Sunday, June 27, 2010

First Bold Move Away from "Graveyard of Empires"?


The New York Times and Reader-Supported News

Op-Ed Columnist
The 36 Hours That Shook Washington

By Frank Rich
Published: June 25, 2010

THE moment he pulled the trigger, there was near-universal agreement that President Obama had done the inevitable thing, the right thing and, best of all, the bold thing. But before we get carried away with relief and elation, let’s not forget what we saw in the tense 36 hours that fell between late Monday night, when word spread of Rolling Stone’s blockbuster article, and high noon Wednesday, when Obama MacArthured his general. That frenzied interlude revealed much about the state of Washington, the Afghanistan war and the Obama presidency — little of it cheering and none of it resolved by the ingenious replacement of Gen. Stanley McChrystal with Gen. David Petraeus, the only militarily and politically bullet-proof alternative.

What we saw was this: 1) Much of the Beltway establishment was blindsided by Michael Hastings’s scoop, an impressive feat of journalism by a Washington outsider who seemed to know more about what was going on in Washington than most insiders did; 2) Obama’s failure to fire McChrystal months ago for both his arrogance and incompetence was a grievous mistake that illuminates a wider management shortfall at the White House; 3) The present strategy has produced no progress in this nearly nine-year-old war, even as the monthly coalition body count has just reached a new high.

If we and the president don’t absorb these revelations and learn from them, the salutary effects of the drama’s denouement, however triumphant for Obama in the short run, will be for naught.

There were few laughs in the 36 hours of tumult, but Jon Stewart captured them with a montage of cable-news talking heads expressing repeated shock that an interloper from a rock ’n’ roll magazine could gain access to the war command and induce it to speak with self-immolating candor. Politico theorized that Hastings had pulled off his impertinent coup because he was a freelance journalist rather than a beat reporter, and so could risk “burning bridges by publishing many of McChrystal’s remarks.”

That sentence was edited out of the article — in a routine updating, said Politico — after the blogger Andrew Sullivan highlighted it as a devastating indictment of a Washington media elite too cozy with and protective of its sources to report the unvarnished news. In any event, Politico had the big picture right. It’s the Hastings-esque outsiders with no fear of burning bridges who have often uncovered the epochal stories missed by those with high-level access. Woodward and Bernstein were young local reporters, nowhere near the White House beat, when they cracked Watergate. Seymour Hersh was a freelancer when he broke My Lai. It was uncelebrated reporters in Knight Ridder’s Washington bureau, not journalistic stars courted by Scooter and Wolfowitz, who mined low-level agency hands to challenge the “slam-dunk” W.M.D. intelligence in the run-up to Iraq.

Symbolically enough, Hastings was reporting his McChrystal story abroad just as Beltway media heavies and their most bold-faced subjects were dressing up for the annual White House correspondents’ dinner. Rolling Stone has never bought a table or thrown an afterparty for that bacchanal, and it has not even had a Washington bureau since the mid-1970s. Yet the magazine has not only chronicled the McChrystal implosion — and relentlessly tracked the administration’s connections to the “vampire squid” of Goldman Sachs — but has also exposed the shoddy management of the Obama Interior Department. As it happens, the issue of Rolling Stone with the Hastings story also contains a second installment of Tim Dickinson’s devastating dissection of the Ken Salazar cohort, this time detailing how its lax regulation could soon lead to an even uglier repeat of the Gulf of Mexico fiasco when BP and Shell commence offshore drilling in the Arctic Ocean.

The Interior Department follies will end promptly only if Obama has learned the lessons of the attenuated McChrystal debacle. Lesson No. 1 should be to revisit some of his initial hiring decisions. The general’s significant role in the Pentagon’s politically motivated cover-up of Pat Tillman’s friendly-fire death in 2004 should have been disqualifying from the start. The official investigation into that scandal — finding that McChrystal peddled “inaccurate and misleading assertions” — was unambiguous and damning.

Once made the top commander in Afghanistan, the general was kept on long past his expiration date. He should have been cashiered after he took his first public shot at Joe Biden during a London speaking appearance last October. That’s when McChrystal said he would not support the vice president’s more limited war strategy, should the president choose it over his own. According to Jonathan Alter in his book “The Promise,” McChrystal’s London remarks also disclosed information from a C.I.A. report that the general “had no authority to declassify.” These weren’t his only offenses. McChrystal had gone on a showboating personal publicity tour that culminated with “60 Minutes” — even as his own histrionic Afghanistan recommendation somehow leaked to Bob Woodward, disrupting Obama’s war deliberations. The president was livid, Alter writes, but McChrystal was spared because of a White House consensus that he was naïve, not “out of control.”

We now know, thanks to Hastings, that the general was out of control and the White House was naïve. The price has been huge. The McChrystal cadre’s utter distaste for its civilian colleagues on the war team was an ipso facto death sentence for the general’s signature counterinsurgency strategy. You can’t engage in nation building without civilian partnership. As Rachel Maddow said last week of McChrystal, “the guy who was promoting and leading the counterinsurgency strategy has shown by his actions that even he doesn’t believe in it.”

This fundamental contradiction helps explain some of the war’s failures under McChrystal’s aborted command, including the inability to hold Marja (pop. 60,000), which he had vowed to secure in pure counterinsurgency fashion by rolling out a civilian “government in a box” after troops cleared it of the Taliban. Such is the general’s contempt for leadership outside his orbit that it extends even to our allies. The Hastings article opens with McChrystal mocking the French at a time when every ally’s every troop is a precious, dwindling commodity in Afghanistan.

In the 36 hours between the Rolling Stone bombshell and McChrystal’s firing, some perennial war cheerleaders in the Beltway establishment, including the editorial page of The Washington Post and Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution, did rally to the general’s defense and implored Obama to keep him in place. George Stephanopoulos, reflecting a certain strain of received Beltway wisdom, warned on ABC that the president risked looking “thin-skinned and petulant” if he fired McChrystal.

But none of the general’s defenders had an argument for him or the war beyond staying the course, poor as the results have been. What McChrystal’s supporters most seemed to admire was his uniquely strong relationship with Hamid Karzai, our Afghanistan puppet. As if to prove the point, Karzai was the most visible lobbyist for McChrystal’s survival last week. He was matched by his corrupt half-brother, the reported opium kingpin Ahmed Wali Karzai, who chimed in to publicly declare McChrystal “honest.” Was Rod Blagojevich unavailable as a character witness?

You have to wonder whether McChrystal’s defenders in Washington even read Hastings’s article past its inflammatory opening anecdotes. If so, they would have discovered that the day before the Marja offensive, the general’s good pal Hamid Karzai kept him waiting for hours so he could finish a nap before signing off on the biggest military operation of the year. Poor McChrystal was reduced to begging another official to wake the sleeping president so he could get on with the show.

The war, supported by a steadily declining minority of Americans, has no chance of regaining public favor unless President Obama can explain why American blood and treasure should be at the mercy of this napping Afghan president. Karzai stole an election, can’t provide a government in or out of a box, and has in recent months threatened to defect to the Taliban and accused American forces of staging rocket attacks on his national peace conference. Until last week, Obama’s only real ally in making his case was public apathy. Next to unemployment and the oil spill, Karzai and Afghanistan were but ticks on our body politic, even as the casualty toll passed 1,000. As a senior McChrystal adviser presciently told Hastings, “If Americans pulled back and started paying attention to this war, it would become even less popular.”

To appreciate how shielded Americans have been from Afghanistan, revisit Rahm Emanuel’s appearance last Sunday morning on “This Week,” just before the McChrystal firestorm erupted. Trying to put a positive spin on the war, the president’s chief of staff said that the Afghans were at long last meeting their army and police quotas. Technically that’s true; the numbers are up. But in that same day’s Washington Post, a correspondent in Kandahar reported that the Afghan forces there are poorly equipped, corrupt, directionless and infiltrated by Taliban sympathizers and spies. Kandahar (pop. 1 million) is supposed to be the site of the next major American offensive.

The gaping discrepancy between Emanuel’s upbeat assessment and the reality on the ground went unremarked because absolutely no one was paying attention. Everyone is now. That, at least, gives us reason to hope that the president’s first bold move to extricate America from the graveyard of empires won’t be his last.

==========================

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on June 27, 2010, on page WK10 of the New York edition of The New York Times.

21 comments:

  1. June 27, 2010
    Tomgram:

    Excerpts:

    Much of the time, our wars may hardly exist for us, but in the age of celebrity, our generals do -- exactly because they become celebrities. When Barack Obama picked Stanley McChrystal as his Afghan war commander, the general was greeted by the media as little short of a savior. He was, we were told, super-humanly fit, utterly austere (eating only one meal a day), and -- strangely for the man who was to oversee a protect-the-people counterinsurgency war -- had spent his professional life in the deepest shadows of counter-terror warfare at the head of groups of hunter-killer special operations forces. His was the darkest of legacies, but he was greeted like Superman.

    ...McChrystal was, in fact, always a divided man, caught between his counter-terror past -- he significantly increased special operations units in Afghanistan and sent them out to hunt Taliban mid-level leaders (and in the process kill civilians) -- and his newer fealty to counterinsurgency which led him to institute rules of “courageous restraint” that left American ground troops grumbling.

    While the president officially picked McChrystal back in 2009, he was, in reality, the choice of Bush’s favorite general, Centcom commander and now new Afghan war commander, General David Petraeus. So the present White House line -- “This is a change in personnel but it is not a change in policy” -- couldn’t be more accurate. There have already been several moments in the Obama presidency when a daring president might have changed the course of the war and begun winding it down... The first two missed moments have already led, via chaos and failure in Afghanistan, to the third, in which the president dethroned a military demi-god for a man genuinely worshipped in Washington.

    David Petraeus is not a blunt instrument. He’s the most politically savvy military man of his generation. It says something about our moment in American war-making, however, that the main claim to fame of the four-star general who is treated like the Ulysses S. Grant of the twenty-first century has nothing to do with victory...

    With Petraeus, Obama again took the easier road in the immediate moment. What will he do, though, in 2011 as the presidential election campaign gears up, if his chosen general, beloved of the right, asks for more troops?

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  2. See also at Tom Dispatch -

    The Land Where Theories of Warfare Go to Die :
    Obama, Petraeus, and the Cult of COIN in Afghanistan
    By Robert Dreyfuss

    Less than a year ago, General David Petraeus saluted smartly and pledged his loyal support for President Obama’s decision to start withdrawing U.S. forces from Afghanistan in July 2011. In December, when Obama decided (for the second time in 2009) to add tens of thousands of additional American forces to the war, he also slapped an 18-month deadline on the military to turn the situation around and begin handing security over to the bedraggled Afghan National Army and police. Speaking to the nation from West Point, Obama said that he’d ordered American forces to start withdrawing from Afghanistan at that time.

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  3. Perhaps this should read An Islamic View...rather arrogant to assume this is the only one? Nevertheless perhaps of note?

    The Islamic View of McChrystal's Firing:

    "History is evident of more powerful and experienced generals than General McChrystal and empires mightier than the United States of America being surrendered and bowed down before the Afghans."
    http://tinyurl.com/2frdljb

    ===

    Quagmire? Nine years on, Americans grow weary of war in Afghanistan:

    A plurality of 48 percent now say ending the war in Afghanistan is a more important goal than winning it.
    http://tinyurl.com/37zzlct

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  4. Although often this The Washington Post newspaper is not a favorite among progressives, perhaps there's something of import here. This was sent by a friend who's much more astute than eye on this topic and with a pulse quite accurate on current events.
    Connie

    Note that the author will be ONLINE 11 am EST for a chat MONDAY:

    Andrew J. Bacevich is a professor of history and international relations at Boston University. His book "Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War" will be published in August. He will be online at 11 a.m. on Monday, June 28, to chat. Submit your questions and comments before or during the discussion.


    http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/25/AR2010062502160_pf.html
    washingtonpost.com

    Endless war, a recipe for four-star arrogance

    By Andrew J. Bacevich
    Sunday, June 27, 2010; B01

    Note the beginning of this article:
    LONG WARS ARE ANTITHETICAL TO DEMOCRACY. (boldened letters are mine - Connie)
    Protracted conflict introduces toxins that inexorably corrode the values of popular government. Not least among those values is a code of military conduct that honors the principle of civilian control while keeping the officer corps free from the taint of politics.

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  5. Endless war, a recipe for four-star arrogance

    By Andrew J. Bacevich
    Sunday, June 27, 2010; B01 Washington Post (notice that the author plans to be online for a chat Monday 11 am) There may be a url above or below on another comment or search...

    Excerpts:

    LONG WARS ARE ANTITHETICAL TO DEMOCRACY. (boldened letters are mine - Connie)
    Protracted conflict introduces toxins... the Rolling Stone profile that led to Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal's dismissal -- hint at the toll that nearly a decade of continuous conflict has exacted on the U.S. armed forces....Wearing four stars does not signify indispensability. But indications that the military's professional ethic is eroding, evident in the disrespect for senior civilians expressed by McChrystal and his inner circle, should set off alarms.

    Earlier generations of American leaders, military as well as civilian, instinctively understood the danger posed by long wars. "A democracy cannot fight a Seven Years War," Gen. George C. Marshall once remarked. The people who provided the lifeblood of the citizen army raised to wage World War II had plenty of determination but limited patience. They wanted victory won and normalcy restored.

    The wisdom of Marshall's axiom soon became clear. In Vietnam, Lyndon B. Johnson plunged the United States into what became its Seven Years War. The citizen army that was sent to Southeast Asia fought valiantly for a time and then fell to pieces. As the conflict dragged on, Americans in large numbers turned against the war -- and also against the troops who fought it.

    ...The Long War is not America's war. It belongs exclusively to "the troops," ...

    ...Stanley McChrystal is no Marcus Flavius, lacking the Roman's eloquence, among other things. Yet in ending his military career on such an ignominious note, he has, however clumsily, issued a warning that deserves our attention.

    The responsibility facing the American people is clear. They need to reclaim ownership of their army. They need to give their soldiers respite, by insisting that Washington abandon its de facto policy of perpetual war...

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  6. Senator Byrd just died...here's an earlier speech of his right before Iraq War. What now for congress? Plz place comments if you'd like to help encourage this blogsite to continue

    http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/06/flashback-sen-byrds-speech-on-eve-of-iraq-war.php?ref=fpblg

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  7. @Connie,A rather lengthy yet complete post covering all the details of the affair.
    I suppose it's time for US to quit before it's forced to as Afganistan has been a graveyard of superpowers as you correctly wrote..:)

    ReplyDelete
  8. Yes, many topical items only need shorter posts or series. Yet, even for records & progressions, other world impacting events need more organized and thorough treatment. Thanx for posting, Syeda. I am grateful and would appreciate your return here often & any suggestions or heads up.

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  9. About this affair,I suppose..US is doing alot of number things wrong.
    Firstly lives are been lost on both sides.

    Secondly,USA,is increasing Terrorism by violence in Afganistan.

    Thirdly,the United states of America is been weaken economically because of this pointless war.

    On a side note,the evacuation of US army is also crucial for my nation's stability as many of the terrorist have fled from Afghanistan to my nation,thus increasing terrorist attacks in my nation.If US leaves Afghanistan soon it won't only help itself but also Pakistan as well.

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  10. Syeda, I could not agree more. The problem is what to do? We have quite a few who are actively trying to end the war and the unconstitutional, inhumane activity since the gitgo. Yet the majority, although they also want the war to end, are not active and in many cases it's due to simply trying to survive and in other cases they are "numbed out"...

    Still we must not give up!

    One of the best things your nation could do is to absolutely refuse to allow Blackwater, Xe Services (and other names Blackwater has come up with and to speak out against their recent contract to operate in Afghanistan. In fact, perhaps you could distribute the latest on Blackwater to your media? I will try to post it soon.

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  11. See the following, Syeda, and perhaps you might have more time than I too follow-up with your favorite media/journlists/lists? There's hardly been a more perfect time to help create fury over Blackwater & Drones in your part of the world. Our nation needs more than humiliation over these huge and inhumane war efforts NOW.
    Again, thanx for your interest.

    Some items just came in after these listed...so will try to post them on the next comment...

    Obama won't charge Blackwater with violation of Sudan sanctions ...
    Jun 27, 2010 ... Posted on Sunday, June 27, 2010. Bookmark and Share ... Obama won't charge Blackwater with violation of Sudan sanctions ...
    www.mcclatchydc.com/

    Beth's Blog
    Sunday, June 27, 2010. Posted by Beth at 4:09 AM . Sunday, June 27, 2010. Labels: posters ... Feds won't charge Blackwater in Sudan sanctions case ...
    bethsownblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/blog-post_1215.html

    Also find related at Asian Times online

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  12. News which just came in for Blackwater

    Sudan Tribune Blackwater deal in Afghanistan questioned by Congress‎ - 3 hours ago


    The Obama administration has awarded $220m (£146m) in new contracts to the military contractor formerly known as Blackwater to provide security...

    The Guardian - 16 related articles »
    CIA defends Blackwater contract‎ - BBC News - 1282 related articles »

    Also another source for the one mentioned, last comment: Obama won't charge Blackwater with violation of Sudan sanctions‎ - San Jose Mercury News - 51 related articles »

    ReplyDelete
  13. For American Citizens & Others: Plz call legislators now: US War Escalation Vote This Week
    ...
    IF you aren't a citizen, would you plz pass this on to lists where there may be some?

    From: David Swanson
    To: "activists@lists.mayfirst.org"

    WarIsACrime.org

    Pelosi and Hoyer Trying to Pass War Escalation Funding By Thursday

    House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, who will openly tell you he does whatever President Obama and Speaker Pelosi instruct, can bring the war escalation funding to the House floor despite the opposition of Appropriations Chairman David Obey. This is because the House passed the bill without the war escalation funding and sent it to the Senate, which has now sent it back to the House.

    The current plan is to pass a single bill that includes both the war money and some lipstick (disaster relief, etc.). This will require keeping the lipstick thin enough to win some Republican votes and slathering it on thick enough to win a lot of Democratic votes (which can also be won through campaign funding, earmarks, committee positions, PR stunts, etc.).

    One trick that will apparently be used to win Democrats' support is the inclusion of extra, meaningless votes, just for show, on the two components of the bill. They'll vote on the war escalation funding, and lots of Democrats will vote No. And they'll vote on the disaster relief, etc., and lots of Republicans will vote No. Both elements will pass, but nothing will have been done. Then they'll hold a meaningful vote on the whole bill, and lots of the Democrats who just moments before pretended to oppose war escalation will vote for the bill that funds it.

    This can only work if Nancy Pelosi is correct in her belief that we're all a bunch of morons.

    You'll be told that they've scaled back the war funding. What they've just done is remove the few crumbs that were intended for potentially useful civilian aid in Afghanistan. Meanwhile they've increased the military funding, which is all for escalating the war and therefore cannot plausible be squeezed into the same sentence with "scaled back."

    You'll be told that separate votes were held and that your representative opposed the war funding. This is nonsense. The only way to oppose war funding is to try to stop it, which means voting against it no matter what else is included.

    Call your Representative through the Capitol Hill switchboard: (202) 224-3121 and send them an Email here.

    They've just been asked by the House Majority Whip how they will vote in the pretend vote on the war funding alone and how they will vote on the actual bill with everything that's in it. Demand to know what answers they gave. Report those answers at http://defundwar.org

    If we can stop this thing through Thursday, we'll have a break over which to continue building opposition, a break during which more news (always bad) will keep coming in from Afghanistan, a July 4th break during which we will celebrate opposition to another foreign occupation.


    If We Don't Stop War Funding, They'll Slash Social Security and Medicare

    That's the plan which was pushed by House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer last week and by unsuccessful corporate pseudo rallies this weekend.

    It's time to choose.


    Don't Let a Bigger War Begin

    nukelogo

    When you call Congress also let them know that you will hold them accountable for any war they allow our country or Israel to launch against Iran.

    Will they commit to ceasing to provide weapons to Israel?

    Will they inform the Secretary of Defense that illegal war is grounds for impeachment?

    Get the latest news at
    http://dontattackiran.org%20

    Participate

    ===========
    Also see the Human Rights Watch release today with the No More Gitmos news listed in Comments http://www.oneheartforpeace.blogspot.com

    ReplyDelete
  14. I suppose there's a bigger thing than lives and economy that's stopping the United States leave Afghanistan.,And that is "Dignity".
    The Army and the Government both don't want to except that they have been defeated.
    They think it's shameful..but everyone knows no army can defeat a nation.Armies are meant to fight with armies not nations.And Afghanistan is a nation at war.There's no army there.

    About your suggestion that our Government should restrict Blackwater away from Pakistan and Afghanistan.This is a very difficult Task as you may know that we haven't been able to resist against USA's orders.

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  15. Syeda,

    Your comment here is in need of a post by itself or an Op Ed by you. Extremely courteous while saying the truth with deep insight. Either it is "Dignity" or it is American untransformed individualistic Ego. Yet, how do such groups get a chance to save face when they've been such bullies and while doing some isolated good mainly made a mess of others' lives and their own?

    This is so well said by you: "everyone knows no army can defeat a nation.Armies are meant to fight with armies not nations.And Afghanistan is a nation at war.There's no army there."

    So both your nation and our people have such a hard time standing up to our leaders...yet that looks like what history and the well-being of our Collective Best is going to mean:

    THE PEOPLE Standing up!

    Let's talk about some ways...

    Thanx so much for this discussion..how do we get better visibility for such a discussion, do you suggest?

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  16. Connie,thanks for showing so much esteem for my views....
    About having any suggestions to bring an end to all of this,I'm blank zero.
    The only possible way is the a united moment just like the Long march we had in Pakistan recently for freedom of judges.
    Moreover,the US citizen should stop believing in figures given by the American press about causalities in Afghanistan.
    There's a banned trust in Karachi,which is allegedly blamed for having links with Taliban.
    That trust issue a weekly newspaper and according to that paper,around 150 soldiers died in the recent attack on Bagram airbase.4 aircrafts were also destroyed.
    So it's more terrible than it seems.
    I'm sure if the US people knew exactly what's the real picture in Afghanistan they won't stop from rushing over to the White house.

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  17. Syeda,

    I would say you are more than "blank zero"...
    That united moment you mentioned, the Long March, was a stellar moment in history for us all.

    And the figures along with history of the US involvement to the detriment of other nations, is staggering. And yes, we should be horrified at what's happening to our own military guys and you would think that would raise up much more action.

    Still, I'm counting on the whole world to continue to rise up to expose and force the US and Israel to be accountable for their evils and to amend their ways.

    We do have quite a few dedicated and courageous ones who right now are making some small headway. And more history is being exposed currently about US overthrows and the havoc it wrecks...in new books. I will try to post some reviews soon...

    Let's keep talking...

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  18. Ahem...
    I was thinking the other day about the title of your blog..
    And I think it isn't appropriate.
    As the EX-US president called this war against terrorism as a 'crusade" back in 2001.
    So it's already another yet crusade going On..!

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  19. Yes, and I'm so glad you brought this up! There are several angles by which this title doesn't work and your perspective here is definitely one of the major concerns.
    Another is that many who don't "get" the need over the years to end US violence say the "Peacemakers" who point out growing parallels to much older Crusades are "Crusading"! In fact a dear aunt of mine whom I hadn't seen in years asked me upon our reunion: Connie, are you still Crusading?

    Also, I admit that in my passion for peace sometimes I do end up sounding like that kind of crusader perhaps my aunt is talking about and 'campaigns' themselves can sometimes be thought to be 'crusades'. I am currently seeking to 'deepen my work' - to Be the Change I want to see in the world, to tell more stories, to find more creative ways to Be Peace and attract peace rather than to lament, rail and to seek to force compliance in any way...

    Still whether or not the US has tried to begin another huge and hellish Crusade (some do understandably believe they have) we can still say NO! (All of us world-wide!) NO -- NO more! Let's unite to STOP IT! There's no more place in history for any more Crusades to become any more full-blown and to continue and to end up causing any more clashing of cultures and religions and GREED FOR OIL, water and land for "look-out posts" for the same. Nor to be a bully over Nuclear "equipment"
    with other nations when the US is the least trustworthy "safe-keeper" nation to handle the same for years to come.

    How might we do this? Well, we citizens of the US must do all we can to stop more funding for our US wars & occupations by VOTE (see the reports of recent voting in House in recent posts here). We can stop being the largest exporter of arms in the world! Exporting arms which end up in the hands of all manner of terrorists beyond the few we keep naming as our "enemies" just doesn't make sense. By this standpoint aren't we perhaps the most hypocritical nation in the world as well whenever we say we are for human rights and a Beacon of Peace on the globe? We must stop our use of torture and assassinations and outsourcing of the same. And we are currently pressured by the world to end our support of Israel for ditto reason. And the guilty UN which ushered such a poorly-conceived plan as the Israel state should be behind us all the way.

    How might we do this worldwide? Well, we do need more non-violent actions and events. Problem here is that sometimes these end up somewhat violent. Some groups unfortunately encourage rioting - random destruction. Sometimes within an entirely peaceful group there have been known to be "plants" whether among US contractors who don't want wars to end because that is how they make their living (like morticians who don't want dying to end? excuse the rough metaphor)...or some other group.

    We do need more trans continental discussions and sites. We do benefit from brave journalists and all manner of writers and historians world-wide.

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  20. And I particularly love inter-faith discussion because I don't see how we're going to break the "stale-mate" of our positions without Spirit helping and because by ourselves united without Spirit we are just not nearly as strong as we may think we are.

    Due to a peacemaker's own logic and/or due the misuse and abuse of religion for way to long and so many wars in the name of God -- some who want peace may not recognize any sort of possibility for God or Allah. Yet even for these there may be a growing appreciation for the spiritual. Many may appreciate Spirit and various ways to put the same...perhaps we might recognize The Collective Humanity among us all at our best, the Collective Soul, the Collective Ego and even Love as that which binds us together: The One Heart of us all (you may want to see that other site I started sometime:

    http://www.oneheartforpeace.blogspot.com

    SO, now we need to look into the most creative, life-sustaining ways. I have a few ideas...yet first, I'd love to hear your own.

    Thanx so much for coming by and leaving your well-considered and quite appropriate comments! I am re-posting this article because there are now stronger winds from US to End the Warring abroad and so this post is still quite current. And hopefully these comments will also stay intact as well. So maybe we will get more visibility for this discussion and encourage others to come by as well? So check and post either place you may wish. I will leave this post here as well.

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  21. I also love to have a discussion on this topic..
    And I guess you did repost this one but the comments didn't remain intact..:)

    ReplyDelete