[Peace] If You Care About Ending Wars, You Must Care Whether Presidential Candidates Lie

[Robert Naiman]

https://www.facebook.com/robert.naiman/posts/10159051932542656

If You Care About Ending Wars, You Must Care Whether Presidential
Candidates Lie

Some people are now claiming that it doesn’t matter if presidential
candidates lie. Apparently, we’re supposed to be grateful now if Democratic
presidential candidates lie less than Trump. This is like saying that we
should be grateful to our spouses if they don’t beat us. We must enforce
higher aspirations than Democratic presidential candidates who lie less
than Trump. It makes no difference if presidential candidates promise to
end endless wars if we already know that the presidential candidates are
liars. This is true for other issues of course, health care, labor law
reform, student debt, Social Security, trade. Obama promised to fight for a
public option on health care and then he didn’t; Obama promised to protect
Social Security and then he tried to cut Social Security; Obama promised to
lead the fight for the Employee Free Choice Act and then he did nothing;
Obama promised to repeal and replace NAFTA and then he did everything he
could think of to try to cram the TPP down our throats which would have
been “NAFTA on steroids.” But let us focus here on wars. Trump promised to
make America great again and said that great nations don’t fight endless
wars. And yet here we are, three years into Trump’s term, and Trump hasn’t
ended any wars, he’s escalated them. Obama promised not only to end the
Iraq war but to “end the mindset that got us into war in the first place.”
He didn’t do either, and he started new wars in Libya, Syria, and Yemen,
violating Article I of the Constitution each time. It’s currently a pipe
dream to hope that we can meaningfully hold these people accountable to
such promises after they are elected if they were lying; if the AFL-CIO
couldn’t hold Obama accountable on trade and labor law reform, if the
enviros couldn’t hold Obama accountable on climate change, if Obama
couldn’t be held accountable on Social Security, or the public option, or
closing Guantanamo, or CIA torture, or protecting national security
whistleblowers, or ending “signature strike” and “side payment”
assassinations, what prayer in God’s creation do we have of holding these
people accountable on peace if they’re lying now? Who claimed that dropping
bombs on Libya didn’t “rise to the level of participation in hostilities”?
Who pioneered the idea of expanding “imminent threat” until it could cover
the Moon? Of course, after the election, no matter who is elected, we have
to try to do whatever we can with whatever tools we have. But at this
juncture, we have to be honest about what we’ve been able to do with those
tools so far, which is almost nothing in terms of practical effect. If you
look at these things from an inside DC point of view, we’ve made tremendous
progress. But when you check the news from Yemen, or Iraq, or Afghanistan,
or Syria, we’ve accomplished almost nothing. We’ve established the
principle that the President must not keep hundreds of thousands of U.S.
ground troops in a foreign combat situation indefinitely. As former
Republican Defense Secretary Robert Gates once said, any future Defense
Secretary who advocates for a land war in Asia should have their head
examined. So we accomplished that. We can check that one off. Besides that
we have little to show for our efforts in DC. The Democratic presidential
primary is a unique opportunity to change these dynamics which we will not
have for another four to eight years. Whoever now says that the lying of
presidential candidates doesn’t matter might as well get a tattoo that
says, “I love #EndlessWar.” And they should put the tattoo on their
forehead, where we can all see it.
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