A lady emailed me recently from New York City saying she now lives in
terror, frustration, and anger, and cries every day after the tragic
and ruthless bombings that occurred there. Perhaps she may now be
able to empathize with the women of Baghdad, where the United States
did not drop two bombs on two buildings. In 1991, under George Bush,
it bombed the city relentlessly for six weeks, raining more bombs
on Iraq than were dropped in all of World War II. The Bush administration
bombed their military installations. It also blew up their factories,
their bridges, their roads, their power plants, their fallout shelters
crowded with innocent women and children, even their schools, day
and night, hour after hour, for a month and a half. While the Iraqis
were dying, many Americans sat in chairs waving flags and watching
the bombings on TV like watching a football game. The estimated million
Iraqis, half of them children, who died of malnutrition and disease
as a direct result of the subsequent sanctions against Iraq, are
still dying like flies there today, but are of no concern to the
Bush administration, which is proposing that the sanctions be further
tightened. Such a colossal tragedy of human suffering is not even
on the radar screen of the very people responsible for it. This does
not swell my chest with patriotic pride.
I have to wonder how the citizens of New York City would have fared if
their entire infrastructure had been bombed — their electricity
gone, drinking water gone, communications gone, bridges gone, roads
destroyed, many more thousands dead; polluted water, no food, no
medicines or medical supplies
— and then have to try to heal and rebuild without assistance, under
the crippling weight of economic sanctions. But I don’t have to
wonder long — under such circumstances, the citizens of New York
would die like flies as well. Relative to our population, the million
Iraqi Gulf War deaths would be equivalent to 12 million American deaths — the
populations of New York City, Newark, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington
D.C., Baltimore, and San Francisco combined. And now, incredibly, we’re
repeating the same scenario in Afghanistan.
I'll never forget the image of the fallout shelter in Baghdad I saw on
TV
— the one bombed by US warplanes. I saw weeping men carrying out
the charred bodies of hundreds of dead wives and children. Our government
simply dismissed the killings as the fault of Saddam Hussein. I’m
an “army brat” and a former ROTC student. I grew up in a military
family and I know that any man who had to carry out his dead family in
such a situation would vow until his death to strike back at the people
who were responsible for these senseless mass murders.
Now, sadly, we are carrying the charred bodies of our own loved ones
from bombed buildings as the cycle continues. The United States,
in retaliation, is terrorizing Afghanistan, and, once again, some
Americans cheer and wave flags as US bombs rain down. The people
of Afghanistan are being punished for crimes committed by people
who are already dead — people, ironically, not from Afghanistan.
The right-wing spokespeople and talk radio hosts are demanding that
no one think about this and certainly not talk publicly about the
insanity, inhumanity, and brutality of the Bush administration’s
foreign policies. To do so would be “unpatriotic,” they
say. Under the cover of this smoke screen, right-wing politicians
are shamefully exploiting our national tragedy in order to further
their own anti-human rights, anti-environment, pro-militarism agenda — an
agenda with its eye on mideast oil. This is patriotism? No, this
is an unconscionable insult to America and to those who died in the
Trade Center bombings.
The bombings of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were not insane
acts committed by cowardly terrorists against an innocent country,
as our president would like you to believe. They were, instead, carefully
timed, well thought out acts of retaliation against the cruel policies
of the former Bush administration, policies that were continued by
the Clinton administration. This in no way justifies these crimes,
but it does shed light on the root cause of our current predicament.
It should also reveal that more violence against innocent people
is not an appropriate response. More violence will lead to further
retaliation and continue the gruesome and utterly stupid cycle of
hatred and vengeance.
Bush’s cry for war has been met with loud applause in the United
States, but has anyone realized that the last Bush administration's cries
for war have led us into this nightmare in which we now find ourselves?
Has America lost its intelligence, its wisdom, and its conscience? Has
anyone noticed that the perpetrators of the crimes in New York City and
Washington D.C. are already dead? In a civilized society, the rule of
law is used to achieve justice. Suspects are indicted, tried, and punished
according to the evidence against them. Our president has now appointed
himself to be the world’s judge, jury, and executioner, with the
declared right to assassinate foreigners at will. He has chosen the blunt
instrument of war to conduct what should be the surgical removal of a suspect from
a foreign country. He has now expanded this into yet another wholesale
bombing of a nation, with the stated option to bomb additional nations
at whim. This insanity is tantamount to bombing Montana after Timothy
McVeigh’s crime, with Nevada next in line. Has it occurred to anyone
that the bombing of a foreign country is a gross and flagrant violation
of international law? Or has the incredible pro-Bush propaganda campaign
convinced Americans that they can thumb their nose at international law
so long as they invoke God and wave a flag? Is it a fact of life that
Americans love war and love to bomb other nations? Some obviously do,
but most do not.
Americans, generally speaking, are good people with great talents. We
are a wonderful depository of human accomplishment and ability, but
our political system is flawed — we have placed too much power
in the hands of too few people. With intelligent discourse, discussion
and debate, open dialog, a free and objective press, the rule of
law, and courage, we can make the right choices to deal with difficult
situations. Yet, our democracy is now being threatened — not
by Arabs, Muslims, or foreigners, but by our own tunnel vision, our
own refusal to admit to our short-comings and our unwillingness to
see the faults of our government and its foreign policies. As a so-called
“patriotism” now attempts to stifle our free speech and ram
a murderous and misguided prolonged war down our throats, we Americans
who really do love our country must band together and demand a positive
and constructive future for our nation as well as for the world. We must
demand that our tax dollars be used to better our society and our planet — to
improve our roads, bridges, schools, and medical care, to establish a
true and wise defense against real threats, to establish a living wage
for all Americans, to protect and preserve our environment. Otherwise,
the politicians and corporations that control our government will dump
our tax dollars, our natural resources, and the lives of our military
personnel, once again, down the rat-hole of war; a rat-hole that funnels
huge amounts of money, by the way, directly into the pockets of a few
wealthy Americans.
Now that we have been brushed by the nightmare of hatred that leveled
the twin towers, our mouths have been soured by our own medicine.
Perhaps we will begin to understand that the cycle of destruction,
death, and vengeance must end. More killings and bombings by Americans
will inevitably ratchet up the cycle of violence yet another notch.
We do not need more of the same —
instead, now more than ever, we need to employ a new manner of thinking.
We, the citizens of the United States, must demand it. Otherwise, we
start to look a lot like terrorists ouselves.