by Jaime O'Neill
— from the Paradise Post
Republicans think of themselves as manly folks who stand for defense and against taxation, but the truth is that Republicans are the party of spoiled brats. Like children, they want everything, but don't want to pay for anything.
They wanted a war in Iraq, but they didn't want to pay for it, so they've borrowed from the Chinese to the tune of untold billions that someone else's kids are going to have to pay for, just as other people's kids mostly fight that war for them. And they wanted lots of overpriced no-bid contracts for some of the sleaziest companies imaginable, but they didn't want to pay for that, either. The money that's been enriching all those corporate cronies has also been put on the tab because tax relief to the richest 1 percent of those who least needed relief was much more important to Republicans than a pay-as-you-go plan for the lavish spending they were doing. They wanted unregulated banking and lending, a utopian environment for the greedy and the irresponsible, and they got it.
What the rest of us got was an economy that's circling the drain. They love to disparage "tax-and-spend Democrats" but the main difference between Republicans and Democrats has been that Republicans like to spend, but they don't like to tax, at least not those people who have the most money. For far too long, too many Americans have bought into an economic plan that George W. Bush's daddy once called "voodoo economics" when Reagan was promoting the idea.
Under Republican stewardship, we spend like drunken sailors who never think we'll have to face the dawn. Republicans are like shopaholics. They never met a war they didn't like, and they buy 'em off the rack. And they don't shop for bargains, either; they pay whatever is asked, no matter how outrageous. If Halliburton says a 6-pack of Coke for the troops costs $45, well, that's fine, just put it on the card.
When the credit card gets maxed out, they get a new one. As in the joke about the ditzy wife, they figure they can't be broke because they still have checks. Now it's true that Democrats spend taxpayer money, too, and we could surely argue about how wisely some of that money is spent. Democrats, however, still cling to the old-fashioned idea that when you buy something, it's gotta be paid for.
And when it comes to government spending, the money to pay for things like roads and bridges comes from taxation. I'd love to be a Republican, love to live in a world where nothing had to be paid for, but up here in Butte County, we received the benefit of millions of dollars in firefighting expenditures this past summer, a boon to our community and to each of us individually. Sure, we all pay state taxes, but if we had to cover all the cost of fighting our recent fires out of some set-aside pocket of taxes from this county alone, we couldn't have afforded it.
People who don't live here and who may never even visit here helped pay to fight our fires, though no one asked if they wanted to have their tax money spent so far from their own backyards. Those of us who lived in the path of those fires ought to recognize with some gratitude that whatever we paid in state taxes this year, we got a helluva bargain. Personally, I paid just under $2,009 in state taxes last year, and that was money well spent, if you ask me.
I can't even begin to list what all I got for that money, but somewhere on that list is paychecks for guys who fight fires, and fly air tankers that drop fire retardant on flames that almost certainly would have wiped out my entire neighborhood had that work not been done.
"To be a man is, precisely, to be responsible."
I've admired that quote ever since I first read it. To be a man, or an adult, is to be responsible-to our families, and to the society and country that sustains us. It seems like a no-brainer, but if we want all the services we cannot provide for ourselves - like schools, and roads, and fire protection - then those things must be paid for, and those people who have the most money should pay accordingly.
As nice as it might seem to shrink government until "we could drown it in the bathtub," to quote Republican strategist Grover Norquist, the fact is we need government, need the things it provides, and the services it administers, from the oversight of what goes into baby food we eat when we are infants to the Social Security checks mailed to us when we're old.
The Republicans call this "cradle-to-grave" socialism, but their failures at governance should be apparent to everyone by now. Thanks to Republicans here in California, all attempts to pass a budget are routinely held up year in and year out as Republicans try to block taxes on the rich and services to the poor, the elderly, the halt, and the blind. At the national level, the idea that things don't need to be paid for has put not only our economy in peril, but the world's economy as well.
A failure to provide oversight of our financial institutions has led to colossal failures - Fannie and Freddie Mac, Bear-Stearns, Lehmann Bros, AIG - and now those irresponsible private enterprise excesses have added to the huge burden of the federal government. Were it not for taxes, the system would be collapsing, even though the bail outs, like the war, are all on credit, even as the richest people in this country seek new ways to spend the money they already have, and as John McCain looks for more houses he can buy and then forget he owns.
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Saturday, September 20, 2008
When Refusing to Kill Has a Higher Sentence Than Murder
by Ann Wright
From the beginning of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States military has come under intense criticism and scrutiny for the deaths of civilians. This week, the secretary of defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff made trips to Afghanistan and Pakistan to "acknowledge" the deaths of innocent civilians in attacks in those countries.
In the five and one-half years of the US occupation of Iraq, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians have been killed by US military personnel at checkpoints, during convoy movements and during operations to find the "enemy." In the half-decade of US military presence in Iraq, a very small number of US military personnel and an even smaller number of CIA and contractors have been charged with manslaughter or murder in these deaths. The deaths of most civilians are counted in the "costs of war." A few dozen military have been court-martialed on allegations of mistreatment, manslaughter and murder of Iraqi civilians. With a very few exceptions, most who were court-martialed have been acquitted. Those who were convicted have generally served light sentences.
This week we see again that punishment is less for murdering four Iraqis than for refusing to participate in a war that many citizens, and many in the military, see as a crime against the peace - a war crime.
On September 18, 2008, the US Army sentenced Specialist Belmor Ramos to seven months in prison, demotion to private and a dishonorable discharge for standing guard from a turret in a Humvee while three others in his unit, the First Infantry Division, bound, blindfolded, shot in the heads and dumped the bodies of four unidentified Iraqi men into a Baghdad canal in 2007 in retaliation for deaths in Ramos's unit. According to Associated Press reports, during the court-martial, Ramos admitted his guilt: "I wanted them dead. I had no legal justification or excuse to do this."
Ramos had been charged with conspiracy to commit murder, for which he could have received a life sentence. The military judge in Ramos's court-martial in Vilsek, Germany, would have sentenced him to 40 years in prison had the military prosecutor not agreed to a plea bargain for seven months to testify in the upcoming court-martials of the three non-commissioned officers - Sgt. John E. Hatley, Sgt. 1st Class Joseph P. Mayo and Sgt. Michael P. Leahy Jr. - who were charged on September 16, 2008, with premeditated murder, conspiracy to commit premeditated murder and obstruction of justice.
Longer Sentences for Resisting War Than for Murdering Civilians
Just one month ago, US Army Private Robin Long was sentenced to fifteen months in prison, reduced to private and given a dishonorable discharge for having been absent without leave from the Army rather than serving in a war he believed was unlawful. He had been deported from Canada where he had been speaking on his concerns about the legality of the war for three years and was handed over by Canadian immigration officials to the US military for prosecution. One month earlier, US Army Private First Class James Burmeister voluntarily returned from Canada and was sentenced in July 2008 to six months in prison for refusing to return to Iraq after two previous tours in which he was hit by three IEDs. In May 2008, Private First Class Robert Weiss was court-martialed in Vilseck, Germany, and sentenced to 7 months in jail for refusing to go to Iraq. Also in May 2008, Private First Class Ryan Jackson was also court-martialed and sentenced to 100 days in jail for refusing to go to Iraq.
In 2007, the court-martial of US Army First Lieutenant Ehren Watada, the first commissioned officer who refused to deploy to Iraq, ended in a mistrial. He is still on active duty with the Army. Also in 2007, US Army Sergeant Mark Wilkerson refused to return to Iraq and was sentenced to seven months in jail. The Army denied the conscientious objection application of US Army medic Specialist Agustin Aguayo; he refused to return to Iraq and was sentenced to eight months in jail. Also in 2007, Specialist Melanie McPherson, a US Army Minnesota Reservist, refused to go to Iraq in a job she was not trained for; she was court-martialed and sentenced to three months in jail.
In 2006, US Army Specialist Dale Bertell refused to return to Iraq and was sentenced to four months in jail. US Army Texas National Guard Specialist Katherine Jashniski refused to deploy to Afghanistan; she was sentenced to four months in jail. US Army Sergeant Ricky Clousing of the 82nd Airborne Division refused to return to Iraq and was sentenced to three months in jail. US Marine Corporal Ivan Brobeck voluntarily returned from 18 months in Canada and was court-martialed for refusing to return to Iraq; he was sentenced to eight months in jail.
In 2005, US Army Sergeant Kevin Benderman refused to return to Iraq and was sentenced to 15 months in jail; he served 13 months. US Army Specialist Blake LeMoine refused to return to Iraq and served seven months in jail. When the conscientious objection application of US Army Private Neil Quentin Lucas was denied, he refused to go to Iraq and served 13 months in jail.
In 2004, US Army Sergeant Camilo Mejia refused to return to Iraq and was sentenced to 12 months in jail. The highest-ranking non-commissioned officer to refuse orders to Iraq, US Army Sergeant First Class Abdullah Webster, was sentenced to 14 months in jail. He was within two years of retirement when he refused to deploy to Iraq. US Navy Petty Officer Third Class Pablo Paredes refused to deploy on a ship carrying Marines to a war he considered illegal. He was sentenced to three months confinement. The US Marines denied the conscientious objection application of Corporal Joel Klimkewixz and he was sentenced to seven months in jail.
In 2003, the US Marines denied the conscientious objection application of Marine Reservist Stephen Funk and sentenced him to six months in jail. All of the war resisters who have been court-martialed for refusing to go to Iraq or Afghanistan have been given either dishonorable or bad conduct discharges.
Thousands of other military service members who privately and silently oppose the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been given administrative discharges upon their voluntary return to the military after having been absent without leave.
Light Sentences for the Murders of Iraqis
Some of the more prominent cases where US military personnel have been court-martialed, but not necessarily convicted, for the murders of Iraqi civilians include:
On August 29, 2008, a civilian jury in Riverside, California, acquitted former US Marine Sergeant Jose Nazario Jr. on charges of voluntary manslaughter in the deaths of four unarmed Iraqi detainees during the siege of Fallujah, Iraq, in 2004.
In June, 2008, a U.S. military judge dismissed charges against Lieutenant Colonel Jeffrey Chessani, who had been accused of failing to investigate the November 2005 massacre of 24 unarmed Iraqi civilians in the town of Haditha. Of the eight Marines originally charged in the Haditha massacre, only one still faces prosecution. Criminal charges have been dismissed against six of the Marines and a seventh Marine was acquitted.
In 2007, seven Camp Pendleton Marines and a Navy corpsman were charged with murder and related offenses in the April 2006 kidnapping and killing of a 57-year-old retired Iraqi policeman in the village of Hamdania northwest of Baghdad. Only one of the men, squad leader Sergeant Lawrence Hutchins III, remains in jail, convicted of murder and sentenced by a Camp Pendleton military jury to 15 years. The other six either served out the terms they agreed to in plea deals or had their sentences commuted by Lieutenant General James Mattis, the Commanding General of Camp Pendleton. Mattis ordered the men below Hutchins's rank released after a military jury in July 2007 found Corporal Trent Thomas guilty for his role in the murders but limited his sentence to time already served. In releasing the others, General Mattis determined that Thomas's sentence created an unfair disparity for his fellow Marines who had been convicted with higher sentences.
In December 2007, US Marine Reservist Lance Corporal Delano Holmes was convicted of negligent homicide for the stabbing death of Iraqi Army Private Munther Jasem Muhammed Hassin, a man he shared guard duty with at Camp Fallujah, Iraq, on December 31, 2006. Holmes killed Hassin, stabbing him 17 times, slashing him another 26 times and nearly slicing his nose from his face. A military jury sentenced Holmes to time served, the second time in five months that a Camp Pendleton Marine military court jury allowed a defendant convicted in a homicide case to be sentenced to only time served. Holmes was reduced in rank from lance corporal to private and given a bad conduct discharge.
In August 2008, Article 32 hearings were held in Vilsek, Germany, to determine whether to proceed with criminal charges against Staff Sergeant Jess Cunningham and Sergeant Charles Quigley for the death of an Iraqi. The hearing officer has not yet decided whether the two will be court-martialed.
In only one murder case in Iraq have convicted US military personnel received substantial sentences. In August 2007, a military jury convicted US Army Private First Class Jesse Speilman of rape and four counts of felony murder for the rape and murder of Abeer Qassim al-Janabi, a 14-year-old Iraqi girl, and the murders of her parents and younger sister on March 12, 2006, in Mahmoudiya, a village about 20 miles south of Baghdad. Speilman was sentenced to 110 years in prison, but will be eligible for parole in ten years. During their court-martial, Specialist James P. Barker and Sergeant Paul Cortez testified they took turns raping Abeer while Private Steven Green shot and killed her mother, father and younger sister. They also testified that Green shot Abeer Qassin in the head after raping her. They then set her body on fire to destroy evidence. Cruz was sentenced to 100 years in prison under a plea agreement and will be eligible for parole in 10 years. Barker pleaded guilty at his court-martial and was sentenced to 90 years in a military prison, with the possibility of parole. Private Bryan Howard was sentenced to 27 months in prison under a plea agreement. Private Steven D. Green was discharged from the Army for anti-social behavior before the murders had been discovered. However, he was arrested and charged with rape and murder in the Western District Court of Kentucky. He will be tried in that court on April 29, 2009. His attorney has filed documents for an insanity defense.
Higher Punishment for Killing Fellow Servicemen Than Iraqis
Punishment for murder of other U.S. service members is dramatically higher than for murder of Iraqi and Afghan civilians.
In April 2003, US Army Sergeant Hasan Akbar, a member of the 101st Airborne Division, allegedly threw grenades into a tent at Camp Pennsylvania in Kuwait that killed two officers and wounded 14. Akbar was sentenced to death in April 2005.
In June 2005, US Army 42nd Infantry Division Staff Sergeant Alberto Martinez allegedly killed two superior officers with an anti-personnel mine and grenades inside one of Saddam Hussein's palaces, near Tikrit, Iraq. Martinez's court-martial is underway at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. If convicted, he could face the death penalty.
Earlier this week, on September 14, 2008, two US Army soldiers, assigned to the 3rd Infantry Division, were shot and killed, reportedly by another soldier at their base, near the town of Iskandariyah, about 30 miles south of Baghdad. The soldier who reportedly killed the two others is confined and will be brought before a military magistrate this week for pretrial procedural determinations.
Ann Wright is a retired US Army Reserves colonel with 29 years of military service. She also was a US diplomat who served in Nicaragua, Grenada, Somalia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Sierra Leone, Micronesia and Mongolia. She was on the small team that reopened the US Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, in December 2001. She resigned from the US diplomatic corps in March 2003 in opposition to the Bush administration's decision to invade and occupy Iraq. She is the co-author of "Dissent: Voices of Conscience," profiles of government insiders who have spoken and acted on their concerns of their governments' policies.
From the beginning of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States military has come under intense criticism and scrutiny for the deaths of civilians. This week, the secretary of defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff made trips to Afghanistan and Pakistan to "acknowledge" the deaths of innocent civilians in attacks in those countries.
In the five and one-half years of the US occupation of Iraq, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians have been killed by US military personnel at checkpoints, during convoy movements and during operations to find the "enemy." In the half-decade of US military presence in Iraq, a very small number of US military personnel and an even smaller number of CIA and contractors have been charged with manslaughter or murder in these deaths. The deaths of most civilians are counted in the "costs of war." A few dozen military have been court-martialed on allegations of mistreatment, manslaughter and murder of Iraqi civilians. With a very few exceptions, most who were court-martialed have been acquitted. Those who were convicted have generally served light sentences.
This week we see again that punishment is less for murdering four Iraqis than for refusing to participate in a war that many citizens, and many in the military, see as a crime against the peace - a war crime.
On September 18, 2008, the US Army sentenced Specialist Belmor Ramos to seven months in prison, demotion to private and a dishonorable discharge for standing guard from a turret in a Humvee while three others in his unit, the First Infantry Division, bound, blindfolded, shot in the heads and dumped the bodies of four unidentified Iraqi men into a Baghdad canal in 2007 in retaliation for deaths in Ramos's unit. According to Associated Press reports, during the court-martial, Ramos admitted his guilt: "I wanted them dead. I had no legal justification or excuse to do this."
Ramos had been charged with conspiracy to commit murder, for which he could have received a life sentence. The military judge in Ramos's court-martial in Vilsek, Germany, would have sentenced him to 40 years in prison had the military prosecutor not agreed to a plea bargain for seven months to testify in the upcoming court-martials of the three non-commissioned officers - Sgt. John E. Hatley, Sgt. 1st Class Joseph P. Mayo and Sgt. Michael P. Leahy Jr. - who were charged on September 16, 2008, with premeditated murder, conspiracy to commit premeditated murder and obstruction of justice.
Longer Sentences for Resisting War Than for Murdering Civilians
Just one month ago, US Army Private Robin Long was sentenced to fifteen months in prison, reduced to private and given a dishonorable discharge for having been absent without leave from the Army rather than serving in a war he believed was unlawful. He had been deported from Canada where he had been speaking on his concerns about the legality of the war for three years and was handed over by Canadian immigration officials to the US military for prosecution. One month earlier, US Army Private First Class James Burmeister voluntarily returned from Canada and was sentenced in July 2008 to six months in prison for refusing to return to Iraq after two previous tours in which he was hit by three IEDs. In May 2008, Private First Class Robert Weiss was court-martialed in Vilseck, Germany, and sentenced to 7 months in jail for refusing to go to Iraq. Also in May 2008, Private First Class Ryan Jackson was also court-martialed and sentenced to 100 days in jail for refusing to go to Iraq.
In 2007, the court-martial of US Army First Lieutenant Ehren Watada, the first commissioned officer who refused to deploy to Iraq, ended in a mistrial. He is still on active duty with the Army. Also in 2007, US Army Sergeant Mark Wilkerson refused to return to Iraq and was sentenced to seven months in jail. The Army denied the conscientious objection application of US Army medic Specialist Agustin Aguayo; he refused to return to Iraq and was sentenced to eight months in jail. Also in 2007, Specialist Melanie McPherson, a US Army Minnesota Reservist, refused to go to Iraq in a job she was not trained for; she was court-martialed and sentenced to three months in jail.
In 2006, US Army Specialist Dale Bertell refused to return to Iraq and was sentenced to four months in jail. US Army Texas National Guard Specialist Katherine Jashniski refused to deploy to Afghanistan; she was sentenced to four months in jail. US Army Sergeant Ricky Clousing of the 82nd Airborne Division refused to return to Iraq and was sentenced to three months in jail. US Marine Corporal Ivan Brobeck voluntarily returned from 18 months in Canada and was court-martialed for refusing to return to Iraq; he was sentenced to eight months in jail.
In 2005, US Army Sergeant Kevin Benderman refused to return to Iraq and was sentenced to 15 months in jail; he served 13 months. US Army Specialist Blake LeMoine refused to return to Iraq and served seven months in jail. When the conscientious objection application of US Army Private Neil Quentin Lucas was denied, he refused to go to Iraq and served 13 months in jail.
In 2004, US Army Sergeant Camilo Mejia refused to return to Iraq and was sentenced to 12 months in jail. The highest-ranking non-commissioned officer to refuse orders to Iraq, US Army Sergeant First Class Abdullah Webster, was sentenced to 14 months in jail. He was within two years of retirement when he refused to deploy to Iraq. US Navy Petty Officer Third Class Pablo Paredes refused to deploy on a ship carrying Marines to a war he considered illegal. He was sentenced to three months confinement. The US Marines denied the conscientious objection application of Corporal Joel Klimkewixz and he was sentenced to seven months in jail.
In 2003, the US Marines denied the conscientious objection application of Marine Reservist Stephen Funk and sentenced him to six months in jail. All of the war resisters who have been court-martialed for refusing to go to Iraq or Afghanistan have been given either dishonorable or bad conduct discharges.
Thousands of other military service members who privately and silently oppose the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been given administrative discharges upon their voluntary return to the military after having been absent without leave.
Light Sentences for the Murders of Iraqis
Some of the more prominent cases where US military personnel have been court-martialed, but not necessarily convicted, for the murders of Iraqi civilians include:
On August 29, 2008, a civilian jury in Riverside, California, acquitted former US Marine Sergeant Jose Nazario Jr. on charges of voluntary manslaughter in the deaths of four unarmed Iraqi detainees during the siege of Fallujah, Iraq, in 2004.
In June, 2008, a U.S. military judge dismissed charges against Lieutenant Colonel Jeffrey Chessani, who had been accused of failing to investigate the November 2005 massacre of 24 unarmed Iraqi civilians in the town of Haditha. Of the eight Marines originally charged in the Haditha massacre, only one still faces prosecution. Criminal charges have been dismissed against six of the Marines and a seventh Marine was acquitted.
In 2007, seven Camp Pendleton Marines and a Navy corpsman were charged with murder and related offenses in the April 2006 kidnapping and killing of a 57-year-old retired Iraqi policeman in the village of Hamdania northwest of Baghdad. Only one of the men, squad leader Sergeant Lawrence Hutchins III, remains in jail, convicted of murder and sentenced by a Camp Pendleton military jury to 15 years. The other six either served out the terms they agreed to in plea deals or had their sentences commuted by Lieutenant General James Mattis, the Commanding General of Camp Pendleton. Mattis ordered the men below Hutchins's rank released after a military jury in July 2007 found Corporal Trent Thomas guilty for his role in the murders but limited his sentence to time already served. In releasing the others, General Mattis determined that Thomas's sentence created an unfair disparity for his fellow Marines who had been convicted with higher sentences.
In December 2007, US Marine Reservist Lance Corporal Delano Holmes was convicted of negligent homicide for the stabbing death of Iraqi Army Private Munther Jasem Muhammed Hassin, a man he shared guard duty with at Camp Fallujah, Iraq, on December 31, 2006. Holmes killed Hassin, stabbing him 17 times, slashing him another 26 times and nearly slicing his nose from his face. A military jury sentenced Holmes to time served, the second time in five months that a Camp Pendleton Marine military court jury allowed a defendant convicted in a homicide case to be sentenced to only time served. Holmes was reduced in rank from lance corporal to private and given a bad conduct discharge.
In August 2008, Article 32 hearings were held in Vilsek, Germany, to determine whether to proceed with criminal charges against Staff Sergeant Jess Cunningham and Sergeant Charles Quigley for the death of an Iraqi. The hearing officer has not yet decided whether the two will be court-martialed.
In only one murder case in Iraq have convicted US military personnel received substantial sentences. In August 2007, a military jury convicted US Army Private First Class Jesse Speilman of rape and four counts of felony murder for the rape and murder of Abeer Qassim al-Janabi, a 14-year-old Iraqi girl, and the murders of her parents and younger sister on March 12, 2006, in Mahmoudiya, a village about 20 miles south of Baghdad. Speilman was sentenced to 110 years in prison, but will be eligible for parole in ten years. During their court-martial, Specialist James P. Barker and Sergeant Paul Cortez testified they took turns raping Abeer while Private Steven Green shot and killed her mother, father and younger sister. They also testified that Green shot Abeer Qassin in the head after raping her. They then set her body on fire to destroy evidence. Cruz was sentenced to 100 years in prison under a plea agreement and will be eligible for parole in 10 years. Barker pleaded guilty at his court-martial and was sentenced to 90 years in a military prison, with the possibility of parole. Private Bryan Howard was sentenced to 27 months in prison under a plea agreement. Private Steven D. Green was discharged from the Army for anti-social behavior before the murders had been discovered. However, he was arrested and charged with rape and murder in the Western District Court of Kentucky. He will be tried in that court on April 29, 2009. His attorney has filed documents for an insanity defense.
Higher Punishment for Killing Fellow Servicemen Than Iraqis
Punishment for murder of other U.S. service members is dramatically higher than for murder of Iraqi and Afghan civilians.
In April 2003, US Army Sergeant Hasan Akbar, a member of the 101st Airborne Division, allegedly threw grenades into a tent at Camp Pennsylvania in Kuwait that killed two officers and wounded 14. Akbar was sentenced to death in April 2005.
In June 2005, US Army 42nd Infantry Division Staff Sergeant Alberto Martinez allegedly killed two superior officers with an anti-personnel mine and grenades inside one of Saddam Hussein's palaces, near Tikrit, Iraq. Martinez's court-martial is underway at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. If convicted, he could face the death penalty.
Earlier this week, on September 14, 2008, two US Army soldiers, assigned to the 3rd Infantry Division, were shot and killed, reportedly by another soldier at their base, near the town of Iskandariyah, about 30 miles south of Baghdad. The soldier who reportedly killed the two others is confined and will be brought before a military magistrate this week for pretrial procedural determinations.
Ann Wright is a retired US Army Reserves colonel with 29 years of military service. She also was a US diplomat who served in Nicaragua, Grenada, Somalia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Sierra Leone, Micronesia and Mongolia. She was on the small team that reopened the US Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, in December 2001. She resigned from the US diplomatic corps in March 2003 in opposition to the Bush administration's decision to invade and occupy Iraq. She is the co-author of "Dissent: Voices of Conscience," profiles of government insiders who have spoken and acted on their concerns of their governments' policies.
Friday, September 19, 2008
Palin + McCain Equals More Bush
by Helen Thomas
WASHINGTON -- Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has awesome self-confidence. Chosen by fellow Republicans to be Sen. John McCain's running mate, she told an interviewer: "I'm ready." That confidence reflects her naivete about her role that puts her one heartbeat away from the presidency.
In accepting the nomination as veep, she invoked the greatness of President Truman, based on their small-town origins. But anyone who was around during Truman's era knows there is a world of difference between Palin and Truman. Take, for example, humility.
Truman was vice president for only a short time when on April 12, 1945, he was summoned to the White House and told the stunning news that President Franklin Roosevelt was dead. Truman and FDR were not close and Truman was not deeply familiar with the U.S. military plans for World War II. He also did not know about the atomic bomb.
As the nation's new leader, Truman wanted a few days to move into the White House. He understood the magnitude of his new job. The morning after being sworn in, Truman emerged from his Washington apartment to go to work on his first day as president. He took one look at the three wire service reporters who standing in front of his building.
"Boys," he said to the familiar faces, "the moon and the stars fell on me. If you ever prayed before, pray for me."
So when Palin says she is "ready," one thinks of the two U.S. wars under way in Iraq and Afghanistan -- and the devastating market crash on Wall Street.
There is no question that Palin has given a big lift to McCain and helped boost his ratings so that he's now virtually tied with Barack Obama, the Democratic nominee. As a team, McCain and Palin are on the same page. Both are pro-guns and anti-abortion. She is literally a rifle-toting mama, against sex education and has attempted to ban books she considers immoral from her hometown library.
But Palin's evangelical rigidity on social issues puts her out of step with the modern woman. She is said to be more reactionary than McCain -- if that's possible. Is it any wonder that activist feminist organizations have come out in support of Obama?
The new Republican ticket seems like the current White House tenant. Neither McCain nor Palin appear to have any significant doubts about President Bush's disastrous policies. Palin's gubernatorial tenure in Alaska is personified by massive firings when she took office. She does not tolerate dissent and shuns the media.
It seems clear to me that we would have another imperial presidency if McCain and Palin win the hearts and minds of the American people in the November balloting. Bob Woodward of The Washington Post has been privy to the workings of the Bush White House and has written four books to prove it. In his latest Book, "The War Within," Woodward depicts Bush as a "man of few doubts" who is "still following his gut, convinced that the path he has chosen is right."
Bush, who has switched from using the word "win" in speaking of Iraq to "succeed," has the gung ho McCain-Palin team behind him. The question is, why? Woodward also wrote that Bush was intolerant of confrontations and in-depth debate. He said Bush maintained an "odd detachment" in the management of the war in Iraq "and too often failed to lead."
Bush has never explained why he invaded Iraq -- a country that had no doomsday weapons and did us no harm. It's doubtful that McCain or Palin could explain Bush's mindless mission in the Middle East if they gained the White House.
© Copyright 2008 Hearst Newspapers
WASHINGTON -- Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has awesome self-confidence. Chosen by fellow Republicans to be Sen. John McCain's running mate, she told an interviewer: "I'm ready." That confidence reflects her naivete about her role that puts her one heartbeat away from the presidency.
In accepting the nomination as veep, she invoked the greatness of President Truman, based on their small-town origins. But anyone who was around during Truman's era knows there is a world of difference between Palin and Truman. Take, for example, humility.
Truman was vice president for only a short time when on April 12, 1945, he was summoned to the White House and told the stunning news that President Franklin Roosevelt was dead. Truman and FDR were not close and Truman was not deeply familiar with the U.S. military plans for World War II. He also did not know about the atomic bomb.
As the nation's new leader, Truman wanted a few days to move into the White House. He understood the magnitude of his new job. The morning after being sworn in, Truman emerged from his Washington apartment to go to work on his first day as president. He took one look at the three wire service reporters who standing in front of his building.
"Boys," he said to the familiar faces, "the moon and the stars fell on me. If you ever prayed before, pray for me."
So when Palin says she is "ready," one thinks of the two U.S. wars under way in Iraq and Afghanistan -- and the devastating market crash on Wall Street.
There is no question that Palin has given a big lift to McCain and helped boost his ratings so that he's now virtually tied with Barack Obama, the Democratic nominee. As a team, McCain and Palin are on the same page. Both are pro-guns and anti-abortion. She is literally a rifle-toting mama, against sex education and has attempted to ban books she considers immoral from her hometown library.
But Palin's evangelical rigidity on social issues puts her out of step with the modern woman. She is said to be more reactionary than McCain -- if that's possible. Is it any wonder that activist feminist organizations have come out in support of Obama?
The new Republican ticket seems like the current White House tenant. Neither McCain nor Palin appear to have any significant doubts about President Bush's disastrous policies. Palin's gubernatorial tenure in Alaska is personified by massive firings when she took office. She does not tolerate dissent and shuns the media.
It seems clear to me that we would have another imperial presidency if McCain and Palin win the hearts and minds of the American people in the November balloting. Bob Woodward of The Washington Post has been privy to the workings of the Bush White House and has written four books to prove it. In his latest Book, "The War Within," Woodward depicts Bush as a "man of few doubts" who is "still following his gut, convinced that the path he has chosen is right."
Bush, who has switched from using the word "win" in speaking of Iraq to "succeed," has the gung ho McCain-Palin team behind him. The question is, why? Woodward also wrote that Bush was intolerant of confrontations and in-depth debate. He said Bush maintained an "odd detachment" in the management of the war in Iraq "and too often failed to lead."
Bush has never explained why he invaded Iraq -- a country that had no doomsday weapons and did us no harm. It's doubtful that McCain or Palin could explain Bush's mindless mission in the Middle East if they gained the White House.
© Copyright 2008 Hearst Newspapers
Whoa and Woe: Living in Sarah Palin's America
by David Michael Green
I can’t tell you how despondent I’ve grown in the last weeks.
Is there really no hope for this country, after all? It now appears so.
In January of 2003, John Le Carre wrote that, “America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is the worst I can remember: Worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam War.”
He was surely right then. Except that what once looked like a period now seems like an epoch.
Just as I was foolish enough to believe that we could dare to hope again, so it now seems that we are locked once more in what has become an eternal loop of Republican depredations, and Democratic responses of “Wha happened?” as the absurdly predictable freight train rolls over them, right on schedule.
Sarah Palin and everything associated with her pick is truly the barometer of the country’s degradation. We are now talking about making someone the potential leader of the Free World who is even more ill-informed, even more rigidly dogmatic, and even more ideologically regressive than was the hapless George W. Bush of 2000. Only this time, we’re talking about doing so as we are still in the midst of eating eight years worth of the consequences of that same prior idiocy. We are folding in half Santayana’s famous adage about being condemned to repeat history, so that we are already screwing up again by the time we get to the second half of the sentence. To understand our current level of stupidity, one might imagine if, on the day after Pearl Harbor – as the smoke was still billowing over the wreckage and the bodies and oil still floating about the water’s surface – Americans all got together and said, “We need to make even more of our military forces vulnerable to surprise attack!”
Three major data points have been added to the Palin story in the last week, all of them discouraging in the extreme. The first was the Charles Gibson interview. If history records that this was the moment in which the American experiment in democracy finally came crashing down to the floor in a cloud of dust, then history should also record Gibson as the Great Enabler of democracy’s demise. It’s not that he didn’t ask a tough question or two. It’s just that he didn’t ask very many, he didn’t follow up properly on the ones he did ask, and he didn’t probe her in any way to see if she’s capable of the slightest independent philosophical thought, or the merest understanding of the arc of history.
So, who cares, eh? Just another day at the shop in what calls itself the American media, right? No, actually, not. Here’s what’s going to happen. Palin’s handlers are furiously pumping her full of as much Cliff Notes quips about the world she’s completely ignored all her life as they can jam into her brain in a month. She does the Gibson interview, she does an even easier one on Fox, then she does the Biden debate (during which neither the media nor Biden push very hard, and she reels off a string of memorized platitudes and cheap zingers). After which she is then kept tightly under wraps until the election, while the McCain campaign claims that she’s been exposed to plenty of tough questioning and anyone calling for any more is an elitist who is piling on like the snobs they are. Oh, and don’t forget this part – piling on to a woman, no less, in ways they never would to a man, because they are not just elitist snobs, but also sexist, elitist snobs.
Thus, history will record the Gibson interview as the first, last and only chance to see what is really behind the crash course in rote memorization. It’s bad enough, in the pathetic state the country has come to occupy, that a complete cipher like Sarah Palin stands as close as she already does to power. So much worse is all the complicity. Gibson’s interview was a serious crime – felonious abdication in the first degree – and all the more so because he and his network and the rest of the media pretend like it was enough, either in terms of depth, or of the number of interviews to which she’ll be subjected. Where’s the shame? If the members of the American media hadn’t all had their embarrassment chips surgically removed, none of these pathetic milquetoast side-kicks to power would ever be able to leave the house.
The second major data point on Palin is the exception that proves the media rule. The New York Times is actually doing its job for once in the last eight years – unlike, say, in Election 2000, the run-up to the Iraq war, or when the Downing Street Memos were released. They did some real journalism two weeks ago and exposed the fact that McCain had hardly done any vetting on Palin before picking her, and had hardly even met her. Now they’ve done some more homework, and exposed what sort of person she’s been as mayor and governor. The first problem, of course, is that the regressive right has spent decades sowing the myth of a liberal-biased media, with the Times leading the way. This is precisely the tool they will use to dismiss these damning reports, and of course, they’ve already begun as soon as the first story was published. The second problem is that this is an America where many people will believe that absurd line, despite the real tendecy of the mainstream media to be little more than corporate genuflectors. And the third problem is that most Americans don’t even seem to care that much about the content of these exposés, regardless of the source.
They should, though, for what the latest article reveals is that Palin is grossly incompetent, grossly inattentive to her responsibilities, rigidly dogmatic, deeply uninformed, and a committed practitioner of cronyism, secrecy and the politics of destroying ‘enemies’, including by using the instruments of government to do so. She’s a sort of dumbed-down Richard Nixon. Or, well... a female George W. Bush. These are just some of the highlights from the Times’ thorough review of the public record and interviews with 60 Republican and Democratic Alaskans at the state and local levels:
• Palin got famous in Alaska for exposing corruption on the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, where a member was doing Republican Party work on the public’s nickel. But then she was later caught by a conservative journalist doing the exact same thing herself. She admitted to him that she was wrong, and even though he didn’t publish anything about what she had done (of course), she nevertheless preemptively attacked him in the media for “smearing” her.
• Palin’s cronyism is so rampant that the Times reports “The Wasilla High School yearbook archive now doubles as a veritable directory of state government”. She gave a childhood friend of hers, a former real estate agent, a $95,000-a-year directorship in the State Division of Agriculture. The old buddy “cited her childhood love of cows as a qualification for running the roughly $2 million agency”. Her attorney general is a former borough assemblyman that no one in the legal community had heard of prior to his appointment. He had never supervised people before, but now runs an office of five hundred staff.
• She and her staff use private email accounts to conduct state business, and purposely chose to do so in order to avoid future scrutiny, including potential subpoenas.
• Sarah Palin has now been in office for about 650 days. She has spent 312 of those at her home in Wasila, 600 miles away from the capital (and has billed the state per diem expenses for that), leading the Times to find that “Democrats and Republicans alike describe her as often missing in action”. So much so that members of the state legislature began wearing “Where’s Sarah?” pins.
• In Palin World, opponents of Sarah aren’t just opponents. They are enemies of her, and of the state of Alaska, and they are labeled “haters”.
It goes on from there. What emerges pretty clearly is Sarah Barracuda, alright. But not in a good way. Not some sort of tough fighter on behalf of her constitutents. More like Sarah’s Barracuda than Sarah Barracuda. This is a person who appears to be wholly without principle, wholly without competence in good governance, who knew as early as 1996 that she wanted to be president, was willing to do whatever was necessary to get there, and now is frighteningly close to achieving her goal.
The third and most frightening Palin episode of all is the reaction she has produced in the regressive ranks, including amongst most so-called intellectuals. Any pretense of dispassionate analysis, any patina of real patriotic concern for the country, any half-hearted reference to fair political play, have all been definitively obliterated by this latest volley of right-wing insanity. It is scary to see the robots in action, frightening to realize the utter resemblance they bear to the shock troops of any garden variety authoritarian or totalitarian movement, and disheartening in the extreme to realize how utterly opposite would have been their reaction had Palin been put on the Democratic ticket. I long for some sort of time-warp experiment one could conduct, where regressives would go crazy in reaction to some Democratic individual or action, only to have it then correctly labeled as Republican. Watch what happens, for example, should Barack Obama win the Electoral College vote (and thus the presidency), but not the popular vote. I’d bet regressives would go to the Supreme Court arguing that the constitutional system is unfair, even though exactly that system and those circumstances produced Lil’ Bush eight years ago.
Of course, we actually have these scenarios all the time, with just the latest being the newfound ‘concern’ of those on the right for Hillary Clinton, after decades of destroying her. In fact, the entirety of the Bush administration is precisely the same sort of experiment, from front to back. Could you even begin to imagine what they’d say about this goon’s incredible incompetence and monstrous failings if he were a Democrat? But they never cop to any of this, and they never make even the most feeble attempt at dispassionate analysis based on facts. These are Borg. They are frightening precisely in proportion to how massively, existentially frightened they themselves must be in order to so blindly follow scum-peddlers like Limbaugh, Rove and Bush, not to mention just about any religious huckster anywhere out there on the horizon – and there are lots of them.
What is perhaps especially discouraging is the regressive punditocracy, who have shown themselves in the last two decades to be completely biased and living unashamedly in a principle-free zone. Cheering on Bill Clinton being impeached for lying about adultery by a gaggle of Republican pukes whose crimes on that very same front were far more egregious was a sickening sight. Even worse was their complicity in the stealing of Election 2000, a massive affront to American democracy (and no, Mr. Justice Scalia, you little fascist thug, I will not “just get over it”). I can say with full honesty that I was fully invested in that case in the necessity for a fair election process, that year and every year, without regard to the winner. Democracy comes first, even – yes – if that means sticking George W. Bush in the Oval Office. But I saw little of that dispassionate commitment to democratic process from the blowhards on the right, or on the Supreme Court. These same people have since excused every failure and depredation of the absolute worst president in American history, ever, often finding ways to somehow still blame his calamities on the Clinton administration. And now they fawn over Sarah Palin, who gives every indication of being Dan Quayle with a vagina. And an even more massive ambition-to-competence-ratio score. Does anyone seriously doubt, even for a moment, how widely and deeply these same folks would mortally eviscerate her, if she had been Obama’s pick?
The Palin nod was a masterful display of Rovian-style cynical calculation, in all its full destructive glory. They figured, so far correctly, that they could get at least a triple, if not a home-run, out of a foul ball, as long as they gamed the system in that special way for which only amoral, sociopathic right-wing political operatives are so gifted.
First, they bring out Palin, who ignites a level of passion amongst the religious right shock troops that John McCain could never get anywhere near. A clean and robust single! But then they move the runner to second base by taking advantage of what they know will be the reaction to the pick by those outside the programmed posse. Since she’s “Sarah Who?” to the whole world (including, five minutes ago, to those regressives who now are utterly gaga about their new hero), they know there will investigations and allegations which will immediately arise in response to the choice. So they cleverly and cynically feign great umbrage at all of these because some of them were possibly over the top. Now she becomes this great victim of the liberal press, and independent women voters are supposed to flock to her in support of what they think is a kindred soul suffering the products of sexism, as they have during their lives. She’s meant to pick off Hillary Democrats. It’s a smash double.
Which is then advanced to a triple, when this so-called unfair treatment by the media can now be used as an excuse to keep her away from any situation in which she might be revealed as knowing nothing about the world, let alone where her corruption, cronyism or incompetence as governor or mayor might be called into question. And then, finally, if you can also position her so that any shots by Joe Biden in their 90-minute debate can be instantly deemed male bullying of a helpless woman victim (hey, what happened to Sarah Barracuda?), bang!, you’ve smacked the balled out of the park.
Amazing, eh? Think what you can do if you haven’t had a scruple since 1968 (and even then, it was only by accident)! Think what can be accomplished by (alleged) people who care only about winning! Think about how much you can pillage from American politics today if you don’t give a damn about the destructive costs your actions will have on the system tomorrow! You can take a foul ball and turn it into a home run. You can take a corrupt and vicious policy know-nothing and make her president of the United States and leader of the Free World.
Amazing, indeed.
Just think if these guys were running Wall Street, instead of American politics. You’d have CEOs bringing home tens of millions of dollars in compensation for making stupid and insanely greedy decisions that not only crashed their firms, but the entire world economic system as well. Hard to imagine, eh?
Hey, wait a minute...!
I can’t tell you how despondent I’ve grown in the last weeks.
Is there really no hope for this country, after all? It now appears so.
In January of 2003, John Le Carre wrote that, “America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is the worst I can remember: Worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam War.”
He was surely right then. Except that what once looked like a period now seems like an epoch.
Just as I was foolish enough to believe that we could dare to hope again, so it now seems that we are locked once more in what has become an eternal loop of Republican depredations, and Democratic responses of “Wha happened?” as the absurdly predictable freight train rolls over them, right on schedule.
Sarah Palin and everything associated with her pick is truly the barometer of the country’s degradation. We are now talking about making someone the potential leader of the Free World who is even more ill-informed, even more rigidly dogmatic, and even more ideologically regressive than was the hapless George W. Bush of 2000. Only this time, we’re talking about doing so as we are still in the midst of eating eight years worth of the consequences of that same prior idiocy. We are folding in half Santayana’s famous adage about being condemned to repeat history, so that we are already screwing up again by the time we get to the second half of the sentence. To understand our current level of stupidity, one might imagine if, on the day after Pearl Harbor – as the smoke was still billowing over the wreckage and the bodies and oil still floating about the water’s surface – Americans all got together and said, “We need to make even more of our military forces vulnerable to surprise attack!”
Three major data points have been added to the Palin story in the last week, all of them discouraging in the extreme. The first was the Charles Gibson interview. If history records that this was the moment in which the American experiment in democracy finally came crashing down to the floor in a cloud of dust, then history should also record Gibson as the Great Enabler of democracy’s demise. It’s not that he didn’t ask a tough question or two. It’s just that he didn’t ask very many, he didn’t follow up properly on the ones he did ask, and he didn’t probe her in any way to see if she’s capable of the slightest independent philosophical thought, or the merest understanding of the arc of history.
So, who cares, eh? Just another day at the shop in what calls itself the American media, right? No, actually, not. Here’s what’s going to happen. Palin’s handlers are furiously pumping her full of as much Cliff Notes quips about the world she’s completely ignored all her life as they can jam into her brain in a month. She does the Gibson interview, she does an even easier one on Fox, then she does the Biden debate (during which neither the media nor Biden push very hard, and she reels off a string of memorized platitudes and cheap zingers). After which she is then kept tightly under wraps until the election, while the McCain campaign claims that she’s been exposed to plenty of tough questioning and anyone calling for any more is an elitist who is piling on like the snobs they are. Oh, and don’t forget this part – piling on to a woman, no less, in ways they never would to a man, because they are not just elitist snobs, but also sexist, elitist snobs.
Thus, history will record the Gibson interview as the first, last and only chance to see what is really behind the crash course in rote memorization. It’s bad enough, in the pathetic state the country has come to occupy, that a complete cipher like Sarah Palin stands as close as she already does to power. So much worse is all the complicity. Gibson’s interview was a serious crime – felonious abdication in the first degree – and all the more so because he and his network and the rest of the media pretend like it was enough, either in terms of depth, or of the number of interviews to which she’ll be subjected. Where’s the shame? If the members of the American media hadn’t all had their embarrassment chips surgically removed, none of these pathetic milquetoast side-kicks to power would ever be able to leave the house.
The second major data point on Palin is the exception that proves the media rule. The New York Times is actually doing its job for once in the last eight years – unlike, say, in Election 2000, the run-up to the Iraq war, or when the Downing Street Memos were released. They did some real journalism two weeks ago and exposed the fact that McCain had hardly done any vetting on Palin before picking her, and had hardly even met her. Now they’ve done some more homework, and exposed what sort of person she’s been as mayor and governor. The first problem, of course, is that the regressive right has spent decades sowing the myth of a liberal-biased media, with the Times leading the way. This is precisely the tool they will use to dismiss these damning reports, and of course, they’ve already begun as soon as the first story was published. The second problem is that this is an America where many people will believe that absurd line, despite the real tendecy of the mainstream media to be little more than corporate genuflectors. And the third problem is that most Americans don’t even seem to care that much about the content of these exposés, regardless of the source.
They should, though, for what the latest article reveals is that Palin is grossly incompetent, grossly inattentive to her responsibilities, rigidly dogmatic, deeply uninformed, and a committed practitioner of cronyism, secrecy and the politics of destroying ‘enemies’, including by using the instruments of government to do so. She’s a sort of dumbed-down Richard Nixon. Or, well... a female George W. Bush. These are just some of the highlights from the Times’ thorough review of the public record and interviews with 60 Republican and Democratic Alaskans at the state and local levels:
• Palin got famous in Alaska for exposing corruption on the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, where a member was doing Republican Party work on the public’s nickel. But then she was later caught by a conservative journalist doing the exact same thing herself. She admitted to him that she was wrong, and even though he didn’t publish anything about what she had done (of course), she nevertheless preemptively attacked him in the media for “smearing” her.
• Palin’s cronyism is so rampant that the Times reports “The Wasilla High School yearbook archive now doubles as a veritable directory of state government”. She gave a childhood friend of hers, a former real estate agent, a $95,000-a-year directorship in the State Division of Agriculture. The old buddy “cited her childhood love of cows as a qualification for running the roughly $2 million agency”. Her attorney general is a former borough assemblyman that no one in the legal community had heard of prior to his appointment. He had never supervised people before, but now runs an office of five hundred staff.
• She and her staff use private email accounts to conduct state business, and purposely chose to do so in order to avoid future scrutiny, including potential subpoenas.
• Sarah Palin has now been in office for about 650 days. She has spent 312 of those at her home in Wasila, 600 miles away from the capital (and has billed the state per diem expenses for that), leading the Times to find that “Democrats and Republicans alike describe her as often missing in action”. So much so that members of the state legislature began wearing “Where’s Sarah?” pins.
• In Palin World, opponents of Sarah aren’t just opponents. They are enemies of her, and of the state of Alaska, and they are labeled “haters”.
It goes on from there. What emerges pretty clearly is Sarah Barracuda, alright. But not in a good way. Not some sort of tough fighter on behalf of her constitutents. More like Sarah’s Barracuda than Sarah Barracuda. This is a person who appears to be wholly without principle, wholly without competence in good governance, who knew as early as 1996 that she wanted to be president, was willing to do whatever was necessary to get there, and now is frighteningly close to achieving her goal.
The third and most frightening Palin episode of all is the reaction she has produced in the regressive ranks, including amongst most so-called intellectuals. Any pretense of dispassionate analysis, any patina of real patriotic concern for the country, any half-hearted reference to fair political play, have all been definitively obliterated by this latest volley of right-wing insanity. It is scary to see the robots in action, frightening to realize the utter resemblance they bear to the shock troops of any garden variety authoritarian or totalitarian movement, and disheartening in the extreme to realize how utterly opposite would have been their reaction had Palin been put on the Democratic ticket. I long for some sort of time-warp experiment one could conduct, where regressives would go crazy in reaction to some Democratic individual or action, only to have it then correctly labeled as Republican. Watch what happens, for example, should Barack Obama win the Electoral College vote (and thus the presidency), but not the popular vote. I’d bet regressives would go to the Supreme Court arguing that the constitutional system is unfair, even though exactly that system and those circumstances produced Lil’ Bush eight years ago.
Of course, we actually have these scenarios all the time, with just the latest being the newfound ‘concern’ of those on the right for Hillary Clinton, after decades of destroying her. In fact, the entirety of the Bush administration is precisely the same sort of experiment, from front to back. Could you even begin to imagine what they’d say about this goon’s incredible incompetence and monstrous failings if he were a Democrat? But they never cop to any of this, and they never make even the most feeble attempt at dispassionate analysis based on facts. These are Borg. They are frightening precisely in proportion to how massively, existentially frightened they themselves must be in order to so blindly follow scum-peddlers like Limbaugh, Rove and Bush, not to mention just about any religious huckster anywhere out there on the horizon – and there are lots of them.
What is perhaps especially discouraging is the regressive punditocracy, who have shown themselves in the last two decades to be completely biased and living unashamedly in a principle-free zone. Cheering on Bill Clinton being impeached for lying about adultery by a gaggle of Republican pukes whose crimes on that very same front were far more egregious was a sickening sight. Even worse was their complicity in the stealing of Election 2000, a massive affront to American democracy (and no, Mr. Justice Scalia, you little fascist thug, I will not “just get over it”). I can say with full honesty that I was fully invested in that case in the necessity for a fair election process, that year and every year, without regard to the winner. Democracy comes first, even – yes – if that means sticking George W. Bush in the Oval Office. But I saw little of that dispassionate commitment to democratic process from the blowhards on the right, or on the Supreme Court. These same people have since excused every failure and depredation of the absolute worst president in American history, ever, often finding ways to somehow still blame his calamities on the Clinton administration. And now they fawn over Sarah Palin, who gives every indication of being Dan Quayle with a vagina. And an even more massive ambition-to-competence-ratio score. Does anyone seriously doubt, even for a moment, how widely and deeply these same folks would mortally eviscerate her, if she had been Obama’s pick?
The Palin nod was a masterful display of Rovian-style cynical calculation, in all its full destructive glory. They figured, so far correctly, that they could get at least a triple, if not a home-run, out of a foul ball, as long as they gamed the system in that special way for which only amoral, sociopathic right-wing political operatives are so gifted.
First, they bring out Palin, who ignites a level of passion amongst the religious right shock troops that John McCain could never get anywhere near. A clean and robust single! But then they move the runner to second base by taking advantage of what they know will be the reaction to the pick by those outside the programmed posse. Since she’s “Sarah Who?” to the whole world (including, five minutes ago, to those regressives who now are utterly gaga about their new hero), they know there will investigations and allegations which will immediately arise in response to the choice. So they cleverly and cynically feign great umbrage at all of these because some of them were possibly over the top. Now she becomes this great victim of the liberal press, and independent women voters are supposed to flock to her in support of what they think is a kindred soul suffering the products of sexism, as they have during their lives. She’s meant to pick off Hillary Democrats. It’s a smash double.
Which is then advanced to a triple, when this so-called unfair treatment by the media can now be used as an excuse to keep her away from any situation in which she might be revealed as knowing nothing about the world, let alone where her corruption, cronyism or incompetence as governor or mayor might be called into question. And then, finally, if you can also position her so that any shots by Joe Biden in their 90-minute debate can be instantly deemed male bullying of a helpless woman victim (hey, what happened to Sarah Barracuda?), bang!, you’ve smacked the balled out of the park.
Amazing, eh? Think what you can do if you haven’t had a scruple since 1968 (and even then, it was only by accident)! Think what can be accomplished by (alleged) people who care only about winning! Think about how much you can pillage from American politics today if you don’t give a damn about the destructive costs your actions will have on the system tomorrow! You can take a foul ball and turn it into a home run. You can take a corrupt and vicious policy know-nothing and make her president of the United States and leader of the Free World.
Amazing, indeed.
Just think if these guys were running Wall Street, instead of American politics. You’d have CEOs bringing home tens of millions of dollars in compensation for making stupid and insanely greedy decisions that not only crashed their firms, but the entire world economic system as well. Hard to imagine, eh?
Hey, wait a minute...!
McCain's Passion Play
How the Senator Trivializes and Insults the Real Heroes
By STEVEN T. BANKO
Am I the only one to think that John McCain trivializes both his sacrifice as a POW and the determination of a wide range of specially challenged Americans to lead productive lives? I’m referring to McCain’s repetition of his POW status as a wild card to trump any failing that is otherwise difficult to explain.
Was there any more pathetic display of his willingness to cheapen his sacrifice than McCain’s recent performances with Jay Leno and Katie Couric? He couldn't remember how many houses he owns because he once had “no house, no kitchen table, no chair.” One might think not having a house as a prisoner might make one more acutely aware of exactly how many houses one owned—but not John McCain.
Now we’re told McCain is computer illiterate because – you guessed it — he was a POW and his tortured arms can’t work a keyboard. Tell that to the millions of profoundly disabled Americans who master cyberspace with their teeth, who navigate in wheelchairs with their chins or a single functioning finger, or who communicate with synthesizers. They struggle every day to prove how normal they are. Their lives are campaigns against prejudice and stereotypes and fear. They fight through their disabilities. They adapt to a world that too often turns its eyes away from them.They strive not for privilege or for pampering or for priority. Instead, they seek only opportunity. Their impediments are challenges, not excuses. Their obstacles are surmounted every day. Their opportunities are seized with grit and determination.
People overcome blindness, deafness and physical limitation every day. Army and VA hospitals are replete with traumatic amputees – veterans McCain didn’t think deserved increased benefits — whose heroism didn’t end with their injuries. They continue to achieve, to overcome and to succeed in the face of obstacles that would overwhelm most people and apparently including John McCain.
More than one in five handicapped Americans earn college degrees. They do so by adapting to the learning environment not by whining about its difficulties. They set a goal. They work toward achieving that goal. And they can take full credit when they overcome their disability and earn their triumph. They don’t demand accommodation, nor do they use their disability as an excuse. It’s a reality they live with on the road to earning and achieving “normalcy” in their lives. In the early days of John McCain’s career, there was little mention of his disability, even though we all knew about his torture. McCain’s ability to overcome that disability was a notable achievement. That achievement is diminished now that he uses it as an excuse.
No one expects that John McCain would be an avid weight lifter in light of his disabilities. No one expects him to be a marathoner or a tennis player. But we ought to expect that his mental acuity is agile enough to master the basics of the greatest technological advancement of the 20th century.
There might be a reasonable explanation for McCain not knowing how many houses he owns. There might be a similar explanation for his computer illiteracy. But being a POW four decades ago is not it.
Steven T. Banko III served in Vietnam, where he was awarded two Silver Stars, four Bronze Stars, the Air Medal and Four Purple Hearts. He has long been active in veterans' affairs and is a frequent contributor to Buffalo Report.
By STEVEN T. BANKO
Am I the only one to think that John McCain trivializes both his sacrifice as a POW and the determination of a wide range of specially challenged Americans to lead productive lives? I’m referring to McCain’s repetition of his POW status as a wild card to trump any failing that is otherwise difficult to explain.
Was there any more pathetic display of his willingness to cheapen his sacrifice than McCain’s recent performances with Jay Leno and Katie Couric? He couldn't remember how many houses he owns because he once had “no house, no kitchen table, no chair.” One might think not having a house as a prisoner might make one more acutely aware of exactly how many houses one owned—but not John McCain.
Now we’re told McCain is computer illiterate because – you guessed it — he was a POW and his tortured arms can’t work a keyboard. Tell that to the millions of profoundly disabled Americans who master cyberspace with their teeth, who navigate in wheelchairs with their chins or a single functioning finger, or who communicate with synthesizers. They struggle every day to prove how normal they are. Their lives are campaigns against prejudice and stereotypes and fear. They fight through their disabilities. They adapt to a world that too often turns its eyes away from them.They strive not for privilege or for pampering or for priority. Instead, they seek only opportunity. Their impediments are challenges, not excuses. Their obstacles are surmounted every day. Their opportunities are seized with grit and determination.
People overcome blindness, deafness and physical limitation every day. Army and VA hospitals are replete with traumatic amputees – veterans McCain didn’t think deserved increased benefits — whose heroism didn’t end with their injuries. They continue to achieve, to overcome and to succeed in the face of obstacles that would overwhelm most people and apparently including John McCain.
More than one in five handicapped Americans earn college degrees. They do so by adapting to the learning environment not by whining about its difficulties. They set a goal. They work toward achieving that goal. And they can take full credit when they overcome their disability and earn their triumph. They don’t demand accommodation, nor do they use their disability as an excuse. It’s a reality they live with on the road to earning and achieving “normalcy” in their lives. In the early days of John McCain’s career, there was little mention of his disability, even though we all knew about his torture. McCain’s ability to overcome that disability was a notable achievement. That achievement is diminished now that he uses it as an excuse.
No one expects that John McCain would be an avid weight lifter in light of his disabilities. No one expects him to be a marathoner or a tennis player. But we ought to expect that his mental acuity is agile enough to master the basics of the greatest technological advancement of the 20th century.
There might be a reasonable explanation for McCain not knowing how many houses he owns. There might be a similar explanation for his computer illiteracy. But being a POW four decades ago is not it.
Steven T. Banko III served in Vietnam, where he was awarded two Silver Stars, four Bronze Stars, the Air Medal and Four Purple Hearts. He has long been active in veterans' affairs and is a frequent contributor to Buffalo Report.
Thursday, September 18, 2008
The Bricker Amendment: A Battle against the Imperial Presidency
by Gregory Bresiger, Posted September 17, 2008
Executive agreements shall not be made in lieu of treaties.... The President shall publish all executive agreements except that those which in his judgment require secrecy shall be submitted to the appropriate committees of Congress in lieu of publication.
— Part of one of the proposed Bricker amendments
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
— Tenth Amendment to the Constitution
George Bush, basically unchallenged by Congress in his calamitous war in Iraq, can thank several of his Republican predecessors for his imperial power.
Out of power for some 20 years in the early 1950s, many Republicans had been critics of the secretive foreign policy of Democratic presidents in the 1930s and 1940s. These were the Republicans who supported the Bricker amendment, which aimed to rein in the power of presidents.
The Bricker amendment’s intent was at least twofold.
First, it would prevent presidential executive agreements from undermining the powers of the states as detailed in the Tenth Amendment. Since the Supreme Court had held that treaties, which require the approval of the Senate, override Tenth Amendment provisions, critics feared that executive agreements, which would be issued by imperial presidents without Senate consent, would constitute an even graver assault on the Tenth Amendment.
More broadly, Bricker advocates warned that imperial presidents could make agreements that pushed the nation into war situations without bringing those many agreements before a Senate treaty-review process.
The Bricker amendment in its various incarnations was actually a collection of proposed amendments to the Constitution that not only would have prohibited treaties that conflicted with the Constitution but also would have restricted the ability of presidents to enter into executive agreements. Executive agreements are used by imperial presidents to bypass the often messy advise-and-consent, treaty-review process.
The amendment was originally offered and generally backed by Republicans who were upset by Franklin Roosevelt’s and Harry Truman’s foreign policies in the 1940s and 1950s. Decades later, when it was Republican presidents who seemed to ignore Congress’s powers, many Republicans would forget that it was their party that had proposed the Bricker amendment.
Indeed, a major political party out of power will often change once it has captured office. A recent example is George W. Bush’s comments in the presidential debate of 2000 on the overextension of U.S. commitments around the world and the tendency to use American power as “rent-a-troops.” Yet since the election, Bush has arguably become the greatest interventionist president since Woodrow Wilson.
But part of the problem of presidents who behave like monarchs isn’t that they were reviled abroad but how these “great” presidents were viewed at home. World War I and World War II presidents had become heroes to most mainstream historians and journalists by the late 1940s, even though those presidents either made executive agreements or stretched presidential powers to the breaking point. Still, some in post–World War II America were alarmed.
After 20 years of presidential defeats, Republicans finally captured the presidency in 1952. Initially, many were enthusiastic about containing the war powers and treaty-making powers of presidents. But people soon discovered that many of the critics of presidential prerogative were not as enthusiastic about controlling the institutional powers of the chief executive when one of their own occupied the office.
The Bricker amendment was possibly the last serious effort to turn back imperial presidents. It represented “the high water mark of the isolationist surge in the 1950s,” one historian wrote. It was also, he says, an attempt to reverse “twenty years of usurpation of Congress’ constitutional powers.”
Still, the story of the Bricker amendment is also the story of how ultimately a Republican presidency — the Eisenhower administration — with the help of Democrats, defeated it. Eisenhower complained that it represented a refusal of America “to accept the leadership of world democracy that had been thrust upon it.”
Sen. John W. Bricker was an Ohio Republican who had run as Thomas Dewey’s vice-presidential candidate in the 1944 election. Franklin Roosevelt easily won.
Purposes of the amendment
Bricker, unlike Dewey, represented the so-called isolationist wing of the Republican Party. These were men who questioned the backdoor foreign policies of the Roosevelt and Truman administrations. By 1950 and the coming of the Korean War, the ability of a president to ignore Congress and the Tenth Amendment had become apparent to Bricker. “The constitutional power of Congress to determine American foreign policy is at stake,” he warned.
One of the goals of the amendment was to prevent presidents from liberally interpreting open-ended treaties and charters, such as the UN treaty or the NATO alliance. Both Republican and Democratic presidents came to believe that those treaties gave them huge power to enter into and wage war with little or no congressional approval. A president with myriad treaty obligations, critics said, could easily go to war without consulting Congress.
The Bricker amendment was also intended to ensure that presidents could not subvert the power of the states and Congress through executive agreements with foreign regimes. By the 1940s, more and more of them were used by the president, who shunned the sometimes-messy treaty-review process. Besides liberally interpreting existing treaty obligations, executive agreements, critics complained, were not mentioned in the Constitution. The Bricker amendment required that those agreements be submitted to Congress.
Those who backed the use of executive agreements and fought Bricker insisted they were needed to ensure that a president had the flexibility to act in foreign affairs. They include diplomatic historians such as Alexander DeConde, the author of A History of American Foreign Policy, who wrote, “Isolationists sought to shackle the President’s power at a time when international crises were moving with awesome swiftness.” On the other hand, we will see that the failure to “shackle” imperial presidents has led to America’s participation in endless wars.
Other critics of Bricker argued that the courts would prevent the presidents from making illegal executive agreements that violated the Constitution. Later, critics pointed to various Supreme Court decisions and congressional actions that have required a president to comply with the Constitution. For instance, the Case Act of 1972 during the era of President Nixon required the secretary of State to transmit to Congress any international agreement made by means other than treaty.
“But virtually every subsequent presidency has circumvented this law,” writes one legal commentator. While Democrats blazed a path of presidential imperiousness in the early and mid part of the 20th century, Republican administrations felt no obligation to return to a respectful relationship with Congress and the states.
J. Woodford Howard Jr., a legal commentator in The Oxford Guide to the Supreme Court, writes,
Covert agreements regarding South Vietnam, Sinai and disarmament, for instance, were labeled as arrangements or accords, thus requiring no report. The Iran-Contra scandal illustrates other hazards of compliance. Executive agreements are striking examples of expanding presidential power.
The roots of abuse
Bricker and others saw “expanding presidential power” coming. Indeed, given various U.S. Supreme Court decisions affirming the right of the president to make executive agreements, Bricker warned that the Tenth Amendment had become “dead as a dodo.”
Bricker was strongly backed in his efforts by Frank Holman, president of the American Bar Association. Holman in 1940 had argued that Roosevelt’s pro-British policies practically guaranteed that the United States would enter World War II. Even though Roosevelt had campaigned for reelection in 1940 on a platform of neutrality, keeping the nation out of World War II, he had been instructing the Navy to help convoy British ships in dangerous areas. In Prophets on the Right, Ronald Radosh details this policy that misled many.
By the early 1950s, Holman charged that through the use of executive fiat, “the forces of autocracy and bureaucracy were moving toward a centralized government so powerful as to destroy the rights of the individual, the rights of states, and the right to local self-government.”
The “isolationist” members of Congress also believed the rights of Congress to limit imperial presidents in matters of war and peace had been under attack at least since the early part of the 20th century.
Indeed, former Navy Secretary John Lehman, in his book Making War, documents that development even as he bragged that he participated in it:
By the mid-twentieth century, the ironic situation had developed whereby important matters were handled by informal executive agreements; unimportant matters, by solemn treaties.
In fact, Lehman, as an aide to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in the 1970s, advised Kissinger not to submit an agreement with the Soviets on offensive weapons in the form of a treaty. Kissinger took his advice.
This abuse of executive agreements — the abuse that the Bricker amendment was designed to remedy — had been building up over generations even in Bricker’s time. For example, in 1905 when the Senate wouldn’t approve a treaty with Santo Domingo, Theodore Roosevelt simply put it into effect until the Senate relented two years later. Roosevelt also made a secret agreement with the Japanese concerning Korea in 1907. The Senate was neither informed nor consulted.
One of Franklin Roosevelt’s most controversial actions — the destroyers-for-naval-bases deal of 1940 with the British — was deemed by his legal advisors to be an executive agreement. Therefore, it was not subject to the congressional treaty-review process. Congress also never reviewed or approved the controversial agreements made by a dying Roosevelt at Yalta, the agreements that divided Central and Eastern Europe in the waning days of World War II.
The Korean War
But the Korean War, in retrospect, seems a signal departure from any pretense of presidential legality. Roosevelt had gone to Congress for a formal declaration in World War II. In 1950, as he ordered troops to Korea, Truman never asked for a war declaration. The American president, as commander in chief, had become a king who could plunge the nation into war at his whim, critics believed.
The outbreak of the Korean War fed this fear of an imperial president who could sidestep Congress and the people. As the war became more and more unpopular, several mainstream political figures believed Truman’s actions had clearly crossed the line of illegality.
Some presidents had been much more effective or discreet in cloaking their foreign-policy power grabs. For example, many of Wilson’s pro-British policies prior to U.S intervention in World War I had been effected in secret, as was later documented by the correspondence between Wilson and his closest advisor, Col. E.M. House. Similarly, Roosevelt had quietly worked with the British in the period between the outbreak of World War II and the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
The Korean War was different. Here the president didn’t even seek the pretext of asking Congress for a declaration of war. He argued that UN treaty commitments gave him the right to send troops to Korea. Some maverick members of Congress disagreed.
“My conclusion, therefore,” wrote Sen. Robert Taft (R-Ohio), “is that in the case of Korea, where a war was already under way, we had no right to send troops to a nation, with whom we had no treaty, to defend it against attack by another nation, no matter how unprincipled the aggression might be, unless the whole matter was submitted to Congress and a declaration of war or some other direct authority obtained.”
Taft, a supporter of Bricker, was going through his final illness as the debate heated up. Howard Buffett, Republican congressman from Nebraska, charged that Truman had used the UN treaty as a cover. “Truman entered the war by his own act, and not because of a United Nations decision,” Buffett said.
Defeat of the amendment
When the Bricker amendment was offered at the beginning of 1953, it had more than enough co-sponsors to pass the Senate. Yet little by little, as the Eisenhower administration turned against it, the amendment was defeated. Nevertheless, a watered-down version failed by only one vote. The vice president stood by in the Senate, ready to cast the deciding vote if needed.
Vice President Richard Nixon and Sen. Lyndon Johnson (D-Texas) helped kill the amendment. They claimed it would have severely hampered the president’s ability to conduct foreign policy.
Johnson, then the Senate minority leader, called the Bricker amendment “the worst bill I can think of. It will be the bane of every president we elect.”
Here was an irony of his opposition: Johnson conceded the bill’s popularity. It was “apparent from the start that it could not be defeated by a straight-out vote. No one could vote against the Bricker amendment with impunity and very few could vote against it and survive at all,” Johnson told his aide Bobby Baker.
Johnson and Nixon would later be the main beneficiaries of its defeat, each waging tragic wars and doing it in ostensibly legal ways during their presidencies. Johnson, as president, later sent 500,000 troops to Vietnam after campaigning against the Vietnam War in 1964. Nixon, elected in 1968 to end U.S. participation in the war, secretly expanded the war into Cambodia and Laos.
Others responsible for torpedoing Bricker included Republicans who, when out of power in the 1940s and early 50s, had been warning that the presidency was destroying the constitutional separation of powers.
We speak now of President Eisenhower and his first secretary of State, John Foster Dulles. They had once shared many of the objections of “isolationists.”
Here is what Dulles said before he became U.S. secretary of State:
Treaties can take powers away from Congress and give them to the president. They can take powers from states and give them to the federal government or to some international body and they can cut across the rights given to the people by their constitutional Bill of Rights.
Later called to account in the debate over the Bricker amendment, Dulles would say only that the Eisenhower administration would never abuse its power.
With the vigorous backstage work of the administration, the Bricker amendment failed. Yet, because it mustered many votes and came close to passage, “the fight over the Bricker amendment had important consequences,” writes Duane Tananbaum in The Bricker Amendment Controversy. “Even though the amendment was defeated, the conflict made Eisenhower and his advisers more aware of Congress’s resentments over past encroachments by previous presidents on legislative prerogatives.”
The Bricker amendment, which has been reintroduced from time to time in Congress, remains relevant in an era of the imperial president, an era in which the protection of liberty requires the restraint of the institutional powers of the president. Frank Holman, in his memoirs, called the Bricker amendment a good cause:
“However long the fight for an adequate constitutional amendment on treaties and other international agreements,” he wrote, “it will and must be won.”
Gregory Bresiger is managing editor of Traders Magazine and also writes for the New York Post Sunday Business Section.
This article originally appeared in the June 2008 edition of Freedom Daily. Subscribe to the print or email version of Freedom Daily.
Executive agreements shall not be made in lieu of treaties.... The President shall publish all executive agreements except that those which in his judgment require secrecy shall be submitted to the appropriate committees of Congress in lieu of publication.
— Part of one of the proposed Bricker amendments
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
— Tenth Amendment to the Constitution
George Bush, basically unchallenged by Congress in his calamitous war in Iraq, can thank several of his Republican predecessors for his imperial power.
Out of power for some 20 years in the early 1950s, many Republicans had been critics of the secretive foreign policy of Democratic presidents in the 1930s and 1940s. These were the Republicans who supported the Bricker amendment, which aimed to rein in the power of presidents.
The Bricker amendment’s intent was at least twofold.
First, it would prevent presidential executive agreements from undermining the powers of the states as detailed in the Tenth Amendment. Since the Supreme Court had held that treaties, which require the approval of the Senate, override Tenth Amendment provisions, critics feared that executive agreements, which would be issued by imperial presidents without Senate consent, would constitute an even graver assault on the Tenth Amendment.
More broadly, Bricker advocates warned that imperial presidents could make agreements that pushed the nation into war situations without bringing those many agreements before a Senate treaty-review process.
The Bricker amendment in its various incarnations was actually a collection of proposed amendments to the Constitution that not only would have prohibited treaties that conflicted with the Constitution but also would have restricted the ability of presidents to enter into executive agreements. Executive agreements are used by imperial presidents to bypass the often messy advise-and-consent, treaty-review process.
The amendment was originally offered and generally backed by Republicans who were upset by Franklin Roosevelt’s and Harry Truman’s foreign policies in the 1940s and 1950s. Decades later, when it was Republican presidents who seemed to ignore Congress’s powers, many Republicans would forget that it was their party that had proposed the Bricker amendment.
Indeed, a major political party out of power will often change once it has captured office. A recent example is George W. Bush’s comments in the presidential debate of 2000 on the overextension of U.S. commitments around the world and the tendency to use American power as “rent-a-troops.” Yet since the election, Bush has arguably become the greatest interventionist president since Woodrow Wilson.
But part of the problem of presidents who behave like monarchs isn’t that they were reviled abroad but how these “great” presidents were viewed at home. World War I and World War II presidents had become heroes to most mainstream historians and journalists by the late 1940s, even though those presidents either made executive agreements or stretched presidential powers to the breaking point. Still, some in post–World War II America were alarmed.
After 20 years of presidential defeats, Republicans finally captured the presidency in 1952. Initially, many were enthusiastic about containing the war powers and treaty-making powers of presidents. But people soon discovered that many of the critics of presidential prerogative were not as enthusiastic about controlling the institutional powers of the chief executive when one of their own occupied the office.
The Bricker amendment was possibly the last serious effort to turn back imperial presidents. It represented “the high water mark of the isolationist surge in the 1950s,” one historian wrote. It was also, he says, an attempt to reverse “twenty years of usurpation of Congress’ constitutional powers.”
Still, the story of the Bricker amendment is also the story of how ultimately a Republican presidency — the Eisenhower administration — with the help of Democrats, defeated it. Eisenhower complained that it represented a refusal of America “to accept the leadership of world democracy that had been thrust upon it.”
Sen. John W. Bricker was an Ohio Republican who had run as Thomas Dewey’s vice-presidential candidate in the 1944 election. Franklin Roosevelt easily won.
Purposes of the amendment
Bricker, unlike Dewey, represented the so-called isolationist wing of the Republican Party. These were men who questioned the backdoor foreign policies of the Roosevelt and Truman administrations. By 1950 and the coming of the Korean War, the ability of a president to ignore Congress and the Tenth Amendment had become apparent to Bricker. “The constitutional power of Congress to determine American foreign policy is at stake,” he warned.
One of the goals of the amendment was to prevent presidents from liberally interpreting open-ended treaties and charters, such as the UN treaty or the NATO alliance. Both Republican and Democratic presidents came to believe that those treaties gave them huge power to enter into and wage war with little or no congressional approval. A president with myriad treaty obligations, critics said, could easily go to war without consulting Congress.
The Bricker amendment was also intended to ensure that presidents could not subvert the power of the states and Congress through executive agreements with foreign regimes. By the 1940s, more and more of them were used by the president, who shunned the sometimes-messy treaty-review process. Besides liberally interpreting existing treaty obligations, executive agreements, critics complained, were not mentioned in the Constitution. The Bricker amendment required that those agreements be submitted to Congress.
Those who backed the use of executive agreements and fought Bricker insisted they were needed to ensure that a president had the flexibility to act in foreign affairs. They include diplomatic historians such as Alexander DeConde, the author of A History of American Foreign Policy, who wrote, “Isolationists sought to shackle the President’s power at a time when international crises were moving with awesome swiftness.” On the other hand, we will see that the failure to “shackle” imperial presidents has led to America’s participation in endless wars.
Other critics of Bricker argued that the courts would prevent the presidents from making illegal executive agreements that violated the Constitution. Later, critics pointed to various Supreme Court decisions and congressional actions that have required a president to comply with the Constitution. For instance, the Case Act of 1972 during the era of President Nixon required the secretary of State to transmit to Congress any international agreement made by means other than treaty.
“But virtually every subsequent presidency has circumvented this law,” writes one legal commentator. While Democrats blazed a path of presidential imperiousness in the early and mid part of the 20th century, Republican administrations felt no obligation to return to a respectful relationship with Congress and the states.
J. Woodford Howard Jr., a legal commentator in The Oxford Guide to the Supreme Court, writes,
Covert agreements regarding South Vietnam, Sinai and disarmament, for instance, were labeled as arrangements or accords, thus requiring no report. The Iran-Contra scandal illustrates other hazards of compliance. Executive agreements are striking examples of expanding presidential power.
The roots of abuse
Bricker and others saw “expanding presidential power” coming. Indeed, given various U.S. Supreme Court decisions affirming the right of the president to make executive agreements, Bricker warned that the Tenth Amendment had become “dead as a dodo.”
Bricker was strongly backed in his efforts by Frank Holman, president of the American Bar Association. Holman in 1940 had argued that Roosevelt’s pro-British policies practically guaranteed that the United States would enter World War II. Even though Roosevelt had campaigned for reelection in 1940 on a platform of neutrality, keeping the nation out of World War II, he had been instructing the Navy to help convoy British ships in dangerous areas. In Prophets on the Right, Ronald Radosh details this policy that misled many.
By the early 1950s, Holman charged that through the use of executive fiat, “the forces of autocracy and bureaucracy were moving toward a centralized government so powerful as to destroy the rights of the individual, the rights of states, and the right to local self-government.”
The “isolationist” members of Congress also believed the rights of Congress to limit imperial presidents in matters of war and peace had been under attack at least since the early part of the 20th century.
Indeed, former Navy Secretary John Lehman, in his book Making War, documents that development even as he bragged that he participated in it:
By the mid-twentieth century, the ironic situation had developed whereby important matters were handled by informal executive agreements; unimportant matters, by solemn treaties.
In fact, Lehman, as an aide to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in the 1970s, advised Kissinger not to submit an agreement with the Soviets on offensive weapons in the form of a treaty. Kissinger took his advice.
This abuse of executive agreements — the abuse that the Bricker amendment was designed to remedy — had been building up over generations even in Bricker’s time. For example, in 1905 when the Senate wouldn’t approve a treaty with Santo Domingo, Theodore Roosevelt simply put it into effect until the Senate relented two years later. Roosevelt also made a secret agreement with the Japanese concerning Korea in 1907. The Senate was neither informed nor consulted.
One of Franklin Roosevelt’s most controversial actions — the destroyers-for-naval-bases deal of 1940 with the British — was deemed by his legal advisors to be an executive agreement. Therefore, it was not subject to the congressional treaty-review process. Congress also never reviewed or approved the controversial agreements made by a dying Roosevelt at Yalta, the agreements that divided Central and Eastern Europe in the waning days of World War II.
The Korean War
But the Korean War, in retrospect, seems a signal departure from any pretense of presidential legality. Roosevelt had gone to Congress for a formal declaration in World War II. In 1950, as he ordered troops to Korea, Truman never asked for a war declaration. The American president, as commander in chief, had become a king who could plunge the nation into war at his whim, critics believed.
The outbreak of the Korean War fed this fear of an imperial president who could sidestep Congress and the people. As the war became more and more unpopular, several mainstream political figures believed Truman’s actions had clearly crossed the line of illegality.
Some presidents had been much more effective or discreet in cloaking their foreign-policy power grabs. For example, many of Wilson’s pro-British policies prior to U.S intervention in World War I had been effected in secret, as was later documented by the correspondence between Wilson and his closest advisor, Col. E.M. House. Similarly, Roosevelt had quietly worked with the British in the period between the outbreak of World War II and the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
The Korean War was different. Here the president didn’t even seek the pretext of asking Congress for a declaration of war. He argued that UN treaty commitments gave him the right to send troops to Korea. Some maverick members of Congress disagreed.
“My conclusion, therefore,” wrote Sen. Robert Taft (R-Ohio), “is that in the case of Korea, where a war was already under way, we had no right to send troops to a nation, with whom we had no treaty, to defend it against attack by another nation, no matter how unprincipled the aggression might be, unless the whole matter was submitted to Congress and a declaration of war or some other direct authority obtained.”
Taft, a supporter of Bricker, was going through his final illness as the debate heated up. Howard Buffett, Republican congressman from Nebraska, charged that Truman had used the UN treaty as a cover. “Truman entered the war by his own act, and not because of a United Nations decision,” Buffett said.
Defeat of the amendment
When the Bricker amendment was offered at the beginning of 1953, it had more than enough co-sponsors to pass the Senate. Yet little by little, as the Eisenhower administration turned against it, the amendment was defeated. Nevertheless, a watered-down version failed by only one vote. The vice president stood by in the Senate, ready to cast the deciding vote if needed.
Vice President Richard Nixon and Sen. Lyndon Johnson (D-Texas) helped kill the amendment. They claimed it would have severely hampered the president’s ability to conduct foreign policy.
Johnson, then the Senate minority leader, called the Bricker amendment “the worst bill I can think of. It will be the bane of every president we elect.”
Here was an irony of his opposition: Johnson conceded the bill’s popularity. It was “apparent from the start that it could not be defeated by a straight-out vote. No one could vote against the Bricker amendment with impunity and very few could vote against it and survive at all,” Johnson told his aide Bobby Baker.
Johnson and Nixon would later be the main beneficiaries of its defeat, each waging tragic wars and doing it in ostensibly legal ways during their presidencies. Johnson, as president, later sent 500,000 troops to Vietnam after campaigning against the Vietnam War in 1964. Nixon, elected in 1968 to end U.S. participation in the war, secretly expanded the war into Cambodia and Laos.
Others responsible for torpedoing Bricker included Republicans who, when out of power in the 1940s and early 50s, had been warning that the presidency was destroying the constitutional separation of powers.
We speak now of President Eisenhower and his first secretary of State, John Foster Dulles. They had once shared many of the objections of “isolationists.”
Here is what Dulles said before he became U.S. secretary of State:
Treaties can take powers away from Congress and give them to the president. They can take powers from states and give them to the federal government or to some international body and they can cut across the rights given to the people by their constitutional Bill of Rights.
Later called to account in the debate over the Bricker amendment, Dulles would say only that the Eisenhower administration would never abuse its power.
With the vigorous backstage work of the administration, the Bricker amendment failed. Yet, because it mustered many votes and came close to passage, “the fight over the Bricker amendment had important consequences,” writes Duane Tananbaum in The Bricker Amendment Controversy. “Even though the amendment was defeated, the conflict made Eisenhower and his advisers more aware of Congress’s resentments over past encroachments by previous presidents on legislative prerogatives.”
The Bricker amendment, which has been reintroduced from time to time in Congress, remains relevant in an era of the imperial president, an era in which the protection of liberty requires the restraint of the institutional powers of the president. Frank Holman, in his memoirs, called the Bricker amendment a good cause:
“However long the fight for an adequate constitutional amendment on treaties and other international agreements,” he wrote, “it will and must be won.”
Gregory Bresiger is managing editor of Traders Magazine and also writes for the New York Post Sunday Business Section.
This article originally appeared in the June 2008 edition of Freedom Daily. Subscribe to the print or email version of Freedom Daily.
George Bush Desperate for "Trophy Strike"
By StopTheWarCoalition
18/09/08 "StopTheWarCoalition" -- - George Bush has signed a secret order allowing US troops to operate in Pakistan, without permission from the Pakistani government or agreement by the United Nations, contravening numerous international laws and conventions. Bush says the recent ground assault by US commandos and the big increase in the number of US missiles fired from unmanned aircraft are directed at al-Qaeda leaders, but the Pakistani government and local observers say that most of the dozens killed in these attacks have been civilians, the majority of them women and children.
The Guardian newspaper suggests a different interpretation for these attacks: "Bush is thought to be in a desperate push for a trophy strike...before he leaves office." No doubt part of the calculation is the hope that this will boost the electoral chances of John McCain in his campaign to succeed Bush as president.
Since 1945, American has bombed 25 countries round the world, killing many millions of people (some estimates put the figure as high as 20 million). But George Bush has a message for all the families grieving as a result of his contribution to this horrendous scale of mass slaughter. He recently expressed his sorrow, following the US attack in Afghanistan which killed 90 civilians: "I am a partner in your loss and that of the Afghan people."
And, of course, all those grieving families will be comforted by an earlier Bush pronouncement: "America is a Nation with a mission -- and that mission comes from our most basic beliefs We have no desire to dominate, no ambitions of empire. Our aim is a democratic peace -- a peace founded upon the dignity and rights of every man and woman."
18/09/08 "StopTheWarCoalition" -- - George Bush has signed a secret order allowing US troops to operate in Pakistan, without permission from the Pakistani government or agreement by the United Nations, contravening numerous international laws and conventions. Bush says the recent ground assault by US commandos and the big increase in the number of US missiles fired from unmanned aircraft are directed at al-Qaeda leaders, but the Pakistani government and local observers say that most of the dozens killed in these attacks have been civilians, the majority of them women and children.
The Guardian newspaper suggests a different interpretation for these attacks: "Bush is thought to be in a desperate push for a trophy strike...before he leaves office." No doubt part of the calculation is the hope that this will boost the electoral chances of John McCain in his campaign to succeed Bush as president.
Since 1945, American has bombed 25 countries round the world, killing many millions of people (some estimates put the figure as high as 20 million). But George Bush has a message for all the families grieving as a result of his contribution to this horrendous scale of mass slaughter. He recently expressed his sorrow, following the US attack in Afghanistan which killed 90 civilians: "I am a partner in your loss and that of the Afghan people."
And, of course, all those grieving families will be comforted by an earlier Bush pronouncement: "America is a Nation with a mission -- and that mission comes from our most basic beliefs We have no desire to dominate, no ambitions of empire. Our aim is a democratic peace -- a peace founded upon the dignity and rights of every man and woman."
Supporting Our Troops
by Steve Almond
Perhaps the most insidious byproduct of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has been a reflexive sanctification of the military. To put this in bumper stickerese: Support the Troops.
Well, I have an ugly confession to make: I don't support the troops - at least not unconditionally. When somebody tells me they serve in the military, my first impulse isn't to say, "Thank you for your service!" like those insufferable chickenhawks on talk radio.
My first impulse is to say, "I'm sorry to hear that." Because I am. I'm sorry to know that the person I'm talking to might someday be maimed or killed on the job, or might someday kill someone else. Or refuel a plane that drops bombs on buildings.
I can't see how anyone who calls himself or herself Christian - or human, for that matter - wouldn't be sorry.
The fact that we have an army, that we need an army, is inherently tragic. It's an admission that our species is still ruled by fear and aggression.
There are, of course, plenty of laudable functions that soldiers serve. But their sworn duty is to wage war. They may perform this duty with courage. They may feel great love for their country. But we don't pay them simply for their patriotism or integrity. We also pay them to kill people.
And here it's worth making a point often overlooked. Anyone who pays taxes in this country "supports the troops." We're the ones who subsidize their training and equipment and medical care and education.
I'm happy to do so, as long as I believe those soldiers are being deployed on a mission that feels morally necessary - targeting terrorists who seek to kill civilians, for instance, or trying to prevent a genocide.
The problem with the knee-jerk militarism of the past several years is that it has led to an absence of financial and moral oversight that is fundamentally undemocratic. Our troops have become human shields for war criminals and profiteers.
Consider the $1.39 billion contract awarded in 2003 to a subsidiary of Halliburton. The reconstruction project was secretly bid - to one company. There was much tough talk in Congress about preventing such sweetheart deals. But five years later, the US government continues to pay vast sums of our money to firms with ties to the administration.
In 2005, we learned that $9 billion allocated for reconstruction projects had been lost. With the US economy slumping, fighting this kind of flagrant graft and mismanagement shouldn't be politically risky. But then, anyone who cries foul runs the risk of being accused of . . . not supporting the troops.
No surprise. After all, this was the rallying cry used to silence dissent when the core rationale for invading Iraq evaporated. And it's still being used to justify the occupation.
It remains unthinkable for a politician (or public official of any sort) to say aloud that our troops sometimes commit atrocities, that they are not all worthy of support, that some of them - faced with a terrifying and ethically incoherent mission - are driven to savagery. This grim duty has been left to the soldiers themselves.
Americans have often looked to heroic violence as a means of spiritual regeneration. Our most powerful national myth is the notion that anyone fighting on our behalf is a hero. I understand why friends and families of our soldiers feel this way. But for the rest of us, too often "supporting the troops" isn't about the troops at all. It's about the childish desire to feel morally exempt from the violence carried out in our names.
© Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company
Steve Almond is the author of the essay collection "Not that You Asked."
Perhaps the most insidious byproduct of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has been a reflexive sanctification of the military. To put this in bumper stickerese: Support the Troops.
Well, I have an ugly confession to make: I don't support the troops - at least not unconditionally. When somebody tells me they serve in the military, my first impulse isn't to say, "Thank you for your service!" like those insufferable chickenhawks on talk radio.
My first impulse is to say, "I'm sorry to hear that." Because I am. I'm sorry to know that the person I'm talking to might someday be maimed or killed on the job, or might someday kill someone else. Or refuel a plane that drops bombs on buildings.
I can't see how anyone who calls himself or herself Christian - or human, for that matter - wouldn't be sorry.
The fact that we have an army, that we need an army, is inherently tragic. It's an admission that our species is still ruled by fear and aggression.
There are, of course, plenty of laudable functions that soldiers serve. But their sworn duty is to wage war. They may perform this duty with courage. They may feel great love for their country. But we don't pay them simply for their patriotism or integrity. We also pay them to kill people.
And here it's worth making a point often overlooked. Anyone who pays taxes in this country "supports the troops." We're the ones who subsidize their training and equipment and medical care and education.
I'm happy to do so, as long as I believe those soldiers are being deployed on a mission that feels morally necessary - targeting terrorists who seek to kill civilians, for instance, or trying to prevent a genocide.
The problem with the knee-jerk militarism of the past several years is that it has led to an absence of financial and moral oversight that is fundamentally undemocratic. Our troops have become human shields for war criminals and profiteers.
Consider the $1.39 billion contract awarded in 2003 to a subsidiary of Halliburton. The reconstruction project was secretly bid - to one company. There was much tough talk in Congress about preventing such sweetheart deals. But five years later, the US government continues to pay vast sums of our money to firms with ties to the administration.
In 2005, we learned that $9 billion allocated for reconstruction projects had been lost. With the US economy slumping, fighting this kind of flagrant graft and mismanagement shouldn't be politically risky. But then, anyone who cries foul runs the risk of being accused of . . . not supporting the troops.
No surprise. After all, this was the rallying cry used to silence dissent when the core rationale for invading Iraq evaporated. And it's still being used to justify the occupation.
It remains unthinkable for a politician (or public official of any sort) to say aloud that our troops sometimes commit atrocities, that they are not all worthy of support, that some of them - faced with a terrifying and ethically incoherent mission - are driven to savagery. This grim duty has been left to the soldiers themselves.
Americans have often looked to heroic violence as a means of spiritual regeneration. Our most powerful national myth is the notion that anyone fighting on our behalf is a hero. I understand why friends and families of our soldiers feel this way. But for the rest of us, too often "supporting the troops" isn't about the troops at all. It's about the childish desire to feel morally exempt from the violence carried out in our names.
© Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company
Steve Almond is the author of the essay collection "Not that You Asked."
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Life And Death
By Peter Chamberlin
17/09/08 "ICH " - -- When it becomes obvious to the rest of the country that we are truly locked into a life or death struggle the people will rise-up from their easy chairs and demand answers. If we cannot make them aware of the obvious fateful track we are now on before then, then it will be too late for us all.
The life or death struggle I am referring to is not with some shadowy terrorist group, or with an axis of foreign governments, but with our own government. We are in an existential struggle with the Bush Administration and everyone in government who supports the violence they carry-out upon the world.
The struggle is between the American people and an out of control administration determined to visit world war III upon the world before its allotted time is up. For their own reasons (which are transparent to the discerning eye), Bush and Cheney are going to find a politically feasible way to attack someone else before their power is taken away.
This attack plan risks the survival of the planet and all life upon it, to carry-out the neocon war. Our two co-presidents are so committed to their obviously catastrophically failed war plan to seize all the resources of South Asia that they cannot allow their time to expire without taking irreversible actions. They think that they can threaten, bribe, intimidate and selectively nuke key governments in the region (including Russia and China) to have their way with them.
This most distrusted government in our history wants us to trust their judgment that they can "shock and awe" the world into submission to American demands, without destroying the world in the process. This most incompetent government ever elected by the American people, diddled while the economy was crushed by the weight of its insane economic and military policies, and enacted police state laws in an illegal manner, and now intends to kill many millions more innocents than it already has for the sake of total control.
This most devious and malign administration to ever curse the White House threshold thinks that it would be a good thing to kill millions as "collateral damage" in their plan to create a global American empire. They are either so foolish that they think that America would survive in a post-nuclear war world, or they have other plans for themselves so that they do not care whether this Nation survives the ravages of their scheme to reap absolute wealth. Perhaps this gives credence to the rumor from the Latin American press about a recent Bush family purchase of a large portion of Paraguay –
"...a few short miles from the US Mariscal Estigarribia Military Base...
[Sitting atop the] Acuifero Guaraní...one of the largest underground water reserves in South America."
The solutions being discussed (to this life or death struggle between the American people and a malignant administration determined to risk the fate of the world) range from impeachment to outright revolution. I am of the opinion that violent revolution is wrong, unless government actions turn it into a matter of self-defense, and that impeachment is too slow and weak to stop Bush from pushing the button when the opportunity arises. The opportunity may arise very soon in the mountains of Pakistan, as American troops making illegal incursions are now being repelled by Pakistani military forces.
This administration cannot be trusted to possess the powers that it has usurped. The Bush Administration has to have its hands tied now, even before it is removed from office. Congress must know whose side in this life or death struggle the American people are on.
We the people have to assume our rightful power and show our hand now, as we find the means to legally bind the bloody hands and force the issue to a head, before Bush or Cheney acts. Congress must witness an aroused population that is "mad as hell and not gonna take it anymore!"
If you won't stand-up for the sake of your own children's lives, then what will you take a stand for?
peter.chamberlin@yahoo.com
17/09/08 "ICH " - -- When it becomes obvious to the rest of the country that we are truly locked into a life or death struggle the people will rise-up from their easy chairs and demand answers. If we cannot make them aware of the obvious fateful track we are now on before then, then it will be too late for us all.
The life or death struggle I am referring to is not with some shadowy terrorist group, or with an axis of foreign governments, but with our own government. We are in an existential struggle with the Bush Administration and everyone in government who supports the violence they carry-out upon the world.
The struggle is between the American people and an out of control administration determined to visit world war III upon the world before its allotted time is up. For their own reasons (which are transparent to the discerning eye), Bush and Cheney are going to find a politically feasible way to attack someone else before their power is taken away.
This attack plan risks the survival of the planet and all life upon it, to carry-out the neocon war. Our two co-presidents are so committed to their obviously catastrophically failed war plan to seize all the resources of South Asia that they cannot allow their time to expire without taking irreversible actions. They think that they can threaten, bribe, intimidate and selectively nuke key governments in the region (including Russia and China) to have their way with them.
This most distrusted government in our history wants us to trust their judgment that they can "shock and awe" the world into submission to American demands, without destroying the world in the process. This most incompetent government ever elected by the American people, diddled while the economy was crushed by the weight of its insane economic and military policies, and enacted police state laws in an illegal manner, and now intends to kill many millions more innocents than it already has for the sake of total control.
This most devious and malign administration to ever curse the White House threshold thinks that it would be a good thing to kill millions as "collateral damage" in their plan to create a global American empire. They are either so foolish that they think that America would survive in a post-nuclear war world, or they have other plans for themselves so that they do not care whether this Nation survives the ravages of their scheme to reap absolute wealth. Perhaps this gives credence to the rumor from the Latin American press about a recent Bush family purchase of a large portion of Paraguay –
"...a few short miles from the US Mariscal Estigarribia Military Base...
[Sitting atop the] Acuifero Guaraní...one of the largest underground water reserves in South America."
The solutions being discussed (to this life or death struggle between the American people and a malignant administration determined to risk the fate of the world) range from impeachment to outright revolution. I am of the opinion that violent revolution is wrong, unless government actions turn it into a matter of self-defense, and that impeachment is too slow and weak to stop Bush from pushing the button when the opportunity arises. The opportunity may arise very soon in the mountains of Pakistan, as American troops making illegal incursions are now being repelled by Pakistani military forces.
This administration cannot be trusted to possess the powers that it has usurped. The Bush Administration has to have its hands tied now, even before it is removed from office. Congress must know whose side in this life or death struggle the American people are on.
We the people have to assume our rightful power and show our hand now, as we find the means to legally bind the bloody hands and force the issue to a head, before Bush or Cheney acts. Congress must witness an aroused population that is "mad as hell and not gonna take it anymore!"
If you won't stand-up for the sake of your own children's lives, then what will you take a stand for?
peter.chamberlin@yahoo.com
Lipstick on Which Pig?
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. - This is for all of you who are truly frightened by Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin: give it a rest.
The corruption scandals, Troopergate, her musings on how to ban library books, the moose slaughter, the drill-baby-drill, the creationist stupidity, the pregnant underage daughter and the acceptance of statutory rape as a marriage-brokering tool, the bridge to nowhere and all the rest of it - including the story on the front page of The New York Times on Sunday about how she hired most of her junior high school yearbook to run her government - well, yes, Sarah Palin reeks.
Meanwhile, the real danger of her candidacy has been ignored. It took Frank Rich, on the Times' op-ed page on Sunday, to point out that McCain, in his desperation to be president, has so compromised himself that he allowed the party to pick a running mate who is younger, stronger, more vital and more forceful. With McCain so weak, Palin and the men who pull her strings will take over the office of the Imperial Vice-Presidency, Dick Cheney's operation, which is already up and running the country. The Republicans are proposing another weak, lame presidential figurehead, with the real power concentrated behind closed doors.
I'm not arguing that Palin wouldn't be a real danger to what's left of our democracy, but the reality of the 24-hour news cycle is that for every lash, there's an immediate and equal backlash. The Palin bounce? It lasted exactly two weeks. The news media, like so many young children stricken with an advanced case of attention deficit disorder, is easily attracted by bright and shiny objects.
This week it moved to another narrative: is the second great depression coming? And if so, when?
Every time a large financial institution founders, the press is on it like a pack of wolves. But they move on once they've stripped the story to the bone. Our crumbling financial infrastructure has been crumbling for quite some time, yet after Bear Stearns fell and Countrywide was bought out, all we heard about was Palin, pigs and lipstick. Now these names have returned to the news, and the names of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, AIG, Merrill Lynch, Washington Mutual and Lehman Brothers are being added to the Wall of Shame.
The crumbling of the American economy raises many critical questions. The first, of course, is whether our banks - and our savings - are safe. Eleven federally insured banks and thrifts have failed this year. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., which insures bank accounts and CDs up to $100,000, is reporting that its funds have dropped below the minimum target level set by Congress. A Treasury Dept. loan might be needed to shore the fund up if Washington Mutual or another struggling financial institution fails.
The Feds - using taxpayer dollars - helped Bear Stearns in its sale to J.P, Morgan Chase & Co. They just bailed out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Now they're shoring up AIG. America's capital market is going up in smoke. We're still fighting two foreign wars. Where will the money come from to bail out the FDIC, or will the government even care? Is anyone asking these questions?
Still, FDIC officials have said that 98 percent of U.S. banks are still sound and well funded. So don't panic. For now. Given the financial turmoil, we return once again to the political reality that it's the economy, stupid.
So how fit is McCain to be president? This is a man who has admitted that he doesn't know much about economics. A man whose chief economic advisor (until he was forced to fire him) was former Senator Phil Gramm, Mr. Enron-Loophole, Mr. "Nation of Whiners," Mr. Reduce-Government-Oversight-on-Banking-Insurance-and-Brokerage-Activities or, in other words, the architect of what's happening right now.
On Monday, McCain said, "The fundamentals of the American economy are strong." On Tuesday, forced to backtrack, he said he meant that "American workers, the backbone of the economy, were productive and resilient." Still backtracking, he then called the economic situation "a total crisis" and decried the "greed" in Wall Street and Washington. He sounded like a babbling fool.
McCain's solution? A commission to study what went wrong.
This isn't 9/11. We know what went wrong. The moneychangers wrecked the temple. We don't need a commission. We need a new government.
According to James Kunstler, who writes a well-respected if slightly profane financial blog whose title I cannot repeat here, "The Republicans must be clearly identified as the party that wrecked America... it's hard to imagine the American people giving the clean-up task to the very group that created the mess -- no matter how many cute little faces Sarah Palin can make on TV."
Obama's strength in this campaign has always been issues, particularly economic ones. Right now he's vague about solutions, but he's a bright man who listens to bright advisors.
The country is looking ito the abyss. Suddenly the bleats about lipstick on pigs, sexism, elitism and all the other Republican tricks don't seem to mean a thing. The campaign is back on Obama's ground - are you really better off than you are eight years ago? And if not, who do you blame? "The party that wrecked America," that's who. Do you really want four more years?
Economically, legally, morally, politically, scientifically - wherever you look, the Republicans have failed. They've even failed with FEMA again. Supposedly, the damage from Hurricane Ike in Texas is as bad as it was in New Orleans, so FEMA has instituted a 2,000-foot no-fly zone to prohibit the press from taking pictures. Brownie's successors aren't doing a heck of a job, either.
Sarah who?
Joyce Marcel is a columnist for the Brattleboro (Vt.) Reformer and The American Reporter (american-reporter.com). A collection of her columns, "A Thousand Words or Less," is available through joycemarcel.com. Write her at joycemarcel@yahoo.com.
DUMMERSTON, Vt. - This is for all of you who are truly frightened by Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin: give it a rest.
The corruption scandals, Troopergate, her musings on how to ban library books, the moose slaughter, the drill-baby-drill, the creationist stupidity, the pregnant underage daughter and the acceptance of statutory rape as a marriage-brokering tool, the bridge to nowhere and all the rest of it - including the story on the front page of The New York Times on Sunday about how she hired most of her junior high school yearbook to run her government - well, yes, Sarah Palin reeks.
Meanwhile, the real danger of her candidacy has been ignored. It took Frank Rich, on the Times' op-ed page on Sunday, to point out that McCain, in his desperation to be president, has so compromised himself that he allowed the party to pick a running mate who is younger, stronger, more vital and more forceful. With McCain so weak, Palin and the men who pull her strings will take over the office of the Imperial Vice-Presidency, Dick Cheney's operation, which is already up and running the country. The Republicans are proposing another weak, lame presidential figurehead, with the real power concentrated behind closed doors.
I'm not arguing that Palin wouldn't be a real danger to what's left of our democracy, but the reality of the 24-hour news cycle is that for every lash, there's an immediate and equal backlash. The Palin bounce? It lasted exactly two weeks. The news media, like so many young children stricken with an advanced case of attention deficit disorder, is easily attracted by bright and shiny objects.
This week it moved to another narrative: is the second great depression coming? And if so, when?
Every time a large financial institution founders, the press is on it like a pack of wolves. But they move on once they've stripped the story to the bone. Our crumbling financial infrastructure has been crumbling for quite some time, yet after Bear Stearns fell and Countrywide was bought out, all we heard about was Palin, pigs and lipstick. Now these names have returned to the news, and the names of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, AIG, Merrill Lynch, Washington Mutual and Lehman Brothers are being added to the Wall of Shame.
The crumbling of the American economy raises many critical questions. The first, of course, is whether our banks - and our savings - are safe. Eleven federally insured banks and thrifts have failed this year. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., which insures bank accounts and CDs up to $100,000, is reporting that its funds have dropped below the minimum target level set by Congress. A Treasury Dept. loan might be needed to shore the fund up if Washington Mutual or another struggling financial institution fails.
The Feds - using taxpayer dollars - helped Bear Stearns in its sale to J.P, Morgan Chase & Co. They just bailed out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Now they're shoring up AIG. America's capital market is going up in smoke. We're still fighting two foreign wars. Where will the money come from to bail out the FDIC, or will the government even care? Is anyone asking these questions?
Still, FDIC officials have said that 98 percent of U.S. banks are still sound and well funded. So don't panic. For now. Given the financial turmoil, we return once again to the political reality that it's the economy, stupid.
So how fit is McCain to be president? This is a man who has admitted that he doesn't know much about economics. A man whose chief economic advisor (until he was forced to fire him) was former Senator Phil Gramm, Mr. Enron-Loophole, Mr. "Nation of Whiners," Mr. Reduce-Government-Oversight-on-Banking-Insurance-and-Brokerage-Activities or, in other words, the architect of what's happening right now.
On Monday, McCain said, "The fundamentals of the American economy are strong." On Tuesday, forced to backtrack, he said he meant that "American workers, the backbone of the economy, were productive and resilient." Still backtracking, he then called the economic situation "a total crisis" and decried the "greed" in Wall Street and Washington. He sounded like a babbling fool.
McCain's solution? A commission to study what went wrong.
This isn't 9/11. We know what went wrong. The moneychangers wrecked the temple. We don't need a commission. We need a new government.
According to James Kunstler, who writes a well-respected if slightly profane financial blog whose title I cannot repeat here, "The Republicans must be clearly identified as the party that wrecked America... it's hard to imagine the American people giving the clean-up task to the very group that created the mess -- no matter how many cute little faces Sarah Palin can make on TV."
Obama's strength in this campaign has always been issues, particularly economic ones. Right now he's vague about solutions, but he's a bright man who listens to bright advisors.
The country is looking ito the abyss. Suddenly the bleats about lipstick on pigs, sexism, elitism and all the other Republican tricks don't seem to mean a thing. The campaign is back on Obama's ground - are you really better off than you are eight years ago? And if not, who do you blame? "The party that wrecked America," that's who. Do you really want four more years?
Economically, legally, morally, politically, scientifically - wherever you look, the Republicans have failed. They've even failed with FEMA again. Supposedly, the damage from Hurricane Ike in Texas is as bad as it was in New Orleans, so FEMA has instituted a 2,000-foot no-fly zone to prohibit the press from taking pictures. Brownie's successors aren't doing a heck of a job, either.
Sarah who?
Joyce Marcel is a columnist for the Brattleboro (Vt.) Reformer and The American Reporter (american-reporter.com). A collection of her columns, "A Thousand Words or Less," is available through joycemarcel.com. Write her at joycemarcel@yahoo.com.
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
An Open Letter to Christian Troops in Iraq and Afghanistan
America is Now Rome
By STAN GOFF
On February 1, 1996, I retired from the United States Army. I had served in the 173rd Airborne Brigade in Vietnam as an infantryman, the 82nd Airborne Division, the 4th Infantry Division, 2nd Ranger Battalion, the Jungle Operations Training Center, 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment - Delta, the United States Military Academy at West Point, 1st Ranger Battalion, 7th Special Forces Group, 75th Ranger Regiment, and finally 3rd Special Forces Group. I worked all over "hot spots" in Latin America during the 80s and early 90s. I participated in Grenada and Somalia; and I was the team sergeant for a Special Forces A-Detachment during the 1994 invasion of Haiti. In all that time, I was one of those atheists in the foxholes they say don't exist. I could never have known that I'd find the faith to follow Christ and be baptized on Easter of my 56th year. But I did, even when I'd never grasped for spiritual reassurance as I slogged through the Central Highlands of Vietnam, leapt from airplanes into the night, or had helicopters shot out from under me. I've been taking up residence close to death for a long time. My faith isn't about jumping over death. It's about reconciling with God, who Jesus Christ showed us is Love.
When I was baptized I continued to carry my history; but one identity was sloughed off in the water and a new one born out of it. I write this open letter to troops, brothers and sisters -- of all branches -- who profess the faith of Christ. I write you to ask that you remember your baptism, because at that baptism you declared your renunciation of evil. * The big preposition Note the preposition. I didn't say faith in Christ, I said faith of Christ. Christian is a diminutive term; it means "little Christ." To be a Christian is not to merely have faith in Christ. That's too easy, and Jesus of Nazareth was not about easy. To be Christian is to aspire to have the faith of Christ. Christ's call is not to go along with the program, say the magic words, then be rescued from death. Christ did not merely command belief. Christ commands you to follow him. That command does not wait until death for it to become effective in your life. "Love your enemy." This is not an etching at some altar that you visit; it is your path laid before you by the footsteps of Christ in this world. This is an action religion, not an abracadrabra religion. Christ tells us to take up the cross. That means be willing to risk all, to suffer all when suffering can heal the brokenness in the world. The brokenness of 1st Century Palestine was not altogether different from the brokenness of the world now. Jesus' ministry was conducted in the teeth of a Roman military occupation. Like Nuri al Malaki's "government," the Palestinian Jewish upper-class then lived in an uncomfortable collaboration with that occupation. There were also Jewish insurgents who fought the Roman occupation, who fought among themselves, and who attacked collaborating Jewish sects as well. One particular nationalist party that emerged prior to the revolt with Rome was known as the Zealots. You may recall that Jesus had such folk among his small band of disciples. "And when day came, he called his disciples and chose twelve of them, whom he also named apostles: Simon, whom he named Peter, and his brother Andrew, and James, and John, and Philip, and Bartholomew, and Matthew, and Thomas, and James son of Alphaeus, and Simon, who was called the Zealot..." (Luke 6:13-15)
We can't beat around the bush about this comparison. It's clear.
We Romans
America is now Rome. You are Rome's army of occupation. To the Roman soldier, when Jesus passed down the dusty byways of his occupied land, he appeared no more or less than a random Iraqi or Afghan appears to you. What do you look like to them? Jesus himself looked at the Jewish resistance to Roman occupation, then looked at the corpses rotting on crosses along the roads as Roman examples to the Palestinian Jew,; and he chose a new way. His way was neither passivity, nor counter-violence, but non-violent resistance, just like Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King, who both cited Jesus' ministry in their own prophetic missions. Jesus looked at the violence-counterviolence cycle, and determined that each person in that system was redeemable as an individual - each a child of God, each beloved of God. Jewish, Roman, Samaritan, male, female... no matter. He also looked at how the system itself -- operating with a self-reinforcing dynamic that transcends the individual -- led people into the cycles of accusation and violence; and he proposed to undermine that system with this radical doctrine of spiritual equality, a redemption open to all through grace, and a redemption never imposed at the point of a sword... or under threat of a bomb. In the original story, written in Greek, Jesus says, "I am not of this world." At least that's how many interpretations go. But the original Greek word kosmos means world, flesh, or system, depending on context. "I am not of this system." Not simply the system of Roman occupation, but the system of violence-counterviolence... all systems of domination, because domination breeds the cycle of violence-counterviolence.
Pretensions of the devil
Scripture has been interpreted to suit plenty that is the very evil you renounced at your baptism. The subjugation of women. Slavery. War. Even the white supremacist sects have quoted Scripture. But in order to do so, literalism and decontextualizaton have been used to distort the essence and spirit of the Scriptures for the most impure of motives. In America, we hear much about a few references to sex in the Bible, but little about the many references to poverty, and less about Jesus' provocations on peace. When Jesus says his way will break the dominance of one generation over another within the family, between slave and master, between male and female, he does not confine this vision to heaven - where the upside-down "kingdom" without oppression lives in the dimension of Spirit. He says "on earth as it is in heaven." Jesus was an earthy guy. He bathed in rivers, shat on the ground, and broke bread with fishmongers, tax-collectors, outcasts, prostitutes, Zealots... and he showed mercy to the child of a Roman soldier.
Even on the cross, in his final breaths as the Romans' victim, he cries out to God on behalf of those who kill him: "When they came to the place that is called The Skull, they crucified Jesus there with the criminals, one on his right and one on his left. Then Jesus said, 'Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.'" (Luke 23:33-34) What do you think that means? Certainly the Roman soldiers (soldiers like you) knew they were participating in a crucifixion. The Roman troops had done this many times.
What they did not understand was how their system led them to do this. In Matthew 27:54, it was a Centurion who heard these words -- "forgive them" -- and experienced an earthquake, saying, "Truly, this is the Son of God." (Do you see how the symbolic truth here is more powerful than the literal seismology?) Forgiveness unmasks Satan, who is not the boogyman of popular culture, but the spirit in the culture -- some would call it a zeitgeist -- that acts as God's jealous pretender, that promotes Self as God, that plays the accuser to stir up the mob (weapons of mass destruction?), that sets up idols... so that we will "know not what we do," so we will not know who and whose we are. You can hear the voice of Satan in every instance of boasting, humiliation of another, profaning of what we know to be sacred (like God's Creation), every thought and word of aggression or revenge, every put-down of other people (all beloved of God). Where you are, you can see how the state of war and occupation -- putting you at odds with an occupied population that does not want to be occupied -- amplifies and focuses the malevolent spirit. Now ask yourself why? Why do troops run down civilians with vehicles to avoid slowing down? Why do troops throw bottles and cans at pedestrians to entertain themselves? Why did the massacres like Haditha occur? Why did the utter destruction of Fallujah happen? Why are wedding parties bombed by US aircraft? Why did a whole squad participate in the premeditated half-hour-long rape and murder of a screaming 14-year-old girl? Why is it that approaching an invader's roadblock can carry death sentence for a whole family? Why can children can be woken from their beds by soldiers kicking down the house doors? Why are thousands are held imprisoned without casue? Why are Iraqi and Afghan elders obliged to obey 20-year-old invaders who can't even speak their language? Why do your peers (perhaps even you) refer to all Iraqis or Afghans with epithets? Why do your peers laugh when they retell stories of their own cruelties and their humiliations of the people whose nations they have invaded? Why are you there? What is the spirit in our culture that spins out clever excuses for these evils? It is that same spirit that you renounced at your baptism, which I call on you to remember now. Remember your baptism, where you renounced Satan.
Making and unmaking enemies
Do you really understand -- any better than the Roman soldiers who "did their jobs" at Golgotha -- how this system has led you to where you are today? You are in the system; but that system is not God's. It is a system of human concupiscience, human malice, human domination, human hubris... a system that functions when you follow the crowd against the Holy Spirit. Satan loves a crowd. These are the weapons of the Satanic spirit that seizes the lynch mob, that calls us to domination and calls it self-defense -- even altruism. This is the spirit of our zeitgeist. Remember your baptism. You declared your renunciation of Satan, and you made that declaration to God.
Did you think it would be easy? The Roman soldiers had been convinced, and had convinced themselves, that they were right to do what they did. To make it alright in their own minds to do what they did, they had to withdraw recognition of the Jewish Palestinians' basic humanity. I don't know what they called the Palestinians, but I am sure there was some equivalent of the term "rag head" or "hajji." And in turn, no doubt, many angry Jews in Palestine had dehumanizing epithets for the Romans. That's the cycle. And as Gandhi said, "and eye for an eye makes the whole world blind." Jesus said the same thing. He said that not only were you not to attack your enemies, you are commanded by God to love them. It was on the mountainside, there with His disciples sitting before the crowds, He said, "You have heard that it was said, 'You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous." (Matt 5:43-45) That's how Christ told us to break the cycle of enemy-making. Fight the system by loving the "enemy," but fight the system nonetheless. Provoke with your presence, but do not batter. This is how demonic power is unmasked, and how it was unmasked on the cross, where Christ baited a snare for Satan with his own frail body. Loving the enemy neutralizes the category of enemy.
Unfortunately, even with phalanxes of chaplains ready to distort and press the message of Christ into the business of war, this means that you are now part of an organization that has no reason to exist without an enemy. The ethic of the military is inscribed in the infantry phrase, "close with The Enemy and destroy him." The ethic of Christ is inscribed in neighbor-love -- love of anyone who is near, and enemy-love -- the unmaking of the category of "enemy." These two perspectives - military doctrine and the ethic of Christ -- cannot be reconciled. "For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors (enemies who exploited the people for the economic benefit of Rome) do the same? And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles (those who were not of the Jewish nation) do the same? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect." (Matt 5:46-48) Christ told you to "love your enemies." Break the cycle of enemy-making.
Yet the armed forces are based, at their very core, on the existence of an enemy to destroy. The very doctrine that governs your organization, your technology, and your methods, cannot exist without The Enemy. To accomplish that, the armed forces must do two things: they must devalue the lives of all who are not members of the nation, and they must set up an idol to supplant God.
The idolatry of nation
In your military chapels hang American flags. But God's Creation does not stop at the border of the United States; and God's love is not extended exclusively to Americans; just as God's love was not extended exclusively to the Jews, but also embraced Samaritans and Gentiles and tax-collectors, and even the Roman soldiery who conducted the crucifixion of Jesus. And when we say we are blessed, we need to understand that blessing is not a reward of material goods or social power. To bless means to make whole... to heal brokenness. The root word in "salvation" is not save, but salve... a healing balm. If God is to bless America, then first and foremost, that means "heal" America -- reconcile America to God. Not put the symbol of political authority in the chapel where it can pose as something holy. America cannot be blessed by God without that same blessing -- that same making whole -- extending to the entire human family, because under God, the human family is indivisible. As theologian Shane Claiborne notes:
No wonder it is hard for seekers to find God nowadays. It is difficult to know where Christianity ends and America begins. Our money says, 'In God we Trust.' God's name is on American money, and America's flag is on God's altars.
The Hebraic tradition of Jesus forbids idolatry. Making the flag of a nation, one that has entered history only recently and will as surely leave it some day, an object of worship is idolatry. For God clearly says, "You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I am a jealous God ..." (Exodus 20:3-6) And at the heart of belief is not whether we have the proper mental acquiesce to a particular religious decree but whether or not we will follow this God who loves so passionately that even the enemy becomes the object of love. Such love is always contrary to the systems of empire and domination. Jesus clearly refuses the claim of Caesar over his life, economically and as a point of worship. Remember, he asks the followers of the Pharisees and Herod to hold up a coin with a graven image, an image of Caesar - the 'divine one,' an image explicitly forbidden by Judaic law, and then says, "give to this image, this false God, what it is due." "...Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's'" (Mark 12:17) Jesus was facing an attempt to entrap him in a debate about not paying taxes to The Enemy (Rome). His reply: Caesar's money? That's part of Caesar's system, not mine, and not God's. The use of this story today to claim one realm for religion and another for obedience to the state, the idea that there were two separate spheres in the state and religion then at all, is a grotesque retrojection of later interpretations into 1st Century Palestine. It is an absurdity that exploits our historical ignorance about that time and place.
This obedience-to-the-state interpretation of the story of the coin with Casear's graven image was proffered when the church was merged with the state... and it is blasphemy, a demonic co-optation of Scripture by principalities and powers to trick subject populations into support for the schemes of power. Christ didn't obey the state; he subverted it. Then the state bowed to the lynch mob and nailed this gentle rabbi to a cross for a slow and painful execution. There are a couple of things that we can never seem to separate from the state, however: money and war. * The pigeon-sellers of war The one time Jesus became physically angry in Scripture was when he overturned the tables of the pigeon-sellers and money-changers who were encamped on the steps of the temple, driving them out when they exploit and abuse and rob the poor ones who only seek obedience to God, corrupting a practice that was meant to connect and honor and instead making it an exploitive practice done in the name of religion and under the sanction of Rome. (Mark 11:15-18) Remember your baptism; and know that God's currency is courage in love, not the currency of Caesar that dissolves communities with obsession and envy and war. Can you see the money-changers at work again? Look around you now at the orgy of war-profiteering, the get-rich(er)-quick schemes that attach to war like pilot fish on a shark. But the shark must have enemies to feed upon. Now, even when there is no credible military threat to the United States that a standing military can prevent, you are being bent to the will of a doctrine that must have The Enemy. If there is no enemy, then one must be created.
The Enemy is the raison d'etre of the armed forces. And so other nations - nations of people who have already suffered terribly - were selected to become The Enemy in order to justify the plundering of their resources and the subsidized economies of war - from no-bid contracts for hi-tech weapons to contractors who pay exorbitant salaries and charge outrageous prices to wash your clothes, feed you, and run facilities that insulate you from the harsh and incessant realities of the nations you now occupy. Do you really think that were it not for oil, you would even be in that region? Do you know how many campaign contributions are funneled to politicians of both parties by "defense" contractors? Enemies make money. Enemies are good business. The business of war is good these days. The structures of evil and the evil of structures are visible to anyone who consents to see. Consenting to see constitutes an entry through the passageway of Grace.
Entering the New Life
You -- as an individual human being -- are redeemable through grace. Faith -- radical trust -- is how we act into Grace. "Consider the lilies of the field..." All the excuses and twisted explanations that are made for these wars of occupation - and that is what they are, lies and excuses - are designed to clear away the psychological and spiritual obstacles to your carrying out this occupation of other peoples' lands. The politicians are creating the twisted logic. The contractors are supporting the twisted logic. The warlike culture in America is directed by the very spirit you renounced at your baptism. The malevolent spirit is not just the devil; it is a devil-maker... a demonizer, an enemy-maker. The devil -- the malevolent within our zeitgeist -- demonizes Arabs (our brothers and sisters before God), demonizes Muslims (our brothers and sisters before God) and expresses these explanations-for-war as pus is expressed from an infected wound. Even some clergy are complicit - as it was in the time of Jesus, when the clergy itself called for his execution. (Mark 11:17) You -- soldier, sailor, airman, marine... and you, officer -- must pray for them; and you must not obey them. You know, many of you, that the ugliness of any description of war can never be equal to the stark and actual obscenity of war. That obscenity is the visible face of Satan that many of us are working very very hard not to see. It's the twisted imitator of God, the demonic spirit, the misleader... that crafts a War Jesus. That millions have been misled does not in any way change what it is. Jesus never gave his sanction to war. The most common quote from scripture used by warmongering government and clergy is Luke 12:49-53, where Jesus says He will sow discord in the family.
I have come to bring fire on the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! But I have a baptism to undergo, and how distressed I am until it is completed! Do you think I came to bring peace on earth? No, I tell you, but division. From now on there will be five in one family divided against each other, three against two and two against three. They will be divided, father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law."
He does not say "not peace, but war." He's says "not peace, but division." And the faultline for that division is between generations. Age and gender in 1st Century Palestine defined familial authority. Familial authority was the basis of social stability (the "peace" of Power). Get your head around that.
These divisions are not between brothers and sisters who are the co-children of God, but between generations and the hereditary powers that inhered in the system of human authority. To name this passage a call to war, or its justification, simply because it says he comes not to bring "peace" to domination in the patriarchal household, is a rhetorical acrobatic, just as the return of Caesar's image is not by any stretch a call to obey the government.
This passage is a call to divide human authority in order to reunite authority under a loving God. And it is a clear call. The official doctrine of the armed forces is based on an Enemy. The doctrine of the Kingdom of God "on earth as it is in heaven" has no enemies. Ever since Constantine subverted the church by making it a state religion, the powers and principalities have taken the name of Christ and abused it to make war. Christ invoked to support prejudice and oppression. Christ invoked to line pockets (ignoring that Jesus said you cannot serve God and money at the same time). (Matt 6:24) Look past these centuries of pretenders, because the Word that is the Christ remains unshakable, even when it is a minority view in a broken and warlike culture. You are called to disobey human authority each and every time that authority commands you to increase the brokenness of the world. Refuse to fight. Refuse to support the fighting. Lay down your weapons and refuse to fight, and you will be blessed. "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God." (Matt 5:9). You will be healed and made whole; you will be reconciled to God because you will have begun your reconciliation with the billions of human beings who are -- under God -- one family. You will be reviled -- powerfully at first -- as Christ was on the way to Golgotha. The malevolent spirit will writhe. You will be ridiculed as an extremist, less-than-a-real-man (or whichever other gendered attack), an apostate, just as Jesus was when even his closest friends refused to acknowledge their relation to him while the crowd howled for his blood. And you will enter into conflict with your own families. You will not be nailed to a cross; but you may be jailed, spat on, isolated, abused... but you will also be embraced, accepted, and loved. We already love you. This is what you need far more than the esteem of the demonic macho culture of war that glorifies the taking of human life - God has already forgiven your past and pointed to the path ahead. Do not any longer give the glory to Rome that belongs to God. * From Jerusalem to Baghdad Do not expect praise or stained-glass or elegiac music in the background when you refuse. This path blazed by Christ is gritty and hard. As George MacLeod once said,
I simply argue that the cross should be raised at the center of the [street market] as well as on the steeple of the church. I am recovering the claim that Jesus was not crucified in a cathedral between two candles, but on a cross between two thieves; on the town's garbage heap; at a cross road, so cosmopolitan they had to write His title in Hebrew and Latin and Greek... At the kind of a place where cynics talk smut and thieves curse and soldiers gamble. Because that is where He died. And that is what He died for. And that is what He died about. That is where [Christians] ought to be and what [Christians] ought to be about.
"About" in a place not unlike Mosul or Baghdad or Bagram or Khoust. The mission that made Jesus into the Christ, the anointed, was not cleaned and pressed, not shiny like a supermarket, not sanitary like a freshly scrubbed bathroom, not air-conditioned, not safe. You are at the kind of place where God breaks into the world to the exact degree that you let yourself become a "little Christ" -- the hands and feet and eyes and ears of Christ. Christ doesn't demand your mere belief. Christ demands participation in the work of God. Lay down your weapons, refuse your orders, accept the ridicule and abuse of the mob that "does not know what it is doing," and Christ will walk beside you. You'll be surprised at how many of us will walk beside you, too.
Who would lead a total revolution that would shake off internal oppression as well as the foreign yoke... Jesus' approach stood in unique opposition to the prevailing assumptions of his day. He articulated an altogether different way... He did not come in the sectarian guise of his time, offering redemption only to those belonging to a particular group, nor did he adopt a primarily adversarial stance. He came with a prophetic message concerned for the good of all and with an eagerness to bring God's kingdom within reach of everybody, even the enemy.
[from Jesus and the Non-Violent Revolution, by Andre Trocme] Remember your baptism. Your allegiance is to the eternal God, not the flag of a transient empire. Who and whose are you? You will hear people say that this burnt out veteran has no authority to speak as a Christian on these matters. And I am burnt out; and I did come to Christianity late in life. But I am not making any of this up. Honest and fearless Christian theologians of the ecumenical, prophetic, and evangelical churches have spoken out against war, and in exactly the terms presented here. I bring nothing original to this plea for obedience to the God of the Nazarene. I write to you as one who has shared your experience, not that of the clergy or the Academy. I have known your position, trapped between the regrets and guilt of the past and the anxieties of the future, plodding against the current of Holy Spirit to clutch at the "esteem" of your militarized nation, "proving" yourselves again and again to your peers who define masculinity and human value by the ability to risk one's own safety to dominate or destroy others. That is who I was before I was baptized into who and whose I am, and that is why I can tell you that the risk you must take is the risk not to dominate. It is the risk of losing the esteem of those who "know not what they do." Seek your redemption and the redemption of the world, the flesh, the system... by taking up the cross, walking the painful path to Golgotha, and overcoming your alienation from the triune God, who Paul - himself a violent persecutor of Jesus' followers until his epiphany - called Love, Grace, and Fellowship with your human family. The fellowship you lose if and when you refuse to fight, if you refuse to give another hour of support to this obscene enterprise, will be replaced not seven-fold, but seven-hundredfold by the fellowship of Peace: Christians, non-Christians, veterans, and non-veterans, and from many nations. This Pentecost waits for you. Have faith, knowing that faith is not sorcery... not magic... not abracadabra. Faith is radical trust that God has your back. And trust the evidence not of what those around you try to excuse and explain, but of what you see them actually do. Watch how your institution treats 'the least among us," because that is how the institution is treating Christ (Matt 25:40). You cannot point a gun at another human being, frighten a child, bully a man, demean a woman, violate the sanctity of a threshold, or kill, and not be doing this violence to Christ. There is nothing circumstantial about it. Christ was categorical about this. You must resist; and you must do so without violence and be prepared to love those who abuse you for your refusal. And trust, too, that all will be well, even though you might pass through a dark night first. Your obedience to peer pressure and your obedience to the government are both superceded absolutely by obedience to God. Elections will not stop this war, just shift its emphasis. Only you will stop it, starting with yourself. That is the way Jesus worked; and at your baptism you promised to follow the Christ. Refuse your work. Refuse your orders. Refuse to pick up the weapon and fight; and pray for the redemtion of those who will stand against you when you stand with God. When you do, and do so in the name of Christ, there are thousands more waiting that will follow. And there is One who will walk beside you every step of the way.
Stan Goff is the author of "Hideous Dream: A Soldier's Memoir of the US Invasion of Haiti" (Soft Skull Press, 2000), "Full Spectrum Disorder" (Soft Skull Press, 2003 He is a Methodist and an organic gardener. He has written about the military and militarism, and about masculinity-constructed-as-conquest. He can be reached at: stan@stangoff.com
By STAN GOFF
On February 1, 1996, I retired from the United States Army. I had served in the 173rd Airborne Brigade in Vietnam as an infantryman, the 82nd Airborne Division, the 4th Infantry Division, 2nd Ranger Battalion, the Jungle Operations Training Center, 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment - Delta, the United States Military Academy at West Point, 1st Ranger Battalion, 7th Special Forces Group, 75th Ranger Regiment, and finally 3rd Special Forces Group. I worked all over "hot spots" in Latin America during the 80s and early 90s. I participated in Grenada and Somalia; and I was the team sergeant for a Special Forces A-Detachment during the 1994 invasion of Haiti. In all that time, I was one of those atheists in the foxholes they say don't exist. I could never have known that I'd find the faith to follow Christ and be baptized on Easter of my 56th year. But I did, even when I'd never grasped for spiritual reassurance as I slogged through the Central Highlands of Vietnam, leapt from airplanes into the night, or had helicopters shot out from under me. I've been taking up residence close to death for a long time. My faith isn't about jumping over death. It's about reconciling with God, who Jesus Christ showed us is Love.
When I was baptized I continued to carry my history; but one identity was sloughed off in the water and a new one born out of it. I write this open letter to troops, brothers and sisters -- of all branches -- who profess the faith of Christ. I write you to ask that you remember your baptism, because at that baptism you declared your renunciation of evil. * The big preposition Note the preposition. I didn't say faith in Christ, I said faith of Christ. Christian is a diminutive term; it means "little Christ." To be a Christian is not to merely have faith in Christ. That's too easy, and Jesus of Nazareth was not about easy. To be Christian is to aspire to have the faith of Christ. Christ's call is not to go along with the program, say the magic words, then be rescued from death. Christ did not merely command belief. Christ commands you to follow him. That command does not wait until death for it to become effective in your life. "Love your enemy." This is not an etching at some altar that you visit; it is your path laid before you by the footsteps of Christ in this world. This is an action religion, not an abracadrabra religion. Christ tells us to take up the cross. That means be willing to risk all, to suffer all when suffering can heal the brokenness in the world. The brokenness of 1st Century Palestine was not altogether different from the brokenness of the world now. Jesus' ministry was conducted in the teeth of a Roman military occupation. Like Nuri al Malaki's "government," the Palestinian Jewish upper-class then lived in an uncomfortable collaboration with that occupation. There were also Jewish insurgents who fought the Roman occupation, who fought among themselves, and who attacked collaborating Jewish sects as well. One particular nationalist party that emerged prior to the revolt with Rome was known as the Zealots. You may recall that Jesus had such folk among his small band of disciples. "And when day came, he called his disciples and chose twelve of them, whom he also named apostles: Simon, whom he named Peter, and his brother Andrew, and James, and John, and Philip, and Bartholomew, and Matthew, and Thomas, and James son of Alphaeus, and Simon, who was called the Zealot..." (Luke 6:13-15)
We can't beat around the bush about this comparison. It's clear.
We Romans
America is now Rome. You are Rome's army of occupation. To the Roman soldier, when Jesus passed down the dusty byways of his occupied land, he appeared no more or less than a random Iraqi or Afghan appears to you. What do you look like to them? Jesus himself looked at the Jewish resistance to Roman occupation, then looked at the corpses rotting on crosses along the roads as Roman examples to the Palestinian Jew,; and he chose a new way. His way was neither passivity, nor counter-violence, but non-violent resistance, just like Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King, who both cited Jesus' ministry in their own prophetic missions. Jesus looked at the violence-counterviolence cycle, and determined that each person in that system was redeemable as an individual - each a child of God, each beloved of God. Jewish, Roman, Samaritan, male, female... no matter. He also looked at how the system itself -- operating with a self-reinforcing dynamic that transcends the individual -- led people into the cycles of accusation and violence; and he proposed to undermine that system with this radical doctrine of spiritual equality, a redemption open to all through grace, and a redemption never imposed at the point of a sword... or under threat of a bomb. In the original story, written in Greek, Jesus says, "I am not of this world." At least that's how many interpretations go. But the original Greek word kosmos means world, flesh, or system, depending on context. "I am not of this system." Not simply the system of Roman occupation, but the system of violence-counterviolence... all systems of domination, because domination breeds the cycle of violence-counterviolence.
Pretensions of the devil
Scripture has been interpreted to suit plenty that is the very evil you renounced at your baptism. The subjugation of women. Slavery. War. Even the white supremacist sects have quoted Scripture. But in order to do so, literalism and decontextualizaton have been used to distort the essence and spirit of the Scriptures for the most impure of motives. In America, we hear much about a few references to sex in the Bible, but little about the many references to poverty, and less about Jesus' provocations on peace. When Jesus says his way will break the dominance of one generation over another within the family, between slave and master, between male and female, he does not confine this vision to heaven - where the upside-down "kingdom" without oppression lives in the dimension of Spirit. He says "on earth as it is in heaven." Jesus was an earthy guy. He bathed in rivers, shat on the ground, and broke bread with fishmongers, tax-collectors, outcasts, prostitutes, Zealots... and he showed mercy to the child of a Roman soldier.
Even on the cross, in his final breaths as the Romans' victim, he cries out to God on behalf of those who kill him: "When they came to the place that is called The Skull, they crucified Jesus there with the criminals, one on his right and one on his left. Then Jesus said, 'Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.'" (Luke 23:33-34) What do you think that means? Certainly the Roman soldiers (soldiers like you) knew they were participating in a crucifixion. The Roman troops had done this many times.
What they did not understand was how their system led them to do this. In Matthew 27:54, it was a Centurion who heard these words -- "forgive them" -- and experienced an earthquake, saying, "Truly, this is the Son of God." (Do you see how the symbolic truth here is more powerful than the literal seismology?) Forgiveness unmasks Satan, who is not the boogyman of popular culture, but the spirit in the culture -- some would call it a zeitgeist -- that acts as God's jealous pretender, that promotes Self as God, that plays the accuser to stir up the mob (weapons of mass destruction?), that sets up idols... so that we will "know not what we do," so we will not know who and whose we are. You can hear the voice of Satan in every instance of boasting, humiliation of another, profaning of what we know to be sacred (like God's Creation), every thought and word of aggression or revenge, every put-down of other people (all beloved of God). Where you are, you can see how the state of war and occupation -- putting you at odds with an occupied population that does not want to be occupied -- amplifies and focuses the malevolent spirit. Now ask yourself why? Why do troops run down civilians with vehicles to avoid slowing down? Why do troops throw bottles and cans at pedestrians to entertain themselves? Why did the massacres like Haditha occur? Why did the utter destruction of Fallujah happen? Why are wedding parties bombed by US aircraft? Why did a whole squad participate in the premeditated half-hour-long rape and murder of a screaming 14-year-old girl? Why is it that approaching an invader's roadblock can carry death sentence for a whole family? Why can children can be woken from their beds by soldiers kicking down the house doors? Why are thousands are held imprisoned without casue? Why are Iraqi and Afghan elders obliged to obey 20-year-old invaders who can't even speak their language? Why do your peers (perhaps even you) refer to all Iraqis or Afghans with epithets? Why do your peers laugh when they retell stories of their own cruelties and their humiliations of the people whose nations they have invaded? Why are you there? What is the spirit in our culture that spins out clever excuses for these evils? It is that same spirit that you renounced at your baptism, which I call on you to remember now. Remember your baptism, where you renounced Satan.
Making and unmaking enemies
Do you really understand -- any better than the Roman soldiers who "did their jobs" at Golgotha -- how this system has led you to where you are today? You are in the system; but that system is not God's. It is a system of human concupiscience, human malice, human domination, human hubris... a system that functions when you follow the crowd against the Holy Spirit. Satan loves a crowd. These are the weapons of the Satanic spirit that seizes the lynch mob, that calls us to domination and calls it self-defense -- even altruism. This is the spirit of our zeitgeist. Remember your baptism. You declared your renunciation of Satan, and you made that declaration to God.
Did you think it would be easy? The Roman soldiers had been convinced, and had convinced themselves, that they were right to do what they did. To make it alright in their own minds to do what they did, they had to withdraw recognition of the Jewish Palestinians' basic humanity. I don't know what they called the Palestinians, but I am sure there was some equivalent of the term "rag head" or "hajji." And in turn, no doubt, many angry Jews in Palestine had dehumanizing epithets for the Romans. That's the cycle. And as Gandhi said, "and eye for an eye makes the whole world blind." Jesus said the same thing. He said that not only were you not to attack your enemies, you are commanded by God to love them. It was on the mountainside, there with His disciples sitting before the crowds, He said, "You have heard that it was said, 'You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous." (Matt 5:43-45) That's how Christ told us to break the cycle of enemy-making. Fight the system by loving the "enemy," but fight the system nonetheless. Provoke with your presence, but do not batter. This is how demonic power is unmasked, and how it was unmasked on the cross, where Christ baited a snare for Satan with his own frail body. Loving the enemy neutralizes the category of enemy.
Unfortunately, even with phalanxes of chaplains ready to distort and press the message of Christ into the business of war, this means that you are now part of an organization that has no reason to exist without an enemy. The ethic of the military is inscribed in the infantry phrase, "close with The Enemy and destroy him." The ethic of Christ is inscribed in neighbor-love -- love of anyone who is near, and enemy-love -- the unmaking of the category of "enemy." These two perspectives - military doctrine and the ethic of Christ -- cannot be reconciled. "For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors (enemies who exploited the people for the economic benefit of Rome) do the same? And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles (those who were not of the Jewish nation) do the same? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect." (Matt 5:46-48) Christ told you to "love your enemies." Break the cycle of enemy-making.
Yet the armed forces are based, at their very core, on the existence of an enemy to destroy. The very doctrine that governs your organization, your technology, and your methods, cannot exist without The Enemy. To accomplish that, the armed forces must do two things: they must devalue the lives of all who are not members of the nation, and they must set up an idol to supplant God.
The idolatry of nation
In your military chapels hang American flags. But God's Creation does not stop at the border of the United States; and God's love is not extended exclusively to Americans; just as God's love was not extended exclusively to the Jews, but also embraced Samaritans and Gentiles and tax-collectors, and even the Roman soldiery who conducted the crucifixion of Jesus. And when we say we are blessed, we need to understand that blessing is not a reward of material goods or social power. To bless means to make whole... to heal brokenness. The root word in "salvation" is not save, but salve... a healing balm. If God is to bless America, then first and foremost, that means "heal" America -- reconcile America to God. Not put the symbol of political authority in the chapel where it can pose as something holy. America cannot be blessed by God without that same blessing -- that same making whole -- extending to the entire human family, because under God, the human family is indivisible. As theologian Shane Claiborne notes:
No wonder it is hard for seekers to find God nowadays. It is difficult to know where Christianity ends and America begins. Our money says, 'In God we Trust.' God's name is on American money, and America's flag is on God's altars.
The Hebraic tradition of Jesus forbids idolatry. Making the flag of a nation, one that has entered history only recently and will as surely leave it some day, an object of worship is idolatry. For God clearly says, "You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I am a jealous God ..." (Exodus 20:3-6) And at the heart of belief is not whether we have the proper mental acquiesce to a particular religious decree but whether or not we will follow this God who loves so passionately that even the enemy becomes the object of love. Such love is always contrary to the systems of empire and domination. Jesus clearly refuses the claim of Caesar over his life, economically and as a point of worship. Remember, he asks the followers of the Pharisees and Herod to hold up a coin with a graven image, an image of Caesar - the 'divine one,' an image explicitly forbidden by Judaic law, and then says, "give to this image, this false God, what it is due." "...Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's'" (Mark 12:17) Jesus was facing an attempt to entrap him in a debate about not paying taxes to The Enemy (Rome). His reply: Caesar's money? That's part of Caesar's system, not mine, and not God's. The use of this story today to claim one realm for religion and another for obedience to the state, the idea that there were two separate spheres in the state and religion then at all, is a grotesque retrojection of later interpretations into 1st Century Palestine. It is an absurdity that exploits our historical ignorance about that time and place.
This obedience-to-the-state interpretation of the story of the coin with Casear's graven image was proffered when the church was merged with the state... and it is blasphemy, a demonic co-optation of Scripture by principalities and powers to trick subject populations into support for the schemes of power. Christ didn't obey the state; he subverted it. Then the state bowed to the lynch mob and nailed this gentle rabbi to a cross for a slow and painful execution. There are a couple of things that we can never seem to separate from the state, however: money and war. * The pigeon-sellers of war The one time Jesus became physically angry in Scripture was when he overturned the tables of the pigeon-sellers and money-changers who were encamped on the steps of the temple, driving them out when they exploit and abuse and rob the poor ones who only seek obedience to God, corrupting a practice that was meant to connect and honor and instead making it an exploitive practice done in the name of religion and under the sanction of Rome. (Mark 11:15-18) Remember your baptism; and know that God's currency is courage in love, not the currency of Caesar that dissolves communities with obsession and envy and war. Can you see the money-changers at work again? Look around you now at the orgy of war-profiteering, the get-rich(er)-quick schemes that attach to war like pilot fish on a shark. But the shark must have enemies to feed upon. Now, even when there is no credible military threat to the United States that a standing military can prevent, you are being bent to the will of a doctrine that must have The Enemy. If there is no enemy, then one must be created.
The Enemy is the raison d'etre of the armed forces. And so other nations - nations of people who have already suffered terribly - were selected to become The Enemy in order to justify the plundering of their resources and the subsidized economies of war - from no-bid contracts for hi-tech weapons to contractors who pay exorbitant salaries and charge outrageous prices to wash your clothes, feed you, and run facilities that insulate you from the harsh and incessant realities of the nations you now occupy. Do you really think that were it not for oil, you would even be in that region? Do you know how many campaign contributions are funneled to politicians of both parties by "defense" contractors? Enemies make money. Enemies are good business. The business of war is good these days. The structures of evil and the evil of structures are visible to anyone who consents to see. Consenting to see constitutes an entry through the passageway of Grace.
Entering the New Life
You -- as an individual human being -- are redeemable through grace. Faith -- radical trust -- is how we act into Grace. "Consider the lilies of the field..." All the excuses and twisted explanations that are made for these wars of occupation - and that is what they are, lies and excuses - are designed to clear away the psychological and spiritual obstacles to your carrying out this occupation of other peoples' lands. The politicians are creating the twisted logic. The contractors are supporting the twisted logic. The warlike culture in America is directed by the very spirit you renounced at your baptism. The malevolent spirit is not just the devil; it is a devil-maker... a demonizer, an enemy-maker. The devil -- the malevolent within our zeitgeist -- demonizes Arabs (our brothers and sisters before God), demonizes Muslims (our brothers and sisters before God) and expresses these explanations-for-war as pus is expressed from an infected wound. Even some clergy are complicit - as it was in the time of Jesus, when the clergy itself called for his execution. (Mark 11:17) You -- soldier, sailor, airman, marine... and you, officer -- must pray for them; and you must not obey them. You know, many of you, that the ugliness of any description of war can never be equal to the stark and actual obscenity of war. That obscenity is the visible face of Satan that many of us are working very very hard not to see. It's the twisted imitator of God, the demonic spirit, the misleader... that crafts a War Jesus. That millions have been misled does not in any way change what it is. Jesus never gave his sanction to war. The most common quote from scripture used by warmongering government and clergy is Luke 12:49-53, where Jesus says He will sow discord in the family.
I have come to bring fire on the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! But I have a baptism to undergo, and how distressed I am until it is completed! Do you think I came to bring peace on earth? No, I tell you, but division. From now on there will be five in one family divided against each other, three against two and two against three. They will be divided, father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law."
He does not say "not peace, but war." He's says "not peace, but division." And the faultline for that division is between generations. Age and gender in 1st Century Palestine defined familial authority. Familial authority was the basis of social stability (the "peace" of Power). Get your head around that.
These divisions are not between brothers and sisters who are the co-children of God, but between generations and the hereditary powers that inhered in the system of human authority. To name this passage a call to war, or its justification, simply because it says he comes not to bring "peace" to domination in the patriarchal household, is a rhetorical acrobatic, just as the return of Caesar's image is not by any stretch a call to obey the government.
This passage is a call to divide human authority in order to reunite authority under a loving God. And it is a clear call. The official doctrine of the armed forces is based on an Enemy. The doctrine of the Kingdom of God "on earth as it is in heaven" has no enemies. Ever since Constantine subverted the church by making it a state religion, the powers and principalities have taken the name of Christ and abused it to make war. Christ invoked to support prejudice and oppression. Christ invoked to line pockets (ignoring that Jesus said you cannot serve God and money at the same time). (Matt 6:24) Look past these centuries of pretenders, because the Word that is the Christ remains unshakable, even when it is a minority view in a broken and warlike culture. You are called to disobey human authority each and every time that authority commands you to increase the brokenness of the world. Refuse to fight. Refuse to support the fighting. Lay down your weapons and refuse to fight, and you will be blessed. "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God." (Matt 5:9). You will be healed and made whole; you will be reconciled to God because you will have begun your reconciliation with the billions of human beings who are -- under God -- one family. You will be reviled -- powerfully at first -- as Christ was on the way to Golgotha. The malevolent spirit will writhe. You will be ridiculed as an extremist, less-than-a-real-man (or whichever other gendered attack), an apostate, just as Jesus was when even his closest friends refused to acknowledge their relation to him while the crowd howled for his blood. And you will enter into conflict with your own families. You will not be nailed to a cross; but you may be jailed, spat on, isolated, abused... but you will also be embraced, accepted, and loved. We already love you. This is what you need far more than the esteem of the demonic macho culture of war that glorifies the taking of human life - God has already forgiven your past and pointed to the path ahead. Do not any longer give the glory to Rome that belongs to God. * From Jerusalem to Baghdad Do not expect praise or stained-glass or elegiac music in the background when you refuse. This path blazed by Christ is gritty and hard. As George MacLeod once said,
I simply argue that the cross should be raised at the center of the [street market] as well as on the steeple of the church. I am recovering the claim that Jesus was not crucified in a cathedral between two candles, but on a cross between two thieves; on the town's garbage heap; at a cross road, so cosmopolitan they had to write His title in Hebrew and Latin and Greek... At the kind of a place where cynics talk smut and thieves curse and soldiers gamble. Because that is where He died. And that is what He died for. And that is what He died about. That is where [Christians] ought to be and what [Christians] ought to be about.
"About" in a place not unlike Mosul or Baghdad or Bagram or Khoust. The mission that made Jesus into the Christ, the anointed, was not cleaned and pressed, not shiny like a supermarket, not sanitary like a freshly scrubbed bathroom, not air-conditioned, not safe. You are at the kind of place where God breaks into the world to the exact degree that you let yourself become a "little Christ" -- the hands and feet and eyes and ears of Christ. Christ doesn't demand your mere belief. Christ demands participation in the work of God. Lay down your weapons, refuse your orders, accept the ridicule and abuse of the mob that "does not know what it is doing," and Christ will walk beside you. You'll be surprised at how many of us will walk beside you, too.
Who would lead a total revolution that would shake off internal oppression as well as the foreign yoke... Jesus' approach stood in unique opposition to the prevailing assumptions of his day. He articulated an altogether different way... He did not come in the sectarian guise of his time, offering redemption only to those belonging to a particular group, nor did he adopt a primarily adversarial stance. He came with a prophetic message concerned for the good of all and with an eagerness to bring God's kingdom within reach of everybody, even the enemy.
[from Jesus and the Non-Violent Revolution, by Andre Trocme] Remember your baptism. Your allegiance is to the eternal God, not the flag of a transient empire. Who and whose are you? You will hear people say that this burnt out veteran has no authority to speak as a Christian on these matters. And I am burnt out; and I did come to Christianity late in life. But I am not making any of this up. Honest and fearless Christian theologians of the ecumenical, prophetic, and evangelical churches have spoken out against war, and in exactly the terms presented here. I bring nothing original to this plea for obedience to the God of the Nazarene. I write to you as one who has shared your experience, not that of the clergy or the Academy. I have known your position, trapped between the regrets and guilt of the past and the anxieties of the future, plodding against the current of Holy Spirit to clutch at the "esteem" of your militarized nation, "proving" yourselves again and again to your peers who define masculinity and human value by the ability to risk one's own safety to dominate or destroy others. That is who I was before I was baptized into who and whose I am, and that is why I can tell you that the risk you must take is the risk not to dominate. It is the risk of losing the esteem of those who "know not what they do." Seek your redemption and the redemption of the world, the flesh, the system... by taking up the cross, walking the painful path to Golgotha, and overcoming your alienation from the triune God, who Paul - himself a violent persecutor of Jesus' followers until his epiphany - called Love, Grace, and Fellowship with your human family. The fellowship you lose if and when you refuse to fight, if you refuse to give another hour of support to this obscene enterprise, will be replaced not seven-fold, but seven-hundredfold by the fellowship of Peace: Christians, non-Christians, veterans, and non-veterans, and from many nations. This Pentecost waits for you. Have faith, knowing that faith is not sorcery... not magic... not abracadabra. Faith is radical trust that God has your back. And trust the evidence not of what those around you try to excuse and explain, but of what you see them actually do. Watch how your institution treats 'the least among us," because that is how the institution is treating Christ (Matt 25:40). You cannot point a gun at another human being, frighten a child, bully a man, demean a woman, violate the sanctity of a threshold, or kill, and not be doing this violence to Christ. There is nothing circumstantial about it. Christ was categorical about this. You must resist; and you must do so without violence and be prepared to love those who abuse you for your refusal. And trust, too, that all will be well, even though you might pass through a dark night first. Your obedience to peer pressure and your obedience to the government are both superceded absolutely by obedience to God. Elections will not stop this war, just shift its emphasis. Only you will stop it, starting with yourself. That is the way Jesus worked; and at your baptism you promised to follow the Christ. Refuse your work. Refuse your orders. Refuse to pick up the weapon and fight; and pray for the redemtion of those who will stand against you when you stand with God. When you do, and do so in the name of Christ, there are thousands more waiting that will follow. And there is One who will walk beside you every step of the way.
Stan Goff is the author of "Hideous Dream: A Soldier's Memoir of the US Invasion of Haiti" (Soft Skull Press, 2000), "Full Spectrum Disorder" (Soft Skull Press, 2003 He is a Methodist and an organic gardener. He has written about the military and militarism, and about masculinity-constructed-as-conquest. He can be reached at: stan@stangoff.com
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