TIMES
EAGLE
NORTH
COAST
In a dark time the eye begins to see
MARCH 2003
~Theodore Roethke
50CENTS
VOL24NO5
ROXANNA VILLA
THE PATRIOTS’GAME
BY MICHAEL PAUL McCUSKER
“War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But
no matter how necessary, war is always evil."
-JIMMY CARTER
War is never necessary, and there has never been a
‘good war’, only bad wars that compel a tribe, a city, a nation to
defend itself against the ruthless ambitions of an eager enemy.
The possibility of war in Iraq, the cradle of civilization, is
an ironic symbol that humanity is threatening the future by never
getting past the conflicts of its earliest superstitions — which
originated from the most elemental questions pertaining to life
and purpose but have been frozen in mutually savage dogmas
like fossils in ice.
Usually the tempest before a war is the most dangerous
and intense period of international relations. The world is again
at that point, a critical moment of history that will determine if for
once mechanisms designed to prevent war will this time work
as they were intended despite almost reckless pressure to make
war.
The people who want war in Iraq are the ideological
conservatives in the White House whose inspired historical
vision is that perpetual warfare (a Christian-type jihad) is the
means to expand and protect the American neo-empire which
is being called the “New World Order", a term Hitler used for his
Nazi nightmare of world dominance (the also-called Thousand
Year Reich’) back in the 20th century.
President George Bush seems to be a religious zealot
while Saddam Hussein, portrayed as Hitler reincarnate, simply
wants to hang on to power as an old fashioned dictator Bush
is considered to be engaged in a “messianic mission" with a
“faith-based foreign policy of the most explosive kind." Once he
proclaimed Hussein as evil the assumption became self-fulfilling
that any attempt to oust him would be a just war. In accordance
with his intent on a crusade against terrorism in the Middle East,
Bush announced a policy of pre-emptive war (which alternates
with the term “preventive war”) in a speech at West Point last
June.
Yet former President Jimmy Carter says war in Iraq
would be an unjust war and overturn two centuries of bipartisan
participation in the United States in decisions about warfare.
(Half a dozen members of Congress have attempted to sue the
White House for bypassing the Constitution to make war, which
Congress illegally ceded following 9/11 — a federal judge has
denied the claim.) Pope John Paul II sent a missive to Bush in
early March which warned that there is no moral justification for
a preemptive war, which he said would disrupt relations between
Christianity and Islam and would be “a defeat for humanity."
The most persistent opposition to war with Iraq is from
fear that thousands of innocent civilians will be killed, injured
and maimed. The war plan the Pentagon seems to have
developed is that one day in March (or perhaps April) the U.S.
Air Force and Navy will launch hundreds of cruise missiles at
Iraq, more than were launched during the Persian Gulf War.
Ditto the second day, which prompted a Pentagon official to
say, “There will not be a safe place in Baghdad " He also said,
reported by CBS, that the “sheer size of this has never been
contemplated before." Which does not even begin to calculate
the clouds of aircraft that will attack Iraq with bombs
Millions throughout the world and the USA are against
invading Iraq and prefer to continue UN weapons inspections
however chancy and flimsy they are. Although Saddam Hussein
is recognized as a brutal dictator whose reign has terrorized the
Iraqi people, the prospect of killing Iraqis in order to free them is
not popular.
Marches against the U.S. starting a war in the Middle
East have drawn several million persons all over the world
In The U.S., Wednesday, February 26 was an all day national
telephonathon to Congress organized by peace groups. Feb
ruary 12 was a national Poetry Against the War day with read
ings all over the country. Lysistrata readings were performed in
59 countries and every state in the USA on March 3, including
a reading in Cannon Beach. March 5 was a moratorium-style
'don’t go to work day'.
As peace activities have become more intense and
populous as the velocity toward war accelerates, every act to
prevent or forestall it is criticized, downplayed and ultimately
ignored by the White House (Bush said he doesn’t listen to
“focus groups") with arrogant disregard for any other possibility
than war.
Despite Bush's Disneyland vision of a post-Saddam
Hussein Middle East, anti-American sentiment throughout the
world is reported to be at a maximum because the USA has
abandoned helping bring real peace to the Middle East and
because of its intemperate support of Israel.
Germany and France oppose the United States as the
world’s only superpower and hope for the European Union to
gain equity. They seek for the new world order to be pluralistic;
Asian and Islamic as well the West. And they certainly don’t
support the Churchillian alliance of Britain and the USA as a
world dominating unity of the “Anglo-Saxon speaking peoples."
The United Nations Security Council by insisting its
protocol is superior to the U.S. unilateral insistence of the use
of military power bodes far more hope for the future than eradi-
MAKING MORE ENEMIES
Chauvinism blinds people to their own problems, and
this is what has happened to America under President Bush.
Instead of addressing legitimate grievances, Bush is making
more enemies in his blind rush to attack Iraq
No country has the right to attack another, especially the
United States, which should lead by example The war against
terrorism is going to be made more terrible, not easier, by the
war on Iraq.
It is the beginning of an unending battle patterned after
the policies that are failing in Israel, where instead of addressing
the problems and being fair to all, the ruling party has embarked
on a policy of death to all
Not until the Israel/Palestine problem is dealt with fairly
will we have a chance at peace.
-ANCIL NANCE
And! Nance is a great Oregon photographer He lives in
Portland
eating Saddam Hussein and his possible weapons of mass
destruction. Even if war occurs, it should only be through UN
auspices and not U.S. bombast and pontification.
Here is the real conflict: the test of the future as a world
civilization loosely ruled by a confederation of United Nations or
a U.S. mandated world (which might very well set precedent for
China assuming ascendancy down the road). If indeed the U.S.
uses its superpowerdom to recreate the world as an American
clone as consummation of its true Manifest Destiny', which
America are we thinking about — the America of the Revolution;
the America of the Emancipation; the America of the Cold War;
or the America that demands the imperial prerogatives of being
the world’s sole superpower?
The tug of war in the UN Security Council has been at
least instructive as to how international politics might be handled
in the future, especially in crises and prevention of war, which
was its essential charter when the UN was organized at the end
of World War 2. The Preamble to the UN Charter, adopted in
June 1945, a month after Germany collapsed but while Japan
was still at war, stressed a determination to “save succeeding
generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetimes
has brought untold sorrow to mankind ”
World War 2 is called the “Good War”.The 20th century
obviously proved there is no such war. Both world wars might
have been prevented if nations and the humans they reflect
were not so ready to commit violence for their aspirations.The
Hitlers, Stalins and Mussolinis of the last century could never
have so devastated the world if their populations had not
blindly or fearfully followed them into the hell they made for
humanity.
Eventually the large mass of common people will have
to seize history from those who have usurped it and made it so
tragic and bloody. A world government consisting of separate
states will certainly be as fractious, messy and malevolently
divisive and maliciously class competitive as the U.S has been
from its inception All of our national woes will be magnified and
compounded, as will those of every other nation, at least in the
beginning — but as the European Union struggles to find a
separate identity from its diverse identities, so eventually will
world civilization that is at parturition.
Although millions of Americans have publicly opposed
war with Iraq, polls say most want to wait for UN approval before
starting a war but will support Bush without it because they feel it
is his right as commander-in-chief to make arbitrary decisions
for war or peace, and also because in this instance Congress
more or less gave him a blank check, abdicating its own respon
sibility These polls also indicate many of those questioned do
not wish to be thought “unpatriotic" by being critical or question
ing of Presidential policy, particularly after 9/11.
If anyone remembers an old Humphrey Bogart movie.
The Black Legion they might recognize the inflammatory rhetoric
of 100% Americanism focused against "alien undesirables"
which is rather familiar of late “What this country needs," the
Black Legion boss tells his blackrobed celluloid impersonations
of the real life Ku Klux Klan, “is bigger and better patriots."
But the patriot game is changing in this new century
millennium Bigger and better patriots think globally rather than
nationally They are world citizens rather than stiff-necked, belli
cose nationalists. True patriots reject narcissistic nationalism
and abhor war, whether just or unjust because it’s all in the
family.