[Peace-discuss] Howard Zinn

[Morton K.Brussel]

What Zinn writes in the speech below strikingly resembles what Dennis 
Kucinich has been saying.

MKB

Published in the January 2004 issue of The Progressive

The Logic of Withdrawal

by Howard Zinn

 


[A note of explanation: In the spring of 1967, my book Vietnam: The 
Logic of Withdrawal was published by Beacon Press. It was the first 
book on the war to call for immediate withdrawal, no conditions. Many 
liberals were saying: "Yes, we should leave Vietnam, but President 
Johnson can't just do it; it would be very hard to explain to the 
American people." My response, in the last chapter of my book, was to 
write a speech for Lyndon Johnson, explaining to the American people 
why he was ordering the immediate evacuation of American armed forces 
from Vietnam. No, Johnson did not make that speech, and the war went 
on. But I am undaunted, and willing to make my second attempt at speech 
writing. This time, I am writing a speech for whichever candidate 
emerges as Democratic Party nominee for President. My supposition is 
that the nation is ready for an all-out challenge to the Bush 
Administration, for its war policy and its assault on the well-being of 
the American people. And only such a forthright, courageous approach to 
the nation can win the election and save us from another four years of 
an Administration that is reckless with American lives and American 
values.]

My fellow Americans, I ask for your vote for President because I 
believe we are at a point in the history of our country where we have a 
serious decision to make. That decision will deeply affect not only our 
lives, but also the lives of our children and grandchildren.

At this moment in our nation's history, we are on a very dangerous 
course. We can remain on that course, or we can turn onto a bold new 
path to fulfill the promise of the Declaration of Independence, which 
guarantees everyone an equal right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of 
happiness.

The danger we are in today is that the war--a war without any 
foreseeable end--is not only taking the lives of our young but 
exhausting the great wealth of our nation. That wealth could be used to 
create prosperity for every American but is now being squandered on 
military interventions abroad that have nothing to do with making us 
more secure.

We should listen carefully to the men serving in this war.

Tim Predmore is a five-year veteran of the army. He is just finishing 
his tour of duty in Iraq. He writes: "We have all faced death in Iraq 
without reason or justification. How many more must die? How many more 
tears must be shed before Americans awake and demand the return of the 
men and women whose job it is to protect them rather than their 
leader's interest?"

What is national security? This Administration defines national 
security as sending our young men and women around the world to wage 
war on country after country--none of them strong enough to threaten 
us. I define national security as making sure every American has health 
care, employment, decent housing, a clean environment. I define 
national security as taking care of our people who are losing jobs, 
taking care of our senior citizens, taking care of our children.

Our current military budget is $400 billion a year, the largest in our 
history, larger even than when we were in the Cold War with the Soviet 
Union. And now we will be spending an additional $87 billion for the 
war in Iraq. At the same time, we are told that the government has cut 
funds for health care, education, the environment, and even school 
lunches for children. Most shocking of all is the cut, in billions of 
dollars, for veterans' benefits.

If I became President, I would immediately begin to use the great 
wealth of our nation to provide those things, which represent true 
security.

Immediately on taking office, I would propose to Congress, and use all 
my power to ensure that this legislation passes, that we institute a 
brand new health care system, one that builds on the success of our 
Medicare program, and that has been used effectively in other countries 
in the world.

I would call it Health Security, because it would guarantee to every 
man, woman, and child free medical care, including prescription drugs, 
paid for out of the general treasury, like the free medical care for 
members of Congress, and for members of our armed services. This would 
save billions of dollars wasted today in administrative costs, profits 
for insurance companies and pharmaceutical firms, huge salaries for 
CEOs of private medical plans. There would be no paperwork for the 
patient, and no worries about whether any medical condition, any 
medical emergency, would be covered. No worry that losing your job 
would mean an end to your medical insurance.

I would do something else immediately on taking office. I would ask 
Congress for a Full Employment Act, guaranteeing jobs to anyone who is 
willing to work. We would give the private sector all the opportunity 
to provide work, but where it fails to do so, the government would 
become the employer of last resort. We would use as a model the great 
social programs of the New Deal, when millions of people were given 
jobs after the private sector had failed to do so.

I would also take steps to reverse the attacks on our environment by 
the Bush Administration, which has been more concerned for the profits 
of large corporations than for the air, land, and water we depend on. 
In December of 2002, it relaxed its pollution standards for antiquated 
coal-fired power plants in the Midwest, and those emissions cause 
hundreds of premature deaths each year. It has refused to sign the 
Kyoto agreement on global warming, though climate change is an enormous 
peril to the coming generations. The Nuclear Regulatory Agency in 
January of 2003 refused to order a nuclear reactor closed though its 
lid had rusted nearly all the way through, because, according to an 
internal commission report, the agency did not want to impose 
unnecessary costs on the owner and was reluctant to give the industry a 
black eye.

This Administration has done nothing to stop the emissions from the 
chemical plants all over the country, and it has stored chemical 
weapons in areas where residents have become sick as a result. In April 
of 2003, Darline Stephens of Anniston, Alabama, told a journalist: "I 
live five or ten miles from chemical weapons. We're over there 
searching for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but we have them 
here in our hometown."

The Bush Presidency has sacrificed the cause of clean air and clean 
water because it has ties to the automobile industry, the oil industry, 
the chemical industry, and other great commercial enterprises. I would 
insist on regulating those industries in order to save the environment 
for us, our children, our grandchildren.

A decision must be made, and I promise to make it. We cannot have 
Health Security, or job security, or a decent environment, unless we 
decide we will no longer be a nation that sends its military everywhere 
in the world against nations that pose no threat to us.

We have already lost 400 lives in Iraq. Over 2,000 of our young have 
been wounded, some of them so seriously that the word "wounded" does 
not convey the reality.

Robert Acosta is twenty years old. He has lost his right hand and part 
of his forearm.

Twenty-one-year-old Edward Platt has had his leg amputated above the 
knee.

The entertainer Cher, visiting the Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, 
called in to a television program, saying, "As I walked into the 
hospital the first person I ran into was a boy about nineteen or twenty 
years old who'd lost both of his arms. . . . And when I walked into the 
hospital and visited all these boys all day long . . . everyone had 
lost either one arm . . . or two limbs. . . . I just think that if 
there was no reason for this war, this was the most heinous thing I'd 
ever seen. . . . I go all over the world and I must say that the news 
we get in America has nothing to do with the news that you get outside 
of this country."

The families of those who have died in this war are asking questions 
which this Administration cannot answer. I read recently about the 
mother of Captain Tristan Aitken, who was thirty-one years old, and 
died in combat in Iraq. She said about her son: "He was doing his job. 
He had no choice, and I'm proud of who he was. But it makes me mad that 
this whole war was sold to the American public and to the soldiers as 
something it wasn't. Our forces have been convinced that Iraqis were 
responsible for September 11, and that's not true."

This mother has it right. Americans were led into war, being told again 
and again by the highest officials of government, including the 
President, that it was absolutely necessary. But we now know that we 
were deceived. We were told that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction 
that were a danger to us and the world. These weapons, despite enormous 
efforts by both an international team and our own government's 
investigative body, have not been found.

Virtually every nation in the world, and public opinion all over the 
planet, believed we should not go to war. Countries much closer to Iraq 
than ours did not feel threatened, so why should the United 
States--with its enormous arsenal of nuclear weapons and with its 
warships on every sea--have felt threatened?

Common sense should have told us that Iraq, devastated by two wars 
(first with Iran, then with our country) and then ruined by ten years 
of economic sanctions, could not be a threat sufficient to justify war. 
But that common sense did not exist in Washington, either in the White 
House, which demanded war, or in Congress, which rushed to approve war. 
We now know that decision was wrong and that the President of the 
United States and the people around him were not telling us the truth.

As a result of believing the President, we went to war in violation of 
the United Nations Charter, in defiance of public opinion all over the 
world, and thus in a single move placed ourselves outside the family of 
nations and destroyed the goodwill that so many people everywhere had 
toward our country.

On September 11, 2001, a terrorist attack in New York and Washington 
took close to 3,000 lives. The Bush Administration has used that tragic 
event as an excuse to go to war, first in Afghanistan and now in Iraq. 
But neither war has made us safer from terrorism. The Bush 
Administration lied to the American people about a connection between 
Iraq and Al Qaeda, when even the CIA has not been able to find such a 
connection.

Indeed, by its killing of thousands of people in both countries, the 
Bush Administration has inflamed millions of people in the Middle East 
against us and increased the ranks of the terrorists.

The Iraqi people are happy to be rid of Saddam Hussein, but now they 
want to be rid of us. They do not want our military to occupy their 
country. If we believe in self-determination, in the freedom of the 
Iraqis to choose their own way of life, we should listen to their 
pleas, leave their country, and allow them to work out their own 
affairs.

I would, therefore, as President, call for an orderly withdrawal of our 
troops from Iraq and Afghanistan. I would remove our troops from 
elsewhere in the Middle East. Only the oil interests benefit from that 
military presence.

I am proposing a fundamental change in the foreign policy of our 
country. This Administration believes that we, as the most powerful 
nation in the world, should use that power to establish military bases 
all over the world, to control the oil of the Middle East, to determine 
the destinies of other countries.

I believe that we should use our great power not for military purposes 
but to bring food and medicine to those areas of the world that have 
been devastated by war, by disease, by hunger. If we took a fraction of 
our military budget we could combat malaria, tuberculosis, and AIDS. We 
could provide clean water for the billion people in the world who don't 
have it and would save millions of lives. That would be an 
accomplishment we could be proud of. But how proud can we be of 
military victories over weak nations, in which we overthrow dictators 
but at the same time bomb and kill the people who are the victims of 
these dictators? And the tyrants we overthrow are very often the ones 
we have helped stay in power, like the Taliban in Afghanistan or Saddam 
Hussein in Iraq.

We are at a turning point in the history of our nation. We can go on 
being a great military power, engaging in war after war, in which 
innocent people abroad and our own men and women die or are crippled 
for life. Or we can become a peaceful nation, always ready to defend 
ourselves, but not sending our troops and planes all over the world for 
the benefit of the oil interests and the other great corporations that 
profit from war.

We can choose to use the wealth of our nation and the talents of our 
people for war, or we can use that wealth and talent to better the 
lives of men, women, and children in this country. We can continue 
being the target of anger and terrorism and indignation by the rest of 
the world, or we can be a model of what a good society should be like, 
peaceful in the world, prosperous at home.

The choice will come in the ballot box. I ask you to choose for the 
peace of the world, and the security of the American people.

Howard Zinn, the author of "A People's History of the United States," 
is a columnist for The Progressive.

Copyright 2003 The Progressive, Madison, WI
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