[Peace-discuss] Parties and wars

Sat Jul 21 06:39:45 UTC 2018

The last communication I saw from Rodney Davis bragged that he, Davis, had met with the chair of the Armed Services Committee. I wonder why Davis is meeting with him? How many companies here in Davis' district make items for warmongers? Is Davis looking for more? Am I missing other possibilities?
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------ Original message------From: Robert Naiman via Peace-discussDate: Fri, Jul 20, 2018 7:55 PMTo: Estabrook, Carl G;Cc: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net);Subject:Re: [Peace-discuss] Parties and wars
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-timeshttps://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-quick-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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