Five Years and Counting: A Call to Pundits and Politicians to Deepen the Conversation
On this, the fifth anniversary of the beginning of the Iraq War, it is critical that we heed the words of Albert Einstein: “The problems that exist in the world today cannot be solved by the level of thinking that created them.”
For over a year, public dialogue about this war has revolved almost exclusively around exit strategy timetables and levels of insurgent violence. Should we stay one year or 100? Are there fewer car bombs this month or last?
Exit strategies and indiscriminate violence must be considered, no doubt. But too often public debate on the Iraq War seems to dwell, in Einstein’s words, on the level that created it. A level at which fear dominates and those at the margins of our society — women, low-income people, people of color and youth — are at best, excluded from decision-making processes and, at worst, disproportionately affected by the consequences of war.
As we enter into our sixth year in Iraq, we must elevate our thinking to a level beyond fear and its necessary corollaries — racism, misogyny and economic injustice — to a place where strategy is not owned by the military alone, but is informed by those who should have had a say all along. And we must deepen our thinking to carefully consider the implications of enduring war and occupation on the lives of women, youth and low-income families at home and abroad.
Just look at the state of our nation today. We claim to defend women’s human rights, while violating them repeatedly in Iraq and back home. We are in the throes of an economic crisis fueled by trillions of dollars we have spent on a failing war abroad.
So, five years since the start of the war, and in the midst of an election year, what kinds of questions should we be asking? And to whom should we be listening?
For starters, the experiences of women whose partners have returned from violence abroad to inflict violence at home, as well as those of women who have reported widespread sexual assault within the military and private security firms, should inform policy decisions that will guarantee the protection of women’s rights-and lives. (Alarmingly, The New York Times reports that, since the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, there have been 150 cases of fatal domestic violence or child abuse involving U.S. service members and new veterans.) Likewise, economic policy and military budgets should reflect the needs of a low-income, single parent — and so many others like her — who is struggling to support her family, while any hope of relief is siphoned away for a war with no end.
Our increasing interdependence on each other and with the rest of the world demands an approach guided by a vision of a just and inclusive democracy that invites the perspectives and participation of those traditionally excluded from centers of power — including women. Those who are also, not surprisingly, most impacted by war.
In this vein, the media must cover the broader impact of the Iraq war on those most at risk: the woman in Iraq who is afraid to leave her house for water for fear of being kidnapped, the wife of a veteran who sports the bruises of both her husband’s anger and the country’s callous treatment of young, often low-income men of color in this country who are recruited into the military with cash cards and free lunches.
Similarly, our political leaders must engage in a more comprehensive conversation about Iraq, including the inextricable links between a failing war and a failing economy. In particular, they must take a good, hard look at the real economic fall-out in this country — the trillions spent while so many are struggling to keep their homes, pay exorbitant medical bills, afford school, or just the next meal.
And finally, I and many other social justice advocates nationwide are still waiting for our presidential candidates to inspire us with a vision that will prevent us from returning to this violent, seemingly intractable place. To this end, we want them to articulate a new level of systemic understanding that acknowledges the connections between war and racism, misogyny and economic inequality. We want them to ensure an exit from Iraq that protects the rights and livelihoods of those made disproportionately less secure by war. And we want to be sure that they will incorporate the lived experiences of people across the spectrum of race, class and gender into their platforms and policies during this election season and beyond.
Our democracy, and the rest of the world, depend on it.
Sara K. Gould is President and CEO of the Ms. Foundation for Women, the first national women’s philanthropy in the United States and the foundation engaged nationally to build women’s collective power to ignite change.
Copyright © 2008 HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
firstly I know you are on ”our” side… but
QUIT CALLING IT A WAR.. IT IS NOT A WAR IT IS
AN ILLEGAL INVASION AND OCCUPATION OF A SOVEREIGN COUNTRY…
THANK YOU
We will be there as long as President McCain wants us to be. The time for debate ended in the year 2000.
Michael Gordon is a cold fish. Stanley Fish is a cold Fish.
Notice that as the New York Times veers farther and farther to the right, the number of Iraqis killed grows less and less.
In his or her war assessment editorial of March 20, the author speaks of Iraqis dying by the tens of thousands.
The day before, one of the principal champions of Winter Soldier (not at the New York Times, of course), writing on the internet, gave the familiar “hundreds of thousands.”
The best justified of studies, however, starting with Lancet/Johns Hopkins/Columbia School of Nursing and ending with an exclusively British group, place the present figure at 1.3 million.
The realistic minority of commentators have rounded off to a million.
That would mean that we Americans are now working on a second million of Iraqi dead,
unless we include the infanticide of the sanctions, in which case it’s a third million.
Another way of putting this, given the wish for prolongment voiced by so many, is that the Iraqis are not dying by tens or hundreds of thousands but by the millions.
> “The problems that exist in the world today cannot be solved by the level
> of thinking that created them.”
I’m afraid that Americans are going to continue to solve those problems through actions driven by fear and ignorance. Fearful and ignorant people aren’t into thinking. They want action. Big flags waving. People, who don’t look like them, dying.
Protest did not shorten the Vietnam War by a single day.
Nixon needed the Vietnam War for his re-election, or else he would have “lost” it to the Communists.
Nixon needed the Vietnam War for his diplomacy with China and the USSR.
Nixon only ended the Vietnam War to attempt to salvage public support when his administration unraveled in the Watergate hearings.
The only way to compel Bush to end the Iraq War is to impeach him. He would only end the war if he had to submit to the public to remain in office.
Since no impeachment is in the offing, the Iraq War will continue. All the candidates will only move our troops into the Baghdad embassy compound in the next administration and phase one of the PNAC plan for the world’s future will be fulfilled.
WaPost EDITOR SHOWS WITH NEW DOCS CIA INVOLVEMENT IN JFK ASSASSINATION AT HIGHEST LEVEL.
(Sorry, I am tired of the Left being Gatekept away from the stories that could actually get large numbers of people intereste even though they might not listen to tweedy university sociologists. Dont think this is a left gatekeeping strategy? See The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts an Letters, by Francis Stonor Saunders. Also see The Mighty Wurlittzer: How the CIA Played America.
Laftgatekeeping has a well documented history. It creates dichotomies between structural analysis and something that is called conspiracy theory to create a cowcatcher, baby and bathwater psychological effect.)
Our Man in Mexico: Winston Scott and the Hidden History of the
CIA
http://www.amazon.com/Our-Man-Mexico-Winston-…
ALSO THE AUTHOR IS FIELDING QUESTIONS ON THE BOOK AT EDUCATION FORUM
http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php…
DAVID KAISER, AUTHOR OF THE ROAD TO DALLAS JUST PUBLISHED BY HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS, WHICH ALSO ARGUES THAT THERE WAS A CONSPIRACY IS ALSO GOING TO BE FIELDING QUESTIONS AT EDUCATION FORUM
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A critical question makes the Kennedy Assassination perhaps more relevant to today than ever:to what extent is the nominal leader, the President, really in control of the permanent military, political, and communications bureacracies that shape his options? In 1961, when Kennedy became president, key components of this permannent bureacracy were thirteen years old. As a parent with a teenager there were moments of tension when one can wonder who or what called the shots. This was uniquely the case in 1960, as for eight years– the truly formative ones in the developement of the entire post-war US society– the CIA had been given extreme lattitude. Kennedy’s relations with the permanet political and military bureacracy can serve as basis of comparison for how matters of war and peace are decided today, when blame-game controversies sometimes seem mere PR strategies for plausible denial 10.0
Jefferson Morleys book leaves little doubt that no matter what our betters tell us, the CIA was to a very significant degree doing its own things in 1963. The reason this emerges far more clearly than in other books, is that Morley’s never allows the ocean of detail to alter his camera agle. It is not a totalizing focus like some other books that mistake thickness for ambition. Rather, it sticks to the Mexico City CIA station, its chief Winston Scott, and his close World War Two friend and possibly his own privatest Idohaon– the only one weirder than fellow poet and contemporary Ezra Pound– James Jesus Angleton.
Morley is carefull. When your asking about unauthorized actions of the CIA people who normally talk freely in the New Yorker have a way of clamming up. It is hard to find sources in the middle ground, for example on the question of who knew what when about the Bay of Pigs. Far easier to treat this grey area as the blacktop of the Langley 500, the way Tim Weiner does in his childishly simplified and baldly propagandistic narration of Kennedy relations with the CIA.
How does he get insiders to talk for a book that is lethal to the government sanctioned version of the assassination? By not oversating things. By mentioning enough right wing cubans without so many as to lose sense of thier handlers. By clearly delineating who was in charge of what CIA operation, and who didn’t know about them as well. We can see the critical wires cross, and are not confused in a whirl of unessential relations. We can see the extra piece– George Joannides– being added like one too many bones in an ankle and the clarity with which one could mistake treason for the logical coorination of a counterintelligence
operation. Individuals are not blamed here, but the flow chart that teaches how the Cubans were “turned” is clear for the first time. At least for me, but I’m gradual.
Also Morley tells the story from the persepctive of Win Scotts family. This “works” in many ways. It might just be the footwear necessary for treading accross one the most contested and and important middle grounds — between president and permanent bureacracy– in twentieth and 21st Century history. cont. at
http://www.amazon.com/Our-Man-Mexico-Winston-…
As an example, we should call the pundits and politicans to deepen the conversation on Jeremiah Wright’s allegedly controversial statements about 9/11. He said, to paraphrase, that the chickens had come home to roost, and that we were getting back some of what we had been giving out. That sounds reasonable to me. Its an argument that Chalmers Johnston made in a scholarly way prior to 9/11. He called it “blowback”. I’d like to hear more of that line of reasoning.
But the universal reaction of pundits and politicians, including Barack Obama, has been that we can’t link 9/11 to US foreign policy. We can’t see it as “blowback”.
That would make sense if the GWOT were only about a single crime of 9/11, but its expanded to far more than that, to Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran, even though the hijackers were mostly Saudis and their financial backers and enablers were mostly Saudis and Pakistanis. Here we see again the pathological fingerprint of US foreign policy. Saudi Arabia is an ally, so we can’t bomb them or accuse the of 9/11. We can’t point out that the Saudi King is one of the 10 worst dictators in the world. We don’t invade Pakistan and overthrow its dictator, instead we invade Iraq. Musharref is our guy in Pakistan, but Saddam was no longer our guy in Iraq. When Iraq invaded Kuwait, Bush senior cited the inviolable principle that countries can’t just invade their neighbors and take land by force. He never applied that principle to Israel. No president ever has accused Israel of taking land from Arabs and giving it to Jews, even though that, in a nutshell, is the definition of Zionism. Israel is an ally, so even though this kind of imperialism went out of fashion a century ago, its ok for the Israel government to expand its borders and take land by force.
“We will be there as long as President McCain wants us to be. The time for debate ended in the year 2000.”
To our international visitors, please be assured not all Americans are this cynical and defeatist. Of course trolls can be clever in their little weak kneed posts secretly supporting criminals like McWars, who will never be elected for his outrageous ideas, infidelity and extremist rhetoric that would destroy this country.
Anybody remember Pat Tillman? Who killed him?
This is not a plug for Obama, but praise for the fact that his recent speech on race relations began to deepen the dialogue across the nation. Those of us who are in a position to speak truth to power as individuals now are in a position to see the collective power of truth later.
www.raycarlson.com