Ten best reasons to send more US troops to Afghanistan
10. If you want to breed and train more would-be terrorists who hate the USA, the best way to do so is attacking Afghan villages where key Al Qaeda cells have left to regroup elsewhere.
9. If you want to keep Afghan women powerless, ignore the advice of their own leaders that grass-roots economic development is crucial — and send the Marines instead, to boost the power of macho warlords who gather loyalty by fighting foreign invaders.
8. If you want to make sure that no one is learning that government could do good things like building schools and community health clinics in America, hiring teachers and writers and railroad construction workers, feeding hungry children, or renewing our rotting sewer system — then sink hundred of billions of dollars into this war so as to bankrupt domestic-needs programs.
7. If you want to make even higher profits from burning oil and coal instead of letting America invest in creating a wind/solar renewable energy network that will heal the climate crisis, free us from coal and oil, and make America competitive again — a multi-billion-dollar war is terrific.
6. If you want to stymie all investigations into past use of torture and “extraordinary rendition” by past US governments and utterly negate the closing of Guantanamo, multiplying prisoners in Bagram (Afghanistan) will help a great deal.
5. If you like to knit blankets for legless veterans while making sure the Veterans Administration will be so swamped with the wounded that they have to wait months for treatment despite the best efforts of overworked staff, many many more maimed soldiers are by far the best result of a war.
4. If you are trying to do research on the suicide rate, homeless rate, and other symptoms of post-traumatic stress syndrome, there will never be a better milieu for producing experimental subjects.
3. If you want to create a surge of right-wing populist rage that will shatter the Democratic Party and elect Sarah Palin President in 2012, then combine thousands of dead and maimed American soldiers with millions of unemployed American workers.
If you can think of two more, please add them by commenting at the bottom of the page. AND — if you think all these are terrible reasons and would like to tell your Senators to oppose sending more troops, please click here.
and fax them. We have provided a usable letter; we welcome your adding your own thoughts.
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Comments
16 comments postedIf you’re a currency speculator betting against the dollar, pray and work for pouring more money into escalating the war in Afghanistan. It’s actually a no brainer—Higher war profits and continuing deficits that will eventually sink the dollar—and make a fortune for the Wall St. derivatives traders.
If you want to perpetuate the lie that pursuing war and destruction is the way to achieve peace, then send 30,000 (or however many you choose) soldiers into Afghanistan.
If you can imagine sending your daughters at 18 to war….
If you want to increase the debt they will have to pay….
THE U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES CAN STOP THE WARS BY NOT INITIATING ANOTHER FUNDING BILL FOR THEM.
THE PRESIDENT CAN DECIDE NOT TO ESCALATE THE WAR IN AFGHANISTAN AND START SENDING TROOPS HOME
VETERANS FOR PEACE AND ITS ALLIES CAN COMPEL THEM TO DO SO
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To President Obama and the House of Representatives:
As veterans of our nation’s wars, we insist you hear our call.
British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin spoke an unassailable truth when he said, “War would end if the dead could return.” If you believe that is true, Mr. President and Members of the House, you must heed our counsel well: we are the closest anyone can come to that truth the dead would speak. Stop the killing!
Because we personally understand what war truly means, we have written, called and demonstrated repeatedly for an end to the killing in Afghanistan and Iraq. We have protested at and have been arrested in House Office Buildings, the House Gallery, the White House and Congressional offices across the nation. We have pleaded, then demanded, that you stop the suffering in these countries. Although promised prior to the election, no combat brigades have returned from Iraq. And now we can smell the mire of escalation in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Nevertheless, we cannot cease to appeal to that spark of humanity in your hearts. We know wealthy, powerful interests such as weapons contractors, lobbyists and right-wing broadcasters daily make a deafening noise, trying to drown out the voice that insists, “Stop the killing.” We also know that no matter how quiet the voice of humanity might become, it can never be silenced.
So we lift up to you voices much more eloquent than our own, voices of soldiers who survived the worst fighting human beings have ever experienced, World War One. For nearly 100 years, the wisdom and compassion of their poetry has endured. Their words now stand as one of the world’s most powerful witnesses to the madness of war.
You must hear them.
…And you yourself would mutter when
You took the things that once were men,
And sped them through that zone of hate
To where the dripping surgeons wait;
And wonder too if in God’s sight
War ever, ever can be right.
- From “Foreword” by British ambulance driver, Robert Service
And
…If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.
- From “Dulce et Decorum est” (It is Sweet and Right to Die for Your Country) by British Army Lt. Wilfred Owen, killed a week before the 1918 Armistice.
More than that we cannot say to you, so we will address our former brothers and sisters in arms who are now our brothers and sisters in peace.
Veterans For Peace urged its chapters to demonstrate opposition to the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan by doing two things:
1) Take the actions listed below within the next several days, after President Obama decides to escalate the war in Afghanistan, and
2) Plan acts of even greater resistance during the two days following such a decision.
Continue writing and calling our representatives and demanding peace.
If we’ve done that: take to the streets
If we’ve done that: sit down in the streets
If we’ve done that: sit down in Congressional offices
If we’ve done that: sit down, clog up, incapacitate, call in sick, withdraw consent and generally bring the nation’s business to a halt, wherever and whenever we can, with any peaceful means available.
Let me repeat - all actions must be nonviolent and peaceful. Sample Letter to follow.
2- those of us who believed Obama that “all” his budget requests would be in the one appropriations bill will be vindicated since the escalation for Afghanistan will be done at no cost, or will come from oil revenue, and will not require a supplemental appropriation.
you forget that if you want to get red of few young American soldiers send them to be killed by el qaeda and Taliban warier
If you want to deeply root futility in the hearts and minds of young Americans who are witnessing an ever increasing hopelessness among their financially and spiritually starved parents and friends, then sink more billions into militarism and ignore the desperate pleas of American citizens to stop the wars and heal our minds, our bodies, our spirits, and our relationship with the earth itself, as well as the people who populate it.
If you want to show how the Obama Administration has kowtowed to the warmongering influence of “The Family” made infamous in Jeff Sharlet’s historical expose of the same title, and perpetuate the endless war that Gore Vidal describes in “Dreaming War” and “Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace,” then march into the future of the valley of death bringing evil with every bullet and perpetual debt with every $45 gallon of gas (TIME, this week).
Two more reasons
2. Will continue Mr. Bush’s policy successes.
1. Will encourage good will toward Americans everywhere.
If we want to flaunt just how little the United States has learned from our economic challenged; them making a shakey commitment of some $400 billion is sure to expose our inability to learn.
If you want more proof that the Democrats are just as hawkish as the Republicans and that the claim they are a lesser evil is just a myth, carefully watch Obama and the Democratic-controlled Congress escalate in Afghanistan.
If you want still more proof that electoral politics — as opposed to direct actions — is an empowerment scam, similar to democratically-elected student councils, support the Afghanistan invasion and occupation. Just like Woodrow Wilson in WWI and LBJ in Vietnam, this anti-war vote quickly produced expanded war!
If you want to be economically so indebted to China that the US will move further down the road to losing its economic freedom, raise the deficit beyond repair (that is the real deficit including war costs) by hugely increasing military spending in a miss-directed effort.
If you want to fuel more Major Hasans as per Thomas Friedman in today’s NY Times at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/29/opinion/29friedman.html?em, send more US troops to Afghanistan
If you wish to define whether you are a fraud or a hypocrit go ahead and pursue a policy of deceit and misinformation in Afghanastan. You have abandoned your progressive base, those who worked and supported you, on health care, civil rights, economic recovery, Honduras, land-mines and now you can join those Republicans and reactionaries who decry your every move in a twisted idealological subservience to General McCrystal who will stand in history with General George McClelland, General George Custer,General Douglas McArthur, and General William Westmoreland. But please, in your address regarding our presence in Western Asia have the decency to at least mention the matter of the oil and gas pipelines being constructed or in the planning stage and supported by United States corporate interests.
Dear Dr. Keister, It’s a little staggering to see someone so totally miss the point of what I thought was such obvious sarcasm in the “Ten Best Reasons,” but I’d be glad to have more details on that pipeline. — Shalom, AW
It gives Barack Obama a place to land on his way to Copenhagen. He can land in Kabul and transfer to a chopper, so he himself can rise in a black helicopter to a menacing height and light some Apache missile fire launched by his own trigger finger into the rebels. When Obama lands, he can walk the now “safer” streets, and see the conditions in which the rebels are just trying to live with decency or make a living in the war torn country that our Creator saw fit for them to be born in. Then he can call and ask Congressman Kucinich, “If we are the one’s we have been waiting for, what are we here to do?” Dennis can remind him that we are here to create the conditions of peace, and more trolling soldiers are the conditions for war for ages. That’s some contemplation material on the second leg of his trip to Copenhagen.
If you are concerned that the U.S. has lost its world lead in many measures (health, education, etc.) and needs to reassert its ability to lead in something, showing the physical and moral ability to blackmail and terrorize countries and kill resistant people around the world by escalating in Afghanistan is just your ticket.
If you want to “perfect” the drone weaponry (and the drone people to devise and run foreign/military policy), Afghanistan escalation offers many remote places inaccessible to world media for your experimentation.