[Peace-discuss] Top 9 Reasons To Stop Bombing Iraq
ewjohnson via Peace-discuss
peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net
Fri Aug 15 12:00:21 EDT 2014
Is Herb Stein's law Sustainable?
On 08/15/2014 10:43 PM, Carl G. Estabrook wrote:
> Some cold comfort in Herb Stein's Law: “If something cannot go on
> forever, it will stop.”
>
>
> On Aug 15, 2014, at 8:56 AM, ewjohnson via Peace-discuss
> <peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net
> <mailto:peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net>> wrote:
>
>> As long as Hillary Clnton and Barack Obama are running around live
>> and loose,
>> there is no such thing as Justice in the USA,
>> there is only the mockery of Justice,
>> and no one should be punished for any crime,
>> small or great, as long as Obama is allowed to
>> openly flaunt the law,
>> spit on the constitution, and
>> attempt to ride over every fundamental principle
>> of determining + and -.
>>
>> Actually I don't know real outcome yet, as none of us do...
>>
>> yet it has been observed...
>>
>> /Though the mills of God grind slowly;/
>> /Yet they grind exceeding small;/
>> /Though with patience he stands waiting,/
>> /With exactness grinds he all./
>>
>> /
>> /Or as another fellow Cicero might have put it in longer but
>> straighter words---
>>
>> "Look here,
>> ya ignorant son-of- a-lab-rat.
>> They aint No One gonna get away with this fo-ever.
>> Quo usque tandem abutere yer dyin' podium,
>> They ain't no more fuckin' tandem for you or nostra.
>> Our patience is completely down to Zero-minus.
>>
>> Time,
>> and WE za people
>> is gonna abutere on yo ass but good.
>> Ni zenme Capisce,
>> "kemo-sabe"?"
>>
>> An other outcome is the he takes the whole ship down with 'im.
>> /
>> /
>> On 08/15/2014 08:10 PM, David Johnson via Peace-discuss wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> Top 9 Reasons To Stop Bombing Iraq
>>>
>>> <Mail Attachment.jpeg>
>>> Educate! <http://www.popularresistance.org/category/educate/>
>>> Foreign Policy
>>> <http://www.popularresistance.org/tag/foreign-policy/>, Iraq
>>> <http://www.popularresistance.org/tag/iraq/>, Wars and Militarism
>>> <http://www.popularresistance.org/tag/wars-and-militarism/>
>>> By David Swanson, www.warisacrime.org
>>> <http://warisacrime.org/content/top-9-reasons-stop-bombing-iraq>
>>> August 14th, 2014
>>> Powered by <Mail Attachment.png>Translate
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>>>
>>> *1. It’s not a rescue mission.* The U.S. personnel could be
>>> evacuated without the 500-pound bombs. The persecuted minorities
>>> could be supplied, moved, or their enemy dissuaded, or all three,
>>> without the 500-pound bombs or the hundreds of “advisors” (trained
>>> and armed to kill, and never instructed in how to give advice — Have
>>> you ever tried taking urgent advice from 430 people?). The boy who
>>> cried rescue mission should not be allowed to get away with it after
>>> the documented deception in Libya where a fictional threat to
>>> civilians was used to launch an all-out aggressive attack that has
>>> left that nation in ruins. Not to mention the false claims about
>>> Syrian chemical weapons and the false claim that missiles were the
>>> only option left for Syria — the latter claims being exposed when
>>> the former weren’t believed, the missiles didn’t launch, and less
>>> violent but perfectly obvious alternative courses of action were
>>> recognized. If the U.S. government were driven by a desire to
>>> rescue the innocent, why would it be arming Israel, Egypt, Jordan,
>>> Bahrain? The U.S. government destroyed the nation of Iraq between
>>> 2003 and 2011, with results including the near elimination of
>>> various minority groups. If preventing genocide were a dominant
>>> U.S. interest, it could have halted its participation in and
>>> aggravation of that war at any time, a war in which 97% of the dead
>>> were on one side, just as in Gaza this month — the distinction
>>> between war and genocide being one of perspective, not proportions.
>>> Or, of course, the U.S. could have left well alone. Ever since
>>> President Carter declared that the U.S. would kill for Iraqi oil,
>>> each of his successors has believed that course of action justified,
>>> and each has made matters significantly worse.
>>>
>>> *2. It’s going to make things worse, again.* This bombing will
>>> aggravate the Sunni-Shia divide, increase support for ISIS, and
>>> create a lasting legacy of hostility and violence. President Obama
>>> says there is no military solution, only reconciliation. But bombs
>>> don’t reconcile. They harden hearts and breed murderers. Numerous
>>> top U.S. officials admit that much of what the U.S. military does
>>> generates more enemies than it kills. When you continue down a path
>>> that is counterproductive on its own terms, the honesty of those
>>> terms has to be doubted. If this war is not for peace, is it
>>> perhaps — like every other war we’ve seen the U.S. wage in the area
>>> — for resources, profits, domination, and sadism? The leader of
>>> ISIS learned his hatred in a U.S. prison in Iraq. U.S. media report
>>> that fact as if it is just part of the standard portrait of a new
>>> Enemy #1, but the irony is not mere coincidence. Violence is
>>> created. It doesn’t arise out of irrational and inscrutable
>>> foreignness. It is planted by those great gardeners in the sky:
>>> planes, drones, and helicopters. A bombing campaign justified as
>>> protecting people actually endangers them, and those around them,
>>> and many others, including those of us living in the imperial Homeland.
>>>
>>> *3. Bombs kill.* Big bombs kill a lot of people. Massive bombing
>>> campaigns slaughter huge numbers of people, including those fighting
>>> in the hell the U.S. helped to create, and including those not
>>> fighting — men, women, children, grandparents, infants. Defenders
>>> of the bombing know this, but ignore it, and make no effort to
>>> calculate whether more people are supposedly being saved than are
>>> being killed. This indifference exposes the humanitarian
>>> pretensions of the operation. If some humans are of no value to
>>> you, humanitarianism is not what’s driving your decisions. The U.S.
>>> war on Iraq ’03-’11 killed a half million to a million-and-a-half
>>> Iraqis and 4,000 Americans. A war that puts fewer Americans on the
>>> ground and uses more planes and drones is thought of as involving
>>> less death only if our concern is narrowly limited to U.S. deaths.
>>> From the vantage point of the ground, an air war is the deadliest
>>> form of war there is.
>>>
>>> *4. There are other options.* The choice between bombing and doing
>>> nothing is as false now as it was in September. If you can drop
>>> food on some people, why can’t you drop food on everyone? It would
>>> cost a tiny fraction of dropping bombs on them. It would confuse
>>> the hell out of them, too — like Robin Williams’ version of God high
>>> on pot and inventing the platypus. Of course, I now sound crazy
>>> because I’m talking about people who’ve been demonized (and
>>> personified in a killer straight out of a U.S. prison). It’s not as
>>> if these are human beings with whom you can lament the death of
>>> Robin Williams. They’re not like you and me. Etc. Yadda. Yadda.
>>> But in fact ISIS fighters were sharing their appreciation of
>>> Williams on Twitter on Tuesday. The United States could talk about
>>> other matters with ISIS as well, including a ceasefire, including a
>>> unilateral commitment to cease arming the Iraqi government even
>>> while trying to organize its ouster, including an offer to provide
>>> real humanitarian aid with no nasty strings attached, but with
>>> encouragement of civil liberties and democratic decision making.
>>> It’s amazing how long minority ethnic groups in Iraq survived and
>>> thrived prior to the U.S. bringing democracy, and prior to the U.S.
>>> existing. The U.S. could do some good but must first do no harm.
>>>
>>> *5. There are now enough weapons already there to practically
>>> justify one of Colin Powell’s slides retroactively. *The U.S.
>>> accounts for 79% of foreign weapons transfers to Western Asia (the
>>> Middle East). The war on Libya had identical U.S. weapons on both
>>> sides. ISIS almost certainly has weapons supplied by the U.S. in
>>> Syria, and certainly has weapons taken from Iraq. So, what is the
>>> U.S. doing? It’s rushing more weapons to Iraq as fast as possible.
>>> Americans like to think of the Middle East as backward and violent,
>>> but the tools of the violence trade are manufactured in the United
>>> States. Yes, the United States does still manufacture something,
>>> it’s just not something that serves any useful purpose or about
>>> which most of us can manage to feel very proud. Weapons making also
>>> wastes money rather than creating it, because unaccountable profits
>>> are the single biggest product manufactured.
>>>
>>> *6. This is going to cost a fortune.* Bombing Iraq is depicted as a
>>> measure of great restraint and forbearance. Meanwhile building
>>> schools and hospitals and green energy infrastructure in Iraq would
>>> be viewed as madness if anyone dared propose it. But the latter
>>> would cost a lot less money — a consideration that is usually a top
>>> priority in U.S. politics whenever killing large numbers of people
>>> is not involved. The world spend $2 trillion and the U.S. $1
>>> trillion (half the total) on war and war preparations every year.
>>> Three percent of U.S. military spending could end starvation on
>>> earth. The wonders that could be done with a fraction of military
>>> money are almost unimaginable and include actual defense against the
>>> actual danger of climate change.
>>>
>>> *7. Bombs are environmental disasters.* If someone photographs a
>>> big oil fire, some will give a thought to the environmental damage.
>>> But a bombing campaign is, rather than an environmental accident, an
>>> intentional environmental catastrophe. The poisoned ground and
>>> water, and the disease epidemics, will reach the United States
>>> primarily through moral regret, depression, and suicide.
>>>
>>> *8. There go our civil liberties.* Discussions of torture,
>>> imprisonment, assassination, surveillance, and denial of fair trials
>>> are severely damaged by wartime postures. After all, war is for
>>> “freedom,” and who wouldn’t be willing to surrender all of their
>>> freedoms for that?
>>>
>>> *9. War is illegal.* It doesn’t matter if the illegitimate
>>> government that you’re trying to dump invited you to bomb its
>>> country. How can anyone take that seriously, while the U.S.
>>> installed that government and has armed it for years, as it has
>>> attacked its people? War is illegal under the Kellogg Briand Pact
>>> and the United Nations Charter, and pretending otherwise endangers
>>> the world. Domestically, under U.S. law, the president cannot
>>> launch a war. While the Senate has been silent, the U.S. House
>>> voted two weeks ago to ban any new presidential war on Iraq.
>>> Offering Congress a slap in the face, Obama waited for it to go on
>>> break, and then attacked Iraq.
>>>
>>>
>>>
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>>
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