[Peace-discuss] Letter to the News-Gazette

[C G Estabrook]

There are parallels between the US wars on Afghanistan today and Vietnam so long ago.

For years after President Kennedy’s invasion of South Vietnam in 1962, Americans supported it, but that changed rapidly. By 1969 about 70% of the public regarded the war as “fundamentally wrong and immoral,” not “a mistake,” largely as a result of student protest. That mass opposition compelled the business community and then the government to stop the escalation of the war. 

Some have argued that the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 was a ‘mistake,’ but it was in fact a crime - illegal under the UN Charter, in spite of Congress’ (constitutionally questionable) AUMF. More than 3,000 US and NATO soldiers have died there, and our government has killed between 90,000 and 350,000 people, many of them civilians.

Our government claims that it’s ’stopping terrorism,’ but it is in fact creating terrorists: perpetrators of the crimes of 9/11/2001 understood themselves to be counter-attacking the source of attacks on the Mideast. 

The US has long attempted to exercise military control over the Mideast for its energy resources. The US doesn’t need oil from the Mideast, but Mideast gas and oil are needed by our economic competitors from Germany to China: control gives the US a chokehold, which benefits only the American one percent. 

We should withdraw our troops (and weapons) from Afghanistan and pay reparations to the country where successive US administrations have caused so much terror and death for so long.

—CGE