The paper reported the death of 8 more US soldiers today. Once again, a coffin returned to Sawtown with the remains of another of our children. We honor their sacrifice and we question the impossible mission they are asked to do. The debate is growing and is becoming increasingly polarized. It is even on the airwaves.
The call-in host had the telephone caller tied in verbal knots. He was so frustrated that he lost his train of thought and blurted out, “Thank-god the liberals weren’t in control when Hitler was in power or he’d still be there today.”
There was no sound, no response for what seemed like minutes. Even a second of quiet on the radio sounds like a long time. The host finally simply replied, “We were, or don’t you remember FDR?”
Our typically short US memory and the re-writing of history now has many of us believing that the Republicans are strong on security and the Democrats are weak. This is most likely because Reagan was willing to bankrupt the US Treasury and condemn us and our children for generations to come to paying off a debt that went directly into the pockets of the nation’s richest 5%. In the process he also bankrupted the USSR and put millions of people into poverty, creating fertile fields for social unrest for decades yet to come. That is the image; the reality is something completely different.
The history of most of the 20th century is that Democrats were the party of war and Republicans were the party of peace. The roll call is pretty clear: Wilson-WWI, FDR-WWII, Truman-Korea, JFK/LBJ-Viet Nam, and Clinton-Bosnia. Okay, Bush, Sr. did the Kuwait thing but it hardly counted as a war (although even he knew enough not to completely destabilize the region); neither did Granada, Panama, or any of those neo-colonial forays where the opponent didn’t really have an army. It takes two to tango and to make war.
The lessons learned here seems pretty straight forward. When we fight as an occupying force by ourselves we don’t do so well. When we are part of a global force we do pretty well. In those cases where we win and don’t occupy we do best of all.
The other lesson is that winning the peace is as important or more so than winning the war. The Marshall Plan in Europe and MacArthur’s occupation in Japan understood the importance of national institutions, insuring reasonable governance, and taking care of people regardless of the color of their skin, their nationality, and friend and former foe alike.
Democracy is not a seed which can be planted and ignored. Democracy rarely succeeds where there are great disparities in wealth, significant numbers of voters starving, and the absence of functioning legal systems. Even where a strong democratic tradition exists hunger and despair seem to be able to easily overwhelm it. WWII was clearly the outcome of a failure of democratic institutions in the axis countries primarily because of the world’s failure to win the peace after WWI. (The League of Nations was no UN).
Every war fought since 1789 resulted in the deaths of workers and their sons disproportionately to the wealthy and their sons. The volunteer army makes this imbalance even more lopsided. High unemployment in urban ghettoes, racist labor markets, and high college education costs means that we have substituted an economic draft for a political one.
Workers and their sons and now their daughters are still dying in greater numbers than the rich. Halliburton, big oil, and defense contractors all make billions while we fight to save pension plans and health insurance coverage.
Great nations are not judged by how many wars they win or by how many people they kill. Great nations are judged by their contribution to the betterment of humankind and the quality of life of their citizens. The Egyptians gave us math, and engineering, the Greeks poetry, philosophy, and theater. Rome advanced these into the most complex social structure of its time including a republican form of government even though it only lasted a few hundred years.
How will we be judged? Coca-Cola and the atomic bomb? The war on terrorism can not be won with bombs and bullets. It can be won with food, jobs, and education both overseas and at home.
The downfall of most empires has been that they failed to adapt to change. The conditions that were in place that lead to their ascendancy get ritualized and frozen. We “won” WWII and now we try to replicate that in every war we fought thereafter. We sweep into the country convincing ourselves that we have liberated it. Other countries have changed, adapted to the new realities. We seem not to.
We are at war. We are fighting our workers, our seniors, our children, our urban poor, and our people of color. We are also fighting to make the world safe for big oil and big corporations.
The buzz on the street of Sawtown is that it is time to give peace a chance.
August 31, 2006
