[Peace-discuss] AWARE ON THE AIR, April 18

[C. G. Estabrook]

Introduction to AWARE ON THE AIR on Urbana Public Television for the 
16th week of 2017 [April 18]:

Good evening and welcome to AWARE on the Air, presented by members and 
friends of AWARE, a local peace group. The name AWARE stands for 
“anti-war anti-racism effort.”

We are recording this at noon on Tuesday, April 18th, in the studios of 
Urbana Public Television, Urbana, Illinois.

Our subject is the wars the US government is waging around the world.

At this moment the USG is making war and killing people in Afghanistan, 
Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen. Thousands of U.S. 
troops are fighting in these WARS, although most Americans are not aware 
of it.

In addition, the 70,000-members of the U.S. ‘Special Operations Command’ 
are active in three-quarters of the countries of the world. Their 
activities include kidnapping (‘rendition’), torture, and murder.

Furthermore our government is provoking new wars - against countries 
with nuclear weapons - in eastern Europe, Ukraine, the Middle East, 
Korea, and the South China Sea.

Why is our government terrorizing the world to the point that 
international polls show the US is by far the most feared country in the 
world - not Russia, China, N. Korea, or Iran?

The answer is simple and horrible. The US is killing people to protect 
the profits of the 1%, the American economic elite.

When World War II ended in 1945, the US was the only undamaged major 
country, and controlled the world economy, for the benefit of that 1%. 
In all the years since, US administrations have been willing to kill 
people and make war to “maintain the disparity,” as American planner 
GEORGE KENNAN said.

The result was nothing less three-generations of American war, up to 
today, against peoples struggling to control their own countries. Since 
the Second World War, the US has:

~ Attempted to overthrow more than 50 governments, most of them 
democratically-elected.
~ Attempted to suppress a populist or national movement in 20 countries.
~ Grossly interfered in democratic elections in at least 30 countries.
~ Dropped bombs on the people of more than 30 countries.
~ Attempted to assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders.

In total, the United States has carried out one or more of these actions 
in 69 countries ... The "enemy" changes in name – from communism to 
Islamism -- but the US makes war against governments not under US 
control or influence, or that prevent the US from occupying a strategic 
position in our campaign to control the world economy.

In the years since WWII, US presidents have killed more than 20 million 
people in 37 nations. The US continues to be, in the words of Martin 
Luther King, “The greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”

The sheer scale of suffering, let alone criminality, is little known in 
our country.
~ the most numerous victims of our terrorism are Muslims;
~ half a million Iraqi infants died in the 1990s as a result of the 
embargo imposed by the Clinton administration; and
~ extreme jihadism (“radical islamic terrorism”), which led to 9/11, was 
invented by the Carter administration 40 years ago, when the CIA rounded 
up some Muslim fanatics, armed them, and sent them into Afghanistan “to 
give the Russians a Vietnam of their own” - as President Carter’s 
National Security Adviser said.

Our anti-War group AWARE was established 15 years ago, after the attacks 
of 9/11/2001, by citizens of Champaign-Urbana who realized that the US 
government would use those crimes to justify its already long-standing 
attempts to exercise military control over the Middle East and its 
energy resources.

In those years the US has attempted in particular to exercise military 
control over the Mideast and its energy resources. The U.S. doesn’t need 
oil from the Mideast, but Mideast gas and oil are needed by America’s 
economic competitors in Europe and Asia, and so control over them gives 
the U.S. a major advantage over China, Germany, and other countries - a 
chokehold which benefits only the American economic elite, the one 
percent. In 2003 the US illegally invaded Iraq - and killed perhaps a 
million people for that purpose - and now has thousands of troops and 
mercenaries throughout the Mideast.

The U.S. government says that we’re fighting terrorism, but we are in 
fact creating terrorists - in response particularly to our drone 
assassinations, “the most extreme terrorist campaign of modern times” - 
which have killed more than 5,000 people, including U.S. citizens and 
hundreds of children.

Those of us in AWARE, like other anti-war groups in the United States 
and around the world, call upon President Trump to

~ (1) establish a foreign policy based on diplomacy, international law, 
human rights, and respect for the sovereignty of other nations;
~ (2) end the wars (in the Mideast and elsewhere) and stop the drone 
attacks;
~ (3) cut military spending by at least 50% and close the more than 700 
foreign military bases (neither Russia nor China has more than twelve); 
bring US troops (and weapons) home; and withdraw US ‘special forces’ 
who’ve been sent into 3/4 of the world’s countries;
~ (4) stop US support of human rights abusers, notably Israel and Saudi 
Arabia; and
~ (5) lead on global nuclear disarmament.

There’s a lot of news about US government war-making this week, but you 
don’t get a very clear account in the American media - which are 
dominated by pro-war people and the political establishment, Republicans 
and Democrats alike.
We’ll try to give a better account tonight...

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