Date: Sun, 12 Oct 2003 18:02:31 -0700 From: Judy <jaw-AT-earthlink.net> Subject: Re: Endless War Paul said, or quoted: >What do any of you really know about war? For those of you who might live >in the US, you don't need to look as far away as Iraq to find a state of >war. All you have to do is look south, towards Mexico. > >For those of you in Europe, all you have to do is look east, towards >Chechnya or south, towards Algeria. > >How many of you who speak of war as if you know something about it, have >actually ever lived in a war zone or been anywhere near one? > >But let's looks away from Iraq for one moment, where so many of you have >suddenly found an social conscience and look south, towards Juarez, >Mexico, just across the border from El Paso, Texas. Do you imagine that a person can only look one way at a time? Is that how it is for you? Do you not wish to invest any care about the atrocity of the US occupation of Iraq? As for me, i am in the US. Last time I looked, my country is waging war on Afghanistan and Iraq, and is rattling sabers at a number of other countries. I brace myself to one day soon here that my country's people have been accepted as "military advisors" into the Philippines conflict. The victims in those countries are real enough. What makes it especially gutwrenching for me is that it is MY people, MY leaders, MY tax contribution, and in MY name, that these wars are victimizing people far away from me. These geographically distant wars are not far removed Americans emotionally and spiritually, and certainly not financially, as paying for them robs us of material resources we need here at home. Billions a month. Can anyone even begin to conceive of the cost to not just Americans but to all people of such waste? members of my society are placed in military uniforms, to go half way around the world and remove other peoples' governments and to war continuously against their people who fight for their countries' freedom from foreign occupation. As time goes by, first it's just an occasional acquaintance, and then, increasingly, there are people i know who's children are soldiers permanently damaged by this war, the personal relationship to canon fodder. My country's leaders manipulate my fellow citizens into believing this warring is righteous, necessary self defense by the good people agasint the evil people, and most of my fellow americans buy into this, fearful that if they don't support their leaders and support such violence against those in other countries, we here will be attacked by "terrorists." To be sure, the people in New York City have experienced a war zone, the nature of which has been interpreted only by untrustworthy opportunist members of the Bush administration and their media cheerleaders. We don't really know what happened to New York or the Pentagon, but whatever it was, it was some kind of war. The mother of twin girls who were classmates of my daughter, who i met and shared warm conversation with at Back to School night when they were freshmen. died on one of the hijacked planes. I think it was the one that crashed in Pennsylvania. My daughter's friends lost their mother. war reaches out and touches far and wide. The lying bush administration told our people that this was the beginning of the endless war on terror, deftly manipulating the fear created by 911 and "the anthrax scare" as it's been called. Just as fear was so deftly used during WWII to intern people of Japanese descent in the US, robbing them of untold value of their property, homes and businesses, dislocating and demolishing families, yes, taking people during the night and disappearing them, beating people, shooting them in the back, just as that was accomplished by using fear of war in an opportunist manipulative way, 911, whatever it was, has been used to restore opium production in Afghanistan, to place puppet governments in Iraq and Kabul, to get the deal for the gas and oil pipeline from central asia to the gulf that the Taliban refused to agree to, to position Americans for direct access to Iraqi resources, to position the American military in a place for easy waging of war on Iran, Somalia, Syria and others, perhaps to further Greater Israel, one would think given the position of Wolfowitz, Perle, Cheney and others on Zionist Pacs and think tanks. If the US government trully cared about the Iraqi people, they never would've perpetrated the sanctions on them. Perhaps they would've supported the Shi'ite uprising in the south following the first gulf war, the uprising they encouraged and suggested they would support, and then left the Shi'ites out to dry, mission accomplished, the Baghdad regime's resources were tied up and depleted in yet another military demand, the putting down of outright civil rebebellion. And all the better, the killings by the regime of the rebels then provided propaganda to prove the saddam regime was somehow more evil and brutal than any other. If Washington reallly cared about the northern Iraqis, they would not have left the Kurds hanging out to dry so many times throughout the 80s, encouraging them to rebel, implying support would be there, only to turn away from the perfectly understandable repression of the rebellion by the Baghdad regime, and to have donald Rumsfeld shake Saddam's hand at a photo op. To hear it told in the US media/government, Saddam was a crazed hitleresque devil when he gassed the Kurds. We don't here about how the Kurdish village that was gassed was assisting the Iranians in their war agaisnt Iraq. What is to be expected if a group within a sovereign state activedly militarily supports that state's enemies in a war? It's legtimate use of coercian to put down such rebellions by whatever means it takes. do many americans know that this is exactly what the British rulers did to the Kurds in Iraq when it was they were the targets of Kurdish rebellion? The British military leaders of the day (the mid 20s) are on record as saying that the results of gassing the Kurds were quite delightful in their quick effectiveness. Yet that's not the perspective that most people have on the story of why the US had to "topple Saddam." Lies, manipulations. Countries that don't face armed rebellion by groups within their own societies have the luxury of being able to claim governing by the rule of law and without brutality. Yet look what happened when David Koresch and his people created an armed camp based on anti US government beliefs and goals, in the state of Texas, near the town of Waco. The US government showed itself to be as capable as Saddam Hussein and the Taliban of dealing with such rebellion within its midst. A whole society of men women and children were incinerated by the US government. That's what states do. It's considered "legitimate coercian." But according to US mythology, what is legitimate for Americans and their allies is not legitimate for their chosen enemies. Americans can have stockpiles of nuclear weapons, but not north korea. Americans can have stockpiles of any WMD you can imagine and more, but not Iraq. Americans can legitimately use nuclear weapons such as in Hiroshima and in the now being planned "limited nuclear attacks" with "mini nukes" and "bunker buster nukes", but if a country named on the axis of evil should threaten to use nukes, they are fair game to be annihilated, not to mention, placed under trade and aid blockade and starved into deep poverty. This is war. Now we have the endless war on terror. The nature of this war is shrouded in mystery and heavily laden in mythical meanings, and is the best tool for leading the country by use of fear mongering since the best days of the cold war when americans would support any atrocity anywhere out of fear that "communists" would crawl up on their shores and "enslave" us. The communist threat finally lost all salience, and now we have the endless war on terror. Guess what? this IS a war zone. Without the money taken from my paycheck, no such warrring would be possible. Against my will, I am drug into paying for the slaughter and project of world domination. Agaisnt my will and my good judgement, I am being set up to be a potential target of people in the countries victimized by my country who may need to blow up me and peolple i am personally attached to in their efforts to rid themselves of this very real much too real war by the Americans agaisnt Iraq and Afghanistan, with more wars against other far away people percolating on the backburner, waiting in the wings to be foisted on target peoples, the american people and the people of the world, aggaisnt their will and a gaisnt what they know is right, using fear mongering to sustain legtimacy as long as they can keep cultivating and manufacturing "terrorist threats." Until the US came in, there was no "terrorist" activity in Iraq, no exploding trucks, demolished buildings, and politically targetted murders. there was only the violence of the Iraq regime agaisnt its enemies. That violence should've been the target of worldwide opposition and of various non warring tactics to pressure the regime to respect human rights. In fact, according to Amnesty International, the regime did have concern about its image in this regard, and may have been workable. However, that was not the agenda of Washington. It suited the US better if Saddam was brutal to his enemies, as Aemricans had been to the people in Waco Texas. The more bad PR for Saddam the better. Foment rebellion agaisnt him by Kurds and southern Shi'ites, and his predictable response, predictable for any government facing such rebellion, would be useful to legtimate a war on Iraq that adds so much more torment to the people there. The kind of war that i have, as an american, been drug into all my life, has been war by powerful incredibly rich resource wasting US armies, against small weak poor powerless peoples, while somehow the leaders of America manage with smoke and mirrors to convince most Americans that it's the small weak people who are the terrifying monster, while our country is the heroic and generous courageous white knight, trying to make the world pure and secure, free of evil. So i know about war. all though the wars were half way around the world, my own friends and relatives were sent to fight them. When they returned and we talked, i found some addicted to heroin, some traumatized psychologically and not able to work to supprt themselves, and some physically wounded, missing a limb. All had lost friends in battle and had watched more than their share of horror. Two of my friends' sons, friends at my job, members of the low paid clerical staff,of course, have sons in Baghdad. I wrote letters to one of them, even though i don't know him well, just becuase his mom has been my friend since he was about 7 years old, and she told me the soldiers live to get mail. Now he's home. He's very quiet now, she says. Our other friend, her son is still there. He had been in the military for 19 years and was about to retire, he's a sergeant. Now he is very much at risk of being killed. I have to experience the unpleasant inner conflict of feeling compassion for these people while at the same time, hating what they do by giving their bodies to be used as fodder for this war against poeple in Afghanistan and Iraq, people who have never done us any harm nor intended to do us any harm, like the peasants of vietnam. I hurt and i cry almost every day from knowing that my leaders are using my money and my country's people to commit atrocities and to dominate far away people. It's not a new found social conscience. I wish it was. I wish it was a new thing that America is suddenly using its terrible wealth and power to harm people in far away lands who would never have harmed me, yet it's done in my name and using the resources of my society that i have contributed to. For almost as long as I can remember, i've suffered from this lonely grief, in the midst of a sea of americans who support the wars, believing in their sheep-like naivete that their US leaders have only their best interests at heart, and are fighting for our freedom and our secuirty, against demonic enemies who are out to bury and enslave us, to take away our way of life, our rights to have big screen TVs and SUVs, to watch X rated movies, to listen to rock and to wear sexually revealing clothes. Most Americans I know who even bother to try to think at all about why we are fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan tell me that if we don't, those muslim fundamentalists will come here to the US and use anthrax to bring us to submission and then, make us wear burqas and djabas and to pray to mecca all day, and to never be able to freely talk dirty again in public. If I mention the US military occupation of Saudi Arabia and others, and US support of the Israeli occupation of Palestine, their eyes glaze over, "does not compute." They think i'm just trying to confuse them so that they can be taken over and enslaved. This is how war is waged, in the battle for public opinion in the struggle for legitimation. War of this nature is quite real to me, over the past 40 years of my life. that is much too long. It has been hurting for too long, and it promises to get much worse before it can get better, if there is any hope that it can get better which is hard to see. thank you for the opportunity to ventillate a small amount of all the pent up grief and anguish that i live with, my social conscience suddenly discovered 40 years ago. Is it a social conscience? My interests are selfish. Like you, i want a different kind of world. judy > >And I won't even speak about the rapes and murders and disappearances of >young Mexican women working for approximately $3.00 to $4.00 dollars a day >in US owned factories, just south of the border. Women who, on their way >to work, get kidnapped by guys who rape them and kill them. The yound >girls who work in the maquiladoras, the foreign-owned factories, the young >girls who leave for work when it is still dark and often don't make it to >work alive. No, I won't go into details, I'll spare your delicate >sensibilities, so you can focus your high-minded thoughts on the people of >Iraq, who no one seemed to care about as long as Saddam Hussein was >slaughering them. > >So let's look away from Iraq, where you've suddenly found a social >conscience and south towards Juarez Mexico for just a moment.
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