by Howard Zinn |
| The war against Iraq, the assault on its people, the occupation of its cities, will come to an end, sooner or later. The process has already begun. The first signs of mutiny are appearing in Congress. The first editorials calling for withdrawal from Iraq are beginning to appear in the press. The anti-war movement has been growing, slowly but persistently, all over the country. Public opinion polls now show the country decisively against the war and the Bush Administration. The harsh realities have become visible. The troops will have to come home. And while we work with increased determination to make this happen, should we not think beyond this war? Should we begin to think, even before this shameful war is over, about ending our addiction to massive violence and instead using the enormous wealth of our country for human needs? That is, should we begin to speak about ending war—not just this war or that war, but war itself? Perhaps the time has come to bring an end to war, and turn the human race onto a path of health and healing. A group of internationally known figures, celebrated both for their talent and their dedication to human rights (Gino Strada, Paul Farmer, Kurt Vonnegut, Nadine Gordimer, Eduardo Galeano, and others), will soon launch a worldwide campaign to enlist tens of millions of people in a movement for the renunciation of war, hoping to reach the point where governments, facing popular resistance, will find it difficult or impossible to wage war. There is a persistent argument against such a possibility, which I have heard from people on all parts of the political spectrum: We will never do away with war because it comes out of human nature. The most compelling counter to that claim is in history: We don’t find people spontaneously rushing to make war on others. What we find, rather, is that governments must make the most strenuous efforts to mobilize populations for war. They must entice soldiers with promises of money, education, must hold out to young people whose chances in life look very poor that here is an opportunity to attain respect and status. And if those enticements don’t work, governments must use coercion: They must conscript young people, force them into military service, threaten them with prison if they do not comply. Furthermore, the government must persuade young people and their families that though the soldier may die, though he or she may lose arms or legs, or become blind, that it is all for a noble cause, for God, for country. When you look at the endless series of wars of this century you do not find a public demanding war, but rather resisting it, until citizens are bombarded with exhortations that appeal, not to a killer instinct, but to a desire to do good, to spread democracy or liberty or overthrow a tyrant. Woodrow Wilson found a citizenry so reluctant to enter the First World War that he had to pummel the nation with propaganda and imprison dissenters in order to get the country to join the butchery going on in Europe. In the Second World War, there was indeed a strong moral imperative, which still resonates among most people in this country and which maintains the reputation of World War II as “the good war.” There was a need to defeat the monstrosity of fascism. It was that belief that drove me to enlist in the Air Force and fly bombing missions over Europe. Only after the war did I begin to question the purity of the moral crusade. Dropping bombs from five miles high, I had seen no human beings, heard no screams, seen no children dismembered. But now I had to think about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the firebombings of Tokyo and Dresden, the deaths of 600,000 civilians in Japan, and a similar number in Germany. I came to a conclusion about the psychology of myself and other warriors: Once we decided, at the start, that our side was the good side and the other side was evil, once we had made that simple and simplistic calculation, we did not have to think anymore. Then we could commit unspeakable crimes and it was all right. I began to think about the motives of the Western powers and Stalinist Russia and wondered if they cared as much about fascism as about retaining their own empires, their own power, and if that was why they had military priorities higher than bombing the rail lines leading to Auschwitz. Six million Jews were killed in the death camps (allowed to be killed?). Only 60,000 were saved by the war—1 percent. A gunner on another crew, a reader of history with whom I had become friends, said to me one day: “You know this is an imperialist war. The fascists are evil. But our side is not much better.” I could not accept his statement at the time, but it stuck with me. War, I decided, creates, insidiously, a common morality for all sides. It poisons everyone who is engaged in it, however different they are in many ways, turns them into killers and torturers, as we are seeing now. It pretends to be concerned with toppling tyrants, and may in fact do so, but the people it kills are the victims of the tyrants. It appears to cleanse the world of evil, but that does not last, because its very nature spawns more evil. Wars, like violence in general, I concluded, is a drug. It gives a quick high, the thrill of victory, but that wears off and then comes despair. I acknowledge the possibility of humanitarian intervention to prevent atrocities, as in Rwanda. But war, defined as the indiscriminate killing of large numbers of people, must be resisted. Whatever can be said about World War II, understanding its complexity, the situations that followed—Korea, Vietnam—were so far from the kind of threat that Germany and Japan had posed to the world that those wars could be justified only by drawing on the glow of “the good war.” A hysteria about communism led to McCarthyism at home and military interventions in Asia and Latin America—overt and covert—justified by a “Soviet threat” that was exaggerated just enough to mobilize the people for war. Vietnam, however, proved to be a sobering experience, in which the American public, over a period of several years, began to see through the lies that had been told to justify all that bloodshed. The United States was forced to withdraw from Vietnam, and the world didn’t come to an end. One half of one tiny country in Southeast Asia was now joined to its communist other half, and 58,000 American lives and millions of Vietnamese lives had been expended to prevent that. A majority of Americans had come to oppose that war, which had provoked the largest anti-war movement in the nation’s history. The war in Vietnam ended with a public fed up with war. I believe that the American people, once the fog of propaganda had dissipated, had come back to a more natural state. Public opinion polls showed that people in the United States were opposed to send troops anywhere in the world, for any reason. The Establishment was alarmed. The government set out deliberately to overcome what it called “the Vietnam syndrome.” Opposition to military interventions abroad was a sickness, to be cured. And so they would wean the American public away from its unhealthy attitude, by tighter control of information, by avoiding a draft, and by engaging in short, swift wars over weak opponents (Grenada, Panama, Iraq), which didn’t give the public time to develop an anti-war movement. I would argue that the end of the Vietnam War enabled the people of the United States to shake the “war syndrome,” a disease not natural to the human body. But they could be infected once again, and September 11 gave the government that opportunity. Terrorism became the justification for war, but war is itself terrorism, breeding rage and hate, as we are seeing now. The war in Iraq has revealed the hypocrisy of the “war on terrorism.” And the government of the United States, indeed governments everywhere, are becoming exposed as untrustworthy: that is, not to be entrusted with the safety of human beings, or the safety of the planet, or the guarding of its air, its water, its natural wealth, or the curing of poverty and disease, or coping with the alarming growth of natural disasters that plague so many of the six billion people on Earth. I don’t believe that our government will be able to do once more what it did after Vietnam—prepare the population for still another plunge into violence and dishonor. It seems to me that when the war in Iraq ends, and the war syndrome heals, that there will be a great opportunity to make that healing permanent. My hope is that the memory of death and disgrace will be so intense that the people of the United States will be able to listen to a message that the rest of the world, sobered by wars without end, can also understand: that war itself is the enemy of the human race. Governments will resist this message. But their power is dependent on the obedience of the citizenry. When that is withdrawn, governments are helpless. We have seen this again and again in history. The abolition of war has become not only desirable but absolutely necessary if the planet is to be saved. It is an idea whose time has come. Howard Zinn is the co-author, with Anthony Arnove, of “Voices of a People’s History of the United States.” |
16.6.06
After the War
FRONTLINE: coming soon: the dark side | PBS
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In July 2003, United States [Dr. Evil] Vice President Dick Cheney stands outside the Oval Office as he listens to President [Curious George] W. Bush speak about Iraq in the Rose Garden at the White House. Credit: © Brooks Kraft/Corbis
(60 minutes) On September 11, 2001, deep inside a White House bunker, Vice President Dick Cheney was ordering U.S. fighter planes to shoot down any commercial airliner still in the air above America.
At that moment, CIA Director George Tenet was meeting with his counter-terrorism team in Langley, Virginia. Both leaders acted fast, to prepare their country for a new kind of war.
But soon a debate would grow over the goals of the war on terror, and the decision to go to war in Iraq. Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and others saw Iraq as an important part of a broader plan to remake the Middle East and project American power worldwide. Meanwhile Tenet, facing division in his own organization, saw non-state actors such as Al Qaeda as the highest priority.
FRONTLINE's investigation of the ensuing conflict includes more than forty interviews, thousands of pages of documentary evidence, and a substantial photographic archive. It is the third documentary about the war on terror from the team that produced Rumsfeld's War and The Torture Question. (read the press release)
WEB SITE FEATURES
Extended interviews with former members of the U.S. intelligence community, journalists, and White House and Congressional officials involved in intelligence oversight [Was it??];
Analysis of some of the main themes covered in the program;
A chronology of events;
Plus, the opportunity to watch the full program again in streaming video, readings and links, and more.
PRESS RELEASE
FRONTLINE INVESTIGATES VICE PRESIDENT CHENEY'S ROLE AS CHIEF ARCHITECT OF THE WAR ON TERROR AND HIS BATTLE WITH THE DIRECTOR OF CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE FOR CONTROL OF THE "DARK SIDE"FRONTLINE presents
THE DARK SIDE {Dr. Evil and Curious George}
Tuesday, June 20, 2006, 9 to 10:30 P.M. ET on PBS
http://www.pbs.org/frontline/darkside
Amid daily revelations about prewar intelligence and a growing scandal surrounding the indictment of the vice president's chief of staff and presidential adviser, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, FRONTLINE goes behind the headlines to investigate the internal war that was waged between the intelligence community and Richard Bruce Cheney, the most {EVIL} powerful vice president in the nation's history.
"A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies," Cheney told Americans just after 9/11. He warned the public that the government would have to operate on the "dark side." They already had.
In The Dark Side, airing June 20, 2006, at 9 P.M. on PBS (check local listings), FRONTLINE tells the story of the vice president's role as the chief architect of the war on terror and his battle with Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet for control of the "dark side." Drawing on more than 40 interviews and thousands of documents, the film provides a step-by-step examination of what happened inside the councils of war.
Early in the Bush administration, Cheney placed a group of allies throughout the government who advocated a robust and pre-emptive foreign policy, especially regarding Iraq. But a potential obstacle was Tenet, a holdover from the Clinton administration who had survived the transition by bypassing Cheney and creating a personal bond with the president.
After the attacks on 9/11, Cheney seized the initiative and pushed for expanding presidential power, transforming America's intelligence agencies, and bringing the war on terror to Iraq. Cheney's primary ally in this effort was Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
"You have this wiring diagram that we all know of about national security, but now there's a new line on it. There's a line from the vice president directly to the secretary of defense, and it's as though there's a private line, private communication between those two," former National Security Council staffer Richard Clarke tells FRONTLINE.
In the initial stages of the war on terror, Tenet's CIA was rising to prominence as the lead agency in the Afghanistan war. But when Tenet insisted in his personal meetings with the president that there was no connection between Al Qaeda and Iraq, Cheney and Rumsfeld initiated a secret program to re-examine the evidence and marginalize the agency and Tenet.
Through interviews with DoD staffers who sifted through mountains of raw intelligence, FRONTLINE tells the story of how questionable intelligence was "stovepiped" to the vice president and presented to the public.
From stories of Nigerian yellowcake to claims that 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta had met with Iraqi agents in Prague, The Dark Side dissects the now-familiar assertions that led the nation to war. The film also examines how that stovepiped intelligence was used by the vice president in unprecedented visits to the CIA, where he questioned mid-level analysts on their conclusions. CIA officers who were there at the time say the message was clear: Cheney wanted [to create the illusion of] evidence that Iraq was a threat.
At the center of the administration's case for war was a classified October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate that found evidence of an Iraqi weapons of mass destruction program. But Paul Pillar, one of the report's principal authors, now admits to FRONTLINE that the NIE was written quickly in a highly politicized environment, one in which the decision to go to war had already been made.
Pillar also reveals that he regrets participating in writing a subsequent public white paper on Iraqi WMD. "What was the purpose of it? The purpose was to strengthen the case for going to war with the American public. Is it proper for the intelligence community to publish papers for that purpose? I don't think so, and I regret having had a role in it," Pillar says.
For the first time, FRONTLINE tells of George Tenet's personal struggle in the runup to the Iraq war through the accounts of his closest advisers.
"He, I think, asked himself whether or not he wanted to continue on that road and to be part of it. And I think there was a lot of agonizing that George went through about what would be in the best interest of the country and national interest, or whether or not he would stay in that position and continue along a course that I think he had misgivings about," says John O. Brennan, former deputy executive director of the CIA.
Tenet chose to stay, but after the failure to find Iraqi WMD, the tension between the agency and Cheney's allies grew to the point that some in the administration believed the CIA had launched a covert war to undermine the president.
The film shows how in response, Cheney's office waged a campaign to distance itself from the prewar intelligence the vice president had helped to cultivate. Under pressure, Tenet resigned. Cheney's chief of staff, Scooter Libby, would later admit to leaking key sections of the NIE -- authorized, [no doubt] he says, by Cheney.
Libby also stated that the vice president told him that President Bush had declassified the material. Insiders tell FRONTLINE that the leak was part of the battle between the vice president and the CIA.
The Dark Side is a FRONTLINE co-production with the Kirk Documentary Group. The producer, writer and director is Michael Kirk. The co-producer is Jim Gilmore. FRONTLINE is produced by WGBH Boston and is broadcast nationwide on PBS. Funding for FRONTLINE is provided by the Park Foundation and through the support of PBS viewers. FRONTLINE is closed-captioned for deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers. FRONTLINE is a registered trademark of WGBH Educational Foundation. The executive producer for FRONTLINE is David Fanning.
pbs.org/pressroom
Promotional photography can be downloaded from the PBS pressroom.
Press contacts
Diane Buxton (617) 300-3500
Andrew Ott (617) 300-3500
MADNESS OF KING GEORGE CONTINUES
"A little Madness in the Spring
Is wholesome even for the King."
-- Emily Dickinson
American Poet 1830-1886
For our loathsome king, madness is always in season. His newfound "passion" for cycling is yet another excess in exercise, a diversion from the demons that usually grip him. But, gratefully, when he's outside peddling, he's not clowning in the Oval Office where the "decider" and his "gut" create more suffering and havoc for the world.
Washington in the spring is lush and green, brimming with blossoms, freshness and hopeful renewal -- a state of nature not found in the state of our union.
It's too much to hope that someday, when tooling around on his expensive bike, Bush might actually think about how fragile and threatened our green Earth is and how imperative good stewardship is to save it for other generations.
Bush says cycling allows him to "chase the fountain of youth."
Yet, six years into his presidency, he has done nothing to deal with the greenhouse gases that spur global warming and shorten the life expectancy of our entire ecosystem. He has fostered our national addiction to petroleum. His energy policies encourage wasteful consumption and add to the already-obscene profits of oil companies and their executives.
Bush permits his favored industries to poison the air we breathe and imperil the health of millions of people, especially children. He devotes his energies to enhancing the wealth of his family and his Houston cronies.
Issues like clean air and the survival of the planet don't occupy any of King George's precious time. Once, though, he did sit down with half a dozen cycling enthusiasts for a chat about their shared hobby. They met for 35 minutes.
That's 34 minutes and 45 seconds longer that Bush spent reacting to the intelligence report he received in August 2001 titled, "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." (Can you blame anyone for wanting to strike the US as it is today?)
Bush spent more time in one cycling seance than he has personally devoted -- during his entire administration -- to working on the creation of the nation of Palestine, the single most important deed required to even begin quelling violence and terrorism in the Middle East.
Bush's spring offensive, aimed as jolting his tanking poll numbers, is another flop. His staff shuffle and the new branding of the struggle with terrorism as "World War III" no longer fool the long-fooled American people.
The latest CBS poll shows only 30 percent now say they approve of Bush's handling of his war in Iraq.
CIA Director Porter Goss got sacked amid reports one of his top deputies attended hooker-graced poker parties at the Watergate Hotel in Washington with former Congressman Duke Cunningham, the convicted bribe taker. Goss may have played a few hands himself.
He was a disaster from the get-go, filling top CIA posts with his own political hacks. Goss had an undistinguished stint with the agency decades ago, but built his political stock as a Florida congressman and House Intelligence Committee chairman.
During his oversight, he presided over the colossal intelligence failures prior to the 9/11 attacks. He also allowed his predecessor, George "The Whore" Tenet, to get away with blaming the agency for Bush's "intelligence failures" on Iraq's weapons programs.
The Busheviks are back-pedaling on any real diplomatic initiatives. Their essential foreign policy is protecting oil interests and corporate greed.
When big oil beckons, big Dick rises to the occasion. Vice President Cheney made a rare trip from the bat cave and accused Russia of using its oil and gas resources as "tools of intimidation or blackmail." Cheney wants to rekindle the Cold War and rattle the Russian bear. His disgraceful hypocrisy is as transparent as it is dangerous.
In his speech to European leaders in Vilnius, Lithuania, last week, Cheney dared to pretend the United States can preach civic virtue and democratic values to the Russian government.
He accused the Putin government of alienating allies and "other actions by the Russian government have been counterproductive, and could begin to affect relations of other countries."
Dick Cheney has systematically and repeatedly attacked the fundamental constitutional rights of the American people. He favors illegal spying, denial of due process and claims unlimited executive authority. He and his boy Bush should be impeached and tried for treason. I AM STILL WAITING
For "enemy combatants," Cheney supports torture, imprisonment without charges, kidnapping and the rejection of international law and the Geneva accords.
He claims the "war-time president" can do anything with no accountability to any one. In a just world, those actions would assure Cheney and Bush a war crimes trial in the Hague.
Of all people to lecture the Russians on human rights and democratic principles, no one is more unfit than Dick Cheney. The hypocrisy of his mission was even more apparent when he went to Kazakhstan to cozy up with its despotic leaders and promote U.S. oil interests, especially -- surprise, surprise -- Halliburton's.
If freedom and democracy are taking lickings in Russia, they are getting killed in Kazakhstan. But Lord Halliburton didn't utter a syllable about those abuses. He was too busy cutting deals for his former company -- in which he still has a financial stake -- and pumping up other U.S. energy interests there.
Nursultan Nazarbayev, the Kazakh president, won re-election to his third six-year term in 2005 with a Stalin-like 91 percent of the vote. In the last six months, two of his political opponents have been murdered. Amnesty International has cited Kazakhstan for a litany of human rights abuses.
But when did a little blood in the pursuit of oil ever bother [the] big Dick? He's plunged into the geopolitical conflicts in the region sucking up to the Kazakhs to assure a U.S. claim on its vast energy resources. Halliburton runs an oil services operation there and wants to build new export routes for the nation's enormous reserves.
While every single organization monitoring human rights abuses ranks Kazakhstan's record much worse than Russia's, Cheney chose to ignore that unpleasant truth. He expressed support for the Kazakh government, without hesitation or reservation.
He told reporters, "I have previously expressed my admiration for what has transpired here over the past 15 years both in terms of economic development as well as political development."
The murders, torture, political prisoners and rigged elections don't mean a damn thing to Cheney. Like in Iraq, it's all about oil and the use of the U.S. military power and influence to assure its steady flow.
The Busheviks use stunning arrogance to pressure and demand that nations in Central Asia and the Middle East cater to our insatiable thirst for oil. We wage wars and support tyrants to get it. We claim foreign energy reserves as our "own," usually depriving impoverished people of their resources.
Our greed creates more unrest in already troubled regions and encourages terrorism.
Nations around the world, including many long-time friends, distrust, even despise us. George W. Bush doesn't really care. He and his people are wealthy and content. Now, in another spring of the world's discontent, Bush is taking carefree rides on his bike, isolated from the disasters he inflicts on suffering people and our environment.
Emily Dickinson concluded the poem from which the words at the beginning of this column are taken with the following:
"But God be with the Clown
Who ponders this tremendous scene
This Experiment of Green
As if it were his own!"
God save us from our clown-king.
