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Friday, July 27, 2007 |
NOT A JEW BUT A CHRISTIAN, I TOO HAVE BEEN TAKEN ABACK AND HIGHLY DISTURBED BY THE ANTI-ISRAEL NOTIONS BEING FLOUTED BY SO MANY IN THE ANTI-WAR MOVEMENT. THERE ARE ATROCITIES COMMITED BY ISRAEL - NO QUESTION. AND THOSE POLICIES MUST BE PUBLICIZED AND CONDEMNED. THE ISRAEL/PALESTINE ISSUE MUST BE ADDRESSED FOR THE GOOD OF THE REGION, INDEED FOR THE LIFE OF BOTH ISRAEL AND PALESTINE. AND I DON'T THINK THERE SHOULD BE ANY IDEA FOR PEACE TAKEN OFF THE TABLE OF DISCUSSION.
THAT SAID, THOSE WHO HAVE THE NOTION THAT ISRAEL SHOULD NOT EXIST, THAT ISRAEL HAS NO RIGHT TO EXIST, CAN CERTAINLY PUT FORTH THE IDEA ... BUT IT IS NOT PART AND PARCEL OF THE ANTI-WAR SENTIMENT AND DILUTES THE ANTI-WAR MOVEMENT'S POTENTIAL MEMBERSHIP. JEWS ARE FEARFUL OF THE OUTRIGHT ANTI-SEMITIC SENTIMENTS EXPRESSED BY SO MANY GROUPS WHOSE GOALS REACH FAR BEYOND ENDING THE WAR.
IF WE TRULY WANT AN ANTI-WAR MOVEMENT TO END THIS HORRIBLE SITUATION IN IRAQ AND KEEP US OUT OF IRAN, WE HAVE TO FOCUS. INCLUDING EVERY OTHER GROUP'S FOCUS AS IF IT IS A NATURAL ACCOMPANIMENT TO PEACE IS DESTRUCTIVE TO THE MOVEMENT AND INSULTING TO ITS MEMBERS' INTELLIGENCE. PRO-CASTRO, FOR EXAMPLE. DEATH TO ISRAEL ANOTHER EXAMPLE.
PEACE NOW. OUT OF IRAQ. NO TROOPS, NO PRIVATE ARMY IN IRAQ. BRING THEM HOME.
Trey Ellis: What Have You Done to Stop This War?.
Look, I'm a life-long Democrat and much of me would be thrilled to have the Republicans rendered as impotent as the Democrats had been up until the last midterms. I would delight in the knowledge that Karl Rove's master plan to replace two-party rule with a permanent single-party hegemony actually delivered decades and decades of dominance to the Dems. The karmic jiujitsu could have made every day to me feel like Christmas.
But me waking up happy isn't worth one more young soldier losing an arm, his sight, her life. Me waking up happy isn't worth endangering the power of our democracy.
The Titanic that is the Bush presidency is no longer sinking. With 75 percent of all Americans disapproving, the ship has essentially sunk. As Eleanor Clift said on The McLaughlin Group last week, the question is not will the Republicans abandon ship and help the Democrats extricate us from Bush's war, but when.
The Bush presidency is turning out to be not only the Katrina of America's image abroad, the Katrina of the mightiest military the world has ever known, the Katrina of Iraq, the Katrina of Katrina, but now the Katrina of the Republican party itself.
Loyalty, in general, is a wonderful thing and much of the Republicans' recent successes stem from their ability to coalesce and remain so. Clinton's popularity was twice as high as Bush's when so many Democrats pulled out the long knives during the Lewinsky scandal.
The Republicans running for president don't vote in Congress so don't matter. Every day that they pander to the ever-diminishing pool of Bush loyalists and war fans is another day that they relegate their candidacies to irrelevance.
But how can we help nudge more Republicans in Congress to do what must already be in their hearts? It is sadistic to make our troops wait even one more day before someone in Washington lifts a finger to save them?
It is time for moderates and the middle-aged to take to the streets.
The young and the radical have been marching against this war since the beginning. The verbose, like me, have just been writing against it. I have shied away from groups like A.N.S.W.E.R. because even a whiff of anti-Semitism I find intolerable. Fortunately, just Googling ANSWER and anti-Semitism now I found this excellent article in Tikkun, the thoughtful and progressive Jewish magazine that allayed my fears.
It is time for more mainstream groups to hit the streets and shout. It's easy enough for Republicans to discount the wail of the usual suspects from the left. Republicans were never going to get their votes, anyway, no matter how many of them show up with a sign. It is something altogether more powerful if moderates come out in force.
MARCH ON WASHINGTON, SEPTEMBER 15th
This will be the next planned huge demonstration. I say it's time for every person who cares deeply about ending this seemingly endless nightmare to finally come out and vote with their feet.
 [The Huffington Post Full Blog Feed]
8:28:14 AM 
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Sen. Mike Gravel: Dying in Vain in Vietnam and Iraq.
During Monday night's YouTube.com/CNN debate, I was asked if I would stand by my statement that our soldiers in Vietnam died in vain. Here's why our country needs to own up to this fact, especially now that our soldiers are once again dying in vain in Iraq.
Throughout our three decades in Vietnam, we had several opportunities to stop the war. But each time our leaders chose to escalate because they saw Vietnam as a pivotal battle in the war on communism. From Eisenhower to Nixon, the mantra was the same: If we don't fight the communists in Vietnam, the dominos will fall and we'll have to fight them in California. Under that logic, thousands of American deaths were regarded as a small price to pay. This false notion also obfuscated the immorality of dropping more bombs on the people of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos than were dropped in WWII -- people who were never a threat to our vital interests nor meant us any harm.
The idea that Vietnam was part a worldwide communist conspiracy hid the fact that we were actually caught in the middle of a civil war that we instigated by denying them free elections. By the time Nixon came to power in 1969, it was perfectly clear that after spending billions of dollars and losing 36,000 troops, we still couldn't win. To secure Vietnam, the CIA overthrew the Cambodian government, opening the door to Pol Pot. Nixon then chose to expand the war by bombing and invading neutral Cambodia and Laos -- killing 800,000 innocent civilians.
Nixon began a phased troop withdrawal that was intended to gradually hand over all military operations to the Vietnamese government. This "Vietnamization" strategy took four years and resulted in the deaths of an additional 22,000 Americans. And for what? South Vietnam fell almost immediately, and the only other country that went communist was the one we destabilized -- Cambodia, where Pol Pot killed one-third of his people until the communist Vietnamese government intervened and deposed him in 1978.
After South Vietnam fell, none of the dire predictions of communism spreading across all Asia came true. It's still a communist country, but we now have MFN trade relations with Vietnam; and you can buy a Baskin Robbins ice cream cone in Ho Chi Minh City.
After three decades of needless bloodshed, 58,000 Americans were killed and tens of thousands came home physically maimed and psychologically scarred. Their sacrifices should be honored. But we must also acknowledge that their heroism didn't make the war itself any less futile. Today we do our veterans and our soldiers in the field a great disservice by repeating the same mistakes in Iraq.
George Bush and the chickenhawk neocons argue against withdrawal with the same Vietnam mantra: Let's fight them there so we don't have to fight them here. Some even suggest that we need to expand the war into Iran in order to secure Iraq. Our Democratic leaders, including the four presidential candidates in the Senate, counter Bush's surges with Nixonian calls for a phased withdrawal of only a portion of our troops, leaving tens of thousands of our soldiers in permanent military fortress-bases. Sounds like Vietnam to me.
In a recent pro-Iraq war speech, John McCain mocked a speech I made back in 1971 calling for an immediate withdrawal from Vietnam and predicting that the dominos wouldn't fall. Well I was right then and I believe that if we immediately withdraw from Iraq and seek the help of Iran, Syria and the world community, we can bring an end to the bloodbath that we instigated. McCain and the Warhawks have been discredited -- the real threats now are the so called voices-of-reason who advocate a phased withdrawal. There is nothing reasonable about refusing to immediately stop our solders and the Iraqi people from dying in vain.
 [The Huffington Post Full Blog Feed]
8:11:09 AM
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Mia Farrow: No Hopes For Us.
If we hear of Eastern Chad at all, it is as a spillover of the genocidal slaughter in Darfur. But this swath of land along Darfur's border has become a full-scale catastrophe in its own right, and it is without the immense and effective humanitarian infrastructure which is sustaining millions of lives in Darfur.
When I first came here in November 2006, I met Abdullah Idris Zaid, who was lying in the tiny Goz Beida hospital. It was a terrible month in eastern Chad. The Janjaweed, Darfur's government-backed Arab militias, joined with Chadian Arab tribes on a rampage of destruction; 60 villages were burned and scores of people were killed, raped, and mutilated. Mr. Zaid's eyes were gouged out by Janjaweed knives.
This month I found him in the Gouroukoum camp for displaced people. He is 27-years-old, a husband and a father. His four-year old daughter Boushra led him to the mat outside his hut and gently placed a cup of water in his hands. He told me that this is the third place they have sought refuge, and still he does not feel safe.
"They will come again," said Mr. Zaid. "They said, 'we do not want you black people here.' The Janjaweed come from Sudan. If the United Nations does not send troops into Sudan and stop them, then they will return."
Eastern Chad has been plunged into chaos and lawlessness. In border towns, pick-up trucks outfitted with machine guns and loaded with armed, uniformed men careen through the dusty streets. No one knows who they are: the army, Chadian rebels, bandits? It makes little difference to the victims of the escalating violence. For about $5 dollars (U.S.), anyone can get a uniform in the marketplace. As I passed through the town of Abeche, a U.N. refugee agency guard was murdered and two staffers severely wounded. About 100 humanitarian vehicles have been highjacked in the last year; aid workers have been robbed, beaten, abducted and killed.
Eight months ago, 40,000 Chadians had been displaced by Janjaweed attacks. Today the number is 175,000 and rising. People have fled from their burning villages and the fields that sustained them to squalid camps across Eastern Chad. "Mortality rates of children under five are double what is accepted as the threshold for an emergency," says Johanne Sekkenes, a Doctors Without Borders program director. "The situation here is massively deteriorating. The needs are huge. Assistance has been too little, and it comes too late."
There have been years of debate as to how the tide of violence engulfing the region can be stemmed. Until recently, the excuse for inaction was the steadfast resistance of the Sudanese government to U.N. peacekeeping presence. Sudan's recent consent to a limited force under African Union command comes in the wake of countless broken promises and falls far short of what is needed. Nonetheless, it leaves the onus squarely on other countries that have the power to contribute troops, but lack the political will to do so.
And so the cacophony of voices continues, deliberating as to whether and how a force should be dispatched, and who should contribute the resources and troops. No one seems to be listening to the most important voice of all -- that of the people of Darfur and Eastern Chad, ringing loud and clear from refugee camps across the region.
Oumda al Fatih, is the leader of 20,000 Darfurians at Goz Amir refugee camp. Between the camp and the Darfur border there is nothing but the ashes of destroyed villages. "Twice, Janjaweed from Sudan came here and attacked us," he told me. The refugees had fled these attackers before, but now they were far from home. With no idea where to find water in the unfamiliar desert, they did not even try to run. "We sat on the ground and we held our children and waited for two days. And we were thinking, 'No hopes for us. No hopes for us.'
"We are the ones being killed, tortured and raped. We are the ones who have lost everything. We are refugees with no freedom, no rights, not enough food, no fields; we are living in terror. We accept the U.N. troops. We are asking for help."
This is the voice of the people of Darfur and Eastern Chad. It calls urgently for an international force with the resources and mandate necessary to protect defenseless civilians and the aid workers who are struggling to sustain them. These desperate pleas are what we should be hearing and responding to -- urgently.
This piece first appeared in The Wall Street Journal.
Ms. Farrow, a UNICEF ambassador, has just returned from her sixth trip to Darfur and its borders with Chad and the Central African Republic.
 [The Huffington Post Full Blog Feed]
8:09:13 AM
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Was Tillman Murdered?. "Army medical examiners were suspicious about the close proximity of the three bullet holes in Pat Tillman's forehead and tried without success to get authorities to investigate whether the former NFL player's death amounted to a crime," reports the Associated Press. [t r u t h o u t]
6:50:56 AM
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© Copyright 2007 Patricia Thurston.
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