This was published by Veterans for Peace on their website.
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If One is Peaceful, and Helpless to Change Evident Wrong, What is Left?
Twelve years ago on February 15, 2003—12 to 14 million persons, the largest public protest in world history (Guinness Book of Records) took to the streets worldwide to protest America's imminent attack on Iraq. The French academic Dominique Reynié said 36 million persons, from January 3 to April 12, 2003 combined in almost 3,000 protests against the impending Iraq war. And not only this massive outpouring of individual passions, but almost every organized US religion opposed the imminent war, including the US Conference of Catholic Bishops. Pope John Paul II said then, "No to war! War is not an inevitably."
Key US allies—notably France, Germany, New Zealand and others—also strongly opposed such war, stating no significant evidence of weapons of mass destruction existed. That to invade Iraq was legally unjustified in context of the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Committee's own 12 February 2003 report. Nevertheless, as though dismissing cries of a petulant child, Messrs. Bush and Cheney (each a self-professed "legal" Vietnam War draft evader) hubristically launched their "Operation Iraqi Freedom" on 19 March, 2003.
It is impossible to describe in a few words here, the incalculable human tragedy, financial waste and unintended liberation of world terrorism directly caused since then by this inept, illegal, corrupting decision, made not by a democratic nation after due deliberation, but by a small controlling cabal of political, military and industrial adventurers.
As one of many significant worldwide peace-seeking organizations, and as we consider our mission to help change America's militarization into peace-based policy, we in Veterans For Peace face a chilling reality: that based on recent revelations by eminent historians and economists, the ability of the US public to cause real change to war policies initiated by actual power controllers of America—the military/industrial complex and financial elites—through the electoral process or public demonstrations is just about zero.
A recently released peer-reviewed study—"Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens" —states: "The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence." In effect, that the US is now, officially, an oligarchy.
Michael Glennon, former legal counsel to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, alludes to this problem as well in his new book "National Security and Double Government." He says the US defense and national security apparatus is effectively self-governing, with virtually no accountability, transparency, check and balances of any kind. And there's no real hope to change this through voting, he says, due to pervasive political ignorance on the part of the American people, and our indifference to the threat emerging from these concealed institutions!
OK, so what can a small, peace-driven local group, such as NE Ohio's Chapter 39, VFP, do to constrain America's massive, dangerous war-thirsty oligarchy? Glennon observes that if change is to happen, reform energy must come from the American people, not from government as government is the problem. But this is nigh impossible, he says, because public ignorance is in many ways rational, e.g., there's little profit in our learning about, and trying to resolve, problems we can’t affect, policies we can’t change.
Nevertheless, I have copied the following paragraph from Mark D. Morrison-Reed's book "The Selma Awakening", wherein Rev. Reed describes the mindset of the relatively few Selma protesters who in March, 1965, confronted the massive residual evil of America's human slavery, then condoned by both law and religion and thus considered to be unchangeable. He said: "It is not possible, nor necessary, to know the outcome of our actions; therefore we act in faith. Faith asks not that we succeed, Conscience urges us on, for we have dreamed of a better, more just tomorrow. We dare; therefore we act. In acting, we risk having our hearts broken a thousand times; therefore, we are sustained by hope. This is the price those who cleared the way for us accepted. It is what living fully, deeply and with integrity demands."
Veterans For Peace can, and will, do at least this.
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Walt Nicholes, President Chapter 39 Veterans For Peace, NEOH
(Nicholes is a World War II veteran and president of Chapter 39, Veterans For Peace, NEOH)
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