[Peace] Suggested text for Main Event flyer

[C. G. Estabrook]

Randall Cotton wrote:
> 
> Someone is needed to create content for AWARE's "Main Event" flyer.
> One side of the flyer will contain publicity for AWARE's upcoming Dan
> Kenney events, but though there were suggestions for content for the
> flipside (see below in the minutes, under "Main Event"), no one has come
> forward yet to put this together.
> Contact: Randall Cotton, recotton at earthlink.net, 351-8644/722-8470

> ...
> Flyer page 1 will be advertisement for Dan Kenney events
> Suggestions for the other side of the flyer:
> Something on the economy
> Something on local armed forces leaving this week to go to Afghanistan
> Something including the statistics that we disseminate via the anti-war
> electronic billboard
> 
> Volunteer needed to assemble a second side for the flyer

[Page 2 of the flyer should complement Kenney's topic by connecting the war and 
the bailout (which is not dead). I'm willing to edit (and format) a selection 
from the following piece by Chalmers Johnson (which is too long to fit on one 
page).  Johnson is the author of three linked books on the crises of American 
imperialism and militarism. They are Blowback (2000), The Sorrows of Empire 
(2004), and Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (2006). --CGE]

	We Have the Money.
	If only we didn't waste it on the defense budget
	Chalmers Johnson

There has been much moaning, air-sucking, and outrage about the $700 billion 
that the U.S. government is thinking of throwing away on rich New York bankers 
who have been ripping us off for the past few years and then letting greed drive 
their businesses into a variety of ditches. In fact, we dole out similar amounts 
of money every year in the form of payoffs to the armed services, the 
military-industrial complex, and powerful senators and representatives allied 
with the Pentagon.

On Wednesday, Sept. 24, right in the middle of the fight over billions of 
taxpayer dollars slated to bail out Wall Street, the House of Representatives 
passed a $612 billion defense authorization bill for 2009 without a murmur of 
public protest or any meaningful press comment at all. (The New York Times gave 
the matter only three short paragraphs buried in a story about another 
appropriations measure.)

The defense bill includes $68.6 billion to pursue the wars in Iraq and 
Afghanistan, which is only a down-payment on the full yearly cost of these wars. 
(The rest will be raised through future supplementary bills.) It also included a 
3.9 percent pay raise for military personnel and $5 billion in pork-barrel 
projects not even requested by the administration or the secretary of defense. 
It also fully funds the Pentagon's request for a radar site in the Czech 
Republic, a hare-brained scheme sure to infuriate the Russians just as much as a 
Russian missile base in Cuba once infuriated us. The whole bill passed by a vote 
of 392-39 and will fly through the Senate, where a similar bill has already been 
approved. And no one will even think to mention it in the same breath with the 
discussion of bailout funds for dying investment banks and the like.

This is pure waste. Our annual spending on "national security" – meaning the 
defense budget plus all military expenditures hidden in the budgets for the 
departments of Energy, State, Treasury, Veterans Affairs, the CIA, and numerous 
other places in the executive branch – already exceeds a trillion dollars, an 
amount larger than that of all other national defense budgets combined. Not only 
was there no significant media coverage of this latest appropriation, there have 
been no signs of even the slightest urge to inquire into the relationship 
between our bloated military, our staggering weapons expenditures, our 
extravagantly expensive failed wars abroad, and the financial catastrophe on 
Wall Street.

The only congressional "commentary" on the size of our military outlay was the 
usual pompous drivel about how a failure to vote for the defense authorization 
bill would betray our troops. The aged Sen. John Warner (R-Va.), former chairman 
of the Senate Armed Services Committee, implored his Republican colleagues to 
vote for the bill "out of respect for military personnel." He seems to be 
unaware that these troops are actually volunteers, not draftees, and that they 
joined the armed forces as a matter of career choice, rather than because the 
nation demanded such a sacrifice from them.

We would better respect our armed forces by bringing the futile and misbegotten 
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to an end. A relative degree of peace and order has 
returned to Iraq not because of President Bush's belated reinforcement of our 
expeditionary army there (the so-called surge), but thanks to shifting internal 
dynamics within Iraq and in the Middle East region generally. Such shifts 
include a growing awareness among Iraq's Sunni population of the need to restore 
law and order, a growing confidence among Iraqi Shi'ites of their nearly 
unassailable position of political influence in the country, and a growing 
awareness among Sunni nations that the ill-informed war of aggression the Bush 
administration waged against Iraq has vastly increased the influence of Shi'ism 
and Iran in the region.

The continued presence of American troops and their heavily reinforced bases in 
Iraq threatens this return to relative stability. The refusal of the Shia 
government of Iraq to agree to an American Status of Forces Agreement – much 
desired by the Bush administration – that would exempt off-duty American troops 
from Iraqi law is actually a good sign for the future of Iraq.

In Afghanistan, our historically deaf generals and civilian strategists do not 
seem to understand that our defeat by the Afghan insurgents is inevitable. Since 
the time of Alexander the Great, no foreign intruder has ever prevailed over 
Afghan guerrillas defending their home turf. The first Anglo-Afghan War 
(1838-1842) marked a particularly humiliating defeat of British imperialism at 
the very height of English military power in the Victorian era. The 
Soviet-Afghan War (1978-1989) resulted in a Russian defeat so demoralizing that 
it contributed significantly to the disintegration of the former Soviet Union in 
1991. We are now on track to repeat virtually all the errors committed by 
previous invaders of Afghanistan over the centuries.

In the past year, perhaps most disastrously, we have carried our Afghan war into 
Pakistan, a relatively wealthy and sophisticated nuclear power that has long 
cooperated with us militarily. Our recent bungling brutality along the 
Afghan-Pakistan border threatens to radicalize the Pashtuns in both countries 
and advance the interests of radical Islam throughout the region. The United 
States is now identified in each country mainly with Hellfire missiles, unmanned 
drones, special operations raids, and repeated incidents of the killing of 
innocent bystanders.

The brutal bombing of the Marriott Hotel in Pakistan's capital, Islamabad, on 
Sept. 20, 2008, was a powerful indicator of the spreading strength of virulent 
anti-American sentiment in the area. The hotel was a well-known watering hole 
for American Marines, Special Forces troops, and CIA agents. Our military 
activities in Pakistan have been as misguided as the Nixon-Kissinger invasion of 
Cambodia in 1970. The end result will almost surely be the same.

We should begin our disengagement from Afghanistan at once. We dislike the 
Taliban's fundamentalist religious values, but the Afghan public, with its 
desperate desire for a return of law and order and the curbing of corruption, 
knows that the Taliban is the only political force in the country that has ever 
brought the opium trade under control. The Pakistanis and their effective army 
can defend their country from Taliban domination so long as we abandon the 
activities that are causing both Afghans and Pakistanis to see the Taliban as a 
lesser evil.

One of America's greatest authorities on the defense budget, Winslow Wheeler, 
worked for 31 years for Republican members of the Senate and for the General 
Accounting Office on military expenditures. His conclusion, when it comes to the 
fiscal sanity of our military spending, is devastating:

"America's defense budget is now larger in inflation-adjusted dollars than at 
any point since the end of World War II, and yet our Army has fewer combat 
brigades than at any point in that period; our Navy has fewer combat ships; and 
the Air Force has fewer combat aircraft. Our major equipment inventories for 
these major forces are older on average than any point since 1946 – or in some 
cases, in our entire history."

This in itself is a national disgrace. Spending hundreds of billions of dollars 
on present and future wars that have nothing to do with our national security is 
simply obscene. And yet Congress has been corrupted by the military-industrial 
complex into believing that, by voting for more defense spending, they are 
supplying "jobs" for the economy. In fact, they are only diverting scarce 
resources from the desperately needed rebuilding of the American infrastructure 
and other crucial spending necessities into utterly wasteful munitions. If we 
cannot cut back our long-standing, ever increasing military spending in a major 
way, then the bankruptcy of the United States is inevitable. As the current Wall 
Street meltdown has demonstrated, that is no longer an abstract possibility but 
a growing likelihood. We do not have much time left.

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