They will kill me but they will not kill my voice,
because it will be the voice of all Afghan women.
You can cut the flower but  you cannot stop the coming of spring.
— Malalai Joya

Within weeks of my leaving Kabul in mid-August 2011, the US Embassy there was shelled by rocket-propelled grenades. The Embassy then “canceled all trips in and out of Afghanistan for its diplomats, and suspended all travel within Afghanistan.”¹

In my 30 days in Kabul I never saw another westerner outside guarded compounds – except in military convoys. Such fear reveals how illusory any US claims of “progress” have been over these past ten years – despite the hundreds of billions of dollars squandered. Not to mention all the orphans and the numerous number of limbs and lives lost.

In the States, only now do we seem to be waking up to the absolute failure of this war – by any standard except that of generating mega-profits for certain “defense” corporations. Few, including our leaders, have firsthand knowledge of Afghanistan. Few can conceive of the tenacity of the armed  resistance, its willingness to risk, its willingness to sacrifice.

Few of us have any idea how the Afghan people suffer from our ten-year invasion and from our hamstrung occupation. Those of us opposing war need to better understand war and its toll on human beings.

Haunted by this gap in my own education, I went to Afghanistan  with a small Voices for Creative Nonviolence delegation. Among us were two vets – one, Jacob, a paratrooper and explosives specialist, had done three tours of duty in Afghanistan.

Nervous Armed Men

Early on we learn that, according to the Red Cross, security is worse here than it’s been in the last 30 years of war. In Kabul life is lived opaquely — except for the internal refugees’ mud huts, homes huddle in compounds behind thick metal doors and high walls topped with barbed wire.

Kabul is a city of sandbags and nervous, armed men, both on foot and in big, shiny, urgently honking vehicles. Approach the international airport and Afghan soldiers will have you out of your vehicle three times, patting you down before you even reach the parking lot.

Our delegation is restricted in our movements. Do we avoid venturing forth from the clipped lawns and rose gardens of our guest house compound? Hardly. But every morning until our driver arrives, we stay inside those high walls, never lingering together outside on the street. Then we scoot into his van. With preternatural reflexes, Imam plunges us into what must be some of the densest, scariest, least-regulated (no traffic lights) traffic on the planet.

We’re off to visit a primary school, a women’s co-op, a photo gallery, a de-mining museum, a refugee camp. Or we tour the Kabul zoo – with its pack of scrawny wolves and its flock of vultures. On one of the few occasions we stay out after dark, we attend a US Embassy-sponsored film festival showcasing young Afghan filmmakers.

We have 40 or so meetings with teachers, journalists, editors, social entrepreneurs, and with the staff of various NGOs — internationals, Afghan-Americans, and Afghans. Whether guarded or candid, perplexing or illuminating, each encounter provides a piece (a figment?) of the puzzle. We glimpse complexities and contradictions — and tragedies — some beyond our sheltered imaginations.

I journeyed to Afghanistan expecting to hear what Afghans think about Reaper drones. I think the Reaper is cowardly. Here in Central New York at Hancock air base, young technicians  pilot these robot planes – equipped with Hellfire missiles and 500-pound bombs – over Afghanistan, frequently killing civilians.

I expected to meet with drone survivors. But staff at Kabul’s no-questions-asked Emergency Hospital (Italian-run, specializing in war wounds) tell us that drone victims would be treated elsewhere – if at all – closer to where drones prey. And where we westerners dare not go.

One human rights NGO staffer allows that, yes, drones kill civilians, but—ta da! — they also destroy madrassas (Islamic schools). I wince at this functionary’s equanimity: rural Afghans may be rather less cavalier about such aerial terrorism.  But few of our contacts seem  interested  in drones. Instead they’re angered by the US military’s night raids on homes – terrorism stalking Kabul itself.

Malalai & Ian

Several of  those we meet with are inspiring. Malalai Joya (a pseudonym) is a young woman barely five feet tall. She was elected to Parliament from a remote region, but was drummed out of that august body for publicizing the war crimes of her parliamentary colleagues. While this notoriety led to international speaking tours, it also led to assassination attempts. Malalai only survives by moving with her guards from safe house to safe house.

To find her, we get our directions via several cell phone calls en route; we don’t know our exact destination until moments before we arrive. Through heavy metal doors, we enter one of those unmarked compounds on a nameless unpaved street (typical of Kabul) and are met by two armed men. One stands a few feet off, gun poised, while the other frisks us — and has us snap photos with our cameras and write with our pens to confirm that these aren’t disguised weapons.

Malalai comes out to greet us and invite us inside. Immediately I’m captivated by the care and courage she radiates.  Malalai’s remarks to us suggest why she is a marked woman:

~ If more US troops leave, one more enemy will be gone – no more bombing, no more white phosphorus….

~ The US military are expanding military bases here. They won’t leave us. They work for Balkanization….It’s a big lie that the U.S. will leave by 2014. [In fact, the US is quietly lobbying the Karzai government to agree to permanent US bases.]

~ When you are in the heart of Asia, you’re surrounded by other countries with oil and gas. From here these can be controlled.

~ Under the UN the Taliban have been replaced by the war lords.

~ Afghan and foreign NGOs are corrupt. [She refers to  them as “NGO lords.”]

~ Afghanistan has the second biggest copper mine in the world.

~ Under the Taliban 185 tons of poppy were exported; now over 4000 tons are exported. [Hmmm. Who gets the lion’s share of  drug traffic profit – Afghans or Americans?]

In her “Message on the Tenth Anniversary of NATO’s War and the Occupation  of Afghanistan,” Joya declares:

Ten years ago the US and NATO invaded my country under the fake banners of women’s rights, human rights, and democracy. But after a decade, Afghanistan still remains the most uncivil, most corrupt, and most war torn country in the world. The consequences of the so-called war on terror have only been more bloodshed, crimes, barbarism, human rights and women’s rights violation, which has doubled the miseries and sorrows of our people.²

Malalai, it’s clear, is not one of those who entwine their interests with those occupying her country. Check out her memoir,A Woman Among Warlords [Scribner, 2009].

*****

Ian Pounds is a long-term volunteer at one of the several orphanages we visit. Ian tells us that Afghanistan has over a million orphans. He notes that “the US is part and parcel of the drug trade.” He goes on, “The US has no intention of leaving Afghanistan. The US is here to pressure Iran….The US was ready to go into Afghanistan before 9/11; it’s not here to save the women.”

Now “80% of the girls don’t go to school and many end  up in forced marriages.” The women’s prisons here “are full of women who have been raped and therefore accused of having sex out of marriage.” (For an extended  report on Afghan women, especially those in prison, see Ann Jones’ grimly eloquent 2006 book, Kabul in Winter: Life Without Peace in Afghanistan.

Shortly after our visit Ian emails us some stats drawn from the Afghanistan section of Save the Children’s July 2011 report on the “State of the World’s Mothers.” Among them:

~ Fifty women die in childbirth each day.

~ One in five children die before age five.

~ One in three women are physically or sexually abused.

~ Women’s life expectancy: 44 years.

The report declares Afghanistan the worst country in the world to be a mother.

Staring Through the Keyhole

To begin understanding this harrowed land you must see its teeming capital. Yet Kabul provides only an incomplete and, indeed, distorted picture of the country as a whole.

From our too few day-trips outside the capital, it’s clear that Kabul bears little resemblance to the hinterland. One might as well try to imagine an elephant having only seen its trunk. Or one might seek to understand the US by visiting only Washington or New York…or Syracuse.

Swollen with internal refugees, Kabul is said to now have about a fifth of Afghanistan’s population. Kabul’s social structures are not those of the countryside. Nor do urban agendas and interests—or security issues—reflect those of the rural areas where most Afghans live.

I belabor this point because I’m taken aback by how many of those we meet in the capital seem to favor an ongoing US military presence (or do some – not knowing us – say what they think visiting US Americans must want to hear?) Perhaps some prefer the devil they’ve come to depend on to other, less well-heeled, devils? Many surely fear chaos if the US leaves and its corrupt puppet government dissolves – “within three days,” an academic and former US Embassy contractor tells us.

They fear the ensuing civil war — as if for years the invader hadn’t been making night raids, humiliating women, detaining and  torturing their male relatives, arming fundamentalist warlords, fostering corruption, promoting ethnic hatred, paying off the Taliban, displacing hundreds of thousands, waging air war…and  testing its high-tech weapons systems on the Afghan people.

Some, especially among the NGO strata, have a stake in the status quo. Why not? In a region where many earn less than $2 a day, the status quo seems to work well enough for those Kabulis with internationally-derived incomes. Without the invader such emoluments would vanish. But I keep wondering how rural Afghans — already savaged by the occupation and by those resisting the occupation — would see things. Mostly confined  to Kabul, how are we to know?

Reparation

My few weeks in Afghanistan reinforce what I already do know: US taxpayers must face our complicity in the terror of US militarism. As the war on Afghanistan is now into its eleventh year, we must overcome our chauvinism and uncritical thinking. We must get beyond our bubble.

This past century teaches that no war truly ends. Its consequences endure and ramify. As with the people of Viet Nam and Iraq,  the Afghan people – the orphaned, the widowed, the amputated, the displaced, the heartsick, the driven mad – will continue to suffer long after the last US soldier leaves, the last base is closed, the last drone is grounded.

Even then our responsibility to the people of Afghanistan will remain. We must provide reparation for the wounds we have inflicted. Dollars cannot compensate for the lives lost or the infrastructure devastated. Nonetheless, we must give our utmost. We must get out of the way of Afghans and (judiciously) provide the economic support they need to rebuild their country and their lives.

We must also begin the overdue reparation of ourselves. We must end our worship of violence. We must mend our hearts that have tolerated so long what we’ve been doing to the Afghan people. We must fully support the healing of our returned soldiers who, maimed in body and soul, are doomed to live out their days having experienced what we have done. And we must hold accountable those who conned us into invading Afghanistan and those who keep us there.

We must convert our war-besotted economy to one that profits from life, not death. We must dismantle our bloated military. To stop subverting and invading the Islamic oil lands, we must own up to  our Islamophobia and  break our addiction to oil. We must struggle to free not only Afghan children, but our own, from the destitution and killing that threatens to engulf us.

We must no longer avert our eyes.

1. 14 Sept. 11 Associated Press.
2. 7 Oct. 11, CommonDreams.org.

Hiroshima/Nagasaki wasn’t so much about targets as about audiences. We sacrificed a couple hundred thousand harmless, unarmed, undefended human beings to make a point. That spectacle wasn’t so much for Japan as for the Soviet Union and the world at large.

Thanks to the U.S. head start on nuclear technology – vividly showcased at Hiroshima/Nagasaki – for 65 years the U.S. has been able to hold the planet hostage. It’s been able to deploy nuclear blackmail to further its hegemonic design.

But the Bomb didn’t long remain the lone superpower’s monopoly. Hiroshima/Nagasaki was the spark of nuclear proliferation. Our god-challenging weapon made us no safer.

Every August 6th letters to editors perpetuate the 20th century’s most pernicious myth: thanks to Hiroshima/Nagasaki, World War II ended. The fanatic, loathsome Japs were forced to surrender and would not have to be invaded. Thousands of G.I. lives were thereby saved. Thank God for the Bomb!

Never mind that by summer 1945 the U.S. air force ruled Japanese skies. Never mind that Japan’s major cities lay in ashes. Never mind that the U.S. navy ruled the sea; nothing could get through its blockade. Never mind that Japan was totally depleted. Never mind that Japan had already been seeking surrender.

The U.S. might have simply let Japan dangle for as long as it took and then swept in to feed the emaciated and bury the dead. It could have let Japan surrender with a remnant of honor intact and without the atomic terrorism.

There are parallels between Hiroshima/Nagasaki and Iraq/Afghanistan/Pakistan. Once again we are embarking on a menacing new era – that of robotic warfare. (Note to self: reread P.W. Singer, Wired for War: the Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century, Penguin, 2009).

Atomic-bomb-as-life-saver was a Big Lie. Now in the 21st century the Pentagon is pedaling the exact same myth: that unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) like the MQ9 Reaper drone – maintained at our local Hancock Air Base — are all about “saving our boys.”

For several years now the Pentagon has used high-tech robots like the Reaper built by General Atomics, Inc., not only for surveillance, but to kill and blow up things in Iraq and Afghanistan. Defying international law, the CIA uses the Reaper to assassinate and blow up things in Pakistan.

The “beauty” of it is that technicians, wielding joysticks at satellite-linked computers thousands of miles from any battleground, can “pilot” these drones. They can deliver – with laser accuracy – their hellfire missiles and 500-pound bombs. And they can do so with no physical risk.

The Reaper has become the Pentagon’s and the CIA’s darling. With no onboard pilot or crew, no one dies or is captured when the Reaper crashes or is shot down. That means no embarrassing body bags being shipped back home. So, few ask: what are we doing over there anyway?

Such distancing and such unaccountability almost guarantee mission creep. Mission creep means an easy slide into perpetual warfare. How juicy for General Atomics and the other corporate war profiteers!

Just as the Hiroshima/Nagasaki civilian casualties failed to matter, so too the drone’s Iraq/Afghanistan/Pakistan civilian casualties – numbering in the thousands. We forget that many victims will have survivors nursing enduring hatred for the U.S.

Who knows? One day drone missiles may be aimed at us. Thanks to the Pentagon’s love affair with death — and despite the trillions we squander on “defense” — the Pentagon is only making the world safe…for corporate profit.

Already 40 nations are said to be either importing or manufacturing their own drones. Like nuclear proliferation, drone proliferation could haunt us till the end of our days.

But only if we fail to act.

Years ago I hitchhiked through Africa. I spent several weeks each in Sudan, Uganda, Nigeria, Namibia, Tanzania, Zimbabwe and apartheid South Africa. For a year – between treks – I taught peasant kids in a remote one-room school in Kenya.

My experiences with people all over Africa were diverse, but generally positive. They were different from those I had had with black people back in the United States.

At the time, struck by the contrast, I drew up a list of all the encounters I could recall having had with U.S. blacks. A manageable task – as with most middle-class, white North Americans (and even an itinerant like me), such encounters had been sparse.

That list included separate incidents in which I was

~ punched in the face;
~ beaten to the ground;
~ confronted by a burly knife-wielding drunk determined (he said) to “get whitey”;
~ called a “racist pig” by a middle-aged student for questioning her impeccable term paper (it was most unlikely she had written it herself).

A black person scanning this list might wonder how many of those incidents would have been avoided or defused if race conditions in the U.S. weren’t so flammable. Or if I hadn’t seemed so entitled. On the other hand, a white person might wonder why those incidents didn’t make me an out-and-out racist.

One reason I have escaped the racist trap — not that any of us escape entirely — is that I do a lot of reading. I’ve read many books on black Americans and black Africans, and on capitalism and colonialism. Those books expose a scarring history; they expose the impact of organized power (white) over the lives of the less centralized and less weaponized (people of color). Those books expose the historical impact of men with guns on those without.

Another reason I haven’t succumbed as much to racism, I think, is all the low-budget travel I’ve done. I’ve gotten out of what I call “the bubble” – those self-imposed limitations, geographical and otherwise, typical of so many U.S. Americans. The bubble, partly constructed by our mainstream media, leads many into jingoism and into U.S. exceptionalism: the illusion that U.S. people are somehow more decent and precious than others.

Low-budget travel provided me the opportunity to observe the human condition. I’ve seen how people can live in penury — due to social, economic and historical factors — through no fault of their own. And do so with dignity and neighborliness. In part because I was often on the receiving end of hospitality, I could better see people as human beings and not as “other.”

I should point out here that, thanks to a privileged headstart, I’ve been able to have some professional training. But such training can be a mixed bag. Take my (former) field — anthropology. The field originated in the 19th century in the context of the expansion of well-armed white people over much of the globe. Anthropology was an adjunct to colonialism.

Here in the U.S. there are two kinds of anthropology: physical and cultural. During its early decades physical anthro fixated on racial traits and typologies. In effect physical anthro was seeking out and quantifying anatomical differences between “us” and “them.”

Cultural anthropology carried the white supremacist mission in still another direction. In origin, and by its choice of problems and selection of data, cultural anthro fostered the conceit that Anglo-America was the peak of cultural evolution. Further, it served colonial administration, intentionally or not, by inventorying the resources and manpower of conquered peoples and identifying indigenous pockets of compliance… or resistance.

At times anthropology has facilitated physical and cultural genocide. To the detriment of the communities they studied, during the Viet Nam War, anthro and other academic research in Southeast Asia was financed by a very goal-oriented CIA. In Afghanistan today the U.S. military has its so-called Human Terrain social scientists deployed along with the invading troops.

Anthropology happens to be the field I’m most familiar with. It’s probably not much more guilty than some other fields. Academic learning, in general, especially that which pretends to be “objective” or “value free,” or which poses as “social science,” tends to serve the agendas of those who finance it. By the data it neglects or emphasizes, it can spawn myths and subtle slanders that justify or bolster white governance.

Ironically, academic learning helped provide me with liberal notions about race while at the same time credentialing me for a place in the very class system that perpetuates and profits from racial exploitation.

It’s the old story of the Haves and the Have Nots. While modern genetics knows there really isn’t any such thing as “race,” liberals in regard to race can be quite classist: I find it easy to look down on poor whites, especially those who don’t share my facility for appearing “politically correct.”

Not every white can afford a gated community or suburban insulation. Some have more reason to fear and resent blacks. Some may have had their bruising encounters with blacks on the street (see above). That blacks have had vastly more to fear from whites and from white law enforcement hardly matters if you are a white feeling threatened.

The fears and resentments of poor whites — which we reflexively label “racism” — may very well be based, in part, on concrete experience. Poor whites are on the downside of a class system that pits them against blacks — blacks who, despite their disadvantages, are often brimming with brio and capability.

In our effectively segregated society, poor whites — far more than prosperous whites — rub elbows with poor blacks. After all, they’re scavenging the same few crumbs and for the same scarce jobs. Sometimes they clash. Racial epithets abound. Such conflict, of course, is deplored by the genteel.

But these good people — I’m talking about you and me — gain from a divided working class. Racial strife makes it very hard for workers, tenants, and welfare clients to organize for decent wages, housing and social services. For the affluent, skimpy social services mean lower taxes; cheap labor means lower prices, and both mean higher dividends.

Like prosperity, our self-esteem is relative. In the early eighties in South Africa, I could see that black degradation fostered white self-esteem. I don’t think it’s so different here. Racism is hardly an exclusively lower-class franchise; it results from how the nation’s power structure operates.

There’s a whole strata of genteel and structural racism that isn’t vulgar or verbal or directly violent. That strata’s violence is systemic (item: in my home town far more black babies die from preventable illness in their first year than white). Such systemic racism isn’t confrontational. On the contrary, it operates on aversion and invisibility, on obliviousness and avoidance — reflecting the opaque distance between suburb and slum. And it’s a function of the disparity of wealth — shaping life options — that marks the gulf between whites and people of color.

I’d like to close with a kind of curious assertion: What we typically think of as racism (e.g., people under stress calling one another “nigger,” etc.) often isn’t real Racism. It’s a product of Racism, a product of those forces determining the unequal distribution of power and opportunity in our society.

To the extent that I profit from and help perpetuate such forces, consciously or unconsciously, I foster Racism.

Now try to imagine that Hamas – the elected government of Gaza – had long been blocking humanitarian aid to Israel and was determined to keep the flotilla from reaching Israel. Suppose that Hamas had the military wherewithal – which of course it doesn’t – to hijack that flotilla miles out to sea in international water.

Suppose that armed Hamas commandos, descending from helicopters in the night, swarmed all over the flotilla. And, that as it did so those commandos repeatedly shot a U.S. citizen in the head and murdered eight others.

The International Maritime Bureau (a division of the International Chamber of Commerce) defines piracy as “the act of boarding any vessel with an intent to commit theft or any other crime, and with an intent or capacity to use force in furtherance of that act.”

The U.S. State Department defines terrorism as the use of violence or the threat of violence on civilians for political purposes.

Our imagined – and very far-fetched scenario – fits both those definitions. Yet many commentators seem to go out of their way to avoid describing the recent attack on the humanitarian aid flotilla in international waters as piracy.

Nor do these commentators use the T-word – so readily invoked at every other opportunity.  Can it be that we only use terrorism or terrorist to refer to actions by people of color or by those who resist U.S. and Israeli invasions and occupations?  

Can it be that this crass double standard makes our minds such mush that we are no longer capable of seeing straight?

We have been socialized to treat [animals] as objects for our use rather than beings with intrinsic value and rights. It is easier easier to exploit when we depersonalize. Objectification and exploitation of animals parallels the objectification of women and cultural minorities…

– Linda Destefano

To “objectify” is to turn creatures into things objects without thought, without right, without need, without feeling. Objectification is a major obstacle to peace and justice on this bleeding planet.

Turning the living into things is precisely what the U.S. war machine did to the people and land of Southeast Asia. It is what that machine is doing to the people and land of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Such lethal objectifying can only occur insofar as military personnel are themselves objectified; i.e., desensitized and robotized. How and why does our culture foster such barbarity?

We need to resist objectification wherever and whenever we can. There are several fronts where the struggle must be waged. They connect and overlap. Struggle on one fortifies each of the others. When any one front is neglected, justice for all suffers.

Take sexism. Sexism entails objectifying women, often as sex objects, usually as work objects. To objectify half of the human species — especially that half doing the least to destroy and the most to nourish — is to deny and degrade all life. As long as there is sexism, violence will thrive. Eliminating sexism is crucial to eliminating war.

Take racism. Racism entails objectifying people of color. When people are reduced to things they can be exploited and war can be made on them.  A “nigger” is a thing. So are ”gooks” and “hajis.”

Because, over the centuries, the people of pallor had a knack for weaponry we became world-striding conquerors.  Since we conquer people of color, extract their resources and live off their labor, we have to depersonalize them. To live with our righteous selves we can’t value those we exploit. Or those exploited on our behalf. Hence, racism.

Workers are likewise objectified. Under industrialism and corporate capitalism jobs are structured so workers are depersonalized and function as mindless machines, as drones. Their stupor is then used to justify their further exploitation.

The training and enculturation of higher functionaries (officers, engineers, executives, professionals, etc.) tend to compartmentalize their minds. Oblivious to their own co-optation, for them the consequences of their actions often remain opaque.

Industrialism and corporate capitalism – think oil spill — see not only people, but the whole of nature as dead matter. Air, earth, water, forests and rivers are treated as inert and not as the vital elements of the biosphere that they are.

The ecology movement, in exorcising our centuries-long amnesia, teaches us the intrinsic value of all nature. The recovery of this knowledge by the industrial world is essential to the struggle against violence on all fronts.
                                                       
All oppressed and their struggles are one. Worldwide, most workers are women, most women are persons of color, most persons of color are workers. Even if they aren’t thus doubly or triply victimized, they share the same fate: they are dehumanized, brutalized — treated as animals.                                                     

As long as vast categories of humans are treated as non-human animals and as long as non-human animals are denied care and respect, workers, women and people of color will likewise be denied care and respect. Everyone loses.

This isn’t platitude, it’s common sense. It’s the pragmatism behind, for example, organized labor demanding a living wage for non-unionized workers. The higher the wage floor, the higher the wage scale for all.

The more respect for the least empowered, the more respect for all.  Long ago a Palestinian sage put it this way: “What you do to my least brethren…you do to me.”

Insofar as the objectification of any kind of creature is routinized, the barbarism of a culture grows. Our layers on layers of callousness, like proliferating systems of military ‘defense,’ threaten us all.  By objectifying anyone — human or non-human — we risk sharing her fate. The hardening of our hearts hardens our entirety.

What we do to animals in laboratories and on factory farms, the Nazis did in prison camps to defenseless minorities.  Their medical experiments, presided over by doctors and scientists, grew out of standard laboratory procedure.

Whether it be in some research labs or in Nazi death camps – or in occupied Palestine or among the tortured of Abu Ghraib, Bagram and Guantanamo — the cold-bloodedness is similar. In each, caged, silenced, disenfranchised victims are met by clinical detachment and totalitarian power. By playing god the perpetrators deny their own humanity.

In all of these cages the victims and their tormentors are not so different from each other or from ourselves. How can we not consider them our kin? As ecologists and feminists keep reminding us: we are all connected. There is no heartbeat that is not somehow our own.

No, I’m not flaunting my bigotry, nor succumbing to guilt. I’m acknowledging that I’ve been deeply conditioned by a society permeated with racism. For a white person raised in the U.S., racism recovery demands persistent mindfulness. It’s the task of a lifetime.

Admitting you’re an alcoholic is hard; likewise admitting to racism. Conveniently, our standard notion of racism features behavior we avoid. We “know” we’re not racist because we shun ethnic slurs; we wince at the N-word.

The flipside of this (necessary but insufficient) standard is our widely held, but rarely examined, notion of anti-racism. Again, we “know” we’re anti-racist because, in my case for example, back in the eighties we organized against South African apartheid. Or because recently we contributed to Haiti earthquake relief.

But such notions of racism/anti-racism don’t go deep enough. It takes work to fathom racism’s breadth and subtlety and to perceive the social and economic forces fostering the de facto segregation that warps our social fabric.

Equally essential, we must recognize and resist the racism pervading U.S. foreign policy. The Pentagon’s current military adventures – whether in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen or Somalia — were foreshadowed, in the 19th century, by relentless Indian wars and by U.S. invasions of Mexico and the Philippines.

Financed by federal income taxes, this generations-old war machine has never had much use for the lives of peoples of color. It’s no accident that its numerous invasions and interventions invariably target non-white people.

In my first 14 years of school I had only two black classmates; despite over 18 years of schooling I never had a black teacher. I was 19 before I had a personal conversation with a black person. My early college days were spent in a lovely ivy enclave set off by walls and rent-a-cops from the black and brown ghetto at its gate.

Demoralized by the irrelevance of my courses, I dropped out. Thanks not only to family connections, but also to the sixties building boom in my hometown, I could work construction. In Syracuse’s 15th Ward, “urban renewal” drove thousands of blacks out of what was becoming prime real estate. The forced relocation demolished a vibrant black ghetto.

Despite that boom, few blacks could break into the construction trades; there wasn’t a single black in our union local. None of us challenged the arrangement. Forty-five years later not much has changed here: few black contractors can bid on even modest building jobs.

It’s no wonder that in the early eighties when I hitchhiked through South Africa, it seemed like home. And last spring when I spent a month in Israel and the Occupied Territories, that European colony also felt like home. [See my July ’09 Peace Newsletter article, “Life in the Bubble: At Home in the Israeli Settler State.”]

Basic to these segregated societies and to our militarism is what poet Adrienne Rich calls solipsism. In philosophy solipsism is the theory that the self is the only reality: you exist only as a figment of my imagination.

Rich speaks, in particular, of white solipsism: a cultural egoism, which assumes — quite unconsciously — that only white history or discovery or suffering or interests have merit and standing. Most white folks — whether in South Africa or Israel or here — grow up in white neighborhoods going to white schools and consuming white-controlled media. This is how we internalize white “reality.”

For many of us the solipsism that denies or demeans or destroys did not originate with racism. It began, historically and personally, before we were exposed to ethnic diversity. While being molded for roles defined by gender, boys acquire the parallel male solipsism of a patriarchal culture. Sexism precedes racism, grinding the lens that makes our racist outlook second nature. Sexist behavior provides an ongoing rehearsal for our racist performance.

When we were young we had little control over our enculturation and so weren’t to blame for such tunnel vision. But now that we’re grown, we are responsible for the kinds of callousness and exclusivity we choose to honor. Many of us eagerly — or obliviously — float along the mainstream that invalidates the lives of people of color. Their labor and their living conditions, their needs and their pain, their gifts and their rights, are systematically negated, rendered invisible, rendered mute.

White solipsism helps explain the foreign policy double standard which regards only political violence aimed at whites as “terrorism.” Since World War II few whites have been victims of aerial warfare: no wonder few here see such warfare as the cowardly terrorism it is.

Although the pundits glibly link “terrorism” to Islam, they never call Congress or Bush/Clinton/Bush/Obama terrorist when they squander billions invading Islamic oil lands or when (say) U.S. drone aircraft assassinate those resisting the invasion and occupation. Or when those unmanned drones kill civilians willy-nilly.

In the moral calculus of white America the tens — maybe hundreds — of thousands of slain Iraqis or Afghans barely exist. Even we who actively oppose U.S. militarism in West Asia and the Mid East often ignore the racism at its heart.

To overcome our “isms,” we could curb our over-consumption and our over-eager embrace of privilege. We could shed our patterns of exclusivity, bursting the bubble of self-reinforced segregation. We could withhold and re-direct our federal taxes – without which U.S. militarism would soon exhaust itself.

Through cross-cultural study and solidarity work we could better understand the human condition – especially that of the huge majority of our species who aren’t white, who aren’t affluent, who don’t blackmail the globe with aerial warfare and nuclear terror.

Unlike the people of Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Palestine, most US Americans are oblivious to drones. But we’d better wake up. Drones are poised to become tools of domestic surveillance.

The Houston police are now secretly experimenting with drones. Col. Kevin Bradley, local Hancock Airbase drone commander, looks forward to having drones used for domestic police work.¹ ACLU please take note.

In Upstate New York we’re beginning to learn about the Reaper drone in our midst – “piloted” via satellite out of Hancock on the outskirts of Syracuse. Syracuse’s Reaper now flies surveillance and assassination missions over Afghanistan. The Pentagon proudly describes the Reaper as a “hunter/ killer.”

But the US isn’t alone in developing and deploying drone technology. I became aware of Israel’s use of drones during its December 2008/January 2009 invasion of Gaza. Israel deploys two types of hunter/killer: the “Hermes,” produced by Elbit Systems Ltd, and the “Heron,” produced by the government-owned Israeli Aerospace Industries.

Recently – by Googling “Israeli drones” – I learned that Israel pioneered the drone and that Israel purveys that cutting edge weaponry throughout the world. As far back as 1982 Israel used drones against Syria. In the early nineties Israeli drones were used in the Kosovo campaign. Israeli drones invade the skies over Lebanon and patrol occupied West Bank and besieged Gaza. Israeli drones reportedly can reach Iran.

Even Israel acknowledges that, during the Gaza invasion, it killed well over 1000 Palestinians. Such was the butchery that over 100 Palestinians were killed for every Israeli killed. Among the wide range of weapon systems deployed in and over Gaza, drones accounted for the deaths of at least 87 civilians, many of them children.

The cold-bloodedness of it all struck me as I read the 39-page, June 2009 Human Rights Watch report: “Precisely Wrong: Gaza Civilians Killed by Israeli Drone-Launched Missiles.” Frequently those killings had no combat or defensive role whatsoever. Like aerial warfare generally, those killings were out-and-out state terrorism.

Israel’s drone technology is so “good,” and now so well demonstrated in Gaza, that other nations are lining up to put in orders. These exports generate enormous revenue for Israel’s weapons industry, an enterprise boosted by $3 billion a year in US military aid to Israel.

Israel’s known drone customers include: Turkey ($185 million for 10 Heron drones); Brazil ($350 million drone deal for border and police work); India (occupying Kashmir and long hostile to Pakistan); Georgia (used Hermes drones against Russia in 2008). Russia, very impressed with Georgia’s drone performance, has acquired three different types of Israeli drones ($53 million) for reverse engineering to kick-start its own drone industry.

To better service Pentagon contracts, Israel even has drone factories in the US – in Starkville, Mississippi and Columbus, Ohio. The US uses Israeli “Skylark” drones in Iraq. Brits, Germans, and Canadians use Herons over Afghanistan. They assassinate those perceived, correctly or not, as enemies. Given the flimsiness of the legal cases against most Guantanamo prisoners, we know that an informant or bounty hunter’s word that someone is a “terrorist” or “enemy combatant” is dubious.

In an ominous indicator of how easily lethal misjudgments can be made by those whose god-like job it is to select drone targets, the aforementioned Col. Bradley sees domestic anti-drone protesters as a “threat” to his pilots.¹ Such attitudes help explain how the drone’s “precision” strikes can kill so many civilians. These deaths, whether in occupied Gaza or elsewhere, defy international humanitarian law.

One might suggest that much of US mainstream media is itself “occupied” by the nation’s highly militarized power structure. Otherwise, why aren’t the nation’s newspapers editorializing against the killer drones that rile up hatred against the US? And that subject US military and intelligence facilities to deadly reprisal?

Why doesn’t our media admit that much of the “terrorism” it constantly invokes is blowback from the kind of US policies that deploy hunter/killer drones? Why doesn’t our media point out that those in the chain of command responsible for these extra-judicial executions are war criminals?

Why doesn’t it call those nations deploying armed drones against civilians what they are: rogue states? And why doesn’t it describe their cowardly airborne killings as what they are: terrorism?

Corporations and militarists in the US and Israel promoting killer drones claim that as an unmanned weapon the drone saves lives — i.e., no pilots are shot down in action. This is specious: for every pilot saved, many other humans are killed or maimed.

Drone boosters further argue that, with its extraordinary surveillance capability, the drone’s laser-guided missiles are more precise killers than those of (say) a manned F-16 fighter jet. However, “[D]rones, much like sniper rifles, are only as good at sparing civilians as the care taken by the people who operate them. The accuracy and concentrated blast radius of the missile can reduce civilian casualties, but in Gaza, Israel’s targeting choices led to the loss of many civilian lives.”²

The Heron hunter/killer even has camera-bearing missiles that relay images in real time. This allows a pilot on the ground far away, suddenly realizing that noncombatants are about to be slain, to divert the missile at the last moment. But such capability makes the killing of children and other non-combatants – whether in Gaza, Iraq, Pakistan or Afghanistan — all the more detestable. No more blaming such “collateral damage” on the “fog of war.” Because the surveillance capability of these killer drones is so remarkable, when obvious noncombatants are targeted, the pilots know exactly what they are doing. This means the chain of command also knows exactly what is being done.

Because the drone cameras provide live footage of the strike, and since such footage is archived, the circumstances under which the killings occur are well documented. Such evidence needs to be presented to domestic or international war crimes tribunals. Problem is, just as Israel refused to cooperate with the UN’s Goldstone investigation, it refuses to release the footage. If the Human Rights Watch Gaza investigation were somehow flawed, such footage would refute its damning conclusions.

The US should insist that Israel release the footage. More: US military aid to nations like Israel that flaunt international law should cease.

The Pentagon trains foreign military in “anti-insurgency” tactics at schools such as the US Army’s School of the Americas at Ft. Benning, Georgia. In a further “anti-insurgency” initiative, at Ft. Huachuca, Arizona the US Army trains soldiers to operate drones. Of particular concern to us in Syracuse, Hancock Airbase is becoming the national headquarters for training Reaper drone maintenance crews from all service branches.

Likewise, since at least 2005 Israel has been training many of the world’s drone operators and maintainers. Some of these operators have gone on to deploy in Iraq and Afghanistan.

1. 18 Dec. 09 Syracuse Post-Standard.
2. HRW, p.3.

That drone is a high-tech, high-flying robot. Via satellite it communicates with “pilots” on the ground. It can operate in radioactive environments. Its sensors can see in the night. It can hover for hours, invisibly, over a target. With uncanny accuracy, God-like, the Reaper’s missiles and bombs can obliterate that target.

There is nothing honorable about the Reaper. Its pilots take no risk. Operating from thousands of miles away, they need no courage. Robot-like themselves, they only need a highly cultivated indifference to human life.

Domestically, the drone, with its extraordinary surveillance capability, abets “Big Brother.” Drones now monitor the U.S./ Canadian and U.S./ Mexican borders. What keeps them from further spying on everything in between?

Internationally, Reapers are killing machines. The Pentagon calls them “hunter-killers.” Similar armed and airborne drones are named “Predator” and “Avenger.” What does that say about the mindset of those deploying them?

In Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, the Reaper’s job is to assassinate. Trouble is, often such assassination occurs far from combat and proceeds from dubious intelligence. There’s no due process. Condemned by the UN Human Rights rapporteur, the Reaper perpetrates extra-judicial executions.

The Reaper violates sovereignty. No representative body invites them over their airspace. CIA Reapers in Pakistan, supposedly a U.S. ally, have killed hundreds. (Maybe it’s only Pakistan’s notoriously venal government and not the Pakistani people who are U.S. allies?)

The Reaper violates international law. Like other aerial weapons in our arsenal, it kills mostly civilians. Even if it wanted to, the Pentagon could tell us little about the victims; often it doesn’t even know who they are…or how many the Reaper has maimed or massacred.

These war crimes – both those the US military perpetrates in Iraq and Afghanistan, and those the CIA perpetrates in Pakistan — are cloaked in secrecy. Like the mercenaries the CIA uses to launch its Reapers, with Reapers there is no accountability.

We wonder why people “hate us.” Suppose an alien military flew Reapers over the U.S. Suppose they killed our people, demolished our homes….Because it kills so many civilians, the Reaper generates hate. It spurs retaliation. It recruits terrorists. It is terrorist.

Such retaliation could strike areas – such as Syracuse – that host the Reaper. No PR campaign won our acquiescence. No public hearing demonstrated that Central New Yorkers want to become part of the global battleground.

The Reaper does nothing to foster peace. It does nothing to foster justice. It is an enemy of humanity. Its technology should not be developed. Like landmines, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, and all other nuclear weapons, it should be abolished.

Imagine: a civilian government choosing to heed international law. Imagine it daring to cut the Pentagon budget; daring to outlaw war profiteering. Imagine further its commander-in-chief liquidating the oil empire, withdrawing U.S. military bases from the Middle East and west Asia.

Now imagine what a radar-evading, missile-bearing Reaper, invisible at 25,000 feet, might do to the White House….

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.