After the carnage of World War II the members of the now defunct Victory Chapter of American Gold Star Mothers in St. Petersburg, Florida, knew better than most what is was like to lose their sons, daughters and husbands in war. "We'd rather not talk about it," said Ceil Rindfuss whose son was killed in WWII. She told the St. Petersburg Times in 1960, "It's a terrible scar that never heals. We hope there will never be another war so no other mothers will have to go through this ordeal." But as a result of the invasion of Iraq, too many now mourn family members lost to war.

Few Americans know that Mother's Day was initially suggested by two peace-minded mothers, Julia Ward Howe, a 19th century anti-slavery activist and suffragette, and Anna Reeves Jarvis, mother of eleven, who influenced Howe and had asked her fellow Appalachian townspeople, badly polarized by the Civil War, to remain neutral and help nurse the wounded troops of both sides. While neither lived to see an official Mother's Day, it was eventually designated as a national holiday by President Woodrow Wilson in 1914, a president whose armies invaded Mexico, brought the U.S. into World War I and whose administration carried out brutal punishments against opponents of the World War I and the draft, such as Eugene V. Debs. It was Wilson who once declared that, "A war of service is a thing in which it is a proud thing to die" — a sentiment by someone who had never served in the military and which reminds me of Charles Edward Montague's classic putdown of living room heroes, "War hath no fury like a non-combatant."

Though she never had children, my favorite female opponent of war and imperialism was the forgotten poet and feminist Katharine Lee Bates who wrote "America the Beautiful" as a poem in 1895, now virtually our second national anthem. My favorite Bates anti-war poem is "Glory," in which an officer heading for the front bids farewell to his tearful mother.

"Again he raged in that lurid hell Where the country he loved had thrown him. "You are promoted!" shrieked a shell. His mother would not have known him."

More recently, many may no longer remember Lenore Breslauer, a mother of two children, who helped establish Another Mother for Peace during the Vietnam War. By the end of the sixties the group had 450,000 members and sympathizers, inspired by its ingenious and telling theme: "War is not healthy for children and other living beings." Years later, the message was not lost on three mothers on Long Island, N.Y., with the first name of Carol who initiated Mothers and Others Against War in 1979 to protest against Jimmy Carter's resurrection of draft registration. They stayed on to battle against Ronald Reagan's military intervention in El Salvador and Nicaragua. What these mothers and others recognized quite clearly was that war and the draft helped kill and grievously wound hundreds of thousands of troops and millions of civilians in places like Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and who knows where else.

On this Mother's Day we could use more of the anger and dissenting spirit of countless numbers of women and mothers who have condemned male-created and dominated wars. In Russia, mothers joined together and protested using their drafted sons as cannon fodder wars in Afghanistan and Chechnya. In Argentina and Chile, mothers and grandmothers protested the murders and disappearances of their children by the neo-fascist barbarians who ran their nations in the late seventies and early eighties. And in our country the anti-war movement has often been led by women, demonstrating, in essence, against "those who think that War is a glorious golden thing…invoking Honor and Praise and Valor and Love of Country" — as a bitter Roland Leighton, a British combat soldier of WWI, wrote long ago to his fiancée, the British antiwar writer Vera Brittain.

Unhappily on this Mother's Day, peace seems further away then ever. Even so, my hope is that more and more American mothers and all other women who have remained silent will continue to work against our now and future wars and the ever-present possibility of drafting their young. Do we still need to glorify war and military service? Do we need yet another war memorial to the dead in Washington? Do we need more war widows and mothers grieving for the rest of their lives over their dead husbands and wives, children and grandchildren? Do we really need to continue disseminating the myth that an idealistic America always fights for freedom and democracy no matter the cost or cause?

On this Mother's Day, more than 4500 U.S. troops have died in Iraq and Afghanistan and many more have been wounded in body and mind in elective and ideologically inspired wars. They all had mothers.

Murray Polner [send him mail] wrote No Victory Parades: The Return of the Vietnam Veteran and most recently co-authored Disarmed and Dangerous, a biography of Dan and Phil Berrigan, and with Thomas Wood Jr. wrote and edited We Who Dared Say No To War. He served in the U.S. army.

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The 66th anniversary of the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was approaching and a neighbor, a retired fireman and WWII veteran, asked if I thought the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were justified. He said he did because many American soldiers and marines might have been killed in a land invasion of Japan's main islands. Okinawa, he said, was bad enough. Invading Japan would have been far worse. In no way was he dismissing the killing of so many civilians but like virtually all Americans at the time he unquestioningly believed the Government's assertions — obviously not stated in this precise way — that because of Pearl Harbor and the many American deaths occurred while hopskotching across the islands of the Pacific, it was perfectly alright to kill enemy civilians in a war. President Truman's announcement at the time avoided dealing with the issue when he emphasized that Hiroshima was a military base. Ergo, the city was a legitimate wartime target. He never sought to explain Nagasaki.

A memory: On an army transport on the way home from my military service I met a young, newly married couple. He was an airman with a new Japanese bride who had lived in Hiroshima. On August 6, 1945 the bomb dropped. Her mother, she explained, was so terrified that she sent her to grandma and grandpa in Nagasaki, just in time to live through the attack on Nagasaki three days later.

My wife and I rented a TV film Trinity made in 1980, featuring interviews by and about J. Robert Oppenheimer, Hans Bethe, Edward Teller, General Leslie Groves and the team of physicists who developed the first atom bomb in Alamogordo, New Mexico. We viewed the film on August 6, 2011, completely forgetting that the sixth of August was the date a Japanese city was incinerated and the world changed forever.

But were the two bombings warranted?

Hiroshima was never a military base. Tokyo, another possible target, had already been devastated by firebomb raids. Still, either Truman had no real knowledge about Hiroshima or simply fabricated a tale that it was a military city. In future years he never expressed the slightest doubt about the green light he had given to his commanders. Obviously Truman, reputedly a prodigious reader, never bothered reading John Hersey's classic 1946 book Hiroshima (originally published in The New Yorker), once widely read and studied by American students from high school through college. Hersey's description of what the bombers did to Japanese civilians is unbearable as in a scene when he depicts the melting of human eyeballs from the intense heat. "In a city of two hundred and forty- five thousand, nearly a hundred thousand people had been killed or doomed at one blow," wrote Hersey; "a hundred thousand more were hurt."

American cheered the bombing, the victory and the technological achievement but not everyone among Washington's elite circles agreed. Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy, FDR and Truman's chief of staff, for example, was horrified, saying, "The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender," adding, "My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children."

David Swanson's perceptive book War is a Lie quotes the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey stating that Japan would have surrendered no later than November 1, 1945 or by the end of December 1945 "even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped." General Dwight Eisenhower, like Leahy, supported the SBS' conclusion but both were overwhelmed by those eager for retribution and possibly an eventual go at the Soviets.

Today, seven nations possess nuclear arsenals (U.S., Russia, India, Pakistan, Israel, China and North Korea) and repeated if still unverified accusations are regularly aimed at Iran for either harboring or working on a Bomb. Some American politicians love to say that all options are "off the table" when referring to Iran and North Korea. I wonder under what circumstances the U.S. would repeat Hiroshima and Nagasaki and be willing to destroy, say, millions in Teheran or Pyongyang.

To my neighbor who asked if the two atomic attacks were justified, I told him that I thought it was not since the war was already won and a land invasion was unnecessary. But above all else, I added, the reasons for an attack that may or may not have been war crime (though future nuclear attacks should certainly be judged as crimes) were manufactured by policymakers and subsequently became the gospel, and thereafter echoed by millions of Americans.

Murray Polner [send him mail] is a book review editor for HNN.org and was editor of Present Tense, published by the American Jewish Committee from 1973-90. He wrote Rabbi: The American Experience; co-edited (with Stefan Merken) Peace, Justice, and Jews: Reclaiming Our Tradition, as well as No Victory Parades: The Return of the Vietnam Veteran and, with Jim O’Grady, Disarmed & Dangerous, a biography of Daniel and Philip Berrigan. His most recent book is We Who Dared to Say No to War: American Antiwar Writing From 1812 to Now, co-authored with Thomas Woods.

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Adam Hochschild's haunting yet illuminating assessment of World War I (mainly concentrating on Great Britain) To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2011) is a welcome addition to the vast historical and literary output literature of that pointless war. But it is different. By no means a detailed if conventional history of battles and strategies and politicians, it is, firstly, a powerful condemnation of a war that should never have been fought. The battle at Passchendaele (officially, the Third Battle of Ypres) cost the lives of at least 300,000 men. Hochschild rightly calls it "a blatant, needless massacre initiated by generals with a near-criminal disregard for the conditions men faced.' In northern Italy, German and Austrian armies at Caporetto caused more than 500,000 Italian casualties – dead, wounded or captured. On the eastern front the Russian armies, its generals and government corrupt and incompetent, were effectively defeated a year or so after the Romanovs entered the war.

What makes To End All Wars so original (mirroring to some extent Paul Fussell's splendid 1975 book The Great War and Modern Memory) is that Hochschild also eloquently tells the story of courageous and principled Britons and to a lesser degree the French Socialist antiwar leader Jean Jaures, who opposed the war and even refused to serve in its ranks. Though he praises the great anti- war poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen (a combat lieutenant whose parents were told of his death in France the day the Armistice was signed) it also looks sympathetically at those who chose to volunteer or accept conscription "for whom the magnetic attraction of combat, or at least the belief that it was patriotic and necessary, proved so much stronger than human revulsion at mass death or any perception that, win or lose, this was a war that would change the world for the worse."

And indeed it did. The war was an abattoir, a charnel house consuming millions of soldiers, volunteers, reservists and draftees – (Britain, desperately needing ever more cannon fodder, instituted the draft in 1916). Poison gas (chlorine) and mustard gas were used as were tanks and aerial bombings. It was much like WWII and our own wars, large and small, laboratories for industrial warfare and the "prostitution of science for purposes of sheer destruction" as the conservative Lord Lansdowne, former viceroy of India and secretary for war in the Lloyd-George cabinet, presciently put it in a letter to the pro-war Times of London – which refused to publish it. The war, writes Hochschild, author of the brilliant King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa, "forever shattered the self-assured sunlit Europe of hussars and dragoons in plumed helmets and emperors waving from open horse drawn carriages."

It was too a global war maintained by European empires – four of whom would crash – whose conclusion led to revolutions by a populace, who once cheered on its war-loving rulers and the men they sent away to fight. Among them were my uncle and father both drafted into the Russian army, my uncle eventually taken prisoner by the Austro-Hungarians and my father deserting after the Tsar's abdication, captured by a White army and pressed into service, and then deserting once more

Today, there are some two hundred British WWI cemeteries in Belgium and France alone, (separate graveyards contain the remains of Senegalese soldiers and Chinese laborers, "reminders of how far men traveled to die"), many containing only pieces of bodies while some remains have never been identified. The war touched all classes in Britain. Five grandsons of former Prime Minister Lord Salisbury were killed as were the eldest son of Prime Minister Herbert Agar and the two sons of the future PM, Bonar Law. In Germany, Chancellor Theobold von Bethmann-Hollweg lost his eldest son. John Kipling, whose father Rudyard, was a zealous supporter of the war (like John Buchan, John Galsworthy, Arthur Conan Doyle, Emmaline and Christabel Pankhurst, former suffragettes, and of course Winston Churchill) until his 18 year old son John was killed in battle and suddenly the deeply aggrieved father, the perennial flag waver who never served in the military, composed an "enigmatic" couplet (to Hochschild, but not to me) in his "Epitaphs of the War":

If any question why we died

Tell them because our fathers lied

Georges Duhamel, a front-line doctor, reflected on what he — unlike Rudyard Kipling and other living room warriors – had lived through. In his memoir The Life of Martyrs and Civilization, 1914-1917 (Century 1919) he wrote about his experiences in anger, declaring, "I hate the twentieth century as I hate rotten Europe and the whole world…"

While the war was raging, 20,000 Britons. declared themselves to be Conscientious Objectors and 6000 British men were imprisoned rather than fight. A few were sentenced to death, but never executed. Charlotte Despard (whose brother General Sir John French commanded British forces in France until forced out by the equally incompetent and politically-connected General Sir Douglas Haig and who later sought to crush the Irish rebellion) wrote and demonstrated against the war. Sylvia Pankhurst, an early suffragette, who turned pacifist while her mother Emmaline and sister Christobel became fervent home front warriors) Keir Hardie, labor leader and socialist spoke and agitated from the very beginning against the war. Perhaps most prominently because of his family heritage, Bertrand Russell, the mathematician, antiwar crusader, plus many others, sadly now forgotten, refused to believe in the warmakers and their propagandists.. The British Government tried very hard to squelch opponents of the war, using Scotland Yard and its director Basil Thomson to pursue antiwar people — much like the U.S. used Edgar Hoover's FBI during the Vietnam War, a war Russell also publicly opposed. Not until 1919 were all British COs released from prison. (In the U.S. Eugene V. Debs, imprisoned by the Wilson Administration because he opposed conscription and the war, was not released until 1920 after the much-maligned Warren Harding became president). And not until 2006, following a campaign organized by a citizen's group "Shot at Dawn," did the British finally pardon more than 300 soldiers executed during WWI.

The Allies were rescued by the arrival of fresh U.S. troops. Within a year or so it was all over. According to a conservative count by the U.S. War Department in 1924 over 8.5 million soldiers died in WWI and more than 21 million were wounded, including hundreds of thousands who lost their limbs, eyesight and hearing while an astonishing number were badly shell shocked.. Hochschild movingly notes an epitaph placed by a mother and father on their son's grave at Gallipoli: "What harm did he do Thee, O Lord?"

In 1919, the Allies, having won a pyrrhic victory, forced Germany to sign a punitive treaty that declared themselves solely to blame for the war, thus virtually assuring another war. For antiwar people, Hochschild concludes, their struggle against mass industrialized violence "remains to be fought again – and again."

Originally published in History News Network.

Murray Polner [send him mail] was editor of Present Tense, published by the American Jewish Committee from 1973-90. He wrote Rabbi: The American Experience; co-edited (with Stefan Merken) Peace, Justice, and Jews: Reclaiming Our Tradition, as well as No Victory Parades: The Return of the Vietnam Veteran and, with Jim O’Grady, Disarmed & Dangerous, a biography of Daniel and Philip Berrigan. His most recent book is We Who Dared to Say No to War: American Antiwar Writing From 1812 to Now, co-authored with Thomas Woods.

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~ General Omar Bradley

"Canada must be ours [say the war hawks]. We have nothing to do but to march into Canada and display the standard of the U.S., and the Canadians will immediately flock to it."

~ Rep. Samuel Taggart, 1812

The United States of America has historically been addicted to war, an addiction that persists today more than ever with a vast "national security" apparatus, over 700 military bases, and a nation torn between those who believe in military intervention for humanitarian causes and those who extol war as a way of maintaining the country’s worldwide hegemony. Now we are faced with endless wars in the Middle East as the drums are beating for war against Iran in Washington, Jerusalem and western European capitals.

Several years ago Thomas Woods, Jr. asked me to collaborate with him in a book we titled We Who Dared to Say No to War: American Antiwar Writing from 1812 to Now (Basic Books, 2008). We intended to portray a broad American antiwar tradition often absent from classrooms, films, television and the new media. Tom is a libertarian and conservative and I a left-liberal and believer in nonviolent activism. We differ on some things but not on our opposition to our nation’s reliance on war and conquest (as well as our mutual support for civil liberties).

We have no illusions that our book can deter contemporary warmakers or outwit the fabrications and manipulations of governments and propagandists past and present. We were (and are) instead motivated by the hope that arguments for war might be critically examined, as the men and women of different political persuasions we include in the book did in their time. To quote from our introduction, we intend the book to be "a surprising and welcome change from the misleading liberal-peace/conservative-war dichotomy that the media and our educational establishment and popular culture have done so much to foster."

During our efforts to find appropriate and effective essays, speeches and documents, I turned to Americans who had shaped my own thoughts about war: Randolph Bourne, the physically handicapped prophet who died far too young (at 32) but memorably wrote that "war is the health of the state"; Robert A. Taft, bitterly assailed as an isolationist — in truth, he was very suspicious about military interventions — who rightly condemned the undeclared entry into the Korean War, where some 38,000 GIs died, many more were wounded in body and mind and several million Korean civilians killed, saying "the President has no right to involve the United States in a foreign war"; Russell Kirk, the founder of postwar American conservatism, urging "a policy of patience and prudence" against "preventive war" and decrying how "a handful of individuals…made it their business to extirpate the populations of Nagasaki and Hiroshima"; and a man I proudly voted for in 1972, George McGovern, who publicly excoriated his pro-war senatorial colleagues by describing each of them as "partly responsible for sending 50,000 young Americans to an early grave." "This chamber," said this onetime World War II bomber pilot unforgettably, "reeks of blood," adding Edmund Burke’s cautionary words: "A conscientious man would be cautious how he dealt in blood."

Unsurprisingly, we found that the arguments used for war today are the same ones that have been employed in all our wars. We begin with Daniel Webster’s speech in December 1814 after the War Hawks (a term coined during America’s aggressive war to capture Canada) urged a draft: "Where is it written in the Constitution," he asked, "in what article or section is it contained, that you may take children from their parents, and parents from their children, and compel them to fight the battles of any war in which the folly of the wickedness of Government may engage it?"

For the U.S. government’s war of aggression against Mexico in 1846—48 we include (among numerous others) the abolitionist William Goodell, who called President Polk’s invasion a "war for slavery." In another selection then-Representative Abraham Lincoln denounced the Mexican War, calling Polk’s war message "the half-mumbling of a fever dream" and Polk a "bewildered, confounded, and miserably perplexed man."

Before the U.S. entered World War I, Eugene Debs, the Socialist labor leader, spoke truth to power: It is "the working class who freely shed their bloods and furnish the corpses." Debs received a ten-year prison sentence for that speech. Senator George Norris, the progressive Republican from Nebraska (the Midwestern states once had many such Republican politicians) who condemned U.S. entry into WWI and their advocates, likewise condemned war profiteering: "Their object in having war and in preparing for war is to make money."

That, incidentally, isn’t a problem that has gone away. Think of contemporary war profiteers who have made so much money in Iraq and Afghanistan, while a threatened war with Iran promises untold riches as well. Add to this the hysteria generated during the Cold War, a frenzy which consistently and deliberately exaggerated Soviet military capabilities while frightening many Americans. (See, for example, the declassified documents released in September 2009 by George Washington University’s private National Security Archive.)

These are tough words, echoed by so many men and women (Helen Keller, Jane Addams, Jeannette Rankin, Rep. Barbara Lee, Gold Star mothers, etc.) whose words we sought to rescue from obscurity. Had we more room we would also have written about the military decimation of our Native American tribes and the habitual interference in the affairs of Caribbean and Central American states.

What we learned in writing this book was that lies, deliberate manipulation of patriotic feelings, scare tactics, a compliant, often indifferent media, and bribery of legislators kept and keeps the war machine oiled and too many decision makers in clover. Virtually everything heard in the past is still heard today. We quoted William Jay’s observation after the invasion of Mexico: "We have been taught to ring our bells, and illuminate our windows and let off fireworks as manifestations of our joy, when we have heard of great ruin and devastation, and misery, and death, inflicted by our troops upon a people who never injured us, who never fired a shot on our soil and who were utterly incapable of acting on the offensive against us."

And we concluded, "Everything we’ve seen recently, we’ve seen before. Time and again."

In the end, I have personal favorites: William Graham Sumner, an irascible Yale academic who opposed the Spanish-American and Philippine-American wars and the nation’s growing appetite for imperial conquest and world power; Marine Commandant David Shoup, who said of our Vietnam adventure, "Let’s Mind Our Business"; and W.D. Ehrhart, a combat Marine veteran of Vietnam, who enlisted at age 18 and years later told students at a Pennsylvania school, "I am no longer convinced that what I owe to my country is military service whenever and wherever my government demands it…if I owe something to my country, my country also owes something to me…it owes us the obligation not to ask for our lives unless it is absolutely necessary." Then there is Howard Zinn, WWII bombardier turned pacifist, who argues, "We need to refute the idea that our nation is different from, morally superior to, other imperial powers of world history" and instead "assert our allegiance to the human race, and not to any one nation." Libertarian Lew Rockwell writes, "Do we reject war and all its works? We do reject them." Especially moving is the contribution of Andrew Bacevich, a Vietnam War veteran, Boston University professor, and father of a son killed in Iraq, whose distressing "I Lost My Son to a War I Oppose; We Were Both Doing Our Duty" is unforgettable.

Our book will not change the course of history. Still, it reflects our mission, our passion: to encourage debate and discussion, in our nation’s classrooms as well as among our compatriots, now drowning in a mass culture that celebrates trivia — "amusing themselves to death" in the late Neil Postman’s incisive words. Tom Woods and I would like to encourage an alternative patriotism that goes not abroad every few years to seek and destroy real and imagined "enemies" while sacrificing a new generation of our young.

Murray Polner [send him mail] was editor of Present Tense, published by the American Jewish Committee from 1973—90. He wrote Rabbi: The American Experience; co-edited (with Stefan Merken) Peace Justice Jews: Reclaiming Our Tradition, as well as No Victory Parades: The Return of the Vietnam Veteran and, with Jim O’Grady, Disarmed & Dangerous, a biography of Daniel and Philip Berrigan. His most recent book is We Who Dared to Say No to War: American Antiwar Writing From 1812 to Now, co-authored with Thomas Woods.

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Why should anyone care about 5,000 part-African, part-southern Indian Chagossians, who once inhabited Diego Garcia, a remote island in the Indian Ocean mid-way between Africa and Indonesia, who were exiled so the U.S. could build yet another military base?

Since the onset of WWII and its aftermath, tens of millions have been massacred by governments and assorted religious and secular fanatics. In that time, too, the U.S., the world’s most powerful military force, has quietly expelled indigenous populations on the too-little contested argument that the world’s "indispensable nation" possessing several thousand nuclear bombs has a moral duty to do as it wishes to defend its national interest, however ambiguously and broadly defined. Undeterred by Milton Eisenhower’s prophetic phrase in 1953 about a rising "military industrial complex" about which his presidential brother tried unsuccessfully to warn us, why, then, should anyone care about Chagossians?

David Vine, an anthropologist at American University hired by attorneys representing the Chagossians to tell their sad story, does care and with a heavy dose of revealing documentation, convincingly argues their case. His Island of Shame is filled with rage at how the British and U.S. governments stole a people’s home, sent them into foreign slums and then forgot about them. The purpose of this forced dislocation was to control the Indian Ocean, Central Asian oil fields, and help carry out American wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan. Today, Chagossian-free, isolated Diego Garcia is "the single most important military facility we’ve got," at least according to the military analyst John Pike.

Between 1968 and 1973, in an act hidden from the world, ignored by the press and TV and Congress and Parliament (the British retain nominal control of Diego Garcia, but granted a long-term lease to the U.S.) the two countries threw out the dark-skinned Chagossians to develop a major U.S. air and naval base.

David Vine was never allowed to visit the island — very few are granted this privilege — but he did translate relevant documents and materials from the French, Mauritian Kreol, and Seselwa (Seychelles Kreol). His rage at what he rightly considers an injustice solely to service the American war machine is apparent in every chapter, perhaps best revealed in a striking and squalid but telling incident that occurred just before the final ejection of the remaining Chagossians.

"British agents and U. S. troops on Diego Garcia herded the Chagossians’ pet dogs into sealed sheds and gassed and burned them in front of their traumatized owners awaiting deportation" — yet another example of how imperial invaders exhibit their values.

Off-limits to all but a few very special visitors, Diego Garcia so top secret (more so than Guantanamo and Bagram Air Force Base) Vine suggests that, in addition to serving as a launching pad for bombing raids in Afghanistan and Iraq, it has been used for "rendition" of prisoners, citing, for example, British Foreign Secretary David Miliband’s admission to Parliament in February 2008 that the island has been used as a way station for shipping suspected terrorists to friendly nations (paid handsomely by U.S. and British taxpayers to treat prisoners as they wish) plus a Council of Europe report that the island has been used to lock away suspects. Verifiable details remain highly classified since the Bush administration said nothing and the Obama administration, eager to prove its toughness in national security, has thus far been silent about rendition, secret prisons, and Diego Garcia.

The displacement of local people is hardly new and Vine catalogs many defenseless people such as Greenland’s Inughuit of Greenland, the Bikini Atoll islanders, and 3000 Okinawans dispatched to Bolivia because of continuing American military expansion. Nowadays, U.S. military personnel are stationed in approximately 1,000 military bases outside continental U.S. at a cost estimated at more than $100 billion annually. In Hugh Gusterson’s wonderfully descriptive words, "The U.S. is to military bases as Heinz is to ketchup" (Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, 3/10-09). Said one critic in 2007 — who happens to be the leftist Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa unwilling to renew a U.S. base — when asked if he would renew an American base’s lease in his nation answered, only if "they let us put a base in Miami — an Ecuadorian base."

And finally there is the plaintive voice of the exiled Olivier Bancoult of the Chagos Refugees Group, its survivors still trying to return home: "We are the descendants of slaves. Our skin is black. We don’t have blue eyes…Whether we are black, whether we are white, whether we are yellow, we must all have the same treatment, …Stop all the injustices that have been committed against us."

It won’t happen, of course. The American Empire stands in their way. Vine’s seminal Island of Shame reveals just one of the multitude of injustices and cruelties always committed in the name of war and preparation for more war.

This article originally appeared on George Mason University’s History News Network.org.

Murray Polner [send him mail] was editor of Present Tense, published by the American Jewish Committee from 1973—90. He wrote Rabbi: The American Experience; co-edited (with Stefan Merken) Peace Justice Jews: Reclaiming Our Tradition, as well as No Victory Parades: The Return of the Vietnam Veteran and, with Jim O’Grady, Disarmed & Dangerous, a biography of Daniel and Philip Berrigan. His most recent book is We Who Dared to Say No to War: American Antiwar Writing From 1812 to Now, co-authored with Thomas Woods.

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In Transforming America’s Israel Lobby (Potomac Books), Fleshler’s incisive and thoughtful book I read during AIPAC’s recent annual meeting, he asks why American Jews, overwhelmingly liberal to moderate (e.g., 78% voted for Obama and at least 70% support a "two-state solution"), have permitted right-wingers, hawks and neocons to speak in their name on Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and of course, Israel. The hundreds of thousands who protested against an invasion of Iraq in New York City on a frigid day in February 2003 included many Jews yet the pro-Israel establishment ("pro-Israel" is a bogus term so critics can be thought of as anti-Israel) remained and remain mute.

"Precisely where have all the Jewish doves been hiding all these years?" Fleshler asks. "What accounts for their collective tongue-biting"?

This was never more evident than in the nearly universal assault on a book, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt’s The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. Given the overwhelmingly negative response it received one would think latter day Cossacks had landed to pillage and rape Israel and its Jewish allies. Yet the authors are scholars associated with the "realist" school of foreign policy, Mearsheimer at the University of Chicago and Walt at Harvard. Their sin was asking if unquestioned support for Israel was always in the American national interest.

Oddly enough, Mearsheimer and Walt would agree with much of Fleshler’s criticisms save his contention that the power of the Israel Lobby is overrated. Though hardly monolithic, it behaves much like every other lobby in fighting for their client’s interests. AIPAC, for example, works the Congress, not that most members require much persuasion. It would be hard to find a national politician who dares tangle with them. At every one of AIPAC’s annual meetings politicians rush to declare their eternal love for Israel.

Transforming America’s Israel Lobby contends that things may be changing and points to several possible trends. Still, the election of Benjamin Netanyahu and the naming of Avigdor Lieberman as his Foreign Minister means that two authentic hardliners eager to attack Iran will never allow "two states for two peoples" if that means a truly independent Palestine, as U.S. policy allegedly favors. I wonder if the U.S. will be able to resist Netanyahu’s call to arms when the latter visits Washington this week. With the coming of Obama it’s possible we may see a reduction of the lobby’s influence and power but there is certainly no reason to be overconfident.

Fleshler, though, thinks the lobby appears more powerful than it really is, and cites an occasional denial of Israel’s requests, most recently Bush 2′s refusal to allow Israeli bombers the right to fly over Iraq to attack Iran. There are a few —very few — similar refusals, such as Bush 1′s insistence that either Israel cease building additional settlements in the occupied West Bank or else forego American money. Infuriated, more than one thousand lobbyists arrived in Washington and then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir was "reassured by AIPAC and Likud operatives in Washington that Israel could win a fight in Congress." Bush 1 tried to fight back, but was overwhelmed, famously complaining in one his memorable press conferences, "We’re got one little guy [himself] over here. I think the American people will support me." But following strong protests he did back down.

There are, however, less publicized instances where efforts have been made to silence critics. NYU historian Tony Judt’s scheduled lecture (he’s Jewish and a critic of the lobby) at a Polish institute in Manhattan was abruptly cancelled when local lobbyists protested. Bishop Tutu’s talk at a Catholic college in Minnesota was called off and only restored after outraged faculty and students vigorously dissented. Fleshler mentions that Mearsheimer and Walt’s scheduled talk at a Chicago meeting was cancelled. No surprise there. But Jimmy Carter, who did more for Israel than any other President, was condemned as anti-Israel because he dared use the forbidden word "Apartheid" in the title of one of his books about Israel. When Carter’s speech and Q&A at Brandeis University ended, C-Span’s coverage showed the former President receiving a huge ovation from his Jewish audience, lending some credence to Fleshler’s belief that things are changing.

Still, there’s the more recent example of the lobby’s strength: The nomination of Charles Freeman, a thirty-year veteran of the diplomatic corps and the Pentagon to the National Intelligence Council which manages the National Intelligence Estimates (it infuriated Israel and its friends in November 2007 when it claimed Iran was not in the nuclear weapon business) was promptly shot down by the lobby and its allies and Freeman’s name was withdrawn by the new (and intimidated?) Obama administration.

The late Reform Rabbi and WWII veteran Alexander Schindler (he was awarded the Purple Heart and Bronze Star), one of the last fearless and liberal national Jewish leaders, once portrayed his generation’s loyalty as grounded on a "kidney machine," which he defined as the Holocaust and Israel. Newer generations are now more acculturated, more assimilated, and public anti-Semitism is at its lowest ebb in U.S. history. "Why should we care about all those old institutions? We need our own institutions" an anonymous (why anonymous?) young activist told Fleshler. And Tom Dine, an early leader of AIPAC who now rejects its approach and consults for the Israel Policy Forum, told Fleshler he rejects the leadership of the traditional organizations, "These people have to go. These people have stayed too long."

Technology has spawned a trickier challenge to the supporters of the status quo. A growing number of outspoken bloggers and websites like Jeremiah Haber’s "Magnes Zionist," Richard Silverstein’s "Tikkun Olam," Bernard Avishai.com, Philip Weiss’ "Mondoweiss," Shammai Leibowitz’s "Pursuing Justice," Tony Karon’s "Rootless Cosmopolitan," and the magazine Tikkun, columnists M. J. Rosenberg and Rabbi Henry Siegman, once head of the American Jewish Congress and the Synagogue Council of America, offer alternative views and sharp critiques. New American Jewish dissenting organizations such as J Street, which supports political candidates, Brit Tzedek v’Shalom, a grassroots group which claims 35,000 members including 1500 rabbis and ran a full-page ad in a recent New York Times, the think tank Israel Policy Forum, American Friends of Peace Now, Jewish Voices for Peace, and other challengers have emerged.

Where their predecessors Beira, New Jewish Agenda, and the Jewish Peace Lobby were excoriated as anti-Israel and driven to cover, the new groups are able to raise money (though not nearly as much as the older ones), lobby Congress, become involved in political races (as J Street does) and use the Internet to spread their messages. Their members tend to be younger, better educated and more secure than their parents and grandparents. They are the people who can build a different American Jewish community which can help shape a more realistic policy in the Middle East, oppose settlements, work for a sovereign Palestine alongside Israel, and avoid a war with Iran with its unpredictable consequences.

The last word is by M.J. Rosenberg in his Foreword. Rosenberg is an acute onetime congressional aide, a former editor of AIPAC’s "Near East Report" and is now working for the nonconformist Israel Policy Forum. Given the will and determination, he argues, "any president can pursue Middle East peace without fear of the lobby, because the overwhelming majority of American Jews are not hardliners, advocates of the lobby’s line, or single issue voters. American Jews are Americans and treating us as if our only concern were sustaining the status quo in Israel is both insulting and wrong. Few of us take our cue from the lobby."

If Fleshler, Rosenberg and the newcomers are right, then change may be coming. But — and it’s a real But — it’s a huge "if."

A version of this article originally appeared on George Mason University’s History News Network.org.

Murray Polner [send him mail] was editor of Present Tense, published by the American Jewish Committee from 1973—90. He wrote Rabbi: The American Experience; co-edited (with Stefan Merken) Peace Justice Jews: Reclaiming Our Tradition, as well as No Victory Parades: The Return of the Vietnam Veteran and, with Jim O’Grady, Disarmed & Dangerous, a biography of Daniel and Philip Berrigan. His most recent book is We Who Dared to Say No to War: American Antiwar Writing From 1812 to Now, co-authored with Thomas Woods.

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The neocons who emerged from that cafeteria never had any use for liberalism and never understood why Jews consistently vote Democratic. (78% voted for Obama). But liberal and moderate Jews have always been a mystery to neocons. It was the late Milton Himmelfarb, a Commentary contributing editor who famously wondered why Jews lived like Episcopalians yet voted like Puerto Ricans. An appropriate answer was offered by Earl Shorris in his sharp-edged 1982 book Jews Without Mercy: A Lament when he condemned neoconservatism’s "self-interest, without mercy for the old or the poor, a movement that condemns oppression only when it serves the interests of the movement to do so."

For Heilbrunn, neoconservatism is less about ideology or hatred of liberals but rather a "mindset…decisively shaped by the Jewish immigrant experience, by the Holocaust and by the twentieth century struggle against totalitarianism." It is, he states confidently in a fit of pop sociology, "in a decisive respect a Jewish phenomenon."

But is it? Growing up a child of poor Jewish immigrants well-versed in the tragedies of the Jewish past and whose family were victims of the Nazi invasion of Russia, my father and grandfather sneered when anyone mentioned Stalin or Trotsky’s names, and regularly cautioned me to steer clear of left and right extremists. Both factions had cost them great pain in their native country. Personally, I remember Max Shachtman, who went from Communism to Trotsky to cheering on the Vietnam War, being jeered while trying to instruct Jews with the same background as his about his version of Marxism. It was Shachtman, Heilbrunn notes, who "inculcated a hatred of liberalism in his protégés, among them, Irving Kristol, Joshua Muravchick, Al Shanker, even Bayard Rustin, the erstwhile pacifist and Shanker’s pal in the New York City teacher union.

By the eighties the neocons began taking on Presidents. Carter was soft on communism and his novel defense of human rights for all and not merely for your side in the Cold War was unacceptable. Kissinger and Nixon’s policy of détente was scorned. Bush I was loathed because he wanted to curtail new Jewish settlements on the West Bank and had to retreat before the clout of the Israel Lobby, telling a press conference that he, the President of the United States, was only a "lonely little guy" trying to question Israeli policy. Even Reagan, who Heilbrunn rightly points out was "not reflexively pro-Israel" was excoriated in Commentary in 1983 for failing to follow its political and military advice to ship American GIs to fight in the civil wars then raging in Central America. The magazine called it "appeasement by any other name." Nor for that matter could neocons abide foreign policy’s so-called "realists" William Fulbright, George Kennan, James Baker and Brent Scowcroft.

In addition to being subsidized by very conservative billionaires their success in pursuit of authority and influence was fueled by their perception of Washington’s amoral, Byzantine climate. Nourished by ideological pamphleteers such as the Wall Street Journal editorial page, Fox TV, Commentary, the Weekly Standard, right-wing foundations and others, they delighted in spreading around empty shibboleths such as "National Greatness," "benevolent global hegemony," "regime change" and "Islamofascism." Liberal "elites" were members of a "new class," whatever that meant.

From 2001 on they became camp followers of the Bush/Cheney administration. They played a crucial role in pressing the case for war against Iraq. No longer outsiders and critics, as their elders had been, they were a new generation of right-wing biological and intellectual progeny, pugnacious second-stringers — virtually none of whom have ever served on active military duty — welcomed into power centers that had for so long eluded their elders. Above all, they were prepared to demonstrate American military might anywhere and everywhere.

Encyclopedic in breath, extremely readable, the book has too many throwaway lines. Heilbrunn dismisses as "a fire-breathing liberal" Patricia Derian, Carter’s human rights advocate, without pausing to make clear what it is that bothers him about her politics and human rights. Edward Said, a neocon punching bag because of his contrarian views on Palestinians wrote — never defined here — "much nonsense about the Middle East." The views of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, highly critical of the Israel Lobby, are "addled," no details offered. Laurie Mylroie is "an eccentric [why?] scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who claimed that Saddam Hussein was behind the bombing of the World Trade center in 1993" and Michael Ledeen, a onetime AEI member whose book Freedom Betrayed, argued that the right, not the left, was best suited to toppling dictatorial regimes. "This," concludes Heilbrunn, "was neoconservatism on steroids," without pausing to argue the case with Ledeen.

All the same, now that we have a new administration, the question is whether neoconservatism is finished.

Heilbrunn rightly doubts their departure. Their vast network of institutions, publications and wealthy donors remains intact and they are eager to take on Iran and sooner or later even North Korea. In his book and especially later in the paleocon magazine The American Conservative — an arch-enemy of neocons — ("Where Have All the Neocons Gone," January 12, 2009), Heilbrunn shrewdly wonders whether the new administration’s liberal hawks and neocons might somehow come to see eye to eye. "Perhaps reaching out to the Obama administration will help rejuvenate neoconservatism. It could prove to be a more comfortable fit than either side might anticipate."

After all, nothing is impossible in Washington.

This piece originally appeared on History News Network.org.

Murray Polner [send him mail] was editor of Present Tense, published by the American Jewish Committee from 1973—90. He wrote Rabbi: The American Experience; co-edited (with Stefan Merken) Peace Justice Jews: Reclaiming Our Tradition, as well as No Victory Parades: The Return of the Vietnam Veteran and, with Jim O’Grady, Disarmed & Dangerous, a biography of Daniel and Philip Berrigan. His most recent book is We Who Dared to Say No to War: American Antiwar Writing From 1812 to Now, co-authored with Thomas Woods.

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In Deployed: How Reservists Bear the Burden of Iraq (University of Michigan Press, 2008) Michael Musheno (chair of the Criminal Justice Studies department at San Francisco State University) and Susan M. Ross (Associate Professor of Sociology at Lycoming College) have presented us with valuable insights in their sympathetic portrayal of 46 anonymous reservists in the 893rd Military Police Reserve Company, another pseudonym used in the book. Called to active duty after the invasion of Iraq, all returned alive.

During the Vietnam War the reserves (and National Guard as well) were havens for those wishing to avoid the draft. Those who couldn’t find a reserve slot or manage a deferment were shipped off to basic training and if even more unlucky, were sent to Vietnam. Massive infusions of cannon fodder were desperately needed and Selective Service provided them. Lyndon Johnson preferred a draft because he was wary of political opposition from reservist and Guard families eager to keep their sons at home. Iraq was different. George W. Bush and Richard Cheney (both non-veterans) sent in the reserves and Guard and let everyone else alone because above all they wanted a passive public. As of 2006, more than 186,000 reservists had served in Iraq and Afghanistan.

When the 893rd’s men and women enlisted, they thought they would be "weekend warriors." For a part-time position the pay was good. (At age 19 I too once joined the reserves, happy to receive government checks, and later served on active duty). The 893rd ‘s reservists were certainly motivated to join by economic factors. "Simply put," the authors comment, " a tightening American economy that squeezes lower and middle-class families’ abilities to provide for themselves and their children increases participation rates in the Army Reserve and National Guard." But so did a sense of nationalism, especially after 9/11 and for others, cultural orientations [authors' italics], what Musheno and Ross define as enlisting as "as a way of enhancing their sense of themselves."

In their demographic breakdown of the 46 men and women of the 893rd, the authors found that they were overwhelmingly male (89.9%), white (71.7%) enlisted personnel (91.3%), 21.7% had a high school or GED diploma, while 71.5% had some college, a bachelor’s degree, and more.

In general, they write, "few Reservists anticipated that they were beginning a series of deployments that would in many cases last more than two years and put them for long stints in the midst of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq," adding that the 893rd were heading for Baghdad "within days of President Bush’s announcement on board the USS Abraham Lincoln that the mission in Iraq had been u2018accomplished.’"

Deployed is the first of many books and studies to come about "citizen" soldiers suddenly called to active duty regardless of their marital, parental, occupational or student status. One reservist received an afternoon call telling him to report the following morning. Most had no idea where they going and for how long. Rumors were rampant but that’s the military way and everyone in the unit accepted their assignments though we now know that some of the 186,000 reservists (not part of the 893rd) refused to deploy.

As an MP detachment and part of the army’s constabulary force they expected to guard gates, airports, bridges and tunnels, and perhaps arrest some drunks. Iraq service was different. Some felt estranged from the regulars. One claimed to have been mistreated by regular noncoms and he and his mates were viewed as make-believe soldiers. The four women reservists took care of one another, as did many of the men who formed close friendships with their fellow reservists. As Musheno and Ross tell it, some reservists adapted, others struggled with their assignments in the war-zone and still others resisted as best they could. One reservist was proud of "what I have done" and easily adjusted to post-Iraq life. Others did not. One was upset when enlistments were frozen by the Pentagon’s "stop-loss policies. "It makes me angry to think that the army feels that it has the right to extend people’s contracts," said one angry reservist about the practice, "and hold them past their original orders. Who do they think they are? And there’s nothin’ you can do about it, you know." Marriages and family life were disrupted. Others were concerned that, in spite of have served for two years, they could be recalled at any time. Then, too, when the torture of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib by another MP reserve unit was broadcast to the world some of the 893rd reservists felt tainted, abruptly thrust into a controversy for which they were entirely unprepared. My guess is that some reservists — as many Americans have — doubted that only low-level MPs were responsible for Abu Ghraib, especially in an administration as secretive and paranoid as the Bush administration.

Musheno and Ross conclude that the reservists had made "extraordinary sacrifices." But it is reasonable for some to believe that after all they had volunteered. Shouldn’t they then be required to fulfill their legal duties? Hardly, the authors rightly insist, labeling reservists the "New Conscripts of the Twenty-First-Century U.S. Army." They do so, they write, because they want "to awaken the public to their sacrifices and draw the attention of decision makers to halt the abuse of reservist call-ups to sustain protracted wars that are neither just nor in the interest of the United States."

Meanwhile, Iraq and Afghanistan veterans — reservists and regulars alike — have too often received shoddy hospital treatment (remember the Walter Reed scandal?), received devastating wounds, and as the RAND Corporation concluded in April 2008, twenty percent of returnees are suffering from PTSD, possibly major depression and 19 percent may have brain damage. A bill proposing a generous GI Bill flounders in Congress in the face of Pentagon opposition and a threatened presidential veto. On one visit to the 893rd reserve center Musheno and Ross noticed photographs of George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld on the wall but nothing was posted "about when, where or how to seek help with the problems associated with either home-grown or war-zone struggles."

While Deployed is a notable addition to the literature of our persistent wars, the real problem, remains, as the title of Martin Binkin’s 1993 book asked, Who Will Fight the Next War?

Who, indeed? Check out your local high school students and college underclassmen as well as your own teenagers. They will, unless and until this country’s historic addiction to war is somehow, in some way, cured.

This piece originally appeared on George Mason University’s History News Network.org.

Murray Polner [send him mail] was editor of Present Tense, published by the American Jewish Committee from 1973—90. He wrote Rabbi: The American Experience; co-edited (with Stefan Merken) Peace Justice Jews: Reclaiming Our Tradition, as well as No Victory Parades: The Return of the Vietnam Veteran and, with Jim O’Grady, Disarmed & Dangerous, a biography of Daniel and Philip Berrigan. His most recent book is We Who Dared to Say No to War: American Antiwar Writing From 1812 to Now, co-authored with Thomas Woods.

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Back in the 1980s the major American Jewish welfare organization adopted as its fundraising slogan "We are One." The implication was that American Jews were a united bloc. But we are not "one" and never have been. Ideologically, we are everything from anarchists to Zionists, working people to the gilded rich. Noam Chomsky is as Jewish as Irving Kristol, and Norman Finkelstein as Jewish as Alan Dershowitz. We are neither angels nor saints. And we are certainly not monolithic, despite perennial efforts to paint anyone critical of various aspects of Israeli policies as "self-hating" Jews.

The truth is that the overwhelming number of America’s estimated 6 million Jews is opposed to the Cheney-Bush-neocon regime as their voting patterns have shown time and again. In 2000 and 2004 the overwhelming majority of us voted for Gore and Kerry. In the 2006 congressional elections 80% of the Jewish vote went Democratic. And repeated surveys of Jewish college students show them to be overwhelmingly liberal to moderate. Tikkun Olam or "saving the world" remains our true heritage and legacy.

In a new book I recently edited with Stefan Merken (Peace, Justice, & Jews: Reclaiming Our Tradition), we differed with those Jewish organizations that are silent — about Israel and the Palestinians, about Iraq, about Iran. The overwhelming majority of American Jews has supported a negotiated "land for peace" settlement between Israel and Palestinians and has no interest in pursuing this or any Administration’s fantasies of perpetual war.

Indeed, one of the shrewdest American Jewish commentators, M. J. Rosenberg of the Israel Policy Forum, has rightly written: "There is nothing pro-Israel about supporting policies that promise only that Israeli mothers will continue to dread their sons’ 18th birthdays for another generation."

American Jewish peace voices do not genuflect before the Israel Lobby. See, for example, Brit Tzedek v’Shalom — the Jewish Peace Alliance for Justice and Peace — which is said to have more than 15,000 members, the Jewish Voice for Peace, and Meretz USA an affiliate of Israel’s Meretz bloc; Americans for Peace Now, which reportedly has 25,000 members, Rabbis for Human Rights, the Jewish Peace Fellowship, and the Shalom Center. Prolific writers abound too: Rabbis Arthur Waskow of the Shalom Center, Michael Lerner of Tikkun magazine and Henry Siegman, former head of the American Jewish Congress when it was still liberal and now President of the U.S./ Middle East Project, Michael Massing at the New York Review of Books, Tony Karon, Philip Weiss, Norman Birnbaum, and many more who will never be silent.

Unlike Israel, where free speech and public debate thus far remains sacred, a number of so-called major American Jewish organizations (many of whom have few if any paid members) have sought mightily to stifle critics. The publication of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt’s book (The Israeli Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy), flaws and insights all, has been treated as the second coming of pogromists and saber-wielding Cossacks.

Tony Judt, the distinguished New York University historian and critic, was prevented from speaking at the Polish Consulate in New York City because of ADL’s pressure. Judt, who is Jewish, was scheduled to speak about "The Israel Lobby & U.S. Foreign Policy." A protest, with more than one hundred signatories, many of them Jewish, soon appeared (The Case of Tony Judt: An Open Letter to the ADL, New York Review of Books, November 16, 2006), denouncing the "climate of intimidation." This suppression of alternative views, this scotching of debate, this silencing of differing views, is nothing less than a sign of frightened men and women creating a new blacklist.

Jimmy Carter, who accomplished more for Middle Eastern peace than any other president, was bitterly denounced earlier this year for daring to use the word "Apartheid" in describing Israel’s domination of Palestinians, a word often heard and read in Israeli newspapers. (See his book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid).) Israel may or may not practice South African-style "apartheid" — as some leftists insist — but when he spoke at Brandeis University after the true believers had publicly excoriated him, most of the students at the meeting (which was aired on C-Span) stood and applauded. (The squelching of debate isn’t limited to the U.S. Danny Rubinstein, a veteran Israeli journalist for the Israeli daily Ha’aretz was invited and then disinvited by the British Zionist Federation because he, like other Israelis, had dared to use the forbidden word). Two Catholic colleges also caved in to pressure. St. Thomas College in Minneapolis (barring Bishop Tutu, it was forced to back down in the face of protests) and De Paul University in Chicago, which denied tenure to critic Norman Finkelstein after the faculty had overwhelmingly supported him.

Jewish neoconservatives on the other hand (and there are lots of non-Jewish neocons as well) get a free ride. Yet they do not speak as Jews and they certainly don’t represent the rest of us. But because so many of them are Jewish, the rest of us are often held responsible for their epic blunders. Indeed, some of the guilt-by-association allegations against all Jews are nothing less than classic anti-Semitism.

Neocons are in reality very well paid home front warriors and publicists for the new American Empire. Callow ideologues, they played a crucial role in getting the U.S. into Iraq and are now desperate to take on Iran but from afar (please don’t count on they or their close family members ever ending up in combat units in Iran). Some are probably motivated by right-wing Israeli sympathies; most, however, are drawn to rigid Manichean geopolitical doctrines of preemptive war. Now they are clinging as "national security" advisors to the bellicose Rudolph Giuliani, once again hoping for another "cakewalk" against Iran.

The truth, though, is that the primary responsibility for the massive bloodletting in the Middle East rests with the President, Vice-President, Donald Rumsfeld, their Congressional sycophants, a mass media that serves as a willing transmission belt, and the mighty oil, munitions and yes, Israel Lobby, which also includes Christian fundamentalists and Christian Zionists, desperate to welcome Armageddon.

Let me be very clear. No American Jewish peace voice or group questions the right of Israel to exist as an independent sovereign state. Nor, I hope, should any non-Jewish critic though Israel is no more immune to criticism than any other country. And not to be overlooked is that within Israel many courageous and principled Jewish critics of any number of Israeli policies are active, among them the feminist center for peace and justice Batshaolm; the leftist peace bloc opposed to the occupation of the West Bank Gush-Shalom; the anti-militarist New Profile; Meretz; Peacewatch; the Israeli daily Haaretz, B’Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, Yesh Gvul, an organization supporting Israeli soldiers refusing to serve in the Occupied Territories, Shalom Achschav/Peace Now, which favors Palestinian self-determination, the Israel-Palestine Center for Research & Information, a joint organization working for a "two-state, two-people" resolution and many more.

The same thing is happening among more and more American Jews right now.

Murray Polner [send him mail] was editor of Present Tense, published by the American Jewish Committee from 1973—90. He wrote Rabbi: The American Experience; co-edited (with Stefan Merken) Peace Justice Jews: Reclaiming Our Tradition, as well as No Victory Parades: The Return of the Vietnam Veteran and, with Jim O’Grady, Disarmed & Dangerous, a biography of Daniel and Philip Berrigan.

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Review of David Halberstam’s The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War (Hyperion, 2007)

When David Halberstam died in an automobile crash on his way to interview the old New York Giant Quarterback Y.A. Tittle for yet another of his sport books he had already turned in his "Korea book," as he called it, to his publisher. Officially titled The Coldest Winter, this is by far his finest work, told with verve, insights and penetrating portraits of the suffering of GIs and junior officers. In it, he turns a sharp light on the personalities who transformed this fierce and unwinnable "police action" where 38,000 Americans — many of them reluctant draftees — were killed, not to mention several million Koreans and the many Americans wounded in body and mind. Called our "forgotten war," the constitutional issues it raised and the continual use of American combat forces everywhere casts an ominous shadow throughout the book. "The century’s nastiest little war," as the military historian S.L.A. Marshall wrote, it opened the door to Joe McCarthy’s populist demagoguery and the toxic climate it created and the rise of the powerful China Lobby that wanted to "unleash" Chiang Kai-shek’s exiled army and reconquer the Chinese mainland.

Only five years after the end of the "Good War," North Korea and the dictatorial ideologue Kim Il Sung — distrusted by Mao and mocked by Stalin and Douglas MacArthur — ("Where is Kim Buck Tooth?" he laughed on one of his rare trips to Korea soon after he asked his aides, "Any celebrities here to greet me?") — pleaded with the Soviet and Chinese dictators to allow him to invade the South and finish off a low-key Korean civil war. After all, Secretary of State Dean Acheson had inexplicably omitted South Korea from the American defensive perimeter in the Far East. Kim finally received reluctant approval from Beijing and Moscow, neither of whom trusted him or his military. Then, without asking for Congressional ratification, and against the advice of some of his military advisors, Harry Truman decided the time had come to draw a line against what he believed to be a simple case of Communist aggression and fight a "limited war," but always careful lest the Chinese and Soviets intervene too. On June 30, 1950, U.S. ground forces, initially consisting of poorly trained service troops and officers living comfortably in Japan, were suddenly thrown into combat with an enormous loss of life.

As they always do, Americans rallied around the flag. It was what the libertarian scholar Llewellyn Rockwell, Jr. described as that "mysterious thing called nationalism, which makes an ideological religion of the nation’s wars." There were virtually no protests other than pacifists such as Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker and the principled Senator Robert Taft. Having just smashed the Nazis and Japanese it seemed that America’s military machine was unstoppable. Communism had to be stopped by any means necessary, or so the popular mantra went in those years. Even so, as the war dragged on fewer and fewer Americans rallied to the war, if they cared at all. "Korea would not prove a great national war of unifying singular purpose, as World War II had been, nor would it, like a generation later, divide and thus haunt the nation," writes Halberstam. "It was simply a puzzling, gray, very distant conflict, a war that went on and on, seemingly without hope of resolution, about which most Americans, save the men who fought there and their immediate families, preferred to know as little as possible."

Because Truman had stubbornly and foolishly refused to ask Congress for a declaration of war, "the opposition was off the hook in terms of accepting responsibility for America’s response." As a result, the more protracted the war became, the more it became a political war whose legacy contributed to further poisoning American political life. It certainly helped give rise to the fabrication about domestic enemies and the media "stabbing our troops and the country in the back," a distortion first spread by the unrepentant and defeated World War I German General Erich Ludendorff, repeated after Vietnam and which will surely be heard again when and if the Iraq War ever ends.

Halberstam delineates the stunning blunders and character defects of the major actors. Stalin, the cruel cynic, finally gave Kim his approval to cross the 38th Parallel but also warned him never to expect help from Soviet troops. “If you should get kicked in the teeth I shall not lift a finger," Stalin told Kim, though obviously hoping to keep the U.S. bogged down in an unwinnable war if the Chinese were to become involved. Mao had nothing but contempt for Kim and the North Korean military but once MacArthur ordered his troops to the Yalu River border with China, Mao dispatched 300,000 "volunteers" to fight Americans (the South Korean military having largely collapsed, much like the South Vietnamese military in the seventies). Kim and South Korean strongman Syngman Rhee surely deserved one another. Halberstam tells us that General John Hodge, who had once led US troops in South Korea, loathed Rhee. As the military historian Clay Blair wrote, Hodge despised Rhee as "devious, emotionally unstable, brutal, corrupt and wildly unpredictable." Still, Rhee was America’s man until he unwisely sought to subvert the truce finally signed in July 1953.

Halberstam never loses sight of the war and his crisp and readable text is filled with examples of the courage of ordinary soldiers and marines, obviously a reminder of what he witnessed in Vietnam. If he sophomorically seems to glorify Generals by always referring to them by their nicknames (Lightning Joe Collins, Dutch Keiser, Al Gruenther, etc.), he does name feckless senior officers who he insists failed their troops.

No officer was more incompetent, concludes Halberstam in his provocative appraisal of General Douglas MacArthur, the all-powerful proconsul in Japan and commander of forces in the Far East. (Max Hastings, the highly-regarded British military historian, blamed MacArthur for the WWII defeat in the Philippines: [He] "abandoned his doomed command on Bataan, and escaped to safety with his own court, complete even unto personal servants, and made good the claim that his own value to his country surpassed that of a symbolic sacrifice alongside his men.")

During the Korean War MacArthur flew into Pyongyang after the First Cavalry had reached the city. The very critical Halberstam then notes: "He did not spend a night in Korea; in fact he did not spend the night there during the entire time he commanded." In fact, he remained in Tokyo, bunkered down with his politicized generals, and did not return to Korea until two weeks after the Chinese struck. His military intelligence was "doctored" by his obsequious staff; moreover, his goal now was to invade China.

Why China? Again, Halberstam quotes Max Hastings: "It will never be certain how MacArthur’s affronted personal hubris influenced his attitude toward the Chinese, how far he became instilled with a yearning for crude revenge upon the people who had brought all his hopes and triumphs in Korea to nothing." General Omar Bradley was far less forgiving. He wrote about his fellow General that his "legendary military pride had been hurt. The Red Chinese had made a fool of the infallible u2018military genius.’ " His only recourse, Bradley went on, was to revenge himself by initiating "an all-out war with Red China and possibly the Soviet Union, igniting WWIII, and a nuclear holocaust," much like today’s American ideological fanatics who are promoting what they call World War IV in the Middle East, consequences be damned.

What MacArthur did after the successful landing at Inchon led his supporters to believe the war had reached its end. He triumphantly told his troops the mission was accomplished and predicted they’d be home by Christmas. And then, defying orders from Washington, he sent his troops north to the Yalu, a move cheered on by the China Lobby and the capital’s home front warriors. This challenge to the President’s authority set up a profound constitutional clash between an elected President and the general with a Napoleonic complex. When Truman fired him, MacArthur returned home to a nation he barely knew with his eye on the White House. Huge crowds lionized him and Truman was widely excoriated until it became clear that other than urging war with China and possibly the Soviet Union, MacArthur had little to offer the country.

By disobeying orders from Washington to cease and desist doing whatever he pleased and then winning support among politicians and the press, Halberstam crowns this marvelous book by writing, "…domestic politics had now become a part of national security calculations, and it showed the extent to which the American government had begun to make fateful decisions based on the most limited of truths and the most deeply flawed intelligence in order to do what it wanted to do for political reasons, whether it would work or not." He then rightly cites Lyndon B. Johnson and George W. Bush as two recent prime examples of presidential arrogance and ignorance that has led to so much chaos and bloodletting in their wars.

Luckily, Washington finally sent General Mathew Ridgeway to Korea and while ostensibly subordinate to MacArthur, he reorganized his forces so that at least an unsatisfactory deadlock might finally be reached. It was Ridgeway, a general’s general in Halberstam’s admiring treatment, who famously and memorably said of the men who served under him, "All lives on a battlefield are equal and a dead rifleman is as great a loss in the eyes of God as a dead General. The dignity which attaches to the individual is the basis of Western Civilization, and this fact should be remembered by every Commander."

Buy the book

Murray Polner [send him mail] co-authored Disarmed and Dangerous, a biography of Daniel and Philip Berrigan and wrote No Victory Parades: The Return of the Vietnam Veteran. This article originally appeared on George Mason University’s History News Network.

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As everyone now knows, the "mainstream media" has been losing advertisers, readers, and money for years. The familiar reasons include younger non-readers, a lack of interest in world affairs, and ideologically inspired attacks on the "liberal media" plus the Internet and bloggers and assorted technological advances. Scrawls listing "news" headlines on the bottom of TV screens are the latest gimmicks. Worst of all, our print press and of course TV networks have long since given up on hard, and if need be skeptical, reporting about what our "leaders" say and want us to believe.

What brought the major media to this point is debatable but nothing in recent history can absolve virtually every American newspaper and TV network for the spineless manner it became an echo chamber for the Bush administration’s bellicose, deceitful and incompetent misadventure in Iraq. (An honorable exception is Knight-Ridder’s Washington staff — now McClatchy — which recognized almost from the start that a catastrophe lay ahead.) How and why our newspapers and news magazines fell for the utopian fantasies dreamed up by feckless neoconservatives and our five-draft deferment hawk Dick Cheney will forever haunt them. At least the New York Times has publicly apologized for its bad reporting about Iraq but we have yet to hear many apologies or explanations from anyone else.

Lying by Presidential administrations is hardly novel. The Spanish American War, the invasion of the Philippines, entry into World War I, the repeated occupations of Caribbean and Central American mini-states, the Vietnam War, Reagan’s proxy war in Central America, the curious and unexplained invasions of miniscule Granada and Panama, where America’s erstwhile protégé Noriega ( la Saddam) suddenly became the "enemy" are prime examples of presidential falsehoods. In every instance what the press reported then and now during "crises" hatched in Washington is what the White House and the so-called foreign policy elite wanted it to report.

To begin with, not many in our press corps seriously asked before 2003 why we intended to go to war. Was it because of the region’s oil or to defend Israel? If so, these possibilities were rarely discussed and debated. Or was it simply American arrogance that the "world’s only superpower" could do whatever it pleased?

From the beginning, skeptics were anathema and absent on TV, where, sadly, most Americans find their news. A critic like Scott Ritter was denigrated. Sagacious commentators such as Seymour Hersh, Mark Danner, Michael Massing, Ron Suskind, Murray Waas, Robert Parry, Pat Buchanan, former Reagan administration official and sometime Wall Street Journal associate editor Paul Craig Roberts, together with the libertarians at LewRockwell.com, wrote early and often for relatively small groups of intellectuals and policy wonks but could not be heard over the din of triumphal home-front warriors. Major book publishers, at least until the Iraq War consensus began falling apart, initially shied away from putting out books critical of the way the war was foisted on an unsuspecting public. Sunday morning TV offered viewers a dreary round of familiar oracles saluting our "Churchillian" President. The authors of When The Press Fails (University of Chicago Press), a significant and timely well-documented account (W. Lance Bennett and Regina G. Lawrence are political scientists and Steven Livingston teaches media and public affairs), report in detail how Americans were never informed in any detail of the possible risks involved in initiating a distant war in so volatile a region against a nation that had never harmed us.

What every one of them did over and again was allow Bush and Cheney and their sycophants to define the terms and therefore the "debate" about WMDs and Sadaam Hussein’s non-existent connection to Al Qaeda; that is, until the truth caught up with them. When Andrew Card, the White House Chief of Staff, explained in 2002 why their propaganda campaign for war had to start in September, he said, "From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August" few in the press or the tame 6:30 TV "news," let alone the vaunted Washington press corps, began investigating "when there was still time to debate the U.S, invasion in public." The authors continue: "In short, a war being promoted through a sales campaign was not the story the news highlighted." Instead, "the result is that the public was saturated with the sales pitch, which was delivered loud and clear throughout the news media."

There were many other examples for challenging the war makers, such as the "Downing Street" memo, which proved that the Bush administration had Iraq in its sights long before March 2003, a fact which was widely noted in the U.K. but essentially ignored in this country. Torture and Abu Ghraib are prominently discussed in the book. The three authors of When The Press Fails point out that the word "torture" was generally dropped in the media and the softer word "abuse" substituted, leading many unsuspecting readers and viewers to accept the President’s view that Americans didn’t torture.

And when Cheney suggested time and again that war against Iraq was a necessity, as he does now when he threatens war against Iran, consequences be damned, the press and of course TV "news" remains largely silent about the new war he and the neocons —virtually all of whom neither served on active military duty nor sent their own kids off to war — are now urging on Americans. The Guardian, a British newspaper, reported on 7/16/07 that Cheney’s pro-war views about Iran seem to be winning. "The balance in the internal White House debate over Iran has shifted back in favor of military action before President George Bush leaves office in 18 months."

True or not, who in the major national media will now turn their reporters loose to determine what the White House has in mind for Iran and whether yet another war is in American interests? Will they investigate as best they can why three US aircraft carriers and almost half the U.S. fleet of 227 ships are stationed near Iran? Will they ask if a tacit Washington-Jerusalem agreement has been reached whereby Israel will attack Iran, and then the U.S. will find an excuse to enter another Middle Eastern conflict? And above all, they need to ask how another war can be fought without a draft.

One of our most incisive commentators today is Hendrik Hertzberg of The New Yorker. Referring to Cheney’s threats against Iran, Hertzberg closed his July 9 and 16 essay on an alarming note: "The awful climax of u2018Cheney/Bush’ may be yet to come."

That the media performed so miserably is hardly novel given that the " significant legacy of the McCarthy era is caution in the newsroom in the face of government intimidation." This charge is made by former CNN correspondent Edward Alwood’s Dark Days in the Newsroom: McCarthyism Aimed at the Press (Temple University Press) another acute examination how the press — again with so few exceptions — rolled over when Joe McCarthy, HUAC, Hoover’s FBI and other opportunistic rogues hounded and assailed everyone they claimed — without evidence — was promoting Communism in this country.

Notwithstanding the careful studies by Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes, who relied on the invaluable Venona transcripts to prove there were indeed Soviet spies who needed to be prosecuted, the Washington-based inquisitors and headline hunters of the fifties, backed by a terrified national press (Some proud exceptions: The New York Times, the New York Post and Time) gave McCarthy and Hoover’s red-hunters all the support they needed. Yet aside from truthful informers such as Elizabeth Bentley and Whitaker Chambers, the inquisitors employed liars like Harvey Matusow, a cunning Bronx hustler, who eventually came to his senses and published his mea culpa, False Witness, with a minuscule pro-communist publishing house no less.

But McCarthy, Eastland, Jennings, J. Parnell Thomas, Hoover and other headline hunters were after bigger fish than low-level current and ex-CP members and fellow travelers. One of their primary targets was the Newspaper Guild, their way of taming frightened publishers and editors. Men and women reporters in newspaper offices and the union were often unjustly smeared because they had been liberals, leftists or during the darkest days of the Great Depression had once joined the Communist Party, then quite legal. Many other people were also savagely attacked and humiliated. The rabid Hearst and Scripps-Howard press and McCarthyite columnists excoriated them and scared employers promptly fired them. When some of my public school teachers were fired for being “leftists” or “Communists” none were ever shown to have propagandized their students. Nor were any of them ever convicted of spying. In that most shameful of times lives were smashed, careers ruined, marriages broken. One of my dismissed teachers spent the remainder of his working life delivering milk. Public officials, university presidents and boards of education cowardly gave up their employees. I don’t recall many newspaper editorials or radio commentators defending their right to teach.

McCarthy also went after editor James Wechsler, who as a young man had briefly been a Communist. As the tough editor of the then-liberal New York Post his paper had critically scrutinized Nixon, Hoover and McCarthy. For these crimes he was always shadowed by the ubiquitous FBI and forced to testify before the amoral McCarthy.

In the end, Wechsler had wise words for the press.

"It was said long ago that the function of a newspaper [and TV networks] is to u2018comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable," Wechsler said years later. "Too many newspapers have forgotten the words or grown soft and comfortable themselves that they view the phrase as inflammatory. We like it and we propose to remember it, not because we regard success as subversive but because success too often means the complacent loss of conscience."

Murray Polner [send him mail] co-authored Disarmed and Dangerous, a biography of Daniel and Philip Berrigan and wrote No Victory Parades: The Return of the Vietnam Veteran. This article originally appeared on George Mason University’s History News Network.

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Philip Gold’s The Coming Draft: The Crisis in Our Military and Why Selective Service is Wrong for America (Ballantine Books).

"To many politicians," explained Rep. Ron Paul, the Republican Texan libertarian congressional loner, "the American government is America," thus explaining why every war or national "emergency" creates a national fervor for a draft. "Conscription is wrongly associated with patriotism," said Paul after Rep. Charles Rangel tried recently to reintroduce a draft, "when really it represents collectivism and involuntary servitude." For whatever reasons, including opposition to the Iraq death trap, most Americans have for now turned against a draft and its illegitimate child, compulsory national service for all eighteen year olds (girls and gays too?) which Gold correctly described in a 2004 article in Washington Law & Politics as a "kind of allegedly desirable work done via the creation of a monstrous new teenager-herding bureaucracy."

When Jimmy Carter, intimidated by neoconservatives for being soft on Communism, foolishly reintroduced draft registration to "send a signal" to the Russians after their invasion of Afghanistan it had no effect on Moscow. Within ten years the Soviet Union would collapse of its own incompetence and corruption, none of which had anything to do with draft registration (which because of bureaucratic lethargy and governmental stupidity, still continues wasting taxpayer money). To those in out of Washington still promoting a draft in the hope of deterring other "axis of evil" nations, the suggestion, Gold believes, is highly debatable.

No draft is fair. Nor will many want to serve in Iraq, Iran, North Korea or anywhere else without knowing why. No dove, Gold a onetime Marine officer (and "disaffected conservative") who earned a Ph.D. in history from Georgetown and writes about national security issues, recognizes the serious problems whenever America has resorted to conscription.

Four million Americans turn eighteen every year. Should the current lottery system ever be utilized, how could a draft of say, 50,000 annually, be justified when all the rest are free to go about their civilian lives? No congressional son was drafted during Vietnam and virtually none of their kids — as well as in the executive branch — are in the active military today. The same favoritism and deference to influence and wealth will certainly prevail in any future draft. Anyone with political contacts and family connections will always be able to avoid active military duty, or if not, receive plum jobs. What a draft does is simply encourage Washington’s homebound hawks.

For too many conservatives another draft means recapturing the mythical ethos of WWII and the pre-sixties. In that imaginary Eden, there was no racial or religious discrimination, women knew their place, support for tyrants abroad was justified in the name of fighting Communism and young men called to the colors went willingly and patriotically (I went when drafted, but neither willingly nor patriotically, nor did any draftee with whom I served). People, Gold acutely comments, need a "good enough reason" to go to serve in the military.

In his 2004 article he argued against a draft "save in extremis," though that phrase is too vague. The way to avoid conscription is to avoid unnecessary wars and think twice about sending our men and women into battle in the name of "freedom and democracy" or another "war to end all wars." Interventionists falsely call this "isolationism" but is it not a willingness to adopt a sane foreign policy that encourages peaceful, live and let live relations, while courting and finding common ground culturally, economically and diplomatically with potential rivals? It may not always work but it can’t be worse than America’s historic addiction to war and intervention. Philip Gold is right. Another draft is a mindless idea in a very troubled time.

Murray Polner [send him mail] co-authored Disarmed and Dangerous, a biography of Daniel and Philip Berrigan and wrote No Victory Parades: The Return of the Vietnam Veteran. This article originally appeared on the History News Network.

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That Inferno: Conversations of Five Women Survivors of an Argentine Torture Camp. Foreword by Tina Rosenberg. (Vanderbilt University Press, 2006).

Thirty years ago rightwing Argentine admirals and generals rebelled against their legally elected government. From 1976 to 1983, while most of the world looked away, they began their "dirty war" against the country’s dissidents and leftists, descriptions often broadly and vaguely defined.

That Inferno, a book of "conversations" with five female survivors of the infamous Mechanics School of the Argentine Navy — a torture center — calls on us to try to remember what was done to them and their country — not to mention other Latin and Central American countries then under the sway of assassins and criminals. Having suffered excruciating tortures (one women said "they didn’t kill women, but they executed our husbands") they recall a time when they and tens of thousands were killed, tortured, thrown out of planes (they were dubbed "fish food"), raped, and babies of imprisoned women handed over to childless pro-regime couples. After the Junta’s botched military campaign (backed, incredulously, by a majority of still nationalistic Argentineans) to capture the Falkland/Malvinas from the British, a war in which they and their largely conscript armed forces were soundly thrashed, the women and other prisoners were released but often found themselves unable to function "normally," reliving their nightmare over and again.

In his prologue, Leon Rozitchner, an Argentinean intellectual and activist, points out that these crimes against humanity "would not have been possible without the training received in the U.S. and European intelligence schools and war colleges and without the support of the powerful Catholic Church and economic interests linked to national dominance and imperialism."

Other institutions were just as silent, and by their silence, supportive of the Junta. Marguerite Feitlowitz’s seminal A Lexicon of Terror: Argentina and the Legacies of Torture discusses the absence of protest by Argentina’s organized Jewish community. Two percent of the population and ten percent of the "disappeared" were Jewish as was a high percentage of the courageous Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. The lesson: Silence always results in acquiescence.

Jimmy Carter was mocked by American right-wingers for trying to counter the Junta’s murderers when he halted the sale of weapons. He also became the first modern American President to actually believe in and practice the defense of human rights. But when Ronald Reagan entered the White House human rights in Argentina and anywhere else was derided as liberal claptrap (except in Communist states) and arms sales to Argentina were resumed.

Yet Reagan’s policies were more in accord with traditional U.S. foreign policy than Carter’s. Throughout the Twentieth Century the U.S. has always been willing to accept Latin and Central American despots, killers and its wealthy ruling elites.

Perhaps those who torture and murder their opponents will one day be tried in a court of law. Argentine President Nestor Kirchner told his people he would carry out his duties "without rancor but with memory." Memory is crucial as victims of the Gulag, the Holocaust and other atrocities have learned. Future generations need to know what horrors were carried out in their names.

Murray Polner [send him mail] co-authored Disarmed and Dangerous, a biography of Daniel and Philip Berrigan and wrote No Victory Parades: The Return of the Vietnam Veteran. This article originally appeared on the History News Network.

Jerry Elmer’s compelling autobiographical account of his life as a draft resister and war protestor is a rare bird indeed. Other than John Balaban’s Remembering Heaven’s Face (Poseidon, 1991), memoirs by antiwar draft resisters and pacifists are relatively rare.

The son of liberal Jewish Viennese refugees from the Nazis, he grew up in Great Neck, N.Y., a New York City suburb. A student rebel, he earned mediocre grades, wore an antiwar button in class, and when told to remove it by a teacher and principal he was supported by the local school board. Soon after he left high school for the road and the cause, working with various pacifist and nonviolent organizations (like himself, pacifist but certainly not passive). The two radical Roman Catholic priests Daniel and Philip Berrigan whose draft board raids brought national publicity and jail terms for the brothers and their allies inspired him. (Eventually he thought Philip was too intolerant of anyone unwilling to break the law and take the punishment). Moved by Dan Berrigan’s famous remark that he would rather destroy paper than babies, Elmer was convicted for raiding a draft board and destroying "government property" — that is, the files of young draft-eligible young men (really boys) and then accepted — he says reluctantly — a plea bargain and evaded jail.

While Elmer’s recollections have far too many unnecessarily sophomoric criticisms about various antiwar people he encountered — apparently those he disliked were all imperfect save himself — he raises pertinent questions about the war, the opposition, and by extension our current impasse in yet another extremely dubious war in Iraq.

For example, who helped end the Vietnam War? What role did antiwar marchers and protestors play? And to what extent did practitioners of direct nonviolent action help stop the killing? No one, of course, can definitely tell, though Elmer makes a strong case that people like himself played a crucial role in generating opposition to the killing and mobilizing many more people to oppose the war.

Elmer is a Harvard Law School graduate and has since been admitted to practice in state and federal courts. He now practices commercial litigation in Providence, R.I. and serves as legal counsel to the Fellowship of Reconciliation, an interfaith pacifist organization founded in 1915. Still a pacifist, he writes, "We pacifists are right to oppose all violence, regardless of who commits it or what excuse are given for it." Even more significantly, and looking back at the sixties, he argues that nonviolent direct action is more effective than violence because it avoids "alienating the very people we are trying to reach and influence."

Some writers have insisted that identifying the mass of antiwar people with more radical protestors made it easier for the entire movement of millions of people disgusted with the war and the draft to be easily dismissed by prowar elements. An obsequious media eager to present radicals as the heart of the antiwar and anti-draft movement gave beards, long hair, beads, marijuana and nude demonstrators exaggerated prominence. It may in fact be one of the reasons it convinced an overwhelming number of Americans to re-elect in 1972 a dishonorable paranoid like Nixon over George McGovern, a genuine war hero and outspoken antiwar liberal.

Murray Polner [send him mail] co-authored Disarmed and Dangerous, a biography of Daniel and Philip Berrigan and wrote No Victory Parades: The Return of the Vietnam Veteran. This article originally appeared on the History News Network.

In Mitchell Lerner’s informative and worthwhile collection of essays by a group of historians scrutinizing LBJ’s domestic and foreign policies (Lerner teaches history at Ohio State University in Newark, Ohio and is the author of The Pueblo Incident), the essay by David L. Anderson, the 2004 president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, concludes that as a war president LBJ "was not a profile in courage."

The volume as a whole covers his domestic successes as well his foreign policy problems during the 1967 Six Day War. This review, however, will deal exclusively with David Anderson’s superb essay about the Vietnam War.

Relying on declassified phone discussions and other newly released material, Anderson believes that, while LBJ could ask the right questions of people, especially about his hopes for a Great Society, where Vietnam was concerned, he had no consistent policy and was surprisingly weak when dealing with his hawkish advisors. He and his closest advisors had a Cold War mindset and believed that no President could dare sound weak on communism. Anderson quotes Robert Schulzinger’s shrewd opinion in A Time for War: The United States and Vietnam, 1941—1975, that, "Had all American leaders not thought that all international events were connected to the Cold War, there would have been no American war in Vietnam." But alas, they did and we now have a Vietnam memorial wall.

A master of cajoling, tradeoffs, threats and smarmy good fellowship in the Senate, the complex, dominating LBJ as President believed he could persuade a professional revolutionary like Ho Chi Minh to behave himself just as he had corralled the veteran cold warrior AFL-CIO George Meany to enlist labor to back a war that not only damaged its interests but also those of its members forced to fight the war.

In the Congress, political courage was rare. Senators Wayne Morse and Ernest Gruening were the only two members who voted against the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, which gave LBJ a free hand. The House of Representatives voted unanimously for the resolution and no one rose to ask if there was evidence (there never would be) that North Vietnamese had attacked a U.S. warship. With the resolution in his pocket, and Americans allegedly under attack, LBJ’s popularity soared as Americans rallied around the flag. Communists were out to dominate the world, the Domino Theory was conventional wisdom, and only the U.S. stood in Moscow’s imperial way, or so went the unquestioned mantra until 1967—8, when a large anti-war movement began taking shape drawing growing numbers of moderate Americans to its cause.

Meanwhile, intelligence was "fixed" and the public and lots of insiders too were offered a steady diet of military progress over a motley peasant enemy about whom so many knew so little. Walt Rostow, portrayed by David Dellinger, the pacifist and antiwar leader, in From Yale to Jail offering him "books and articles that advocated the basic communist philosophy" when both were at Yale and Oxford, kept telling LBJ how well the war was going and informing LBJ about the "light at the end of the tunnel." When he couldn’t find the right CIA department to back up his view, he went shopping for another CIA desk. Anderson cites George W. Allen, the CIA’s senior Vietnam analyst complaint in the latter’s None So Blind: A Personal Account of the Intelligence Failure in Vietnam, that he would not play along with Rostow and "be a party to u2018cooking the books.’" During his later period of repentance, Robert McNamara’s In Retrospect explained, "The [so-called] Wise Men had no clue that all this was going on." By the time Johnson realized the war was a lost cause, it was too late. The irony, says Anderson, was that "Johnson never wanted a big war because he wanted no war at all."

Hawks believed otherwise. Some have since argued that the U.S. should have bombed more than they did. Yet B-52s dropped as many or more bombs on that rural society than on Germany during WWII. General Westmoreland wanted to dispatch more and more cannon fodder into the war, which LBJ wisely rejected. The General believed he should have been allowed to send more troops into North Vietnam but LBJ worried how the Soviets and Chinese might react — a distant echo of Harry Truman calling a stop to Douglas MacArthur’s risky plan to expand the Korean War into China and later firing him for insubordination.

By 1968, popular opposition to the war was widespread on the streets and campuses and it seemed as if the country was undergoing a nervous breakdown especially after the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy and the turmoil at the Democratic convention in Chicago. Congressional centrists were also increasingly restive and, as Anderson wisely concludes, the war was " already doing more damage to itself and to Vietnam than the level of American interest could tolerate." In the end, it was, to paraphrase General Omar Bradley when he famously criticized the Korean War, "the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time."

The irony and sadness is that the lessons of Vietnam absorbed by the Bush-Cheney administration and its unrepentant hawkish allies are the wrong lessons. As a result, as in Vietnam, American soldiers and Iraqi civilians are the latest victims of their ideological blindness.

Murray Polner [send him mail] co-authored Disarmed and Dangerous, a biography of Daniel and Philip Berrigan and wrote No Victory Parades: The Return of the Vietnam Veteran. This article originally appeared on the History News Network.

Sound familiar?

Since then, the world’s addiction to war and violence has never abated. Nor has America’s. Big and small and proxy wars, attacks on militarily powerful states such as the Dominican Republic, Grenada and Panama, plus interventions in the Caribbean and Central America, to name but a few, have occurred in nearly every decade. All of which seems to reflect Randolph Bourne’s famous, all-too prescient remark that, “War is the health of the state.” (Of course you can always pacify the population with patriotic and reverent ceremonies honoring the heroic troops who died in battle — always, the rationale goes — in the cause of “freedom.”)

During Vietnam —and later, before the Iraq War — we antiwar dissidents finally began mass protesting, marching, contacting politicians, writing, constructing placards and posters, praying, carrying out acts of civil disobedience and marching but to no avail. At least not yet.

My own humble proposal to put an end to war and terrorism everywhere is somewhat different, namely that the International Criminal Court in The Hague be empowered to investigate, indict and try every high-level — and only high-level — governmental leaders whose policies have led to the murder of civilians. The court should be granted the muscle to deal with all those unaccountable politicians including those whose nations have not joined the ICC. In that event, the guilty leaders will never again be allowed to travel to a signatory nation without risk of arrest.

Had such a court had the power, scores of notorious African, Central and Latin American presidents and generals would now be behind bars, as would past, present and future caudillos, generalissimos, presidentes, commissars, fhrers, duces, Great Leaders, presidents, vice-presidents and assorted zealots. Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon would have been hauled into court and tried for their responsibility in causing millions of deaths in Southeast Asia. The court would have had the power to call to the dock Saddam Hussein and any American and British leader who lied so Iraq might be invaded.

This accountability, this threat to punish guilty heads of state, this permanent black cloud would forever strip them of honor and memory and with hope, dissuade future leaders from murdering in the name of one ideology or another and then justifying the resulting savagery with groupthink, excessive flag waving, religious fanaticism and the demonization of “enemies.”

Moreover, we could institute special worldwide celebrations for the naysayers and whistleblowers that refuse to go along with the murderous plots afoot in their countries. John Kenneth Galbraith and George Ball are rightly remembered for saying “no” to JFK and LBJ. Who now cares to honor Dean Rusk, Walt Rostow and McGeorge Bundy? I would also have a curriculum devised to teach the young everywhere the virtues of tolerance.

It’s a dream, I know, but the alternative is a 21st Century even worse than the one Sumner envisioned.

Murray Polner [send him mail] co-authored Disarmed and Dangerous, a biography of Daniel and Philip Berrigan and wrote No Victory Parades: The Return of the Vietnam Veteran. A version of this article appeared in the July-August issue of Fellowship magazine.

Nothing much was said publicly about standing for the song until first baseman-slugger Carlos Delgado, then of the Toronto Blue Jays, refused last year to rise from his dugout bench, declaring he wasn’t thrilled how the U.S. had treated Vieques in Puerto Rico when it used the island for bombing practice. Nor did he appreciate America’s invasion of Iraq. This rare act of defiance was unheard of. After all, after 9/11, Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig had ordered all teams to play "God Bless America," which New York Time sports columnist William Rhoden correctly called "a political statement," and which should have allowed room for alternative views to be aired.

To his credit, Delgado neither caved nor apologized. But the incident revealed why politically dissenting opinions in baseball, football or basketball are so rare. Pro sport figures can say what they wish — as is their right — but dare depart from officially if unwritten sanctioned behavior and you’re a marked man. Superstars like Delgado or Curt Schilling, the Boston Red Sox pitcher who publicly backed George Bush for President in 2004, can easily survive the criticism. Steve Nash, the Phoenix Suns’ spectacular point guard and the league’s MVP is critical of American foreign policy, but he’s a Canadian. The San Diego Padres had several players years back that belonged to the John Birch Society and they went unchallenged. The First Amendment, after all, supposedly protects athletes too. But lesser players had better watch their words.

Star players have been quoted supporting George Bush, the death penalty or New York City mayoral candidates yet spark no sports-page furor; regular displays of militarism at sporting events, such as Air Force flyovers during the Super Bowl, pass without comment. (Would the masters of this over-hyped commercial extravaganza ever permit anti-war U.S. veterans of the Iraq or Vietnam wars to march onto the field?) Most sport writers never comment about this display of militarism just as their counterparts in the news and editorial departments were reluctant to investigate what a bewildered Bush and his bellicose Vice President and neocon allies were planning for Iraq.

Challenge the good guy, patriotic image and you’re anathema. Muhammad Ali famously said "no" to his draft board and lost his title. In 1968, Timmie Smith and John Carlos, two protesting black Americans, held up their fists in protest during award ceremonies at the 1968 Olympics, for which they were ostracized and pilloried.

Sports, goes the prevailing mantra, are not the place to air political views. When Toni Smith, a Division III female college basketball player at Manhattanville College in a New York City suburb, was assailed and taunted for refusing to salute the flag in early 2003, she explained, "I can no longer, in good conscience, salute the flag. The war America will soon be entering in has reinforced my beliefs." Happily, Filip Bondy, who covers sports for the New York Daily News, defended her right to express her views. "If sports events are inappropriate forums for political statements, then what exactly is The Star Spangled Banner?" he asked. And, why, I wonder, are we — to the best of my knowledge — the only nation that always asks spectators to stand and pay homage to its flag before each major sports event?

But if athletes behave, benefits flow. During the Vietnam War, a tacit agreement — never investigated — may well have been struck between baseball, football and the government whereby players eligible for the draft — every one of them mute about that bitterly contested war — were permitted to join hard-to-secure Reserve and National Guard slots and thus saved from possible Vietnam duty. Like Washington’s legion of war hawks, all they needed were the right connections.

And there is a corollary to all this. Andrew Carroll, who edited a collection of soldiers’ letters in Behind the Lines, told the New York Times that combat vets expressed to him their apprehension that warfare "was increasingly being romanticized in the popular culture." Maybe (or maybe not) that’s OK for Hollywood, TV, and the fashion and video industries. But when our government does it, it’s appalling, particularly when it lies.

Take Pat Tillman, the ex-Arizona Cardinal football player who volunteered for Ranger service and was killed in Afghanistan. His burial ceremony became a national TV spectacle extolling patriotic sacrifice (for others, of course) and a subtle defense of the Iraq war. President Bush even paid a political visit to Sun Devil Stadium, the Cardinals’ home field, during the 2004 election campaign, ostensibly to honor Tillman. The trouble, as everyone now knows, is that Pat Tillman was killed by "friendly fire." The Pentagon finally confessed (remember the fiction they concocted about that female soldier from rural West Virginia and her "heroism"?) Its flacks had staged it all. As Dave Zirin (www. edgeofsports.com), one of the finest sportswriters, wrote at the time: Tillman, a sincere patriot, "had joined the Rangers for ideals like freedom and justice, but fought in a war for oil and empire." He added, "the final injustice was that in death, even more than in life, he was a pawn in their game."

I wrote a biography of Branch Rickey, who once ran the Brooklyn Dodgers. He was a southern Ohio religious conservative, a cold warrior and backer of the House Un-American Committee, Richard Nixon and Joe McCarthy. But whatever his political leanings, he possessed the integrity and honesty to refuse to go along with those opposed to Jackie Robinson’s entry into baseball. At the time I argued (some disagreed) that while he was also shrewd enough to understand that racial integration would benefit the Dodgers economically, a more significant reason was his unshakable religious faith that we are all children of God. Denounced for daring to break the color line, he refused to back down and was the only one of sixteen baseball owners to demand that baseball change its ways.

I confess to navet. The silence of virtually all our professional athletes in our troubled era bothers me because I’m a lifelong sports fan who sees in their timid behavior a mirror of what is happening in our larger culture. I ask myself: If Hollywood celebrities can take sides and express their deeply felt political views, why not athletes and the rest of us too?

Daily, American and Iraqis are killed and wounded in a war that most Americans (or so report all polls) no longer support or even understand, yet where they (and most mass media) blink at our government’s fabrications. Most Americans prefer, in Neil Postman’s wonderfully descriptive phrase, to amuse themselves to death and thus ignore the daily tragedies occurring in a faraway place to someone else’s child or spouse.

Murray Polner [send him mail] wrote Branch Rickey: A Biography, No Victory Parades: The Return of the Vietnam Veteran, and co-authored Disarmed and Dangerous, a dual biography of Daniel and Philip Berrigan.

Far too many civically obedient Americans are content to express their feelings with vacuous "support our troops" stickers and continue — in Neil Postman’s famous phrase — "amusing themselves to death," numb to the miseries of the battlefield. The steady stream of government manipulation of public opinion nonetheless confounds patriotic Americans, rightly proud of our nation and its many freedoms. Is it any wonder that they respond to an endless series of manufactured "crises" given the lack of hard news in most of the media? And surrender their kids to Washington’s fantasies of imperial grandeur and endless conflicts? Can anyone name one prominent member of our cloistered Washington prowar crowd who has a child or grandson on active duty in Iraq or Afghanistan today? Or ask why only one congressman has a son there?

I’ve forgotten the source but I do remember reading a small item about a mother in New York state mourning her soldier son’s death in Iraq. What’s it about, she asked? "Is it about oil? I don’t know what this war is for. We don’t want anyone else to die in this useless, stupid war."

But die they will as the doctrine of preemptive war threatens Iran, Syria, North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba, and sooner or later China and anyone else who dares stand in the imperial way. Diplomacy, negotiations, compromise are discarded for a steady stream of threats and packaged news. But, argue our powerful, well funded, theoretical and thoroughly inept neoconservatives, it’s all about democracy and freedom, a mindless judgment (it’s no longer WMDs) repeated endlessly by our "opinion makers" who before the 2003 invasion overwhelmingly and unquestioningly accepted the argument that Saddam had WMDs and was somehow involved in 9/ll. Rather, democracy has little or nothing to do with Iraq, the Middle East and Central Asia. Instead, think oil, control of natural resources, and imperial expansion.

Democracy does not spring to life overnight but instead requires past experience, a large and enterprising middle class and a tradition of fairness to minorities and the poor. It requires a basic respect and tolerance among people with different backgrounds. It requires a central government that is not all-powerful and allows individuals the freedom to flourish. It is not solely associated with elections since many thugs have been "elected." It requires an abiding respect for laws that are reasonable and fair. It requires a widespread feeling among people that, despite differences, "we’re all in it together." Moreover, it is hard to imagine a genuine democracy backed by the U.S. military springing suddenly to life in the Middle East. It is a region where historic U.S. support for dictatorships and authoritarian governments have never planted the seeds of a democratic society.

Peaceable alternative policies are rarely promoted with the same vigor as those opting for war. Take Iran, for example. Threats from Washington only bring threats from Tehran. Genuine negotiations are always possible and many compromises are available, but who among the administration’s tightly closed circle of political and ideological advisors plays the role of house dissenter? Is there a George Ball or J. Kenneth Galbraith out there? Moreover, The New York Times recently reported that a "bipartisan " panel, appointed by the President, concluded that "U.S. intelligence on Iran [is] inadequate to allow firm judgments about Iran’s weapons programs." What does that tell us about U.S. assertions (generally unchallenged in the mainstream media) that an Iranian Bomb is on the way? Could this be yet another WMD scam?

In Anthony Lewis’s enlightening essay on the Pentagon Papers in the current New York Review of Books, he quotes the former RAND scholar Melvin Gurtov’s description of what the Pentagon Papers were all about.

"The crux of these documents," concludes Gurtov (in John Prados and Margaret Pratt Porter, eds., Inside the Pentagon Papers (University Press of Kansas, 2005), "was what they revealed about the duplicity of US leaders, who consistently lied to the American people, the Congress, and the press about many aspects of the war in the Kennedy and Johnson years. Presidents and their national security advisors knew the war was being lost…." Might historians someday reach the same conclusion about the Cheney-Bush decision to invade Iraq and expand Pax Americana throughout the world when their papers and the archives are finally released to the public?

Finally, if yet another nation is to be invaded in the name of "democracy" and "freedom" then reluctant and uninspired conscripts may have to replace the Iraq war’s depleted and exhausted volunteers, swelling the casualty lists once again. None of this seems to trouble Washington’s bellicose party itching to dominate the Persian Gulf and Central Asia. A draft, imperial dreams and war always go hand in hand.

Prowar imperialists such as Theodore Roosevelt and Rudyard Kipling changed their minds once their sons were killed in World War I. Grieving, TR went to an early grave. Kipling could only assuage his grief and guilt by penning his shattering couplet:

If any question why we died
Tell them, because our fathers lied.

Murray Polner [send him mail] wrote No Victory Parades: The Return of the Vietnam Veteran and co-authored Disarmed and Dangerous, a dual biography of Daniel and Philip Berrigan.

Nevertheless, these two incidents — and obviously many other whispered conversations held among officers and their friends — only underscore the fact that some in the professional military have serious doubts about a war and occupation that has cost so much in lives, money and moral standing, not to mention the serious impact it has had on the military.

While civilian control of the professional military is an essential element of American democracy, Army generals Matthew Ridgeway, James Gavin and Robert L. Hughes, Marine Generals Hugh Hester and Samuel G. Griffith, Rear Admiral Arnold True and Marine colonels William Carson and James A. Donovan did criticize aspects of the Vietnam War. They weren’t doves or anti-war libertarians but all recognized that the military intervention in an Asian civil war had been a ghastly blunder. My own hunch is that once they’re out of uniform and safe from bureaucratic or political vendettas, even more generals and colonels will be just as critical about the colossal blunder the Cheney-Bush-Rumsfeld trinity and their neocon propagandists have created in Iraq and now threaten to repeat against Iran.

All this by way of introduction to General David M. Shoup, Commandant of the Marine Corps during part of the Vietnam era. Howard Jablon’s David Shoup: A Warrior Against War (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), an all-too-brief, intelligently written and sympathetic portrait of Shoup, tries to explain why a Marine lifer and recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor for his role in WWII’s savage battle of Tarawa, became a fearless critic of the war in Southeast Asia. Jablon, incidentally, teaches history at Purdue University North Central.

So why should a marine who served in China in the twenties question his country’s motives in chaotic and war-torn China?

His two tours there led him to read and think extensively about what he was doing and why the U.S. was involved. He came away blaming the missionaries, businessmen and politicians who, to further their own interests, agitated for U.S. military participation in a conflict that had little or nothing to do with American national interests. In short, it was the U.S. involving itself once again in an economically-driven imperial adventure — much as it had against Mexico in the 19th Century, Spain and the Philippines at the turn of the 20th Century, Haiti and Nicaragua time and again, Iran and Guatemala in the early fifties, and Chile, Central America and the Caribbean during the Reagan era.

Shoup was certainly no pacifist, but his China experiences ultimately helped lead him to question American strategy. In 1961, before American combat units arrived in force in Southeast Asia, Kennedy administration hawks and its sycophants in the mass media sought to present Laos — yes, impotent, impoverished, landlocked, rural, Laos — as a crucial link in the cold war against the spread of communism throughout Southeast Asia. After some military hawks proposed using nuclear bombs Shoup objected. "Whoever even thought that nuclear weapons should be used in Laos was very misinformed about what a proper target for a nuclear weapon consisted of," he said, "because in all the analysis that I remember, there was never any target presented."

After he retired, Shoup became a public dissenter. On May 14, 1966, he spoke out at Pierce College in California. "I don’t think the whole of Southeast Asia…is worth the life or limb of a single American" [and] I believe that if we had and would keep our dirty bloody dollar crooked fingers out of the business of these nations so full of depressed exploited people, they will arrive at a solution of their own design and want, that they fight and work for." In the April 1969 issue of Atlantic Monthly ("The New American Militarism") he and fellow marine Colonel Donovan denounced the way the U.S. conducted its foreign policy. Later, in a foreword to Donovan’s book Militarism U.S.A., Shoup emphasized, quite rightly — as the Iraq morass has proven — that "there are limits of U.S. power and our capabilities to police the world."

Of course he had his critics, especially among erstwhile military friends and the pro-war crowd in the White House and in Washington’s political circles. "Shoup," writes Jablon, "paid dearly for his dissention. He was alienated from the Corps he loved." Still, he had his defenders, such as Senators Stuart Symington and William Fulbright. Naturally, LBJ and Nixon were appalled by his views and Jablon reports that they put J. Edgar Hoover on his trail, the better to add to the vast number of Americans spied upon because of their political opposition to the war.

"Praised or feared," Jablon concludes in his engrossing portrait of this intriguing marine who has been undeservedly forgotten, "Shoup added intelligence as well as nobility to the crusade to stop the war."

It will be interesting to see if any of today’s senior military officers (as opposed to the bellicose neocon civilians and careerist military bureaucrats inside the Pentagon) will have anything to say one day about what went wrong and why in Iraq and in the future wars now being dreamed up in Washington’s hawkish circles.

Murray Polner [send him mail] co-authored Disarmed and Dangerous, a biography of Daniel and Philip Berrigan and wrote No Victory Parades: The Return of the Vietnam Veteran. This article originally appeared on the History News Network.

As W.H. Auden memorably and painfully asked in his "Epitaph for an Unknown Soldier":

"To save your world you asked this man to die; Would this man, could he see you now, ask why?"

With casualty lists and grieving families growing daily, you have to wonder why the same hawks who dreamed up the war and are therefore responsible for the resulting carnage and misery, continue to maintain their influence in the White House and Pentagon and are now actively promoting yet another war, this time against Iran, a country larger, more populated, and with a far more sophisticated military than Saddam ever had.

Their conventional reason is that Iran either has nuclear weapons or is planning to manufacture them — a rationale that conceals an imperial agenda cloaked in a false crusade for freedom and democracy.

The truth is, as with Iraq and its non-existent WMDs and non-connection ties to 9/11, no evidence is offered save that of anonymous Iranian exiles," a walk-in source …not previously known to U.S. Intelligence," reported the Washington Post. Sound familiar?

The International Atomic Energy Agency, which regularly monitors Iranian facilities, has thus far not discovered any Iranian nuclear weapons. And even if they eventually do, it’s hard to believe that Tehran would dare risk nuclear retaliation other than as a last and desperate line of defense.

What we do know is that Iran has the ability to produce enriched uranium which can be used for weaponry or civilian use but which was temporarily suspended by Tehran last October thanks to persuasive British, French and German negotiators. The Europeans, with reluctant U.S. support, are now trying to get Iran to freeze permanently any nuclear bomb plans in return for firm guarantees of more trade and security.

So why the sudden obsession with Iran, when the hawks’ current misadventure in Iraq — or so predicted the astute Hebrew University military historian Martin Van Creveld — "will almost certainly end as the previous one [Vietnam] did. Namely, with the last U.S. troops fleeing the country whole hanging on to their helicopters’ skids."

The answer is oil and power.

Last January 2004 the Oil and Gas Journal reported that Iran held about 10% of the world’s total following new discoveries of oil. Most of its oil fields are situated in huge onshore fields in the southwestern Khuzestan region close to Iraq and the Persian Gulf. Even so, it would be nave to believe that the American interest in Iran is solely about its oil.

Michael Klare of Hampshire College, a specialist on resource conflict, told Ritt Goldstein, an American political journalist in Sweden, that "It’s all about power" and "the oil of the Persian Gulf is the most important geopolitical focus of power in the world," which he defined as the ability to "have the veto power over the allocation of Persian Gulf oil." John Pike of Global Security, a Washington-area think-tank concurred: "It’s only incidentally about control of oil, it’s about control of everything…power." It’s no mystery, then, that U.S. military forces have encircled the Persian Gulf, and are stationed throughout Central Asia and parts of the Caucasus.

The problem for American war planners is that they are trapped. Any air or land attack will meet fierce Iranian resistance (and renewed and even larger massive antiwar demonstrations in this country asking, no demanding, that no more GIs die in fulfillment of Bush and Cheney’s shallow and vacuous policies), stoked by an ancient sense of nationalism, not to mention President Bush’s designation of them as part of the "Axis of Evil." There are also historical memories of the U.S.-British role in ousting the democratically elected Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953 and replacing him with the authoritarian Shah.

Kaveh L. Afrasiabi, who teaches Political Science at Tehran University and whose book After Khomeini, was published in the U.S. by Westview Press, claims Iranian advocates of building nuclear weapons are a "minority’ and in general, "there is an elite consensus" opposed to them.

Still, he warns that any attack on Iran will not be easy. The Iranian military, he wrote in the Asia Times, have taken the lessons of the 2003 Iraq War to heart along with Iran’s savage eight-year with Iraq in the eighties (when the U.S. supported Saddam). "Suicide attack" centers, he claims, have recruited more than 25,000 volunteers. There will be missile counterattacks wherever US forces are stationed including against any countries allying themselves with the invaders. Iran also relies heavily on fairly accurate long-range missiles such as Shahab-3 and Fateh-110, which can "hit targets in Tel Aviv," as Kemal Kharrazi, Iran’s foreign minister, has warned.

Then why not let Israel attack, as it did at Osirak in Iraq in 1981, when it blasted Saddam’s nuclear reactor? But the situation is far more complex now because the Iranians have widely scattered their missile sites, including to heavily populated areas. They also now claim they have the ability to retaliate.

If George Bush chooses to go to war again, reluctant and uninspired draftees may be called on to replace the Iraq War’s depleted and exhausted ranks, swelling the casualty lists once again, something which barely registers with cloistered Washington-based hawks itching to dominate the Persian Gulf region. It will surely produce a series of revolts on campuses as well as in suburbia and even in elite neoconservative homes that are not eager to send their own young to war.

Americans, who accepted the false WMD arguments for invading Iraq, would do well to heed the words of Gary Sick, who served as the Iran specialist on Jimmy Carter’s National Security Council, when he told the Middle East Report’s editor: "If you like Iraq, you’re going to love Iran."

Murray Polner [send him mail] wrote No Victory Parades: The Return of the Vietnam Veteran and co-authored Disarmed and Dangerous, a dual biography of Daniel and Philip Berrigan. This essay originally appeared on the History News Network.

In this country the madness and shame of the Red Scare that followed the end of WWII damaged far too many people who were neither Stalin’s apologists nor KGB spies. In his book, Washington Gone Mad, Michael Ybarra shrewdly noted, "There actually were Communists in Washington. But it was the hunt for them that did the real damage."

One of the victims was James Kutcher, an unheralded and long forgotten genuine American hero, His challenge to the U.S. Government, portrayed in his memoir published in 1953 and updated in 1973, remains strikingly relevant given the dilemma it presents to critics and dissenters in a nation which is today consumed with dangerous, radical imperial dreams and its threat to initiate a series of endless wars.

Kutcher was a member of the fractious Socialist Workers Party, a fringe Trotskyist group. Drafted in 1941, he lost both legs in combat on the Italian front. Fitted with prosthetics, he learned to walk with them and two canes and returned home to live with his working class family in a federal low-rent housing project in Newark, N.J. The Veterans Administration also hired him for $40 a week.

The story begins in 1948 when the VA decided to fire him because he and his party were "subversive," a term with no precise legal definition (any more than who is and is not a "loyal" citizen today) but which is a favorite tool of repressive governments everywhere.

How Kutcher fought back is the heart of his book, The Case of the Legless Veteran. Originally published by a small British house in 1953 since no American publisher would dare touch it, terrified lest its appearance on its lists might bring Washington’s inquisitors down on its neck. "Sooner or later McCarthy or those other congressional committees are going to start in on the publishing business," he says an editor told him. "You can call it cowardly, if you want to, but I call it caution and common sense." Pioneer Publishers, another miniscule publisher, finally issued it here. Twenty years later, still a loyal SWP member, he added two additional chapters.

The book opens with a modest disclaimer. "In most respects," Kutcher begins, "I am an ordinary man. I have no special talents. I never showed any capacity for leadership."

Even so, he was no Milquetoast. Because of his dismissal he became tough and single-minded.

He went public and received the backing of non-communist labor unions and civil libertarians of all stripes — few of whom sympathized with the SWP. Conservatives such as Harold Russell, his onetime hospital buddy who had lost both his hands in the war, came to his support (Russell was best known for his role in the classic post-World War II film The Best Years of Our Lives). The once famously liberal New York Post and its memorable columnist Murray Kempton and others rushed to his defense. In a frightened era when so few people and media lacked the courage to challenge America’s false patriots and powerful government, Kutcher relentlessly battled back and ultimately won. In 1956 the VA finally rehired him.

"Legless Veteran" was aimed at two targets: The U.S. Government and opportunistic and scurrilous profiteers of an anti-Red crusade gone mad and the Communist Party, perhaps because of the longstanding bitterness between Stalin and Trotsky. But mainly I believe it was because of the Party’s dishonesty and duplicity.

Nowhere was this more evident than in 1941, while Kutcher was still in the Army, when eighteen SWP members and other Trotskyists were convicted under the infamous Smith Act. The Communists and their sycophants cheered — together with conservatives and liberals — disappointed only that the sentences meted out had not been harsher. Seven years later, when their leadership cadres were indicted under the same outrageous law, they unashamedly denounced it as a challenge to civil freedom and called for all friends of freedom to fight the charges.

In 1949, their leaders already in the dock, the West Coast party newspaper Daily People’s World had the gall to turn on Kutcher. "What is being touted as the u2018case of the legless vet’ and a u2018test case’ for civil liberties hasn’t the remotest connection with the defense of civil rights," they commented. In other words, convicting Party leaders was a violation of the Constitution but Kutcher’s cause was not. Their reasoning was eerily similar to that of the government’s Loyalty Board, which approved his dismissal from the VA.

During his ordeal there were other hard-to-believe obstacles he had to confront. In 1952 he and his family received a letter from the local public housing authority ordering them to sign a loyalty oath and swear that no Kutcher family member belonged to any of the 203 groups cited on the U.S. Attorney General’s list of subversive groups. Failure to do so, they wrote, would mean eviction. The order was in compliance with a new federal law demanding that every tenant in federal low-rent apartments sign loyalty oaths.

Kutcher’s father was furious, more so at his son for not quitting the SWP. He pleaded with the public housing bureaucrats: "I have begged [my son] again and again to leave this organization but he refuses, saying it is not subversive and he is not subversive…What should I do? I want to sign the certificate [but] I do not want to break up my family because my son needs help to take care of him. Please help, please tell me what to do, so that I can keep my home."

Naturally, no one answered his plea. The law was sacrosanct, no matter how unjust, faceless bureaucrats must have reasoned. Besides, no one wanted to defend "disloyal" people. So Kutcher turned to the American Civil Liberties Union, which successfully persuaded a court to issue a restraining order preserving the apartments of the Kutchers and eleven other families who refused to swear that they were "loyal Americans."

James Kutcher left the SWP in 1983 and died in 1989. During the years since his reinstatement, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI carried on extensive spying on the SWP until the group sued and won its case. In essence, the court ruled that they like others had a right to be as political as they wished.

In 2005 and beyond it remains to be seen how much we have learned. We need to wonder if freedom of expression will survive the war on terrorism. Certainly, James Kutcher’s legacy is that we need not genuflect before any current or future Torquemadas.

Murray Polner [send him mail] wrote No Victory Parades: The Return of the Vietnam Veteran and co-authored Disarmed and Dangerous, a dual biography of Daniel and Philip Berrigan. A version of this article originally appeared on the History News Network.

Obviously, Iraq has not been a "cakewalk" as was widely trumpeted by its neocon promoters in the months leading up to the American invasion. And if, as Donald Rumsfeld once said, Iraq turns out to be "a long hard slog" (it has), who then will be called on to do the slogging?

It is fair to ask how many wars our imperial nation can fight with its hard-pressed volunteer forces, many of whom are now forbidden to leave when their enlistments run out. Or, when they are finally released, how many will re-enlist. The National Guard, for example, failed to meet this year’s quota of 58,000, recruiting 5,000 less people. A more pressing question is, how many Americans will be forced to fight, perhaps die for the crazed imperial dreams concocted by a small clique of extremely influential and well-funded neoconservatives, virtually none of whom ever bothered to serve in the military they so profess to love? And among Americans (the late Neil Postman once described them as "amusing themselves to death"), unless their immediate family members are in the military, how many Americans will care if a draft is reinstated and more GIs must die fighting Iraqis and Iranians who have never attacked us?

And even more ominously: There is increasing chatter in Washington among neoconservatives and their pet columnists of ever more wars ahead. They call it spreading their version of democracy; I call it aggressive and unjustifiable wars. Israel, America’s client state, is now hinting at an attack on Iran while neocons here are suggesting that America’s next target should be Iran. Unanswered is what happens if Iran strikes back at Israel and U.S. forces in Iraq? In fact, the issue of Iran is now being discussed behind closed doors at the White House. How many dissenters do you think are present at these sessions?

This time Selective Service System (SSS) regulations have been changed. This time, as SSS states, "a college student could have his induction postponed only until the end of the current semester. A senior could be postponed until the end of the full academic year." Canada will no longer welcome anti-draft people. A new SSS plan, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer last May, proposes raising the age of draft registration to 34 years old, up from 25, and possibly including women as well. People with special skills, such as computers, foreign languages, medical training and the like, will also be subject to being drafted. In effect, if approved, it will be a universal draft where everyone, including the kids of the rich and powerful, will allegedly be eligible to serve in the military.

But remember this: No congressional son was drafted during the Vietnam War and today there are virtually no congressional sons or daughters serving as enlisted combat personnel in Iraq. Since 9/11, it is almost impossible to name a single prominent pro-Iraq war activist, those who demand an all-out war against terrorism, whose son or daughter has enlisted for active military duty.

The truth is, no draft can ever be fair. Other than delighting America’s living room hawks, the same favoritism and deference to influence and wealth — the well-documented kind George W. Bush received when he was granted a hard-to-get slot in the Texas Air National Guard because of his father’s influence — will certainly prevail in any future draft. Anyone with political pull and family connections will always be able to avoid active military duty, or if not, receive plum, safe jobs.

All a draft can do is help transform yet another generation of Americans — your kids — into potential cannon fodder. It also contributes to the further militarization of this country. "How many men and women," rightly asked Father Andrew Greeley, the Chicago Sun-Times columnist, "will be required to pacify Iraq and turn it into a freedom-loving democracy? How long will it take, how many lives must be sacrificed … ?"

Since World War I, the world has experienced continuous bloodletting, almost always enhanced by conscription. The Korean and Vietnam wars were both sustained because of the continual supply of new draftees, at least until the system broke down in the late sixties when it became clear to our centrist elites that the United States had been defeated at a cost of 58,000 GI lives, hundreds of thousands of others wounded in body and mind, and some three million Vietnamese — mainly civilians — dead.

And who bore the brunt of our recent wars? Draftees did.

The two world wars, Korea, and Vietnam were largely fought with drafted soldiers who were killed or wounded in combat in far greater numbers than better-trained regulars. The lesson is clear: The more potential cannon fodder Selective Service can impress into the military, the more savage the war becomes, the longer it goes on and the greater the number of casualties. Another draft will allow policymakers to rely even more on war rather than diplomacy. It would certainly mean more military adventures abroad, more military and civilian deaths, and ultimately more unrest at home.

Many pro-draft politicians are doubtless waiting for the post-election period when a "safe" effort will be made to reintroduce conscription under the guise of fighting terrorism. For far too many, another draft means recapturing the mythical ethos of WWII — the "Good War" — and the pre-Sixties, when no one cared enough to protest governmental policies. In this imaginary Eden, there was no racial or religious conflict, women knew their place, support for tyrants abroad was justified in the name of fighting Communism, and young men called to the colors went willingly and patriotically to proudly serve their God and country. But please note that today many if not most pro-draft people in Congress and the White House are non-veterans.

Late last spring an article appeared in the Baltimore Sun, written by Nick Leonhardt, a high school senior. In it, he wrote:

"Some anxious teens and their parents feel relieved that both President Bush and Senator John Kerry deny plans to reinstate the draft. But cynical youths already believe that candidates routinely break promises after they are elected. The man who shakes their hands during the presidential campaign may demand salutes after his inauguration."

America, and especially its young, should oppose conscription because it is a form of slavery and tramples on our freedom, which should never be sacrificed for ideological pipe dreams and political manipulation.

Another draft is a terrible idea in a very troubled time.

Murray Polner [send him mail] wrote No Victory Parades: The Return of the Vietnam Veteran and co-authored Disarmed and Dangerous, a dual biography of Daniel and Philip Berrigan.

Norton studied with Strauss’s students and admirers, at the University of Chicago. She describes how Paul Wolfowitz, Irving Kristol and other prominent Straussian neocons drew on and then misused Strauss’s ideas to further their own policies. Today, these neoconservatives are "committed to an American imperialism they believe will usher in a new world order." The advance press information accompanying her book cites Norton’s revelations: many Straussian adherents who worked (and presumably work) in Republican administrations "advocate authoritarianism and praise military dictators"; and then raises her significant question, "How Europeans rightly see the shadow of fascism in Straussian politics, and why Americans fail to."

Bellicose neoconservatives "came to power and have influenced the character of governance in the United States. Their ascendance is also," writes Norton, "a story of American conservatism… a radical departure from traditional American conservatism…They are not preservers; they are (as they will tell you) revolutionaries… we know that the influence of the Straussian matters. We need to ask where that influence leads."

Following are quotations from Prof. Norton’s book (excerpted from the Yale Book News and the book itself). Writing and publishing, they are masters of the Washington bureaucratic scene, prodigious fundraisers, dominant among the civilian leadership of the Pentagon. They love talking about expanding democracy throughout the world (at least, the oil-producing world) but care little about favored authoritarians and tyrants. They are the people who led this country into Iraq where more than 1,000 GIs have been killed, not to mention the many thousands wounded in body and mind and 10—15,000 Iraqi civilian deaths. But guess what? Virtually no neocon offspring are to be found on the front line in Iraq or Afghanistan. Up next: Iran? North Korea? Syria? Central Asian and Caucasian oil fields?

The Flag of Our Fathers

"Straussian neoconservatives want a u2018strong state’ with a strong leader. They want an expansionist foreign policy. They praise war and warlike virtues and denounce the decadence of intellectuals. They want women to return to children, cooking, and the church. They delight in the profusion of flags: flags on cars, flags on houses, flags worn in lapels. They encourage citizens to inform on their neighbors. They plan to establish a new world order to rival Rome."

The Romance of War

"Straussians believe that war makes men manly. War places greatness within the reach of ordinary men. Dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori.

"This is the romance of war. Consider it again. In war, death is forced upon many men: the willing and the unwilling, the volunteer and the draftee, the one who gives his life for his country and the deserter, scurrying backwards as the shell hits. In war, one soldier gives his life for his country’s freedom, as across the field, in another foxhole, another trench, another quadrant, another soldier dies to see that country conquered and the extent of his own empire extended. In war, one gives his life for the Aryan race, another that all men can live as equals."

Straussians and Women

"Tiny little men with rounded shoulders would lean back in their chairs and declare that Nature had made men superior to women. Larger, softer men, with soft while hands that never held a gun or changed a tire delivered disquisitions on manliness. They were stronger, they were smarter, and Aristotle said so."

Corrupting the Republic

"The story of the Peloponnesian war, as the Straussians once told it, was the story of a lovely arrogant city, gone down to ruin in pursuit of empire. Athens, the free city, in love with novelty, is led astray by an errant student of Socrates. He offers Athens the temptations of imperial power. Athens falls, and the shame of the Melian dialogues, the suffering of its prisoners in the quarry, plague, and ruin fall upon it in return. This was the story as the Straussians told it in my time. They tell it differently now.

We are on the Sicilian Expedition."

There’s much more. Read the book.

Murray Polner [send him mail] wrote No Victory Parades: The Return of the Vietnam Veteran and co-authored Disarmed and Dangerous, a dual biography of Daniel and Philip Berrigan.

It’s too much to bear.

I used to commute to work by rail with a neighbor who lived down the road. He had been an Air Force Captain during the Vietnam War and one of his jobs was to visit families and tell them a family member had died in the war. Tell me more, I pleaded. I’m sorry I told you that, he said apologetically. It was hard. He did tell me that he’d never allow his sons to join the military.

Some memories: My boyhood pal Porky never returned from the Korean War. The laconic and pleasant Trinchintella boy, who helped around his father’s neighborhood gas station and was trained for Vietnam as a helicopter gunner, was grievously wounded and died in a military hospital in Japan, his parents at his side. My former student Ronald Boston, shy, unathletic, African American, a kid who tried so hard to get good grades. His mother tended my mother in a nursing home and told me one day she had a dream in which Ronald was killed in Vietnam. Poor Mrs. Boston. Poor Ronald. He never did make it home except in a casket. In an earlier "good war," Irving Starr, whose family owned the Deli next door, was killed during a raid over Ploesti oil fields. His body was never found. Phil Drazin who used to play ball with us younger kids. When his father learned the news he raced out of his store and ran screaming into Strauss Street. I wish I remembered the name of an 18-year-old who lived in an adjoining apartment. 0ne summer afternoon his father walked from work toward the bench outside the building in which he lived and began sobbing. My mother, who was very good about such things, embraced him as he cried for his only son.

I have never forgotten any of them. I visit the Vietnam Memorial in Washington and New York City. I devour books by Paul Fussell, Samuel Hynes, W.Y. Boyd, E.B. Sledge, all of whom lived as soldiers or marines through the carnage of war and memorized Donald Hall’s poem "1943" ("They toughened us for war…Dom died in the third wave at Tarawa…"). During the Vietnam War, I interviewed several hundred combat veterans for a book I wrote about three hawkish soldiers who believed they were fighting for freedom, four doves that spoke of atrocities and smashed ideals, and three I thought of as "haunted," perhaps forever. I wrote, "Never before in American history have as many loyal and brave young men been as shabbily treated by the government that sent them to war."

These days I scan the lists of killed GIs in the New York Times, many of whom, now nearing a thousand, are rarely mentioned in conservative or liberal mass media. Perhaps they really don’t care enough to even print their names.

But mainly I think of them because the same people who sent them to war in Iraq and are now subtly promoting yet another war, this time against Iran. "Forget an 0ctober Surprise, a much worse one could come in September," wrote the experienced foreign correspondent Martin Sieff in the Washington Times. "Full-scale war between the U.S. and Iran may be far closer than the [distracted] American public might imagine. Iranian defense Minister Ali Shamkhani’s recent bombshell threatened to retaliate should the U.S. or its Israeli partner target nuclear facilities. "Believe him," said Sieff, ominously.

September or not, and given the fact that U.S. troops are currently tied down in Iraq and more than 130 other places around the world, it’s still "a serious confrontation," said Iran expert Cliff Kupchan of the Nixon Center. And who is promoting the notion of another preemptive attack and if need be wasting yet another generation of American men and women in war? None other than our neocons, who always remind me of Charles Edward Montague’s delicious put down of British hawks in World War I when 8 million soldiers were killed and millions of others perished in an entirely unnecessary war. "War," said Montague, "hath no fury like a non-combatant." Don’t hold your breath waiting for news that members of the clan will be sending their kids to recruiting stations.

Leading the charge on the government side is Under Secretary of State John Bolton, their point man and ultra hawk in Colin Powell’s reticent and pusillanimous State Department. Bolton recently told his fellow true believers at the Hudson Institute that Iran has hidden a vast nuclear arms program for nearly two decades. "We cannot let Iran, a leading sponsor of international terrorism, acquire nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them to Europe, most of Central Asia and the Middle East, or beyond" — meaning New York, Washington and Los Angeles, I imagine. The same bellicose talk has emanated from Condaleeza Rice and the usual hard line pundits, the identical people who brought us the daily casualty lists but whose caskets we are not allowed to photograph or see. They can’t come right out before the election and admit Iran is next on their imperial agenda, but it’s very much on their minds.

Here’s a nightmarish scenario: U.S. and Israelis bomb Iran, its nuclear facilities and even more (or vice versa) and Iran counterattacks against Israel’s Dimona nuclear facilities and maybe Israel proper. A draft is reinstated to provide hundreds of thousands of additional cannon fodder to fight 70 million non-Arab Iranians who in the 1980s absorbed 500,000 deaths in a savage war against Sadam’s Iraq. More Middle Eastern terrorists are created and American college campuses erupt in fury. Sixties redux, only worse.

But possibly this is just a replay of the hoary Dulles-Nixon "madman" theory to keep adversaries guessing. Or maybe there will be secret talks aimed at settling the problem? Or that Washington’s neocons have learned a painful lesson after Iraq and rue all those American and Iraqi deaths, not to mention the badly wounded. Frankly, I wouldn’t bet on it.

Prowar imperialists such as Theodore Roosevelt and Rudyard Kipling changed their tunes once their sons died in World War I. Kipling could only assuage his grief and guilt in his shattering couplet:

If any question why we died
Tell them, because our fathers lied.

Murray Polner, [send him mail] a onetime draftee, wrote No Victory Parades: The Return of the Vietnam Veteran and edited When Can I Come Home? about exiles, deserters and antiwar prisoners during the Vietnam era. He is the book review editor for Historynewsnetwork.org.

By
the time George W. Bush entered the White House, younger second-string,
and too often second-rate, neocons had already arrived, courtesy
of well-funded ubiquitous think tanks, articles, books, TV spots,
and subsidized magazines and newspapers. Typically, their writings
were the sort of essays which might merit an A– or B+ in class,
well written but drowning in speculation, guesswork, and supposedly
definitive judgments too often fashioned out of whole cloth. They
didn’t appear to have much of a sense of the past, given their subsequent
misjudgments and given the fact that so many of them are rigid ideologues,
utopians in a menacing and chaotic world. After 9/11 they helped
spread rumors about Iraqi WMDs, Saddam’s close ties to the 9/11
attacks, dismissed the United Nations and European roles and wholeheartedly
backed the Patriot Act, parts of which represent a danger to future
dissenters, right and left. Like Vice President Cheney and others
in the Bush White House, they were exalters of an American imperium,
proud as punch that despite his modest anti-nation building campaign
speeches, President Bush quickly came to mirror their thinking.

Dependent
on and beholden to wealthy foundations and individuals with their
own agendas, the neocons, well schooled in Washington’s Byzantine
political climate, savvy about popularizing their points of view;
had captured the presidency. Along the way they found new mantras
and embraced vague, untested shibboleths such as "national
greatness" and "benevolent global hegemony." Perhaps
their greatest weakness has been their refusal to test critically
the fundamental axiom on which they concocted a fantasy of democracies
springing up in the Muslim Middle East following a walkover military
victory and joyous reception in Iraq. Democracy is admirable, of
course, but their theoreticians and polemicists never bothered explaining
how establishing a democratic state in Iraq, a nation which had
never known democracy, could stimulate the spread of democracy to
other Arab states which also had no experience with it. Nor were
they ever skeptical that voting equated automatically with democracy.
Egypt, Yemen, Jordan, anyone? True believers, they listened to and
promoted the views of Iraqi exiles who lacked believability.

Even
more ominous was the Paul Wolfowitz-neocon doctrine of preemptive
war, "a program breathtaking in its ambition," wisely
observed George Szamuely, former editorial writer for the Times
(London), the Spectator and the Times Literary Supplement,
a genuine and thoughtful conservative. "Wolfowitz," he
wrote, "was advocating total global supremacy by the United
States. In every single region of the world the United States was
to ensure that no power or coalition of powers could emerge that
would challenge the rule of the United States in that region….
Any power seeking to challenge this order could expect a vigorous
and forceful U.S. response."

It
was as critics left and right rightly recognized, a prescription
for endless war.

After
the fall of Iraq in 2003, they seemed remarkable prescient. They
had won! But had they? Now we know they were painfully wrong. The
callow generalizations of living-room warriors without military
or significant political experience had no idea what their invasion
of Iraq would come to mean: no flowers and kisses from ebullient
crowds, savage guerilla resistance, the ever-present possibility
of religious civil war, and the birth of new terrorists. Nor have
they expressed any regret, sorrow or shame about the many Americans,
allies and Iraqi dead, wounded, tortured and terrorized in Iraq.

Neocons
are the heirs of Woodrow Wilson, not because of his ill-formed fantasies
of world peace through war, but rather the man who invaded Mexico,
took the country into WWI, treated dissenters such as Eugene V.
Debs with brutal prison sentences and who viewed blacks as inferior
– along with his failed and confusing vision of newly created and
artificial rump states in a League of Nations. But neocons have
yet another American imperial ancestor: Senator Albert Beveridge,
a passionate supporter of American imperialism during the Spanish-American
War and the subsequent bloody invasion of the Philippines, which
cost 4,000 American lives and 250,000 Filipino deaths. When Beveridge
pontificated, "We are the trustees of the world’s progress,
guardians of its righteous peace…. His chosen nation to finally
lead in the regeneration of the world" he echoes his spiritual
heirs in the Weekly Standard, New York Post, Fox TV, Pentagon
civilian corps and the White House.

It
will take a long time before this generation of neocons will be
able to atone for their profound blunders. Nor will they be able
to satisfy millions of us who still have never heard an honest explanation
of why we invaded Iraq instead of going after Osama, which has caused
problems that may take generations to resolve. I hope that some
day the neocons can even find time to attend a ceremony for our
Iraqi war dead and then pray for forgiveness.

June
24, 2004

Murray
Polner’s [send
him mail] most recent book was
Disarmed
and Dangerous,
a biography of Daniel and Philip Berrigan, co-written with Jim O'Grady.
He has appeared in the New
York Times, Washington Monthly, Commonweal,
Antiwar.com, LewRockwell.com and many religious and secular publication.

Antiwar
protests in Kent had erupted following President Nixon’s TV speech
on April 30 that U.S. forces had invaded Cambodia, thus enlarging
a war he had once pledged to end. The next day Nixon derided antiwar
students everywhere as "bums." Protests on the campus
and in the neighboring town of Kent had erupted resulting in some
vandalism and property damage. The college ROTC was set ablaze on
May 2nd. No one has ever determined who set the fire, though students
were falsely blamed. On May 3, Ohio Governor James Rhodes, a Republican
conservative running for the Senate (he lost) called antiwar students
"worse than brownshirts and the Communist element and also
the night riders and vigilantes. They are the worst type people
that we harbor in America."

On
May 4th, then, Ohio guardsmen fired their M-1 semiautomatic rifles,
a .45 pistol and a shotgun for 13 seconds, killing four students
and wounding nine others.

We
do know that, according to a government memo dated October 9, 1973,
"undercover federal narcotics agents were present on the Kent
State University campus on May 4, 1970." Also an armed federal
agent was present on that day though no one was able to prove that
his weapon was ever fired. It has never been shown that the agents
were tied to the shootings, though there have been allegations of
a government conspiracy. But still, rumors were rampant. Students
were said to be armed with weapons but none were found. Another
tale had it that a student sniper had fired and that too was shown
to be a lie. In fact, we do not know why the National Guard –
the Vietnam era’s haven for men dodging the draft – was called
in and who ordered the men of Troop G to open fire.

After
the shootings began, Glenn Frank (now deceased), a conservative
KSU geology professor, courageously sought to persuade Guard officers
to stand down and then made a successful plea to students to disband,
less they too be shot. In 2000 I spoke with his son, Alan, a former
KSU student who estimated he was 50-75 feet from the guardsmen.
He was working on his father’s papers and believed that his father
had become increasingly dubious that justice had been served.

Even
so, for most Americans today, there is only historical amnesia.

Two
years ago, on the 30th anniversary of this avoidable tragedy, I
wrote that without the discovery of a "smoking gun," or
a deathbed confession, or the release of all local, state and federal
documents and court records (some have complained that not all relevant
documents have been released) plus a thorough examination of the
papers of then Governor James Rhodes and the Ohio National Guard
and the Nixon archives, we may never know the truth. All the same,
I remain convinced that a serious historian can help tell us if
war in Southeast Asia and the bitterness it caused at home, led
directly to a college campus in small-town Ohio alive with antiwar
activity.

To
this day, the definitive book about that terrible day has not been
written. Certainly, some informative works have been published but
they have concentrated only on some aspects. What we need is a book
that fairly examines all the events. "And yes, there are new
materials" to be found, especially in the invaluable and extensive
May 4 collection at the Kent State library, says Nancy Birk, its
Curator and University Archivist, citing as examples the U.S. Department
of Justice and Charles Thomas papers.

Charles
A. Thomas worked for twelve years at the National Archives and was
selected to study films of the shooting. He concluded that, "none
of the available footage showing dead and wounded students following
the lethal volley had been used in assembling the compilation film
shown at the public hearings" of the Scranton presidential
commission in August 1970. In Kent State/May 4, edited by Scott
L. Bills (KSU Press) Thomas wrote, "it looked very much as
if someone had doctored the evidence to minimize any impression
of the Guard’s brutality and to plant the spurious notion that the
soldiers had been confronted with a raging student mob."

Still,
the Scranton Commission’s 1970 verdict, "Report of the Presidential
Commission on Campus Unrest," which, while liberally casting
responsibility on all parties in the days leading to May 4th, decided
that "The indiscriminate firing of rifles into a crowd of students
and the deaths that followed were unnecessary, unwarranted and inexcusable."

In
its summary of the FBI investigation, the Justice Department concluded
that "the few moments immediately prior to the firing by the
National Guard are shrouded in confusion and highly conflicting
statements." But "the claim by the National Guard that
their lives were endangered by the students was fabricated subsequent
to the event." Yet in spite of more than 1000 pages of FBI
reports, eyewitnesses and other investigations, in the end the courts
placed the essential burden of guilt on student antiwar demonstrators.
After a federal grand jury in 1974 indicted eight guardsmen a federal
judged dismissed all charges against the eight men. From the start,
a majority of citizens, according to a Gallup poll conducted by
phone, took the side of the National Guard, many respondents apparently
willing to believe that "radical" students on college
campuses threatened the war effort. Finally, in 1975, a civil suit
brought by the parents found for the defendants, but an appellate
court overturned the verdict. But after so many years defending
their dead and wounded sons and daughters the exhausted families
chose to settle with Ohio for the very modest amount of $675,000
and a statement signed by Rhodes and the guardsmen saying, "We
deeply regret those events and are profoundly saddened by the deaths
of four students and the wounding of nine others which resulted."

My
hope is that a fair-minded historian can tell us what happened and
why and whether justice was truly served.

So
is there a historian willing to undertake this necessary study?

April
28, 2004

Murray
Polner’s [send
him mail] most recent book was
Disarmed
and Dangerous,
a biography of Daniel and Philip Berrigan, co-written with Jim O'Grady.
He has appeared in the New
York Times, Washington Monthly, Commonweal,
Antiwar.com, LewRockwell.com and many religious and secular publication.

Nothing
is more worthwhile recalling today than his excoriation of American
imperialism, which speaks directly to our times. While fellow Darwinians
were sanctioning expansion and military adventurism as a corollary
of the "struggle for existence" and "most favored
races," Sumner turned angrily against the new aggressive spirit
in the country following the Spanish-American War and the invasion
of the Philippines and its bloody, four year war that left 250,000
Filipinos and more than 4,000 U.S. soldiers dead and 3,000 wounded.
After the peace treaty ending the Spanish American War was signed
in 1898, transforming the Caribbean into an American lake, Sumner
was unimpressed. His essay, The Conquest of the United States
by Spain is a searing and thoroughgoing condemnation of American
imperialism. It may be the most acute and thoroughgoing criticism
ever written by an American. "My patriotism," he wrote,
"is outraged by the notion that the United States never was
a great nation until in a petty three months campaign it knocked
to pieces a poor, decrepit, bankrupt old state like Spain."
The invasion of the Philippines, a third-rate guerilla war reminiscent
of later wars in Vietnam and Iraq, outraged Sumner in part because
both required a powerful central government since it imposed more
"burdens than benefits" while the resulting militarism
inevitably seriously threatened free government, not to mention
loss of U.S. troops and countries and civic structures often left
shattered, their future uncertain.

He
and other anti-imperialists were denounced in the 1900 Republican
platform as "copperheads," much as pre-Iraq War extremists
tended to label antiwar critics as virtual traitors. Teddy Roosevelt,
the war lover, once called him a liar to which the imperturbable
Sumner replied caustically that if he ever voted for T.R., "I
shall be disgraced forever." Then there was the arch-imperialist
and premature neoconservative Senator Albert Beveridge of Indiana
who thundered at the turn of the 20th century, "[God],
has made us the "master organizers of the world…He has marked
the American people as His chosen nation to firmly lead in the regeneration
of the world… We are trustees of the world's progress, guardians
of its righteous peace." Nonsense, Sumner roared. "Grand
platitudes," he scoffed. And, of course, he accurately predicted
what lay ahead for unsuspecting Americans: "war, debt, taxation,
diplomacy, a grand governmental system, pomp, glory, a big army
and navy, lavish expenditures, political jobbery." With it
would arise a legacy of political rulers who would always be able
to find a war "whenever they [thought] it [was] the time for
us to have another." Before American's entry into World War
I, wars erupted with Great Britain, native Indians, Mexico and Spain
and the Philippines. After the war there were interventions in Panama,
Puerto Rico, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Cuba. Following
World War II, which left at least 50 million dead and many millions
crippled in mind and body, there were interventions in Guatemala,
Iran, Korea, El Salvador, Grenada, Nicaragua and Haiti and Panama
again, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Chile by proxy and now Iraq — and
if our militarists have their way, in Iran and Syria. Now there
are U.S. soldiers and "advisors" stationed in some 130
nations.

Imperialism,
Sumner argued, led to chauvinism, an aggressive outgrowth of mindless
patriotism manufactured by the arrogant truculence of men and women
relying on emotional sloganeering ("Support Our Troops in Iraq")
and threats against dissenters and traditional civil liberties (what
George Orwell once called "orthodox sniffery" – or
are you loyal?). Who can disagree with Sumner's credo that, the
20th century would bring a "frightful effusion of
blood in revolution and war?"

More
than all else, his importance lies in the fact that he anticipated
the lethal rise of false utopianism, highly sophisticated mass propaganda
techniques, two world wars, concentration camps and gulags, religious
and nationalistic hatreds that have murdered many millions of human
beings in the 20th century and threaten to reoccur in
this century.

Sadly,
though, Sumner (1840–1910) has been largely forgotten. Few
read him anymore or discuss and debate his views. Four years after
he died of a stroke in 1914, E.L. Godkin, The Nation's irrepressible
editor wrote that Sumner's vigorous and biting prose ("like
a strong wind – it exhilarates") was still effective, still relevant,
still capable or provoking intelligent and rational debate.

When
he died in 1910 his views were beginning to fade. The rise of an
American empire in the Caribbean and Pacific left Sumner a lonely,
carping, bitter, critic and scholar, an individualistic anomaly
of his time. And yet to his everlasting credit he sensed correctly
what lay ahead. Shortly before his death he wrote, "I have
lived through the best years of this country's history. The next
generations are going to see war and social calamities. I am glad
I don't have to live on into them."

March
19, 2004

Murray
Polner’s [send
him mail] most recent book was
Disarmed
and Dangerous,
a biography of Daniel and Philip Berrigan, co-written with Jim O'Grady.
He has appeared in the New
York Times, Washington Monthly, Commonweal,
Antiwar.com, LewRockwell.com and many religious and secular publication.

My
personal response is that in religious, secular and practical terms
I remain a pacifist, a Jewish pacifist no less. In the long run,
nonviolence has a far better chance of maintaining peace than B52s,
cluster and daisy cutter bombs and a very lucrative weapons industry.
And where Israel and Palestine are concerned, the never-ending reprisals
and retaliatory raids have led to nothing but sheer hell for all
parties.

Pacifists
know very well why wars begin and how hard it is to stop once underway,
when appeals to uncritical patriotism drown out and stigmatize critics.
We aren’t “passiv-ists” but are instead activists opposed to killing,
including those motivated by religious zealotry and governments.
I – and we – know very well the role economic greed, arms races,
imperial triumphalism, diplomatic myopia, hypocrisy, lies, and religious
and ideological fanaticism has and still plays. That we recognize
it, is one thing. That few, if any, listen to our alternatives before
the shooting starts, is quite another. Still, we are always asked – no, challenged – during wartime: What would you do NOW? This
was true again after the calamitous attack on the World Trade Center.

I
do not have the answers that would bring these killers to justice,
end worldwide terrorism and bring about peace and justice. But neither
do bellicose and sheltered Washington-based syndicated columnists,
politicians, neoconservative hawks and 24/7 cable station screamers.
I certainly understand why many otherwise decent and outraged Americans
want to punish the 9/11 murderers and that “love” is hardly a prescription
for the world’s ills. Yet for those who were queasy about the war
and possible future escalation, merely to raise questions in traditional
media about the attack and past and present American policies has
become taboo. Those who do have been excoriated in varying ways
for daring to voice differing opinions.

I
ask: Can America’s military might actually cleanse the world of
terrorism? Hard-line war hawks in Washington – many of whom have
never even served on active military duty – think so. They are
articulate, have exceptional access to the media and are savvy about
the Byzantine world of Washington politics. They demand that President
Bush avoid repeating his father’s role in not going after Saddam
Hussein in the Gulf War. With impunity, Washington-based warriors
criticize Colin Powell and others seemingly reluctant to invade
Iraq, while many mainstream editors and TV producers have generally
ignored dissenters, pacifist and non-pacifist alike. If our homefront
hawks have their way, who’s next? Iran? Syria? Libya? Somalia? Sudan?
Yemen? North Korea? America’s potent military is quite capable of
destroying a lot of terrorists (and a lot of guiltless civilians
too) but may very well create a new generation of terrorists.

Sadly,
with few honorable exceptions, the mass media seems to have become
a transmitter of government statements. Small wonder, then, that
for a long time relatively few Americans have heard or read little
of options from right and left and pacifists too that might have
prevented some of our wars, including those we’ve armed and supported,
as, for instance, in Central and South America.

Where
Israel is involved, she is hardly the ogre too often portrayed in
some left and rightwing circles. Intifada 2 is an outgrowth of many
mistakes on both sides and to me, a mutual tragedy. Had Palestinians
adopted a policy of nonviolent civil disobedience rather than their
disastrous Intifada 2, they and Israel might be closer a political
solution than now. It is also fair to condemn Arafat’s refusal to
meet Barak’s unprecedented proposals. Had he done so, wouldn’t there
now be a Palestinian nation (truncated, but potentially viable)
and far fewer dead, wounded and traumatized? But it is equally fair
to point to Israel’s harsh occupation and colonization of Palestinian
lands while recognizing that these too played a crucial role in
helping to create the hatred of a new generation of Palestinian
bombers. The fact is, there is and always was peaceful and reasonable
policies available in the Middle East -as there were and are in
many of the world’s wars today. But not many have paid heed. Neither
Palestinian suicide bombers nor Israeli tanks and F-16s have brought
peace. “War does not bring Peace,” a sign at a Peace Now rally in
Israel in December poignantly reminded us. It never has.

January
4, 2002

Murray
Polner [send
him mail] served
in the U. S. Army and now chairs the Jewish Peace Fellowship. He
wrote No
Victory Parades: The Return of the Vietnam Veteran
and co-authored Disarmed
and Dangerous,
a biography of Daniel and Philip Berrigan. Versions of this article
appeared in Shalom:
The Jewish Peace Letter
and SocialAction.com, two
Jewish publications.

Support
LRC

So
with thanks to Jonathan Swift, here is my own u201Cmodest proposal.u201D
Let peacemakers of all ideological and political beliefs broaden
their search for new and additional partners in the battle against
war and warmakers by forming tactical alliances with antiwar, anti-conscription
groups and people with whom they may not always agree. (Does anyone
remember Murray Rothbard's journal Left
and Right?)?

During
the air war against Serbia, many in and out the traditional foreign
policy elite expressed their unhappiness because u201COur Boysu201D were
not sent into combat (u201Cthe what's-the-use-of-having-a-military-if-we-won't-use-them
syndromeu201D). And today, our Beltway's unrepentant warriors, an integral
part of the cloistered and influential foreign policy oligarchy – few of whom have ever been on active
military service and whose kids will probably never serve either-now
have a new shibboleth called u201Chegemonyu201D or u201Cglobal leadershipu201D However
one defines it, Barbara Conry of the libertarian-conservative Cato
Institute put it well in describing it as u201Cessentially coercive,
relying on u2018diplomacy' backed by threats or military action.u201D

But
– and this is my essential point – antiwar and nonviolent
activists of various political stances continue to rely too much
on opportunistic, habitually fainthearted political allies who may
be with them on domestic policies but who are too often mute whenever
Washington unleashes its military and political muscle in Central
and Latin America, Lebanon and the Middle East, Grenada, Panama
and the Balkans, not to mention the first four or five years of
the Vietnam War.

New
u201Ccrisesu201D will surely arise and wars threaten (Taiwan? Korea?) and
we need to develop a working coalition and relationship with antiwar
people of all stripes, the better to counter the warmakers' propaganda
and resist their call to arms. The coalition I propose includes
liberals and leftists, moderates, libertarians and conservatives,
and of course ordinary Americans unhappy about sending their kids
off to yet another American military intervention. Let's ask ourselves:
Do we really need another memorial to our war dead in Washington?

Many
of you will find other attitudes on domestic issues personally objectionable,
but antiwar people can use all the partners they can find without
subjecting them to rigid ideological or special interest purity
tests. Like their politics and views on abortion, guns, free trade,
public health and the environment or not, many of us nevertheless
regularly express strong and articulate reservations about American
actions abroad. We're often denigrated as u201Cneo-isolationists,u201D but
we know the term is a deliberate way of trying to limit or close
off serious, tough public debate about alternatives to policies
that could very well lead to the next war.

Certainly
China is high on the enemies list for our latest crop of Washington-based
hawks, whose extraordinarily exorbitant and still technologically
unworkable missile defense scheme is aimed less at so-called rogue
states than at China, lest they challenge American mastery of East
Asia.Writing in the British newspaper The Independent
late last August, the liberal Andrew Marshall rightly
concluded that, bit by bit, with very little open discussion
or dissent, China is becoming our newest adversary, and, more ominously,
u201CThe U.S. is thinking itself into a new global conflict.u201D

Consider,
too, Bill Clinton's misconceived policy of expanding NATO to the
Russian frontier and his equally perilous scheme (with a majority
of congressional backing) that sent $1.3 billion in largely military
aid to Colombia in its alleged war on drugs (a war that's as inane
as it is futile). Other possible (and presently ignored) future
wars that will sooner or later have their cheerleaders and u201Cexpert
analystsu201D urging action in defense of u201Cfreedomu201D include the potentially
lethal, though still muted, struggle presently underway between
the U.S., Russia, Turkey, Iran, the oil giants and others for control
of Central Asia's vast oil deposits.

Perceptive
conservatives and libertarians are dissenting. Like Harry Browne,
who ran for the presidency on the widely ignored Libertarian
ticket in 2000, but who memorably (at least for me) wrote, u201CWar
is genocide, torture, cruelty, propaganda, dishonesty and slavery.
War is the worst obscenity government can inflict upon its subjects.
It makes every other political crime –
corruption, bribery, favoritism, vote-buying, graft, dishonesty-seem
petty.u201D Not many politicians and media pundits will dare say this
aloud and mean it.

There
are a lot of others neither libertarian, conservative or rightwing
who are saying the same thing. So I have asked my fellow antiwar
progressives: Aren't antiwar, anti-draft people worth
reading and perhaps getting to know?

And,
to my conservative and libertarian friends I also ask: Shouldn't
you too get to know your liberal and leftist antiwar counterparts?

Left
and Right Against War. Why not?

June
5, 2001

Murray
Polner co-authored Disarmed
and Dangerous: The Radical Lives and Times of Daniel and Philip
Berrigan and wrote No
Victory Parades: The Return of the Vietnam Veteran. He also
wrote Branch
Rickey: A Biography, the story of a southern Ohio conservative
who racially integrated previously all-white baseball. A version
of this article appeared originally in Fellowship magazine,
but addressed specifically to its pacifist, progressive and liberal
readers.

~
William L. White, Saturday Evening Post, October 18, 1941

Each
time I read that some liberals and neoliberals, conservatives, neo-
and otherwise, and a few hawkish academics have again begun talking
up the supposed virtues of a military draft, I return to James J.
Martin, that sadly disregarded anarchist-conservative-libertarian
whose magisterial work Men
Against the State badly needs to be read and debated by
each new generation of pundits, professors and politicians.

I
also take up my tattered copy of his Revisionist
Viewpoints: Essays in a Dissident Historical Tradition in
which he condemns any government that shanghais its young men: "Conscription
has been inextricably intertwined with vast foreign wars and an
economy more or less geared to these struggles. The magic word has
always been u2018defense" and where "the interrelation of
business, the military, and the state seems to be [for most Americans]
beyond comprehension." And when a Midwestern academic recently
urged universal service, I could only recall that Martin memorably
pronounced the idea a "great totalitarian dream"

From
the Cold War to the end of the Vietnam War, "conscription has
maintained its Svengali-like grip on the American imagination,"
he wrote. The rationale today is if military recruiters don't find
enough candidates and if America's overseas commitments continue
to expand we'll need ever more troops. Now, more than 90% of 18-25-year-old
males, about 15 million males, who are still required to register
or the draft at age 18, are available should our foreign policy
elite call for another draft.

Opponents
of the voluntary military have for years advanced many reasons for
a draft, ranging from an alleged need to mend the country's moral
fiber to fostering civic responsibility and drawing closer the professional
military and civilians. Some have even argued that it would make
the military more democratic. (As a former draftee, I can't recall
much democracy while on active duty).

For
many on the political right, a draft means recapturing the fictitious
ethos of World War II and the ensuing pre-civil rights, pre-Vietnam
War eras when all Americans supposedly pulled together. In that
imaginary paradise, their were no Jim Crow laws, no McCarthyism,
and women knew their place while the government backed homicidal
despots abroad in the name of anti-communism. And when young men
were called to the colors they went willingly, eager to fulfill
their patriotic obligation.

The
faith of many political liberals rests on social engineering. The
military, they argue, would in part be transformed into a combination
prep school and job center for America's have-nots, while their
own kids (especially among perennially bellicose neoconservatives)
safely matriculate at the university.

The
primary reason for the draft trial balloons is not that America
has a "hollow" military or that it lacks "readiness"
(both patently absurd) or that it can't recruit enough warm bodies
for the ranks. That's the spin. The main reasons are the excessive
number of warm bodies required to fulfill the antiquated and improbable
two-war strategy devised in the Pentagon. That's the inane notion
that his country could successfully fight two major wars at the
same time (while keeping the support of the rest of us), an overreaching,
grandiose fantasy that allows the Pentagon and Congress greater
opportunities to grab more money for their insatiable pork-barrel
projects while manipulating an indifferent public and friendly media
into believing that they're enhancing "national security."
Unlikely as it seems, can anyone imagine fighting, say, North Korea
and China, while simultaneously fighting Iran and Iraq to defend
"democratic" Saudi Arabia (I mean, oil)?

Then,
too, so long as this country's worldwide, open-ended, and endless
military commitments continue, this country is going to need a steady
supply of conscripts to serve as its global gendarmes. Who's next:
Iraq? Colombia? China? The Balkans again?

Mark Danner put it very well some years ago in World Policy Journal.
This nation. he properly observed, is "marooned in the Cold
War." Madeleine Albright's "indispensable nation"
and neoconservatives' love affair with "hegemony" — really
an American empire, nothing more, nothing less — keeps us frozen
in time, as if Stalin was still in the Kremlin. Left to the Beltway's
hardline insiders who never saw a war that didn't like, and to heavily
subsidized special interests, and absent any genuine and protracted
national debate, this country will continue to lurch along, unable
and unwilling to fashion, let alone consider, a much less militarized
and far less interventionist approach.

In
the end, a draft would cost billions and possibly give rise to renewed
domestic discord when
there is absolutely no credible threat to Americans in sight. In
their arrogance and hypocrisy, "The Cold Warriors," James
J. Martin once astutely warned us, "demand a monopoly of violence,
that u2018peace' may not be u2018endangered.'" Their way of thinking
has brought about a lot of needless violence and not much peace.

March
7, 2001

Murray
Polner wrote No
Victory Parades: The Return of the Vietnam Veteran and co-authored
(with Jim O'Grady) Disarmed
and Dangerous: The Radical Lives and Times of Daniel and Philip
Berrigan.