“The wars are long, the peace is frail, the madmen come again.
There is no freedom in a land where fear and hate prevail.”

- “Wasn’t That A Time”
Lyrics by Pete Seeger

I’m not sure just when we lost the right to call ourselves a “free” nation.  It almost began when Joseph McCarthy began seeing a communist around every corner, but most Americans managed to survive that inquisition.  Perhaps it was when we first sent observers to South Vietnam; or perhaps it was when we allowed four students to be killed at Kent State with no one held accountable.  Certainly, it was no later than some time during the Nixon administration.

We thought we had bought ourselves a reprieve when Nixon was forced from office, but we were wrong.  The growth of the American military industrial complex has led us to see some form of warfare as the solution to every problem.  We wage “the war on drugs,” “the war on poverty,” “the war on terror” and, worst of all, real wars around the globe from Vietnam to Nicaragua to Iraq to Afghanistan.  Our military might stretches around the world, whether anyone else wants it there or not.

In 1776, our grievances against King George were read aloud in Philadelphia:

• He has kept among us, in times of peace, standing armies without the consent of our legislature.
• He has affected to render the military independent of and superior to civil power.
• He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his assent to their acts of pretended legislation:
  • For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
  • For protecting them, by mock trial, from punishment for any murders which they should commit on the inhabitants of these states
  • For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of trial by jury:
  • For transporting us beyond seas to be tried for pretended offenses:
• He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burned our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

Now, we have become King George.

He has kept among us standing armies.

Around the world, the United States maintains over 700 military bases in over 120 countries.  In earlier centuries, as the British Empire grew, you could trace the spread of British imperialism by counting the number of British colonies; today, America’s version of the colony is the military base.

In Japan’s southern prefecture of Okinawa, the citizens want us to leave, but we refuse to go.

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of trial by jury.

Bush administration officials have admitted that many detainees locked up in Guantánamo Bay were innocent men swept up by U.S. forces unable to distinguish enemies from noncombatants.  There are still innocent people there, some of whom have been there more than seven years.

Of the Guantánamo detainees who have been able to obtain a habeas corpus hearing, over 70% have been found to be wrongfully detained - after years of being held in a cage without having charges brought.

Members of the Bush administration, including the former President himself, have admitted the U.S. realized many detainees held at the U.S. military prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, were innocent but nevertheless held them in hopes they could provide some form of intelligence.  It did not matter if a detainee was innocent or not.  Our government’s attitude has been that because he lived in Afghanistan and was captured at or near a battle area, he must know something of importance.

For transporting us beyond seas to be tried for pretended offenses.

Despite George W. Bush’s protestations that “torture is never acceptable, nor do we hand over people to countries that do torture,” evidence of torture inflicted on those rendered by the CIA to countries like Egypt, Syria, Morocco and Uzbekistan, has been detailed in official government documents.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burned our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

Vietnam

Between 1962 and 1970, millions of gallons of Agent Orange were sprayed across parts of Vietnam.  First it killed the rainforest, stripping the jungle bare.  Then it spread its toxic reach to the food chain leading to a proliferation of birth deformities.

In a small commune in the Cu Chi district, which was heavily sprayed with Agent Orange, twenty-one-year-old Tran Anh Kiet suffers with twisted and deformed feet, hands and limbs, and his attempts at speech are confined to plaintive and pitiful grunts.  He is an adult stuck inside the stunted body of a fifteen-year-old, with a mental age of around six; he has to be spoon fed by his family.

According to Red Cross records, 150,000 Vietnamese children like Kiet suffer from birth defects that can be readily traced either to their parents’ exposure to Agent Orange during the war or to the consumption of dioxin-contaminated food and water since 1975.  The Vietnam Victims of Agent Orange Association estimates that three million Vietnamese were exposed to the chemical during the war, and at least one million suffer serious health problems today.

Iraq

After more than seven years of American occupation, Iraq has, effectively, split into two countries with the very real possibility of a third breaking off.  Despite our declarations of having successfully exported our precious democracy to Iraq, Iraqis have no effective government.

Today, in Iraq, it is very hard simply to get clean water, and the number of citizens with access to safe drinking water has decreased significantly since the U.S. occupation.  The New York Times reported that in Fallujah, after spending over $104 million, we are leaving the citizens not only without effective water treatment but with a boondoggle that “American officials acknowledge that the system may emit a foul odor if it ever does become functional.”

After more than six years of work, expenditures of more than $104 million and without having brought water into a single house, American reconstruction officials decided to abandon the troubled, only partly finished system leaving Fallujah without an of effective sewage treatment system and some of the Fallujah’s busiest streets lined with open trenches.

Iraqi agriculture is collapsing or has collapsed in many places.  As a result, many people have moved to the cities to try to find non-existent work.  There, they live in squalid squatter camps and try to survive.

Fear and Aggression

For over 30 years, the United States’ military, urged on by our civilian government, has been increasingly encroaching on the lives and rights of both American citizens and citizens of other countries.  Since 9/11 our government has encouraged us to live in fear and has used that fear to usurp many of our basic rights while simultaneously escalating our military initiatives abroad.

We should have learned the lessons of Vietnam – that the United States cannot win the hearts and minds of an indigenous people through military force; that we cannot instill democracy at gunpoint.  Instead, we ignored that lesson and we now find ourselves sinking more and more deeply into the fetid quagmire of Afghanistan with not the slightest clue of how to get out.  The counterinsurgency zealots in the military want more troops sent to Afghanistan, and they want the President to completely scrap his already shaky July 2011 timetable for the beginning of a withdrawal.

We’re like a compulsive gambler plunging ever more deeply into debt in order to wager on a rigged game.  In the process, we’ve mortgaged the future of our children by taking long term loans to try to stave off another Great Depression and to try to corral the escalating costs of a runaway healthcare system.  Instead of using the money we’re spending on foreign military junkets to help fix domestic problems, we’re shutting down essential services, emasculating our educational system and ignoring our decaying infrastructure.

There is no victory to be had in Afghanistan, only grief.  We’re bulldozing Detroit while at the same time trying to establish model metropolises in Kabul and Kandahar.  We’re spending endless billions on wretched wars, but we can’t extend the unemployment benefits of Americans suffering from the wretched economy here at home.  Worst of all, we’re inflicting death, dismemberment and the suffering of post traumatic stress disorder on thousands of innocent American young people.

We can wish this were nothing more than a nightmare.  But the difference between what is happening and a nightmare is that you wake up from a nightmare and it’s over.  This is all too tragically real.  This tries the very essence of our souls.