http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Wgr6RMF-PY
Preemptive war and unilateral action are not smart security. Instead, they paint a bull's-eye on our nation. The Bush Administration promoted the Iraq war with lies and flawed analysis. But protection of human rights through international cooperation is what will bring about a safer world.
The new NATO recommendation-- that first use of nuclear weapons is acceptable-- is insanity.
The development of new nuclear weapons is a violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and thus violates our own constitution (remember that a treaty is according to the Sixth Article of that document, the supreme law of the land.)
The reconfiguration of the Nuclear Weapons Complex to build nuclear weapons ("Complex Transformation" is what DOE calls it) is a smoke screen that takes our eyes off the need to clean up the mess we made building them for 60 years.
The current "Defense" (Read "War") budget is out of control and pushing our budget deficits skyward. According to NationalPriorities.org
http://www.costofwar.com/
the total spending for the Iraq/Afghanistan operations is just under one trillion dollars. If you take the "Defense Department" budget, the" Black" Budget, the Veterans Affairs Budget and the Nuclear Weapons Budget for this year and add to it the Supplemental for the Iraq/Afghanistan wars that amount is also nearly $ One Trillion -- A year!
It is un-monitered (the GAO has not been able to acceptably audit it for decades) and based on a willingness to use the military to "police" the world (Read "make them do what we want") rather than defend our borders. If we spent a third of it to aid other nations to feed, clothe, house, and provide clean water, medical care and education to their peoples no one would want to attack us anyway.
We must stop selling conventional arms to other countries and to revolutionary groups around the world. It is turning the world into an armed camp with child soldiers being trained and deployed. We have sold and deployed land mines that last for decades killing civilians and condemning them to legless existence and worse. Military and revolutionary violence lead to chaos that can only be controlled by a government with higher levels of violence that becomes hated by its own people. Not stable, not creative or constructive. We are leading the world into a place where we squander its resources on firearms and military hardware that cannot bring peace or justice--just terror. And the worst part of it all is that both the Democrats and Republicans have been following the economic preachments of Milton Friedman and his disciples willing to approve the most crass use of military force and dictatorial regimes to enforce "Free Markets" on anybody and everybody regardless of what that does to the general populations. The U.S. Air Force Space Command in its' vision 2020 statement claims the mission of "dominating" the military aspects of space to defend the interests and "investments" of the United States world wide. Not workers rights or environmental health but investments. Yikes! take the bulls eye off of us, you military-industrial complex guys. It is not making us safer!
Our troops have a lot of money spent on their training to kill and dominate but there is not money spent "deprogramming" when they leave the military or retire. Thus we build into our population something that is foreign to the society we desire to create here and elsewhere.
The Republicans and now even the Democrats use language like "those who would do us harm" and "the enemy" as if there is a hugh band of aliens out there rather than a world of human beings with the same desires for life and happiness which we have. You police the deviants, you don't go to war with them. War on "Terror" is war on a noun not on a nation-state--the only meaning of war in the minds of the framers of the Constitution.
The Chinese wisdom says that the longer you fight an "enemy" the more like him (or her) you become.
Our "Confidence" in military might, our willingness to treat others as nothing more than collateral damage or potential collateral damage (over one million Iraqis dead, 4 million displaced, and our "whoops" when the drones kill civilians) --our stated intention in the Space Command to dominate Space to "protect US interests and investments", -- our willingess to snub our nose at international law and engage in preemptive war are undermining the security of the world and taking us back the politics of Genghis Khan/Tamerlane. After all, the architect of much of this, Dick Cheney, read Machiavelli's "The Prince" each Christmas. This Military-Industrial Complex is painting a bulls-eye on all Americans rather than making us more secure.
Howard Zinn reminds us of how we are manipulated by the War Machine to support it in the following brilliant essay:
Remembering Howard Zinn on July 4th
On this July 4, we would do well to renounce nationalism and all its symbols: its flags, its pledges of allegiance, its anthems, its insistence in song that God must single out America to be blessed.
Is not nationalism -- that devotion to a flag, an anthem, a boundary so fierce it engenders mass murder -- one of the great evils of our time, along with racism, along with religious hatred?
These ways of thinking -- cultivated, nurtured, indoctrinated from childhood on -- have been useful to those in power, and deadly for those out of power.
National spirit can be benign in a country that is small and lacking both in military power and a hunger for expansion (Switzerland, Norway, Costa Rica and many more). But in a nation like ours -- huge, possessing thousands of weapons of mass destruction -- what might have been harmless pride becomes an arrogant nationalism dangerous to others and to ourselves.
Our citizenry has been brought up to see our nation as different from others, an exception in the world, uniquely moral, expanding into other lands in order to bring civilization, liberty, democracy.
That self-deception started early.
When the first English settlers moved into Indian land in Massachusetts Bay and were resisted, the violence escalated into war with the Pequot Indians. The killing of Indians was seen as approved by God, the taking of land as commanded by the Bible. The Puritans cited one of the Psalms, which says: "Ask of me, and I shall give thee, the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the Earth for thy possession."
When the English set fire to a Pequot village and massacred men, women and children, the Puritan theologian Cotton Mather said: "It was supposed that no less than 600 Pequot souls were brought down to hell that day."
On the eve of the Mexican War, an American journalist declared it our "Manifest Destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence." After the invasion of Mexico began, The New York Herald announced: "We believe it is a part of our destiny to civilize that beautiful country."
It was always supposedly for benign purposes that our country went to war.
We invaded Cuba in 1898 to liberate the Cubans, and went to war in the Philippines shortly after, as President McKinley put it, "to civilize and Christianize" the Filipino people.
As our armies were committing massacres in the Philippines (at least 600,000 Filipinos died in a few years of conflict), Elihu Root, our secretary of war, was saying: "The American soldier is different from all other soldiers of all other countries since the war began. He is the advance guard of liberty and justice, of law and order, and of peace and happiness."
We see in Iraq that our soldiers are not different. They have, perhaps against their better nature, killed thousands of Iraq civilians. And some soldiers have shown themselves capable of brutality, of torture.
Yet they are victims, too, of our government's lies.
How many times have we heard President Bush tell the troops that if they die, if they return without arms or legs, or blinded, it is for "liberty," for "democracy"?
One of the effects of nationalist thinking is a loss of a sense of proportion. The killing of 2,300 people at Pearl Harbor becomes the justification for killing 240,000 in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The killing of 3,000 people on Sept. 11 becomes the justification for killing tens of thousands of people in Afghanistan and Iraq.
And nationalism is given a special virulence when it is said to be blessed by Providence. Today we have a president, invading two countries in four years, who announced on the campaign trail in 2004 that God speaks through him.
We need to refute the idea that our nation is different from, morally superior to, the other imperial powers of world history.
We need to assert our allegiance to the human race, and not to any one nation.
This piece was distributed by the Progressive Media Project in 2006.
