A Peaceable Proposition – The Golden Rule ‘Greening’ of U.S. Foreign Policy

                                                                An Earth Manifesto publication by Dr. Tiffany B. Twain  

                                                                                                                     January 12, 2010

Just over sixty-eight years ago on December 7, 1941, the Japanese Air Force launched an attack that devastated the U.S. Pacific Fleet stationed at Pearl Harbor on the beautiful Hawaiian Island of Oahu.  This national trauma almost immediately led to the entry of the U.S. into the Second World War.  Americans joined the Allies, a group of nations that had been fighting, in increasing numbers since 1939, the aggressive and violent resource acquisition and world domination gambits of Adolf Hitler’s Germany and Hirohito’s Japan. 

Today, after the triumph of the Allies in World War II and the long Cold War between nuclear-armed superpowers that followed it, the United States is embarked on its own course of superpower domination.  The U.S. military has roughly 1,000 military bases in other nations across the globe, and it is occupying two entire countries in the Middle East with armed forces that are attempting to enforce police-state conditions to stabilize Iraq and Afghanistan against opposition from sectarian insurgents and nationalists and religious fundamentalists and assorted warlords.  The high costs of this aggressive U.S. course of action are mounting steeply in terms of money spent, and sons and daughters killed and injured, and injustices and collateral damages perpetrated, and the violent opposition and terrorist reactions that are being stimulated by our violations of the sovereignty of other nations. 

General Douglas MacArthur once said:  “I believe that the entire effort of modern society should be concentrated on the endeavor to outlaw war as a method of the solution of problems between nations.”  We must begin to recognize the transcendental truth of this compelling observation.  It should, in fact, become a defining principle of American foreign policies.  The United States should begin to courageously act in ways that are consistent with this understanding.

We must also begin to recognize the profound ecological folly of war.  There is a very heavy ‘carbon footprint’ of American military occupations and the many bases that we maintain abroad.  The U.S. military uses more oil every year for its occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan than is used by all of the 1.1 billion people of India.  These wars add more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than over half of the world’s countries.  Even the Pentagon has admitted that far-reaching and exorbitantly-costly national security risks are posed by global warming and abrupt climate change which are being caused by steadily increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

Professor Bruce E Johansen observes:  “Peacemakers are often assumed to be naïve dreamers.  Given the environmental circumstances, however, the timely end to wars is not naïve, but necessary.  The Earth can no longer afford war.”

This state of affairs in the world calls for a broad and transformative 'greening' of all aspects of business and governmental activities.  We must stop stubbornly defending the entrenched status quo.  And no mere ‘greenwashing’ will suffice.  Progressive change is needed for our human civilization to survive and prosper.  Bold and wide-ranging reforms must be made that are in accord with common sense and the clearest understandings of ecologists, philosophers, psychologists, sociologists, political scientists, statespersons, economists, biologists, and spiritual leaders.  The wisest understandings of honestly ethical lawyers and politicians, if any, should also be taken into account. 

‘Ha!’, you may think!  Ethical lawyers and politicians?  Note that there actually have been honest politicians, despite our generally appropriate cynicism in this regard.  Consider, for instance, the honorable progressive Senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota, who died in an airplane crash in 2002.  He believed that politics should be about more than power and money and winning at any cost.  He noted:  “Politics is about the improvement of people’s lives.  It’s about advancing the cause of peace and justice in our country and in the world.” 

Let us collectively embrace this idea, and simultaneously recognize that there is a deep truth in Mark Twain’s observation:

     “An inglorious peace is better than a dishonorable war.”   

Freedom is one of the highest values of human aspiration.  In light of this fact, we should organize our societies in ways that maximize intrinsic and ‘unalienable’ human rights and civil liberties.  These freedoms can be assured only in the context of an adherence to Golden Rule ethics, in which every individual agrees to abide by the responsibilities of the greater social good and reasonable rules of law. 

In connection with this overarching individual responsibility, we should all oppose efforts by our leaders to wage wars of aggression, which were deemed “the supreme international crime” by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg after World War II.  We have had quite enough of self-serving bombastic war-justifying propaganda, and we need to begin to understand that our national security is bound up with the mutual security of people everywhere.  The imperial ambitions and domineering militarism of our leaders is contrary to peaceable goals and truer mutual security!

History shows that the more money a nation spends on its military, the more likely it is to go to war.  This historical fact reinforces the value of the idea that we should reduce the enormous amount of money we spend on our military.  The savings we achieve from this change should be redirected to domestic investments like healthcare and nutrition and education and progress toward a more sensible and fiscally responsible balanced budget.

And in the future, before we launch any militant attempts to bring safety and security and order, or freedom, or democracy, to people in other countries, it should be mandatory that we recognize that a repressive war zone is NOT the ideal place for such initiatives.  If, per chance, our national motives are more complex and distinctly different than the rationalizations used to convince the public of the case for preemptive wars, our own democratic society should make concerted efforts to really understand WHY we go to war, and also why we continue our military occupations no matter how damaging, unjust, costly or counterproductive they become.  This essay delves into these topics.

As our world becomes increasingly crowded, war becomes ever more dangerously a “disastrous anachronism”.  The need grows for us to channel heated sensibilities and violent emotions and aggressive impulses and conflicting conceptions of the greater good into less adversarial and more peaceful methods of ensuring the common good.

The national elections of November 2008 promised hope of positive change in the status quo of the domestic and foreign policies of the United States.  The American people have been getting increasingly frustrated with the extremely costly quagmire of our military occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.  They want to be able to believe that the U.S. can alter its course and bring its troops home and stop intervening militarily in the affairs of other nations.  They yearn to have faith that our democratic republic will more honestly and prudently honor its national ideals.  At the same time, people want our leaders to be more fair and sensible in addressing the compelling global challenges that face humanity. 

Unfortunately, we have chosen a tight spot ‘between a rock and a hard place’.  If we cease our Middle East military occupations and bring our troops home, we will ‘lose face’ and feel the psychological sting of failure and defeat, and risk empowering those who we have been exploiting and humiliating for years.  If we further escalate these wars and try to occupy Afghanistan and Iraq indefinitely, we will figuratively bleed to death with the big financial and social and moral costs of our militarism and imperial hubris and our clinging to hyper-dependence on Middle East oil to power our civilization.

The organization EarthJustice is founded on a very sensible and propitious idea.  It is dedicated “to protecting the magnificent places, natural resources, and wildlife of this earth and to defending the right of all people to a healthy environment.”  Unfortunately, because of the high costs and the ecological folly of our militarism and wars, ‘green’ goals like this are being subverted.  Let’s change this!  Let’s begin to more intelligently balance our means and our commitments and weigh all foreign policy courses of action in the light of broader considerations.

The U.S. needs an exit strategy from our occupations of Middle Eastern nations, and we must not continue to commit ourselves to endless wars with so many risks and injustices.  We should stop wielding such blunt foreign policy instruments as ‘preemptive wars’ and harsh economic sanctions that really hurt the people of other nations rather than the regimes we oppose.  Read on for elaborated insights.

Considerations of U.S. Policy in Afghanistan

Let’s be honest with ourselves, my fellow Americans!  Let us see through the fog of self-justifying rationalizations and propaganda that tell us we are the good guys with a humble foreign policy.  We have a more extensive and far-flung military empire than any nation in history, with millions of troops and contractors and support personnel stationed in more than 130 countries abroad.  We have acted on the international stage with imperialistic aggression and arrogance by embracing preemptive warfare and a hard-nosed offensive “you’re-either-with-us-or-against-us” posture, instead of acting with greater fairness and focusing on the mutual security of all involved.  Our military occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq are ruthlessly repressive, and they thus cause terrible collateral damages and widespread hardships and injustices.  This understandably stokes insurgent opposition.

In the wake of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trace Center and the Pentagon, it would have been far better if President Bush and his cronies had seen beyond their ideologies and propensities for retribution and their poorly-focused aggression, and if they had heeded Mark Twain’s wise observation about American military adventurism: 

     “It is easier to stay out than get out.”  

We have been occupying Afghanistan longer than the Soviet Union did during its terribly destructive war from 1980 to 1988, and longer than the combined amount of time that the U.S. fought in World Wars I and World War II.  We should have learned the lesson from the Soviet Union’s misguided war in Afghanistan that it is dirty business that is quite likely destined to be an extraordinarily damaging failure.  This failure is a probability no matter how many troops we send there, because it is a brutally unjust occupation that creates practical grievances and numerous civilian casualties and widespread anger and exacerbated instability.  Insurgent opposition is the inevitable and natural result of our heavy-handed militarism.

If the U.S. were to be occupied by a foreign power, for any reason whatsoever, millions of freedom-embracing, gun-loving Americans would be immediately radicalized into powerful opposition to foreign armies and air forces and military police and security agents.  This insurgency would fight occupiers from the beginning, especially if our society was so poor and unstable that there was 40% unemployment, like there is in Afghanistan. 

Think about it!  About half the people of Afghanistan are under 20 years old.  We will never win the hearts and minds of such young people if we contribute to social problems in their country like ethnic conflicts, corruption, widespread poverty, unemployment, heavy civilian casualties, and cultural oppression.  An arrogant attitude that presupposes superior Western military and cultural and political power stokes resentment and stimulates the motives for blowback retaliations.  Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam War, insightfully noted in the film The Fog of War, that we do not have the God-given right to shape every nation in our image, so we should not act as if we do! 

We should find a fair and safe way to extricate our country from what is essentially a civil struggle between warlords of the Pashtun ethnic group and Tajiks and Uzbecs.  Our military presence in Afghanistan is making problems worse, not better, by fueling the growth of insurgent opposition, according to Matthew Hoh, a former Foreign Service official in Afghanistan, who recently resigned from his position in protest of our nation’s policies.  He pointed out that it is foolish not to have a more clearly focused mission. 

We got into occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq in a similar way that we got into the war in Vietnam.  Many misconceptions and much simplistic propaganda and a number of outright distortions of the truth were used to sell these wars to the American people.  Our economic aggression and military presence in the Middle East were the primary causes of the blowback terrorism of 9/11 in the first place.  The reasons now being given to support a further escalation of the war in Afghanistan are equally simplistic, and often bogus. 

First, we are principally fighting Afghani insurgents, not al Qaeda, and our presence is exacerbating the more dangerous instability in Pakistan.  Second, we cannot free the Afghani people from some monolithic ‘Taliban’ in what is a very complex cultural array of ethnic sectarian forces fighting there.  Ronald Reagan called the insurgents “freedom fighters” in the 1980’s when they were fighting the Russian occupation and the puppet Afghan government, and to regard them now as ‘terrorists’ is disingenuous and inaccurate.  Third, the central government we are supporting is barely legitimate, and it is amongst the most corrupt in the world.  Fourth, the belief that it is a feasibly good idea to try to quickly train a large and costly Afghan army and police force that is adequate to suppress warring civil factions is mad.  How can we stabilize Afghanistan when it is our military presence itself that causes most of the insurgent opposition and suicide bombings?

We should ‘Rethink Afghanistan’, and ‘Get Afghanistan Right’!  We eventually must find civilian solutions to the problems in the Middle East, rather than futilely trying to force military solutions.  Endless wars and military occupations with unclear missions are NOT necessary.  We have chosen them, and it is time to reconsider such strategies before they bankrupt our nation financially, socially and morally.

We are supporting a corrupt central government in Kabul, not a great experiment in democracy in Afghanistan.  A ‘corruption perceptions index’ is prepared every year by a global civil society organization called Transparency International.  Their 2009 study was published on November 17, 2009, and it indicated that the public sector in Afghanistan is the second-most corrupt government in the world, out of 180 countries studied.  There is rampant bribery and cronyism and fraud and opium production involvements and misuse of our aid.  The United States should put more pressure on Afghan President Hamid Karzai to negotiate with moderate leaders of the Taliban, whose fanatic fringe may be religious reactionaries who favor the oppression of women, but they are more legitimate than occupying American forces, who are ‘infidels’ that have replaced the Russians in another harsh military occupation of their country.

The U.S. should shift more of its foreign aid to non-military assistance, and help the Afghani people to live better and more secure lives.  We should have adopted a similar strategy at the end of ‘Charlie Wilson’s War’ in 1988, rather than abandoning war-ravaged Afghanistan to ruthless Taliban warlords.  The only way to achieve enduring peace in Afghanistan is arguably to help create conditions there in which the Afghani people are somewhat more free from fear and insecurity and desperation.  We must recognize that Western-style democracy and religious tolerance, and strong guarantees of women’s rights, and the separation of church and state, are all anathema to Afghan political and tribal culture, and that we will never be victorious in imposing our ways upon them.

The United States has spent more than $225 billion on the war in Afghanistan already, and 95% of this has been for military actions, not humanitarian assistance.  Imagine how much goodwill we could have bought for a fraction of that amount of money!  We could have helped the Afghani people build hospitals, water systems, schools, libraries, bridges, roads and other infrastructure.  Unfortunately, while we seem to have an open checkbook for wars, there is very strong opposition to more generous forms of foreign aid, just as there is to fairer and more universal forms of healthcare at home.

Wars that have confused purposes and unclear missions are foolish and costly.  The stated intentions of our leaders are long on idealism and bravado and self-righteousness, but they are short on honest motivations and achievable missions and smart strategic planning.  The result is that our actions tend to be unquestionably counterproductive.  Not only do they foment insurgencies, but they also breed radical opposition, inflame hatreds, increase the motives for global jihad, perpetuate endless conflicts, counter-support terrorist tactics, and undermine regional stability.  These are very negative outcomes, so it is downright foolish to continue to pursue policies with such adverse results.

‘Hard Power’ Versus ‘Soft Power’

History reveals that military overstretch has been a significant factor in the decline and fall of many empires.  Now is the time for the U.S. to choose more humble and sane and fair and affordable and sustainable courses of action.  We have backed ourselves into a corner of distorted priorities and costly actions and wrong-headed aggression, and we are now seeing that arrogant ‘hard power’ is a poor substitute for smarter and fairer principles of ‘soft power’.  We need to understand this distinction more clearly. 

The power and prestige of the United States in the world are diminished when our foreign policies are founded on repulsive ‘hard power’ gambits like intimidation, coercion, deception, naked aggression, unilateralism, heartless economic sanctions, self-serving ideologies, ruthless covert operations, military occupations, trigger-happy security forces, kicked-in doors, harsh interrogations, horrid prison conditions, and extensive ‘collateral damage’ from air strikes.  This is why injustice, brutality, torture, hypocrisy, arrogance and triumphalism create insurgent opposition, and make us more vulnerable.  War should always be a last resort.

When we rely so heavily on hard power policies, our influence is eventually eroded and our national security interests are harmed.  Positive ‘soft power’ values are more attractive because they are admirable and decent and just.  Attributes of ‘soft power’ include democratic fairness, adherence to rules of law, respect for human rights, protections of individual liberties, good neighbor policies, generous foreign aid, and policies that are multilateral and mutually beneficial.  Fair-mindedness and clear legitimacy bolster our power because they enhance our standing and prestige.  Soft power policies are deeply seductive to people because they are intrinsically moral, so they encourage cooperation.  We would be wise to embrace ‘soft power’ options with greater enthusiasm, and we should develop better laws to ensure that the forces of ruthless domineering and amoral profiteering are prevented from being so influential in determining our foreign policies. 

‘Soft power’ tends to encompass different modalities of communication and negotiation than those that characterize hawkish ‘hard power’.  Soft power more readily embraces diplomacy and mediation and compromise to meet the needs and achieve the goals of all concerned.  Even the neoconservative Francis Fukuyama has pointed out that the U.S. is discovering that it is necessary to implement “a dramatic demilitarization of American foreign policy and a re-emphasis on other types of policy instruments."  Please!!

The ‘war on terrorism’ is similar to the wide and costly ‘war on drugs’.  Both of these are overly-broad approaches based on narrow ideologies, and both of them address symptoms instead of real causes.  Often it is better to be ‘smart’ on crime rather than ‘hard’ on crime or ‘soft’ on crime, and this lesson extends to our cultural attitudes toward power.

We should be alert to the fact that centralized governments throughout history have had a tendency to reinforce their power by creating enemies and fomenting hatreds in order to exploit the fears and nationalistic impulses of their citizens.  Iran’s ayatollahs, for instance, rail against the United States as ‘the great Satan’, warning the Persian people about Western imperialism and political interference.  They thus use the external threat of American encroachment to strengthen their control and repression of their people. 

Likewise, American leaders used similar tactics to demonize communism during the Cold War, and now to make us fear terrorism and Islamic peoples.  Using such manipulations, they divert our attention from domestic problems and injustices and workers’ grievances.  Such courses of action have the accompanying benefit for authoritarian rulers of helping to stifle dissent and suppress political opposition and eliminate the voices of those who oppose such ruthlessness.

It is high time that we begin to recognize the dangers of such gambits, and to prioritize our national efforts to create a more just and sustainable society that does not start wars or waste resources, or cause unnecessarily extensive environmental damages, or contribute to the risks of trillions of dollars of costs and widespread biotic calamities related to global warming and climate change.

Speak Truth to Power

"You measure a democracy by the freedom it gives its dissidents, not the freedom it

    gives its assimilated conformists."                --- Political activist Abbie Hoffman

THAT is speaking truth to power!  Ayatollahs, autocrats, authoritarians, tyrants, religious reactionaries, and all political control freaks, listen up!  People now recognize that the self-anointed emperors ‘have no clothes’;  your power-mongering gambits are clear, and it is time to allow the great historical trends toward national independence and truer democracies to progress.  It is time to loosen the reins of intrusive government, and to act with greater fairness and humanity and ecological sanity.

Games People Play

We human animals behave like many other mammals.  We use status displays as well as strategies of deceit and bluff and threat and appeasement gestures in our sex and courtship activities and other social interactions.  We may deny the basic zoological fact that we are animals, but it is a simple fact.

Our motivation to avoid failure in Afghanistan is similar to the psychological tendency in investing that is known as ‘loss aversion’.  We do not want to admit losses and sunk costs, so we effectively double down on bad bets.  President Obama just recently fell prey to such a strategy with his escalation of the Afghan war.  But by pursuing military interventions rather than cutting our losses and negotiating a withdrawal, we risk losing far more.

An Aside from the Front

I was one of thousands of wanderlust-driven young travelers who adventurously journeyed overland ‘across Asia on the cheap’ between Europe and Australia in the 1970’s.  Most of these travelers followed a highlight route that was described in the first Lonely Planet publication by Maureen and Tony Wheeler, Across Asia on the Cheap, a homespun guide of places to see and stay and eat in a dozen nations from Turkey to Indonesia.  My travels took me to Afghanistan, where I spent a month in November and December of 1973.

The Afghani people back then, before 30 years of nearly continuous warfare, were largely honorable people living in an extremely poor country.  They struggled to survive in this ruggedly mountainous and harshly arid nation where more than 2 million of the 15 million people were nomads who migrated around the semi-desert with tents and camels and herds of goats and sheep.  Throughout history, from time immemorial, marauding armies have imperiously coursed across the rugged countryside of Afghanistan to cross over the Khyber Pass seeking riches and glory in Europe or the Far East.  Many invaders have come and gone, including Arabs and Persians, and Mongols under Genghis Khan, and the British, and the Russians.  History shows that all attempts to impose centralized control over the Afghani people have been destined to failure.  The attempt to impose a centralized authoritarian rule over such a disparate collection of ethnic peoples is just too difficult to achieve. 

In neighboring Iran, the U.S. helped overthrow the freely-elected government of Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953, and to install the Shah of Iran who ruled with an iron fist and a ruthless secret police, the notorious SAVAK, until the Shah was finally overthrown by the religious ayatollahs in 1979.  Anyone caught using drugs in Iran was punished severely when I traveled overland across the country in 1973.  Young travelers would arrive in Afghanistan, in dramatic contrast, and find an astonishingly more relaxed authority.  Travelers would go into small restaurants for dinner in Herat, near the Iranian border, and the proprietor would invariably be filling a primitive pipe known as a chillum with strong hashish and passing it around to his customers.  Dilapidated and obviously ill-paid Afghani army regulars would come in to eat, and they would join in to get stoned as if it were as natural to share in this activity as having a cup of coffee.

Any conceptions we Americans have about ‘you’re either with us or against us’ are far beyond the ken of these inadvertent Afghani pawns in the conflict between capitalist-driven empire-protecting globalization interests and their hubris-filled militaristic superpower enforcers, on the one hand, and the tribal warlords and freedom-fighting insurgents and infidel-hating religious extremists, on the other.

President Obama’s compromise solution to the dilemma of what to do with the perplexing situation in Afghanistan and the critical situation in neighboring Iran and Pakistan, where millions of Afghans have been driven as war refugees, is an attempt to make the best of a very bad situation.  Unfortunately, the absurd efforts of Westerners to impose their version of stability and centralized control on a region with such a fractured history is a costly and ultimately futile attempt at the impossible.  We will not be able to train a strong cohesive Afghan army in 18 months, or even 18 years, that will be able to control the intensely independent tribal cultures of Afghanistan.  Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries in the world, and cannot afford to support a large standing army.  We American taxpayers will be left paying the tab, and no matter how long we continue to occupy Afghanistan, we will find that it is not possible to coerce the peoples there into some kind of peaceful coexistence that gives obeisance to a corrupt central authority in Kabul.

More than 35 years have elapsed since I was in Afghanistan, and that country has been involved in internecine warfare for more than 30 of those years.  Now the United States, neck deep in the costly quagmire, is gambling that we can whip the Afghani army into a well-trained fighting force to suppress the warlords and tribal factions, and to defend a corrupt central government in a police-state-like establishment of security.  There is something rather insane about this gamble!

I remember thinking, when I was a young woman, how bizarre it would have been to be born in “Red China”, where all the people were brainwashed by government propaganda into believing that communism was a good thing and that conformity was a necessity.  Such conceptions turn out to have been extremely simplistic, and they ignored the extent to which people in all nations are subtly indoctrinated with solipsistic worldviews and self-righteousness and nationalistic beliefs and feelings of ethnocentric supremacy.  Nations that have a free press have a somewhat greater degree of objectivity about their own national self-image, but all peoples have their own acculturated biases, and it is ridiculous to fervently believe in the narrowly provincial attitudes and convictions of either the ideological elites or the less educated masses.

Robert McNamara pointed out in the film The Fog of War that misunderstanding our enemies, as we did in Vietnam, is dangerous.  He says that we must be able to ‘empathize’ enough with our enemies to see their point view in order to formulate the most sensible and successful foreign policies.  Today in the Middle East, Muslims despise us NOT for our freedoms and democracy and open culture and empowerment of women, they hate us because of our militaristic and imperialistic economic policies and actions in their nations.  This truth has been coherently and consistently communicated to us by Osama bin Laden and other extremists who oppose our aggression and humiliating policies.  Islamic people’s primary opposition is to our heavy-handed military occupations and our harsh economic sanctions in the Middle East and our interference in their sovereign affairs.

In a videotape from the supposed mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, sent less than a month after the airplane hijackings, bin Laden talked about the humiliation and degradation of the Islamic world, and of innocent children being killed in Iraq, and of insecurity in Palestine, and of infidel armies in the land of Muhammad.  He did not say anything about hating our culture or freedoms or democracy.  It is our leaders who have fostered this deceptive story to get us to support wars of aggression in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Again I urge Americans to be more honest with themselves as we deliberate about the proper geopolitical and humanitarian strategies of our foreign policies in Afghanistan.  Let’s admit that our true comprehension of the tragic travails of the Afghani people, beyond the shallow sound-bite mentality of our national debate, is extremely limited.

“Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear -- kept us in a continuous

    stampede of patriotic fervor -- with the cry of grave national emergency.”

                                                                                    --- General Douglas MacArthur     

Differing Approaches to War and Peace and Freedom

Mahatma Gandhi was the leader of India during its movement for independence from British colonial rule.  Gandhi was a champion of social justice and resistance to tyranny through non-violent means and mass civil disobedience.  He inspired other great leaders like Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela.  

Gandhi’s ideals are a dramatic contrast to Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, which champions Islamic opposition to Western military and economic hegemony over Arab nations by the use of terrorist tactics and suicide bombings and attacks on innocent civilians to stoke sectarian conflicts.  Bin Laden subscribes to a strict version of the Sunni sect of Islam which advocates austere puritanism and Arab nationalism and Islamic supremacy.  Bin Laden, like all right-wing extremists, embraces winning at any cost as the highest value, and thus he justifies his terrible guerilla warfare tactics that have harmed international peace so much by provoking preemptive wars by the U.S.

One of the most admirable spiritual leaders in the world is the Dalai Lama.  Seeing his native country of Tibet militarily occupied and colonized by the Chinese, he fled Tibet in 1959.  Since then the Chinese have harshly assaulted the Buddhist culture of Tibet.  They destroyed thousands of monasteries and killed many Tibetans and drove hundreds of thousands of others into exile in Nepal and India and other countries.  Today, the Dalai Lama supports the idea of a ‘Middle Way Approach’ to peacefully resolve the issues related to China’s occupation of Tibet.  Rather than demanding independence, which the authoritarian rulers of China strongly oppose, those who embrace this moderate approach seek autonomy for Tibetans and the protection and preservation of Tibetan culture and religion and national identity.

Another eminently honorable man was Sergio Vieira de Mello, a charismatic Brazilian diplomat who worked for the United Nations for more than 34 years.  His humanitarian and peace-promoting efforts included stints in many countries around the world.  He was the United Nations Transitional Administrator in East Timor from December 1999 to May 2002, during which time he guided that former Portuguese colony to independence from Indonesia, which had occupied it in 1975 after the colony became independent from its centuries-long affiliation with Portugal.  In May 2003, Sergio became the Special Representative of the UN Secretary General in Iraq to help the Iraqi people after the invasion by the United States.  Several months later Sergio was killed by a suicide truck bomber that targeted him because of the assistance he had given East Timor in its efforts to gain independence from Indonesia.  The mastermind behind the attack was the Iraq-based al-Qaeda terrorist Abu Mussab al-Zarkawi, who objected to East Timor’s independence from Indonesia because Indonesia is the nation with the biggest Muslim population in the world.  Pathetic!

I highly recommend the compelling new indie film Sergio for greater insights into his life!

Why is There War?

Many motives drive a nation to war.  In our American democracy, our leaders provide us with rationalizations for war that are generally spin and propaganda rather than the true and honest reasons that underlie motives for war.  They do this to get popular support for military activities.  War throughout history has been waged for a complex array of reasons that include drives for power, competitive advantage, economic ascendancy, control, nationalistic pride and ideological supremacy.  The underlying struggle is about acquiring or defending territory, or getting access to minerals like oil or other natural resources, or obtaining cheap labor, or penetrating foreign markets.  Modern wars are also fought so that bankers and the defense industry and war suppliers can have better opportunities to make bigger profits. 

Unfortunately, violence begets violence and extremism begets extremism.  Injustices wreaked on others beget injustices in reaction.  Empire-building and aggression and militarism create enemies, and the existence of enemies strengthens authoritarian factions which insist on ruthless responses to those who oppose them.  By allowing our leaders to pursue harshly supremacist gambits, the American people have effectively become more vulnerable to terrorist antagonism and blowback retaliation and military overstretch and fiscal ruin.

Herman Goering, who was the early head of Adolf Hitler’s storm troopers and later of the German Air Force during World War II, told a psychologist during the Nuremburg War Crime trials that a nation’s people can always be manipulated by their political leaders into supporting and fighting wars.  Goering said:

"Naturally the common people don’t want war.  But after all, it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy, and it’s always a simple matter to drag people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship.  Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders.  This is easy.  All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and for exposing the country to danger.  It works the same in every country."

Recognizing these facts, we should be able to pursue more enlightened policies.  Political realities may make it difficult for our leaders to actually be honest with the people, but we must somehow make sure that diplomacy and peace and true justice have higher priorities.  The definite powerful need for politicians to act tough on the world stage is largely created by the hawkish right-wing crowd, which so vociferously demands that America act in domineering ways.  Despite these rancorous Stern Father voices, we must find ways to ensure national security and to succeed economically that do not involve military occupations of other countries.  We must work to ensure that our security and liberty prosper together, and that the profit motive of the ‘military-industrial complex’ does not have such an extensive and overweening influence in our foreign policy decisions.

President James Madison once observed that it is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is often attributable to the provisions we make against danger, real or pretended, from abroad.  We Americans treasure our freedoms, so we cannot allow them to be trampled by vested interests that use our fears to curtail our civil liberties.

Author John Steinbeck’s Perspective on War

When John Steinbeck was writing The Log from the Sea of Cortez in 1940 and 1941, he made the following observation:

“There is a war now which no one wants to fight, in which no one can see a gain:  a zombie war of sleep-walkers which nevertheless goes on out of all control of intelligence.  Some time ago a Congress of honest men refused an appropriation of several hundreds of millions of dollars to feed our people.  They said, and meant it, that the economic structure of the country would collapse under the pressure of such expenditure.  And now the same men, just as honestly, are devoting many billions to the manufacture, transportation, and detonation of explosives to protect the people they would not feed.”

Today, the United States has been hijacked by those who believe in the ideology that says we must spend an enormous amount of money on the military every year to make us safe.  It seems extremely likely to me that this is completely wrong, as discussed throughout the Earth Manifesto.  It would be much wiser and more practical to fund initiatives to resolve conflicts without resorting to violence, and to give higher priority to international peacebuilding and social justice and the well-being of American families and environmental protections.

Let’s courageously demonstrate the wisdom and diplomacy and collective discipline of striving to achieve peace, and let us forego the weak-willed expediency of using warfare and aggression to try to achieve our national goals.  Macho impulses get boys and men into fistfights and drive statistical tendencies for males to commit the vast majority of violent crimes.  It is not surprising, then, that in societies where men’s authority is balanced out by a fair participation of women in politics, there is a greater likelihood that problems will be solved without resorting to violence and war.  This leads to an inescapable conclusion that our societies would be well-advised to pursue policies that are more enlightened and fair in allowing women more power and prerogatives.

The Red Herring of “Weakness” by the Most Powerful Nation in History

“Terrorism is the war of the poor, and war is the terrorism of the rich.”

                                                                   --- Sir Peter Ustinov

A deep gulf divides us from those we regard as enemies on the international stage.  Reactionary minds refuse to admit that we create enemies by the anti-Golden-Rule injustice of the way we treat others.  It is the rude and arrogant and ruthless and domineering and imperialistic and humiliating way we treat people that creates enemies, not an imagined invitation to violence and terrorist retaliation that is somehow implicitly contained in “appearing weak”. 

Fear-mongering ideologues like Dick Cheney continuously warn Americans that we must project relentless military power in order not to appear weak, but it seems clear to me that this belief is diametrically opposite of the actual situation.  It is our hard-nosed, hubris-filled projection of power that engenders insurgent opposition and blowback attacks.  In the long run, our safety can only be found in diplomacy and compromise and just actions and cooperative problem-solving and a sensible degree of empathetic respect for the national interests and cultures and religious faiths of others.

Ethnocentricity is a natural tendency to regard one’s own culture as superior and more desirable and moral and worthy, and to regard the culture of other peoples as inferior and immoral and unworthy and even ridiculous.  This is especially true of attitudes in religious matters.  Believers tend to regard their own religion as the only true, revealed and moral faith, while all others are regarded as deluded and false and heretical.  The dangers in such attitudes are instantly apparent to dispassionate observers.

The world is becoming figuratively smaller, and the competition for resources and dominance is heating up.  This makes one thing perfectly clear:  the costs of remaining parochial and ethnocentric and ruthlessly nationalistic and aggressive are unacceptable.  Safety and peace can only be found in a reasonable modicum of mutual security, NOT in our complete domination of others and their coerced acquiescence to our economic and military supremacy.

The Achilles heel of our American empire is our extreme dependence on oil imported from corrupt nations dominated by religious theocracies and authoritarian governments.  In order to preserve the status quo of our addiction, our government meddles in the affairs of these reactionary countries by propping up harsh regimes in Pakistan and Iraq and Afghanistan, and we make an ally of the distinctly despotic rulers in Saudi Arabia.  We also effectively strengthen ‘enemies’ in Iran with our aggression in the Middle East.  Our hard-nosed military occupations, together with our maintenance of military bases with millions of troops and supporting personnel in more than 130 nations abroad, arguably make us less safe.

We should instead be investing in cleaner energy alternatives and leading the world to a fairer, more peaceful, more sustainable and more ecologically sound future.  We should change the status quo by constraining the influence of corporate lobbyists and ending subsidies to Big Oil, and altering the rules of our laissez-faire casino capitalist system, and ending the hyper-aggressive militarism of our foreign policies. 

Here in the U.S. we have one of the most remarkable Constitutionally-governed, rule-of-law oriented governments in the history of civilization, and yet we are allowing vested interests to hijack it and to give unchecked power to multinational corporations.  We are letting motives for amoral profiteering and the overriding greed of wealthy people and CEOs to dominate our politics.  We are moving beyond the provincial ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ phenomenon in terms of exploited resources and externalized damages and privatized profits and socialized costs, and we are moving into the province of a global Tragedy of a Devastated Home Planet.  We are doing this by fomenting unnecessary conflicts, failing to check the rapid increase in needy and greedy people on Earth, and causing deteriorating environmental conditions and an associated diminished diversity of life forms on Earth by destroying habitats, polluting, causing global warming, and over-exploiting natural resources.

Insights into Capitalism and War and Democracy

Let’s be honest and clear.  Let us recognize the difference between honorable and sensible principles, on the one hand, and expediencies and shortsightedness on the other.  Our corporate-dominated capitalist system seeks arenas in which to make profits because profits are the primary raison d’etre of our economic activities.  Profit-making, in fact, is one of the two primary purposes of corporate entities.  The other purpose is to shield owners and shareholders from liability.  Neither of these purposes is generally consistent with ethics or the common good.  War games and aggression for the control of resources and markets and profit-making are poor and unjust means to achieve economic success. 

Capitalism has a regressive influence on human societies because it gives overweening power to rich people and giant corporations.  This power enables 2% of the people in the world to own 50% of the wealth.  Such an unjust distribution of wealth guarantees narrowly-focused decision-making and ever-more intense strife. 

“Our country is now geared to an arms economy bred in an artificially induced

    psychosis of war hysteria and an incessant propaganda of fear.”

                                                                                  --- General Douglas MacArthur           

At this juncture in global human history, the need is greater than ever before for bold cooperation to solve unprecedented environmental and social problems.  Unfortunately, we are still stuck in our testosterone-driven paradigms of dominion and hubristic supremacy.  We should address the wide range of stark environmental and social problems with a proper sense of priorities.  And we should stop choosing foolish priorities and acting in ways that make Islamic peoples less secure and humiliating them by stationing our military in and around their nations.

The American people hope not only for more sensible foreign policies, but also for more progressive domestic policies.  They want the economy to be improved, and more jobs to be created, and the extremes of neo-Gilded Age inequalities to be reduced.  They want rapid medical cost inflation and extreme healthcare inequities to be reduced.  They want the decline in the fortunes of the middle class and poor people to be reversed.  They want a new energy regime to be created that is less wasteful and less polluting.  They want lower taxes for the majority of people.  They want less borrowing by the federal government and less profligate government spending.  They want our environmental and social policies to be farsighted and more nearly sustainable.  They want to have the corrosive effects of extreme political partisanship to be mitigated.  And they want our economic and political system and society to be less dominated by big banks and giant corporations and greedy CEOs and Wall Street insiders and wealthy people.

Instead of ensuring that our economic and political system is dominated by democratic fair representation, we have allowed it to be controlled by the military-industrial complex and right-wing ideologues and tough love reactionaries and bullying Neoconservatives and economic ‘shock doctrine’ capitalists and hyper-inegalitarian forces.  And we are allowing highly regressive tax policies to remain in effect which are contributing to a widening of the dangerously large disparity in income and wealth and personal security between a tiny minority of rich people and the growing woes of the struggling majority of the poor and the declining middle class.

Our national priorities have become distorted all out of proportion to what they should be in a representative democracy.  Our Founders pointed the proper way in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights:  our society should be primarily concerned with establishing justice, promoting the general welfare, protecting against despotism and abuses of power, guaranteeing freedoms and civil liberties to people today and in posterity, creating equality of opportunity for people in their pursuit of happiness, and ensuring national security and peaceful coexistence.

Our government and rules of law were designed so that the voice of the people should be honored by their representatives, but instead large corporations and wealthy people have managed to usurp power and completely dominate our governmental decision-making.  The proof of this is widespread, particularly in our tax policies and in the highly unequal distribution of national income and assets.  Two percent of Americans own 50% of all of the financial wealth in the U.S., and they annually earn about 60% of all capital income, which is taxed at low capital gains rates.  Higher rates of taxes on earnings above $500,000 per year, and on inheritances worth more than $5 million, and on large capital gains, could be instituted that would assess more taxes on only 1% of Americans, and yet the other 99% of people are unable to get their representatives to enact such a system, even though it would be much more progressive and would providentially help everyone by raising enough money to provide universal healthcare, and deal more effectively with our mounting social and environmental problems, and prevent the growing obscenity of our myopic debt-addicted and deficit-spending ways by which we are mortgaging the future.  It is time now to return to our ideals, and make our nation fairer and more responsive to the common good.

Laissez-faire capitalism preaches ideological righteousness that in effect rationalizes abandoning the majority of people in favor of the few.  It is a sink-or-swim system in which tiny life vests are figuratively thrown to the middle class and poor, begrudgingly, while the rich speed recklessly in supercharged torpedo boats through the public waters that are vital to the safety of all.

A Proposal for the Common Good

  “Despair is the solace of fools.”

                     Today’s Special, a humorous 2009 film directed by David Kaplan

I believe in Chipper positivity, and in striving to make the best of whatever circumstances come our way.  But no matter how sunny one's outlook or fortunate one's circumstances, we do live in desperate societies, with hunger and unemployment and medical adversities and homelessness and crime and resource shortages and extreme injustices and growing hordes.  As a result, anxieties and stresses and violent conflicts are increasing globally.  Because of the fact that our societies are so severely afflicted and so greatly in need of effective problem-solving, we must require those people who can afford to help finance the remedies to these challenges to give more money to accomplish the needed tasks.

Financially-fortunate people should recognize the truth of this characterization, and also understand the fickle nature of good fortune.  In doing so, they should cheerfully accept their social responsibility, during times that they are prosperous, to shoulder the light burden of paying higher rates of taxes on higher levels of earnings and capital gains.  This concept of a more steeply graduated income tax system is called progressive taxation. 

When rich people succeed in shifting more of the burden of taxation from what it has been to all other people, like to workers and the middle class and future generations, as George W. Bush did with his enormous debt-financed tax breaks for the rich, this is called a regressive change in taxation.  It is folly to allow our leaders to use shortsighted expediencies of deficit financing to conceal such fiscally irresponsible intergenerational transfers of wealth. 

Let Us Now Begin to Sensibly Remake Our Nation!

Barack Obama was elected to effect “Change we can believe in.”  The people hoped for a new era in economics and politics, an era in which the common good would have higher priority.  They wanted narrow vested interests to be forced to yield to popular pressure to make our country truly fairer and more just and more secure.  When Mr. Obama won the historic election, he promised in his victory speech, "I will always be honest with you about the challenges we face.  I will listen to you, especially when we disagree.  And, above all, I will ask you to join in the work of remaking this nation."

Surely, now is the time to boldly and seriously work to remake our nation.  We must stop escalating our military occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, and begin to bring our young people in the military home.  We need to be more honest in our attempts to actually shift the emphasis of our foreign policies to less militaristic and less imperialistic and more humble ones, and to build peace, and to ensure the safety and well-being of Americans at home and abroad. 

And we must be more aware of the legacy we are leaving to future generations.  We are already using up limited resources at nearly the fastest possible rate, and depleting topsoil, polluting waterways, causing severe deforestation, altering the composition of the atmosphere, damaging wildlife habitats and wetlands and coral reefs, and devastating biological diversity.  We are accelerating the harm we are wreaking on the prospects of our descendents by refusing to limit rapid population growth through generous family planning programs, and by hyper-stimulating resource consumption through unprecedented deficit spending.

The Golden Rule is a common sense ethic of reciprocity that guides us to treat others fairly, as we would like to be treated ourselves.  Ecological sanity is like a Golden Rule attitude applied to our descendents in future generations.  When we see our actions from the point of view of others, we are more likely to act ethically and fairly and sensibly.  It is not hard to imagine that people in the future will want fresh water and clean air and some resources that have not been severely depleted and a stable climate and peaceful relationships with neighbors and other countries.

While Barack Obama inspired great hope in millions of people with his campaign rhetoric, the intense and optimistic political courtship during the elections was followed, as usual once the electoral deal has been sealed, by a marriage of governing that involves hard work and compromises.  High expectations are now crashing against the Procrustean bed of political realities, and political opposition by the radical right is torpedoing civility in debate and subverting the principles vital to the current and future well-being of the majority and people in the future.

When I was a freshman college student in 1967, many believed in the desirability of the great peace slogan of the Sixties:  Power to the People!  This was actually not just a slogan, but a clear articulation of one of the deepest ideals embraced in the Constitution by our Founders.  If we truly want to dedicate ourselves to the struggle to ensure that "government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth," as Abraham Lincoln declared in his Gettysburg Address, we need to find ways to limit the power that rich people and the military-industrial complex and other giant corporations have in influencing our national policies for narrow ends. 

We have fallen into the trap of superpower imperialism and world domination gambits, even though this course of action violates the principles set forth by our Founders, who staunchly believed in noninterventionist foreign policies.  Similarly aggressive gambits by Adolf Hitler ended up very badly, and it is clear that the effects of strategies like this in Afghanistan were catastrophic for the Soviet empire in the 1980’s.

The shocking 9/11 attacks on the United States generated worldwide empathy and sympathy for Americans.  But George W. Bush and his Neoconservative advisors used the attacks as a pretext to launch a broad and apparently endless “war on terrorism”.  They used the fears of Americans to implement both a rash international agenda and a very retrogressive domestic agenda.  The image of George Bush strutting around like a cocky bantam rooster, acting with a reckless and preachy and trigger-happy cowboy mentality, did great harm to our reputation around the globe. 

As a candidate, George Bush had said he was “a uniter, not a divider”.  He told Americans he believed in a humble foreign policy, not in ‘nation building’ and foreign interventions.  He sure turned out to be a different character once he got into office, to the detriment of almost everyone, for reasons including getting us in unnecessary and poorly planned wars, acting with imperial hubris, promoting economic inequalities, spending taxpayer funds profligately, borrowing enormous sums of money for war and for tax breaks for the wealthy, being dishonest, hyping up people’s fears, indulging in hyper-partisanship and dirty politics, and indulging in bubble economics, bank deregulation, budgetary accounting gimmicks, unbalanced corporatism, anti-environmentalism and shortsightedness.  His religious fundamentalism also had a divisive impact rather than a uniting one.

Bush Administration officials used an evolving variety of rationalizations for the war in Iraq.  They misled the American people about their motives;  they denied facts;  they provided serious misinformation;  and they used scare tactics and secrecy and outright lies, just as the Pentagon Papers revealed that the government had done to escalate the war in Vietnam.  O treachery, for spacious lies … above the fruited plain!

Our costly military occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq have been going on for many years now, and it should be clearly understandable that people in other nations are made justifiably angry when the U.S. intervenes in their sovereign internal affairs.  I just keep thinking how much better it would be to make genuine friends on the international stage and to treat others with respect and dignity, rather than to humiliate them.  

Instead of a wide war against the Moslem world and a slap in the face to the sovereignty of nations in the Middle East, the United States should have adopted a saner strategy against terrorism after 9/11.  We should have targeted the criminals who planned the 9/11 attacks.  Our poorly-focused approach in Afghanistan and Iraq has had unintended consequences that are highly negative.  Thousands of American troops have died;  tens of thousands have been injured;  and many collateral injustices have taken place, including the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Afghani civilians and the displacement of millions.  The costs of our military hubris have been enormous in terms of taxpayer’s money and mounting debt, and this makes it much more difficult to deal effectively and fairly with our critical domestic problems.

If we were more honest with ourselves, we would have military conscription so that all citizens would be subject to the dangers of our military adventurism, and we would mandate pay-as-you-go policies for war spending so that everyone had to contribute to the costs of every escalation of war.  Then the national debate about our wars would shift to become decidedly more comprehensive!  Powerful new forces would influence our decision making, and the overriding ability of rich people and large corporations to set foreign policies would be offset, under the influence of such a more accountable new regimen, by citizen concerns about the actual more widely-distributed risks and costs.

We are now in a similar position to where we were in the Vietnam War in 1967.  We are beginning to commit to further escalations of the war in Afghanistan, but we are also seeing that policy failures have led to a risky and costly quagmire.  We are trying to figure out how to ‘save face’ and get out of occupied countries before our involvement destroys our nation and destabilizes the Middle East even further.  A radicalized Pakistan poses a greater risk to us than even Iran does, and our aggressive sovereignty-violating drone attacks on Pakistan are causing growing unrest and instability there.  This provides powerful counter-support to jihad forces that oppose our actions, so it is an extremely dangerous course of action.

An Aside from the Rear

Savants occasionally observe that those who defensively accuse others of something may in fact be guiltier of the charge than those they accuse.  In May 2009, former Vice President Dick Cheney said that the position President Obama has taken on ‘enhanced interrogation’ is “recklessness clothed in righteousness”.  He is saying, essentially, that unless the United States acts with ruthless strength, terrorists will attack us again.  He apparently staunchly believes in this hard-nosed contention, although his extensive economic conflicts of interest do make his sincerity rather questionable.

Other people feel that arrogant ruthlessness is one of the primary causes of terrorist tactics.  A large contingent of Americans is deeply skeptical of Cheney’s point of view, and many people see that the extremely high price we are paying to enforce his militant worldview is causing far more hardships to Americans at home than any foreign army or terrorists ever have.

Cheney’s charge makes me think about his recklessly aggressive role in encouraging George W. Bush to invade and occupy Afghanistan and Iraq.  This has cost the U.S. almost a TRILLION DOLLARS and the lives of more than 5,000 American soldiers and contractors in these wars.  Dick Cheney’s role in authorizing torture-like interrogation practices has become more widely known in the past year.  Cheney also had a defining role in the creation of harsh prisons at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and Bagram, which have galvanized the recruiting efforts of terrorist organizations in reaction to Western hubris and injustice and humiliation.  It seems to me that Dick Cheney is generally responsible for helping making the Middle East less stable and more dangerous.

Please stop crying wolf, Mr. Cheney!  The consequences of crying wolf in the old fable were eventually disastrous.  Likewise, the consequences of the ruthlessly arrogant and naked state-terrorism aggression of the Bush Administration are proving to be colossally costly.  By goading Islamic extremists, you have helped make our nation more feared and hated, and you have simultaneously significantly contributed to an increase in the power of the military-industrial complex and a heightening of the impetus toward national bankruptcy through the debt-financing of our U.S. military interventionism.  These actions are myopic and foolish in a world where peaceful coexistence must be accorded a much higher value.  It is time now to give much less influence to the interests of Big Oil and the profitability of arms manufacturers and war services industries. 

In your perverse world, Dick, it may seem obvious to you that your strategies are win/win/win ones, with heightened fear leading to strengthened control and easier domination and more aggressive repression of the populace, AND greater profits for certain giant corporations.  But it is apparent to me that your strategies are lose/lose ones.  You’ve succeeded in painting a little target on every American that says <Deserves Vengeance>, and then you’ve bombed the hell out of any religious fanatics or resistance forces that oppose our military.  It is reminiscent of the German Army in Greece during World War II;  the Germans would round up 50 innocent civilians and slaughter them for every German soldier killed by resistance fighters, but this ruthlessness did not make Hitler right, or successful, or the German people safer.

In an alternative world where YOU were the one that would be waterboarded, Herr Cheney, your confessions of the full details of your involvement in what the Nuremberg Principles enunciated as the “supreme international crime” -- the waging of a war of aggression -- would be exposed, and you would be locked up forever, or worse.  Instead, you still all too often have the pulpit of the media to defend your crimes, and to set up an “I told you so” prediction for when the next terrorist attack comes, for which you have so strongly stimulated the motivations.  (See the essay Reflections on War for an extensive analysis of ideas on this and many related topics.)

True Power to the People

Winston Churchill once observed that "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."  There is considerable truth in this idea.  Democracy is unruly, and yet the great principles of fairness of representation, equality of opportunity, freedom of speech and religion, protections against tyranny, fair legal treatment for all, and the championing of the general welfare are epic achievements of self-governance in human history. 

Democracy relies on a well-informed public.  In The Wisdom of Crowds, an intriguing book by James Surowiecki, the author adduces many instances in which large groups of people prove to be smarter than an elite few, no matter how brilliant.  Crowds are often better at solving problems, at fostering innovation, at coming to wise decisions, and in making predictions.  This is especially true when there is a diversity of opinions and people think freely and independently.  The media has a great journalistic responsibility in this regard.  It must not act as a mere mouthpiece or cheerleader for vested interests and war. 

In contrast to The Wisdom of Crowds, Charles Pierce has written a book titled Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free.  In this book, Pierce makes some incisive observations about how ideology and groupthink and vested interest spin and corporate power and popular delusions and anti-intellectualism and doctrinaire tendencies toward denial of scientific understandings all threaten to destroy the democratic fabric of our country.  Are we more or less a nation of sheep?

The Founders of our democracy embraced the highest ideals of human aspirations, and their efforts have been followed, in the 220 years since the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were ratified, by a hard-fought progressive evolution of laws in which much has been achieved in providing civil rights and the right of women to vote, and social security and fairness doctrines and labor laws and collective bargaining, and protections of the environment that sustains us.  We should continue to support and advance progressive goals, and make sure that our aggregate activities are sustainable and fair-minded!

It is a grave irony of our post-Cold-War era that in the name of national security we let our government act in ways that make all American citizens less safe.  Our policies have not only made us more vulnerable to terrorist targeting and blowback retaliation and occupied nation insurgencies, but also to even more serious challenges that are caused by associated military overstretch, fiscal ruin, ecological calamity, intensifying domestic discord, high unemployment, and inadequate resources devoted to healthcare and other worsening social adversities and inequities at home.

It is estimated that 45,000 people die in the United States each year because they lack medical insurance, and yet we have still been unable to reform our healthcare system for many decades.  Now that the system has gotten so costly and unfair, and the premiums so high, why are we still unable to eliminate health insurance monopolies in so many states?  Terrorists will probably never kill 45,000 people in any one year, and yet we refuse to spend more on healthcare while we act as if there are no limits on how much we can spend on military occupations of other nations and wars against violent extremists.  It is quite astonishing that every piece of legislation passed by Congress contains so much of what is essentially corporate welfare, like the boondoggles of the Medicare Prescription Drug Act of 2003, while at the same time the laws enacted do little to actually help the majority of people.

My personal hero, Mark Twain, had the remarkable ability to populate his novels and short stories and public lectures with the truest of fictional characters, and to throw in enough tall tales and wild exaggerations in his deadpan story-telling to uproariously entertain his readers at the same time that he provocatively enlightened.  The spin that our leaders lay on us is almost as creative, in a corporatist bureaucratic kind of way, but it is far less humorous -- and drastically less salubrious!

In consideration of all of these ideas, Americans should urge President Obama to take the long view of history, and to find ways to bring our soldiers home from foreign involvements.  Let us begin to close many of our military bases abroad, and bring home the troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the 70,000 troops stationed in Germany.  Let us strive harder to get everyone with a stake in a peaceful Middle East to cooperate together to achieve peaceful coexistence.  Let’s make our nation a truer beacon of sanity to others in the world by making it fairer and more sustainable.  And let’s actually choose to pay forward some good deeds to future generations!

Thanks for your consideration of these ideas.

    Truly,

       Dr. Tiffany B. Twain

Postscript:

Many other ideas are contained in the revolutionarily comprehensive understandings to be found in the website at EarthManifesto.com.  Check them out!  In particular, see the even more thoroughly articulated ideas concerning our foreign policies in the fourth essay in Part Three, Reflections on War.

Also, check out Part Four for highly specific recommendations on how we could and should be making our nation and the world a fairer and safer place.