Happy Christmas: The War is Over

In December 2011 the United States formally ended its military presence in Iraq.  Happy Christmas: the war is over.

President Obama addressed returning (and cheering) troops at Fort Bragg:

"It’s harder to end a war than begin one. Indeed, everything that American troops have done in Iraq -– all the fighting and all the dying, the bleeding and the building, and the training and the partnering -– all of it has led to this moment of success. Now, Iraq is not a perfect place. It has many challenges ahead. But we’re leaving behind a sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq, with a representative government that was elected by its people. We’re building a new partnership between our nations. And we are ending a war not with a final battle, but with a final march toward home."

It is harder to end a war than to begin one.Yes, a bitter truth some of us were crying out in 2003--it is the tragic fact that letting loose the dogs of war is much much easier than reigning them back in. So nearly 9 years of pain and waste later, at least a trillion dollars spent, hundreds of thousands of lives lost and maimed, millions of lives deformed, and our entire political process so fractured that we are unable to respond to the real threats we face, this terrible and quite possibly catastrophic war is over.

President Obama ended the U.S. policy of torture, though he has not yet managed to reign in some of the other excesses of the Bush wars.  But as a candidate, Barack Obama promised to end the Iraq war. He did what he promised, and continues to be castigated for it in shameful terms by mad dog GOPers in Congress and running for president. Several of those candidates--who dare not mention the name of President Bush--are calling for even more reckless military action.   Let's hope the American people leash them up good in the next election.

Words from another dark time, in the post below.

From Another Dark Time

"Every man lives in two realms, the internal and the external. The internal is that realm of spiritual ends expressed in art, literature, morals, and religion. The external is that complex of devices, techniques, mechanisms, and instrumentalities by means of which we live. Our problem today is that we have allowed the internal to become lost in the external. We have allowed the means by which we live to outdistance the ends for which we live.

This is the serious predicament, the deep and haunting problem confronting modern man. If we are to survive today, our moral and spiritual "lag" must be eliminated. Enlarged material powers spell enlarged peril if there is not proportionate growth of the soul. When the "without" of man's nature subjugates the "within", dark storm clouds begin to form in the world."
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"Sooner or later all the people of the world will have to discover a way to live together in peace, and thereby transform this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. If this is to be achieved, man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.

I refuse to accept despair as the final response to the ambiguities of history. I refuse to accept the idea that the "isness" of man's present nature makes him morally incapable of reaching up for the eternal "oughtness" that forever confronts him. I refuse to accept the idea that man is mere flotsom and jetsom in the river of life, unable to influence the unfolding events which surround him. I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality.

I refuse to accept the cynical notion that nation after nation must spiral down a militaristic stairway into the hell of thermonuclear destruction. I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right temporarily defeated is stronger than evil triumphant. I believe that even amid today's mortar bursts and whining bullets, there is still hope for a brighter tomorrow."

--from Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Acceptance Speech for the Nobel Peace Prize, December 10, 1964.

Not So Retro Today

Fewer Americans understand the dangers that nuclear weapons and nuclear war still pose. Few will recall that the peace symbol's original meaning was in support of nuclear disarmament in England. So it's fitting that it was in England yesterday that a new start to controlling nuclear weapons began. See the post below.

Returning to the Path Towards A Nuclear Free World

It's been nearly twenty years since most Americans felt the daily threat of thermonuclear war and the instant end of the world as we know it. With the demise of the Soviet Union, that threat seemed to disappear, but though it diminished, it did not really go away. The U.S. and Russia have enough nukes pointed at each other to destroy both countries, and subsequent studies show the chance of accidental nuclear war is even higher than it was in the 1980s.

Just months before he was killed, President Kennedy fought for and obtained the first treaty between the superpowers that even attempted to slow the nuclear arms race, with the nuclear test ban treaty. Other treaties followed, and nuclear weapons were even destroyed. But the Bushites withdrew American participation in such international treaties, including the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, and made plans for more nukes.

So it was an historic step--but more than that, a vital step--that President Obama took yesterday in his meeting with the Russian president. You probably didn't hear about it, because after decades of one kind of denial, we're deep into another kind. We don't even know we're still in danger. We'd rather twitter about the Queen's new Ipod.

So for the record, there is this excerpt from the joint statement. Read it and rejoice:

As leaders of the two largest nuclear weapons states, we agreed to work together to fulfill our obligations under Article VI of the Treaty on Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) and demonstrate leadership in reducing the number of nuclear weapons in the world. We committed our two countries to achieving a nuclear free world, while recognizing that this long-term goal will require a new emphasis on arms control and conflict resolution measures, and their full implementation by all concerned nations. We agreed to pursue new and verifiable reductions in our strategic offensive arsenals in a step-by-step process, beginning by replacing the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty with a new, legally-binding treaty. We are instructing our negotiators to start talks immediately on this new treaty and to report on results achieved in working out the new agreement by July.

First Family of Peace

In a way it seems like a dream, especially after the past eight years. But Barack Obama is about to become President of the United States. In the top photo, he is with his two daughters--the older one, Malia, is wearing a peace sign. In the second photo, his younger daughter, Sasha, has peace signs on her shoulder as she goes off to her first day of school in Washington, to the Sidwell Friends School, run by the Quakers.

Never Forget

Yes, We Can

A President of Peace

The hot air networks will isolate soundbites and applause lines, the wire services will emphasize Obama's call for a united front against terrorism, especially in Afghanistan. But Barack Obama's speech today before a quarter of a million Europeans--some who came from Poland and the Netherlands and across Europe to Berlin to hear him--was a call for a greater unity, for a world united to foster equality, freedom and peace.

He used the Berlin airlift of 1948 as his central metaphor--the moment, so soon after the horrific bombings that turned many cities in Europe and Japan into literal holocausts--that wave upon wave of American airplanes dropped not bombs but food, to sustain the people of West Berlin.

He used the partnership of the U.S. and Germany that began after World War II and has survived for 60 years as a symbol of the partnerships that has transformed the continent which plunged the world into war twice in the 20th century into a peaceful Union, the United States of Europe that dreamers like novelist James Joyce hoped for.

He used this Union as a symbol for a partnership of peoples around the world, that dreamers like H. G. Wells advocated as the only means that humankind would survive and prosper on this planet. While Obama spoke of his pride in being an American, and of America ideals as a model for the world, he did not shrink from calling himself a citizen of the world.

He spoke of our planetary crises, that bind our fates together and therefore should bring us together in peaceful resolution: nuclear weapons proliferation, and the Climate Crisis.

And from across the Atlantic, we could hear the chants in Berlin: Yes, we can.

So in testimony to this wisdom and eloquence, here are parts of Obama's speech in Berlin today that you may not see highlighted anywhere else.

"Yes, there have been differences between America and Europe. No doubt, there will be differences in the future. But the burdens of global citizenship continue to bind us together. A change of leadership in Washington will not lift this burden. In this new century, Americans and Europeans alike will be required to do more - not less. Partnership and cooperation among nations is not a choice; it is the one way, the only way, to protect our common security and advance our common humanity.

This is the moment when we must renew the goal of a world without nuclear weapons. The two superpowers that faced each other across the wall of this city came too close too often to destroying all we have built and all that we love. With that wall gone, we need not stand idly by and watch the further spread of the deadly atom. It is time to secure all loose nuclear materials; to stop the spread of nuclear weapons; and to reduce the arsenals from another era. This is the moment to begin the work of seeking the peace of a world without nuclear weapons.

This is the moment when we must come together to save this planet. Let us resolve that we will not leave our children a world where the oceans rise and famine spreads and terrible storms devastate our lands. Let us resolve that all nations - including my own - will act with the same seriousness of purpose as has your nation, and reduce the carbon we send into our atmosphere. This is the moment to give our children back their future. This is the moment to stand as one.

And this is the moment when we must give hope to those left behind in a globalized world. We must remember that the Cold War born in this city was not a battle for land or treasure. Sixty years ago, the planes that flew over Berlin did not drop bombs; instead they delivered food, and coal, and candy to grateful children. And in that show of solidarity, those pilots won more than a military victory. They won hearts and minds; love and loyalty and trust - not just from the people in this city, but from all those who heard the story of what they did here.

Now the world will watch and remember what we do here - what we do with this moment. Will we extend our hand to the people in the forgotten corners of this world who yearn for lives marked by dignity and opportunity; by security and justice? Will we lift the child in Bangladesh from poverty, shelter the refugee in Chad, and banish the scourge of AIDS in our time? Will we stand for the human rights of the dissident in Burma, the blogger in Iran, or the voter in Zimbabwe? Will we give meaning to the words "never again" in Darfur?

Will we acknowledge that there is no more powerful example than the one each of our nations projects to the world? Will we reject torture and stand for the rule of law? Will we welcome immigrants from different lands, and shun discrimination against those who don't look like us or worship like we do, and keep the promise of equality and opportunity for all of our people?

People of Berlin - people of the world - this is our moment. This is our time. "

Guernica is not past

The painting by Picasso. The quote by Faulkner:
"The past is never dead. It's not even past.

J'Accuse!

This site is dedicated to exploring the skills that can make peace an ongoing project, a continuing and mostly successful process of solving problems and resolving conflicts without death and destruction.

But America is waging war, and so we must remind ourselves of what war means, and why developing and learning the skills of peace are so vitally important.

This month (last Saturday to be exact) marks the 71st anniversary of the German bombing of Guernica, which essentially inaugurated the mass terror bombing of World War II. Five bombing raids with incendiary bombs dropped from primitive aircraft resulted in some 1650 deaths in this small market town in Spain. By the end of World War II, bombers and missiles killed thousands in London in the Blitz, and massive numbers of sophisticated aircraft and powerful bombs killed 100,000 mostly civilians in Dresden and 130,00 in Tokyo, before the atomic bombs killed at least 280,000 in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Two generations later, much of the world has internalized the horror of that war, as well as the different but in some ways worse horrors of World War I. But America has not, argues Tony Judt in an indispensable article in the New York Review of Books. Some of our political thinkers even argue that such history--any history--is irrelevant as a guide to our present and future, because the bad old past is over, and things are different now.

So Judt asks the question in the title of his piece: "What Have We Learned, If Anything?" What's clear to him--and to me--is what we haven't learned: "In the US, at least, we have forgotten the meaning of war."

One of the main reasons is that in the 20th century, we were lucky. War hardly touched us--not the World Wars, not even the waves of terrorism that Europe experienced, let alone other parts of the world. But even though the lessons of those wars are available to us in accounts, in eloquent writings and filmmaking, we haven't learned them. Instead, we are going through what we should have learned to avoid. For example:

"World War I led to an unprecedented militarization of society, the worship of violence, and a cult of death that long outlasted the war itself and prepared the ground for the political disasters that followed. States and societies seized during and after World War II by Hitler or Stalin (or by both, in sequence) experienced not just occupation and exploitation but degradation and corrosion of the laws and norms of civil society. The very structures of civilized life—regulations, laws, teachers, policemen, judges—disappeared or else took on sinister significance: far from guaranteeing security, the state itself became the leading source of insecurity. Reciprocity and trust, whether in neighbors, colleagues, community, or leaders, collapsed. Behavior that would be aberrant in conventional circumstances—theft, dishonesty, dissemblance, indifference to the misfortune of others, and the opportunistic exploitation of their suffering—became not just normal but sometimes the only way to save your family and yourself. Dissent or opposition was stifled by universal fear.

War, in short, prompted behavior that would have been unthinkable as well as dysfunctional in peacetime. It is war, not racism or ethnic antagonism or religious fervor, that leads to atrocity. War—total war—has been the crucial antecedent condition for mass criminality in the modern era. "

Americans fought and died in the two world wars--but Over There. Americans could observe what happened in those societies, but the lessons didn't take. We didn't experience what they experienced, starting with the extent of death and destruction.

"In World War II, when the US lost about 420,000 armed forces in combat, Japan lost 2.1 million, China 3.8 million, Germany 5.5 million, and the Soviet Union an estimated 10.7 million. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., records the deaths of 58,195 Americans over the course of a war lasting fifteen years: but the French army lost double that number in six weeks of fighting in May–June 1940...

But it is civilian casualties that leave the most enduring mark on national memory and here the contrast is piquant indeed. In World War II alone the British suffered 67,000 civilian dead. In continental Europe, France lost 270,000 civilians. Yugoslavia recorded over half a million civilian deaths, Germany 1.8 million, Poland 5.5 million, and the Soviet Union an estimated 11.4 million. These aggregate figures include some 5.8 million Jewish dead. Further afield, in China, the death count exceeded 16 million. American civilian losses (excluding the merchant navy) in both world wars amounted to less than 2,000 dead. "

So what does this mean?

"As a consequence, the United States today is the only advanced democracy where public figures glorify and exalt the military, a sentiment familiar in Europe before 1945 but quite unknown today. Politicians in the US surround themselves with the symbols and trappings of armed prowess; even in 2008 American commentators excoriate allies that hesitate to engage in armed conflict. I believe it is this contrasting recollection of war and its impact, rather than any structural difference between the US and otherwise comparable countries, which accounts for their dissimilar responses to international challenges today. Indeed, the complacent neoconservative claim that war and conflict are things Americans understand—in contrast to naive Europeans with their pacifistic fantasies—seems to me exactly wrong: it is Europeans (along with Asians and Africans) who understand war all too well. Most Americans have been fortunate enough to live in blissful ignorance of its true significance."

Judt writes in detail about how this also leads us to misjudge our enemies, particularly in the so-called war on terror. Another consequence is this administration's attitude to torture, which used to be the dividing line between democracies and dictatorships.

" Torture really is no good, especially for republics. And as Aron noted many decades ago, "torture—and lies—[are] the accompaniment of war.... What needed to be done was end the war."We are slipping down a slope. The sophistic distinctions we draw today in our war on terror—between the rule of law and "exceptional" circumstances, between citizens (who have rights and legal protections) and noncitizens to whom anything can be done, between normal people and "terrorists," between "us" and "them"—are not new. The twentieth century saw them all invoked. They are the selfsame distinctions that licensed the worst horrors of the recent past: internment camps, deportation, torture, and murder—those very crimes that prompt us to murmur "never again." So what exactly is it that we think we have learned from the past? Of what possible use is our self-righteous cult of memory and memorials if the United States can build its very own internment camp and torture people there? "

I would add something else to Judt's point: it's not only that Americans didn't experience war the way others did, it's also that America--with all these years of prosperity, access to education and information--is still so fond of being ignorant. We don't learn from history because we don't respect the ability to learn from history. We demand our leaders bowl well and be the kind of guy or gal you can have a shot and a beer with. Not that they know anything, or can bring any insight and intelligence to the problems that are killing us, and laying waste the world. Just so they talk tough. We'll keep at if it takes a hundred years! We'll totally obliterate them!

It's not like the lessons of war and the 20th century are unavailable. On TV the other night I happened to see some of Abel Gance's great 1919 film, J'Accuse. There are scenes of men killed in war rising up and returning to accuse those who profited by the war and their deaths (scenes that Gance used again in his 1937 remake.) Some of the men in those scenes were actual soldiers, who shortly afterwards were killed in battle. We are seeing the dead returning, literally. Asked the meaning of his film's title, Gance said: "I am accusing war. I am accusing man. I am accusing universal stupidity."

That was almost 90 years ago. And yet, this past week a story broke about retired military officers trotted out as experts by television news networks to explain the Iraq war and the war on terror, who were not only political instruments of the Cheney administration, but paid by companies profiting from the war. Said the New York Times: " The effort, which began with the buildup to the Iraq war and continues to this day, has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air." J'Accuse!

But these days the news media can't even be bothered to justify the war--they ignore it. They ignore that April has been the deadliest month in Iraq since last September. J'Accuse! Meanwhile, contractors who have made billions to reconstruct Iraq have cheated, lied, done shoddy work or didn't finish the job, and still got rich. J'Accuse! For all the good it will do.

Judt's article concludes:

" Far from escaping the twentieth century, we need, I think, to go back and look a bit more carefully. We need to learn again—or perhaps for the first time—how war brutalizes and degrades winners and losers alike and what happens to us when, having heedlessly waged war for no good reason, we are encouraged to inflate and demonize our enemies in order to justify that war's indefinite continuance. And perhaps, in this protracted electoral season, we could put a question to our aspirant leaders: Daddy (or, as it might be, Mommy), what did you do to prevent the war?"

That last sentiment in fact was a slogan in the 60s (though not a bumper sticker--no one would dare put it on the back of a car, if you wanted an intact windshield.) Our hope ultimately is today's young, like the black junior high age boy I saw the other day, wearing a t-shirt with the script familiar from the Star Wars movies, only the words said: "Stop Wars." But way before he is an adult, Americans have to come to grip with this failure to learn. Or it could be too late.