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Mid-Missouri |
P.O. Box 268 |
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FORNews June 2005War Resistance Building; Compromises UnacceptableEnd the Iraq Occupation Now!Momentum for peace and in opposition to the U.S. occupation and war upon Iraq is building across this nation-- under girded by the increasing public knowledge of the secret notes from British foreign affairs meeting known as the “Downing Street Memo” (this, despite efforts by most major U.S. media to initially banish the news to obscurity). Richard Dearlove, the director of Great Britain's main intelligence agency MI-6 reported to Prime Minister Tony Blair and his top advisers about meetings in the summer of 2002 with top White House officials several months before the war. In the notes, Dearlove made it clear the Bush-Cheney administration was planning to launch a pre-emptive war against Iraq and that “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy,” according to the report made public in the London Times on 1 May. The war, Dearlove wrote, would be “justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD (weapons of mass destruction)” even though the case supporting their existence was “thin.” Opinion polls are showing that better than half the U.S. public are now opposing the war. An MSNBC on-line poll (albeit at times a most unscientific measuring barometer of public opinion) begun in mid- June showed that 95-percent of the 58,000 responding believed that “President Bush misled the nation in order to to go to war with Iraq.” Perhaps our nation's citizens are coming out from the fog of war and unflinching acceptance of fearful words from the White House. The deception of the administration in its Iraq policy and its ignoring of international law in mistreating and detaining without charge or trial of a few thousand so called “enemy combatants” are among the many reasons progressive leaders and journalists are declaring that a “Resolution of Inquiry” should be drawn up to consider the impeachment of Pres. Bush, Vice-president Cheney and several other administration officials (see htpp://democracyrising.us/content/view/245/164 to view an essay by Kevin Zeese and Ralph Nader and an article in the July issue of the Progressive at http://63.247.66.90/~progress/?q=mag_impunity, both detailing possible violations of the law which rise to the level of impeachment). As the bumper sticker states these days, “Regime Change Should Begin at Home.” Such public discussion of impeaching a president and other White House officials may make us somewhat uncomfortable, yet we owe it to ourselves, our children, the peoples of Iraq and other lands to hold all possible war criminal (including U.S. officials) responsible for crimes against their people and for those against humanity. Politically, there are many encouraging signs of change, particularly the leadership shown by Rep. John Conyers of Michigan, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee. He has led a grouping of more than 90 U.S. Representatives pushing the Bush-Cheney administration for an exit strategy from Iraq. Bucking an apathetic media wall, Rep. Conyers also held an historic hearing on June 16, to consider the implications of the Downing Street memo. He and several colleagues hand-delivered more than half a million signatures of U.S. citizens demanding to know answers of the White House to questions raised by the memo. That same day four U.S. representatives, including two Republicans announced a resolution calling for the President to craft by the end of the year an exit strategy from Iraq and to start bringing troops home by Oct. 1, 2006. While it's a step in the right direction and progress for GOP lawmakers, it has the appearance of political chicanery. It looks to me as though these politicians, observing the building wave of popular resistance to the war, want to ride it rather than be wiped out politically a month later in the Congressional election. Would the administration suddenly stop the troop pull-out after the election, once the Republicans and other conservative lawmakers had their chance to look dovish? Call me a cynical realist. We, peace advocates, need to be careful not to fall into political traps. Let us insist on the immediate withdrawal of all U.S. forces. Such a withdrawal was expected by the Bush-Cheney administration of Syrian troops from Lebanon. It was a much smaller force, but the several thousand-person force was withdrawn in a month or so not 1 ½ years. Hopefully, we as a people will heighten our awareness of the intrinsic value of each being on the planet. I was distressed the other day while listening to the Diane Rehm Show. She was talking with a newspaper photographer about the Pentagon and media tacit agreement not to show the human horrors of war-- those who have been killed or severely wounded in war, unlike news outlets in other nations. She prefaced one question asking if refraining to do so was a means to hide the fact that 1700 U.S. soldiers had been killed or that 12,000 Iraqis had been killed by “insurgents.” It wasn't a horrible question, but a woefully incomplete one. What about the more 100,000 Iraqis killed through war waged by U.S. forces? Let us struggle nonviolently, remembering all those affected by the brutality of war, recalling our kinship to all the Iraqi people, to U.S. soldiers, to all inhabitants peoples. Let us wage peace and push for an immediate withdrawal of all our troops and all U.S. military bases from Iraqi soil. Let us provide U.S. funding to rebuild the war-ravaged nation through a truly international process and organization. End the U.S. military occupation now at this, a most fertile and apparent opportune time of change. -Jeff Stack
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