Category: Antiwar (vintage)

… and a special salute to these brave and life-affirming young Jews holding their important message up outside the Combined Jewish Philanthropies Board in Boston.

My copy of the 2006 edition of the annual Military Balance assessment produced by the International Institute for Strategic Studies dropped heavily into my mailbox today. I enjoy looking through their generally fairly reliable information, and have used it as a reference source ever since I worked in the Reuters bureau in Beirut, back in the day…
So, our big fact for today (p.404): In 2004, for the first time ever, the US’s share of the international arms trade rose above 50%. To be precise, it was 53.4%.
The runners-up in this contest of shame were:

Russia– 13.2%
France– 12.7%
Britain– 5.5%
Germany– 2.6%
China– 2.0%

But look, isn’t this just the most amazing coincidence: Of the six front-running arms-exporters, five of them are veto-wielding permanent members on the UN Security Council. (And these are also the five “recognized” nuclear-weapons states.)
But it seems that not being content with having their own huge nuclear and “conventional” arsenals, these states want to get the rest of the world hooked on the arms-acquisition habit, too.
US arms transfers to other countries in 2004 came to a total value of $18.55 billion. Imagine what that sum of money could have achieved for real human security if it had been invested in schools, health-centers, roads, and safe-water systems instead…

I finally got to meet Cindy Sheehan yesterday. She and Ann Wright both came to Charlottesville to speak at a public forum organized by the Charlottesville Center for Peace and Justice.
We got well over 400 people there, which was exciting.
Cindy, I guess I don’t need to introduce to the readers here. Ann was one of the three US Foreign Service Officers who resigned the day the Bush administration started bombing Iraq. (Here‘s her resignation letter.) At that time she was the No.2 person in the US Embassy in Mongolia. She is a whip-smart, extremely principled, and very hardworking person! She was wearing a tee-shirt with the numbers of US (and Iraqi) casualties prominently taped to the front…
She had some really interesting ideas about how CCPJ ought to reach out and talk to folks at the US military’s very own law school– the “Judge Advocate General’s Legal Center and School“– which is located right here in town, next to the UVA law school and right behind one of our main shopping centers. She noted that the head JAG officers from all four of the military services had played a strong role in trying to uphold the government’s compliance with the Geneva Conventions, etc, and said it was quite likely we might find folks at the JAG school who have served down in Guantanamo, or in Bagram, or Iraq.
(I actually thought a while back we ought to do try to talk to some JAG school folks here. So it’s good that Ann kind of jogged my memory on that.)
Anyway, it was really inspiring to meet both Ann and Cindy, and to hear what they said. I don’t have time to write a lot here about it. If you have the capability to download a podcast, you can hear the whole forum yourself, here.
I do have to say, though, that I thought the evening went on a bit long. There were two fairly lengthy spoken introductions and then quite a lot of songs from Terri Allard before we got to the two main speakers. Many in the audience were tired even before Ann and Cindy got started– and it looked as though both of them were pretty tired, too…
These two women are national treasures! We have to look after them!
A footnote: the reason we were able to get these two fabulous women to come and speak here was because of David Swanson, an indefatigable antiwar organizer and nationwide Democratic activist who moved here to town with his wife Anna just a few months ago. We are so lucky to have him him here. Thanks for everything you do, David!

Last Wednesday, I spent the afternoon on the National Mall in Washington DC, helping to set out the (then) 2,428 pairs of combat boots that are at the center of the American Friends Service Committee’s traveling antiwar installation, “Eyes Wide Open”.
Each pair of boots represents a US service-member who has been killed in Iraq. The two clunky black boots in each pair have their laces tied together (for easy handling) and have the name, age, and hometown of the represented GI on a laminated card that is attached there. I gather that some of the boots are the actual combat boots of that soldier, and some are simply representative. Members of the anti-war veterans’ organizations that have been working with AFSC on the project have been in touch with all the family members involved, who have the option of having “Name withheld” put on the tag if they don’t want their loved one’s name included in the exhibition.
Very, very few of the tags that I read said “Name withheld.”
When I was working down there, it was the day before the exhibit was due to open. We had a number of preliminary tasks to do. One was simply to count the pairs of boots in the group of plastic bins used to transport the boots pertaining to each of the different states. A fellow-volunteer named Constance and I counted our way through the bins for a number of different states, finishing up with Texas.
Even just handling the boots to do the counting was already a much more moving experience than I’d been expecting. The boots had been brought here in big Rubbermaid-style storage bins, that were laid out along the side of the grass there in alphabetical order by state. We (and other volunteer duos working alongside us) had to take the boots out of each bin, counting them as we went, and then put them back in, counting again (to make sure.) Constance and I got into a rhythm. There were so many bins! It’s not till you stop to think about it that you realize how much sheer space 2,428 pairs of combat boots must take up. Each bin held roughly 20 pairs.
One-two-three-four… Slow and systematic. Try not to get the laces knotted around each other. Lay the pairs out within easy reach as you take them out. Neater works better…
Seventeen-eighteen-nineteen-twenty-twentyone. Right! Twentyone. Now, let’s count them back in. “You start!” One-two-three-four…
Then you start reading the names and the pitifully young ages of these men (and the much rarer women). And the hometowns. And you get to thinking about the life snuffed out of this young person.
Many of the boots have family memorabilia (laminated against the weather) also attached to them: Photos, poems, children’s drawings. Stuffed animals. Flags. Funeral eulogies.
It can get to you. But you can’t let it get to you, because you have to keep focused on the counting.
Eleven-twelve-thirteen-fourteen…
And then we came to Texas. Other duos had kind of side-skipped it, since its collection ran to twelve big bins. While Constance was off getting some water to drink, I took a deep breath and started in on it.
Texas added up to 214 pairs of boots.
“I wonder how many of those funerals George W. Bush went to?”
H’mm.
Later, I worked with the groups of people trying to lay the boots out on the big broad lawn there. We were at the Washington Monument end of the Mall– but you could look up easily and see the great looming mass of the US Capitol Building at the far end of the greensward. The building, that is, where back in October 2002 the 535 lawmakers acting with their “eyes wide open” gave President Bush carte blanche to do anything he damn’ well pleased to Iraq… including, to invade it.
The boots were laid out in a broad, grid-based array. There were 39 in each row– meaning some 63 rows in all. Roughly four feet between each pair. If you think of all those 2,428 soldiers standing there to attention, this is roughly where their boots would be.
But the soldiers aren’t there…
This was mind-numbing work, too. Hauling the bins along the lines, taking out the boots, having someone get down and arrange them properly, respectfully… The work was a little disorganized, since the guys laying out the grids with strings and red golf-tees often weren’t far ahead of those of us trying to position the boots.
The blazing sun ground its way slowly down the big sky.
There were lots of passers-by. Nearly everyone seemed very interested, and very supportive. Random people stopped and offered to help. It got so that when I needed someone to help me haul a bin onto one of the little moving-dollies they had there, I would just ask a passer-by and he or she would always seem happy to help.
(George W. Bush is in deep, deep trouble over this war.)
When my four hours were up, I walked over to the other part of the exhibit, where they’d been working with huge piles of civilian shoes that represented the Iraqi civilian deaths during the war.
Here, they hadn’t even bothered to have a one-to-one representativity. Which total do you count, anyway? I was glad to see they had a big board highlighting the “epidemiological” study that concluded– ways back, a long time ago now– that just under 100,000 Iraqis had met a premature death on account of the war.
What the organizers had done with the pairs of civilian shoes was great. These, too, had the two shoes in each pair attached together, and had tags with the names of killed Iraqi civilians on them. But groups of volunteers had been spending long hours here laying them out end to end in the form of a huge and very complex labyrinth.
“Go ahead, walk it!” someone said. I did. I kept my eyes focused on the shoes as I walked: men’s shoes, women’s shoes, girls’ shoes, boys’ shoes, baby shoes. Scuffed and mangled shoes. Brand new party shoes. I looked at the shoes and followed the labyrinth in toward the center, and forgot all about the Capitol Building looming so close above me. It was very meditative.
… Well, I never had the chance to see the whole layout of all of the boots and shoes there. I gather that between Thursday and Sunday they had a large number of different activities planned there.
On Thursday, there were terrible storms all over DC. The exhibit organizers had made a decision not to try to take the boots off the exhibit to a dry place, but just to let them stand. I guess combat boots are meant to withstand bad weather. I don’t know about the civilian shoes, though. As I went to various meetings in DC Thursday and saw the downpours, I thought about the boots standing there.
… Well, guess who else went to the exhibit while it was up? Richard Perle– the “Prince of Darkness” himself! One of the major intellectual architects of the war.
Bill Perry, a disabled veteran of the US-Vietnam War and a member of “Vietnam Veterans Against the War” and other antiwar groups, was there and happened to recognize Perle. He put this post about the confrontation that a number of the antiwar people there– mainly war vets– had with Perle up onto David Swanson’s website Afterdowningstreet.org.
There are pictures there, too. I particularly like this one.
Perry wrote there:

Richard Perle had a PBS camera crew about 80 or 90 yards off to the side of the Speakers’ Rostrum @ yesterday’s AFSC Eyes Wide Open (BOOTS) Demo, in Washington, DC. The PBS Producers said they were rehabilitating Perle’s image, so he can be kicked upstairs, similar to the Bush promotion of Paul Wolfowitz to the World Bank.
They thought they wouldn’t be noticed using the “Boots” demo background during the speaking portion of the EWO demo…

I wish I’d been there for that!
Yes, it certainly seems very exploitative if Perle and the people filming him were using the Boots installation as a background for an attempt to rehabilitate him politically…
On the other hand, at least Perle did dare to go near the exhibit and be exposed to the potent reminders it gives of the costs of war.
As for our President???

David Steinbruner, the author of the piece I just posted here, is one of the emergency physicians featured in the new documentary ‘Baghdad ER’ that HBO will be screening this coming weekend.
CNN had this pre-release description of the movie on their website last week. (Also here.) Read the description there. It makes me definitely want to see the movie, though we don’t have HBO.
The WaPo’s Paul Farhi had a short report in today’s paper about a special screening of the movie that was held Monday night at the National Museum of American History. The main thrust of Farhi’s piece was to note that the support the Pentagon once had for the movie project has waned drastically in recent weeks.
He writes:

HBO executives say that top Army officials expressed enthusiasm for the documentary in March, but that the Pentagon’s support has waned. They believe the military is troubled by the film’s unflinching look at the consequences of the war on American soldiers, and that it might diminish public support.
The documentary, shot over 2 1/2 months in mid-2005, contains graphic and disturbing footage of soldiers reeling from their wounds — in some cases, dying of them — as Army medical personnel try to save them. The film illustrates the compassion and dedication of the staff of the 86th Combat Support Hospital in Baghdad. But it also has many gruesome images, such as shots of soldiers’ amputated limbs being dumped into trash bags, and pools of blood and viscera being mopped from a busy operating room floor. At one point, an Army chaplain, reciting last rites for a soldier, calls all the violence “senseless.”
… The network screened the film in mid-March for senior Army officials, including Secretary of the Army Francis J. Harvey, and received an enthusiastic response, said Richard Plepler, HBO’s executive vice president.
… Thereafter, Plepler said, the Army’s support began to evaporate. The network’s offer to co-sponsor a screening of the film this week at Fort Campbell, Ky., the home of the 86th, was turned down by the Pentagon without explanation. The Army wasn’t an official sponsor of Monday’s screening, and none of the service’s highest-ranking officers or senior medical personnel attended, despite HBO’s invitation.

Farhi also wrote this:

Among the guests in attendance was Paula Zwillinger, whose son, Marine Lance Cpl. Robert Mininger, 21, died in Iraq from injuries from a roadside bomb. Zwillinger said in an interview that she didn’t know exactly how her son died until the film’s producers — Joseph Feury, Jon Alpert and Matthew O’Neill — contacted her as they were editing the film. Mininger’s death is chronicled in a prolonged sequence at the end of “Baghdad ER.”
She called the film a gift. “It gave me peace. At least I know he was with someone, and didn’t die alone,” she said.
Despite the grim subject matter, Zwillinger said: “I am positive about this film. It needs to be shown. I want the world to know this is reality. War is graphic, war is raw, war hurts. And we need more support for our troops, no matter what we think of the war.”

Hurrah! The Friends Committee on National Legislation, a small but very effective organization that lobbies the US Congress on issues of concern to Friends (Quakers), tells us that on Tuesday, the full US Senate,

declared the United States should not establish permanent military bases in Iraq and added a clear statement that the U.S. does not wish to control Iraq’s oil resources. The Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL) congratulated Sen. Joseph Biden (DE) on winning approval for the measure, which specifically prohibits the use of any new funds to establish permanent U.S. military bases in Iraq. The House passed a similar ban in March.

Joe Volk, the Executive Secretary of FCNL is quoted there as saying,

“This is an important milestone in the development of U.S. policy toward Iraq. For the first time since the U.S. launched the invasion of Iraq in 2003, both chambers of Congress have now said the U.S. must change course in Iraq… The Senate vote today sends a clear signal to the people of Iraq, to the international community, and to the people of this country that the United States does not intend to permanently occupy Iraq. This Congressional action also is a strong signal that the Bush administration has to change policy in Iraq now.”

FCNL has the largest team of pro-peace lobbyists of any group that works to educate and persuade the members of the US Congress. It has been quietly working with members of both Houses– and both parties– for more than a year now, urging them to take this first declarative step.
Sadly, though, I have to tell you that FCNL is facing a harsh funding crunch. They have two great staff members– Mary Trotachaud and Rick McDowell– who have both spent a significant length of time doing humanitarian and peacebuilding work in Iraq, including before and since the US invasion. Rick and Mary have unique expertise when it comes to providing solid analysis of what’s going on in Iraq today– and they can speak with unique authority about the country when they go and talk to Members and their staffs.
But if FCNL’s funding crunch continues, they might have to let Mary and Rick go. That would be tragic.
You can find out more about FCNL if you go here. And you can find out how to make a donation to their work– either their lobbying work or their (tax-deductible) Education Fund– if you go here.
Please consider being as generous as you can. We can go on all the peace marches we want. (And I went to my usual Thursday pro-peace vigil here in Charlottesville, Virginia, just this afternoon: we got a great response!) But to really keep up the steady work of persuading our members of Congress that there is a broad and very serious pro-peace movement out here in the citizenry and that they’d better listen to us— well, FCNL is a great national network to be a part of… and it’s a network with its pointedly persuasive end located right there, on Capitol Hill.
Great work, the FCNL team, and all your network of contacts there in the halls of Congress! Even, I should say (though I disagreed with him yesterday on a slightly different issue) thanks for your leadership in winning this declaration, Senator Biden!

Wednesday and Thursday this week, the Community of Sant’ Egidio, an international Catholic lay organization, will be bringing a wonderful pro-peace event to Washington DC: the International Prayer for Peace: “Religions and Cultures: the Courage of Dialogue”.
I am honored to have been invited by my friend Andrea Bartoli, a Sant’ Egidio representative in New York, to take part in a discussion he’s organizing Thursday morning as part of this, titled “Religious Contribution to Genocide Prevention.”
It should be a weighty discussion. There will be an Armenian bishop, someone from Great Rabbinate of Israel, a Methodist priest from Nigeria, a Muslim representative, and someone from the Swedish Foreign Ministry who works on genocide prevention full-time.
I am excited at the thought of there being a large, Catholic-led peace event right there in Washington DC. In the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, I sorely missed the strength, wisdom, and political muscle that US Catholics could and should have brought to antiwar movement… They were consumed at that time with the challenge of dealing with the painful legacies of their years of institutionalized child abuse….
But now, maybe we can see them come more strongly into the field of pro-peace activism, led by the wonderful people of Sant’ Egidio. I was glad to see that the Archbishop of Washington DC will be opening the event. Excellent.

The WaPo had an interesting article today. Written by David Brown, it described the publication of the 2nd edition of a book called Disease Control Priorities in Developing Countries (DCP), which provides useful info for policymakers who want to save and improve peole’s lives in a cost-effective way in low- and middle-income countries (LIMC’s).
The article tells us that over a million deaths are now caused worldwide every year by traffic accidents– many of them in LIMCs. Simply installing speed bumps on roads, especially near dangerous intersections, can prevent many of these deaths. The epidemiologists working with the DCP project estimate that this simple measure costs about $5 for every year of a person’s life that is saved, making it one of the most cost-effective life preservers available anywhere…
The DCP has its own website, through which all kinds of really interesting information can be downloaded.
… Anyway, thinking about traffic-slowing speedbumps and the power they have to save lives got me to thinking about the more political kinds of “speedbumps” that can slow down any nation’s rush to war, since wars cause just as many– or more– avoidable deaths around the world these days as do traffic accidents.
Someone called Matthew White has done a huge amount of work compiling a website that charts the Death Tolls for the Man-made Megadeaths of the Twentieth Century. Luckily, he does go a bit further than just the 20th century– including, he has this compilation of stats about the casualties attributable to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.
That page was last updated in June 2005. Of course those numbers would be quite a lot higher today. White refers to the Lancet epidemiological study of October 2004 which found 98,000 excess deaths in Iraq since March 2003. But his own estimation, as of June 12, 2005, was that around. 43,000-58,000 had been killed as a result of the war at that point. (He was using the Iraq Body Count numbers that I use on my sidebar here. However, I note that IBC counts only the reported deaths due to direct physical violence. It misses completely all the deaths caused by war-caused degradation of the water system and other vital infrastructure, war-related degradation of the health services in Iraq, etc etc… Those broader figures were picked up in the Lancet study.)
The epidemiological approach has also been used in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), which is similarly (or even more so) a place wracked by terrible inter-group violence and the related social-political breakdown. This report from October 2000 tells you about the main methodology used in such circumstances, which is to make the best possible estimate of the “crude mortality rate” (CMR). In stressed societies the CMR is typically measured in numbers of deaths per 1,000 people per month. Dr. Les Roberts, cited in that report there,

estimated the Democratic Republic of Congo’s CMR at 5.7. For comparison, Kosovo had a rate of 3.25; Liberia was 7.1; Somalians in Ethiopia suffered a rate of 14.0. However, most of the conflicts with very high rates of mortality lasted from 30 days to as much as 90 or 180 days. The conflict in the DRC, however, has lasted for two years…

And it has continued, even since October 2002. In Dec. 2004, the total death toll attributable to wars and conflicts in the DRC was put at 3.8 million.
So here’s my simple proposal. We know wars kill and maim people in unacceptably large numbers. There is no such thing as a “humane” or “humanitarian” war. This DCP website tells us that in sub-Saharan Africa as a whole, the war-related fatality rate in 2001 was around 28 deaths per 100,000 people, far higher than in any other part of the world.
So why can’t we put political “speedbumps” on the roads that lead to war?
Hey, we could even create an organization that, in order to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, might do some or all of these things:

# take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace, and for the suppression of acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace, and to bring about by peaceful means, and in conformity with the principles of justice and international law, adjustment or settlement of international disputes or situations which might lead to a breach of the peace;
# develop friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples, and to take other appropriate measures to strengthen universal peace;
# achieve international co-operation in solving international problems of an economic, social, cultural, or humanitarian character, and in promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion; and
# be a centre for harmonizing the actions of nations in the attainment of these common ends.

What do you think? Might that be a good idea?
What’s that you say– you, over at the back there? You’re telling me there already is such an organization? And that it’s called the United Nations?
So if such an organization, and such mechanisms for the peaceful resolution of outstanding disputes, were already well established in March 2003– then why on earth did the Bushites gratuitously go to war against Iraq that month?
I think it’s definitely time to revive and strengthen the principles and all the mechanisms of the United Nations. (Including, maybe we should reinstitute harsh punishments for people committing the crime of aggression, which was a crime that was prosecuted at Nuremberg.) We have to save the world from any re-eruption of US aggressivity. We have to carefully put in place real, effective speed-bumps that can not merely slow any rush to war, but also halt it. People’s lives– perhaps hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of them– depend on it.
And the great thing is– not only would such an approach be extremely cost-effective, if we could prevent all this arms-buying and other forms of military spending, then we’d all actually be saving huge amounts of money!. And we could take all those sums saved and invest them in building up the lives of needy people, rather than by killing them…