There is no way to peace. Peace IS the way… David Swanson (WorldBeyondWar.org)
Ask yourself, and then ask your congress members “why are we at war with so many people in so many places around the world?”
How are these people threatening our “homeland”? (Don’t fall for the ISIS BS).
Why have we been replacing secular, progressive “regimes” with Islamic religious strife?
Qui Bono?
This is no accident. It has been planned for a long time.
Don’t believe it because I say so.
Let Gen. Wesley Clark lay it out for you:
“ So I came back to see him a few weeks later, and by that time we were bombing in Afghanistan. I said, “Are we still going to war with Iraq?” And he said, “Oh, it’s worse than that.” He reached over on his desk. He picked up a piece of paper. And he said, “I just got this down from upstairs” — meaning the Secretary of Defense’s office — “today.” And he said, “This is a memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7NsXFnzJGw
Listen to him to the end – it’s about 8 minutes long. He explains the why and even the who (at least some of them). If you lack the patience, fast forward to 7:30 minutes.
This was recorded in 2007, but Clark goes all the way back to 1991 (He only had one star at the time).
He was right then. He’s still right. And the criminals running our government are in the wrong!
Another question to ask: “What effect are all these wars having on the climate?”
Seven
Seven wars with predominantly Muslim countries under our Nobel peace prize winning president. Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya and Iraq. Cheney should be thrilled.
Maybe we can squeeze in a few more before he’s done.
Maybe he’ll get another Peace Prize.
Count the ways
The number of pathways to World Peace you can count on your fingers.
But people can’t count because complexity trumps simplicity; belief-dependency trumps secular-dependency; self-serving trumps sharing-resources.
This is article is an really important submission to any readership/viewingship.
7th Country
Syria Becomes the 7th Predominantly Muslim Country Bombed by 2009 Nobel Peace Laureate
By Glenn Greenwald
The U.S. today began bombing targets inside Syria, in concert with its lovely and inspiring group of five allied regimes: Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Jordan.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article39765.htm
War and Winning
I hate to remind everybody, but we (the USA) haven’t won a war since WWII. And even there, it’s debatable that the Russians did more to win it than we did (at least in Europe).
The signature atrocities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that provided the exclamation points for the war in the Pacific weren’t even aimed at the Japanese. They were ready to surrender, but begged us to pardon their Emperor who was regarded as a god.
MacArthur insisted on unconditional surrender, resulting in a stalemate.
Meanwhile the Russians, who were our allies at the time, were marching through Manchuria towards Japan to join the fray.
The A-Bombs were, in fact, a “shot across the bow” warning the Soviets to behave themselves after the hostilities ended.
Well, the Russians observed, and what they saw required them to “change their underwear” – bigtime!
Anticipating the cold war (which, in fact, had already started) they shifted to high gear, and caught up to us in almost exactly four years
Using detailed data on the American program, and the detailed design description of the Fat Man bomb provided by atom spy Klaus Fuchs, the Soviet program achieved its first Atomic Explosion on August 29, 1949.
(Fuchs, a refugee German physicist, and Communist Party member, was employed by the United Kingdom atomic energy program during World War II, and was sent to work on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos. Fuchs was a gifted physicist who made major contributions to the Manhattan Project. He is also the famous “Atom Spy” who transferred to the Soviet Union virtually everything he knew about atomic weapons.)
As of 01 January 2006, Russia possessed 927 nuclear delivery vehicles and 4,279 nuclear warheads for strategic offensive weapons, while the United States owned 1,255 and 5,966, respectively, according to the Russian Defense Ministry.
Vladimir Putin said in November 2006 that developing Russia’s strategic forces is the main priority on the national defense agenda. “Maintaining a strategic balance will mean that our strategic deterrent forces should be able to guarantee the neutralization of any potential aggressor, no matter what modern weapons systems he possesses,” the president told a meeting with top military officials.
This is something Obama needs to consider as he confronts the Russians over Ukraine.
Moving along, we have Korea (1950-1953+)
The Korean War was a war between North and South Korea, in which a United Nations force led by the United States of America fought for the South, and China fought for the North, also assisted by the Soviet Union. The war arose from the division of Korea at the end of World War II and from the global tensions of the Cold War that developed immediately afterwards.
After several years of intense fighting, in which virtually all Korean real estate changed hands several times, the battle line held at the 38th parallel. The last two years of the war saw stalemate and attrition warfare. The fighting ended on 27 July 1953, when the armistice agreement was signed. The agreement established a new border between the Koreas close to the previous one and created the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), a 2.5-mile-wide fortified buffer zone between them. Border incidents have continued to the present.
Note: An armistice is not a peace treaty. Technically, the Korean War is not yet over and nobody won.
And then there was…Grenada!
Operation Urgent Fury was a 1983 United States–led invasion of Grenada, a Caribbean island nation with a population of about 90,000 that resulted in a U.S. victory within a matter of weeks. Triggered by the house arrest and murder of the leader of the coup which had brought a revolutionary government to power for the preceding four years, the invasion resulted in a restoration of the pre-revolutionary regime.
I lied to you…we won this one. But we didn’t win the next one: Viet Nam.
The Vietnam War was a Cold War-era proxy war that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. This war was fought between North Vietnam—supported by the Soviet Union, China and other communist allies—and the government of South Vietnam—supported by the United States and other anti-communist allies. The Viet Cong (also known as the National Liberation Front, or NLF), a South Vietnamese communist common front aided by the North, fought a guerrilla war against anti-communist forces in the region. The People’s Army of Vietnam (also known as the North Vietnamese Army) engaged in a more conventional war, at times committing large units to battle.
Disillusionment with the war by the U.S. led to the gradual withdrawal of U.S. ground forces as part of a policy known as Vietnamization, which aimed to end American involvement in the war while transferring the task of fighting the Communists to the South Vietnamese themselves.
In the U.S. and the Western world, a large anti-Vietnam War movement developed. This movement was part of a larger Counterculture of the 1960s.
Direct U.S. military involvement ended on 15 August 1973 as a result of the Case–Church Amendment passed by the U.S. Congress.
The capture of Saigon by the North Vietnamese Army in April 1975 marked the end of the war, and North and South Vietnam were reunified the following year. The war exacted a huge human cost in terms of fatalities. Estimates of the number of Vietnamese service members and civilians killed vary from 800,000 to 3.1 million. Some 200,000–300,000 Cambodians, 20,000–200,000 Laotians, and 58,220 U.S. service members also died in the conflict.
Burned indelibly into my brain is the vision of the evacuation of US personnel from the Embassy in Saigon, with hapless Viet-Namese hanging from the chopper skids. I actually knew one of those evacuees. He returned to Saigon as a civilian as soon after the war as conditions allowed.
Anybody who tries to pretend we won that conflict is either lying or delusional.
While Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Cong were the victors, they suffered enormously, both during and after the war.
On 2 July 1976, North and South Vietnam were merged to form the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. Following the communist takeover, 2.5 million South Vietnamese were sent to reeducation camps, with an estimated 165,000 prisoners dying. Between 100,000 and 200,000 South Vietnamese were executed. About 50,000 South Vietnamese deported to “New Economic Zones” died performing hard labor, out of the 1 million that were sent. 200,000 to 400,000 Vietnamese boat people died at sea.
Over 3 million people left Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia in the Indochina refugee crisis. Most Asian countries were unwilling to accept these refugees, who were known as boat people. Between 1975 and 1998, an estimated 1.2 million refugees from Vietnam and other Southeast Asian countries resettled in the United States, while Canada, Australia, and France resettled over 500,000. China accepted 250,000 people.
Explosive remnants of war continue to detonate and kill people today. The Vietnamese government claims that ordnance has killed some 42,000 people since the war officially ended, In 2012 alone, unexploded bombs and other ordnance claimed 500 casualties in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, according to activists and government databases.
Agent Orange and similar chemical substances, have also caused a considerable number of deaths and injuries over the years, including the US Air Force crews that handled them. (RIP LCol. Bob Bowman, USAF 09/2013).
Between 1965 and 1975, the United States spent $111 billion on the war (1975 dollars). This resulted in a large federal budget deficit.
More than 3 million Americans served in the Vietnam War, some 1.5 million of whom actually saw combat in Vietnam. By war’s end, 58,000 American soldiers had been killed, more than 150,000 had been wounded, and at least 21,000 had been permanently disabled. Approximately 830,000 Vietnam veterans suffered some degree of posttraumatic stress disorder. An estimated 125,000 Americans left for Canada to avoid the Vietnam draft, and approximately 50,000 American servicemen deserted. As of 2013, the U.S. government is paying Vietnam veterans and their families or survivors more than 22 billion dollars a year in war-related claims.
So now, we’re up to the Middle East.
Wes Clark spoke about 5 years, but we’re already far beyond that, and the disaster only seems to get worse. Following the dots, it appears that the end game is to balkanize the entire Middle East into unstable ethnic/sectarian enclaves with absolutely no defense against corporate resource exploitation, and who will no longer constitute an existential threat to Israel.
And, we now have some nifty new boogeymen to keep the action moving.
ISIS, ISIL, IS or whatever and their sidekicks (The Khorasan which may not even exist) couldn’t be more perfect if they came straight from central casting. Beheadings, mass graves, gross brutalities have us going nuts, Fear is a great motivator. Neocons and war hawks like McCain are beating the drums and the American sheeple are clamoring for boots on the ground.
This will not end well. All the experience of the terrible wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya has shown that western military action only serves to kill innocents, destroy infrastructure and inflame violence. ISIS is a reactionary force, but it is in part a product of the disastrous occupation of Iraq by Western powers. ISIS is funded by some of our main allies in the region, including Saudi Arabia. Escalating Western military intervention will do nothing to stop them but will create more suffering and further destabilize the region.
BTW, It is definitely NOT anti-Semitism to be critical of the excesses perpetrated by Israel on the Palestinian people: excesses such as the 50 days of bombing and military attacks in July and August that left thousands dead, thousands more wounded, and life-supporting infrastructure obliterated in Gaza. The devastation caused by this recent aggression is unmatched in modern times. This doesn’t help anything.
The only way out of this mess is for the USA to forego war – entirely. It may take a Constitutional amendment. It will never happen until we vote the criminal warmongers out of Washington – from BOTH parties. That’s the first step.
Whom is really in charge?
This a most excellent analysis, à la Chris Pratt. (Or, Chris Pratt is à la Tom Finnell)
tomaidh “The only way out of this mess is for the USA to forego war – entirely. It may take a Constitutional amendment. It will never happen until we vote the criminal warmongers out of Washington – from BOTH parties. That’s the first step.“
I’d like to add a few points, if I may. The people most interested in war-making are not technically the politicians and governments. As far back as the East India Company which accounted for half the world’s trade during the 1700s, the rise of corporate oligarchy, with force behind it, was the precursor to a form of global corportocracy we all bend our knees to today.
Now that the sitting (should I say, shitting) SCOTUS has recreated corporations in the “image of a man,” if we think we had problems before, we ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
It’s possible that being, in reality, independent from and in control of governments, corporations have the deepest vested interest in war.
A little thing like American’s dumping the Two Party’s would be a minor inconvenience but in the end they would just tap into the new pool of wealth and influences to carry on.
In a tiered structuring of whom is really in charge, it goes something like this, top-down:
Corporations
Governments
Military
We The People (last and least)
Of those four sectors We The People are the weakest link and one that is far more easily controlled and made to do the bidding of the top three.
When you factor in to include sexism, racism, religious dogmas, unequal wealth, wealthy/powerful elite, territoriality, ignorance, fear and superstition we are left with one bloody mess that will not heal in the lifetime of even the youngest child born this minute.
It’s the same in every country, really.