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From Lake Wobegone to our present situation GARRISON KEILLOR'S COMMENTS ON OUR CURRENT SITUATION
The opposition to this war is not about George Bush, or pacifism, or flabby thinking by liberals, so much as it is a simple sense of dread at the thought of the United States of America entering into a religious war against Islam. The idea strikes Republicans and libertarians as well as Democrats, that our crusade in Iraq may lead to a place we don't want to go, and that is the Fifty Years War in which suicide bombers become a routine part of American life and we are trapped inside a bad movie that doesn't end. A war that my grandsons will dread as they grow old.
Dread is the feeling that grips the 25% who answer to the word Opposed ----or maybe we're down to 15% by now, after day after day of Olympics coverage of the war, seeing the incredible firepower, witnessing the awesome and inspiring fact that young men and women are willing to face death in behalf of this country (and how would we know, except in war?) --- one sits and watches television reporters who are giddy as if they were embedded in the World Series of War, Our Very Own Yankees vs. pitiful Podunk High. But if you are not embedded, if you are a free American, you may sense that we are floating into a very deep canyon.
We of the 25 or 15 or 7% aren't so visible. The demonstrations don't represent us at all. How do you march under banners that say THIS IS APT TO TURN OUT TRAGICALLY and DON'T HIT THAT TAR BABY?
The people marching in the streets seem to be a lot of Democrats happy for the chance to jeer at Bush. I am not one of them. I went to a vigil on the first Sunday night of the Crusade, and it was straight out of 1972 ---- same people holding the same candles and singing the same songs and not singing them nearly as well. And "We Shall Overcome" doesn't get at what I am feeling, which is: we are caught in the grip of events and heading toward an outcome that cannot be predicted. We are bombing Baghdad and every one of those bombs is going to come back to us.
Here we are, pushing boldly into the Middle East with American troops (would Dwight D. Eisenhower have done this?) to bring democracy to a world that is utterly alien to 99.44% of all Americans. Does this add up? I wish that George Bush were right and that he'd be hailed by historians and his tight-lipped face be chiseled into the mountain. I would sit at the base of the mountain and sell postcards. But I do not accept his case for this war.
I fear the worst.
Our military is tough, well-trained, disciplined, fighting in behalf of a lot of us loose, happy-talking, impulsive, dreamy people walking around eating ice cream cones at the carnival, about as disciplined as a battalion of cats. This is not a militant or religious country. I've been in religious countries and this is not one of them. You can buy liquor on Sunday anywhere in America, find pornography in any Marriott and every Walmart, listen to songs on the airwaves whose lyrics make you wince and turn pale. These are products of entrepreneurial capitalism, which thrives in our loose jazzy democracy, along with timeless art and comedy and enormous human kindness, but if we get caught up in the Fifty Years War against Islam, we will find out how fragile all of this is. We'll become of necessity a much tougher and more disciplined society, in which we obey instructions and stick to the message, and that, dear hearts, is not my country.
The conservative intellectuals who did the think-tank work on our new preemptive strategy have made a brilliant case for it, that reads well in the pages of political journals and sounds brave and good on the Sunday morning talk shows, and now a few tired old liberals must try to express the old conservative objections: the world is not an abstract construct and as much as you try to reassure the Muslim world that this is not a religious war, it is one if they think it is. Everyone knows that 9/11 was a religious attack, and the crusade in Iraq is our response to it. A religious war is the worst kind, a war impossible to win and very difficult to extricate ourselves from. God spare us. God save us from ourselves.
A great deal depends on this country having a genuine election next year, with a real debate that names the dangerous road we've taken. Flag-waving is no substitute for democracy. Every one of us honors the heroism of the young who face death; none of us want to demand this of 57,000 of them in the near future.
________________________________________________________
"Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day."--Theodore Roosevelt, April 19, 1906
"They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane.”--George Orwell: 1984, talking about the brainwashing of the worker class that happens in authoritarian societies.
"Once a government resorts to terror against its own population to get what it wants, it must keep using terror against its own population to get what it wants. A government that terrorizes its own people can never stop. If such a government ever lets the fear subside and rational thought return to the populace, that government is finished."--Michael Rivero
"To plunder, to slaughter, to steal, these things they misname empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace."-- Tacitus
"War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today."--John F. Kennedy
PETER FREUNDLICH: "All Things Considered" 13 March 2003
All right, let me see if I understand the logic of this correctly. We are going to ignore the United Nations in order to make clear to Saddam Hussein that the United Nations cannot be ignored. We're going to wage war to preserve the UN's ability to avert war. The paramount principle is that the UN's word must be taken seriously, and if we have to subvert its word to guarantee that it is, then by gum, we will. Peace is too important not to take up arms to defend. Am I getting this right?
Further, if the only way to bring democracy to Iraq is to vitiate the democracy of the Security Council, then we are honor-bound to do that too, because democracy, as we define it, is too important to be stopped by a little thing like democracy as they define it.
Also, in dealing with a man who brooks no dissension at home, we cannot afford dissension among ourselves. We must speak with one voice against Saddam Hussein's failure to allow opposing voices to be heard. We are sending our gathered might to the Persian Gulf to make the point that might does not make right, as Saddam Hussein seems to think it does. And we are twisting the arms of the opposition until it agrees to let us oust a regime that twists the arms of the opposition. We cannot leave in power a dictator who ignores his own people. And if our people, and people elsewhere in the world, fail to understand that, then we have no choice but to ignore them.
Listen. Don't misunderstand. I think it is a good thing that the members of the Bush administration seem to have been reading Lewis Carroll. I only wish someone had pointed out that "Alice in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking Glass" are meditations on paradox and puzzle and illogic and on the strangeness of things, not templates for foreign policy. It is amusing for the Mad Hatter to say something like, `We must make war on him because he is a threat to peace,' but not amusing for someone who actually commands an army to say that.
As a collector of laughable arguments, I'd be enjoying all this were it not for the fact that I know--we all know--that lives are going to be lost in what amounts to a freak, circular reasoning accident.
On the first day of Spring this year, our government planted seeds of endless war.The next day, the world responded with a call to peace that gave another collective song and vision to the Equinox. Visions of faith, anger, grief, gratitude, and the determination to do the work to bring and sustain real peace in this world (I took part in the march from Times Square to Washington Square Park in NYC).
In a similar vein, many people may not realize that Easter Sunday this year will be falling on the birthday of a particularly terrifying tyrant from last century. Pardon the corny language, but frankly it creeps me out just to think of it.
However, (and here is the point of this note): It seems the perfect time to call another action together on Easter Saturday. To create the most powerful and energy-channeling "Planting Seeds for Peace" event that the world has ever seen.
Via my local group and NJ Peace Action, I am hoping to work in collaboration with Code Pink and United for Peace on that day. And, while I think it will be important to have events in DC *and* New York, I will plan on working in New York.
Thank you for your work....
Terri L. Clegg Hewitt, NJ
This letter from Bob Bailey was published in AIM February 2003. In response to the AIM article (Feb 19) on the peace demonstrations being conducted every Thursday at 6:00pm in front of the West Milford Veterans park Monument, let me say that I have been to all three vigils held so far and the initial vigil held on February 6 had 50 to 60 protestors in attendance, not the 20 protestors in attendance the reporter stated were at the vigil. My experience at all three vigils has been that most inhabitants of cars passing by do not react to our vigil; of those passing by the vigils who do react, more people react positively to the vigils than do react negatively, by perhaps a two or one or two to one ratio.
The AIM reporter does not say where she interviewed the respondents who are opposed to these vigils, as the only non-demonstrator I encountered at the February 6 vigil was the commander of the West Milford American Legion branch, who was very gracious to those participating in the vigil; he was concerned that the demonstrators might exhibit negative feelings towards the military. I assured him that I, as a 24-year veteran of the military, have total respect for the military and I believe everyone else participating in the vigil also respects the military.
Our disagreement is with the current administration's policy of engaging in a preemptive military strike against Iraq in order to create a regime change in that country. The threat posed by the Iraqi government to the U.S. exists, as any potential adversary can be considered a threat to the U.S. The threat from Iraq, however, is being vastly overstated by the Bush administration.
The Iraqi military was greatly decimated in the last Gulf War. Its strength was perhaps reduced by 90 percent in that war. Furthermore, 10 years of sanctions and U.N. weapons inspections have limited their ability to expand their weapons program. With U.N. weapons inspectors currently Iraq from utilizing any weapons they may possibly posses. Comparisons of Saddam Hussein's regime to Nazi Germany may be valid in that they are both corrupt regimes, but to compare their military positions is completely misleading. Nazi Germany's military machine was perhaps the strongest in the world in the 1930's. Furthermore, Nazi Germany had no U.N. weapons inspectors monitoring its weapons systems, as does Iraq. The current Iraqi military does not even have an air defense that can eliminate the U.S. and British warplanes that fly over its air spaces.
The link that the Bush Administration is trying to make between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida is shaky at best. Although both parties are Muslim, al-Qaida is an organization of religious zealots, while Saddam Hussein's government is a secular government, held in contempt by Osama bin Laden. In a recent interview on Arabic television, bin-Laden labeled the Hussein government as "infidels".
I became suspicious when I started reading articles such as one in the Los Angeles Times appearing last October entitled "CIA urged by White House to alter Iraq Reports", detailing how top officials in the Pentagon and elsewhere have pressured CIA analysts for revisions on reports they have made regarding Iraq's links to al-Qaida. Said one intelligence official - "Analysts feel more politicized and more pushed than many of them can ever remember". The sources stated that CIA analysts, who are supposed to be neutral, were fighting to resist the pressure by the administration to adjust their reports.
I question the immediate danger posed by Iraq when not only many countries in Europe and elsewhere are not supporting military intervention by the United States but countries bordering Iraq do not favor this intervention, even countries such as Iran and Kuwait that have engaged in wars with Iraq in the past. Some countries that have agreed to back the U.S. are not acting out of conviction but a wish to maintain good relations with the United sates. For example, Turkey is demanding 30 billion from the U.S. in writing for allowing the U.S. to stage troops on its territory.
No one in the peace movement in any way supports of approves of Saddam Hussein, he is universally acknowledged as a barbaric person. I often wondered why twenty years ago, after Saddam Hussein's army had fired poison gas on Kurds in northern Iraq, killing thousands, Donald Rumsfield, as an envoy of the Reagan Administration, traveled to Baghdad to shake Saddam Hussein's hand and open up diplomatic relations with his regime. As Iraq was then engaged in a war with Iran, a United States adversary, Iraq was then seen as a useful ally and tool of the U.S., no matter how objectionable was his regime (the enemy of my enemy is my friend). After the invasion of Kuwait by Iraq, the cozy U.S. relationship with Iraq was reversed and Iraq became the enemy - Saddam Hussein's mistake.
I would love to see a regime change in Iraq, but bombing it into the Stone Age by the U.S. military is not the way to do this.
Robert Bailey
It had gotten to me... The name-calling: Unpatriotic. Anti-American. Short-Sighted. Dangerous to our nation¹s security. Naïve. Stupid.The assumptions:
“I sure hope these anti-war types appreciate the right to free speech that WAR has given them in the first place."
"If these liberals had been in power during World War II, we¹d all be speaking German now.”The uncomfortable local silence:
Whether to avoid disrespecting the families of people lost in the 9/11 attacks, or out of fear of another attack, or fear of being branded any of the names above, or just plain fear, period.The aggressive “Patriotic” smugness:
- Driving to and from work, harassed on the road by absurdly-huge pickup trucks and SUV¹s with gigantic U.S. flags mounted in various places, showing off their superior "patriotism".
- Hearing story after story of people being pulled over by police more often; sometimes by officers who seemed to enjoy their new-found free license to harass and interrogate people in the name of “national security”.All of this - culminating with my own twenty-minute roadside Police interrogation for having a blown-out tail light - had indeed, gotten to me.
I found myself wanting to leave this place...desperately wanting to move somewhere else...where people would talk to each other, not take joy in abusing or otherwise silencing each other during such a frightening moment in our nation¹s history.
And then, at the call of a few local people, concerned citizens in the Highlands region of northern New Jersey began to gather to talk about Peace.
As the discussions began, and as people saw that their neighbors were neither stupid nor unpatriotic nor any of the above labels; and as we saw that we all shared a concern about the path our nation was heading down; so many, each in turn, said the same thing:
“I thought I was alone out here.”
On January 18, 2003, many in our quickly-growing local group went to Washington, D.C. to join with people from around the nation in a march against the war drive. It was there that my television-media-tainted eyes saw something I had NEVER expected to see.
The people who were marching came from so many walks of American life:
- Christians and Christian leaders (liberal, conservative, Catholic, you name it)
- Muslims
- Jews
- Palestinians
- Unitarians and other Inter-Faith groups
- Iraqis
- Koreans
- Veterans
- families of people serving overseas
- “Soccer Moms”
- Republicans/Democrats/Greens/Libertarians/Independents
- pro-choice groups/pro-life groups
- performance groups
- students
- busloads of people from Arkansas, Oklahoma, Michigan, etc....
- many people who have never gotten involved politically in their lives.
- ...the list goes on.As we were marching that day, we passed the home of a DC resident who¹d decided to make his views known with a banner that said: “Hippies Go Home’.
I looked at his sign and then panned my eyes over the crowd of people marching closest to me at that moment: a raucous group of women of all ages, a professional-looking father with his young daughter on his shoulders, a Korean-American drum troupe, a suburban-looking family (grandparents included) walking together protesting for a son who was serving overseas in the military. We passed a group of veterans, chanting out against the war...and I thought about that man's sign; thought of the need for people to put others in neat little categories when they're afraid.
It occurred to me: so many who are for the war like to tell themselves that the peace protesters are the ones who are cowards, the ones who are afraid. But as I looked around at the people marching, and then back at the "Hippies Go Home" sign, I saw quite clearly who was the coward that day.
As I continued to look around, it became clear to me, something that I could only find words for later: This is truly a People¹s Movement. This is NOT about Left wing or Right wing, no matter how some may try to present it as such.
Middle America, in every sense of the term, is as much a part of this movement as are any groups off to any "wing" of the political spectrum.
The march I witnessed was about the American People rising up (each out of their own “local silences” and uncertainties, no doubt) to speak clearly and plainly to an administration determined NOT to listen. To speak and to tell them that we are AGAINST this drive to war that is NOT being waged for the reasons we¹re being sold.
"People Have the Power", indeed.
In the short time since we¹ve begun meeting locally, small changes have begun to take place.
- More and more neighbors continue to learn about our group; and more and more people continue to say: ³I thought I was ALONE out here!²
- Later this week, we will be having the first Anti-War Peace Vigil to happen in our town in at least 30 years, if EVER. We found this out when the Police Department informed us that they didn’t even have a permit for this kind of thing, and just gave us cautious permission to go ahead.
- There is even talk of starting a community garden in town. And let me be clear: this is not necessarily an area where people would expect such a thing.
Case in point: I was out walking on the frozen lake near my home today, taking pictures of snowmobile tracks and trying to capture on film the sunbeams that were bursting through the clouds. I met a local man I’ve only seen in passing before, and I learned that he has lived here for 25 years. He was riding his snowmobile around on the ice, and pulled over to talk to me when he saw me taking pictures of the landscape. I asked him if he’d heard about the community garden that people were talking about starting this year. His eyebrows shot up in a pleased but surprised expression, and he said “Now THAT¹ll be a first.”
From the looks of things, it seems this may be a year of many firsts.
THIS, I'm happy to say, is the kind of thing I'd like to let get to me.
Terri