Category: Antiwar (vintage)

This report from Abingdon, Virginia, a great little town in the Appalachian southwest of the state.

Staff Sgt. Greg Pennington, 37, had been living with his Army unit in one of Saddam Hussein’s daughter’s castles, said his father, Aulbin Pennington of Konnarock.
The elder Pennington had received a Father’s Day call from his son on Sunday morning…
Monday morning, his daughter-in-law, Janet, called from Fort Hood, Texas, and told him Greg had been killed in action…
Pennington was stationed at Fort Hood. His father said his son and Janet had been married for five years and had no children. He had been in the Army 12 years and in Iraq for more than three months.

Thanks to Yankeedoodle of Today in Iraq for the attention he pays to presenting the state-by-state reports on US casualties.

If you go to this site, you will find the results of the survey that Raed Jarrar and his team from CIVIC have done, that identified and listed 2,081 Iraqi civilian casualties from the first four months of the US government’s attacks against Iraq, March 21 – July 31, 2003.
Big thanks to Riverbend, who sent me to Raed’s site–and who has a new post of her own up on her blog, too.
Profound thanks and appreciation to Raed and all the 150 volunteers on the CIVIC team for their work. Doing the careful counting and evaluation was really important, as was their success in starting to put names and biographical details to many of the casualties.
Raed says about the civilian casualties:

Two thousand killed, Four thousand injured.
Each one of these thousands has a life, memories, hopes. Each one had his moments of sadness, moments of joy and moments of love.
In respect to their sacred memory, I would appreciate it if you could spend some minutes reading the database file: read their names, and their personal details, and think about them as human beings, friends, and relatives — not mere figures and numbers.

He adds the following definitions:

Civilian: anyone killed outside the battlefield, even if his original job was military (e.g. a soldier killed in his house is a civilian). Military: anyone killed while fighting in a battle, even if his original job was a civic one (e.g. an engineer killed while fighting as a Fidaee). We had primitive and simple tools of research, yet I believe our survey is credible and accountable.

I wanted to provide here some of the flavor of the tables in which he presents his data, which give important details like the occupation, monthly income, and number of dependents for each of those killed. (Maybe for the wounded, too. I didn’t check yet.)
However, I found I couldn’t ‘copy and paste’ any data from the form the way it was presented. (Is there a trick there that someone can tell me?) But what I did instead was type into my handy Palm Pilot the listing below, which gives all the names the teams gathered of children under one year of age who were killed in the US attacks.

Continue reading “The youngest of the 2,081”

The AP wire has a great little story that just came across my transom. It starts by reminding us that, “Congress and President Bush have so far provided $119.4 billion for the war in Iraq.” And then, it gives a few examples of what that sum could buy.
Well, in the interests of “fair use” (!) I shan’t reproduce the whole story here. But let’s just note that that bunch of dough could pay tuition, room, and board to send 748,495 people–nearly the whole population of of Jacksonville, Florida– to Harvard University for four years.
Or, it could buy a median-price ($174,100) U.S. home for 685,813 people– slightly more than all the residents of Austin, Texas. One home for EACH of them, man, woman, and child, that is.
I hope your local newspaper carries the whole AP story, with the rest of its truly eye-opening examples.
Here’s the thing, though. The story also notes that, “If the $119.4 billion were divided evenly among Iraq’s estimated 25 million residents, each would get $4,776. That would be eight times the country’s $600 per capita income.”
So here’s my question:

Continue reading “What to do with $119.4 billion”

I’ll pass on the Mother’s Day gift that my firstborn, Tarek, gave me today, as he had found it on Alternet…
Here is the original, pre-Hallmark, Mother’s Day Proclamation, penned in Boston by Julia Ward Howe in 1870:
Arise, then, women of this day!
Arise all women who have hearts,
Whether your baptism be that of water or of tears
Say firmly:
“We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands shall not come to us reeking of carnage,
For caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
We women of one country
Will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.
From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with
Our own. It says, “Disarm, Disarm!”
The sword of murder is not the balance of justice!
Blood does not wipe out dishonor
Nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plow and the anvil at the summons of war.
Let women now leave all that may be left of home
For a great and earnest day of counsel.
Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them then solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace,
Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
But of God…

Continue reading “Passing on the gift”

Whenever I’m in my hometown, Charlottesville, Virginia, on a Thursday I try to take part in the pro-peace “presence” that the C’ville Center for Peace and Justice maintains on a busy intersection in town for one hour during rush-hour, every week.
I was back there today with a great group of CCPJ friends. Our best sign is one that says “Honk for [peace symbol]”. It’s simple, it’s clear, and best of all it’s interactive.
Today, there was more honking and waving from passing drivers than ever. People seemed really charged up about the situation. I think there’s a convergence between the very disturbing news about the big new fighting in Iraq and the equally disturbing news coming out of the 9-11 Commission that is telling everyone that the whole move to invade and occupy Iraq was all along a big and dangerous diversion from the “real” war against terrorism.
I was just looking at the nationwide polling figures at this handy site that gathers all the recent data from the big national polling companies together in one place. A Zogby poll conducted April 1-4 found that 44% of respondents would re-elect Bush, while 51% wanted “someone new”. Bush against Kerry, however, it was 45% to 47%. So Kerry probably needs to come out and define himself more. He has seemed very tentative so far– but let’s hope that’s because he’s planning a really excellent campaign.
A Fox News poll conducted April 6-7 had Kerry ahead of Bush by a statistically insignificant hair: 44% to 43%.
Kerry, it seems to me, has to say something big and significant about the war–and soon. This time around, unlike in 1992, it is not just “the economy, stupid” that people are worried about. They are worried a lot about the economy, yes; but they’re also worried about the war and what it portends for the economy and for many other facets of American life. (Like the physical safety of close family members in Iraq, or like civil liberties at home.)
What would I advise Kerry to say?

Continue reading “Peace, war, and John Kerry”

Sorry I haven’t been posting much recently… I was really busy last week, and then today got hit by exhaustion.
Yesterday, I took part in our hometown commemoration of the first anniversary of the start of the US-Iraq war. It was a march along a busy part of Route 29, preceded at one end by a one-hour vigil at a busy intersection, and followed at the other by a silent vigil on “the Lawn” of Thomas Jefferson’s famous University of Virginia.
The events were organized by the Charlottesville Center for Peace and Justice, which has a great new website.
So in the morning, I was thinking, “What kind of sign shall I carry?” I mulled over a few slogans I could write. Then I opened the WaPo, and there were two whole pages of small ID pictures of US servicemen and women who had been killed over the past two-and-a-half months, with bare biographic details.
There was my sign!
I tore out the two pages, got two large pieces of poster board and wrote at the top of each: “Mourning ALL the victims of this war, including… ” and then I taped one of the WaPo pages onto the rest of the board. It seemed to say just what I wanted it to. I looked quickly online for some “symbolic” photos of the vastly greater numbers of Iraqi war dead, but couldn’t find anything satisfactory. Anyway, I thought the wording indicated my concern for their deaths, too.
So I was standing aat the first vigil holding up one of these signs, and a woman I didn’t know came up to me, looked at it carefully, then pointed to one of the pictures and said, “That’s my brother-in-law.”
It was very moving. We talked a bit. She had come up to Charlottesville from Durham, NC, to take part in the march– a multi-hour drive. I urged her to carry the sign with her brother-in-law’s picture on it, since I had another one I could carry, anyway; and she did.
For the first vigil, and then as we walked south down Route 29, some of the placards invited passing motorists to “Honk for peace”. We got a significantly higher proportion of honks than I have ever heard before.
I think the unpopularity of this war has been increasing fairly rapidly since the beginning of this year. I consider that to be cautiously good news.
But at what a cost, what a tragic cost!
Also, I’d like to see a big increase not just in the unpopularity of this war, but also in the unpopularity of the whole idea of using force and coercion in international relations. Let’s hope that that happens, too.

A letter from Chuck Fager at Quaker House, Fayetteville NC
Dear Friend,
I’m writing you today to express my deep concern about the campaign being mounted on “FreeRepublic.com”, a militantly conservative website, against the large peace rally we’re planning in Fayetteville on March 20, the anniversary of the Iraq invasion.
Quaker House, you may recall, is a faith-based project that does peace work and counsels soldiers and sailors seeking discharges from the military. It has been pursing this mission here in Fayetteville for 35 years since its founding in 1969.
Quaker House is part of a coalition preparing for this march and rally. We believe this will be the largest peace gathering in Fayetteville since May 17 1970. On that day several thousand protesters, including hundreds of GIs, gathered in a city park, to hear Jane Fonda and other speakers denounce the Vietnam War.
That 1970 rally was peaceful, but the aftermath wasn’t.
Three nights after that rally, on May 20, 1970, the original Quaker House was firebombed, and had to be abandoned…

Continue reading “North Carolina peace activists threatened”

Donna Miles of the Armed Forces Press Service, reported Jan. 2 that the Army would be announcing a further expansion of its existing “stop-loss” program within the next week or two.
No numbers yet.
I wrote more about the “stop-loss” program here Dec. 29. It’s a program of totally involuntary military service imposed on the hard-pressed men and women who are already in the various branches of the armed forces. I titled that post “The draft that dares not speak its name.”
At that point, I was citing press reports that more than 40,000 people had already been affected in the Army program. Plus, an unknown number of members of other branches of the armed forces.

Thanks to C’ville “Editor Ludorum” George Loper, here are two photos from early on in our pro-peace demonstration, Thursday:


George actually had to leave soon after we got started setting up, so you can’t see the group at its peak. In these photos, though, you can see the minister of the local Lutheran church, and (in a red jacket) my friend Gladys Swift who’s 80 years old and who got arrested back in March for participating in a pro-peace sit-in at our local Congressman’s office.
A person you can’t see is the strange, very “inquisitive” guy who kept hanging around us for no particular reason. I don’t know his name, but I think he’s one of the people who last winter sometimes used to stage counter-demonstrations to ours on another corner of that intersection. I wonder if he’ll be there next week?

After the end of the conference in Atlanta last week we went to the Martin Luther King, Jr., Center there. Interesting, inspiring, but also a bit disappointing (for me, anyway).
Then, a long wait at the airport. I bought the December Atlantic Monthly because they had an excerpt from Douglas Brinkley’s upcoming book on John Kerry’s (Vietnam) war years.
What Kerry apparently gave Brinkley for the book was wide access to the things he’d written at the time of his deployment in the US Navy in Vietnam, including letters he’d written back then, and extracts from a journal he’d been keeping then. Plus, some ability for brinkley to talk to people Kerry had known back then.
What Kerry apparently did not give Brinkley– or if he did, it never appeared in the Atlantic excerpts– was any present-day, restrospective reflections on the experiences he’d had in ‘Nam, or any explanations of why, despite those experiences, he voted for Bush’s war-enabling resolution back last year.
Which is a pity. Because one thing Kerry’s contemporaneous reflections on ‘Nam showed was a sharp analytical and ethical mind at work which was deeply disturbed by many, many aspects of what he saw there and able to express his disquiet in prose of a maturity unusual in a man as young as he was then.
Reading the piece made me want to go out and buy the book when it comes out January 6. It increased the admiration I had for the person Kerry was back in those days.
But it also forced me to question even more deeply why Kerry voted the way he did on the war vote of October 2002.
What does this all say about him as a potential future president? I’m not sure. I’m still leaning for Dean, but Kerry looks a bit more intriguing now.