[Peace-discuss] Fwd: Everywhere is War

[David Johnson via Peace-discuss]

This article was posted recently in a variety of places. Peace and 
Solidarity,
http://www.blackstarnews.com/us-politics/justice/everywhere-is-war.html

*Everywhere is War*
by Andy Piascik
Summer approaches and the stench of war is all around. Or, as the great 
Bob Marley put it, Everywhere is War. Start with the commemorations over 
a five-week span of Memorial Day, Flag Day and Independence Day, all 
presented varyingly as celebrations of our war dead, symbols of our 
greatness, the freedoms we love so dearly and seek to export to every 
corner of the world and, perhaps most important, the unquestioned 
rightness of our cause.
In reality, the celebrations are of imperialist war, with the talk about 
the hallowed dead just so much cover for the murderous nature of US 
foreign policy. Celebrating the dead – note that the dead celebrated are 
just the American dead, not any of the millions killed by US aggression 
or client states – is a no-lose proposition designed to render anyone 
who asks the wrong questions a traitor or a terrorist. The notion that 
the US regularly commits war crimes and that polished, well-educated men 
like John Kennedy and Barack Obama are war criminals is unthinkable; war 
criminals look like Osama bin-Laden and Saddam Hussein and those other 
nasty people far away, over there.
It’s also the summer of the centennial of the start of what in its time 
was known as the Great War, the greatest blood-letting in history except 
for that of the Second Great War barely two decades later. Of one thing 
we can be sure and that is that the lessons drawn from mainstream 
discussions of World War 1 will be all the wrong ones. Worse, the 
spectacle of the intelligentsia waxing eloquent about the horrors of war 
while unflinchingly cheering on the warmakers in Washington will be 
accepted by one and all of their kind as perfectly reasonable – as 
beyond discussion, in fact.
In recent weeks, meanwhile, mainstream commentators have been shocked to 
discover that things in Iraq are not alright, in fact are worse than at 
any time since the second US blitzkrieg in 2003. Gee, who knew. Who knew 
that an invasion predicated on a lie of weapons of mass destruction, 
designed to secure control of massive oil supplies, would go wrong? The 
political class and intelligentsia didn’t, or at least they pretended 
they didn’t, but millions around the world who demonstrated against the 
invasion in the weeks before it was launched certainly did. And one of 
the points those demonstrators underscored was that a US invasion would 
fuel sectarian divisions and violence, precisely as has happened. 
Al-Qaeda, which did not exist in Iraq prior to the invasion, now 
flourishes while a new group, the Islamist State of Iraq and Syria 
(ISIS), rampages through the country.
The response of many elites in the US, naturally, is for more war. Calls 
from certain factions for a third US invasion are growing louder and, 
true to his preference for violence over diplomacy, Obama has sent a 
strike force to Iraq. Whether the people of the United States can come 
together as we did last summer when we rose up and prevented Obama from 
attacking Syria remains to be seen. As beaten down as we may be, we must 
at least try.
Also on the war front is the Veterans Affairs’ disgraceful neglect of 
ex-soldiers in need of medical care. For years, political elites have 
been slashing benefits for veterans while increasing spending on weapons 
and cutting taxes for the Super Rich. That the problem came to a head 
with a Democrat in the White House is simply an accident of timing, and 
it is especially outrageous that the most enthusiastic cheerleaders of 
the illegal Bush-Cheney invasions, as well as reductions to the VA’s 
budgets and the tax cuts for 1%, now pretend that they care about soldiers.
Equally farcical is the commencement of yet another round of hearings on 
the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi. Such hearings would certainly 
be valuable if everything related to US actions in Libya since the 
launch of the 2011 assault were up for review, but there is virtually no 
chance of that happening. The deaths of tens of thousands of Libyans in 
yet one more illegal military strike, as well as the resulting chaos and 
violence in that country, is of no concern to those who long for the 
good old days of Bush-Cheney interested only in scoring political points.
Last but not least is the saga of the much-vilified Bowe Bergdhal, a 
heroic young man who came to see the criminal nature of the US invasion 
of Afghanistan. The refusal of working class youth to fight for Empire 
is the ruling class’s biggest nightmare and the attacks on Bergdahl, 
like the show trial that convicted Chelsea Manning, show how far they 
will go to punish those in uniform who dare challenge their objectives. 
A hidden aspect of the movement that ended US carnage in Southeast Asia 
is that it was the widespread opposition of soldiers, both as embodied 
by organizations like Vietnam Veterans Against the War as well as active 
duty resisters, that decisively turned the tide.
So alarming was this development that two massive disinformation 
campaigns were immediately launched: the myth of the hostility of the 
anti-war movement for returning soldiers that sought to drive a wedge 
between active duty and homefront resistance (see, for example, Jerry 
Lembcke’s outstanding book _The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory and the 
Legacy of Vietnam_); and the completely fraudulent MIA blitz (expertly 
exposed by Bruce Franklin in _MIA, or Mythmaking in America)_ concocted 
by the Nixon Administration to shift attention away from the death and 
destruction wrought by the US to the plight of nonexistent prisoners of war.
Because preventing any similar development of resistance among soldiers 
is central to imperial objectives, discussion has largely avoided what 
Bergdahl actually said about his service in Afghanistan, including his 
telling declaration in a 2009 e-mail to his parents, as quoted by Amy 
Goodman on /Democracy Now!/: “The future is too good to waste on lies 
and life is way too short to care for the damnation of others as well as 
to spend it helping fools with their ideas that are wrong. I've seen 
their ideas, I'm ashamed to even be American. The horror of the self 
righteous arrogance that they thrive in.” Rather than joining in the 
Bowe Bergdhal lynch mob, US soldiers everywhere, not to mention those 
with loved ones in the military, would do well to heed his words and 
experience.
Lastly, the same standard that applies to the war crimes of others 
applies to the US. As articulated by Robert H. Jackson, chief US 
prosecutor at Nuremberg, a war of aggression such as committed by the US 
against Afghanistan and Iraq “is not only an international crime; it is 
the supreme international crime, differing only from all other crimes in 
that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” In 
such a circumstance, what Bergdahl did was proper and, it could be 
argued, /obligatory/ for anyone party to war crimes. So amidst the flag 
waving and speechifying that glorifies imperialism, we should support 
him and prisoners of conscience like Chelsea Manning. We should demand 
that all services veterans require be provided, that US bases around the 
world be closed, that soldiers be returned home and that the US cease 
its campaign of endless aggression. And as enticing as the military may 
seem in such desperate economic times, we should counsel young people to 
stay away no matter how bleak the alternatives may be.
/Andy Piascik is a long-time activist and award-winning author who 
writes for /Counterpunch, Z Magazine /and many other publications and 
websites. He can be reached at //andypiascik at yahoo.com/ 
<mailto:andypiascik at yahoo.com>/./






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