Humanitarian aid to Afghanistan -- or to the entire world, for that matter, including our own country [America] -- would cost a fraction of what we spend on wars and war preparations, and would make us the most beloved nation on earth. I bet wed favor that course if asked. We were asked on Syria, and we told pollsters we favored aid, not missiles. We stopped the missiles. Congress members in both houses and parties said they heard from more people, more passionately, and more one-sidedly than ever before. But we didnt stop the guns that we opposed even more than the missiles in polls. The CIA shipped the guns to the fighters without asking us or the Congress. And Syrians didnt get the aid that we favored. We arent asked about the drone strikes. We arent asked about most military operations. And we arent being asked about Afghanistan. Nor is Congress asserting its power to decide. This state of affairs suggests that we havent learned our lesson from the Syrian Missile Crisis. Fewer than one percent of us flooded Congress and the media with our voices, and we had a tremendous impact. The lesson we should learn is that we can do that again and again with each new war proposal. What if two percent of us called, emailed, visited, protested, rallied, spoke-out, educated, and non-violently resisted 10 more years in Afghanistan? Wed have invented a new disease. Theyd replace the Vietnam Syndrome with the Afghanistan Syndrome. Politicians would conclude that the U.S. public was just not going to stand for any more wars. Only reluctantly would they try to sneak the next one past us. Or we could sit back and keep quiet while a Nobel Peace Prize winner drags a war hes ending out for another decade, establishing that theres very little in the way of warmaking outrages that we wont allow them to roll right over us. - David Swanson warisacrime.org/content/10-more-years-afghanistan#.UpQX6lPJHDY.facebook
Posted on: Tue, 26 Nov 2013 05:55:15 +0000
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