[Peace-discuss] Parties and wars

Sat Jul 21 00:54:38 UTC 2018

Why not demand everything.

But scale matters. The U.S.-Saudi war in Yemen is killing at a scale that
the drone war can't even dream about.

Robert Naiman
Policy Director
Just Foreign Policy
www.justforeignpolicy.org
naiman at justforeignpolicy.org
(202) 448-2898 x1

On Fri, Jul 20, 2018 at 8:10 PM, Estabrook, Carl G via Peace-discuss <
peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> wrote:

> Why don't we demand that the US end the eight wars this administration
> 'inherited' from the last one - and end the inherited war provocations from
> Ukraine to the S. China Sea? Closing the thousand US bases ringing Russia
> and China might be nice, too. Bring home all the thousands of Special
> Operations Command troops sent into no less than 3/4 of the countries of
> the world. Until we have a campaign like that underway, your voting for
> Rodney Davis (or anyone else) doesn't make much difference - even when the
> Democrats are in full McCarthyist hue and cry:
>
> https://www.rollcall.com/news/politics/democrats-press-gop-
> quick-legislative-response-russiahttps://www.rollcall.
> com/news/politics/democrats-press-gop-quick-legislative-response-russia
>
>
> Perhaps the most malign contribution of the last (Democrat) administration
> was the cooption and neutralization of the anti-war movement. That's the
> Obama-Clinton legacy.
>
> https://www.commondreams.org/news/2015/01/19/noam-chomsky-
> obamas-drone-program-most-extreme-terrorist-campaign-modern-times
> https://www.commondreams.org/news/2015/01/19/noam-chomsky-obamas-drone-
> program-most-extreme-terrorist-campaign-modern-times
>
>
>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
> *From:* Peace-discuss [peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] on
> behalf of Robert Naiman via Peace-discuss [peace-discuss at lists.chambana.
> net]
> *Sent:* Friday, July 20, 2018 6:07 PM
> *To:* C G Estabrook
> *Cc:* Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net)
> *Subject:* Re: [Peace-discuss] Parties and wars
>
> I'll make you a deal. If Trump voluntarily ends the famine-inducing Saudi
> war in Yemen before October, thus sparing millions of human beings from
> being pushed to the brink of starvation, I'll vote for Rodney Davis.
>
>
>
> Robert Naiman
> Policy Director
> Just Foreign Policy
> www.justforeignpolicy.org
> naiman at justforeignpolicy.org
> (202) 448-2898 x1
>
>
>
>
> On Fri, Jul 20, 2018 at 5:41 PM, C G Estabrook via Peace-discuss <
> peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> wrote:
>
>> Or, more reason not to give Democrats control of Congress
>>
>> https://www.rollcall.com/news/politics/democrats-press-gop-q
>> uick-legislative-response-russia
>>
>> Political parties in other countries are often dues-paying, class-based
>> associations pressing for certain well-defined goals - so you can have,
>> e.g., a bankers party, a farmers’ party, a working class party, etc.
>>
>> In contrast, in the US  parties are brands, trying to convince the
>> largest number of voters that Coca-Cola is better than Pepsi-Cola, Cheerios
>> better than Wheaties... (Do they still make Wheaties?) Thus the greatest US
>> crime of the post-WWII world, the US invasion of SE Asia (the ‘Vietnam
>> War’) was not ended by parties’ taking different sides, even though -
>>
>> “By 1969 about 70% of the public had come to regard the [Vietnam] war as
>> ‘fundamentally wrong and immoral,’ not ‘a mistake,’ largely as a result of
>> the impact of student protest on general consciousness. And that mass
>> opposition compelled the business community and then the government to stop
>> the escalation of the war.” [Chomsky]
>>
>> We may ask, Will the Bush-Obama-Trump depredations on the Mideast be
>> brought to end as the Kennedy-Johnson-Nixon assaults on SE Asia were? The
>> answer is hardly clear: history, as has been said, doesn’t repeat itself,
>> but it does rhyme. Remember that Richard Nixon had a ‘secret plan for
>> ending the [Vietnam] war’: he was the anti-war candidate in 1968 (as Trump
>> was in 2016); in each case their opponents (Hubert Humphrey and Hilary
>> Clinton) were leading members of the administrations making war.
>>
>> The Vietnam war ended (to the extent that it did) for three reasons - in
>> order of importance:
>> (1) the brave resistance of the Vietnamese people against US attack;
>> (2) the revolt of the American army in Vietnam (cf. ‘fragging’) - which
>> compelled the sudden ending of the draft in 1973; &
>> (3) the ‘mass opposition’ of the US public (in fact, the least important
>> of the three factors on US policy).
>>
>> When it came to the Mideast (even more important to US government
>> planners than SE Asia), US imperial policy was determined to avoid the
>> ‘mistakes’ of Vietnam:
>> (1) local resistance in the Mideast was widespread, but divided and
>> inchoate (note that 9/11 was a counterattack to US actions);
>> (2) the US military had been assuaged: the draft had been ended (because
>> of US resistance) and only the economic draft was left, so the US fights
>> its Mideast wars largely with foreign proxies, whom it finances (from NATO
>> in Afghanistan to jihadists in Syria); then with drone assassinations. (Cf.
>> “Noam Chomsky: Obama's Drone Program 'The Most Extreme Terrorist Campaign
>> of Modern Times’”);
>> (3) the mass opposition to the US public to foreign wars - perhaps never
>> greater than in 2003, with Bush’s invasion of Iraq - could be managed with
>> lies and propaganda. Obama ran as the peace candidate in 2008. The anti-war
>> movement that should have countered his lies was seduced by him instead, so
>> in office he could immediately expand the war in Afghanistan that he’d
>> attacked in the campaign.
>>
>> The examples of Vietnam and the Mideast seem to make it clear that an
>> anti-war movement today that actually deters US wars will not be based on
>> the Republican and Democrat organizations. They are together part of the
>> ‘war party’ that serves the world-wide economic interests of dominant
>> social groups in the US (‘the one percent’) - not the interests of the
>> population at large, who have to misled with ever more fantastic lies - now
>> including ‘Russian aggression’ and ‘collusion.’
>>
>> ###
>>
>>
>>
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>>
>
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