[Peace-discuss] Who opposes the war?

[Morton K. Brussel]

Hey, Carl, are you left, right, or center?  --Mort

I don't know what "left" Benoit is talking about  --Hillary or Bill,  
Biden or Obama; Hitchens?
Is Chomsky, Herman, or Zinn, Zmag, etc. left?

On Jan 24, 2006, at 9:25 AM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:

> [While the Democratic presidential candidate is agreeing with
> the administration that "A nuclear Iran is a danger to Israel,
> to its neighbors and beyond [so] we cannot and should not --
> must not -- permit Iran to build or acquire nuclear weapons"
> <http://antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=8428> -- and demanding
> that the administration take stronger action against Iran --
> the far right is condemning the war.  --CGE]
>
>
> 	Last Updated: Jan 23rd, 2006 - 08:28:07
>         Anti-war Stance Is Right, Not Left
>         by Gary Benoit
>
> According to the wisdom of the day, the left is against the
> war in Iraq while the right supports the war. So why do The
> John Birch Society and its affiliated magazine THE NEW
> AMERICAN support the withdrawal of our troops from Iraq? Isn’t
> that the position of the hard left? (Click here for an online
> letter to Congress, "Bring Our Soldiers Home From Iraq -- Now!")
>
> In actuality, there are fundamental differences between the
> left and us regarding the question of war.
>
> Unlike the left, we do not believe any one man should ever be
> entrusted with the awesome power of deciding when to go to
> war. It makes no difference if the president is a Republican
> or a Democrat, a conservative or a liberal. The Constitution
> assigns to Congress, not the president, the power “to declare
> war.” If America needs to go to war, Congress should declare it.
>
> Democrat presidents were wrong when they claimed that the
> decision to go to war was theirs to make, and President Bush
> is wrong when he makes the same claim. Mr. Bush’s
> acknowledgement of last December that “as President, I am
> responsible for the decision to go into Iraq,” overlooks the
> fact that this decision was not his to make.
>
> Unlike the left, we recognize that the president’s powers as
> commander-in-chief are limited, as well they should be. Under
> our system of government, we have a president entrusted with
> certain specified powers; we do not have an elected dictator
> or a king. As Alexander Hamilton explained in The Federalist
> Papers (No. 69), the president’s authority as
> commander-in-chief amounts “to nothing more than the supreme
> command and direction of the military and naval forces, as
> first general and admiral … while that of the British king
> extends to the declaring of war and to the raising and
> regulating of fleets and armies — all which, by the
> Constitution under consideration, would appertain to the
> legislature.”
>
> Unlike the left, we do not want to send our troops to war to
> enforce United Nations Security Council resolutions. Yet this
> is exactly what President Bush did in the case of Iraq, by his
> own repeated admissions. For instance, on November 8, 2002,
> the day the Security Council passed its Resolution 1441
> insisting that Iraq eliminate its reputed weapons of mass
> destruction, Mr. Bush declared: “America will be making only
> one determination: is Iraq meeting the terms of the Security
> Council resolution or not?... If Iraq fails to fully comply,
> the United States and other nations will disarm Saddam Hussein.”
>
> Even though the left supports intervening militarily on behalf
> of the UN, it opposed Bush’s intervention in Iraq because the
> Security Council did not pass a new resolution explicitly
> authorizing a military invasion to enforce Resolution 1441 and
> other Security Council resolutions. The irony is that the Bush
> administration, by launching an offensive war against Iraq,
> actually demonstrated it was more interested in putting teeth
> behind Security Council resolutions than the Security Council
> itself was.
>
> Unlike the left, we believe in putting America first, which
> means minding our own business, avoiding foreign
> entanglements, and going to war only when necessary to defend
> our citizens and country. We should not be the world’s
> policeman. Nor should we spill another drop of American blood
> to wage the Bush administration’s “global democratic revolution.”
>
> Using military force to right the wrongs in other countries
> and cultures dissimilar to our own is sure to backfire, even
> if the intent is sincere. As John Quincy Adams correctly
> observed: “America goes not abroad in search of monsters to
> destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and
> independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only
> of her own.... She well knows that by once enlisting under
> other banners than her own, were they even the banners of
> foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the
> power of extrication in all the wars of interest and intrigue,
> of individual avarice, envy and ambition, which assume the
> colors and usurp the standards of freedom.”
>
> Countries that mind their own business are less likely to be
> attacked than those that intervene in other countries’
> affairs, particularly when those interventions come to be
> viewed as unwanted occupations.
>
> Unlike the left, we believe that “to be prepared for war is
> one of the most effectual means of preserving peace,” as
> George Washington succinctly put it. This means preparedness
> by our intelligence services as well as the military against
> terrorist attack or military attack by a foreign power.
> Countries that are prepared are much less likely to be
> attacked than countries that are not prepared.
>
> Unlike the left, we believe that in war “there is no
> substitute for victory,” to quote General Douglas MacArthur.
> Why, therefore, do we want to bring the troops home now? Why
> not win and then get out? Well, if winning means eliminating
> Iraq’s reputed weapons of mass destruction, there is no
> victory to obtain because those weapons do not exist. If it
> means toppling the Saddam regime, that victory has already
> been achieved. But if it means propping up the new Iraqi
> regime until that regime can stand on its own, that “victory”
> would be no victory at all, since that new regime is fast
> becoming another Iran, an “axis of evil” nation.
>
> http://www.thenewamerican.com/artman/publish/article_3103.shtml
>    ###
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