New York City September 11 2001 Baghdad December 8 2009
So you must have some idea of what they are going through now; of what we unleashed upon them;
of what we are about to unleash upon the innocent of Afghanistan.
Violence is not really the answer. The pain and devastation we inflict will not make us safer.
Please, Mr. President, bring our troops home and use the great money for works of peace, not death.
In loving kindness,
Bruce and Noor
Let's try not to be distracted by Obama's call for a limit to our
Afghanistan involvement. His actions have a recent history of falling
far short of his promises, and his logic is much weaker than his
charismatic presence in the media.
Winning the hearts and minds of Afhganistan's population will not be accomplished by killing and maiming its citizens.
Iraq provides evidence that the US is incapable of enforcing internal peace in external nations. We might have learned this in Vietnam, but we didn't. In Iraq we have a recent, current, and bleeding example of the futility of trying to impose from the outside what only the people on the inside are capable of.
The initial cause of Iraqis losing their security was our invasion. The initiator of Iraq's plunge into violence was our occupation. Any Iraqi gains in security are the result of Iraqi actions, not US troop violence. The 'surge', without the coinciding attacks on Al Qaida by the tribal leaders in Anbar would merely have been more of the same: more US troop targets for the resistance to aim at; more US killing of civilians for Al Qaida to recruit on; and more denial of the basic truth that the Iraqis must solve their own problems. The Iraqis have a long way to go, but since we've toned down our violence so has their violence been reduced, and now they are beginning to face their own realities. More so each day that we pull more troops out.
Don't be distracted. The 2010 American 'violence-as-solution' in Iraq and Afghanistan is budgeted at about 12 billion US dollars (Afghanistan will cost more than Iraq this year). This doesn't count the billions given to mercenaries who fight without accountability nor the further billions spent by the CIA in its covert, i.e., illegal, actions along the Afghan/Pakistan border. [Older readers and history buffs will be reminded of covert actions in Laos and Cambodia, I'm sure.]
Let's not be distracted by the fact that we may actually be able to secure two Afghani population centers and the single road that joins them. The majority of the population will be unprotected, resentful of our perceived occupation, and more and more willing to join the resistance that is growing every day.
Obama's notion that Al Qaida needs a safe haven in Afghan/Pakistan territory in order to plot our destruction is another weakness in his logic. He ignores the fact that the major planning was done in Europe and the USA, with the scheme only presented for approval to Al Qaida in Afghanistan after it was defined. The pilot training took place in the US!!!!
Each day we fight Obama's wars we enable Al Qaida and its like to become stronger. We provide them with recruits by our actions. We make ourselves weaker by focusing on a specific geographical area when the real danger is disseminated.
Don't think for a minute that when we kill innocent civilians in Iraq or Afghanistan or Pakistan that the resentment stays within those borders. Some of it grows right here, in the good old USA. We should take the billions upon billions we spend to kill and maim and use that money to grow friends instead of enemies.
We weren't going to post Wright Salisbury''s latest article because it doesn't talk about Iraq. We deplore the American penchant for denial, and each new debacle seems to enable the U.S. public to ignore the disasters we have caused in the past. In some ways our incursion into Afghanistan serves to take our minds off the devastation we brought to the Iraqi people.
Our use of violence in Afghanistan as well as Iraq helps us ignore the growing number of American families who simply do not have enough to eat. We are talking about some 49 million Americans, according to U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack.
However, Wright's impassioned piece deserves to be read. We agree with him. We think you should take the time to see if you do also. And if so, then take at least the minimal action of letting your elected representatives know how you feel. It will only take you a few minutes, and the lives you save and the pain you help avoid will be worth it.
Boots on the ground or food on the table?
At $1,000,000 per year to put a soldier in Afghanistan and
unemployment topping 10%, which do we value more — fighting a war almost
certainly doomed to failure or feeding, clothing, housing and providing health
care to our own people?
Seems
like a no-brainer, doesn’t it?
Think outside the box, Mr. President
Just because you inherited two wars from your mentally- and
morally-challenged predecessor, you are not obliged to continue them. Back in the 60’s, people used to ask, “What
if they gave a war and nobody came?” That
was in the Vietnam era, when young people were being drafted. Lyndon Johnson sat in the White House
suffering severe depression as people marched out front, chanting, “Hey, hey, LBJ. How many kids did you kill
today?”
He was so depressed, he declined to run for another term,
and Richard Nixon became the next president. Hardly an improvement.
But that did put an end to the Selective Service
System. From then on, if we fought a
war, we would not draft college kids. We
would use our National Guard, which
was peopled by middle class folks who wanted to earn a little extra money.
Do something unprecedented: Use your head.
I’m serious. No one
has ever declared a war over before
his country was definitively defeated.
No one. Not Germany, not England
or Spain or Portugal of France. Be the first to admit that your country
can’t win a war and, more than that, recognize your error and end the war in Afghanistan and our continued presence in Iraq.
You have every excuse in the world, and except for a few
right wing nuts, you would be applauded for saving the country from disaster. If you need a reason to give the American
people for the decision, here are six
reasons, any one of which alone provides sufficient grounds for ending the
war.
1) Our allies don’t want to send more than token forces, if
that. What do they know that we don’t? Well, for one thing, they know the war is
very unpopular with their people. A majority
of Americans also think we should get out of Afghanistan.
2) Our country is not
at peril from the Taliban, and Al Queda is a stateless organization that
can find sanctuary elsewhere and is doing so.
3) What is so special about Afghanistan? If we are freeing people from oppression, why did we not intervene in Rwanda,
where a million people were killed in a war between the Tutsis and the Hutus?
4) The government of Harmid Karzai is deeply unpopular and untrusted by the people
of Afghanistan, because it is corrupt and shows no tendency whatever to change
its ways.
5) We can’t allow more of our young people to be killed or wounded in wars of questionable necessity.
6) And finally, we
can’t afford this war. Our economy
is in tatters.
Don’t be fooled by reassurances from our military
commanders. Generals fight. That’s what they do for a living. But tell them to stop fighting and they will
stop, because you are the Commander in
Chief.
You decide, Mr. President.
Wright Salisbury lost his son-in-law,
Edward Hennessy, Jr. in the 9/11 attack. He is also the founder of The
Alliance for Jewish-Christian-Muslim Understanding, Inc., a non-profit
organization dedicated to building bridges of understanding between people of
different faiths.
Just as we burrow deeper into the maelstrom of Afghanistan we are gifted with one of the ugliest warships ever built by any nation.
It is hard to think of a less fitting way to send "a message of America becoming stronger as a result" of 9/11 [Naval Cmdr. Quentin King]. Secretary of the Navy Gordon England announced the naming as to "honor the victims of Sept. 11."
Tragically neither the U.S. Navy nor President Obama evidently understand the enormity of the insult this warship delivers to those innocent civilians lost on September 11, 2001.
America weakened significantly after 9/11. The response to invade and occupy Iraq was a criminal act based on deliberate deceit. The punitive crushing of the Iraqi populace was nothing to be proud of. Our moral standing in the world was greatly diminished. Our civil liberties at home suffered setbacks that may never be recovered.
President Obama will come to New York to commission the USS New York on Saturday. We wish he would stay in Washington and decommission our failed effort in Iraq, and put an end to the inevitable failure of our mission in Afghanistan. We can no more force cultures to adopt the mythical Democratic model than we can forge peaceful tomorrows from weapons of destruction.
We also wish President Obama would stop the lies. We already have more mercenaries in Afghanistan that we have troops, but that fact is never added to official tallies of troop numbers.
Let us honor the innocent civilians who died on 9/11 by stopping the slaughter of innocent civilians by our own hands. This would be a true tribute to the fallen.
