AMERICA IS AT RISK!

WHAT IS TO BE DONE?

During the Twentieth Century, after decades of shameful civil rights abuses, America slowly but surely worked its way to higher moral ground. Of course, there were citizens who refused to move with their nation to that higher ground, but basically the country became better than it had been. Tacit discrimination continued; but the United States is a nation of laws, so conditions improved for millions of Americans. Women gained the right to vote. Legal discrimination on the basis of race ended. Many legal inequities were addressed and laws were changed. We were confident that eventually laws would be changed to end discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identification. Looking back on the century before the election of George W. Bush to the presidency of the United States, we see a nation moving steadily, sometimes painfully, to higher moral ground.

In the first decade of the new century, we are experiencing a slide backwards from moral high ground. Americans have always claimed that honesty and fair play are characteristics of our democracy. For decades other countries have looked to the United States as the model of democracy in the world. It hasn’t been our capitalism or any of our social, religious, or political ideologies that have drawn the attention of the world to America; it has been our democracy. Now in six short years America has steadily lost moral ground in the eyes of the world.

To deliberately inflict an unnecessary, avoidable, punishing war on any part of the world is a crime. Looking back on the Twentieth Century, perhaps the bloodiest century in the history of the world, we see clearly that the wars of that 100-year period were begun by leaders with expansionist motives, leaders who were later judged to have been criminals. The United States did not begin the First and Second World Wars. American presidents at the beginnings of those wars were reluctant to become involved. The country finally entered those wars because it would have been wrong not to do so. Presidents in those days declared war only after our country had been attacked or after all diplomatic efforts had failed to stop a war machine by a hostile nation that had declared its goal of total world domination. As terrible as Al Quaeda’s criminal attack on New York World Trade Center Towers was, it was not the same as the attack on Pearl Harbor. Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor was an act of aggression against America by a hostile nation. Al Quaeda is a criminal organization, not a nation. War against Iraq is a war against a nation. More than fifty thousand Iraqis, many of them innocent children, women, and old people, have been killed in a war which my country started. Thousands more have been wounded. Almost three thousand Americans have been killed in this war.

Our president characterizes the war in Iraq as a war against terrorism. Terrorism is an idea. People are real; they are tangible. People are killing people in Iraq. When my nation began the Iraqi war, it dropped bombs on people. The targets of thousands of missile strikes and bombing raids were people targets. No one at the beginning of the war, not even the President, pretended the targets were ideas. A few days after the war began, when the President, dressed in a fighter pilot costume, landed on an aircraft carrier near my home in San Diego, he didn’t make a speech proclaiming victory over an idea. He proclaimed victory over a nation, an entity made up of people. It wasn’t until much later when it was clear that the war was not over, that it would not be over for a very long time, and that it was and is a colossal mistake made by a dishonest, misguided administration that the President and his advisors began to proclaim that the war is not against people at all but against an idea.

The civil war that is raging in Iraq today is a war between groups of people. Car bombs, roadside bombs, and suicide bombing missions are acts of aggression against people. Ideas are not and, indeed, cannot be killed by bombs and missiles. If we learn anything from history. we learn that ideas are not killed by war. A nation can be built around a set of ideas, but a nation is not the same as the ideas that inspired its development. Intelligent people know the difference. It wasn’t an idea that declared the war that has killed many thousands. It was somebody. In a nation of laws it is reasonable to expect somebody who accidentally kills innocent people to be charged with misdemeanor and punished. Anybody who deliberately kills innocent people in acts of aggression is a criminal.

For all of my life until the beginning of this new century, America was a credible voice and influence in the world community and was a responsible force in helping less powerful countries attempt to bring to justice the political criminals responsible for the deaths of innocent people. Idi Amin and Augusto Pinochet are notable examples. For at least two decades Saddam Hussein of Iraq has been known to be a criminal who is directly responsible for the deaths of thousands of his own people. One can assume that for many years the majority of the long-suffering people of Iraq looked to America and to the other democracies of the world for relief. Few Iraqis could have guessed that an American president's solution to the problem of Saddam Hussein would be to begin a war that would rain bombs and missiles down on them to inflict more horrible suffering.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, Nikolai Chernyshevsky, a Russian revolutionary democrat unhappy with actions taken by rulers of his country, was arrested and confined in the Fortress of St. Peter and Paul where he wrote his famous novel “What Is To Be Done?” The title of his book is the question I ask myself every day as reports pour in from the war front. WHAT IS TO BE DONE? If you have ideas, click "comments" and post them.