~ THE WAR IS NOT OVER ~ IT’S EXPANDING INSTEAD ~
OUR GOVERNMENT CONTINUES TO KILL PEOPLE IN THE MIDEAST; PRESIDENT OBAMA CONTINUES TO MISLEAD US ABOUT WHY

Last Tuesday night President Obama gave a speech about the war that his administration is conducting in the Middle East.  Unfortunately, his account was so misleading as to amount to a substantial lie:

[1] The US war against Iraq is not over. President Obama has just changed the names. The war that the Bush administration called “Operation Iraqi Freedom” when it occupied the country, the Obama administration now calls “Operation New Dawn”; what the Bush administration called “brigade combat teams,” the Obama administration now calls “advisory and assistance brigades.” There are still 50,000 US troops and a similar number of mercenaries in Iraq – which has the second largest known reserves of oil in the world; if Iraq produced mainly cabbage, would those US troops and mercs still be there?

[2] The US is expanding our war against Afghanistan. President Obama sharply escalated President Bush’s war in Afghanistan, although 75% of Afghans are in favor of negotiations including the Taliban, whom the US calls terrorists (or, as Secretary of State Clinton says, “Really bad guys”). There are now more than 110,000 troops under U.S. command in Afghanistan, including more than 34,000 European troops from NATO. The NATO Secretary-General said, “NATO troops have to guard pipelines that transport oil and gas that is directed for the West, [protect sea routes used by tankers], and other crucial infrastructure” of the energy system.

[3] The US is expanding our undeclared war against Pakistan. The incoming Obama administration sneered that he Bush administration was only taking “baby steps” in targeting people in Pakistan (with which we are not at war) for assassination by drone rocket; the Obama administration has greatly expanded that and other death-squad operations. So the strongest armies in the world are killing people to “stop terrorism” in villages in Afghanistan and Pakistan – even while Pakistan is flooded.

[4] The US is expanding our “secret” war against other countries in the region. The US is also killing people in Yemen and Somalia. And it continues to threaten Iran. A look at the map will show why – these countries are on the approaches to the Middle East.  The US insists on controlling by various means a circle with a 1500-mile radius around the Persian Gulf.  “Terrorists,” according to the US government, are those who oppose the US occupation and control of the Middle East.

IT’S NOT “BECAUSE OF 9/11″ OR TO “STOP TERRORISM”

The real reason for the Obama administration’s ongoing war seems to be the long-standing US policy of control over the largest energy-producing region of the world.  And not because we need the gas and oil ourselves: the US imports very little oil from the Middle East for use here at home; most of the energy resources that we consume in the US come from the Americas and West Africa.  But control of Mideast oil and gas gives the US government a powerful bargaining chip in its relations with its real economic competitors in the world – the Europe and East Asia (China and Japan).

Obama’s war will continue until more Americans speak up loudly and reject it.  A majority of Americans do reject it – 72% say that the war is not worth the loss of life and other other costs to the country – even though we rarely hear that view expressed in the news. But for the moment our government doesn’t seem to care about our opinions.

If you are appalled that the Obama administration – against the wishes of three out of four Americans – is conducting an unjustified war in the Middle East and misrepresenting the reason for it, call your Congressional representatives.  Congressman Tim Johnson, Senator Roland Burris, and Senator Dick Durbin can be reached through the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121.  Tell them that the U.S. has no business killing people in the Middle East for resisting our invasion and occupation.
(Your protest makes a difference: Congressman Johnson, who voted for the invasions of Afghanistan and Pakistan, now says that he was wrong to do so and refuses to vote for any more funding for war in the Middle East – and he has kept his promise by voting that way.)

Resistance in the military is growing. On August 23 five peace activists – three veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and one military spouse – blockaded six buses carrying Fort Hood soldiers deploying to Iraq. Police made no arrests, but instead beat the activists out of the streets using automatic weapons and police dogs. The action, organized by “Fort Hood Disobeys,” was aimed at preventing the deployment of 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment soldiers to what the veterans termed an illegal and immoral occupation.

You can join a local peace group that is working to end the US war in the Mideast.  In Champaign-Urbana, one local peace group is AWARE, the Anti-War Anti-Racism Effort, members and friends of which produced this leaflet for the 4 September 2010 Main Event – our monthly peace demonstration at Main and Neil Streets in downtown Champaign.  We meet every Sunday at 5pm in the McKinley Foundation, 5th and Daniel Streets in Champaign, near the UIUC campus. We discuss the war and what can be done against it. Visitors are welcome – and see our Facebook page. AWARE is also happy to provide speakers and/or discussion leaders on the Mideast war and related issues.  Write <cge@shout.net>.  AWARE is composed of people opposed to the war, but it is not affiliated with any other group or political party.

AWARE presents AWARE on the Air each Tuesday 10-11pm on Urbana Public Television, cable channel 6.  Each week we bring you comments by members and friends of AWARE about the war and the opposition to it, locally and nationally, by Americans who oppose our government’s betrayal of our democratic principles.

END THE U.S. WAR FOR OIL IN THE MIDDLE EAST
BRING ALL UNITED STATES TROOPS HOME
STOP PAYING FOR WAR FROM PALESTINE TO PAKISTAN

###

In my view to assert that God exists is to claim the right and need to
carry on an activity, to be engaged in research, and I think this throws
light on what we are doing if we try to prove the existence of God. To
prove the existence of God is to prove that some questions still need
asking, that the world poses these questions for us.

To prove the existence of God, then, would be rather like proving the
validity of science — I don’t mean science as a body of established facts
set out in textbooks or journals, but science as an intellectual activity,
the activity of research currently going on; and not just routine research
which consists in looking for the answers to clearly formulated questions
by means of clearly established techniques, but the research which is the
growing point of science, the venture into the unknown.

It is perfectly possible to deny the validity of this. It Is perfectly
possible to say we now have science (we didn’t have It In the eighth
century, let us say, but we have it now). It is just there; from now on it
is all really just a matter of tidying up a few details. Now of course all
the really great advances in science have come by questioning just that,
by questioning, let us say, whether the Newtonian world is really the last
word, by digging down and asking questions of what everybody has come to
take for granted. But you could imagine quite easily a society which
discouraged such radical questioning. In this century we have seen
totalitarian societies which have been extremely keen on improving their
technology and answering detailed questions within the accepted framework
of science, but extremely hostile to the kind of radical thinking I am
envisaging; the kind of society where Wernher von Braun Is honoured and
Einstein is exiled. I also think that the same effect can be produced in
more subtle ways in societies that don’t look totalitarian. And of course
it was notoriously produced In the Church confronted by Galileo. The
asking of radical questions is discouraged by any society that believes in
itself, believes it has found the answers, believes that only its
authorised questions are legitimate.

Faced with such hostility or such incomprehension, you can, of course,
say: well, wait and see: you will find that in spite of everything,
science will make startling and quite unexpected changes, that our whole
world view will shift in ways we cannot now predict or imagine. But that
is just to assert your belief. And this I think is parallel to asserting
your belief in God. I think a belief in God — in the sense of a belief in
the validity of the kind of radical question to which God would be the
answer — is a part of human flourishing and that one who closes himself
off from it is to that extent deficient. For this reason I welcome, such
belief in God, but what I am asking myself now is not whether I believe,
but what grounds I have for such belief. And here again I think the
analogy with proving the validity of fundamental thinking in science is
helpful. How, after all, do we show that there is still a long and
probably unexpected road to travel in science? By pointing to anomalies in
the present scientific world picture. If your world picture includes, for
example, the idea of ether as the medium in which light waves occur, then
there is an anomaly if it turns out to be impossible to determine the
velocity of a light source with respect to the ether; and so on. Now in a
parallel way, it seems to me, proofs for the existence of God point to
anomalies in a world picture which excludes the God question. It is, it
seems to me, quite anomalous to hold that while it is legitimate and valid
to ask ‘How come?’ about any particular thing or event in the world, it is
illegitimate and invalid to ask it about the whole world. To say that we
aren’t allowed to ask it merely because we can’t answer it seems to me to
be begging the question. The question is: Is there an unanswered question
about the existence of the world? Can we be puzzled by the existence of
the world instead of nothing? I can be and am; and this is to be puzzled
about God.

The question ‘How come?’ can have a whole lot of different meanings and be
asked at several levels, and the deeper the question you ask about an
individual thing the more it is a question about a world to which that
thing belongs; there is finally a deepest question about a thing which is
also a question about everything. Let me explain that enigmatic remark.

Supposing you ask ‘How come Fido?’ You may be asking whether his father is
Rover or whether it was that promiscuous mongrel down the lane. In such a
case the answer is satisfactorily given by naming Fido’s parents. At this
level no more need be said; the question is fully answered at this level.
But now suppose you ask: ‘But how come Fido’s a dog?’ The answer could be:
‘His parents were dogs, and dogs just are born of other dogs’. Here you
have moved to what I call a deeper level of questioning and begun to talk
about what dogs are. You are saying: for Fido to be is for him to be a
dog, and Fido’s parents are the sort of things whose activities result in
things being dogs. Now your original question ‘How come Fido?’ has
deepened into a question about the dog species. It remains a question
about this individual dog Fido, but it is also a question about dogs –
not about dogs in the abstract, but about the actual dog species in the
world. Your question ‘How come Fido?’ at this new level is a question ‘How
come dogs anyway?’

And of course there is an answer to that too in terms of things like
genetics and natural selection and what not. Here we have a new and deeper
level of the question ‘How come Fido?’ — still a question about this
particular puppy, but one that is answered in terms of its membership of a
still wider community; no longer now simply the community of dogs, but the
whole biological community within which dogs come to be and have their
place. Then of course we can ask a question about Fido at a deeper level
still. When we ask how come the biological community, we no doubt answer
in terms of biochemistry. (I am not of course pretending that we actually
have the answers to all these questions, as though we fully understood how
it came about, and had to come about, that there are now dogs around the
place, but we expect eventually to answer these questions.)

And now we can go on from the level of biochemistry to that of physics and
all the time we are asking more penetrating questions concerning Fido and
each time we go further in our questioning we are seeing Fido in a wider
and wider context.

We can put this another way by saying that each time we ask the question
we are asking about Fido over against some other possibility. Our first
question simply meant: How come Fido is this dog rather than another; he’s
Rover’s son rather than the mongrel’s son. At the next level we were
asking: How come he’s a dog rather than, say, a giraffe. At the next
level: How come he’s a living being rather than an inanimate, and so on.

Now I want to stress that all the time we are asking about this individual
Fido. It is just that we are seeing further problematics within him.
Fido’s parents brought it about that he is this dog not another, but in
that act they also brought it about that he is this dog (not a giraffe),
that he is this living dog, that he is this biochemically complex, living
dog; that he is this molecularly structured, biochemically complex, living
dog, and so on. We are probing further into what it is for Fido to come to
be and always by noting what he is not, but might have been. Every ‘How
come’ question is how come this instead of what is not. And every time, of
course, we answer by reference to some thing or state of affairs, some
existing reality, in virtue of which Fido is this rather than what he is
not.

Now our ultimate radical question is not how come Fido exists as this dog
instead of that, or how come Fido exists as a dog instead of a giraffe,
or exists as living instead of inanimate, but how come Fido exists
instead of nothing, and just as to ask how come he exists as dog is to put
him in the context of dogs, so to ask how come he exists instead of
nothing is to put him in the context of everything, the universe or world.
And this is the question I call the God-question, because whatever the
answer is, whatever the thing or state of affairs, whatever the existing
reality that answers it we call ‘God’.

Now of course it is always possible to stop the questioning at any point;
a man may refuse to ask why there are dogs. He may say there just are dogs
and perhaps it is impious to enquire how come — there were people who
actually said that to Darwin. Similarly it is possible to refuse to ask
this ultimate question, to say as Russell once did: the universe is just
there. This seems to me just as arbitrary as to say: dogs are just there.
The difference is that we now know by hindsight that Darwin’s critics were
irrational because we have familiarised ourselves with an answer to the
question, how come there are dogs? We have not familiarised ourselves with
the answer to the question, how come the world instead of nothing? but
that does not make it any less arbitrary to refuse to ask it. To ask it is
to enter on an exploration which Russell was simply refusing to do, as it
seems to me. It is of course perfectly right to point out the
mysteriousness of a question about everything, to point to the fact that
we have no way of answering it, but that is by no means the same as saying
it is an unaskable question. As Wittgenstein said ‘Not how the world is,
but that it is, is the mystery’.

There is indeed a difficulty about having a concept of ‘everything’, for
we ordinarily conceive of something with, so to say, a boundary around it:
this is a sheep and not a giraffe. But everything is bounded by nothing,
which is just to say that it is not bounded by anything. To put what is
the same point another way: we can have no concept of nothing, absolutely
speaking. We can use the word relatively; we can say, ‘There Is nothing in
the cupboard’ meaning there are no largish objects — we are understood
not to be saying there is no dust or no air. ‘There is nothing between
Kerry and New York’ means there is no land. It does not mean there is
absolutely nothing, no sea or fishes. The notions of everything and of
absolutely nothing, are not available to us in the sense that the notions
of sheep or scarlet or savagery are available to us. And this means that
we are asking our ultimate radical question with tools that will not do
the job properly, with words whose meaning has to be stretched beyond what
we can comprehend. It would be very strange if it were not so. As
Wittgenstein says, what we have here is the mystery. If the question of
God were a neat and simple question to be answered in terms of familiar
concepts, then whatever we are talking about, it is not God. A God who is
in this sense comprehensible would not be worth worshipping, or even of
talking about (except for the purpose of destroying him).

It is clear that we reach out to, but do not reach, an answer to our
ultimate question, how come anything instead of nothing? But we are able
to exclude some answers. If God is whatever answers our question, how come
everything then evidently he is not to be included amongst everything. God
cannot be a thing, an existent among others. It is not possible that God
and the universe should add up to make two.

Again, if we are to speak of God as causing the existence of everything,
it is clear that we must not mean that he makes the universe out of
anything. Whatever creation means it is not a process of making.

Again it is clear that God cannot interfere in the universe, not because he has not
the power but because, so to speak, he has too much; to interfere you have
to be an alternative to, or alongside, what you are interfering with. If
God is the cause of everything, there is nothing that he is alongside.
Obviously God makes no difference to the universe; I mean by this that we
do not appeal specifically to God to explain why the universe is this way
rather than that, for this we need only appeal to explanations within the
universe. For this reason there can, it seems to me, be no feature of the
universe which indicates it is God-made. What God accounts for is that the
universe is there instead of nothing. I have said that whatever God is, he
is not a member of everything, not an inhabitant of the universe, not a
thing or a kind of thing. And I should add, I suppose, that it cannot be
possible to ask of him, how come God instead of nothing? It must not be
possible for him to be nothing. Not just in the sense that God must be
imperishable, but that it must make no sense to consider that God might
not be. Of course it is still possible to say, without manifest
contradiction, ‘God might not be’, but that is because when we speak of
God by using the word ‘God’, we do not understand what we mean, we have no
concept of God; what governs our use of the word ‘God’ is not an
understanding of what God is but the validity of a question about the
world. That is why we are not protected by any logical laws from saying
‘God might not exist’ even though it makes no sense. What goes for our
rules for the use of ‘God’ does not go for the God we try to name with the
word. (And a corollary of this, incidentally, is why a famous argument for
the existence of God called the ontological argument does not work.)

What I have been saying may seem to make God both remote and irrelevant.
He is not part of the universe and he makes no difference to it. It is
therefore necessary to stress that God must be in everything that happens
and everything that exists in the universe. If Fido’s parents make Fido to
exist instead of nothing it is because in their action God is acting, just
as if a pen writes it is because in its action a writer is acting. It is
because it is God that wields every agent in the universe that agents
bring things into existence, make things new. Every action in the world is
an action of God; not because it is not an action of a creature but
because it is by God’s action that the creature is itself and has its own
activity. But more of that in the next chapter.

For the moment may I just say that it seems to me that what we often call
atheism is not a denial of the God of which I speak. Very frequently the
man who sees himself as an atheist is not denying the existence of some
answer to the mystery of how come there Is anything instead of nothing, he
is denying what he thinks or has been told is a religious answer to this
question. He thinks or has been told that religious people, and especially
Christians, claim to have discovered what the answer is, that there is
some grand architect of the universe who designed it, just like Basil
Spence only bigger and less visible, that there is a Top Person in the
universe who issues arbitrary decrees for the rest of the persons and
enforces them because he is the most powerful being around. Now if denying
this claim makes you an atheist, then I and Thomas Aquinas and a whole
Christian tradition are atheistic too.

But a genuine atheist is one who simply does not see that there is any
problem or mystery here, one who is content to ask questions within the
world, but cannot see that the world itself raises a question. This is the
man I compare to those who are content to ask questions within the
established framework of science, but cannot see that there are genuine
though ill-formulated questions on the frontiers. I have made a comparison
with scientific research, but just the same parallel could be made with
any kind of creative activity. The poet is trying to write a poem but he
does not know what he is trying to say until he has said it and recognised
it. Until he has done this it is extremely difficult to show that he is
writing a poem or that he could write a poem. I can show, by pointing to
the existence of bricks and cement and so on and the availability of a
workforce, that there could be more houses made. I cannot show that there
will ever be another poem.

I called this paper ‘God and Creation’ In order to indicate what I and the
mainstream Christian tradition understand by creation as a path towards
God. We come across God, So to speak, or rather we search and do not come
across him, when the universe raises for us a radical question concerning
its existence at all. And creation is the name we give to God’s answering
this question.

I hope it will be evident that creation is here being used in a quite
different sense from the way it is used by people who seek to discover the
origin of the universe (was it a big bang or a lot of little pops or
whatever). Whatever processes took place in remote periods of time is of
course in itself a fascinating topic but it is irrelevant to the question
of creation in the sense that makes us speak of God. When we have
concluded that God created the world, there still remains the scientific
question to ask about what kind of world it is and was and how, if ever,
it began. It is probably unnecessary to say that the proposition that the
universe is made by God and that everything that is, is begun and
sustained in existence by God, does not entail that the universe has only
existed for a finite time. There may be reasons for thinking that the
universe is finite in time and space but the fact that its existence
depends on God is not one of them.

Coming to know that the universe is dependent on God does not in fact tell
us anything about the character of the universe. How could it? Since
everything we know about God (that he exists and what he is not) is
derived from what we know of the universe, how could we come back from God
with some additional information about the world? If we think we can it Is
only because we have smuggled something extra into our concept of God –
for example, when we make God in our own image and ask ourselves quite
illegitimate questions like ‘What would I have done If I were God?’ It
should be evident that this is a temptation to be avoided.

There is one last thing I should like to touch on. What are we to make of
the notion of a ‘personal’ God?

I think the idea of a personal God has arisen in two quite different ways.
In the first place people have thought of God as a person because they
have thought of him as a maker — I mean they have had an image of God as
an artist or technician working away at something — and thereby
accounting for its existence. In this sense the person (in the sense of
human person) is an image of God, a picture which may be useful but could
evidently be misleading. In the second place I think people call God
personal because it seems absurd to say he is impersonal. However romantic
we may get about the great impersonal forces of nature that seem to tower
over us, we know perfectly well that they don’t. What is impersonal and
non-intelligent will, in principle, always obey us if only we know the
trick. There are people who speak of God as a great life-force, and that
is all right if they merely want to deny that he is some particular
concrete individual — evidently he is not, but we have to remember that
great forces don’t really get anything done unless they are wielded in a
context. The wind and the waves don’t achieve any aim, there is nothing
that counts as success in their thrashing around. It is only by talking
about them as though they were persons or at least as alive that we can
speak of them getting anything done, and since whatever else we mean by
God we mean what gets something done or made or existing, it seems that we
cannot think of him as merely impersonal.

Once we have denied that God Is merely impersonal we are under a
temptation to imagine him as forming Intentions or thinking out or making
up his mind, but none of this is a legitimate For us the business of being
persons is extremely closely tied but there is no reason at all to
transfer all this to God; indeed not doing so since this version of
personality associated with the fact that we are physical beings, parts of
a material whole.

We can then, I think, say that whatever accounts for the existence of the
universe cannot be limited in the way that impersonal unintelligent things
and forces are, but this does not justify us in attributing to God our own
particular mode of intelligence. If we do speak of God as making up his
mind or changing his mind or deciding or cogitating or reasoning, it can
only be by metaphor as when we speak of his strong right arm or his
all-seeing eye.

###

But we won’t have won until Obama, Clinton, Gates et al. are in cells in The Hague, awaiting trial before an international court, like Milošević. Those out of office, from the Bush and Clinton administrations – and before – by rights should accompany them.

The Nuremberg trials however came only after the collapse of the aggressors’ armies. We can push for that by pointing out the illegality of the use of troops without a declaration of war, and by demanding that our representatives stop voting money for it (as, I’m delighted to say, my Congressional representative – a Republican, Rep. Timothy Johnson – has done, here in Illinois’ 15th CD).

If there is an argument for the attack on Hiroshima, there can be none for that on Nagasaki – a weapons test with live subjects. And we in America have no memory at all of the “finale” described in the official Air Force history, a 1000-plane raid on civilian targets organized by General “Hap” Arnold to celebrate the war’s end, five days after Nagasaki. According to survivors, leaflets were dropped among the bombs announcing the surrender.

Sixty-five years later the U.S. – the only country ever to use such weapons in war – spends more each year on war than the entire rest of the world. And our country has maimed, killed and made homeless more noncombatants than all the rest of the countries in the world combined since World War II.

If Americans knew what was being done in their name around the world, they would be appalled.

Right now Iran’s nuclear ambitions dominate the headlines. The warnings are that Iran may be concealing something from the International Atomic Energy Agency and violating U.N. Security Council Resolution 1887, passed last October and hailed as a victory for Obama’s efforts to contain Iran.

Meanwhile, a debate continues on whether Obama’s recent decision to reconfigure missile-defense systems in Europe is a capitulation to the Russians or a pragmatic step to defend the West from Iranian nuclear attack.

Silence is often more eloquent than loud clamor, so let us attend to what is unspoken.

Amid the furor over Iranian duplicity, the IAEA passed a resolution calling on Israel to join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and open its nuclear facilities to inspection.

The United States and Europe tried to block the IAEA resolution, but it passed anyway. The media virtually ignored the event.

The United States assured Israel that it would support Israel’s rejection of the resolution – reaffirming a secret understanding that has allowed Israel to maintain a nuclear arsenal closed to international inspections, according to officials familiar with the arrangements. Again, the media were silent.

Indian officials greeted U.N. Resolution 1887 by announcing that India “can now build nuclear weapons with the same destructive power as those in the arsenals of the world’s major nuclear powers.”

Both India and Pakistan are expanding their nuclear weapons programs. They have twice come dangerously close to nuclear war, and the problems that almost ignited this catastrophe are very much alive.

Obama greeted Resolution 1887 differently. The day before he was awarded the Nobel Prize for his inspiring commitment to peace, the Pentagon announced it was accelerating delivery of the most lethal non-nuclear weapons in the arsenal: 13-ton bombs for B-2 and B-52 stealth bombers, designed to destroy deeply hidden bunkers shielded by 10,000 pounds of reinforced concrete.

It’s no secret the bunker busters could be deployed against Iran.

Planning for these “massive ordnance penetrators” began in the Bush years but languished until Obama called for developing them rapidly when he came into office.

Passed unanimously, Resolution 1887 calls for the end of threats of force and for all countries to join the NPT, as Iran did long ago. NPT non-signers are India, Israel and Pakistan, all of which developed nuclear weapons with U.S. help, in violation of the NPT.

Iran hasn’t invaded another country for hundreds of years — unlike the United States, Israel and India (which occupies Kashmir, brutally).

The threat from Iran is minuscule. If Iran had nuclear weapons and delivery systems and prepared to use them, the country would be vaporized.

To believe Iran would use nuclear weapons to attack Israel, or anyone, “amounts to assuming that Iran’s leaders are insane” and that they look forward to being reduced to “radioactive dust,” strategic analyst Leonard Weiss observes, adding that Israel’s missile-carrying submarines are “virtually impervious to preemptive military attack,” not to speak of the immense U.S. arsenal.

In naval maneuvers in July of 2009, Israel sent its Dolphin class subs, capable of carrying nuclear missiles, through the Suez Canal and into the Red Sea, sometimes accompanied by warships, to a position from which they could attack Iran – as they have a “sovereign right” to do, according to U.S. Vice President Joe Biden.

Not for the first time, what is veiled in silence would receive front-page headlines in societies that valued their freedom and were concerned with the fate of the world.

The Iranian regime is harsh and repressive, and no humane person wants Iran – or anyone else – to have nuclear weapons. But a little honesty would not hurt in addressing these problems.

The Nobel Peace Prize, of course, is not concerned solely with reducing the threat of terminal nuclear war, but rather with war generally, and the preparation for war. In this regard, the selection of Obama raised eyebrows, not least in Iran, surrounded by U.S. occupying armies.

On Iran’s borders in Afghanistan and in Pakistan, Obama has escalated Bush’s war and is likely to proceed on that course, perhaps sharply.

Obama has made clear that the United States intends to retain a long-term major presence in the region. That much is signaled by the huge city-within-a city called “the Baghdad Embassy” [in Iraq] – unlike any embassy in the world. He has also announced the construction of mega-embassies in Islamabad [capital of Pakistan] and Kabul [capital of Afghanistan] and huge consulates in Peshawar and elsewhere.

Nonpartisan budget monitors report that the “administration’s request for $538 billion for the Defense Department in fiscal 2010 and its stated intention to maintain a high level of funding in the coming years put the president on track to spend more on defense, in real dollars, than any other president has in one term of office since World War II. And that’s not counting the additional $130 billion the administration is requesting to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan next year, with even more war spending slated for future years.”

The U.S. war in the Middle East will continue until more Americans speak up loudly and reject it. A majority of Americans do reject it, but that is not enough for our government. If you are appalled that the US is conducting an unjustified war – and misrepresenting the reason for it – call your Congressional representatives. Congressman Tim Johnson, Senator Roland Burris, and Senator Dick Durbin can be reached through the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121. Tell them that the US has no business killing people in the Middle East for resisting our invasion and occupation. (Your protest makes a difference: Congressman Johnson, who voted for the invasions of Afghanistan and Pakistan, now says that he was wrong to do so and refuses to vote for any more funding for war in the Middle East.)

You can also join a local peace group that is working to end the war in Afghanistan. In Champaign-Urbana, one local peace group is AWARE, the Anti-War Anti-Racism Effort (see our page on Facebook), members and friends of which produced this leaflet for our monthly peace demonstration in downtown Champaign. We meet every Sunday 5-6:30pm at the McKinley Foundation, 5th & Daniel streets in Champaign. Visitors and new members are welcome.

AWARE presents “AWARE on the Air” each Tuesday 10-11pm on Urbana Public Television, cable channel 6. Each week we bring you comments by members and friends of AWARE about the war and the opposition to it, locally and nationally, by Americans who oppose our government’s betrayal of our democratic principles. AWARE is composed of people opposed to the war, but it is not affiliated with any other group or political party.             ###

A correspondent sends an apposite description of the Tea Party protests:

“An astroturf campaign that has become a mass movement”

– that is, a fake grass-roots movement begun by business interests, some associated with the Republican party, to prevent tax rises for social spending – but which unexpectedly came to attract many Americans in the wake of the financial collapse and bank bailouts of 2008.

By 2010 the business publication The Economist was describing Tea Partiers as “America’s most vibrant political force.” The name “Tea Party” is a reference to the Boston Tea Party of 1773, when British colonists in New England (disguised as Indians) destroyed tea taxed by the British government when the colonists had no representation in the British Parliament. Contemporary Tea Partiers say the first word is an acronym for “taxed enough already.”

Particularly after their protest of the administration’s so-called health-reform bill, the Tea Partiers have attracted hysterical condemnation from supporters of the administration Television news channel and website MSNBC (Microsoft and NBC) has been particularly scornful; The Nation magazine has called for prosecutions for “sedition” [sic]; and leading New York Times columnist Frank Rich has written several columns (“vibrant with class hatred,” says media critic Alexander Cockburn) dismissing the Tea Partiers at length as simply “racists.”

Rich’s oft-repeated charge lends support to the important argument put forth by Walter Benn Michaels in “The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality” (2006), that American liberals have substituted race for class: instead of challenging the class divisions in America , they have preferred to accept the structure of privilege in America so long as its racially balanced at every level. Beginning a generation ago, Neoliberalism was a counter-attack to the social critique of the “the Sixties,” and self-styled liberals acquiesced in the program by means of identity politics, making race not class the progressive cause. “What color are the rich kids?” was said to be their concern…

Liberals dismiss as racist what is really class protest. And many Americans – particularly those outside the politically active 20 percent or so of the population (roughly those who have gone to good colleges) – have good reason to protest. Real wages have not risen in America in thirty years, while the (accelerating!) concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny minority has reached unprecedented heights in recent years. The concentration of wealth in America actually declined from the Great Crash of 1929 to the late 1960s – but then the course reversed, gathered speed, and reaches today pre-Depression levels.

People are noticing, and that’s a threat to established political control in America. For at least a decade, according to Harvard’s Vanishing Voter Project, about 75 percent of Americans have felt that even presidential elections don’t matter, that they’re just some kind of game being played by rich contributors, party bosses, and the media. That’s hard to deny, so it shouldn’t surprise us that the politics grown outside that carefully fenced garden should contain some luxuriant varieties, along with some quite sensible critiques. We are perhaps seeing the beginning of a more serious politics in America – or not.

Noam Chomsky described the situation two months ago, on the important television program Democracy Now!:

“Grievances aren’t invented. I mean, for the American population, the last thirty years have been some of the worst in economic history. It’s a rich country, but real wages have stagnated or declined, working hours have shot up, benefits have gone down, and people are in real trouble and now in very real trouble after the bubbles burst. And they’re angry. And they want to know, ‘What happened to me? You know, I’m a hard-working, white, God-fearing American. You know, how come this is happening to me?’

“That’s pretty much the Nazi appeal. The grievances were real. And one of the possibilities is what Rush Limbaugh tells you: ‘Well, it’s happening to you because of those bad guys out there.’ OK, in the Nazi case, it was the Jews and the Bolsheviks. Here, it’s the rich Democrats who run Wall Street and run the media and give everything away to illegal immigrants, and so on and so forth. It sort of peaked during the Sarah Palin period. And it’s kind of interesting … that of all the candidates, Sarah Palin is the only one who used the phrase ‘working class.’ She was talking to the working people … they’re the ones who are suffering. So, there are models that are not very attractive.”

It’s difficult to see how a more attractive model can be put forth without reversing the increasing concentration of wealth. The grievances expressed by the Tea Partiers must be responded to. Here are some suggestions:

[1] They are demanding justice, specifically tax justice, justice regarding income. The Internal Revenue Code is said to be more than twice as long as the KJV of the Bible, and the IRC is the principal instrument for the vast concentration of wealth in very few hands that’s occurred in the last few years. So what do we do? “Get rid of the infamous thing,” as Voltaire said, during the Enlightenment. (He was of course talking about something else.)

Abolish the internal revenue code and establish a low, flat tax on all income. In order to begin to redress the extreme imbalance in wealth in this country, we should perhaps abolish all income taxes. If you tax something, you usually get less of it (that at least is the theory behind raising the taxes on cigarette smoking, and it seems to work). But against the idea of abolition is the sense that in a democracy of one person one vote, we should all contribute at least a little to the functioning of that government. So a low, flat tax — and no Internal Revenue Code.

But we shouldn’t stop there. During the administration of President Richard Nixon, almost forty years ago, a bill that would have established a negative income tax (NIT) almost made it through Congress. Such a proposal joined to a low flat tax could provide an income at the level of a living wage for all Americans. The plan was set out in detail by the late economist Milton Friedman in 1962 in his book “Capitalism and Freedom.”

With an NIT, the need for minimum wage, food stamps, welfare, and even social security would be eliminated — along with the vast and expensive bureaucracies that administer them. The NIT would be in effect a guaranteed annual income (GAI) at the level of a living wage.

Perhaps even more importantly, some degree of liberty would be restored to our work. The need to take any job that’s offered in order to eat regularly and feed one’s family would no longer exist. On the other side, the disappearance of the minimum wage would restore employment to being a capitalist act between consenting adults. Take the job at the wage offered if you want to — but you don’t have to.

Our gimcrack system of minimum wage, food stamps, welfare, and social security doesn’t even work. Today a family of four living on minimum wage cannot afford the average two-bedroom apartment in any community in the United States.

Such a bailout for the rest of us would do far more to end the recession than the bailout of the Bankers. All admit that consumer spending is the crucial support for the real economy. At the dawn of the automobile industry, Henry Ford paid high wages so that his workers could afford the cars that they were building. Now we can’t even employ 10% — some say more than 20% — of those who want to work.

A populace with a guaranteed annual income at the level of a living wage would have to spend it, providing the demand immediately that the administration’s stimulus program is supposed to provide a good way down the road.

How would we pay for it? It’s interesting that that question wasn’t asked a year ago when vast sums were required to bail out the banks. Nor was it heard during the last administration or this one when billions of dollars were said to be needed to kill people in the Middle East.

[2] Tax wealth (as opposed to income). Tax something and you get less of it, as we said, and we don’t want less wealth but rather less differential wealth. Income disparities don’t capture the real nature of economic inequality in America, because the rich don’t take their money in income but, say, capital gains. The distribution of wealth is much more unequal than the distribution of income. The bottom 60% of households possess only 4% of the nation’s wealth. The top 20% has 50% of the income but 85% of the wealth.

Wealth is concentrated in the hands of a small number of families. The wealthiest 1 percent of families owns more than a third of the nation’s net worth, the top 10% of families owns over 70%, and the bottom 40% of the population owns far less than 1%.

A steeply graduated tax on wealth would exempt 95% of all Americans. Only the top 1% would pay noticeable amounts — and toward the top of that 1%, they should be quite noticeable.

But there’s another source of money to pay for the GAI at the level of a living wage that will restore consumer demand:

[3] Bring the troops home and stop paying vast amounts for imperial wars. Bring the troops home, not just from the Middle East, where the administration is killing people to secure control over world oil supplies and is lying about what it doing; it’s not stopping terrorism but creating it. Bring the troops home also from the more than 700 [sic] military bases that he US has around the world.

The US spends more on the military each year than the entire rest of the world. A generation ago, we were told that would stop after the fall of Communism. The peace divided could be returned to the people. It didn’t happen.

That military and those bases are supposed to be defending us against terrorism, but the dirty little secret — in fact it’s a filthy big secret — is that the US needs the threat of terrorism to justify its military incursion into the Middle East.

And terrorism is a real threat, as a result of the US invasion and occupation of foreign lands, notably the Middle East. And why? If the primary product of Iraq were asparagus, do you think that we would have half the American army there?

If the USG really wanted to defend us against terrorism, it would do things it has avoided doing, like securing our ports. (I have a friend who says it would be easy to get a nuclear bomb into New York harbor: “Just wrap it in a bale of marijuana,” he says.)

Of course, it’s no joking matter. The prospects are serious indeed, but instead of dealing with them, our government says it’s stopping terrorism by killing people in Pakistani villages with drone rockets.

[4] We can also afford to provide healthcare, and without the administration’s “Insurance Industry Profit Protection and Enhancement Act.” We already had a system, established more than 40 years ago, that provides for medical care if you’re old enough – Medicare is available only to those over 65. The solution to the so-called healthcare crisis was obvious – Medicare for all. Instead we have Obamacare, rightly called “an absolute gift to the [insurance] industry.”

[5] Liberty must be physical as well as mental. The CEO of the yuppie grocery Whole Foods, Inc., wrote in the Wall Street Journal that there is no “intrinsic right to health care, food or shelter … This “right” has never existed in America.” Americans in his view have only the right to starve, or die of exposure, unless they rent themselves to people like him. But that is hardly the blessings of liberty that the government is established to secure.

“The earth belongs to the living,” wrote Thomas Jefferson, two years after the writing of the Constitution, and he meant specifically the things needed for human flourishing. But of course “Mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.”

The blessings of liberty are of two sorts; (a) the things that give us liberty, the free use of our bodies, and (b) the things that liberty gives us, the free use of our minds. And these things belong to us not as handouts form a Lady Bountiful government, but as rights that it is the responsibility of government to secure, according to the Tea Partiers’ better angels. That much seems right.

###

It’s not “because of 9/11″ or to “stop terrorism,” as President Obama now says. The war is neither just nor legal: the real reason for it seems to be the long-standing U.S. policy of control over the largest oil-producing region of the world. And not because we need the oil ourselves; the US imports very little oil from the Middle East for use here at home. Most of the energy resources that we consume in the US come from the Americas and West Africa. But control of Mideast oil and gas gives the US government a powerful bargaining chip in its relations with its real economic competitors in the world – the European Union and East Asia (China and Japan). That has been American policy for a long time. The National Security Advisor in President Jimmy Carter’s administration (1977-81), Zbigniew Brzezinski (he was also a foreign policy advisor to the Obama campaign), observed that control of Mideast energy provides the US with “critical leverage” over its industrial rivals in Europe and Asia, an idea of American government planners that goes back to the end of World War II, in 1945.

The war in Afghanistan, to which President Obama sent 30,000 additional US troops just before accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, got exactly ninety-two words in his more than hour-long State of the Union Address last month. Last year he called Afghanistan “the central front of the War on Terrorism.” This year it is revealed that he is conducting a secret war in neighboring Pakistan, a much bigger and more modern country, with two-thirds of the population of the United States and a numerically bigger army – but potentially a more dangerous road-block to American control of the entire Mideast. The vast region from Palestine to Pakistan, from the Caspian Sea to the Horn of Africa – what the US military calls “Central Command” – contains much of the world’s oil and gas resources. Over 60 years ago, the State Department described the oil reserves of the region as “a stupendous source of strategic power” and “one of the greatest material prizes in world history.” The same factors enter into the conflicts over pipelines from Central Asia: US planners want to ensure that they go to the West, not the East, and that the pipelines should follow a complicated path to avoid Russia and Iran, so as to ensure US control.

President Obama sharply escalated President Bush’s war in Afghanistan, even though Western-run polls show that about 75 percent of Afghans are in favor of negotiations among Afghans – including both the US puppet government and the Taliban, whom the US calls terrorists (or, as Secretary of State Clinton said recently, “Really bad guys”). There are now more than 110,000 troops under U.S. command in Afghanistan, including more than 34,000 European troops from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer informed a NATO meeting that “NATO troops have to guard pipelines that transport oil and gas that is directed for the West,” and more generally have to protect sea routes used by tankers and other “crucial infrastructure” of the energy system. So the strongest armies in the world are “fighting terrorism” by killing people in villages in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Afghanistan requires a regional solution instead, in which the neighboring countries – Iran, India, Russia, China – work out a settlement and Afghans work something out among themselves. There is a significant peace movement in Afghanistan. Afghans themselves should make the decision about when and how the US and NATO – who have no right to be there – should leave.

Meanwhile the US military continues to occupy Iraq, where the US has just announced that it will double the size of its embassy – already by far the largest in the world. Iraq has the second largest known reserves of oil in the world (after Saudi Arabia). The US is also killing people in Yemen and Somalia. A look at the map will show why. These countries are on the approaches to the Middle East. The US insists on controlling by various means the entire region within a 1500-mile radius of the Persian Gulf. “Terrorists,” according to the US government, are those who oppose the US occupation.

Israel, America’s stationary aircraft-carrier in the Mideast, sent US-supplied aircraft to attack the Palestinians in Gaza, the world’s largest prison-camp, in December of 2008. They killed more than thirteen hundred people. Since then Israel has continued to blockade Gaza. AWARE Films will host a presentation by scholar-activist Robert Naiman at 2pm Sunday 14 February at the Champaign Public Library. Naiman will discuss the Gaza Freedom March and his December 2009 trip to the Middle East. Naiman coordinates Just Foreign Policy and is a frequent contributor to The Huffington Post. The talk is free and open to all. Join us for refreshments and after-talk discussion. For information call 352-2803.

Although known world-wide as “Bush’s poodle,” former British Prime Minister Tony Blair has had to testify before a commission investigating US-UK plotting to invade Iraq, while demonstrators chanted, “Liar! Murder!” Nothing similar has happened in the US to those who planned the illegal war or instituted the US torture of prisoners that accompanied it. And the Obama administration – which has not brought the torture regime to an end – continues to defend Bush administration criminals. This week the Obama administration cleared lawyers John Yoo and Jay Bybee of professional misconduct for crafting memos that justified water-boarding and other forms of torture. Protest John Yoo, War Criminal on Monday 8 February at 11am in Chicago in front of the Union League Club 65 W. Jackson Blvd., between Dearborn & Clark .

For a discussion of why the US government wages war and misrepresents its reasons for it, see the informative book A People’s History of the United States: 1492-Present, and the new graphic novel A People’s History of American Empire, by historian Howard Zinn, who died last week at the age of 87.

THE WAR WILL CONTINUE until more Americans speak up loudly and reject it. A majority of Americans do reject it, but for the moment that is not enough for our government. If you are appalled that the U.S. is conducting an unjustified war in the Middle East – and misrepresenting the reason for it – call your Congressional representatives. Congressman Tim Johnson, Senator Roland Burris, and Senator Dick Durbin can be reached through the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121. Tell them that the U.S. has no business killing people in the Middle East for resisting our invasion and occupation. (Your protest makes a difference: Congressman Johnson, who voted for the invasions of Afghanistan and Pakistan, now says that he was wrong to do so and refuses to vote for any more funding for war in the Middle East.)

Resistance in the military is growing. This week the US military decided to transfer to Iraq the court martial of Iraq war veteran Spc. Marc Hall – for writing a song. Hall has been jailed at Fort Stewart, Georgia, since December 11 because he wrote a song called “Stop Loss” about the practice of involuntarily extending military members’ contracts. You can support him by calling Ft. Stewart Public Affairs Chief, Kevin Larson at 912-435-9879. Tell him that (1) you are opposed to holding Specialist Marc Hall’s court martial in Iraq and (2) all charges against him should be dropped. If you are a veteran, mention that during your call.

You can also join a local peace group that is working to end the war in Afghanistan. In Champaign-Urbana, one local peace group is AWARE, the Anti-War Anti-Racism Effort , members and friends of which produced this leaflet for the 6 February 2010 “Main Event” – our monthly peace demonstration in downtown Champaign, at the corner of Main and Neil Streets. We meet every Sunday 5-6:30pm in the Wahlfeldt Room in the basement of the old post office in Urbana. Visitors and new members are welcome.

AWARE is also happy to provide speakers and/or discussion leaders on the Mideast war and related issues. Write . AWARE is composed of people opposed to the war, but it is not affiliated with any other group or political party.

AWARE presents AWARE on the Air each Tuesday 10-11pm on Urbana Public Television, cable channel 6. Each week we bring you comments by members and friends of AWARE about the war and the opposition to it, locally and nationally, by Americans who oppose our government’s betrayal of our democratic principles.

END THE U. S. WAR AGAINST THE MIDDLE EAST
BRING ALL UNITED STATES TROOPS HOME
STOP PAYING FOR WAR FROM PALESTINE TO PAKISTAN

In the presidential elections of 1952, 1968, and 2000, Republican candidates did well by running against the wars being conducted or recently concluded by incumbent Democratic administrations. Eisenhower’s “I will go to Korea,” Nixon’s “secret plan to end the Vietnam war,” and Bush’s opposition to “nation building” (referring to the Clinton-Gore war in the Balkans) all garnered them votes. It’s possible that a more honest debate on the Long War in the Mideast (it’s not about stopping terrorism) may occur because the Republican wing of our one-party government (it’s one business party) may see it as in its short term interest in 2012.

Of course there have been for some time principled opponents of the Mideast war among Republicans, notably the paleoconservatives around the journals “American Conservative,” “Chronicles,” and the website Antiwar.com. See Bill Kauffman’s excellent book “Ain’t My America: The Long, Noble History of Antiwar Conservatism and Middle-American Anti-Imperialism” (2008). And add now the Ron Paulists – their critique of the war is as clear and cogent as Dennis Kucinich’s and has a larger following – and even a not insubstantial group among the Tea-partiers.

The Democrats’ sell-out on the war has been clear since the Kerry campaign – and their betrayal once they got control of the Congress. Obama sold himself to our rulers with the promise that he could bring the dissidents – primarily the anti-war movement – back in, and he largely succeeded. (The segments of “The Audacity of Hope” on the Vietnam war makes particularly instructive reading on this point.)

An effective anti-war movement in the coming year(s) will have to be marshaled against the Democrats’ policies, and of course against the principal commitments of the Republican party as well. But in the short term we might find some Republicans who claim to be fellow-travelers on the road to a principled peace. We shouldn’t immediately try to kick them to the curb, if only because they’ll provide us with opportunities to talk to more people.