Category: Antiwar (vintage)

I got yet another email today from my friend Chuck Fager, who runs Quaker House in that hotbed of the US military culture, Fayetteville, NC. He’s asking for our help. Mainly, but not only, letter-writing.
Here’s what he writes:

Dear Friends–
Once again, we ask for your help in supporting a military Conscientious Objector, who is in jail for sticking to his beliefs.
The GI in question is a Marine, Joel Klimkewicz. He’s been in the brig at Camp Lejeune, NC since mid-December. He’s serving seven months for refusing an order to pick up a weapon. He’s also being given a Bad Conduct Discharge, one of the military’s worst punishments, usually reserved for serious felonies.

Continue reading “Please support this conscientious objector”

Excerpt from the Judgment of the Nuremberg Tribunal relating to “Count Two”, the Crime of Aggression, as brought against Goering, Ribbentrop, and 14 other defendants:
The charges in the Indictment that the defendants planned and waged aggressive wars are charges of the utmost gravity. War is essentially an evil thing. Its consequences are not confined to the belligerent states alone, but affect the whole world.
To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.

Nicholas J. S. Davies, a Contributing Writer over at Online Journal posted a generally well-argued piece there on December 31, in which he reviewed the history in international jurisprudence of the crime of initiating an aggressive war, and concluded that the US and British governments were guilty of such a crime in initiating the war against Iraq.
(Indeed, though Davies doesn’t go specifically into this, the precedent of Nuremberg would also indicate that the relevant officers in these governments who made the decision to go to war, and those who prepared and planned for it, should be held personally responsible for the catastrophic consequences of those decisions.)
Davies starts off by explaining that, “war crimes fall into two classes: 1) war crimes relevant to battlefield conduct; and 2) waging a war of aggression.” Strictly speaking, I think he has the nomenclature a little fuzzy there. “War crimes” as a term nowadays nearly always refers to crimes that are “grave breaches” of either the Geneva or Hague Conventions– i.e., jus in bello crimes, or “crimes that are committed within the context of a broader war.”
The big jus ad bellum crime, by contrast, is the crime of waging an unjustified war in the first place— regardless of whether or not specific and smaller-order “war crimes” are committed within it. From that point of view, the portion of the Nuremberg judgment cited above is extremely important: the “crime of aggression” as it is sometimes called, or alternatively, a “crime against the peace”, truly is,

the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.

As I noted in this June 2004 JWN post,

Continue reading ““The supreme international crime””

I just found the text of the “Letter to an Israeli Mother” that I originally published in the Arabic-language daily Al-Hayat at the end of July 1998. I referred to it in this post that I put up here yesterday.
The “Israeli mother” in question was one of the leaders of the Four Mothers movement, that in the three-year period 1997-2000 succeeded in bringing about a “virtually complete” Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon.
After Hayat published the Letter, I got a call from Ha’Aretz in Israel, who asked if they could publish it as well. Which they did, on August 14, 1998. That turned out rather strangely, since a substantial portion of the Letter was quoting from an earlier report in Ha’aretz… My intent in using those lengthy quotes had been to bring that interesting material to the attention of the Arab readers of Hayat. But I imagine the Ha’Aretz readers already knew it!
In 1998, Bibi Netanyahu was prime minister in Israel. At one level it all seems such a long time ago…

Continue reading “1998 “Letter to an Israeli mother””

I made a quick reference in a recent post here to the Israeli “Four Mothers” peace movement. This movement, founded by four mothers of Israeli soldiers serving in the IDF’s occupation force in neighboring Lebanon, succeeded, in the years right after its founding in early 1997, in pushing the issue of a speedy Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon, unilaterally if need be to the very top of the national agenda.
Two years later, in the Israeli general election of 1999, Ehud Barak adopted the idea of this withdrawal as one of his key election promises. He won the election handily. In May 2000, the IDF did finally withdraw from all (or very nearly all) of Lebanon, as promised. Many of those parts of Lebanon they had been in for 22 years by then.
That withdrawal was unilateral– i.e., no negotiating its modalities with any other party. despite that, Israel’s northern border with Lebanon has experienced an unprecedented level of stability ever since, to the delight of the people living both north and south of it.
To find out more about the 4Ms, check out the links on this portal, and then explore the whole of that site a little more. The 4Ms disbanded after the withdrawal.
Today, I read this piece in the NYT. It’s G.I. families united in grief, but split by war, by Monica Davey. She’s writing mainly about the moms but also about the other close family members of some of the 1,300 US service members killed in Iraq so far.
Davey writes that while all the moms have been thrown into deep grief by their losses, some of them have remained as strong believers in the essential rectitude of the conflict that killed their menfolk, while others have been driven by their bereavement into a much deeper questioning of the whole war effort. She writes in a very fair-minded way, representing the views of mothers on each side of this divide.
Here is one of them:

Continue reading “The power of mothers!!!!”

In this recent post I wrote about the subversion of allegedly “humanitarian” arguments that are used as pretexts for war. Today I found this recent piece by John Pilger, on Counterpunch, in which he produces some very sobering evidence about how this process worked regarding Kosovo.
He writes:

Just as Iraq is being torn apart by the forces of empire, so was Yugoslavia, the multi-ethnic state that uniquely rejected both sides in the cold war.
Lies as great as those of Bush and Blair were deployed by Clinton and Blair in their grooming of public opinion for an illegal, unprovoked attack on a European country. Like the buildup to the invasion of Iraq, the media coverage in the spring of 1999 was a series of fraudulent justifications, beginning with U.S. Defense Secretary William Cohen’s claim that “we’ve now seen about 100,000 military-aged [Albanian] men missing … they may have been murdered.” David Scheffer, the U.S. ambassador at large for war crimes, announced that as many as “225,000 ethnic Albanian men aged between 14 and 59” may have been killed. Blair invoked the Holocaust and “the spirit of the Second World War.” The British press took its cue. “Flight from genocide,” said the Daily Mail. “Echoes of the Holocaust,” chorused the Sun and the Mirror.
By June 1999, with the bombardment over, international forensic teams began subjecting Kosovo to minute examination. The American FBI arrived to investigate what was called “the largest crime scene in the FBI’s forensic history.” Several weeks later, having not found a single mass grave, the FBI went home. The Spanish forensic team also returned home, its leader complaining angrily that he and his colleagues had become part of “a semantic pirouette by the war propaganda machines, because we did not find one

Be sure you’re sitting down before you click on this link, which shows scenes from funerals of some of the US military personnel killed in Iraq during October and November.
The site where I found the pics, cryptome.org, also carries an invitation to kill George Bush, from which I completely disassociate myself. However, I think they’ve done a great service by compiling and presenting a number of collections of very moving photos (mainly AP photos) of the funerals of those killed in action. The link I give is to the latest of those pages.
I cried when I scrolled slowly through this collection.
Then I also thought of the even greater number of Iraqis killed in the present war, and the extremely degrading situations in which the mortal remains of many of them have been left… I also thought of the extreme anguish suffered by Iraqi family members who do not know if their loved ones are dead or alive, and can only imagine the torment of, for example, a wounded family member left to rot and to dehydrate in some bombed-out house inside Fallujah.
Is it better to know or not to know “the whole truth” about the fate of a threatened loved one?
Is it better to launch a war in the face of a presumed threat, or to seek to have one’s concerns addressed through methods other than war and violence?
How can we inform US voters better than before about the true human costs of war?
Why hasn’t President Bush gone to a single one of these funerals?
No answers here. Only questions.

One more thing I’d meant to mention in the piece I posted Thursday about humanitarianism and war. This is an observation about the way that language has–certainly in the US–become bent and twisted to the extent that when people say “intervention” what they are generally understood to mean is “war”.
Thus nowadays, when people in the policy world say “humanitarian intervention”, what they very often are referring to is outright war.
How twisted is that?
And oh dear, how far we have come from the days when “humanitarian intervention” was generally understood to mean sending food, medicines, or blankets to people in need.
Here’s my proposal, to regain some control of the language and some ethics in our use of it. When we mean “war”, let’s everybody say “war”… or, if they really want to engage in a bit euphemism or jargonish euphemism, they could say “military intervention”. But let’s not ever lose sight of the fact that war is war is war– and that war can never in any sense at all be described as a humanitarian undertaking.
This way, maybe we’ll be able to retrieve and save the original, beneficent sense of the word “humanitarianism.” Wouldn’t that be worth doing?

The attempt by the authors of last year’s US/UK aggression against Iraq to retroactively repackage their venture as a “humanitarian” war seems almost complete. Both Bush and Blair now say in public, “Well, we may have gotten it wrong about the WMDs and Saddam’s relationship with al-Qaeda… But at least the Iraqi people are now better off than they were under Saddam.”
(Unca Dick Cheney is not, of course, even willing to concede the opening premise there. But he is not, formally at least, the president.)
This business of–whether retroactively or pro-actively–pinning a ‘humanitarian’ label on a war has undergone a bit of a revival in recent years. Remember Kosovo, 1999? Remember Bosnia, before then?
But trying to claim that any war can be ‘humanitarian’ is fundamentally dishonest. No war is ‘humanitarian’, ever. War sucks. War kills people; and by design it is a blatant attack on their most basic human rights–their rights to life, to physical security, to the pre-conditions of material and mental wellbeing. To pretend that any war serves ‘humanitarian’ aims is fundamentally to ignore those most evident facts about war–facts that too many Americans seem to have forgotten, if indeed they ever knew them.
Interlude for a seldom-pondered fact here. Almost no governments have ever launched military adventures far from their own borders without citing ‘humanitarian’ war aims… Nearly all the distant imperial conquests undertaken by European powers in past centuries were cloaked in great clouds of ‘humanitarian’ rhetoric… Perhaps this is connected to the fact that no government ever invites its people to mobilize for an ‘unjust’ or even ‘unjustified’ war? Every government, after all, likes to present itself as good, not greedy, overbearing, and grasping.
Anyway, I want to write something here about the sad history of ‘humanitarian’ war in the present era. And primarily about the kinds of outcomes we have seen, and continue to see, from the west’s most ‘humanitarian’ war in recent history, that in Kosovo…

Continue reading “The myth of ‘humanitarian’ war”

Well, we knew it would happen, and it has. Now, a study supported by the Military Operational Medicine Research Program, U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command of Ft. Detrick, Md., has discovered that war is hazardous to the mental health of the soldiers who fight in it.
The study, titled “Combat Duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, Mental Health Problems, and Barriers to Care” was published in the New England Journal of Medicine this week. In addition to revealing some interesting facts about the breadth of the mental-health problems caused by the Iraq and Afghan wars to US service members, it also gives one little window into the shockingly high number of service members who feel responsible for the deaths of nonconbatants–see below.
The principal author of the study was Charles W. Hoge, MD. His five collaborators include a numch of clinical psychologiosts and one other MD. Promising anonymity to respondents, they gave a self-administered questionnaire to a large number of service-people before they were deployed, and then to others subsequent to deployments in either Afghanistan or Iraq. Their principal finding was that:

The percentage of study subjects whose responses met the screening criteria for major depression, generalized anxiety, or PTSD was significantly higher after duty in Iraq (15.6 to 17.1 percent) than after duty in Afghanistan (11.2 percent) or before deployment to Iraq (9.3 percent); the largest difference was in the rate of PTSD.

That would be Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
So if you calculate that the increase in these conditions has been on the order of 6.3 to 7.8 percent among the soldiers (and Marines) who went to Iraq, and that probably 250,000 US service members have now served in Iraq–maybe a lot more?– you could calculate that somewhere between 15,750 and 19,500 Americans have been given serious mental disorders as a result of Bush’s quite optional decision to launch that war.
And we can all imagine what that means for those individuals, their families, and the communities they return to, I’m sure.

Continue reading “US Army & Marines: mental health alert”

Yesterday, a truly amazing piece of reporting by the WaPo‘s Ariana Eunjung Cha told the story of a 23-year-old mother of two in Baghdad, widowed by last year’s war, who has turned to prostitution in an attempt to buy necessities for her kids, her brothers, and the rest of her family.
The piece is so well-written, and so painful. Bill the spouse immediately questioned why the paper only ran it in the “Style” section, which seems totally to trivialize it. I agree.
One of my main reactions, after “wow” at the reporting and a great gaping sadness at the content of the story, was to be really, really glad that there is a strong enough presence of women in the “corps” of foreign correspondents that a piece like this gets done. (As opposed to men foreign correspondents, a goodly number of whom in the bad old days when I was out there as a hack would actually frequent women working in that sector as a matter of course; and who certainly would seldom have either wanted to do a great story like Cha’s, or been in a position of the right kind of intimacy to be able to do it.)
Cha credits Shereen Jerjes, presumably a female Iraqi stringer, with contributing to the work on the report. And a female photojournalist called Andrea Bruce Woodall has an incredible series of photos there on the young woman’s life, as well– including one, of her just at the start of a sexually intimate encounter with a man, that Woodall apparently took from inside a closet in the woman’s bedroom.
I want to come back to this question of the new role that empowered women journalists can make in the way we all understand the costs that war imposes on women and families, and on journalism in general, later.
But while I’m here in the realm of reporting (by women) on post-war prostituion tragedies, I can’t avoid linking to this truly outrageous story from a refugee camp in the DRC, where Kate Holt reports on the lives of young-teenage Congolese girls forced into prostitution by the war there, and who their johns there are:

Continue reading “What war does to womens’ and girls’ lives”