Letter Never Sent

Looks like hope for sanity on Iraq is dying. Think now of all the people who will die in the next few months and weeks when our government goes to war. I’m repulsed.

Bush issues ultimatum on Iraq:

“The Iraqi regime will disarm itself or the Iraqi regime will be disarmed by force – and the regime has not disarmed itself, ” Mr Bush said.

He said the Iraqi leader was a threat to the peace of free nations, and a cruel oppressor of the Iraqi people.

What a charade. The attempts at a diplomatic solution by the US were nothing but craven political calculation. It’s disgusting the way power is used by the elite. War pays dividends if you’re in the right clubs: oil, defense, finance. Remember, war is a racket. It would arguably be beneficial to the US if we suffered a humiliating defeat. No power should rule unchecked, the power of other nations should always balance out a stronger power.

The military sends troops armed with big budgets and 38 lb. cameras to film that good old American propaganda. Make no mistake, these are not journalists. They’re trained parrots. Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil. They’ve gone through the rigorous conditioning perfected by our armed forces. Coming to a theatre near you, 4-minute displays of American machismo, self-righteousness, and down home, simple-minded ‘patriotism’. I can just see all these credulous 19-22 year olds: “This is for you mom and dad! We’re fighting for freedom!” as they load munitions worth more than they’ll ever earn in a lifetime onto jets, tanks, and missile batteries. Stupid, so stupid.

The Dow jumped nearly 3.6 percent today with the news of delays to Bush War 2. As US Rep. Ron Paul points out in an previous post, war is actually harmful to the economy. This is not even to mention the waste involved with destroying valuable property, people, families, and internationational relationships.

The Myth of War Prosperity by Rep. Ron Paul

There is a commonly-held myth that war creates prosperity. Many believe that World War II ended the Great Depression. Unemployment went down because hundreds of thousands of men were drafted, and factories at home busied themselves with war production. This provided the illusion of a bustling wartime economy. But in truth the economy shrank and GDP plummeted. The hidden costs were enormous, because so much human energy and human capital was expended fighting the war rather than doing productive, specialized work back home. …

The greatest economic cost of war, however, comes from the expansion in the size and scope of government. Government always grows during wars and other crises. As economist Murray Rothbard noted, government uses crises to “Engineer the great leaps forward,” in the size of the state. When the crisis ends, government never returns to its former size. As government expands, individual liberty necessarily shrinks. True prosperity cannot exist without individual liberty and its corollaries of limited government, property rights, and free markets. Ultimately, war leaves us with less freedom at home. The sad irony is that while our soldiers have fought for the freedom of Europe, Korea, Vietnam, Kuwait, and Iraq, the government uses war to steadily diminish freedom here at home. While we fight a war in Iraq, we must also fight to maintain and restore individual liberty in America.

From Antiwar.com: MTV Refuses Antiwar Commercial: Mtv has refused to accept a commercial opposing a war in Iraq, citing a policy against advocacy spots that it says protects the channel from having to run ads from any cash-rich interest group whose cause may be loathsome.

Most networks and media spigots have policies of non-advocacy yet they run advertisements for the military and promote all sorts of ‘patriotic’ ie. nationalist crap. It’s hypocrisy.

Our government has been peddling a pack of lies. The whole case against Iraq amounts to a deception. As Heather pointed out, the US intelligence that Iraq had been seeking nuclear materials for a nuclear weapons program was fabricated. In other words, our government used false information because it suits their purposes and then tried to fool the rest of the world with it to garner support for their military takeover. The government has been trying to link Hussein to bin Laden since 1993 after the first WTC bombing. With a budget of trillions they have found NOTHING. It is a lie. As for regimes supporting terrorist, we have been guilty of that. When bin Laden was our ‘terrorist’, a mujahadeen fighting against the Soviets using the same guerrilla tactics, he was a freedom fighter. When we funded the Taliban and helped build Islamic training schools in Pakistan to ‘destabilize’ the Soviet Union with terrorism we were supporting ‘freedom’. Our freedom loving government brought Islamic radicals to the US to learn ‘sabotage techniques’. Now to me, this means terrorism.

If you think for a moment, you’ll realize that governments will always use ‘terrorists’ or guerrillas or partisans as proxies. This is the reality of warfare now. When you use or support ‘terrorists’, which most governments do, you make it very difficult to trace who did what and you can launch covert wars without any governmental or public oversight. To the military and to war planners terrorism is a beautiful thing so long as it is not used against you. The US funds terror groups. At the very least, they have in the past. We funded bin Laden a few years ago to do the same things he has been doing now against American interests. He was just as much of a zealot then as now.

Our government has no ethical problem with terrorism. That must be clear. Any claim to the contrary is a lie. We have supported narco-trafficking fascist guerrillas in Central America, narco-trafficking Islamic radicals in the Mideast, narco-trafficking Albanian Islamic ‘freedom fighters’, the Phillipine’s Abu Sayyaf, terrorists in Italy, even White Russian guerrillas against the Bolsheviks way back in 1918. Terrorists everywhere owe a debt to the US government.

According to most sources around 185 million people (185,000,000) died in all the wars, massacres, slaughters and oppressions of the Twentieth Century. Using this equation, that’s 573.5 million pounds of brain matter, 231 million gallons of blood, 14 million tons of bone and flesh, 8.5 billion years of life that will never be lived, and untold millions who will never be born. The cost to human civilization and progress due to war is too high to pay. We cannot stand by quietly while those who purport to speak in our name and with our voice gird themselves to spill more innocent blood and prepare to wreak more havoc and more man-made armageddon against their fellow men. It’s sickening and I dare anyone to justify any of it.

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. This 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 clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron. – Dwight Eisenhower

Parameters, a publication of the Army War College, often has some good articles. It’s a good window into how the defense establishment thinks and operates. New issue is out for Spring 2003.

PARAMETERS: US Army War College Quarterly, Spring 2003, Vol. XXXIII, No. 1

1. Taiwan: National pride is perhaps the prime motive for capturing Taiwan. Chinese leaders see Taiwan as the last vestige of the humiliation by Japan and the West during the colonial period when imperial powers carved China into spheres of influence. China reclaimed Hong Kong, the British colony, in 1997, and Macau, the Portuguese colony, in 1999. Taking Taiwan would complete that trilogy and end the civil war with the Nationalists.
2. The China Factor in the India-Pakistan Conflict
3. Sino-US Military Relations Since Tiananmen: Restoration, Progress, and Pitfalls: China handles its military relations independently, and conducts military exchanges and cooperation with other countries on the basis of the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence. Military diplomacy should serve the state’s overall diplomacy and the modernization of national defense and the armed forces. In pursuance of this purpose the PLA has actively engaged in external contacts and exchanges in a flexible and practical manner, and made sustained efforts for enhanced mutual trust, friendship, and cooperation with armed forces of other countries, and for regional and world peace, stability, and development.
4. North Korea’s Military Strategy
5. The Concept and Practice of Jihad in Islam: Islamic militancy is still not well understood by Americans. This is partly due to the secrecy which radical Islamic groups practice to protect themselves from the authorities and from outsiders who do not share their views and aims, but also because Western public communications media frequently tend to marginalize such groups. They are dismissed as religious fanatics, anti-Western hooligans, or mindless terrorists, without making an attempt to comprehend the deep discontents that have produced these Islamic groups’ violent actions or the logic of their radical cause which compels them to behave as they do.
6. Nuclear Smuggling: Patterns and Responses
7. Al Qaeda and the Internet: The Danger of “Cyberplanning”: The Internet allows groups with few resources to offset even some huge propaganda machines in advanced countries. The web is an attractive device to those looking for a way to attack major powers via the mass media. The “always on” status of the web allows these individuals not only to access sites day and night but also to scold major powers and treat them with disdain in a public forum. The web can be used to counter facts and logic with the logic of the terrorist. There is no need for the terrorist organization to worry about “the truth,” because ignoring facts is a standard operating procedure.

   Al Qaeda uses polemics on the net not only to offset Western reporting, but also to counter Muslims who don’t toe the party line. It defends the conduct of its war against the West and encourages violence. The web is important to al Qaeda because it can be used to enrage people and neutralize moderate opinion. The website of the Center for Islamic Studies and Research (according to one source, a made-up name), for example, has 11 sections, including reports on fighting in Afghanistan, world media coverage of the conflict, books on jihad theology, videos of hijackers’ testaments, information about prisoners held in Pakistan and Guantanamo Bay, and jihad poetry.26

   It does not pay for any major power to lie, as facts can be easily used against them. Even in the war in Chechnya, there were times when the Chechens would report a successful ambush of a Russian convoy, and the Russians would deny the event ever happened. To prove their point, the Chechens would show video footage of the ambush on the Internet, thus offsetting the credibility of the Russian official media and undercutting the power of their massive propaganda machine. Al Qaeda officials are waiting to do the same to Western media reporting if the opportunity presents itself. In other words, the internet makes government lies more risky.

8. Four Myths about
   Space Power: One way is through special forces actions. Given the growing power of small groups of people to inflict destruction, states may turn to developing massive special operations forces for spreading chaos behind an enemy’s lines. The Soviet Union had a force of 25,000 Spetsnaz troops who would have been unleashed en masse against Western targets from communications and transport systems to nuclear weapons facilities in the event of a third world war.14 North Korea has over 100,000 soldiers in its own special forces units, presumably intended to wreak havoc behind South Korean lines in a future conflict.15 It goes without saying that the chaos created by the most destructive attack a terrorist group like al Qaeda could stage pales compared to what such robust forces could accomplish given the chance.