My Pro-Peace Post

Samar Hassan screams after her parents were shot by U.S. troops in Tal Afar in January 2005.

Hussein and Camila Hassan died when they failed to stop their car at a checkpoint.

Photo courtesy Chris Hondros/Getty Images.

“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.”

~ Former Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower

I’m with the hippies on this ‘peace is preferable to war’ thing.

I’m opposed to war unless an enemy is threatening us on our own soil or territories.

We have soldiers deployed in 150 countries around the world; more than 205,000 of our 1,425,000 active-duty military personnel are serving outside of the United States. We have troops all over the globe – in Africa and the Middle East, Japan, South Korea, Germany, Italy and Spain, among other locales. We even have troops in Canada and Greenland.

Why?

I should know better than to assume our leaders cherish peace. We’ve been at war longer than we’ve been at peace (see image at right) – from the Revolutionary War (1775 to 1783) , Civil War (1861 to 1865) and World Wars I and II (1914 to 1918 and 1941 to 1945, respectively) to Vietnam (1962 to 1973), Operation Desert Storm (1991 to 1992) and Operation Iraqi Freedom (2003 to 2011). (Sadly, I’ve left a number of wars and military actions out of this paragraph.)

Now the POTUS and others are hinting at war with Iran, which has threatened to stop the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz if the U.S. and our allies impose sanctions because of its nuclear ambitions. (This is a big deal because 20 to 30 percent of the world’s oil supply passes through this waterway each day.) It’s nonsensical to go to war with Iran to prevent Iran from causing war – and why aren’t we as worried about Pakistan, North Korea and Russia, all of which already have nukes, as we are about Iran?

The American Enterprise Institute – a conservative, “inside the beltway” think tank that boasts loony former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton and current GOP philanderer frontrunner Newt Gingrich as fellows – admitted that Iran may not be the Evil Empire that hawks and right wingers claim:

"The biggest problem for the United States is not Iran getting a nuclear weapon and testing it, it's Iran getting a nuclear weapon and not using it. Because the second that they have one and they don't do anything bad, all of the naysayers are going to come back and say, 'See, we told you Iran is a responsible power. We told you Iran wasn't getting nuclear weapons in order to use them immediately.'...And they will eventually define Iran with nuclear weapons as not a problem."

Gee, maybe there's something to the claim that we go to war to make some people rich (no-bid Halliburton contract, Mr. Cheney?) and perpetuate a particular ideology rather than to preserve freedom or promote democracy.

I’ve written before about being disappointed that President Obama has curried favor with hawks and made a mockery of his Nobel Peace Prize in the process, so I won’t beat that dead horse anymore – except to say that as long as the guy who broke his campaign promise about Iraq, ramped things up in Afghanistan before winding things down, and launched military action in Pakistan, Libya, Somalia and Yemen insists on marching us to war with Iran, he’s going to find a lot of people sitting on their hands in disgust this coming November 6.

We can’t even count on U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whom I thought was a woman, to stand up to pro-war males and serve as a voice for reason in the administration, to prove that Madeleine Albright and Condoleezza Rice were anomalies, that female Secretaries of State can urge continued diplomacy and promote alternatives to the wholesale destruction of villages, cities, countries, families and human lives. (Albright reportedly once argued for the use of military force in Kosovo and Bosnia by asking Colin Powell, “What’s the point of you saving this superb military for, Colin, if we can't use it?”)

That’s too bad because as we’ve seen time and time again, war makes people do really bad things. Just ask those who knew 14-year-old Abeer Qasim Hamza al-Janabi, who was gang-raped raped and murdered (and whose parents and younger sister were slaughtered) by five American soldiers in Mahmudiyah, Iraq, in March of 2006, or anyone who remembers the Holocaust, with its pogroms and concentration camps and the mass murder of six million Jews by the Nazis during World War II, or the slaughter of 500 unarmed civilians by U.S. Army soldiers in My Lai, South Vietnam, in 1968, or anyone who viewed the recent video of U.S. Marines urinating on the bodies of dead Afghanis.

During the 2000 presidential campaign, Dubya stated that he opposed nation building and foreign military entanglements – he said in a debate that he wasn’t sure the role of the United States was to go around and say to other countries, “This is the way it’s got to be” – and then promptly did just that, ignoring millions around the world who protested against bombing Iraq and waging war in Afghanistan. Together, these despicable enterprises have cost thousands of human lives and $1,296,182,660,793 and counting.

For what?

Why do we posture and pretend to value human life – even going so far as to restrict the legal right of American women to control their own bodies and abort their fetuses – while tacitly approving the abuse and murder of those whose only crimes are that their skin color, language and/or religion are different or they’re in the wrong place at the wrong time?

I know most soldiers don’t cross over to the Dark Side – although last I checked, killing was part of the job – and it’s worth repeating that you can support our troops and be grateful to them for risking their lives and sacrificing so much while at the same time opposing the conflicts in which they’re participating. (Whenever I spot a “Support Our Troops” bumper sticker on the road - usually on a minivan or sport-utility vehicle - I always have to resist the urge to pull up alongside the driver and shout, “How?! How are you supporting our soldiers? What are you doing to support ‘em besides slapping a 12-inch by three-inch sticker on your gas-guzzling SUV?”)

The best way to support our troops is to stop putting them in harm’s way for oil or nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, to bring them home to their spouses and children and parents, and to vote for politicians who believe that war should be a last resort, not a Tier One policy option.

I can overlook some political differences but this testosterone-driven, narrow-minded chest-beating, saber-rattling, weapon-brandishing, "let’s-bomb-‘em-‘cause-sanctions-failed" policy, this predilection for violence and mass murder on the part of politicians is shameful, barbaric and beneath us as evolved human beings, as men and women of the 21st Century.

I’m not some naïve, flighty, Department of Peace-wanting, Ron Paul-supporting isolationist and I rely on oil in my daily life just like everybody else. I realize it would be challenging to heat my house, drive my car or maintain a comfortable lifestyle using less or alternative energy. But I’m willing to try, to make changes. It’s not worth the death of innocent people. It’s not worth the sleepless nights and the blood being shed in my name.

Call me a wuss or hippy or peacenik or bleeding heart liberal if you must. I’ll just turn the other cheek.

“I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.”

~ Five-Star General Dwight D. Eisenhower 

Sources: Huffington Post, Warisacrime.org, CBS News, Costofwar.com.