Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Tag: peace

  • Wishes for the New Year

    Vaya aquí para la versión española.


    David KriegerMay we embrace peace with justice.  May we speak for it and stand for it.  May we make our voices heard and our presence felt.


    May we awaken to the possibilities of our greatness if we stop wasting our resources on war and its preparation. 


    May we end all war in the new year.  Wars always end.  May we end them sooner and lessen the toll of death and suffering.  May we refrain from initiating new wars.


    May we dramatically reduce military spending and reallocate the funds to meeting social needs – the needs of the poor, the hungry, the homeless and those without health care.


    May we end the arms trade, and make pariahs of those who profit from it and from war.


    May we stop provoking a new nuclear arms race with the Russians by the expansion of NATO and deployment of missile defense installations up to their borders in Europe.


    May we recognize the omnicidal threat that nuclear weapons pose to humanity and all life.  May we take these weapons off hair-trigger alert, declare and enforce policies of No First Use, and begin negotiations for a new treaty for the phased, verifiable, irreversible and transparent elimination of all nuclear weapons.


    May we uphold and strengthen human rights for all people in all places.  May we seek justice for the oppressed. 


    May we stop to appreciate the beauty and abundance of our amazing planet, our most important common heritage.  May we make it a healthy planet for all life by restoring the purity of its air and water, the lushness of its forests and the richness of its soil. 


    May we demonstrate a decent respect for the lessons of history and for all who have preceded us on our unique planet, the only one we know of in the universe that supports life.


    May we show by our actions that we take seriously our role as trustees of Earth for our children and their children and all children of the future – that they may enjoy a peaceful and harmonious life on our planetary home.

  • The End of Another War

    The Iraq War, from its outset, disgraced America by its flaunting of international law.  Now the war is over, but the disgrace, destruction and trauma live on. 


    After nearly nine years, America declared an end to the war and withdrew its last troops in December 2011, leaving behind a fortress embassy, mercenary guards and a country in shambles. There is no way to paint a happy or proud face on this war.  It was unnecessary.  It was illegal.  It was immoral.  And it was cruel.


    There was never a link between Iraq and 9/11 or between Iraq and al Qaeda.  Iraq had no program to develop weapons of mass destruction.  Our leaders were told this by the United Nations weapons inspectors on the ground in Iraq.  When George W. Bush initiated the war against Iraq in March 2003, he did so with lies and a “shock and awe” attack on Baghdad.  He had no authorization from the United Nations Security Council. 


    During the nearly nine years the war dragged on, 4,487 American soldiers were killed and more than 32,000 were wounded.   By the Pentagon’s count, more than 100,000 Iraqis were killed and, by other counts, more than a million Iraqis died as a result of the war.  Some five million Iraqis were displaced from their homes. 


    America financed the war on credit, borrowing approximately $1 trillion to pursue it.  Some economists predict that the full costs of the war – with ongoing medical care for veterans and interest on the increase in the national debt due to the war – will run to three to four trillion dollars.  It is a war that is adding to our economic woes now and for which our children and their children will continue to pay far into the future. 


    It was Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and Powell’s war, all individuals who bear the burden lightly.  In a just world, they would each have a place on the docket reserved for the worst criminal cases, for aggressive war – as pointed out at the Nuremberg tribunals – is the worst of crimes.  But this is not a just world.  It is a world where innocent children suffer for the arrogance of smug and mendacious leaders. 


    This war was possible because too many Americans are complacent and, without fully realizing what is at stake, are misled into war.  It was possible also because we have a volunteer military that can be manipulated and abused into committing the atrocity of aggressive war – what at the Nuremberg tribunals was called a “crime against peace.”


    When I think of the Iraq War, many different images come to mind, but two stand out: One is of George Bush’s clueless and self-satisfied smirk; the other is of the sad and frightened face of Ali Ismail Abbas, a 12-year-old Iraqi child who lost both of his arms and his father, his pregnant mother, his brother and 13 other members of his family in the war.  Here are two poems, written during the course of the war, one for Mr. Bush and one for Ali Ismail Abbas.





    GREETING BUSH IN BAGHDAD


    “This is a farewell kiss, you dog.”
      — Muntader al-Zaidi


    You are a guest in my country, unwanted
    surely, but still a guest.


    You stand before us waiting for praise,
    but how can we praise you?


    You come after your planes have rained
    death on our cities. 


    Your soldiers broke down our doors,
    humiliated our men, disgraced our women.


    We are not a frontier town and you are not
    our marshal.


    You are a torturer.  We know you force water
    down the throats of our prisoners.


    We have seen the pictures of our naked prisoners
    threatened by your snarling dogs.


    You are a maker of widows and orphans, 
    a most unwelcome guest.


    I have only this for you, my left shoe that I hurl
    at your lost and smirking face,


    and my right shoe that I throw at your face
    of no remorse. 


       David Krieger





    TO AN IRAQI CHILD


      for Ali Ismail Abbas


    So you wanted to be a doctor?


    It was not likely that your dreams
    would have come true anyway.


    We didn’t intend for our bombs to find you.


    They are smart bombs, but they didn’t know
    that you wanted to be a doctor.


    They didn’t know anything about you
    and they know nothing of love.


    They cannot be trusted with dreams.


    They only know how to find their targets
    and explode in fulfillment. 


    They are gray metal casings with violent hearts, 
    doing only what they were created to do. 


    It isn’t their fault that they found you. 


    Perhaps you were not meant to be a doctor.


       David Krieger





  • Vietnam Ambush

    This article was originally published by Truthout.


    David KriegerIn the 1960s, the United States of America conscripted young men into its military forces.  The head of Selective Service, which imposed conscription, was General Lewis B. Hershey.  Assisted by local Draft Boards, he gobbled up young men and put them in uniforms.  Then they were trained to kill.


    Most young men were edgy and wary about conscription, particularly after it became apparent that the military’s destination of choice was the jungles of Vietnam.  To receive a deferment and remain beyond the military’s clutches, one had to stay in college or graduate school.  Dick Cheney, one of the subsequent great warmongers of our time, successfully used college deferments to stay out of the military until he qualified for a marriage deferment and then a deferment for having a child.  He always managed to stay one step ahead of the military’s grasp.


    Other means of escaping being drafted into the military were failing one’s physical examination, claiming to be gay and conscientious objection.  All were difficult.  One rumor at the time was that if you drank enough Coke fast enough it would raise your blood pressure to the point you’d fail your physical.  This seemed more like an urban legend than fact.  Not many young men were secure enough to use homosexuality as a reason for staying out of the military, and the criteria for conscientious objection were rigid and based in traditional religious practices that objected to killing.  The truth was that most of us were naïve and hadn’t given much thought to avoiding military “service.”  That changed as the war in Vietnam heated up and expanded.


    The generation before us had fought in World War II, which seemed like a good war, pitting democracy against fascism (Hitler, Mussolini, Tojo).  More recently, there had been the war in Korea, which was touted as a fight for democracy against communism.  There was precedent for young men to go docilely into the US military and do its bidding.  And then, along came Vietnam, and Lyndon Johnson’s lies about the Tonkin Gulf incident and General William Westmoreland (“General Wastemoremen”) always seeing a light at the end of the tunnel – all he needed was more conscripts.


    The net of conscription ensnared many of us.  I was one.  Another was Daniel Seidenberg, Jr., who received his draft notice at the age of 19 in the winter of 1967.  He was just out of high school and was a surfer.  When his notice came, he thought about escaping to Canada, but, after visiting Canada, decided against it.  Instead, he joined the regular army, having been promised by the recruiter that he would not be sent to Vietnam.  Despite the promise, after being trained as an infantryman, he was sent to Vietnam.  He ended up with near-fatal head wounds that have left him disabled for life. 


    In 2010, Seidenberg published a book he wrote about his military experience in Vietnam.  The book, titled Vietnam Ambush, confirms the worst fears of those of us who didn’t go to fight in that needless, reckless and lawless war.  It is a well-written account of the war from the perspective of a soldier in the field.  It should be read by every young American who thinks war might be glorious.  In fact, it is a cautionary tale that should be read by young people throughout the world.  It takes the adventure and heroics out of war and tells it like it really is, a dirty business in which the old send the young to fight, kill and die in far-off lands – in the case of the Vietnam War, to fight in humid jungles, which US military planes were busy defoliating with the poisonous chemicals napalm and Agent Orange. 


    Here is how Seidenberg describes his dilemma as a US soldier in Vietnam on the opening page of his book:



    I was a combat infantryman in Vietnam.  We were shooting dice for our souls.  Our very spirits were on the line, if we survived.


    No one could say what we were fighting for.  The consensus was that our purpose was to simply survive it all.  I knew that merely surviving would not be enough.  I had to make sure that I survived with a clean conscience.


    What good is living, if you wind up hating yourself?  And I didn’t want to be responsible for any crimes.


    In a war fought entirely in cold blood, keeping a clean conscience was not easy.  Simply staying alive was not easy.


    Although today there is no longer conscription, there is instead a “poverty draft,” which makes the military an economically-attractive option for escaping poverty.  Being put into a killing zone makes it difficult to not become a killer, if only to stay alive oneself.  Should we allow ourselves to be used as tools in war?  Should we not fight against militarism and those who, like Dick Cheney, promote it?  Should we not refuse to subordinate our consciences to leaders who lie us into war? 


    Vietnam Ambush is a short book.  It is written in simple prose.  It tells the truth.  It reminds us that our society has corrupted its youth with war.  It reminds us that war steals from the young – their youth and their conscience.  It reminds us about the importance of having political leadership that is decent and truthful, not deceitful and dishonest.  It reminds us that war is not a game played on a field of battle; it has consequences that last for lifetimes.  War traumatizes young men and women.  It kills and maims soldiers and civilians alike.  It reminds us to choose peace.

  • Breaking Free from Nuclear Deterrence

    2011_12_16_10th_kelly_lecture.pdf

  • Creating a World Without Nuclear Weapons

    2011_12_09_krieger_dream_of_nation.pdf

  • Occupy Peace

    David Krieger


    This article was originally published by Truthout.


    The Occupy Movement is demonstrating its durability and perseverance.  Like a Japanese Daruma doll, each time it is knocked off balance it serenely pops back up.  The movement has been seeking justice for the 99 percent, and justice is an essential element of peace. 


    For decades, our country has been in permanent preparation for war, spending over half of the total annual discretionary funds that Congress allocates on “defense,” our euphemism for war.  World military expenditures exceed $1.5 trillion annually, and the US spends more than half of this amount, more than the rest of the world combined.


    The US has been engaged in wars around the globe from Korea to Vietnam to El Salvador to Nicaragua to Serbia to Afghanistan to Iraq to Libya.  In all of these wars, many in the one percent reap financial gains.  Many large corporations, such as Halliburton, formerly led by Dick Cheney, are the beneficiaries of lucrative government contracts that support war, while it is mainly the poor who are enlisted to fight, kill and die in our wars.  War is a surefire way of transferring wealth up the social ladder. 


    It is time to wake up to being used as tools in warfare while others profit.  War is not an effective or reasonable way to settle disputes.  It uses up resources and destroys human lives.  In war, people are expendable.  Civilians all too easily become “collateral damage.”  In the Nuclear Age, civilization itself could become collateral damage.


    As President Eisenhower pointed out in 1953, “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children…. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”  How little our politicians have responded to the deep concern of this former military leader.


    War is costly not only in dollars, but on our national psyche.  We slaughtered innocent men, women and children in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and then celebrated our prowess.  We went to war in Vietnam based on lies, killing millions of Vietnamese and dropping Napalm and Agent Orange on them, while they struggled for their freedom and independence.  Ultimately, after the death of more than 58,000 Americans, we withdrew in defeat, declaring victory.  We seemingly learned little that is meaningful from the experience, as we continue to send our soldiers to fight and die in far-off lands, and still based on lies.  Enough is enough. 


    How do we occupy peace?  First, we change our modes of thinking and stop basing our self-worth as a nation on our military prowess.  Second, we bring our troops home from exploitative foreign wars.  Third, we seek peaceful solutions to conflicts.  Fourth, we make our priority justice, and peace will follow.  Fifth, we work to end deaths due to starvation and preventable diseases rather than inflicting deaths by high altitude bombing and drone attacks.  Sixth, we take the lead in abolishing nuclear weapons so no other cities or countries will suffer the fate of the citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  Seventh, we reallocate our resources to health, education and ending poverty rather than continuing to gorge the military beast until it is too fat to move.


    War is a place of fear and fear is a place of borders.  Fear requires us to dehumanize our enemies and, in the process, to dehumanize ourselves.  Borders should not provide a justification for dehumanization.  That is a trick of militarists, who are in need of enemies, real or imagined, to make the war system work for them.  But there is another way to deal with enemies, and that is to turn them into friends by our actions.


    We need to stop fearing each other and treat each other with kindness.  Consideration for the 99 percent does not stop at a country’s border.  We are all humans together and we need each other to be fully human.  We need to embrace our common humanity.  In the Nuclear Age, war is far too dangerous, having the potential to end civilization and most life on the planet.  Peace is an imperative.  We need to find a way to occupy peace, which begins in our hearts and must expand to encompass the world. 

  • 2011 Earth Charter Award

    David KriegerI’m honored to receive this Earth Charter Award from Citizens for Peaceful Resolutions, and particularly an award presented in memory of two dedicated and lifelong peace makers, Bill Hammaker and Betty Eagle. 


    The Earth Charter is a great collaborative and visionary document.  Its words are both poetic and inspirational.  It opens we this passage: “We stand at a critical moment in Earth’s history, a time when humanity must choose its future. As the world becomes increasingly interdependent and fragile, the future at once holds great peril and great promise. To move forward we must recognize that in the midst of a magnificent diversity of cultures and life forms we are one human family and one Earth community with a common destiny.”


    How succinct.  How beautiful.  How true.


    I believe we should all strive to live as world citizens.  I believe strongly in the principles embodied in the Earth Charter, including those for which this award is given: democracy, nonviolence and peace.  They are, at the same time, both goals to achieve and maintain, and a way to live our lives. 


    Democracy, from my perspective, means the opportunity for all members of a society to participate fully and fairly in the political process.  That possibility has been usurped in our political process by the power of money to buy candidates, legislators and legislation.  Regardless of what they may rule at the Supreme Court, as they did in Citizens United, money cannot be allowed to equate to free speech in democratic elections.  We can do far better than we have in making our institutions and political process open and fair.


    It concerns me greatly that our democracy, such as it is, has become so militarized.  We now spend more than half of the discretionary funds in our national budget on the military, some $700 billion annually.  This does not include the tens of billions of dollars we also spend for nuclear weaponry through the Department of Energy, or the budget of the Department of Veterans Affairs, or the interest on the national debt to pay for our foreign wars.  We spend more on our military than all other countries in the world combined.


    We also have more than 700 military bases and our powerful naval fleets spread throughout the world.  We are the only country on Earth that does this.  We are an empire without formal subjects, but we bind countries and leaders to us by our economic power to reward and punish and by the implied threat of our military might.


    A militarized democracy with global reach becomes a militarized empire.  It fights wars of its choosing, despite its obligations under international law, and its people are easily manipulated and lied into war.  The US is now fighting wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, and something less than wars in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.  We are developing a new technology of warfare, based on sanitized long-distance killing with drones and a Global Strike Force that allows the US to attack with no risk of taking casualties.  Recently we have assassinated two American citizens in Yemen using drones.  President Obama signed off on these assassinations.  So much for due process of the law!


    The Global Strike Force plans to replace nuclear warheads with powerful conventional warheads on some inter-continental ballistic missiles, making it possible to attack any target on the globe in under an hour.  Drones and the Global Strike Force make long-distance killing more possible, but no more palatable. 


    Nonviolence is a strategy for social change.  It is more powerful than weapons of war.  These can kill and maim, but they have far less power to influence the human heart than techniques of nonviolence.  The world moves in strange ways.  Gandhi was the great leader of a nonviolent movement to end colonialism in India.  He was influenced by Thoreau and Tolstoy, and in turn he influenced Martin Luther King, Jr. and many other leaders of nonviolent revolutions. 


    Nonviolence is the means to bring about a new world order, one based upon peace and justice.  We have seen it again show its remarkable power during the Arab Spring.  We are witnessing it show its power now on Wall Street in what will hopefully become an American Fall.


    A.J. Muste said this about peace: “There is no way to peace; peace is the way.”  Without achieving peace in the Nuclear Age, we are all – wherever we live on the planet – potential victims of nuclear annihilation.  Nuclear weapons go beyond the homicide and genocide of warfare, and make possible omnicide, the death of all. 


    The Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, which I helped found three decades ago, works to abolish nuclear weapons.  It is a stretch even to call them weapons.  They are the ultimate long-distance killing devices, making the destruction of our world, including all that we hold dear, all too possible. 


    By our capacity for destruction, we have reached a point in our societal evolution at which peace is not only desirable but necessary for our survival – peace is an imperative of the Nuclear Age.  The questions I ask myself are these: Will humanity choose peace?  Will we grow up and put away our adolescent resort to violence as a means of resolving conflicts?  Will we awaken in time to avert catastrophe?


    The answers to these questions remain unclear, but it is clear that we are at a point of decision.  Everything begins with choice and intention.  We need to make the right choices and we need to set our intention to build a new world on a foundation of peace.  We need to stop wasting our resources on war and its preparation.  We need to find news ways to appreciate the miracle of life – our own and others.  We need to become planetary patriots, replacing the acronym MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction) with a new acronym: PASS (Planetary Assured Security and Survival).  It is our job to pass the planet on intact to new generations.


    Our world badly needs peace leadership if we are to create peace.  I urge each of you to be a peace leader by speaking out and acting for peace.  There are many areas of study and training, but a critical one that is often overlooked is peace leadership.  This training is one of our most important projects at the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.  I hope you all will join in this essential effort, keeping in mind the final words of the Earth Charter: “Let ours be a time remembered for the awakening of a new reverence for life, the firm resolve to achieve sustainability, the quickening of the struggle for justice and peace, and the joyful celebration of life.”


    There is so much left to do.  How can we not commit to this beautiful struggle?


    None of us should be content to sit on the sidelines when there is so much to be done.  Despite all the world’s serious problems, and there are many, we must choose hope, for it is hope that propels us to action.  The opposite of hope is despair, which leads to indifference and inaction.  So, I urge you to see hope as a choice, and choose it and live as though we can and will change the world.

  • Could War Be Going Out of Style?

    Martin HellmanIn an article in current issue of Foreign Policy, American University Professor Joshua Goldstein provides data to support his title,“World peace could be closer than you think:”



    the last decade has seen fewer war deaths than any decade in the past 100 years, based on data compiled by researchers Bethany Lacina and Nils Petter Gleditsch of the Peace Research Institute Oslo. Worldwide, deaths caused directly by war-related violence in the new century have averaged about 55,000 per year, just over half of what they were in the 1990s (100,000 a year), a third of what they were during the Cold War (180,000 a year from 1950 to 1989), and a hundredth of what they were in World War II. If you factor in the growing global population, which has nearly quadrupled in the last century, the decrease is even sharper. Far from being an age of killer anarchy, the 20 years since the Cold War ended have been an era of rapid progress toward peace.


    Possible reasons for this substantial decline in war fatalities are given in the article. Professor Goldstein’s related, new book, Winning the War on War: The Decline of Armed Conflict Worldwide, has garnered praise from some noteworthy reviewers, adding credibility to his assertion:



    “Winning the War on War does what no other book has attempted, providing a synoptic view, and narrative, of the slow but successful evolution of UN peacekeeping. It takes an unusual and unorthodox approach that works very well indeed.” Paul Kennedy, J. Richardson Dilworth Professor of History, Yale University; author of the bestseller, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers.


    “Professor Goldstein has written a novel, highly informative, and exceedingly valuable book.” David Hamburg, President Emeritus, Carnegie Corporation of New York; former president, American Association for the Advancement of Science; author of No More Killing Fields.


    I hope you’ll enjoy this thought provoking article and book. I also hope that Prof. Goldstein is right about war fatalities being on a continuing downward trend. Aside from the horrendous loss of life, every war entails at least a small risk of spiraling out of control and ending with the use of nuclear weapons.

  • Time to Disband NATO: A Rogue Alliance

    Alice SlaterWhen the Cold War ended, many believed there would be a peace dividend, nuclear disarmament, and dismantling of the war machine with industrial conversion to peaceful technology. Instead, we’ve witnessed the aggressive expansion of NATO, to include the former Soviet Republics, right up to the Russian border, which should be a wake-up call to many living in the American Empire. Many people still labor under the apparently false impression that the US is exemplary in holding up the rule of law, the sanctity of the United Nations, and human rights. After all, Americans were the good guys who defeated Hitler and made the world safe for democracy. The NATO expansion took place despite promises made to Gorbachev after the peaceful dissolution of the Soviet Union with the fall of the Berlin Wall that if he dropped his objections to the admission of a unified Germany as a full-fledged, fully armed member of NATO, the western states would freeze NATO membership and not expand any further east. Russia lost 20 million people in World War II to the Nazi onslaught, and Russian wariness of a strengthened reunited Germany participating with their former NATO foe was certainly understandable.

    I visited the Soviet Union in 1989 on a delegation of the NY Professional Roundtable during the heady days of Gorbachev’s newly announced doctrine of glasnost and perstroika—openness and reconstruction. It seemed as though every man over sixty was sporting a chest covered with medals, commemorating their service in the Great War. On every other street corner in Moscow and Leningrad, there were memorials to the war dead. The Piskaryovskoye Cemetery at Leningrad, with acres of mass graves, anonymous mounds of over 500,000 buried there who perished in the 872 day siege of Leningrad, was a painful, searing vision which haunts me still. The siege resulted in the tragic deaths of up to 1,500,000 soldiers and civilians and the evacuation of 1,400,000 more, many of whom died due to starvation and bombardment. The guide for our delegation at one point asked me, “Why don’t you Americans trust us?” “Why don’t we trust you?” I exclaimed indignantly. “What about Hungary? What about Czechoslovakia? Why should we trust you?” He looked at me with a pained expression, “But we had to protect our borders from Germany!” I looked into his watery blue eyes and heard the fervent sincerity in his voice. At that moment, I felt betrayed by my government and the years of constant reminders about the communist threat. The land was flat as a table between Russia and Germany. There was no buffer against the German onslaught, except the mountains of Czechoslovakia and Hungary. The Russians were in a defensive posture as they built their military might. They were using Eastern Europe as a buffer against any repetition of the ravages of war they had experienced at the hands of Germany.

    And the huge multi-trillion dollar buildup of nuclear armaments and NATO forces—what were we defending? We had our forces amassed, including nuclear weapons parked in eight NATO countries on their continent. And when we were the only country on the planet in possession of the bomb—after Hiroshima and Nagasaki– we refused to turn it over to international control under UN auspices, which had been urged by Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the bomb. Instead President Truman insisted on an unfair advantage for the US in his Baruch plan—letting the American people think he was being reasonable, pretending to present fair terms for controlling the bomb which in reality impelled Stalin to get his own bomb—putting us into a tragic and costly arms race—imperiling our own national security and the entire fate of the earth.

    Nothing has changed. The Empire has no clothes. It has been revealed. Having unilaterally withdrawn from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with Russia, the US is leading NATO to build a ring of missiles round Russia in Europe. It is globalizing its military forces and operations. An armada of missile-laden NATO war ships is deployed in oceans around the world with nearly 1,000 US military bases on every continent on the planet. Working in this expanded military capacity, NATO members and their allies are encircling China in the Pacific, just as we are surrounding Russia, while rejecting Russia and China’s repeated proposals to negotiate a ban on weapons in space. NATO is a lawless rogue alliance, determined to control the world’s oil and other scarce resources, by brute force.

    The US first led NATO into illegal action when it bombed Kosovo in the interests of “protecting” people, without the UN’s legally required authorization for any acts of warfare that are not taken in self-defense against an armed attack as required by the UN Charter. The US and its NATO allies refused to go to the UN for permission to enter into hostilities, as required under the UN Charter, because Russia was threatening to veto any such action in the Security Council to protect its ally, Serbia. Despite the lip service NATO gave to some sort of trumped up “responsibility to protect” Kosovo’s Albanians, (by bombing the Serbians to smithereens) Clinton was on the record saying: “If we’re going to have a strong economic relationship that includes our ability to sell around the world, Europe has got to be a key …. That’s what this Kosovo thing is all about.”1

    It’s beyond belief that NATO’s assault on Libya is only about “protecting civilians” while at the same time hundreds of civilians are being killed by NATO bombs and drones. Here too NATO’s old boy colonial network is seeking to secure Libya’s oil. NATO is now engaged in three wars in Libya, Afghanistan, and Iraq. The US is also bombing blindly away in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia as well, with “pilots” sitting at their computers and playing with their joysticks, lawlessly targeting “terrorists” with their unmanned drones, raining death and destruction down on the unseen people below, assassinating those whom they suspect may be wishing to do harm, without evidence, trial, finding of guilt, along with a host of innocent men, women and children.

    It’s time to disband NATO. There will be a NATO summit meeting in Chicago, in May 2012. Grassroots activists are organizing around the world to gather at a counter summit in Chicago to restore the rule of law as a means of resolving international disputes and to voice a new vision of global security and peace. To sign on to this new Call for Action and make common cause with the movement to disband NATO, contact: Judith LeBlanc jleblanc@peaceaction.org or Joseph Gerson jgerson@afsc.org.

  • Ten Years, Ten Lessons

    David KriegerSeptember 11, 2001 was a traumatizing day for the United States.  The photographs of the airplanes crashing into the World Trade Towers are still haunting, and the senseless loss of life is still painful.  Images of the burning trade towers and people jumping to their deaths are indelibly etched into the minds of those who saw them.

    U.S. policy decisions after 9/11 have turned what began as a traumatizing day into a traumatizing decade for the United States and the world.  It is not clear what our political leaders have learned over the span of these ten years, but here are some lessons that seem clear to me:

    1. The United States, despite its vast military power, was and remains vulnerable.  Our borders are not inviolate.  Our citizens may be attacked on our own territory.

    2. The U.S. is not hated for its freedom, as President George W. Bush opined, but for its policies in supporting dictatorial and repressive regimes, particularly in the Middle East.  Whatever freedoms the American people had on 9/11 have been greatly restricted over the past decade by the Patriot Act and other measures to increase governmental powers.

    3. Wars are costly and they undermine economic prosperity at home.  The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have overdrawn the U.S. budget and helped to create the current economic malaise in the country.

    4. American leaders are willing to lie the country into war, specifically the war in Iraq.  We should have learned this lesson from the Vietnam War.  There has been no accountability for the initiation of an aggressive war, as there was for the German leaders who were tried and convicted at Nuremburg following World War II for their crimes against peace.

    5. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have injured and killed large numbers of civilians.  For each terrorist who has been killed, more terrorists have been recruited to expand their numbers.  What the Bush administration called the “Global War on Terror,” and the Obama administration prefers to call the “Overseas Contingency Operation,” is unwinnable by military means and likely to be endless.

    6. A volunteer military can be used and abused with little response from the American people.  Large numbers of volunteer soldiers have served multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.

    7. Despite the illegality and moral repugnance of torture, American officials have been willing to engage in it and, as in the case of Dick Cheney, many remain unrepentant for its use.

    8. President Obama’s expansion of the war in Afghanistan has shown that there is bipartisan political support for keeping the flames of war burning.

    After the U.S. was attacked on 9/11, it had the sympathy of the world.  By its policies of endless war, the U.S. long ago lost those sympathies.  If the U.S. wants to find a more decent foundation on which to rest its policies, I would hope that it would be based upon these two larger lessons:

    9. War is not the answer to dealing with the threat of terrorism.

    10. The way forward is with policies that are legal (under U.S. and international law), moral (demonstrating appropriate care for the innocent) and thoughtful (not based in hubris, alienating to the rest of the world and conducive to creating more terrorists).

    Sadly, at the ten-year anniversary of 9/11, the U.S. seems lacking in sufficient self-reflection to grapple with these lessons.