Archives, union press State Department for answers over Clinton email - Fox News
It Could Take Up to 30 Years for Hillary Clinton's Emails to Reach the National Archives - GovExec.com
Feds argue they had no duty under FOIA to search Hillary Clinton's emails - POLITICO
Was Hillary Clinton running her own rogue intel operation? - Washington Times
Clinton's Keystone XL emails sought, ties to TransCanada lobbyist hit - WashingtonExaminer.com
Delay of Boko Haram Terrorist Designation Haunts Hillary Clinton, a Very Well-Heeled Donor May Have Influenced That Policy - PJ Tatler
Report: Hillary's Email Server Was in Danger of Being Hacked - newsmax.com
Expert: Clinton Emails Could Have Been Compromised By Third-Party Spam-Filtering Company - The Daily Caller
Exclusive: Jailed hacker Guccifer boasts, "I used to read [Clinton's] memos… and then do the gardening" - PandoDaily
POLL: Hillary Clinton Support Down 15 Points Among Democratic Voters, Many Democrats Want Independent Email Probe - Reuters
POLL: 54% Think Democrats Should Run A Fresh Face in 2016 - Rasmussen Report
VIDEO: Strong Clinton Supporters Are Worried About The Email Scandal - YouTube
Pelosi: GOP Will Investigate Clinton 'Whether It's Her Emails Or Hair' - CBS
Clinton Foundation donors while Hillary was Secretary of State had ties to foreign governments, report says - Fox News
Exclusive: Despite Hillary Clinton promise, charity did not disclose donors - Reuters
Rand Paul: Foreign donations to Clinton Foundation 'thinly veiled bribes', Hillary should return money from 'abusers of women's rights' - POLITICO
VIDEO: Rand Paul Urges Clinton to Return Foreign Money - YouTube
We asked Clinton donors why they gave. Here's what they said - WashingtonExaminer.com
How the Clintons' Haiti development plans succeed — and disappoint - The Washington Post
The Clinton Foundation and Haiti Contracts - WSJ
VIDEO: Haitians protest outside Clinton Foundation in New York over alleged loss of "billions of dollars" meant to help rebuild after the devastating 2010 earthquake - Washington Free Beacon
Role of Hillary Clinton's brother in Haiti gold mine raises eyebrows - The Washington Post
Hillary Clinton's Brother Defends Haiti Gold Mine Deal: 'I Raise Money for a Lot of People' - Breitbart
That time Bill and Hillary Clinton went to a voodoo ceremony in Haiti - The Washington Post
Politicians Could Use 'Camp For Adults' to Foster Bipartisanship, Hillary Clinton Says at the American Camp Association Conference - CBS
VIDEO: Hillary Clinton: We Really Need Camps for Adults, There is 'Fun Deficit' in America - YouTube
VIDEO: Hillary Clinton Full Keynote Speech to the American Camp Association Conference - YouTube
Hillary Clinton's 'fun deficit' is a real problem for poor kids - The Washington Post
Hillary's Speaking Fee Could Cost Non-Profit The Camp Association 10 Percent Of Its Budget - townhall.com
Hillary Clinton's unanswered questions on marriage equality - MSNBC
Hillary Clinton and the case of Chen Guangcheng, the blind dissident says Clinton's State Department pressured him to take a bad deal with the Chinese government - POLITICO
Hillary supporters launch 'Bill for First Lady' ad campaign (VIDEO) - New York Post
Welcome to the Clintons' $11 Million Dollar Mansion in New York State - UFP NEWS
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Opposing War With a Smile
Remarks at teach-in at Spring Rising event March 20, 2015, UDC Law School. Note: Rally at White House is noon, March 21.
More times than I can count, after I've given a speech about war and peace without tears in my eyes I've afterward been either blamed or credited with optimism. As in "What the hell are you so optimistic about?" or "Oh, I'm so glad you're optimistic." So, as our local Nobel Laureate would say, let me be clear: I am not an advocate for optimism, have no respect for it, and as a matter of fact deeply despise it. I once interviewed a real expert on both nuclear dangers and environmental collapse, someone I truly respect and learn from, and asked him if he thought we'd survive these twin dangers. Yes, he declared, no question. Why? Because, he said, if you watch movies they always end happily. I don't mean that as the unconscious explanation of his confidence. I mean that's what he said and repeated when I questioned him disbelievingly. Because Hollywood, not to mention novels, plays, cartoons, etc., tends to have happy endings, at least in our culture, so will our species. What? That, to me, is about as logical as Samantha Powers' claim that bombing Iraq will work out better if we pay less attention to how bombing Libya worked out. If Hollywood is an accurate portrayal of reality, then torture works, violence rarely traumatizes, and high-speed car chases through city squares rarely hurt anybody. Are we at the point of openly encouraging each other to be idiots? That's how I view optimism.
Now, when I oppose a U.S. war on ISIS, I'm generally accused of supporting an ISIS war on the United States. After all, if you're against one side you must be for the other side. So, when I oppose optimism, I'm generally accused of supporting pessimism. And yet, in reality, I view pessimism as optimism's evil mutant twin. And I view the knowing spreading of pessimism as treason against the universe. This is because I don't think one should work to prevent death and suffering for the purpose of enjoying success. When you do that, you end up working for peace only in those cases where success is guaranteed or highly likely to arrive fast. Now, I find struggling for peace and justice highly rewarding, but that has nothing to do with the occasional successes, the expectations of success, or of course the lucrative salaries. I find struggling for peace and justice an end in itself, as Camus' Sisyphus found rolling the rock up the hill a joyful fulfillment.
Optimism and pessimism seem rather beside the point, and a bit self-indulgent. And by that I do not mean that we should act without strategic consideration of most likely routes to success. What other way to act is there? If we can lessen the damage on one particular war ever so slightly, we absolutely must do so even if we'd rather be painting a detailed picture of what a world without the institution of war would look like. The choice between demanding alternatives to war, as two of the four witnesses at a Congressional Progressive Caucus event did this week, and urging a properly civilized and limited war as the other two witnesses did, is a strategic choice, not a question of personality or emotional preference or zodiacal sign. If we don't present alternatives, the logic of war-or-nothing will land us in war up to our necks.
I've met thousands of peace activists over the past many years, and I wouldn't wish away a single one of them. We need each to bring a thousand more into the movement. But I find that I, as a proselytizing atheist who longs for a world beyond religion as well as war, often tend to have the most appreciation for the religiously driven peace activists, and I believe we usually have the most to learn from them. Why would this be? Well, for one thing, they tend not to be driven by optimism or pessimism but by something else, which they might call God's distaste for war and I might interpret as their own distaste for war. In addition, they're not typically as driven by partisanship, but rather by that purer opposition to war. And further, they're not as likely to oppose a particular war while favoring others, but to see opposing one war as a step on the path to ending all wars. On top of which, they are likely to make a moral argument against killing the people who make up over 95% of the victims of U.S. wars, namely the people who live where the wars are fought.
And here's why I prefer that approach despite rejecting as archaic its fundamental premise: I think it's the most likely to work. A U.S. war was prevented in 2013 because too many people thought it sounded too much like the war that began in 2003. But no alternative was pursued because we hadn't communicated the possibility of taking an alternative approach to the world. So the masters of war bided their time, fueled the war with trainers and weapons, and launched the same war, albeit on the opposite side of the conflict, in 2014 when the propaganda was right. By that I mean the beheading videos, which were much like the beheadings done by Saudi Arabia and other U.S. allies, but these ones were used to manufacture consent for a military solution to a problem that everyone admits has no military solution although it does have a military origin.
When we wait for the right war, the right war always comes. And it is always the wrong choice.
War has a lot of new weapons these days. Who can tell me the single way in which war kills the most people? Just shout it out.
If you said through taking needed resources away from human needs you are correct, and if there's any justice we'll get President Obama's Nobel Prize transferred to you, because you've now done more than he has to earn it.
We like to get upset about the financial cost of war budgets. Yet the routine military budget, which is somehow considered non-war is typically 10 times the war budget. The solution to this is not an audit, not ending the slush-fund use of the war budget, and not ending the manufacture of weapons that don't work. The weapons that don't work are far preferable to the weapons that do work -- I mean if you're on the side of the victims rather than the executioners. The world spends about $2 trillion on war preparations each year, and the United States alone spends half of that. Meanwhile tens of billions could solve starvation, clean water, and other enormous problems, not just in a particular crisis zone but globally. That choice of how to spend unfathomable amounts of money is the top way war kills.
When we buy TV ads as one organization has just done, supporting diplomacy with Iran but falsely implying that Iran is trying to build a nuclear weapon and threatening to use it, and stating that the danger in a war on Iran is that Americans might die, we like to think we're being strategic. After all, people are selfish and stupid, and one must appeal to their selfishness and stupidity. I don't think so. If Iran were really trying to build a nuke and kill us all (including themselves of course) I'd be scared and lean toward distrust and be more likely to urge a tough approach. If a war to prevent the total destruction of Israel could really be prevented by risking a handful of U.S. deaths, I'd consider that brave and noble -- and I'd feel obliged to sign up. It matters when our rhetoric and the facts we tell and the facts we don't tell guide people away from the action we propose.
By the way, the new year in Iran begins at 6:45 and we apologize to anyone who couldn't be here for that reason. Sadly, there is a holiday for a different group of people any day we choose, and we have to schedule things as best we can.
Let's go back to 2013 for a moment. People and groups favoring peace, or at least a time-out from war, argued, in some cases, that investing in U.S. schools and roads and parks would be preferable to wasting our money on $2 million missiles for Syria. Smart and strategic, right? Appeal to selfishness in order to prevent what Seymour Hersh later exposed as a massive campaign to destroy Syria from the air. But humanitarian warriors were given an opening and they jumped through it. We must bomb Syria because we care about the Syrians, they said. Rejecting the argument that Iraqis had failed to be grateful for the destruction of Iraq, they proposed a generous and magnanimous, even friendly, launching of missiles into Syria for the good of the Syrians, and opposed that to the greed of people who wanted more, more, more at home -- isolationist irresponsible first-world ostriches. But of course wars cost very little compared to the base military budget that Congress now wants to increase to record heights, and yet even the war budgets could fund massive investment in human needs both at home and abroad. Why choose? And why allow a debate to go on in ignorance of the fact that non-Americans die in wars, thousands and thousands of them, women, men, children, and infants?
A week ago, the Washington Post ran a column claiming that a war on Iran was the best choice. Imagine the firestorm if they'd said that racism or rape or child abuse or cruelty to cats was the best choice. Nobody would have said "They print lots of columns against torturing kittens, would you stifle debate by censoring one column in support?" Some things are rightly put beyond the realm of acceptable behavior. Not war. On Wednesday, Human Rights Watch put out a report on events of last August 31st when U.S. and Iraqi air strikes "drove ISIS forces away from the town" of Amerli. No doubt, many people died and were maimed and traumatized (also known as terrorized) by those "air strikes," but that's just part of war, which it wouldn't be ethical for Human Rights Watch to question. What concerns Human Rights Watch is what began on September 1st. About 6,000 fighters for the Iraqi government and various militias moved in, with their U.S. weaponry. They destroyed villages. They demolished homes, businesses, mosques, and public buildings. They looted. They burned. They abducted. In fact they behaved exactly as troops taught to hate and murder certain groups of people had behaved in every previously recorded war. Human Rights Watch recommends that Iraq disband the militias and care for the refugees who have fled their wrath, while holding "accountable" those responsible for the documented violations of the "laws of war." Human Rights Watch wants the United States to establish "reform benchmarks." That ought to do it. The possibility of ending participation in the war, creating an arms embargo, negotiating a ceasefire, and redirecting ALL energy into aid and restitution doesn't arise in reports on the proper and civilized if illusory conduct of mass murder.
What if we're trying to fix something that can't be fixed? What if we're asking rapists to wear condoms? Are there not things that should be ended rather than mended because they cannot be mended? Think of fossil fuel use or health insurance corporations or the death penalty or the prison complex or the United States Senate. If your children don't recite the pledge of allegiance will they be in danger of devoting their lives to the Soviet Union? Does altering the hand position to look less Nazi make the pledge non-fascist? Don't some things outlast their usefulness? The Bible verses cited to prove that climate change isn't real may have once served a purpose. Perhaps war did too.
The Strategy Committee of World Beyond War, led by Kent Shifferd, has produced a document that I have learned a lot from. It's called A Global Security System: An Alternative to War, and it begins thus:
"In On Violence, Hannah Arendt wrote that the reason warfare is still with us is not a death wish of our species nor some instinct of aggression, '. . . but the simple fact that no substitute for this final arbiter in international affairs has yet appeared on the political scene.' The Alternative Global Security System we describe here is the substitute. The goal of this document is to gather into one place, in the briefest form possible, everything one needs to know to work toward an end to war by replacing it with an Alternative Global Security System in contrast to the failed system of national security."
When we look at a rational proposal like this new book from World Beyond War, our first reaction should not be to choose optimism or pessimism. Many people look at the relentless presence of war despite all rational arguments and resign themselves to the idea that humans are driven by primitive primate inclinations. The problem with pessimism is not about whether its adherents are right or wrong on some analysis, it is that they turn their analysis into defeatism. This is the process that blaming things on biology is part of. For the vast majority of the existence of the human species there was zero war. War, which for millennia was closer to a game of football than to a nuclear strike, has been sporadically and rarely present. Most countries are not at war most of the time, and most people take no part. In many countries, large majorities say they would never take part in fighting for their country. War requires more conditioning than any other behavior, and the results are more damage to participants than from any other behavior. Not one single person has ever suffered PTSD from war deprivation. And we pick this institution to excuse as inevitable and natural?
No, the case made in A Global Security System is that war cannot result from an individual's or a group's emotional inclinations. It requires long-term investment, planning, and preparation. And if we prepare for other means of avoiding and resolving conflicts then we will end up using those means. If we create a culture of peace, develop peace journalism, invest in peace planning, support systems of global law and dispute resolution, disarm the world of which the United States is the leading armer, send in peaceworkers rather than bombs, negotiate ceasefires rather than military alliances -- if we strengthen and reform and ultimately replace international structures with global, democratic, and nonviolent means of solving our problems, war will go the way of blood feuds, dueling, and colored bathrooms.
Big changes will be needed in our politics, our economy, our energy use, our culture, and in the stories we tell each other about the world. But these changes can come step-by-step and advance self-aware toward complete replacement of the war system with a peace system. Attempting such a change, which is in some ways well underway already, can hardly be less sensible than the knowing failure of war. A few weeks ago Time Magazine featured a debate on the war on ISIS. One side argued for U.S. ground troops while admitting it probably wouldn't solve anything. The other side argued for U.S. bombs and local troops, while admitting that it probably wouldn't work. This is beyond attempting the same thing and expecting a different result. This is attempting the same thing and expecting the same disastrous result.
We can do better.
Takin' it to the streets (and voting booth)!: Time to Demand Medicare for All and Social Security Benefits We Can Live On!
By Dave Lindorff
With Republicans now in control of both houses of Congress, the current president already on record as supported cuts in Social Security and Medicare, and all signs pointing to the likelihood that the 2016 election could bring us either a neo-liberal or a neo-conservative president, and an increasingly Republican-dominated Congress, it's time for an aggressive mass movement built around defending and expanding both those critical public funding programs.
By Kathy Kelly
By the time I leave Kentucky's federal prison center, where I'm an inmate with a 3 month sentence, the world's 12th-largest city may be without water. Estimates put the water reserve of Sao Paulo, a city of 20 million people, at sixty days. Sporadic outages have already begun, the wealthy are pooling money to receive water in tankers, and government officials are heard discussing weekly five-day shutoffs of the water supply, and the possibility of warning residents to flee.
This past year United States people watched stunned as water was cut off, household by household, to struggling people in Detroit, less due to any total water shortage than to a drying up of any political power accessible to the poor in an increasingly undemocratic nation. A local privatization scheme left the city water department underfunded, while dictatorial "emergency management" imposed by the state chose to place the burden of repaying a corrupt government's bad debt on Detroit's most impoverished people. U.S. people were forced to remember the guarantee offered by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, entered into as a treaty obligation by world nations after WWII, that access to water is an inalienable human right. All over the world, water scarcity is becoming a dire threat to the possibility of, as Prof. Noam Chomsky phrases it, decent human survival.
Faced with such news, it is perhaps odd that I think of Professor Yang Yoon Mo, a South Korean activist I have met who, far from any area of drought, has fought instead, and with beautiful and irrepressible courage, to save a small lush rocky outcropping ringed by ocean, and with it both the shoreline, and the hopes for a peaceful future, of his home village.
In 2008, Prof. Yang returned to Jeju island, having left a rewarding life as a famed artist and film critic in the capital, Seoul, to join protests against construction of a planned naval base on the shores of Gangjeong, a village in Jeju Island. Though described as part of South Korea's national defense, the base's dimensions are fitted to the massive size of United States nuclear submarines and Aegis destroyers, part, as Larry Kerschner notes, of a military buildup forming "a semi-circle of naval and other bases surrounding China," the United States' "Asia Pivot" away from focus on the Middle East and toward its traditional superpower rivals. Nobody in Jeju is to be made safer by the base.
Professor Yang Yoon Mo was born on Jeju in 1956, when it was already illegal for traumatized survivors there to mention the recent massacres. Under U.S. occupation between 1948 and 1952, the military government had killed tens of thousands of independence protesters and militants. After a half century of official silence, the South Korean government has apologized and erected a memorial on Jeju memorializing perhaps 14,000-30,000 people killed on Jeju Island alone, many in their prison cells, during a tragic time referred to locally as the April 3rd massacre. Many residents are understandably less than eager to welcome a U.S. military presence back to the island.
When he was born, Professor Yang's mother resolved to protect her son from the tragedy that had befallen her father and uncle, both killed in the massacres. She wanted to steer her son into a safe position in life, even if it meant becoming part of the government establishment.
But, at an early age, Professor Yang showed talent as an artist and he simply didn't "fit in" to the narrow, safe routes his mother's great fear for him dictated. As a teenager, he became fascinated by cartoons, including, to his mother's alarm, political cartoons, and he tried to correspond with mainland South Korean cartoonists. His mother interfered with his correspondence and took to destroying his art. He began to mistrust her and even hate her. Understanding has come to him, since. It was through extensive research and time for reflection, during a recent imprisonment, that he finally began to understand why his mother had wanted so badly to protect him. Among some families on Jeju Island, discussions of the past are still considered off-limits. But professor Yang steadily developed his artistic instincts and his readiness to step beyond borders of acceptable communication. As an artist, he found that his mission was to discover beauty, to protect it, and make it known to the world.
When I met him, he told me, "I have become someone who was willing to die for a rock."
In 2008, the Gureombi Rock was a kilometer-long volcanic outcropping rising stubbornly above the waves somewhat in the manner of a never-suppressed memory of injustice and lying squarely in the way of base construction. In 2008, after participating for 7 nights and 8 days in a pilgrimage to resist the construction, Prof. Yang decided to move to Gangjeong, and in 2009, he pitched a tent on the Gureombi Rock, an exquisitely beautiful, tiny island off the shore of Gangjeong, where he stayed until he was forcibly removed in 2011.
"I focused on Gureombi and not anything else," he told me. "I felt full devotion, full immersion, full absorption."
Over the coming years he would be imprisoned four times, for a total of 555 days. He almost has died. Along with his imprisonments Professor Yang, who is nearly sixty, has endured three prison fasts ranging in length from fifty to seventy-two days, refusing solid foods as a sign of his longing, his hunger, to protect the environment near his home. His most recent prison fast only ended when environmental and peace movement activists came to the prison to persuade him to continue working alongside them.
I visited Gangjeong, and met Professor Yang, in the spring of 2014. Taking a cue from organizers who have spent years protesting U.S. military bases elsewhere in the Pacific Basin, the activists in Gangjeong hold daily protests. Each morning, we would all assemble at the construction site gates, from which South Korean police would carry many of us away in our chairs to allow the passage of construction vehicles and crews to and from the site. Assemblies included Buddhist prayer chants, celebration of the Catholic daily mass and rosary recitation, dances of universal peace, songs and chants.
After several hours of spirited witness and protest, villagers and guests would go to the Gangjeong community kitchen, open seven days a week, 24 hours a day, and enjoy delicious meals together, accepting a free will offering. One afternoon, at the community kitchen, most of the activists had finished their lunch and left when I noticed a slight, unassuming man slipping into the dining hall, fixing himself a tray, and sitting down to eat, alone. I recognized Prof. Yang from the banners and posters that lined roadways up to the construction site and adorned the village community center, the library and the coffee house. His most recent imprisonment had lasted 435 days.
Along with Professor Yang, I met his friend and mentor, Brother Song, a Mennonite minister who, while the Gureombi Rock still stood, nonviolently resisted its destruction by attempting to swim to it, every day. Security posted at the site would roughly throw him back into the water every day, but Brother Song was undeterred.
The protests continue, the kitchen is still open, while inside the construction site, crews assault Gangjeong's beautiful shoreline. Day and night, the South Korean government, in collusion with major companies like Samsung and Hyundai, deploys "construction" crews to rip up plant life, destroy coral reefs, bulldoze and explode entire small islands, threatening the way of life that villagers have long preserved, and arming the United States for cold war competition with China. Sasha David, at the start of his book The Empire's Edge (p.7) writes that the U.S. military buildup in the region "is less about being able to defeat China militarily (that is already possible) and more about leverage in being able to dictate terms of trade in the region."
Gureombi rock is gone from its place on the Jeju coastline. The base plans required its complete demolition: It can no longer be seen.
"Gureombi is inside of me," says Prof. Yang.
Professor Yang Yoon Mo said that earlier in his life, he would have felt defeated after destruction of the Gureombi Rock and the continued construction of the naval site. Now, he says, he realizes that the purpose for peace and environmental action continues, and he is excited to continue envisioning demilitarized islands working together for peace and environmental protection. When I last met him, along with Brother Song, it was in Seoul, South Korea, upon Professor Yang's return from a conference, held in Okinawa, Japan, uniting island activists throughout the region. They were coordinating future plans, and Professor Yang Yoon Mo said that he could even contemplate a fifth imprisonment if it would help broaden and diversify the movement.
I don't think Gureombi is gone, with the way it has changed Prof. Yang, and his community, and incidentally me. We're not permitted to ignore the beauty and hope of the present. If we close our eyes we can put ourselves in an all-too-plausible future where our resources are gone, and the human community, and the world is already barren, and by implication not worth working to save. That's when we need to become someone willing to live and work for a rock.
Back at home, and growing in part out of Occupy Sandy's grassroots humanitarian response to the recent climate-driven disaster in New York, the Detroit Water Brigade has responded to its own city's horror both with political agitation and water distribution programs. They're posting on their sites about Sao Paulo. Prof. Yang's sometime mentor, the activist Bruce Gagnon writes: "From the point of view of corporate capital we are all expendable. We are not going to defeat these corporate forces by remaining isolated inside our single-issue silos ... There is a direct connection between the massive $1 trillion a year Pentagon budget [ ] and the destruction of social progress. There is a direct connection between the military's huge carbon bootprint and climate change." The swim to our neighbor islands will tend to be part of saving our own.
Living, as I briefly do, in a world of imprisoned beauty, on an island inside that archipelago of U.S. prisons so unacceptably similar to that of our old superpower rival, it's no wonder I'm thinking of Prof. Yang Yoon Mo. What we do to the environment, we're doing to each other. What we let our state impose on those walled beyond our borders we will tend to inflict on more and more people walled up within them, until there is no world of beauty left to keep safe for our own use, and no trust left on which any safety can be built. Until it all dries up. Whereas if we recommit to risk and beauty, refusing paths of alleged safety which only avoid temporary danger by leading us toward certain doom, if we seek our security in treating other people fairly, we may find our way to decent lives, along the way toward "decent human survival."
This article first appeared on TeleSUR.
Kathy Kelly, co-coordinator of Voices for Creative Nonviolence (www.vcnv.org) is in federal prison for participation in an anti-drone protest. She can receive mail at: KATHY KELLY 04971-045; FMC LEXINGTON; FEDERAL MEDICAL CENTER; SATELLITE CAMP; P.O. BOX 14525; LEXINGTON, KY 40512.
Poetry of Sorrow and Hope
David Krieger's new book of poems―Wake Up!―shows us that poetry engaged with world affairs can be very powerful.
In a brief introduction to the book, Krieger―the president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and the author of several previous volumes of poetry―remarks that people who write poetry after Auschwitz, as well as after Hiroshima, Nagasaki, wars, and threats of universal death, must not only "confront the ugliness of human brutality," but "express the heart's longing for peace and reveal its grief at our loss of decency." He adds: "They must uncover the truth of who we are . . . and who we could become." In this slender volume, Krieger succeeds brilliantly at this task.
Seven Just Arrested Using Giant Books to Close Drone-Murder Base
From Mary Anne Grady:
At 9:15 am on March 19, the 12th anniversary of the U.S.' illegal invasion of Iraq, seven members of the Upstate Coalition to Ground the Drones and End the Wars shut the main gate of the Hancock Drone Base (near Syracuse, NY) with a giant copy of the UN Charter and three other giant books – Dirty Wars (Jeremy Scahill), Living Under Drones (NYU and Stanford Law Schools), and You Never Die Twice (Reprieve).
The nonviolent activists also held a banner quoting Article 6 of the U.S. Constitution, stating that every treaty signed becomes the supreme law of the land. They brought the books to Hancock to remind everyone at the base of the signed treaties that prohibit the killing of civilians and assassinations of human beings.
The group attempted yet again to deliver a citizens indictment for war crimes to the Hancock Air Base chain of command. In the indictment, the activists state, "There is hope for a better world when WE, THE PEOPLE, hold our government accountable to the laws and treaties that govern the use of lethal force and war. To the extent that we ignore our laws and constitution and allow for the unchecked use of lethal force by our government, allowing the government to kill who ever it wants, where ever it wants, how ever it wants with no accountability, we make the world less safe for children everywhere."
One of the giant books, Living Under Drones: Death, Injury, and Trauma to Civilians from US Drone Practices in Pakistan, states that such missions are responsible for the deaths of hundreds of noncombatants, including women and children, in that region.
One of those arrested, Fr. Bill Pickard of Scranton, PA, stated, "The Reaper drone not only kills and maims humans; it destroys homes and displaces and terrorizes whole communities. U.S. taxpayers pay for such terrorism which perpetuates the violence and generates enormous ill will against the United States."
Hancock hosts the 174th Attack Wing of the NY Air National Guard – the MQ9 Reaper drone hub. Drones flying over Afghanistan are piloted from the base. It is also a training center for drone pilots, sensor operators and maintenance technicians
Today's action at Hancock's main gate is one chapter in the Upstate Coalition to Ground the Drones and End the Wars' (www.upstatedroneaction.
Those arrested were:
Danny Burns, Ithaca
Brian Hynes, Bronx
Ed Kinane, Syracuse
Julienne Oldfield, Syracuse
Fr. Bill Pickard, Scranton
Bev Rice, NYC
James Ricks, Ithaca
Blood on the Corner: Dear UVA From an Alumnus
I'm just back from a rally in front of the Charlottesville Police Department at which I heard a black UVA student say that black friends were going to think twice about trying to attend UVA after what happened tonight.
Unless more video materializes we won't know exactly what happened, but we know this: a black UVA student needed 10 stitches to the head. The policemen who injured him have made known no injuries to themselves whatsoever. In fact they've charged him with "obstruction of justice without force." However it may be that a young man standing on a sidewalk obstructs justice without using force, one thing seems clear: he didn't use force. He's also not accused of threatening to use force. Rather, he's charged with "profane swearing and/or intoxication," neither of which justifies ANY action by police, much less the sort of brutality that requires 10 stitches and leaves blood on the street.
As an alumnus and a local resident may I humbly request that UVA prosecute the police officers responsible and seek, not a Department of Justice report telling us what we know, but meaningful restorative justice that involves actual understanding and reform by those involved.
I have to confess, I'm getting a little tired of the scandals, UVA. And I don't mean playing a shooter with a broken finger in the ACC tournament. I mean:
Paying your employees so little they need second jobs.
Jumping at a false tale of rape, damaging true accounts among other things damaged.
Hosting forums advocating U.S. war in Syria.
Bringing Blackwater mercenaries, neocon reactionaries, torture defenders, and warmongers of all stripes to speak at the Miller Center.
Sending law students to observe the Guantanamo human experimentation camp, who find nothing to oppose.
Weakening the honor code.
Empowering a corporate board that attempts coups -- a board that meets this coming Tuesday and should be confronted with a plan for serious reform.
I know it wasn't your cops tonight, UVA. Nor was it your cops who assaulted the young woman for buying a case of water. But it's your response that can set things right. We don't need a scapegoat or more cameras or a "study." We need the University to instruct the police that violence will not be tolerated.
The University has an honor code but exists in the midst of a society in which police are being turned into warriors -- and guess who plays the role of the enemy? The rumor is that tonight's victim had a fake ID for entering a bar -- certainly less than honorable, but something millions of people have done for many years without being attacked or brutalized.
There's video of a young woman being attacked by a policeman at the rally tonight protesting the initial crime. Apparently her offense was standing in a street and being unable to move because of the surrounding crowd. This assault is on video and should be prosecuted without delay.
I'm not going to urge you to restore the honorable tradition of your imperialist enslaving rapist founder, UVA. I want your to aspire to something better than you've been. I think you can do it.
Ukraine/Russia News - Mar 19, 2015
Poroshenko signs law on Donbas special status, postpones autonomy to Luhansk and Donetsk until elections under Ukrainian law - Sputnik
Poroshenko: we will deal [only] with representatives of Donetsk and Luhansk elected legitimately, according to the Ukrainian law - interfax
Ukraine plans to regain control over Donbas by all means: PM Yatsenyuk - TASS
DPR, LPR separatists leaders: no compromise with Kiev until decision on Donbas status is canceled - TASS
DPR Negotiator: Minsk accord says that all issues concerning elections should be coordinated with DPR and LPR envoys - Sputnik
Ukrainian rebels make new threat to abandon cease-fire - Fox News
VIDEO (Eng subs): DPR PM Zakharchenko: Ukraine govt undermines Minsk agreement with new law on Donbas special status - YouTube
VIDEO: (Eng subs): DPR PM Zakharchenko answers Ukrainian TV reporter question on new law on Donbas special status - YouTube
1 Soldier Killed And 5 Wounded With Attacks Near Donetsk And Mariupol - Interpreter_Mag
Protests and Riots After Ukrainian Soldiers Run Over Child With Armored Vehicle North of Donetsk (VIDEO) - Interpreter_Mag
APA - Ukraine to build fortifications along contact line with rebels
Poltorak: Size of Ukrainian armed forces to reach 250,000 in a month - UNIAN news
The Making of a Christian Taliban in Ukraine - The Intercept
Ukraine's industrial production fell 22.5 percent in February compared with a year earlier - UNIAN news
Hot water rates to increase by 55-57% from April 1, heating by 73% - UNIAN news
Cold water rates may increase by 25% - UNIAN news
Ukraine may cancel state regulation of food prices - UNIAN news
Corruption in Ukraine Aids Organized Crime Syndicates: US State Department - Sputnik International
Why Economies Of Ukraine and Russia Are Almost Inseparable - Hromadske International
Russia Says Kyiv Violates Ukraine Peace Deal Over Autonomy Laws - rferl.org
External Influence Could Bring Kiev to Reason: Russia's Envoy to OSCE - Sputnik International
Russian launches military exercises from the Arctic to the Pacific, missiles in the Baltic and nuclear-capable bombers in Crimea - Business Insider
What's behind Russia's massive muscle-flexing? Virtually every unit, from paratroopers to antisubmarine forces, appears to be on drills - CSMonitor
Russia says drills prove ability to quickly deploy forces - Yahoo News
VIDEO: Russia sends nuclear capable 'Iskander' missile system to Kaliningrad - uatoday.tv
VIDEO: Russian nuclear submarines takes part in large-scale military drills - uatoday.tv
Russia Kicks Off Tank Drills With 1,500 Personnel in Western District - Sputnik International
Putin sends spy ships to Britain to intercept military communications - Daily Express
100,000 gather in central Moscow to celebrate the anniversary of Crimea reunification - RT News
Russia Was Ready for Crimea Nuclear Standoff, Putin Says in Documentary 'Crimea - Way Back Hom' - Bloomberg Business
VIDEO (English subs): 'Crimea - Way Back Home' documentary, TV announcement - YouTube
VIDEO (English subs): 'Crimea - Way Back Home' documentary, Part 1 - LiveLeak.com -
VIDEO (English subs): 'Crimea - Way Back Home' documentary, Part 2 - LiveLeak.com
Boeing was hit by Buk: Submunitions that hit Malaysian Boeing coincide with warhead filling of the newest Russian anti-aircraft missile (PHOTOS) - EN.Censor.net
MH17: Did Sukhoi-25 take down passenger plane? Fighter jet designer says 'could not technically have shot down MH17', allegations a cover-up - ibtimes.com
Exclusive: From 'Red October' village, new evidence on downing of Malaysian plane over Ukraine - Reuters
Vladmir Babak and Reuters' Missile Launch Witnesses – How Do They Fit With What We Know About MH17 So Far? - bellingcat
US Army Delays Ukraine Training in Effort to Preserve Ceasefire - Military.com
US should focus on economic support for Ukraine which is a more important priority: Defense Secretary Carter - Sputnik
Top US General in Europe: Arming Ukraine 'Isn't a Strategy' - Foreign Policy
Why Pentagon is hesitant to arm Ukraine - Yahoo News
Don't send weapons to Ukraine, top Russian Kremlin critic says - The Washington Post
How The Ukrainian Diaspora In The US Is Funding The War Effort In East Ukraine - ibtimes.com
US Plans Show-of-Force Exercise in E. Europe - defensenews.com
U.S. To Conduct Patriot Missile Test in Poland In Response to Russian Aggression - Interpreter_Mag
Here are all the NATO military ships in the black sea (SLIDESHOW)- Business Insider
Germany to send 500 troops for drills in Lithuania - The Peninsula Qatar
Merkel Not Going Along with Poroshenko - EIRNS
Seven EU Countries to Oppose New Anti-Russian Sanctions at Summit - Sputnik International
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Colorado Drone Site Battle Continues
By Felton Davis
David Swanson calls it "the Pentagon's 51st state." Ten percent of the land area of Colorado, to be seized and set aside for robotics and drone warfare testing.
On Friday, the US Army posted the final Environmental Impact Statement for the expanded Piñon Canyon Maneuver Site, on the Fort Carson website. The public was given until April 10th to comment on the plans, which have been called the largest eminent domain land-grab in the history of the United States.
On Saturday, the impact statement was withdrawn, without any warning.
On Sunday, "Not One More Acre" asked supporters to contact the Army and ask for an explanation, something many are reluctant to do, for fear of being "tracked" by the military.
On Monday morning, I sent the Fort Carson public information officer an email, and asked for a copy of the document, and received a polite reply within two hours, containing a link to the statement.
Later on Monday, the Army updated its website, restoring the impact statement for public access, and changing the deadline for comments from April 10th to April 19th.
However, the two documents may not be the same. The EIS posted on Friday was over 30 megabytes in size, and 665 pages long. The one I got was only 22 megabytes in size, and 642 pages long. What happened to 23 pages of the environmental impact statement?
And, needless to say, how many people are going to be able to wade through all that dense material between now and April 19th?
Following one of the hundreds of articles that have appeared about this controversy, a woman from Texas sent in a comment, that she had made a special trip to Colorado to see the area for herself, and what struck her the most was how quiet it was in comparison to Dallas. And that's how I feel. Not NIMBY (not in my back yard), but NOMV (not on my vacation). I don't want to ride through that special enclave of grasses, bushes, shrubs, and small trees, and hear the sounds of weapons being tested. I don't want to see mock Iraqi villages being blown up. And I don't want pilotless drones in the testing phase hovering overhead, ready to zap anything that moves. And as far as the Army's robotics plans are concerned, I believe Yul Brynner's robot gunslinger in "Westworld" is the bottom line. If you build a robot, and set it in motion, eventually it will organize high-resolution vision for its computer brain, and real ammunition for its guns.
Learn More:
Pinon Canyon Maneuver Site on horseback and by tank: Two views of a region under siege By Alan Prendergast, February 24, 2011
Piñon Canyon Preservation Exhibition: video
Rep. McKinley's Piñon Canyon Trail Ride: video
No Piñon Canyon Expansion: video
Piñon Canyon Ablaze - A Hot Issue Gets Hotter: video
PCMS Uranium News: video
Army's New Piñon Canyon Maneuver Site Map: video
Salazar Piñon Canyon Expansion Protest: video
50,000th War in a Row Violates the Laws of War
I think we must be due some kind of prize. This is the 50,000th war in a row to have violated the "laws of war."
The documentation comes from Human Rights Watch which reports that last August 31st U.S. and Iraqi air strikes "drove ISIS forces away from the town" of Amerli. No doubt, many people died and were maimed and traumatized (also known as terrorized) by those "air strikes," but that's just part of war, which it wouldn't be ethical for Human Rights Watch to question.
What concerns Human Rights Watch is what began on September 1st. About 6,000 fighters for the Iraqi government and various militias moved in, with their U.S. weaponry. They destroyed villages. They demolished homes, businesses, mosques, and public buildings. They looted. They burned. They abducted. In fact they behaved exactly as troops taught to hate and murder certain groups of people had behaved in the 49,999 previous recorded wars. "The actions violated the laws of war," Human Rights Watch says.
Human Rights Watch recommends that Iraq disband the militias and care for the refugees who have fled their wrath, while holding "accountable" those responsible for the documented violations of the "laws of war." Human Rights Watch wants the United States to establish "reform benchmarks." The possibility of ending participation in the war, creating an arms embargo, negotiating a ceasefire, and redirecting ALL energy into aid and restitution doesn't arise.
The "laws of war" are not laws of physics. If they were, the first law of war would be:
People instructed to murder will engage in lesser crimes as well.
Laws of war, unlike laws of physics, are just not this sort of observation of something that always happens. On the contrary, they are laws that are always violated. Human Rights Watch explains:
"International humanitarian law, the laws of war, governs fighting in non-international armed conflicts such as that between Iraqi government forces, government-backed militias, and opposition armed groups. The laws of war governing the methods and means of warfare in non-international armed conflicts are primarily found in the Hague Regulations of 1907 and the First Additional Protocol of 1977 to the Geneva Conventions (Protocol I). . . . Central to the laws of war is the principle of distinction, which requires parties to a conflict to distinguish at all times between combatants and civilians. . . . While Iraqi government forces may have destroyed property for military reasons in some cases, Human Rights Watch found that the large-scale destruction of property by pro-government militias in the cases detailed in this report appear to violate international law. . . . In the instances detailed above, it appeared militias destroyed property after fighting had finished in the area and when combatants from ISIS had fled from the area. Therefore it suggests their justification for the attacks may have been for punitive reasons; or in order to prevent Sunni residents from returning to the areas from which they fled."
So, the next time you're murdering large numbers of Sunnis, and the ones designated as combatants have left, please begin behaving decently to all the others. Do not torture anyone you wounded while trying to murder them. Do not destroy people's homes with thoughts of punishment or demographic change in your head, but rather ponder military objectives while burning houses, and as quickly as possible get back to the acceptable and legal efforts to kill combatants, especially whenever possible with bombs from airplanes whose pilots have been carefully instructed to only intend to kill combatants and whose commander in chief defines "combatant" as military-aged male.
Talk Nation Radio: Michael Heaney on What Partisanship Does to a Peace Movement
Michael T. Heaney is co-author with Fabio Rojas of Party in the Street: The Antiwar Movement and the Democratic Party after 9/11. We discuss how partisanship built up and then tore down a peace movement, and what to do about it. Heaney is Assistant Professor of Organizational Studies and Political Science at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He has previously served as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for the Study of American Politics at the Institution for Social and Policy Studies, Yale University, and as the William A. Steiger Fellow in the Congressional Fellowship Program at the American Political Science Association. His research has received funding from the National Science Foundation and has been published in a wide array of academic journals, such as the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Sociology, Social Networks, and Perspectives on Politics.
Total run time: 29:00
Host: David Swanson.
Producer: David Swanson.
Music by Duke Ellington.
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On Climate, Defense Could Preserve and Protect, Rather Than Kill and Destroy
By Emanuel Pastreich, Truthout | Op-Ed
Holding the line against the Kubuchi Desert
One hundred groggy Korean college students stumble off the train in Baotou, Inner Mongolia, blinking in the bright sunlight. A 14-hour train ride from Beijing, Baotou is by no means a popular destination for Seoul's youth, but then this is no shopping excursion.
A short, elderly man in a bright green jacket leads the students through the crowd in the station, hurriedly giving orders to the group. In contrast to the students, he does not appear tired at all; his smile is unimpaired by the journey. His name is Kwon Byung-Hyun, a career diplomat who served as the Republic of Korea's ambassador to China from 1998 to 2001. Whereas his portfolio once covered everything from trade and tourism to military affairs and North Korea, Ambassador Kwon has found a new cause that demands his full attention. At 74 years of age, he has no time to see his colleagues who are busy playing golf or for indulging in hobbies. Ambassador Kwon is in his little office in Seoul on the phone and writing letters to build an international response to the spread of deserts in China - or he is here, planting trees.
Kwon speaks in a relaxed and accessible manner, but he is anything but easy-going. Although it takes him two days to get from his home in the hills above Seoul to the front line of the Kubuchi desert as it makes its ineluctable way southeast, he makes the trip often, and with enthusiasm.
The Kubuchi Desert has expanded so that it is just 450 kilometers west of Beijing and, as the desert closest to Korea, is the main source of yellow dust that showers down on Korea, blown by high winds. Kwon founded the NGO Future Forest in 2001 to combat desertification in close cooperation with China. He brings young Koreans and Chinese together to plant trees in response to this environmental catastrophe in a novel transnational alliance of youth, government and industry.
The Start of Kwon's Mission
Kwon relates how his work to stop deserts began:
"My effort to stop the spread of deserts in China started from a very distinct personal experience. When I arrived in Beijing in 1998 to serve as ambassador to China, I was greeted by the yellow dust storms. The gales that brought in the sand and dust were very powerful, and it was no small shock to see Beijing's skies preternaturally darkened. I received a phone call from my daughter the next day, and she told that the Seoul sky had been covered by the same sandstorm that had blown over from China. I realized that she was talking about same storm I had just witnessed. That phone call awakened me to the crisis. I saw for the first time that we are all confronted by a common problem that transcends national boundaries. I saw clearly that the problem of the yellow dust I saw in Beijing was my problem, and my family's problem. It was not just a problem for the Chinese to solve."
Kwon and the members of Future Forest board a bus for an hour ride and then make their way through a small village where farmers, cows and goats gawk at these odd visitors. After a 3-kilometer walk over bucolic farmland, however, the scene gives way to a terrifying specter: unending sand stretching to the horizon without a single trace of life.
The Korean youth are joined by Chinese peers and are soon hard at work digging into what remains of the topsoil to plant the saplings they have brought with them. They join an increasing number of young people in Korea, China, Japan and elsewhere who are throwing themselves into the challenge of the millennium: slowing down the spread of deserts.
Deserts like the Kubuchi are the product of reductions in annual rainfall, poor land use and the desperate attempt of poor farmers in developing regions like Inner Mongolia to obtain a little cash by cutting down the trees and bushes, which hold the soil and break the winds, for firewood.
When asked about the challenge of responding to these deserts, Ambassador Kwon made a brief response, "These deserts, and climate change itself, are such an overwhelming threat to all humans, but we have not even begun to shift our budget priorities when it comes to security."
Kwon hints at the possibility of a fundamental shift in our basic assumptions about security. We are visited now by the forerunners of climate change, whether the terrible wildfires that swept the United States in the summer of 2012 or the danger to the sinking nation of Tuvalu, and we know that drastic action is required. But we are spending over a trillion dollars a year for missiles, tanks, guns, drones and supercomputers - weapons that are as effective in stopping the spread of deserts as a slingshot is against a tank. Could it be that we need not take a leap in technology, but rather a conceptual leap in the term security: making the response to climate change the primary mission for those well-funded militaries.
To drown by desert or drown by ocean?
Climate change has borne two insidious twins that are greedily devouring the patrimony of the good earth: spreading deserts and rising oceans. As the Kubuchi desert slouches east towards Beijing, it joins hands with other rising deserts in dry lands across Asia, Africa and around the world. At the same time, the oceans of the world are rising, growing more acidic and engulfing the coastlines of islands and continents. Between these two threats, there is not much margin for humans - and there will be no leisure time for far-fetched fantasies about wars on two continents.
The warming of the earth, misuse of water and soil, and poor agricultural policies that treat soil as something to consume rather than a life-sustaining system, have contributed to the catastrophic decline in agricultural land.
The United Nations established the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) in 1994 to unite stakeholders from around the world to respond to the spread of deserts. At least a billion people face a direct threat from spreading deserts. Moreover, as over farming and declining rainfall impinge on the brittle ecosystems of dry lands, home to an additional two billion people, the global impact on food production and on the sufferings of displaced people will be far greater.
So serious is the emergence of deserts on every continent that the United Nations designated this decade as the "Decade for Deserts and the Fight against Desertification" and declared the spread of deserts "the greatest environmental challenge of our times."
The UNCCD executive secretary at the time, Luc Gnacadja, stated bluntly that "The top 20 centimeters of soil is all that stands between us and extinction.
David Montgomery has detailed the severity of this threat in his book Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations. Montgomery stresses that soil, often dismissed as "dirt," is a strategic resource, more valuable than oil or water. Montgomery notes that 38 percent of global cropland has been seriously degraded since 1945 and that the rate of cropland erosion is now 100 times faster than its formation. That trend has combined with increasing temperatures and decreasing rain to make the western regions of America's "breadbasket" marginal for agriculture and subject to increased erosion from heavy rains. In short, even parts of the heart of America's breadbasket, and the world's, are on their way to becoming deserts.
Montgomery suggests that areas like Inner Mongolia that are suffering from desertification today "serve as the canary in the global coal mine in terms of soil." Those expanding deserts should be a warning about things to come for us. "Of course, in my home, Seattle, you can reduce the rainfall by a few inches a year and raise the temperature by one degree and still have evergreen forests. But if you take an arid grass region and reduce the rain by a few inches a year - it already was not getting that much rain. The decline in vegetation, the erosion by wind and the resulting depletion of the soil is what we mean by desertification. But I would like to stress that we are seeing soil degradation around the world, but we only see the manifestations clearly in these vulnerable regions."
Meanwhile, melting polar ice caps are driving a rise in sea levels that will threaten coastal dwellers as shores vanish and extreme weather events like Hurricane Sandy are becoming regular occurrences. The National Academy of Sciences issued a report titled "Sea-Level Rise for the Coasts of California, Oregon, and Washington: Past, Present, and Future" in June 2012, projecting that global sea levels will rise 8 to 23 centimeters by 2030, relative to the 2000 level, 18 to 48 centimeters by 2050, and 50 to 140 centimeters by 2100. The report's estimate for 2100 is substantially higher than the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's projection of 18 to 59 centimeters, and privately, many experts anticipate a more dire scenario. That catastrophe will be within the lifetimes of our children and grandchildren.
Janet Redman, director of the Sustainable Energy and Economy Network at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC, has watched climate policy from the 40,000-foot level of climate summits. She draws attention to how Hurricane Sandy has brought home the full ramifications of climate change: "Hurricane Sandy did help to make the threat of climate change quite real. Such extreme weather is something ordinary people can feel. The governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, says this hurricane was a result of 'climate change,' and he is a very mainstream person."
Moreover, when New Jersey governor Chris Christie asked for Federal funds to rebuild the seashore, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg went much further. Mayor Bloomberg said we need to use federal funds to start rebuilding New York City itself. "He said explicitly that the sea levels are rising, and we need to create a sustainable city right now," recalls Redman. "Bloomberg declared that climate change is here. He even went as far as to suggest that we need to restore the wetlands around New York City to absorb these sorts of storms. In other words, we need an adaptation strategy. So the combination of an extreme weather event with a powerful argument from a mainstream politician with high public/media visibility helps to change the dialogue. Bloomberg is not Al Gore; he is not a representative of Friends of the Earth."
An ambient worry may be condensing into a new perspective on the definition of security. Robert Bishop, former CEO of Silicon Graphics Inc., founded the International Centre for Earth Simulation as a means to make climate change today understandable to policy makers and industry. Bishop notes that Hurricane Sandy will cost something like $60 billion, and the total cost for Katrina and Wilma, and the ultimate cost of the Deep Water Horizon oil spill cleanup, will total about $100 billion each.
"We are talking about ecological disasters that weigh in at 100 billion dollars a pop." He notes, "Those sorts of disasters are going to start changing perspectives in the Pentagon - because they clearly put the entire nation at risk. Additionally, the rise of sea level along the United States' Eastern Seaboard threatens to create major future costs. Big money to protect cities located on the coasts will soon be required. Norfolk, Virginia, for example, is home to the only nuclear aircraft carrier base on the East Coast, and that city is already suffering a serious flood problem."
Bishop goes on to explain that New York City, Boston and Los Angeles, "the core centers of civilization" for the United States, are all located in the most vulnerable parts of the country and little has been done to defend them from the threat, not of foreign troops or missiles, but of the rising ocean.
Why climate change is not considered a "threat"
It would not be true to say that we are doing nothing to address the environmental crisis, but if we are a species facing extinction, then we are not doing much.
Maybe part of the problem is the time frame. The military tends to think about security in fast motion: How can you secure an airport in a few hours, or bomb a newly acquired target within a theater of operations within a few minutes? That trend is exacerbated by the increasing speed of the cycle of intelligence gathering and analysis overall. We need to be able to respond to Web-based network attacks or missile launches instantaneously. Although rapidity of response has a certain aura of effectiveness, the psychological need for a fast answer has little to do with real security.
What if the primary security threat were to be measured in hundreds of years? There does not seem to be any system in place in the military and security community for grappling with problems on such a time-scale. David Montgomery suggests this problem is one of the most serious facing mankind today. For example, the loss of topsoil globally is something on the order of 1 percent a year, making it a shift that is invisible on the policy radar screens in Washington DC. But that trend will be catastrophic for all of humanity in less than a century, as it takes hundreds of years to create topsoil. The loss of arable land, combined with the rapid increase in population around the world, is without doubt one of the greatest security threats we face. And yet few in the security community are focused in on this issue.
Janet Redman suggests that we must find some sort of a long-term definition of security that can be accepted in security circles: "Ultimately, we need to start thinking about security in an inter-generational sense, as what might be called 'inter-generational security.' That is to say, what you do today will impact the future, will impact your kids, your grandchildren and on beyond us." Moreover, Redman suggests, climate change is just too scary for many people. "If the problem is really that severe, it could completely undo everything we have come to value; destroy the world as we know it. We will have to change the way we live our lives. From transportation to food to careers, the family; everything would have to change."
Jared Diamond suggests in his book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive that societies have periodically confronted harsh choices between short-term benefits for the current rulers with their comfortable habits and the long-term interests of future generations, and that they rarely have displayed understanding of "intergenerational justice." Diamond goes on to argue that the more the changes demanded go against core cultural and ideological assumptions, the more likely the society is to fall back on massive denial. If the source of the threat is our blind assumption that material consumption embodies freedom and self-realization, for example, we may be on the same track as the vanished civilization of Easter Island.
Perhaps the current obsession with terrorism and endless military expansion is a form of psychological denial by which we distract our minds from climate change by pursuing a less complex problem. The threat of climate change is so enormous and threatening that it demands that we rethink who we are and what we do, to ask ourselves whether or not every cafe latte or Hawaiian vacation is part of the problem. Far easier to focus attention on an enemy out there in the mountains of Afghanistan.
John Feffer, director of Foreign Policy in Focus and harsh critic of what he terms "the Pentagon's obesity problem," sums up the underlying psychology most vividly:
"Here we are, trapped between the spreading sand and the rising waters, and somehow we simply cannot wrap our minds around the problem, let alone find a solution.
"It's as if we are standing in the middle of the African veldt. From one side a charging elephant is bearing down on us. From the other side, a lion is about to pounce. And what are we doing? We're focused on the lesser threats, like al-Qaeda. We're focused on the ant that has crawled onto our toes and sunk its mandibles into our skin. It hurts, sure, but it's not the major problem. We're so busy looking down at our toe that we've lost sight of the elephant and the lion."
Another factor is simply a lack of imagination on the part of policy makers and those who create the media that informs us. Many people are simply incapable of conceiving of the worst-case environmental catastrophe. They tend to imagine that tomorrow will be essentially like today, that progressions will always be linear, and that the ultimate test for any prediction of the future is our own personal experience. For these reasons, catastrophic climate change is inconceivable - literally.
If it is that serious, do we need to turn to the military option?
It has become a standard line for politicians to praise the US military as the greatest in the world. But if the military is completely unprepared for the challenge of spreading deserts and disappearing soil, our fate could resemble that of the forgotten emperor from Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem "Ozymandias," whose colossal, ruined statue bears an inscription:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Fighting spreading deserts and rising oceans will take colossal resources and all of our collective wisdom. The response involves not only restructuring our entire government and economy, but also recreating our civilization. Yet the question remains: Is the response a mere reshuffling of priorities and incentives, or is this threat the true equivalent of war, i.e., "total war," different only in the nature of the response and the assumed "enemy?" Are we looking at a life-and-death crisis that demands mass mobilization, a controlled and rationed economy and large-scale strategic planning for the short and long term? Does this crisis demand, in short, a war economy and a complete rethinking of the military system?
There are tremendous risks involved in invoking a military response, especially in an age when a violent mindset permeates our society. Certainly opening the door for the Beltway bandits to set up for business in the temple of climate change would be a disaster. What if the Pentagon were to seize on climate change to justify even more military spending on projects with little or no applicability to the actual threat? We know that in many fields of traditional security this tendency is already a serious problem.
Certainly there is a danger that military culture and assumptions will be incorrectly applied to the issue of climate change, a threat that ultimately is best addressed by cultural transformation. As the United States has serious problems reining in its impulse to employ the military option as a solution for just about everything, we need, if anything, to rein in the military, not to fuel it further.
But as regards climate change, the situation is different. Reinventing the military for the purpose of combating climate change is a necessary, if risky, step, and that process could fundamentally transform the culture, the mission, and the priorities of the entire security system. We have no choice but to engage in the debate with the military.
Unless the true security concerns are grasped, from desertification and rising oceans to food scarcity and aging populations, it may be impossible to find a collective security architecture that will allow for deep cooperation between the militaries of the world. After all, even if the US military were to draw down or resign from its world-police role, the overall security situation would likely become more dangerous. Unless we can find room for cooperation between militaries that does not require a common potential enemy, we are unlikely to reduce the terrible risks we presently face.
James Baldwin wrote: "Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed if it is not faced." For us to wish that the military would simply become something different of its own accord accomplishes nothing. We must map out a path to transformation and then pressure and prod the military to assume a new role. So the argument against military involvement is valid, but the truth is that the military will never agree to a deep reduction of military budgets to support spending to address climate change through other agencies. Rather, the danger of climate change must be made visible within the military. Moreover, the introduction of sustainability as a key principle for the military could go far to remedy militarism and the mentality of violence that plagues American society by channeling the energies of the military into the healing of the ecosystem.
It is a truism of the military that it is always preparing to fight the last war. Whether the African chiefs who fought European colonists with charms and spears, the Civil War generals passionate for horses who disparaged filthy railroads, or the generals of World War I who sent infantry divisions into machine-gun fire as though they were fighting the Franco-Prussian War, the military tends to assume that the next conflict will be merely a scaled-up version of the last one.
If the military, instead of postulating military threats in Iran or Syria, takes engagement with climate change as its primary mission, it will bring in a new group of talented young men and women, and the very role of the military will shift. As the United States starts to reassign its military spending, so will other nations of the world. The result could be a far less militarized system and the possibility of a new imperative for global cooperation.
But the concept is useless if we cannot find a way to goad the US military in the right direction. As it is, we are spending precious treasure on weapons systems that don't even meet military needs, let alone offer any application to problems of climate change. John Feffer suggests that bureaucratic inertia and competing budgets are the primary reason we seem to have no choice but to pursue weapons that have no clear application: "The various organs of the military compete with each other for a piece of the budgetary pie, and they don't want to see their total budgets go down." Feffer implies that certain arguments are repeated until they seem like Gospel: "We have to maintain our nuclear triad; we have to have a minimum number of jet fighters; we must have a Navy appropriate for a global power."
The imperative to just keep building more of the same also has a regional and political component. The jobs associated with these weapons are scattered across the country. "There isn't a congressional district that isn't connected in some way to the manufacture of weapons systems," Feffer says. "And the manufacture of those weapons means jobs, sometimes the only surviving manufacturing jobs. Politicians cannot ignore those voices. Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts was most courageous in calling for military reform, but when a backup engine for the F-35 fighter jet that was manufactured in his state was up for a vote, he had to vote for it - even though the Air Force declared that it was not needed."
There are some in Washington DC who have started to develop a broader definition of national interest and security. One of the most promising is the Smart Strategy Initiative at the New America Foundation. Under the direction of Patrick Doherty, a "Grand Strategy" is taking shape that draws attention to four critical issues that radiate out through society and the world. The issues treated in the "Grand Strategy" are "economic inclusion," the entry of 3 billion people into the world's middle class over the next 20 years and the implications of that change for the economy and the environment; "ecosystem depletion," the impact of human activity on the environment and its implications for us; "contained depression," the current economic situation featuring low demand and harsh austerity measures; and the "resilience deficit," the fragility of our infrastructure and overall economic system. The Smart Strategy Initiative is not about making the military more green, but rather about resetting the overall priorities for the nation as a whole, including the military. Doherty thinks the military should stick to its original role and not stretch out into fields that are beyond its expertise.
When asked about the general response of the Pentagon to the question of climate change, he identified four distinct camps. First, there are those who remain focused on traditional security concerns and do take climate change into account in their calculations. Then there are those who see climate change as another threat that must be taken into account in traditional security planning but as more of an external factor than a primary issue. They voice concerns about naval bases that will be underwater or the implications of new sea lanes over the poles, but their basic strategic thinking has not changed. There also those who advocate using the massive defense budget to leverage market changes with an eye toward impacting both military and civilian energy usage.
Finally, there are those in the military who have come to the conclusion that climate change demands a fundamentally new national strategy that spans domestic and foreign policy and are engaged in a broad dialogue with varied stakeholders on what the road forward should be.
Some thoughts about how to reinvent the military, but fast!
We must put forth a plan for a military that devotes 60 percent or more of its budget to developing technologies, infrastructures and practices to stop the spread of deserts, to revive oceans and to transform the destructive industrial systems of today into a new, sustainable economy. What would a military that took as its primary mission the reduction of pollution, the monitoring of the environment, remediation of environmental damage and adaptation to new challenges look like? Can we imagine a military whose primary mission is not to kill and destroy, but to preserve and protect?
We are calling on the military to do something that at present it is not designed to do. But throughout history, militaries often have been required to completely reinvent themselves to meet current threats. Moreover, climate change is a challenge unlike anything that our civilization has ever encountered. Retooling the military for environmental challenges is just one of many fundamental changes that we will see.
A systematic reassignment of every part of the current military-security system would be the first step toward moving from a piecemeal to a fundamental engagement. The Navy could deal primarily with protecting and restoring the oceans; the Air Force would take responsibility for the atmosphere, monitoring emissions and developing strategies for reducing air pollution; while the Army could handle land conservation and water issues. All branches would be responsible for responding to environmental disasters. Our intelligence services would take responsibility for monitoring the biosphere and its polluters, assessing its status and making long-term proposals for remediation and adaptation.
Such a radical shift of direction offers several major advantages. Above all, it would restore purpose and honor to the Armed Forces. The Armed Forces were once a calling for America's best and brightest, producing leaders like George Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower, rather than political infighters and prima donnas like David Petraeus. If the imperative of the military shifts, it will regain its social standing in American society and its officers would again be able to play a central role in contributing to national policy and not watch with their arms tied as weapons systems are pursued for the benefit of lobbyists and their corporate sponsors.
The United States faces a historic decision: We can passively follow the inevitable path toward militarism and imperial decline, or radically transform the present military-industrial complex into the model for a truly global collaborative to combat climate change. The latter path offers us the opportunity to correct America's missteps and to set off in a direction more likely to lead in the long run toward adaptation and survival.
Let's Start with the Pacific Pivot
John Feffer recommends that this transformation could start with East Asia and take the form of an expansion of the Obama Administration's much-vaunted "Pacific pivot." Feffer suggests: "The Pacific Pivot could be the basis for a larger alliance that postulates the environment as the central theme for security cooperation between the United States, China, Japan, Korea and other nations of East Asia, thereby reducing the risk of confrontation and rearmament." If we focus on real threats, for instance how rapid economic development - as opposed to sustainable growth - has contributed to the spread of deserts, the decline of fresh water supplies, and a consumer culture that encourages blind consumption, we can reduce the risk of an arms buildup in the region. As East Asia's role in the world economy increases and is bench-marked by the rest of the world, a regional shift in the concept of security, along with an associated change in military budgeting, could have immense impact globally.
Those who imagine that a new "Cold War" is sweeping East Asia tend to overlook the fact that in terms of rapid economic growth, economic integration and nationalism, the eerie parallels are not between East Asia today and East Asia during the ideological Cold War, but rather between East Asia today and Europe in 1914. That tragic moment saw France, Germany, Italy and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in the midst of unprecedented economic integration and despite talk and hopes of lasting peace, fail to resolve long-standing historical issues and plunge into a devastating world war. To assume that we face another "cold war" is to overlook the degree to which the military buildup is driven by internal economic factors and has little to do with ideology.
China's military spending reached $100 billion in 2012 for the first time, as its double-digit increases push its neighbors to increase military budgets as well. South Korea is increasing its spending on the military, with a projected 5 percent increase for 2012. Although Japan has kept its military spending to 1 percent of its GDP, freshly elected prime minister, Abe Shinzo, is calling for a major increase in Japanese overseas military operations as hostility toward China hits an all-time high.
Meanwhile, the Pentagon encourages its allies to boost military spending and buy US weapons. Ironically, potential cuts in the Pentagon budget are often presented as opportunities for other nations to increase military spending to play an increased role.
Ambassador Kwon's Future Forest has been immensely successful in bringing Korean and Chinese youth together to plant trees and build a "Great Green Wall" to contain the Kubuchi Desert. Unlike the Great Wall of old, this wall is not meant to hold off a human enemy, but rather to create a line of trees as an environmental defense. Perhaps the governments of East Asia and the United States can learn from the example set by these children and invigorate the long-paralyzed Six Party Talks by making the environment and adaptation the primary topic for discussion.
The potential for cooperation between both military and civilian organizations concerning the environment is tremendous if the terms of the dialog are expanded. If we can align regional rivals in a common military purpose that requires no "enemy state" against which to close ranks, we may be able to avoid one of the greatest dangers of the current day. The effect of defusing the situation of competition and military buildup would be an enormous benefit in itself, quite distinct from the contributions made by the climate response mission.
The Six Party Talks could evolve into a "Green Pivot Forum" that assesses the environmental threats, sets priorities between stakeholders and allocates the resources needed to combat the problems.