Spring 2019 #5.2

Volume 5 Number 2 Spring 2019 Donations Accepted Peace in Our Times A Veterans For Peace publication exposing the root causes and enormous costs of war The great lie of war in action I was repeatedly asked not to resign and was offered a more senior position within the State Department. Richard Holbrooke, then the President’s appointed representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, told me he agreed with 95 Time for Peace in Afghanistan percent of what I had written and asked me to join his staff, while the U.S. ambassador, Karl Eikenberry, told me my analysis was one of the best he had encountered and stated he would write an introduction endorsing my resignation letter if I remained with the U.S. Embassy in Afghanistan for the remainder of my tour. In conversation with the U.S. deputy ambassador to Afghanistan, he agreed the war was not just unwinnable, but also corrupt, and stated he would not let his children serve in such a war. Further support for my views was provided by my counterparts serving as political officers in the most violent parts of Afghanistan: Kandahar, Helmand, Kunar, Nuristan and Oruzgan Provinces. These men and women made clear their agreement with my assessment and my resignation. The support from the military was equally effusive and genuine; often such support included apologies along the lines of “I’d like to resign too, but I’ve got kids heading to college in a few years …” (the golden handcuffs are an instrumental and integral aspect of the U.S. empire’s infrastructure). When I asked Karen DeYoung, the Washington Post correspondent who wrote By Matthew Hoh positions effecting war policy in Washington, D.C., the front-page, above-the-fold story on my resignation, with the Department of Defense (DOD) and the State why she wrote such a piece about me, she replied she It has been more than nine years since I resigned Department. My resignation in 2009 was not taken lightly could not find anyone at the Pentagon, State Department in protest over the escalation of the Afghanistan War by my superiors, and my reasons for opposing President or White House who disagreed with me. from my position as a political officer with the U.S. Obama’s “surge” in Afghanistan found support among I relate the above not to cheerlead for myself (although State Department in Afghanistan. It had been my third both military officers and civilian officials at senior levels the sadness and despondency from witnessing the time to war, along with several years of working in in Kabul and Washington. continued on page 19 … A Planet in Crisis: The Heat’s on Us By Dahr Jamail I’m standing atop Rush Hill on Alaska’s remote St. Paul Island. While only 665 feet high, it provides a 360-degree view of this tundra-covered, 13-mile-long, seven-mile- wide part of the Pribilof Islands. While the hood of my rain jacket flaps in the cold wind, I gaze in wonder at the silvery waters of the Bering Sea. The ever-present wind whips the surface into a chaos of whitecaps, scudding mist, and foam. The ancient cinder cone I’m perched on reminds me that St. Paul, was, oh so long ago, one of the last places woolly mammoths could be found in North America. I’m here doing research for my book The End of Ice. And that, in turn, brings me back to the new reality in these far northern waters: as cold as they still are, human-caused climate disruption is warming them enough to threaten a possible collapse of the food web that sustains this island’s Unangan, its Aleut inhabitants, also known as “the people of the seal.” Given how deeply their culture is tied to a subsistence lifestyle coupled with the new reality that the numbers of fur seals, seabirds, and other marine life they hunt or fish are dwindling, how could this crisis not be affecting them? continued on page 8 … A female fur seal on St. Paul Island. 2 V5N2—Spring 2019 Peace in Our Times • peaceinourtimes.org Letters to the Editor A Note from the Editors do it by mistakenly embracing other forms A Bad Choice of racism and elitism no matter where America’s Collective Amnesia they come from or what they appear to For a couple weeks recently I was in the To the editor of Peace in Our Times, re support. Mencken represents another hospital because, it turns out, a cancerous Mencken Prophecy cartoon decaying pillar of our system. mass had taken up residence in my small I was pleased to see the articles by Chris Edwin Krales, Chapter 34, January, bowel … not good news, especially on Hedges in the Winter 2019 edition of 2019 your birthday. Peace in Our Times. Mr Hedges’s analysis Editor’s note: Thank you for pointing But I’m in a country with a competent of our era is summed up beautifully in this out. We should have been more health care system—if expensive and the first sentence of his article on page careful in our image selection. rationed by insurance companies—at 3. He wrote: “The idiots take over in the a good hospital with excellent care and final days of crumbling civilizations.” skilled staff. The mass is removed, weeks On the other hand, the cartoon entitled of nausea ended, and treatment options are “Prophecy” with the Mencken quote explained. The way to a new life is clear. attacking democracy, misses the point There Oughtta On the ride home, however, one completely. It is not the “perfection thing uppermost in my mind had to be of democracy” that has brought us to Be a Law consciously suppressed: the knowledge this stage of deterioration. It is that our that hundreds of thousands of people, democracy was set up by the 1 percent Ilhan Omar, one of two Muslim women many of them children, are suffering and so that it could be turned into what I call elected to Congress, has gone over the dying right now in Iraq from our use of corporate totalitarianism. Corrupt and line in suggesting that politicians are depleted uranium. And what of their inept leadership in a democracy does not influenced by money they get from journey through illness? Their hospitals, Mike Ferner before being arrested at the represent what Mencken calls “the inner the Israel Lobby. It is OK to say that staff, medicines are of what quality? Is White House fence, Dec. 16, 2010. soul of the people”; it indicates a beaten- our leaders are paid off by Big Oil, Big pain relief adequate? Electricity to cool Photo: Ellen Davidson. down population grasping at straws for Pharma, and Wall Street. But it is anti- the intense summer heat? Water to drink help. Why would we struggle to convince Semitic to imply that the Israel lobby that won’t make them sicker? Family and people to try and change our system in the would do such things. friends healthy enough and with resources America’s collective amnesia is teeth of a climate catastrophe, if the goal There should be a law making it illegal to provide critical support? no accident. Without it, the system of a “perfect democracy” is the kind of to reveal how much Nancy Pelosi and And that is “just” one category of just cannot function. It’s maintained by the corrupt, inept leadership we find around Chuck Schumer get from the Israel Lobby. one country the Empire chews up and corporate media, by fetishization of us with Trump in the lead? It is antisemitic to report that the two of spits out on a regular basis. The list is long. sports and shopping and all the necessary Trump is Mencken’s idea of where them met recently with multibillionaires We target a nation, destroy its economy, distractions so the Empire can continue dem ocracy takes us. Mencken was an Haim Saban and Sheldon Adelson and rape its environment, lay waste its people, its devilish work. anti-Semite, a racist, a misogynist, a promised an extensive list of “pro-Israel and then … forget about it. Rarely is the In the words of the great Czech-born white supremacist and an elitist. In a book lawmakers” be appointed to important nation close enough to our borders that its novelist Milan Kundera, “The struggle entitled Defending the Master Race by committees. people, sick enough of the chaos and pain of man against power is the struggle of Jonathan Peter Spiro, Mencken presented Boycotts, although they have a long we’ve caused, can actually pound on the memory against forgetting.” his elitism in the context of white history of being used against slave door … and no one understands why. —Mike Ferner supremacy. He said: “My impression, owners, Nazis, Jim Crow racists, and though I am blond and Nordic myself, homophobes, are simply antisemitic when is that the genuine member of that great used against apartheid Israel and should race, at least in modern times, is often be illegal. In fact, even mentioning the indistinguishable from a cockroach.” Palestinian People is an attempt to deny Join Veterans For Peace! In his diary, published 25 years after that Israel is a Jewish state. Talking about his death in 1956, Mencken had a very the occupation is antisemitic as well. negative view of women and African- Why not talk about human rights abuses Americans. He wrote: “It is impossible in Darfur? to talk anything resembling discretion or The effort to stop anti-Semitism has to judgment to a colored woman.

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