There one of us, Max Obuszewski, spoke over the gate speaker system with barely visible guardhouse personnel in an attempt to deliver a letter to President Obama (a blown-up copy of which we also carried with us and which we had all signed) requesting to meet regarding our opposition to the US invasion of Afghanistan. Several weeks before the NCNR had sent the original of that letter to the President, but had received no response.

After a few minutes of conversation between Max and the disembodied voice from the guard shack, we got nowhere. We then did a die-in there on the sidewalk in front of the pedestrian and vehicle entrances to the White House. One by one, after we each made a brief unscripted statement about why we were there, we lay down motionless and silent for the next fifty minutes. My own statement was along the lines of I was “dying” because of concern that the US was losing its soul due to its brutal invasions of Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and its complicity in last winter’s Israeli invasion of Gaza.

From about 12:40 to 1:30 pm, we lay “dead,” but undisturbed (except for the extremely loud nearby construction machinery on Pennsylvania Ave). Police stood guard and established a yellow “crime scene” tape cordon around us. No police addressed us or ordered us to move.

For about two hours thereafter our group remained on the sidewalk along the iron fence in front of the gates and the guard shack. Our demeanor was neither raucous nor threatening; it was rather like that of folks waiting for an appointment. There was no chanting. During those two hours Max and maybe two or three others had several brief and seemingly courteous conversations with various higher-ranking police officers. The officers sought to cajole us into leaving the area.

One whom I heard speak encouraged us to leave, seeking our cooperation since, he claimed, his arrest resources were stretched thin. Although we couldn’t see them, dozens of other demonstrators were being arrested back in the postcard zone. The officer said we wouldn’t be arrested even if we stayed there all night. (Given the intense noise from the machinery it was very difficult to hear the police or Max’ report backs, or even to discuss our options.)

Outside the “crime scene” tape perimeter and standing on Pennsylvania Ave, about eight or ten of our supporters were keeping an eye on the situation. Some took photos or provided us with plastic bottles of water. At one point an officer confiscated a bottle that had been tossed to us. At times we were prevented from speaking to supporters across the crime scene tape. But at other times the incommunicado wasn’t enforced.

We could see various organized movements of groups of police and police vehicles including a couple of vans – presumably to take us to jail. For a time about a dozen bicycle police lined up in front of us across the northern perimeter of the “crime scene” by the curb on Pennsylvania Ave. preventing further communication with our supporters.

A couple of times police officers passed through us and into the White House grounds. Although we often sat or stood around both the pedestrian and vehicle gates, we didn’t impede anyone’s coming and going.

A force of maybe 20 policemen assembled on the broad sidewalk to the west of us just outside the “crime scene” tape. Some held plastic handcuffs. When it appeared that arrest was imminent, we all stood in a circle, held hands and sung two or three songs. But no arrest occurred. We resumed our informal clustering around the gates. After awhile those police left the area and were replaced by another uniformed group. These had Secret Service badges.

One of our group reported that he overheard an officer say we were about to be “pushed” out of the area. Several of our group then reclined on the sidewalk. Soon the Secret Service approached, and with no explanation or warning, began grabbing and pushing us west along the sidewalk beyond the crime scene perimeter. I was both grabbed and pushed. If I hadn’t been nimble, I would have had to trample those reclining on the pavement.

Some of those on the ground were dragged away. I heard a small older woman who was being manhandled tell the officer that she had a bad leg. Nonetheless he continued pushing her. A few minutes later I saw that she was wearing an Ace bandage around her knee. While a few of our group didn’t get to their feet, none of us physically resisted or defended ourselves in the face of this unprovoked assault.

Reflections

I would urge that the October 5 Action legal team vigorously pursue a formal complaint. Over the years I have been arrested various times for nonviolent anti-war protests in the White House postcard zone. Yet I have never encountered police violence there. This Secret Service violence is a menacing precedent – one that best be nipped in the bud.

The Secret Service needs to learn it can’t impair or endanger U.S. citizens exercising our Constitutional right of assembly and our right to petition the government regarding grievances. At no time did I hear an order – whether from the city police, the park police or the Secret Service — to leave the vicinity. The Secret Service gave us no warning before they began their assault. I don’t recall hearing them say anything before they got physical.

The Secret Service might claim we were resisting arrest or that we were ignoring a lawful order to move. But that would be false. There needs to be clearly understood, court-enforced guidelines to prevent law enforcement agencies using violence against peaceful citizens. Rogue behavior must not be tolerated. Law enforcement agencies need to learn that they above all must respect the law.

The rough stuff risked injury and fomented disorder. Fortunately for everyone involved and despite rather severe provocation, everyone in our group maintained his or her commitment to nonviolence.

The authorities seemed reluctant to arrest us: perhaps they had orders to minimize arrests so as to limit the national and international publicity regarding the extent to which U.S. citizens oppose the recurring U.S. invasions of Middle Eastern nations.

1. Prior to our affinity groups’ leaving the “postcard” zone, a dozen or so mounted police deployed themselves along the iron fence between the zone and the White House grounds. Entering from the west they herded demonstrators away from the fence and toward Pennsylvania Ave. Without provocation, and as I was conforming to their order to move, a passing mounted policeman kicked me just below my rib cage. I wasn’t injured, but I understand that if a citizen even so much as touched a DC policeman, s/he could be charged with a felony.

If war becomes unreal to the citizens of modern democracies, will they care enough to restrain and control the violence exercised in their name? Will they do so, if they and their sons and daughters are spared the hazards of combat?

– Michael Ignatieff, Virtual War (2000)

The drones are coming. Readers of the Syracuse Post-Standard know that the drones (a.k.a. “Reapers”) are arriving at our local New York Air National Guard Base at Hancock Airport.

These Reapers are a new level of aerial warfare. They are high-flying, sharp-shooting, 36-foot long robots. They are crewless – remote-controlled – aircraft. Although they are unmanned, drones do have “pilots.” Those pilots operate in front of computer screens in ground control rooms far from any target.

Last year our former Congressperson, James Walsh (R-NY), hailed the arrival of the Reaper. Not only will it provide a few jobs, but this killer allows, Jim said, pilots to be “literally fighting a war in Iraq and at the end of their shift be playing with their kids in Camillus” (P-S, 25 June 2008, page A1 ).

Drones surveil the US/Mexico and US/Canada borders. In Gaza, the Israeli Air Force uses them to assassinate Palestinians. In its various overseas wars, the US military has come to depend on drones to assassinate humans while bombing vehicles and buildings. Drones preying on Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan are piloted from Creech Air Base in Nevada. Beginning this November, Reapers will also be piloted from here in Central New York.

Because drones seem in the short term and within narrow contexts to reduce US casualties, some cheer them on. However – and this is essential – drones make war easier to initiate… and perpetuate. The folks back home wouldn’t even need to hear about the drones’ brave deeds. No thought-provoking body bags – at least not here at home.

Like many other high-tech weapons, drones are indiscriminate: they can kill offensively or defensively, invaders or resisters. They kill combatants and non-combatants, adults and children. Because most victims are civilian, drones are terrorist.

Terror isn’t just something “they” do. Perpetrators of terrorism can have dark skin or light, be “Islamic” or “Christian.” Terrorists can be states or non-state actors. Terrorist budgets can be scanty or vast. Terrorist weapons can be low-tech or high-tech. They can be launched from land, sea or air.

Like other forms of aerial warfare, drones may well spawn reactive terrorism. Because they kill and maim mostly civilians, drones incite hatred. Such hatred could lead to retaliatory strikes either today or when the victims’ survivors come of age. Those strikes could target any of the hundreds of US military bases bestriding the globe.

They could also target any of the domestic bases from which the drones are piloted. Like it or not, without our consent, Central New York is becoming part of the battleground. (Note: I have no desire to feed into the “fear-of-terrorism” industry, but Central New Yorkers ought to be aware that hosting drones may have blowback.)

Besides being indiscriminate and terrorist, aerial warfare is cowardly. Think about the various devices of aerial maiming and massacre (napalm, white phosphorus, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, cruise missiles…). For decades aerial warfare has been the weapon of rich, powerful, high-tech nations bullying poor, weak, low-tech nations. Apart from a steely will to resist, these latter nations have few defenses. So corrupted now is any notion of military honor that our war-besotted culture no longer even thinks about a “level playing field.” Seldom are warplanes used to defend a nation from attack or from threats to its sovereignty. Generally warplanes – robotic or not – are the aggressor, the violator of others’ sovereignty.

Drones raise cowardice to new heights. Unlike World War II bombardiers or pilots of other pre-robotic aircraft, drone pilots take no risk. Anti-aircraft artillery will never reach them. They shoot goldfish in a goldfish bowl. The various branches of the service use aerial weapons imagery – invariably phallic – to recruit gutsy, often idealistic, kids. In time many of them learn the hard way that enlisting has little to do with defending their country, defending “freedom,” or spreading “democracy.”

Many fail to come home intact. Few find glory, few find honor. Some then realize that only corporations – the organizational mirror image of drones – profit from war.

Drive out the Drone

Work with your local peace group to end the wars where drones are being used. At the Syracue Peace Council we seek to demystify the macho militarism that permeates our culture. We seek to expose the emperor’s nakedness. The Peace Council staunchly opposes “our” overseas wars. Only in macho fantasy can more war make this a better world. Like cancer, war spreads.

Write letters to your Congress people opposing the Reaper. Even better: write letters to the editor. A published letter will be read, not only by the influential editors, but also by tens of thousands of readers. (And by Congressional staffers.) Since the Reaper will be piloted from Central New York, write to the Syracuse Post-Standard. Our local daily has publicized the Reaper’s arrival in more or less neutral terms; urge the editors to speak out against it.

And do your homework. You might ask your local library to order P.W. Singer’s, Wired for War: the Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century (Penguin, 2009). Be sure to read chapter 9, “The Refuseniks: The Roboticists Who Just Say No.”

What most surprised me on this tour was how at home I felt – not in the West Bank, but in Israel. Except for signs in Hebrew, things often seemed so “American” that it was like we were in the 51st state. For example, even in the Arab quarters of Israeli cities, many non-Arab Israelis dress with an immodesty (pleasing to my male, westernized eye) that surely offends the indigenous Muslim people they live among.

But this at-home feeling went beyond appearances. It was in the attitudes. The non-activist Israelis I met reminded me of many folks back in the US. Here were nice, hospitable, English-speaking people who – just as in the US – live in what I call the “Bubble.” Colonizing and nationalizing our minds, the Bubble is spun by our governments and mainstream media. It narrows our horizons, drowns our dissent, stifles the voices of the voiceless. Distracting and trivializing, the Bubble shelters us from others’ pain.

The non-activist Jewish Israelis I met seemed oblivious to – or were quick to rationalize – how predatory their military and the Israeli settlers they protect were being in the Occupied Territories. They took for granted the great theft of indigenous Palestinian land supported with their taxes (and with $3 billion a year of our taxes). After centuries of inhabiting what has become Israel proper, in recent decades Palestinians have been either pushed into exile or relegated by force to the caged reservations and “Bantustans” of Gaza and the West Bank. Israeli scholar Ilan Pappé calls this historical process “ethnic cleansing.”

The fear that some Israelis feel regarding Palestinians mirrors the fear some US whites feel toward people of color. These Israelis also were quick to blame the victim and to shudder at the “other.”

My sense is that these good people had little idea how Israel was economically strangling Palestine. Or that the (much publicized) Palestinian terrorism perpetrated on Israelis was a fraction of the (inadequately publicized) episodic terrorism of the Israeli Air Force and the daily systemic violence that the Israeli Defense Force, the IDF, perpetrates on Palestinians. (One Jewish Israeli woman referred to the protracted aerial bombing of Gaza, killing 900 civilians, as an “incident.”)

Those Other Settler States

I was prepared for what I saw in Israel/Palestine thanks to my knowing what European settlers did to First Nations people in what became the United States. The five or six weeks I spent back in the early eighties in South Africa was also good prep. There too I was struck by how at home I felt. White South Africa was also a 51st state – one then backed by the US government.

In Johannesburg, the commercial and government center, many of the affluent white minority lived in gated communities while by law blacks lived in the grim sprawling Soweto ghetto – whose few roads in and out were controlled by the South African Defense Force.

The South Africa I experienced was legally and physically divided by ethnicity and skin color. “Divided,” though, doesn’t begin to acknowledge the stark disparity of wealth, power and opportunity.

In Israel – and in the US – there are similar disparities, the product of similar apartheids. (Another thing that surprised me, in both Israel and Palestine, were the legions of young male and female Israeli soldiers…many casually toting automatic weapons.)

The US, South Africa, Israel: all three are/were expansionist “settler states.” All three have been populated by land-hungry Judeo-Christian Europeans. These outlanders arrived with far more capital and political and military backing than the indigenous people whose land they coveted − and, by hook or by crook, eventually confiscated…or are now bent on confiscating.

Our delegation spent a week in the occupied West Bank. We passed through the Separation Wall, the Berlin-like barrier dividing Israel from its hapless – but stubborn and resisting – colony. The thing to note about the Wall, four times the height of a man, is that only 20% of it is built on the Green Line, the internationally recognized border between Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

The Israelis built most of the Wall well inside the West Bank on inhabited or cultivated Palestinian land – thereby seizing more Palestinian territory. That land grab is part of achieving “facts on the ground” ASAP before some “peace process” forces the Israelis to stop multiplying their (illegal) settlements throughout the West Bank.

The Last Surprise…Sort Of

In the West Bank I was also surprised – or rather would have been if I hadn’t already read Anna Baltzer’s Witness in Palestine – by all the military roadblocks. As privileged foreigners, the Israeli soldiers waved our vehicles on. But these same soldiers might hold up Palestinians for hours at a time, or delay market-bound Palestinian produce until it rots.

Like the Wall, most of the roadblocks aren’t at the Green Line, but are sprinkled all over the West Bank. They strangulate Palestinian movement, both personal and commercial, within their own territory. They fragment the West Bank, undermining its commerce, leashing its people, generating resentment.

The roadblocks seem intended to ratchet up daily misery. Maybe even more Palestinians will simply pack up and flee. The goal: to transform the West Bank (in the words of the old Zionist canard) into “a land without people for a people without land.”

One way I’ve come to visualize the Occupation is to imagine the indigenous Onondaga Nation here in Onondaga County (NY), a Nation that white settlers long ago reduced to a fraction of its former territory. But to make the situations more comparable, suppose a 25-foot wall separated the Onondagas from the surrounding white-controlled county. Imagine that the Onondagas risked being shot from sniper towers or detained for months without trial if they somehow passed thru the wall without a permit. Imagine further that within the Onondaga Nation there were numerous militarized roadblocks cutting Onondagas off from their neighbors or their crops. Such a bizarre scenario would be a microcosm of the occupied West Bank.

The assembly of Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates, Susan Rice and Joe Biden is a kettle of hawks with a proven track record of support for the Iraq war, intervention, neoliberal economic policies and a world-view consistent with the foreign policy arch that stretches from George HW Bush’s time in office to the present.

– Jeremy Scahill on Obama’s proposed new national security team, 1 Dec. ’08 Guardian UK

Dear Senator Obama:

I’m concerned that you’ve yet to show a grasp of Middle East realities. Nor have you provided a broad critique of US policy in that region beyond your early opposition to the invasion of Iraq. This lapse is dispiriting to we who had hoped your “change” mantra meant you intended to reverse the neo-con drive for global hegemony.

If you do grasp Middle Eastern realities, your choices of advisors and cabinet members suggest that you are aligning yourself with that imperial drive. This is also seen in your determination to expand the US debacle in Afghanistan. Perhaps you fear that opposing the militarism that corrupts us would antagonize the power structure that even now you have begun to lead…or that leads you. Who, one might ask, is co-opting whom?

Your words are ever eloquent, ever civil. You seem to be averse to lying. But you are now enmeshed in a power structure that habitually lies, that knows no other way to speak. It cloaks the reasons the US military occupies Iraq and Afghanistan and keeps the entire Middle East under the gun.

You’ve surely noticed that much of the world’s oil supply is in the Middle East beneath Islamic lands – hence the power structure’s persistent linking of Muslims with “terrorists” (a word invariably left undefined). Your nationalist advisors have by now taught you that US “interests” (also invariably undefined) relate primarily to OIL. “Interests” is code for the US cornering oil reserves and guaranteeing pipelines and shipping lanes – not only for their own sake, but to control the world economy.

Such control, of course, also serves to bring cheap oil home where so many here think it belongs. Thanks to the perpetual greed of US oil and automobile companies, the US is morbidly addicted to oil. Consumer self-indulgence reinforces such addiction. If we haven’t done so already, we will soon pass “peak oil.” Unless the industrial world drastically reduces our over-consumption and switches to renewable energy, it may well tank within the lifetime of your children. Your predecessor failed to understand – or care – that our children will have to live in the toxic and depleted world we bequeath them.

Therefore, with future generations in mind, let me propose several Middle East-related priorities for your presidency:
~ eliminate US dependence on foreign oil (and on coal and nuclear, the other dirty sources of energy). Push energy conservation – the cleanest and most efficient “fuel” of all.
~ comply with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and international law; abolish US nuclear weapons and do so hand in hand with working to abolish nuclear weapons throughout the Middle East…and beyond. While you’re at it, sign the treaty abolishing cluster bombs.
~ repeal the Patriot Acts; abolish torture and extraordinary rendition. As per your promise, immediately close Guantanamo while providing reparation, habeas corpus and other civilian due process to its inmates.
~ outlaw Blackwater-type mercenaries; prosecute US war crimes and do so all the way up the chain of command.

Palestine/Israel

Besides Afghanistan and Iraq, there are other theaters of the Middle East Oil War. Here I’ll only touch on two – Israel and Iran.

Mr Obama, you seem all too comfortable with the pro-Israel tilt in US foreign policy. In your campaign you echoed the boilerplate of US politicians fearful of the make-or-break Israel lobby. Despite the pro-Israel hawks who have your ear, I hope that as Presdent you’ll feel more empowered than you did as a candidate to support the Palestinians whose land the Israelis systematically confiscate.

Years ago I observed that Israel, like its (then) ally white South Africa, was an apartheid settler state. Since that era Israel has kept expanding its illegal settlements and consolidating its apartheid. You hardly acknowledge the Palestinian people and their struggle for justice and against apartheid.

Year after year the US keeps pouring billions of dollars of military aid into Israel. In effect Israel has become the largest military base in the Middle East. It’s a strategic enclave (or “green zone”) artificially wedged into the Islamic world, destabilizing that region and keeping the pot boiling. Israel has one of the most powerful and aggressive military machines on the planet. Its neighbors see that machine as an existential threat.

As long as Israel maintains apartheid, retains its nuclear arsenal, and flouts UN resolutions and international law, you must cut off the military aid that pours oil on the fires of Israel’s intransigence. Otherwise there is little chance of reining in Israel’s expansionism or of achieving an enduring peace in the Middle East.

Iran

I’m no expert on the complex and remarkable land of Iran. Most US policy makers, politicians, generals and citizens know even less about Iran. For example, how many know that this proud nation – unlike certain others – hasn’t invaded another country in centuries?

The 1979 Islamic Revolution deposing the Shah was a pivotal year in US-Iran relations. It began three decades of scant diplomacy between the two nations. But Iranians also recall 1953, an equally pivotal year. That’s when the CIA – trashing international law and Iran’s sovereignty – toppled the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, replacing him with the despotic Shah.

Few here seem to realize that the current President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad – despite all the fuss about him – is neither Iran’s most powerful leader nor its commander-in-chief. Such ignorance of a country with one of the world’s largest reserves of oil and gas can get us – and you – into a heap of trouble.

Cheney-Bush have virulently opposed the development of Iran’s nuclear energy. Their menacing words and bellicose actions embody the hubris and double standard of one nation dictating what another nation’s policies should be. After all, the US is the world’s prime developer and major exporter of nuclear technology. This includes deploying and exporting weaponry hardened with toxic and radioactive depleted uranium. The US is the world’s only perpetrator of nuclear holocaust. Since 1945 this bully has continually practiced nuclear blackmail (“All options are on the table.”).

Here many ask: with its vast oil reserves, why does Iran seek to develop nuclear power? Besides prestige, self-defense and deterrence may well be factors. But Iran knows its oil will eventually peter out. Iran seeks to develop nuclear energy in part because it dares not keep all of its energy eggs in one basket. Few here realize that due to US-championed sanctions, Iran’s oil refining capability is stunted – thus forcing Iran even now to import gasoline.

In September a group of peace and justice activists met with Iranian leaders in New York for the opening of the current United Nations session. President Ahmadinejad told us that Iran spends three times as much on developing renewable energy as on nuclear energy. I hope this could be true not only for Iran but for the US.

How Must the US Treat Iran?

With respect.

End the sanctions. Stop the demonizing. Stop the menacing. Pull back the destroyers and the cruise missiles. Stop violating Iran’s sovereignty with clandestine and provocative infiltrations of US Special Forces.

Keep your promise to negotiate. And again, work to abolish nuclear weapons both at home and in the world at large. That just might abort any Iranian drive to join the nuclear club.

Given the current financial collapse and given your predecessor’s eight-year credibility collapse, the days of the US imperium are numbered. So, dismantle the military bases in Iraq and throughout the Middle East. Slash the military budget that squanders the hundreds of billions needed to rebuild our country.

Mr. President-elect, rejoin the community of nations. Restore our honor.

“We have delivered democracy for them… The least they could do is step up to the plate and help out,” Walsh opined.¹

Let’s not look too closely at that “democracy” we’ve “delivered.” Let’s not ask to what extent bombed-out medical facilities have been restored. Nor to what extent Iraqis, after five years of beneficent occupation, now have electricity and potable water. Nor how many Iraqi jobs any U.S. reconstruction has generated. Nor how much of that $48 billion lined the capacious pockets of Halliburton et al. Nor how much of the “re-building” fund goes to building permanent U.S. military bases.

Nor need we ask who’s going to pay to clean up Iraq’s soil, air and water after their protracted exposure to depleted uranium — the toxic and radioactive substance used in the U.S. shells rained down on that liberated land? And let’s not open that other can of worms: how will we compensate Iraqi families for the unnumbered kin we have killed?

Instead let’s take a more legalistic approach. Let’s look at precedent. In 1990 when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, no one thought to hold that victim responsible for the damage. Nor did anyone claim that, because it had oil assets, Kuwait owed Iraq money.

No one – especially the UN Security Council — questioned that it was Iraq that had to reimburse losses and finance the rebuilding. Indeed, since its Gulf War defeat, Iraq keeps paying billions in reparations. But those billions are only a fraction of what Kuwait and the corporations doing business there still keep demanding.

Fast forward to the new century. Now it’s Iraq that’s been (illegally) invaded; it’s Iraq that’s been laid low. In a classic case of “charging the victim,” Mr. Walsh and some of his Congressional colleagues,² both Democrat and Republican, argue that Iraq must help pay for its own rebuilding. Both common sense and common decency wince.

It is the invader, not the invaded, who is both morally and legally obligated to pay to restore a war-torn land. And note: those billions Iraq has been paying Kuwait go to Kuwaitis and not to any Iraqi war profiteer. Given adequate reparations, Iraq – a land of builders and engineers – is quite capable of repairing itself. It needs no assist from the invader’s avid corporations.

Those who perpetrated the U.S. invasion, besides being tried in a Nurnberg-like tribunal, should make financial amends. Their shills — much of the U.S. mainstream media – also share responsibility. But sorting out who should pay what would take the wisdom of Solomon.

In the case of Kuwait, a UN commission plays Solomon. The case seemed simple enough: only Iraq invaded; it was then vanquished. Ergo, the Iraqi people — via their oil reserves — must be perpetually taxed to repair Saddam Hussein’s folly. Never mind that it was his western allies who helped militarize Saddam’s regime.

Yes, some Iraqis also collaborated with Saddam. But most were Saddam’s victims. Saddam frowned on dissent. Many of his soldiers were conscripts. Thousands of these — slaughtered from the air as they fled homeward – remain interred in desert sands.

Now, the U.S.-Iraq case isn’t quite parallel. All too many U.S. people and our Congressional representatives enthusiastically supported “Shock and Awe” and the ensuing occupation.

Does it let us off the hook — at least a little — that Cheney-Bush and their shills persistently lied to us? Many U.S. Americans believed that our “pre-emptive” war had nothing to do with certain corporations cornering the world’s oil supply. Nor did it even occur to us that Saddam’s move to switch from dollars to euros for oil payments helped trigger the wrath. Wasn’t the war about WMD and about somehow — never mind how — defending our borders against “terror”?

Should U.S. wage earners be forced to pay for a war many might not have supported had they known the truth? Should they then also pay for what that war wrought? Maybe yes, maybe no. One thing is certain: it was the Pentagon that maniacally demolished Iraq.

No, Mr. Walsh, it isn’t the Iraqi people who should devote their national wealth to rebuilding their desolated country. Nor should the U.S. people, also variously victims and dupes of this war, be further taxed. By all rights, the rebuilding fund should come out of our own oiligarchy’s windfall profits and out of the Pentagon’s obscenely bloated budget.

1. “Walsh: Iraq should use oil sales windfall to repay US” by Mark Weiner of the Syracuse, New York Post-Standard, 8 Aug. 2008.
2. “Iraq Told to Pick Up the Tab: Congress Wants to Cut Reconstruction Aid,” by Anne Flaherty, Associated Press in the Syracuse Post-Standard, 15 Apr. 2008.

With war many suffer and suffer profoundly. But few gain. Why then do men go to war so often? In one way or another most soldiers are coerced or brainwashed into battle.

The few who gain keep the pot boiling. Only they have the power to do so. Even as they themselves avoid battle, those few force others to kill and risk death.

Many are the reasons for not going to war. To begin with, just count the victims.

Years ago a group of anti-war activists here in Syracuse brainstormed reasons to oppose the imminent US attack on Iraq. Not much tweaking would be needed for that long list to apply equally to a US invasion of Iran.

That tweaking would be no academic exercise. Mr. Cheney and Mr. Bush, having despoiled two Islamic nations, are poised to despoil a third.

What follows draws on our brainstorm of years ago. As we did then, we begin here with why people of conscience must oppose war in general:

~ war breeds war. War is contagious. Violence breeds violence. “Violence bounces” (e.e. cummings). War unleashes reactive terrorism, retaliatory terrorism. War is terrorism.

~ war is about killing. Killing is immoral. Killing violates conscience. It violates virtually every spiritual heritage. That the killing is at a distance or from a high altitude, or that it is multiple, doesn’t absolve it.

~ in war soldiers lose not only their limbs but their lives. They lose not only their psyches but their souls. Thanks to propaganda and misrepresentation, soldiers are put in harrowing circumstances no human should have to endure. To avoid killing or for the shame of having killed, some commit suicide.

~ war corrupts. Wars of aggression corrupt absolutely. In war, profiteering is rife. Our taxes finance war while the corporations cash in. The profiteers both promote and perpetuate war.

~ war demands censorship. War demands disinformation. The first casualty of war is truth. War stifles dissent and erodes civil liberties. Benito Mussolini told us fascism is the merger of the corporations with the government. War cloaks and consolidates fascism.

~ the US is the unopposed master of aerial warfare. Air war doesn’t discriminate between civilian and military. It targets and destroys infrastructure essential to civilian life. For the past century civilians have been the vast majority of war casualties. Killing civilians is cowardly. It is terrorism.

~ war spreads, surges, spills over, escalates. It ignores borders, ignores limits. War trickles down; it comes home to roost. War cheapens and brutalizes a people and their culture. Domestic abuse rises as soldiers – many suffering post-traumatic stress disorder — return home.

~ pre-emptive war violates national sovereignty. Pre-emptive war violates the UN Charter and international law. Violations of law – especially by the only superpower – undermine global security.

~ financing war becomes a pretext to scale back social programs essential for the quality of life, essential for distributive justice, essential for real democracy. War, especially repeated war, bankrupts. For better or worse it overextends and implodes empire.

~ the US now uses depleted uranium in its armor and ordnance. Upon returning home many soldiers, exposed to toxic and radioactive d.u., fall ill. Some conceive babies congenitally deformed. In Iraq depleted uranium leads to epidemic childhood leukemia.

~ war pollutes and otherwise subverts the environment. War squanders the earth’s resources.

War on Iran

In 1953 a CIA coup toppled the democratically elected statesman, Mohammad Mossadegh. The CIA then installed the Shah, a tyrant and friend to US oil companies. In 1979 a popular revolution overthrew the Shah.

Iran, a cradle of civilization, has twelve next-door neighbors. In the past two centuries it hasn’t invaded any of them. Needless to say it has never invaded the US… or toppled any US president. Nor has Iran looted US oil.

Iran has never provided any credible threat to US security. Yet Bush Inc. keeps saber rattling, brazenly threatening to attack Iran. The folly and viciousness of such provocation is clear:

~ since 1979 diplomacy between the US and Iran has barely been pursued.

~ war against Iran is a neo-con dream. It’s about controlling the oil faucet. It’s about bending the Middle East to US imperial will. It’s about world domination.

~ despite the hype, despite the lies, a war on Iran would be one of naked, Nazi-like aggression. Israel and AIPAC, its US lobby, incite hostility to Iran, distorting a realistic assessment of our interests in the Middle East.

~ war is unpredictable. The contemplated air war may morph into land war: thousands of US soldiers may die; hundreds of thousands of Iranians may die. Millions may be displaced.

~ war on Iran risks drying up Iranian oil on world markets. If an attacked Iran succeeds in blocking the Strait of Hormuz, other Middle East oil will cease to flow. Oil companies may profit from the scarce supply, but prices at the pump will spike.

~ a US invasion co-opts the choices of the Iranian people. It would undermine those progressive Iranians struggling for reform.

~ Muslims are a quarter of the world’s population. They may grow impatient with the US attacking yet another Islamic country. US soldiers in Iraq will reap the blowback of Shia rage.

~ yet another invasion may undermine US ties with its allies as the US further proves itself a global outlaw, a rogue state.

~ like the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, the invasion of Iran would be a war of distraction. That distraction might temporarily obscure those two failed wars and the deepening recession. Domestic opposition here to the war on Iran might somehow provide Bush and Cheney the pretext to suspend the 2008 presidential elections…thus postponing their indictment for war crime.

~ the US has no legal or moral standing to pre-emptively target Iran’s alleged nuclear capacity. The US is the world’s only perpetrator of nuclear holocaust – not once, but twice, not against military targets but against civilians. The US abetted the nuclearization of Israel.

Given its nuclear arsenal, its use of depleted uranium, its arms export industry, its support for the Israeli air war on Lebanon, and its own terrorist training camps (e.g. the US Army’s School of the Americas), it is sheer hypocrisy for the US to claim it is waging “war on terrorism.”

Lastly: for five fierce years a battered and factionalized Iraq – without a national army or air force — has withstood and humbled the mighty US military. Iran is even larger, richer, more intact and more united than Iraq. As Iraq learned when it tried to invade Iran in the eighties, a righteous Iran is no foe to mess with.

Here’s how the U.S. State Department defines terrorism: the use of violence or the threat of violence to harm or intimidate civilians for political purposes.

Given all the commentary out there about terrorism, you’d think this pithy definition might often be invoked. It seldom is. Why? Because applying that definition evenhandedly — to assess each violent episode or campaign, regardless of who perpetrates it — would boomerang. It would expose terrorists who usually aren’t thought of as terrorists.

Retail terrorism — like abduction or suicide bombing — is a tactic of the hardware have-nots. It gets all the attention. Wholesale terrorism — invasion and aerial warfare, for example — is the strategy of the haves. It has a bigger budget and cuts a huger swathe. By some magic consensus wholesale terrorism never, never gets called terrorism.

Now, the State Department definition is pretty good. But it needs to make clear that terrorists use all levels of technology. A box cutter can perpetrate terrorism; so can a “smart” bomb. Just because it’s high tech doesn’t mean it isn’t terrorism.

Terrorism need not target civilians directly. Often it targets the infrastructure that sustains human life – hospitals, electrical grids, water purification and sewage systems, etc.

In the U.S. we assume only the other guys use terrorism — never our side. Judging by our media and our politicians, terrorists are only those who oppose powerful military machines. Even if those terrorists are defending their land.

With the fall of the Soviet Union, our military industrial complex no longer has its bogeyman. These days instead of the Red Menace, Swarthy Terrorists are the enemy.

For U.S. people 9/11 was the watershed, the iconic, terrorist event. This serves the neo-conservative world-dominating agenda. 9/11 was the neo-cons’ answered prayer, their Pearl Harbor and Gulf of Tonkin.

A frightened public is so much easier to mobilize for a bellicose, expansionistic foreign policy. Such policy — and the lies promoting it — led the U.S. into the Iraq quagmire and back into the civilian massacring business.

In a further victory for the neo-con agenda, the so-called war on terror erodes civil liberties here at home. Further, it erodes our quality of life. The war on terror diverts resources from health, education and other human needs to the military.

Military adventurism makes us less safe. It generates even more fear. In a self-perpetuating cycle, war spawns further terrorism: reactive terrorism. So does military occupation, whether in Afghanistan, Iraq or Palestine.

In the past century most war dead were civilians. They were victims of terrorism — not in the mainstream media sense, but in the U.S. State Department sense.

Tens of millions of civilians have been killed by bullets, shells, missiles, cluster bombs and, in Iraq, many are also being killed by toxic and radioactive depleted uranium.

Depleted uranium is just one of kind of nuclear weapon. As the world learned at Hiroshima, Nukes don’t distinguish civilian from military. Nuclear blackmail has been with us for over 60 years.

Some nations stockpile nuclear weapons. (Remember, the threat of violence is also terrorism.) These devices are delivered by artillery or aircraft which few “terrorists” have access to. One might say aerial warfare by its very nature is terrorist.

Militarism, of course, yields enormous corporate profits. These days war profiteering is rife. Some of these profits finance the purchase of TV networks and other corporate sources of news. For example, the war and nuclear contractor, General Electric, owns NBC. Might that (little publicized) fact affect how NBC News reports on terror?

In our democracy another slice of the profits goes to finance the election campaigns of the candidates who favor warlike rather than diplomatic solutions to international issues.

Although NBC News et al. are too discrete to mention it, a leading presidential candidate, a former Viet Nam bomber pilot, was a wholesale terrorist.

What does that say about our rulers? What does that say about us?

A key element of the drawdown plans, not mentioned in the President’s public statements, is that the departing American troops will be replaced by American airpower. . . . The American air war inside Iraq is perhaps the most significant – and underreported – aspect of the fight against the insurgency.

– Seymour M. Hersh, “Up in the Air,” New Yorker, Nov. 29, 2005

There’s an air war over Iraq. It’s invisible (here). It’s deadly (there).

The Iraq air war may be the longest such war in history. In one way or another it has been undermining Iraq’s sovereignty, destroying its infrastructure, and killing and maiming Iraqis for some 16 years.

Despite global pressure to withdraw, Bush Inc. – and indeed the broader US power structure – has no intention of giving up Iraq. The potential oil bonanza is too huge. And Iran – with its oil bonanza – is next door.

That air war is intensifying. The US dropped five times as many bombs in Iraq during the first six months of 2007 as it did in the first half of 2006.¹

“When the troops are cut, we’ll still be bombing the hell out of the place.”²

Terror from the Sky

The high tech mayhem of the First Gulf War and that of the 2003 “Shock and Awe” air attack got plenty of media play. Although bloody and intensely dramatic, these were fleeting episodes.

Since the beginning of the US occupation the media has largely ignored the airborne terror visited on Iraq. Besides “boots on the ground” stories, our corporate media feeds us a daily diet of horror. It features ghastly suicide bombings and the havoc of roadside explosive devices. It pumps us full of the atrocities others commit. The balance is wildly askew.

Because most US journalists in Iraq are embedded, they cover the war from the perspective of the US soldiers they accompany.

“Embeds” seldom accompany chopper or fixed-wing pilots and never accompany unmanned Predator drones — those robot planes that spew death with no risk to those guiding them from afar. So embeds can tell us little about such operations and their consequences.

As in most warfare in recent decades, most Iraq air war victims are civilians.

According to The Lancet medical journal study of Iraqi casualties, between March 2003 and June 2006 coalition air strikes caused over 78,000 violent deaths in Iraq. Coalition air strikes caused half of all violent deaths of Iraqi children under age 15.³

The Pentagon cloaks its airborne missions and their ordnance in secrecy. We seldom hear of the terror the invader rains from the sky. We seldom hear about the civilian-shredding cluster bombs or — as in the leveling of Fallujah — the civilian-igniting white phosphorus. Nor do we hear about the toxic and radioactive depleted uranium shells.

A Shameful History

Seymour Hersh’s November 2005 New Yorker article, “Up in the Air,” led to a flurry of progressive Internet commentary trying (with little success) to wake us up. But it was Dr. Les Roberts and his colleagues’ two Lancet studies of Iraqi war casualties that revealed the scale of the air war.⁴

This hecatomb isn’t unique in our history. From the firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo, to the atomic bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, to Korea and South East Asia, to the first Gulf War and now to Iraq — the air war is the “signature” of US war making.⁵

Such air war almost by definition is asymmetrical. In Iraq there’s no opposing air force and little or no anti-aircraft artillery. This pattern, this trend, shapes the world. It is the rogue elephant in our living room. Such is the denial, however, that we ignore its rampage.

The air war often targets residences or residential neighborhoods. From these areas the equally ruthless (though infinitely less armed and financed) resistance may or may not have staged an attack, and within them the resistance may or may not be seeking shelter.

Aerial bombardment is heinous and cowardly. Visiting wounded children in Baghdad hospitals in 2003 heightened my awareness of the air war. Those memories reinforce my resolve to live below taxable income: I don’t want to contribute a penny in federal taxes to the war machine – whether it kills and maims on land or from the air.

“Bring Them Home” Isn’t Enough

Recently some of us were doing weekly “outreach” — facing oncoming traffic with anti-war signs during rush hour at a busy Syracuse intersection. A passing driver, enraged at our perfidy, screamed that his son had been killed in Iraq.

I had no chance to explain to him our belief that the best way to support our troops is to bring them home. If the man’s son had never been sent to Iraq, he might well be alive today.

Since March 2003 US soldiers, many involuntarily, have been put through hell. Many US Americans have either empathy or some connection to one or more of those soldiers. So, “bring them home” is an apt message to put out there.

But that slogan is incomplete; it needs augmenting by other messages that raise consciousness and look beyond the eventual withdrawal of most US troops from Iraq. “Bring them home” must be accompanied by other messages that, among other things, expose the air war. Otherwise, when those soldiers seem out of harm’s way, people here may move on to other concerns – leaving the air war as robust and off the radar as ever.

“Bring them home” doesn’t address the criminality of the occupation nor the injustice done to the Iraqi people. It doesn’t begin to address reparations.

Nor does it acknowledge that as US forces downsize, many of the surviving soldiers won’t come home. Some will be kept in Iraq to train the Iraqi military to somehow suppress an extremely capable and committed resistance. Such “Iraqization” of the war recalls the feckless “Vietnamization” of an earlier era.

Reserve Cannon Fodder

With downsizing, many surviving soldiers will be deployed elsewhere in the Middle East. They may be out of harm’s way… temporarily. But they’ll be on stand-by: reserve cannon fodder in the perpetual resource war. Think Afghanistan… or Iran… or Pakistan….

Whether the soldiers are re-deployed in the region or rotate home, the phantom air war won’t go away. Given the current gaggle of candidates, this seems assured regardless of who next occupies the White House.

Here is not the place to review the candidates and their rhetoric. Suffice it to say that Hillary Clinton, a leader in the polls and supposedly part of the opposition, is a hawk.

Like other candidates, Hillary has ties to hawkish Israel. She also — in this most corporate-enriching war of all — has close corporate ties. Not to mention ties to Bill. Recall that it was Bill who presided over eight years of low intensity air war and genocidal sanctions on Iraq.

Enforcing the Empire

Apart from whether any of the candidates would end the war, consider the power structure’s frequently cited alternative strategy. It’s embodied in The Iraq Study Group Report.⁶ Published last December, the Report sought to rectify neo-con excesses and strategic blunders.

The Report was compiled by beltway power brokers who fear the Iraq quagmire is breaking the US military machine. They fear the Empire will lose its enforcers.

The Report talks a good game: it calls on Mr. Bush to eventually withdraw most US ground forces. But the Report does not call for US troops to come home.

Rather the soldiers are to be redeployed nearby. Equally ominous, the Report makes no call whatsoever for US forces to vacate Iraq skies.⁷ The Report has gotten away with such an egregious lapse in part because few anti-war activists know it’s a problem. Locally and nationally we have yet to grapple with what the air war means for our work. We have yet to put it on the agenda.

1. Charles J. Hanley, “Air Force Quietly Building Iraq Presence,” July 14, 2007, Associated Press
2. Sydney Schanberg, “The Unseen War in Iraq,” Village Voice, Jan. 24, 2006.
3. Nick Turse, “Our Shadowy Iraq Air War,” TomPaine.com, May 24, 2007.
4. Les Roberts, et al, “Mortality Before and After the 2003 Invasion of Iraq: Cluster Sample Survey,” Oct. 29, 2004, The Lancet. Sequel: Les Roberts, et al, “Mortality After the 2003 Invasion of Iraq: A Cross-Sectional Cluster Sample Survey,” The Lancet, Oct. 11, 2006.
5. Tom Engelhardt, “The Missing Air War in Iraq,” TomDispatch.com, Dec. 15, 2005.
6. James A. Baker, III and Lee H. Hamilton et al, The Iraq Study Group Report: The Way Forward – A New Approach (Vintage, 2006).
7. See Ed Kinane, “Killing the Goose that Lays the Golden Eggs: A look at the Iraq Study Group Report,” Uruknet.info, Feb. 14, 2007; also reprinted at vcnv.org.