"Show me your company, and I'll
tell you who you are," my grandmother would often say with a light
Irish lilt but unmistakable seriousness, an admonition about taking
care in choosing what company you keep.
On Thursday, I could sense her smiling
down through the snow as I stood pinned to the White House fence with
Daniel Ellsberg, Chris Hedges, Margaret Flowers, Medea Benjamin, Coleen
Rowley, Mike Ferner, Jodie Evans, and over 125 others risking arrest
in an attempt to highlight the horrors of war.
The witness was sponsored by Veterans
for Peace, a group comprised of many former soldiers who have "been
there, done that" regarding war, distinguishing them from President
Barack Obama who, like his predecessor, hasn't a clue what war is
really about. (Sorry, Mr. President, donning a bomber jacket and making
empty promises to the troops in the middle of an Afghan night does not
qualify.)
The simple but significant gift of
presence was being offered outside the White House. As I hung on the
fence, I recalled what I knew of the results of war.
Into view came some of my closest childhood
friends -- like Bob, whose father was killed in WWII when Bob was in
kindergarten. My uncle Larry, an Army chaplain, killed in a plane crash.
Other friends like Mike and Dan, whose
big brothers were killed in Korea. So many of my classmates from Infantry
Officers Orientation at Ft. Benning killed in the Big Muddy called Vietnam.
My college classmate with whom I studied
Russian, Ed Krukowski, 1Lt, USAF, one of the very first casualties of
Vietnam, killed, leaving behind a wife and three small children. Other
friends, too numerous to mention, killed in that misbegotten war.
More recently, Casey Sheehan and 4,429
other U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq, and the 491 U.S. troops killed so
far this year in Afghanistan (bringing that total to 1,438). And their
mothers. And the mothers of all those others who have died in Iraq,
Afghanistan, Pakistan. Mothers don't get to decide; only to mourn.
A pure snow showered down as if to
say blessed are the peacemakers. Tears kept my eyes hydrated against
the cold.
The hat my youngest daughter knit for
me three years ago when I had no hair gave me an additional sense of
being showered with love and affirmation. There was a palpable sense
of rightness in our witness to the witless ways of the White House behind
the fence.
I thought to myself, this White House
is a far cry from the "Camelot" administration of John F. Kennedy,
who brought me, and so many others to Washington almost a half-century
ago. And yet, I could not resist borrowing a song from the play,
Camelot: "I wonder what the king is doing tonight. What merriment
is the king pursuing tonight..."
Perhaps strutting before a mirror in
his leather bomber jacket, practicing rhetorical flourishes for the
troops, like, "You are making our country safer." The opposite,
of course, is true, and if President Obama does not know that, he is
not as smart as people think he is.
More accurately, the troops are making
Obama's political position safer, protecting him from accusations
of "softness" on Afghanistan, just as a surge of troops into Iraq
postponed the inevitable, sparing George W. Bush from the personal ignominy
of presiding over a more obvious American defeat in Iraq.
Both presidents were willing to sacrifice
those troops on the altar of political expediency, knowing full well
that it is not American freedom that "the insurgents" hate, but
rather U.S. government policies, which leave so many oppressed, or dead.
Despite our (Veterans for Peace) repeated
requests over many months, Obama has refused to meet with us. On Wednesday,
though, he carved out five hours to sit down with many of the fat cat
executives who are profiteering from war.
It seems the President was worried
that he had hurt the fat cats' feelings - and opened himself to
criticism as being "anti-business" - with some earlier remarks
about their obscenely inflated pay.
Before our witness on Thursday, we
read in the Washington Post that Obama told the 20 chief executives,
"I want to dispel any notion we want to inhibit your success," and
solicited ideas from them "on a host of issues." By way of contrast,
the President has shown zero interest in soliciting ideas from the likes
of us.
'The Big Fool Said to Push On'
In another serendipitous coincidence,
as we were witnessing against the March of Folly in Afghanistan, the
President was completing his "review" of the war and sealing the
doom of countless more soldiers and civilians (and, in my view, his
own political doom) by re-enacting the Shakespearean tragedy of Lyndon
the First.
Afraid to get crossways with the military
brass, who have made it embarrassingly clear that they see no backbone
under that bomber jacket, Obama has just sped past another exit ramp
out of Afghanistan by letting the policy review promised for this month
become a charade.
Hewing to the script of Lyndon the
First, Barack Obama has chosen to shun the considered views of U.S.
intelligence agencies, which, to their credit, show in no uncertain
terms the stupidity of keeping U.S. troops neck-deep in this latest
Big Muddy in Afghanistan -- to borrow from Pete Seeger's song from
the Vietnam era.
There is one reality upon which there
is virtually complete consensus as highlighted by the U.S. intelligence
agencies: The U.S. and NATO will not be able to "prevail" in Afghanistan
if Pakistan does not stop supporting the Taliban. Are we clear on that?
That's what the recent National Intelligence Estimate on Afghanistan
says.
A companion NIE on Pakistan says there
is not a snowball's chance in hell that the Pakistani Army and security
services will somehow "change their strategic vision" regarding
keeping the Taliban in play for the time when the United States and
its NATO allies finally leave Afghanistan and when Pakistan will want
to reassert its influence there.
Should it be too hard to put the two
NIEs together and reach the appropriate conclusions for policy?
It is difficult to believe that -
after going from knee-deep to waist-deep in the Big Muddy by his early
2009 decision to insert 21,000 troops into Afghanistan, and then from
waist-deep to neck-deep by deciding a year ago to send in 30,000 more
-- Obama would say to "push on."
The answer lies in the kind of "foolish
consistency" Emerson termed the "hobgoblin of little minds." Out
of crass political considerations, Obama continues to evidence a spineless
persistence behind this fool's errand. He seems driven by fear of
offending other important Washington constituencies, such as the neoconservative
opinion-makers, and having to face the wrath of the be-medaled and be-ribboned
Gen. David Petraeus. This is pitiable enough -- but a lot of people
are getting killed or maimed for life.
'When will we ever learn?'
To answer this other Vietnam-era song,
well, we have learned -- many of us the hard way. We need to tell the
big fool not to be so afraid of neocon columnists and the festooned
left breast of the sainted Petraeus -- you know, the ten rows of medals
and merit badges that made him so lopsided he crashed down on the witness
table and was given a time-out by the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Outside the White House on Thursday,
we found ourselves singing "We Shall Overcome" with confidence.
And what we learned later of other witnessing conducted that same day
provided still more affirmation, grit, and determination.
For example, 75 witnesses braved freezing
temperatures at the Times Square recruiting station in New York to express
solidarity with our demonstration in Washington.
There in Times Square stood not only
veterans, but also grandmothers from the Granny Peace Brigade, the Raging
Grannies, and Grandmothers Against the War. Two of the grandmothers
were in their 90s, but stood for more than an hour in the cold. The
Catholic Worker, War Resister League and other anti-war groups were
also represented.
What? You didn't hear about any of
this, including the arrest of 135 veterans and other anti-war activists
in front of the White House? Need I remind you of the Fawning Corporate
Media and how its practitioners have always downplayed or ignored protests,
large or small, against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? Dave
Lindorff summed the situation up (see https://www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/345 ) .
A Rich Tradition
Civil Disobedience was Henry
David Thoreau's response to his 1846 imprisonment for refusing to
pay a poll tax that violated his conscience. Thoreau was protesting
an earlier war of aggression, the U.S. attack on Mexico.
In Civil Disobedience, Thoreau
asked:
"Must the citizen ever for a moment,
or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why
has every man a conscience then? I think that we should be men first,
and subjects afterward.
"It is not desirable to cultivate
a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation
which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right."
Imprisonment was Thoreau's first
direct experience with state power and, in typical fashion, he analyzed
it:
"The State never intentionally
confronts a man's sense, intellectual or moral, but only his body,
his senses. It is not armed with superior wit or honesty, but with superior
physical strength. I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after
my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest."
Prior to his arrest, Thoreau had lived
a quiet, solitary life at Walden, an isolated pond in the woods about
a mile and a half from Concord. He returned to Walden to mull over two
questions: (1) Why do some men obey laws without asking if the laws
are just or unjust; and, (2) why do others obey laws they think are
wrong?
More recent American prophets have
thrown their own light on the crises of our time while confronting the
questions posed by Thoreau.
Amid the carnage of Vietnam, Fr. Daniel
Berrigan, SJ, posed a challenge to those who hoped for peace without
sacrifice, those who would say, "Let us have peace but let us loose
nothing. Let our lives stand intact; let us know neither prison nor
ill repute nor disruption of ties."
Berrigan saw no such easy option. "There
is no peace," he said, "because the making of peace is at least
as costly as the making of war -- at least as liable to bring disgrace
and prison."
So, if the making of peace today means
prison, that's where we need to be. It is time to accept our responsibility
to do ALL we can to stop the violence of wars waged in our name. Now
it's our turn to ponder those questions.
This article first
appeared at Consortiumnews.com.