Letters to the Editor
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Trying to stay...
...within the confines of McCain's toughness (I know foolish thought. It's all gonna devolve into Hillary vs Barack eventually.) one wonders about:
Less well known are McCain's promises, if elected, to expand the Army and the Marine Corps to 900,000 soldiers and Marines from a planned strength of about 750,000; to form a U.S.-led League of Democracies to act when the United Nations can't or won't; and to form a new government unit, patterned after the World War II-era Office of Strategic Services, "to fight terrorist subversion" and "take risks that our bureaucracies today rarely consider taking." (from the McClatchy cite upthread)
Where does McCain think these additional soldiers will come from? Conscription? The military is having trouble meeting recruiting numbers now. Mid-level military officers are leaving. Or, is McCain's notion to ramp up the Blackwater numbers?
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The DLC circle around Hillary...
is why I've gone from Edwards to Obama. The thought of those Republican-lite, bought and paid for triangulators running the Democratic party further into the ground has me question Hillary's judgment about those she has advising her.
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You don't understand, Glenn
And I can demonstrate this with a story from my wife's history.
Back in the late '60s my (very much future) wife was very ill and in the hospital. There was a guy working in the hospital who had a conscienous objector deferral from Vietnam. And he was a Maoist. So he would sit by her bedside and read Maoist tracts to her (she couldn't move much). He would get to the end of one of these tracts and he'd ask her - Do you understand? Yes. Do you agree? No. She did not. His response was - Then you don't understand and he'd go back to the top.
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I have seen William Timberman's Shrine to LBJ
It is a ghoulish devotional altar to death and destruction!
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There is a picture of the last supper heroes
All twelve of them.
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Obama needs to explain to America in more detail the real consequences of Serious foreign policy thinking
Howard Zinn historian and teacher and author of the book TERRORISM AND WAR in an interview with Bill Moyers in January of 2003 two months before the Iraq invasion made some points that should form the core of a new Democratic position on war and future foreign policy. It would fit right in with Obama’s campaign advantage of speaking out against the war in 2002 and how real change is needed in Washington. Here are some interview excerpts that Obama and his advisers should consider:
I think oil is one of the important factors (why Bush made war). But I think that there are others. And one of them has to do with something psychological. That macho feeling that people in power have about the United States being the number one superpower and determined to show it.
If we go to war, we will kill thousands, tens of thousands, we don't know how many people. A hundred thousand? We will kill huge numbers of people. And who will we kill? We will kill the victims of Saddam Hussein. If we go to war against Iraq, we are killing the victims of the tyrant. That to me creates a moral equation which is intolerable.
I mean war is a form of terrorism. I know there are people who don't like to equate-- what was done-- you know on September 11th, 2001, they don't like to equate that with a war that the United States engaged in. Sure, they're different. But they're not different in the-- in the fundamental principal that drives the terrorists and that is, they're saying, we're going to kill a lot of people but it will be worth it. We're trying to do something. We're trying to accomplish something. They-- the terrorists are not killing people just for the sake of killing people, they have some end in mind. To show that the American empire is vulnerable or to make some point about American policy in the Middle East. But they have an end in mind. We are doing the same thing. I mean, as I say, the details are different, but we are willing to kill a lot of people for some political end that we have declared.
There are too many places in the world that require attention because human beings are suffering. If we care about human beings, and presumably the reason we are going to depose Saddam Hussein is, oh, we care about the human beings in Iraq whom he has tyrannized. And of course, we should care about them. But, we have-- drawn a line around this little country in the Middle East and said, "This is where all evil reposes." And we are shunning our eyes to the deaths of millions and millions of people. Which is not a potential, which is not a potential like Iraq having a nuclear weapon. But which is a present, ongoing reality. And what is the United States doing about AIDS in Africa? It is giving a pittance to help the people in Africa while it is concentrating on this war in Iraq.
Well, the United Nations, I think, had it right when the United Nations charter was adopted right after World War Two. And according to the United Nations charter-- countries may not make war on other countries preventatively. You can make war on other countries, you know, if other countries are an immediate, immanent threat. If they are doing something.
And the point is that-- are terrorists going to be deterred-- are terrorists going to be scared if we react violently? No. They love it. That's what they dote on. They dote on violence. They dote on having more reasons to commit more terrorism. We solved the problem of the hostages in Iran by negotiations. You know? And-- there are many situations where we engage in violence and in wars that could be solved by negotiations. There were people who said, you know, Curtis LaMay, Joint Chiefs of Staff. Let's nuke the Soviet Union before they do it to us. You know? Well, it would have been a horrible scenario. It would have been tens of millions or 100 million people dead
I do take the threat of terrorism seriously. You cannot eliminate that threat or diminish that threat by bombing a country. By singling out Afghanistan and killing large numbers of people. That doesn't do anything with terrorism.
The-- we were attacked, but then the question is, who attacked us? If we could locate the people who attacked us and get them, grab them, find them. Okay, that's self-defense. But if we are attacked and we don't know who attacked us, and we just select a country from which we think the attackers may have sprung, and then just bomb that country, that is not defense. That is indiscriminate violence.
We should not do war. Because war makes things worse than they were before. War has consequences which you cannot predict.
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/archives/zinnnow_ts.html
Maybe I am foolish to believe that Obama is going to try and really change our mindset. I don’t think I am. He will have a head start if he strongly attacks McCain and the neocons on their faulty thinking and disastrous results every time he addresses a group or speaks to the media. A lot of us won’t get tired of hearing it.