PoliticalAction.com Blog

An Open Letter to The Norwegian Nobel Committee.

On December 10, you will award the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize to President Barack Obama, citing “his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between people.” We the undersigned are distressed that President Obama, so close upon his receipt of this honor, has opted to escalate the U.S. war in Afghanistan with the deployment of 30,000 additional troops. We regret that he could not be guided by the example of a previous Nobel Peace Laureate, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who identified his peace prize as “profound recognition that nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral question of our time — the need for man [sic] to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to violence and oppression.”

President Obama has insisted that his troop escalation is a necessary response to dangerous instability in Afghanistan and Pakistan, but we reject the notion that military action will advance the region’s stability, or our own national security. In his peace prize acceptance speech, Dr. King observed that “Civilization and violence are antithetical concepts…man [sic] must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation.” As people committed to end the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, we are filled with remorse by this new decision of our president, for it will not bring peace.

Declaring his opposition to the Vietnam War, Dr. King insisted that “no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war…We must continue to raise our voices and our lives if our nation persists in its perverse ways… We are at the moment when our lives must be placed on the line if our nation is to survive its own folly. Every man [sic] of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest.”

We pledge ourselves to mobilize our constituencies in the spirit of Dr. King’s nonviolent and committed example. His prophetic words will guide us as we assemble in the halls of Congress, in local offices of elected representatives, and in the streets of our cities and towns, protesting every proposal that will continue funding war. We will actively and publicly oppose the war funding which President Obama will soon seek from Congress and re-commit ourselves to the protracted struggle against U.S. war-making in Iraq and Afghanistan.

We assume that the Nobel Committee chose to award President Obama the peace prize in full awareness of the vision offered by Dr. King’s acceptance speech. We also understand that the Nobel committee may now regret that decision in light of recent developments, as we believe that the committee should be reluctant to present an Orwellian message equating peace with war. When introducing the President, the Committee should, at the very least, exhibit a level of compassion and humility by drawing attention to this distressing ambiguity.

We will do all we can to ensure that popular pressure will soon bring President Obama to an acceptance of the duties which this prize, and even more his electoral mandate to be a figure of change, impose upon him.  He must end the catastrophic policies of occupation and war that have caused so much destruction, so many deaths and displacements, and so much injury to our own democratic traditions.

This prize is not a meaningless honor.  We pledge, ourselves obeying its call to nonviolent action, to make our President worthy of it.

Sincerely,
Jack Amoureux – Board of Directors
Military Families Speak Out

Medea Benjamin – Co-Founder,
Global Exchange

Frida Berrigan – Witness Against Torture

Elaine Brower – World Can’t Wait

Leslie Cagan – Co-Founder
United for Peace and Justice

Bob Cooke – Regional Coordinator
Pax Christi USA, Pax Christi Metro, DC and Baltimore

Tom Cornell – Catholic Peace Fellowship

Matt Daloisio – War Resisters League

Marie Dennis – Maryknoll Office for Global Concerns

Laurie Dobson – Director,
End US Wars

Mike Ferner – National President
Veterans For Peace

Joy First- Convener
National Campaign for Non-Violent Resistance

Sara Flounders – International Action Center

Diana Gibson – Christian Peace Witness

Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb – Shomer Shalom Network for Jewish Nonviolence

David Hartsough – Peaceworkers, San Francisco

Mike Hearington – Georgia Peace & Justice Coalition

Kimber J. Heinz – Organizing Coordinator
War Resisters League

Mark Johnson – Director
Fellowship of Reconciliation

Kathy Kelly – Co-coordinator
Voices for Creative Non-Violence

Leslie Kielson – Co-Chair
United for Peace and Justice

Malachy Kilbride – National Campaign for Nonviolent Resistance

Kevin Martin – Executive Director
Peace Action and Peace Action Education Fund

Linda LeTendre – Saratoga [New York] Peace Alliance

Michael T. McPhearson – National Executive Director,
Veterans For Peace

Gael Murphy – Co-Founder,
Code Pink

Sheila Musaji – The American Muslim

Michael Nagler – Founder
Metta Center for Nonviolence

Max Obuszewski – Pledge of Resistance Baltimore and Baltimore Nonviolence Center

Pete Perry – Peace of the Action

Dave Robinson, Executive Director
Pax Christi

David Swanson – AfterDowningStreet.org

Terry Rockefeller – Families for Peaceful Tomorrows

Samina Sundas – Founding Executive Director
The American Muslim Voice

Nancy Tsou – Coordinator,
Rockland Coalition for Peace and Justice

Diane Turco – Cape Codders for Peace and Justice

Marge Van Cleef – Womens International League for Peace and Freedom

Jose Vasquez – Executive Director
Iraq Veterans Against the War

Craig Wiesner
Multifaith Voices for Peace and Justice

Scott Wright – Pax Christi Metro DC – Baltimore

Kevin Zeese – Executive Director
Voters for Peace

United States Senator Arlen Specter, For the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania

Dear Friends:

I want to share with you an op-ed (link here and copied below) I wrote that ran in today’s Philadelphia Daily News about why I oppose sending additional American troops to Afghanistan.

If you are interested in learning more about how I came to this decision, I encourage you read the floor statement I made in September in which I raised substantive questions about our mission in Afghanistan. At that time, I also wrote detailed letters to – and subsequently received responses and briefings from – Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, CIA Director Leon Panetta, DNI Director Dennis Blair and Admiral Mike Mullen.

As always, please don’t hesitate to contact me on this and any other issues of importance to you.

Sincerely,

Arlen Specter

Why I oppose the Afghan surge
By ARLEN SPECTER

I’M OPPOSED to sending 30,000 more American troops to Afghanistan because I don’t believe they are indispensable in our fight against al Qaeda.
If they were, I’d support such a surge because we have to do whatever it takes to defeat al Qaeda, which seeks to annihilate us.

But if al Qaeda can organize and operate out of Yemen, Somalia or elsewhere, then why fight in Afghanistan, which has made a history of resisting would-be conquerors – from Alexander the Great in the 3rd century BC, to Great Britain in the 19th and early 20th centuries, to the former Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s?

In order to be successful in Afghanistan, it’s necessary to have a reliable ally in the Afghan government. The evidence demonstrates that President Hamid Karzai does not have the requisite reliability.

THE LEGITIMACY of his administration is suspect because of vote fraud. There is widespread corruption at the highest levels of his government. His government has tolerated, if not encouraged, drug-trafficking.

President Obama has said, “President Karzai’s inauguration speech sent the right message about moving in a new direction.” In my judgment, any such “message” amounts to a dubious and belated pledge of reform and deserves to be treated with the greatest skepticism.

For too long, the United States has borne the overwhelming weight of providing troops with only modest NATO contributions. We currently provide 68,000 troops, Britain 9,500 and the other countries just over 36,000. NATO has pledged another 7,000 troops, an inadequate response when you consider the combined populations of NATO countries – excluding the United States – and the threat they face from al Qaeda.

In the context of the Vietnam and Iraq wars, it is understandable that the American people are very skeptical about fighting in Afghanistan. Had we known that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction, we would not have gone into Iraq.

Historians have replayed the tragic mistakes in Vietnam. When you add the 851 killed and 4,605 wounded in Afghanistan to the 4,369 killed and 31,575 wounded in Iraq, it is understandable that the American people do not want to continue the overwhelming burden of fighting in Afghanistan with so little assistance from our allies and so little prospects for success.

The cost of the Afghanistan war imposes an additional burden. It costs $1 million a year for each soldier, or $30 billion a year to support 30,000 additional troops. The cost for the total force in Afghanistan of approximately 100,000 soldiers would be more than $100 billion a year.

Pursuing a successful war in Afghanistan would require considerable additional support from Pakistan.

While Pakistan has been more helpful in recent weeks, their long-term commitment remains uncertain. For years, I’ve urged that the United States should take the lead in brokering a rapprochement with India that would allow Pakistan to redeploy forces from the Indian border to Taliban and al Qaeda strongholds in the mountainous regions of the north. If we could cool that tension with India, they could help us fight the Taliban and al Qaeda.

My opposition to the troop surge in no way diminishes my concern over the challenge we face in al Qaeda and the need to confront it wherever it emerges.

But I question whether Afghanistan is the primary front or even the only battlefield when we may face emerging challenges in Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan itself. That is where we have the best chance to succeed.

We should concentrate on fighting al Qaeda without limitation on time or resources, but we should not engage in the laborious and problematic task of nation-building, or civil affairs, or the protection of other societies in place of their own security systems.

Texas Straight Talk – A weekly column
Rep. Ron Paul (R) – TX 14

Who Wants War?

If anyone still doubted that this administration’s foreign policy would bring any kind of change, this week’s debate on Afghanistan should remove all doubt. The President’s stated justifications for sending more troops to Afghanistan and escalating war amount to little more than recycling all the false reasons we began the conflict. It is so discouraging to see this coming from our new leadership, when the people were hoping for peace. New polls show that 49 percent of the people favor minding our own business on the world stage, up from 30 percent in 2002. Perpetual war is not solving anything. Indeed continually seeking out monsters to destroy abroad only threatens our security here at home as international resentment against us builds. The people understand this and are becoming increasingly frustrated at not being heard by the decision-makers. The leaders say some things the people want to hear, but change never comes.

One has to ask, if the people who elected these leaders so obviously do not want these wars, who does? Eisenhower warned of the increasing power and influence of the military industrial complex and it seems his worst fears have come true. He believed in a strong national defense, as do I, but warned that the building up of permanent military and weapons industries could prove dangerous if their influence got out of hand. After all, if you make your money on war, peace does you no good. With trillions of dollars at stake, there is tremendous incentive to keep the decision makers fearful of every threat in the world, real or imagined, present or future, no matter how ridiculous and far-fetched. The Bush Doctrine demonstrates how very successful the war lobby was philosophically with the last administration. And they are succeeding just as well with this one, in spite of having the so-called “peace candidate” in office.

We now find ourselves in another foreign policy quagmire with little hope of victory, and not even a definition of victory. Eisenhower said that only an alert and informed electorate could keep these war racketeering pressures at bay. He was right, and the key is for the people to ensure that their elected leaders follow the Constitution. The Constitution requires a declaration of war by Congress in order to legitimately go to war. Bypassing this critical step makes it far too easy to waste resources on nebulous and never-ending conflicts. Without clear goals, the conflicts last forever and drain the country of blood and treasure. The drafters of the Constitution gave Congress the power to declare war precisely because they feared allowing the executive unfettered discretion in military affairs. They understood that making it easy for leaders to wage foreign wars would threaten domestic liberties.

Responses to attacks on our soil should be swift and brief. Wars we fight should always be defensive, clearly defined and Constitutional. The Bush Doctrine of targeting potential enemies before they do anything to us is dangerously vague and easily abused. There is nothing left to win in Afghanistan and everything to lose. Today’s military actions are yet another futile exercise in nation building and have nothing to do with our nation’s security, or with 9/11. Most experts agree that Bin Laden and anyone remotely connected to 9/11 left Afghanistan long ago, but our troops remain. The pressures of the war racketeers need to be put in check before we are brought to our knees by them. Unfortunately, it will require a mighty effort by the people to get the leadership to finally listen.

Military Families Across the Country Protest President Obama’s Decision to Escalate War in Afghanistan

Contact: Deborah Forter, Military Families Speak Out, 617-983-0710, or press@mfso.org

http://mfso.org/article.php?id=1354

December 3, 2009 – Following President Obama’s announcement of increased troop levels in Afghanistan, members of Military Families Speak Out (MFSO) and Gold Star Families Speak Out (GSFSO) expressed outrage and deep sadness by speaking out and taking part in protest actions across the country. While the military community is frequently tight-lipped about policy decisions, these military families broke that code of silence to publicly decry the President’s decision to escalate the war in Afghanistan.

MFSO members Linda and Phil Waste of Shellman Bluff, Georgia, describe how their families’ sense of duty to serve this country and their faith in President Obama has been abused:

We have lived in terror for over eight years now. Three of our sons and three grandchildren have served in the Army in Iraq and/or Afghanistan. Our family has endured multiple deployments, extended deployments, stop loss, and the unconscionable practice of pressured reenlistment while in country. At present we have a grandson in Iraq and a granddaughter in Afghanistan. We believe all our sons suffer from some degree of PTSD, one more severe than the others. Our granddaughter is on all kinds of medication for PTSD, and yet is in Afghanistan on her 3rd deployment!

We worked hard to get President Obama elected and sent money out of our retirement to support his election. His many words of ‘hope’ did indeed give us ‘hope’, however, his deeds dashed our hopes on the rocks of more death and destruction of continued wars. The only sane solution is to bring the troops home now!

GSFSO members Kevin and Joyce Lucey of Belchertown, Massachusetts, whose son Jeffrey suffered severe psychological injuries of war and committed suicide after being denied proper care from the Veteran’s Administration, questioned President Obama about this surge in a recent open letter:

You talk of war talk but what of veterans’ care? Our loved ones still lack the care they desperately need. What of the way you continue to treat families of suicides? You stated that you sign letters to all those who lose their lives due to this war. That is not true due to the fact that you continue to refuse to send letters to those loved ones’ families who have committed suicide. The number of these families continues to grow as the military suicides rates rise to unprecedented levels, yet you ignore these families as your predecessor did. Where is the change?

You offer up not troops but citizens of this nation – our loved ones; you are sacrificing them. And for what? Have you any concept of the pain, grief, loss and destruction this policy will create and prolong?

MFSO and GSFSO members protested and responded to the President’s announcement Tuesday evening at venues across the country: speaking at a demonstration in West Point in New York; holding a press conference in Minneapolis, Minnesota; gathering together in Long Beach, California to watch the speech and share reflections with local and national press; holding vigils in New Jersey and other areas. Protests continued across the country on December 2nd, where members of Military Families Speak Out and Gold Star Families Speak Out shared personal experiences with the human cost of the current wars and the urgent need to bring them to an end.

Members of Military Families Speak Out, including families with loved ones currently in Afghanistan or those facing deployment or redeployment, along with members of Gold Star Families Speak Out, whose loved ones have died as a result of these wars, are available for interview.

To arrange for an interview, contact Deborah Forter at Military Families Speak Out, 617-983-0710 or press@mfso.org

Military Families Speak Out is a national organization of over 4,000 families who are opposed to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and have loved ones serving or who have served in the military since 2001. For more information, see http://www.mfso.org. Gold Star Families Speak Out is a chapter of MFSO whose members’ loved ones have died as a result of the current wars. For more information see http://www.gsfso.org.

Fox Business 12/2/09
Ron Paul : Obama Preparing for Perpetual War!

Saying it’s time for Republicans to do more than “take pot shots at ACORN,” freshman Utah Rep. Jason Chaffetz will call on President Barack Obama on Monday to bring U.S. troops home from Afghanistan.

Chaffetz’s push for a troop withdrawal — to be unveiled in a speech at the Hinckley Institute of Politics in Salt Lake City — runs counter to the position of House Minority Leader John Boehner of Ohio and other leading Republicans in Congress. But it also reflects the divisions within the conference about the question of Afghanistan. Chaffetz told POLITICO the issue “has been probably the most difficult one as a freshman in the minority.”

“So much of this is easy, black and white, but Afghanistan is very different and very difficult,” he said.

Chaffetz said he thinks he will “suffer” for the decision and that it would be safer for him politically to stay the course he’s been on.

“I can take pot shots at [Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now] all day long, and I’m good at it,” Chaffetz said. “But even though I am probably going against where the party is on this traditionally, I just think we need to stand up and support the notion that it is time to bring our soldiers home.”

Earlier this year, Chaffetz traveled to the region and said that, since then, he’s “become more engrossed in my conviction it is time to bring our troops home.”

“I am opposed to nation building, and I quite frankly don’t see or understand what victory looks like,” he said. “I believe, as most people do, that our military can do everything we want them to do. … But we’re asking them to fight a war that is not very well-defined. And we are asking them to do so with one hand tied behind their back.”

Chaffetz said the House GOP is divided over whether to “go big or go home” and acknowledged that the “go home” contingent is probably in the minority.

Dear President Obama,

Do you really want to be the new “war president”? If you go to West Point tomorrow night (Tuesday, 8pm) and announce that you are increasing, rather than withdrawing, the troops in Afghanistan, you are the new war president. Pure and simple. And with that you will do the worst possible thing you could do — destroy the hopes and dreams so many millions have placed in you. With just one speech tomorrow night you will turn a multitude of young people who were the backbone of your campaign into disillusioned cynics. You will teach them what they’ve always heard is true — that all politicians are alike. I simply can’t believe you’re about to do what they say you are going to do. Please say it isn’t so.

It is not your job to do what the generals tell you to do. We are a civilian-run government. WE tell the Joint Chiefs what to do, not the other way around. That’s the way General Washington insisted it must be. That’s what President Truman told General MacArthur when MacArthur wanted to invade China. “You’re fired!,” said Truman, and that was that. And you should have fired Gen. McChrystal when he went to the press to preempt you, telling the press what YOU had to do. Let me be blunt: We love our kids in the armed services, but we f*#&in’ hate these generals, from Westmoreland in Vietnam to, yes, even Colin Powell for lying to the UN with his made-up drawings of WMD (he has since sought redemption).

So now you feel backed into a corner. 30 years ago this past Thursday (Thanksgiving) the Soviet generals had a cool idea — “Let’s invade Afghanistan!” Well, that turned out to be the final nail in the USSR coffin.

There’s a reason they don’t call Afghanistan the “Garden State” (though they probably should, seeing how the corrupt President Karzai, whom we back, has his brother in the heroin trade raising poppies). Afghanistan’s nickname is the “Graveyard of Empires.” If you don’t believe it, give the British a call. I’d have you call Genghis Khan but I lost his number. I do have Gorbachev’s number though. It’s + 41 22 789 1662. I’m sure he could give you an earful about the historic blunder you’re about to commit.

With our economic collapse still in full swing and our precious young men and women being sacrificed on the altar of arrogance and greed, the breakdown of this great civilization we call America will head, full throttle, into oblivion if you become the “war president.” Empires never think the end is near, until the end is here. Empires think that more evil will force the heathens to toe the line — and yet it never works. The heathens usually tear them to shreds.

Choose carefully, President Obama. You of all people know that it doesn’t have to be this way. You still have a few hours to listen to your heart, and your own clear thinking. You know that nothing good can come from sending more troops halfway around the world to a place neither you nor they understand, to achieve an objective that neither you nor they understand, in a country that does not want us there. You can feel it in your bones.

I know you know that there are LESS than a hundred al-Qaeda left in Afghanistan! A hundred thousand troops trying to crush a hundred guys living in caves? Are you serious? Have you drunk Bush’s Kool-Aid? I refuse to believe it.

Your potential decision to expand the war (while saying that you’re doing it so you can “end the war”) will do more to set your legacy in stone than any of the great things you’ve said and done in your first year. One more throwing a bone from you to the Republicans and the coalition of the hopeful and the hopeless may be gone — and this nation will be back in the hands of the haters quicker than you can shout “tea bag!”

Choose carefully, Mr. President. Your corporate backers are going to abandon you as soon as it is clear you are a one-term president and that the nation will be safely back in the hands of the usual idiots who do their bidding. That could be Wednesday morning.

We the people still love you. We the people still have a sliver of hope. But we the people can’t take it anymore. We can’t take your caving in, over and over, when we elected you by a big, wide margin of millions to get in there and get the job done. What part of “landslide victory” don’t you understand?

Don’t be deceived into thinking that sending a few more troops into Afghanistan will make a difference, or earn you the respect of the haters. They will not stop until this country is torn asunder and every last dollar is extracted from the poor and soon-to-be poor. You could send a million troops over there and the crazy Right still wouldn’t be happy. You would still be the victim of their incessant venom on hate radio and television because no matter what you do, you can’t change the one thing about yourself that sends them over the edge.

The haters were not the ones who elected you, and they can’t be won over by abandoning the rest of us.

President Obama, it’s time to come home. Ask your neighbors in Chicago and the parents of the young men and women doing the fighting and dying if they want more billions and more troops sent to Afghanistan. Do you think they will say, “No, we don’t need health care, we don’t need jobs, we don’t need homes. You go on ahead, Mr. President, and send our wealth and our sons and daughters overseas, ’cause we don’t need them, either.”

What would Martin Luther King, Jr. do? What would your grandmother do? Not send more poor people to kill other poor people who pose no threat to them, that’s what they’d do. Not spend billions and trillions to wage war while American children are sleeping on the streets and standing in bread lines.

All of us that voted and prayed for you and cried the night of your victory have endured an Orwellian hell of eight years of crimes committed in our name: torture, rendition, suspension of the bill of rights, invading nations who had not attacked us, blowing up neighborhoods that Saddam “might” be in (but never was), slaughtering wedding parties in Afghanistan. We watched as hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians were slaughtered and tens of thousands of our brave young men and women were killed, maimed, or endured mental anguish — the full terror of which we scarcely know.

When we elected you we didn’t expect miracles. We didn’t even expect much change. But we expected some. We thought you would stop the madness. Stop the killing. Stop the insane idea that men with guns can reorganize a nation that doesn’t even function as a nation and never, ever has.

Stop, stop, stop! For the sake of the lives of young Americans and Afghan civilians, stop. For the sake of your presidency, hope, and the future of our nation, stop. For God’s sake, stop.

Tonight we still have hope.

Tomorrow, we shall see. The ball is in your court. You DON’T have to do this. You can be a profile in courage. You can be your mother’s son.

We’re counting on you.

Yours,
Michael Moore

By Phil Giraldi

In a press conference this afternoon President Obama told visiting Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh that the US will “finish the job” in Afghanistan and wipe out every last known terrorist. “Finish the job” is an expression that politicians use a lot when they don’t really have anything substantive to say. It is generally believed that Obama will approve a 34,000 soldier increase for the Afghan conflict when he addresses the nation next week. US soldiers cost the taxpayer $1 million each per year in Afghanistan, which means that the new troop level will cost $170 billion per year. If the insurgents disrupt the Khyber Pass supply line, which they have been successfully doing, it will cost more, possibly much more. It might be cheaper to give the insurgents good jobs working for the Afghan post office or something similar to wean them from their criminal ways. How much more surging can we afford at this price, particularly as it doesn’t seem to be working?

I am all for finding and killing ACTUAL terrorists (as opposed to farmers or wedding party guests) who threaten the United States but I have to wonder who Obama has been listening to lately. There is no coherency to the policies that he appears to embrace, which are little more than mission creep seeking to reconstruct central Asia. There is little or no al-Qaeda presence in Afghanistan while the presence in Pakistan appears to be fairly small and largely preoccupied with scurrying from one bolt hole to another. If the US successfully eliminates al-Qaeda it will just move somewhere else and continue doing what it is doing, which does not appear to be very much or very effective. Is it really worth 100,000 troops on the ground at enormous cost? Not to mention lots of dead American soldiers and Afghan civilians.

There is no US national interest in fighting the Taliban – which do not threaten the United States in any way, shape, or form – while shoring up fraudulently elected President Hamid Karzai and his merry band of cutthroat thieves. Is Obama also hinting to the Indians that he will next turn on the Muslims seeking to liberate Kashmir, who also do not threaten the US? Do we keep endlessly going after terrorist groups after that and where does it all end? If Obama seriously wants to “finish” it in Afghanistan he would gather all of its neighbors in a latter-day Congress of Vienna to work out a security formula that is acceptable to most of them and then pull out. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to be able to tell the troops by Christmas that they are coming home by? – Phil Giraldi, American Conservative Defense Alliance

In a videotape released around September of 2007, Osama bin Laden said, “If you would like to get to know some of the reasons for your losing of your war against us, then read the book of Michael Scheuer.”

Michael F. Scheuer is the former Chief of the Osama bin Laden tracking unit at the Counterterrorist Center with the CIA. He had a 22 year career with the CIA and served in this position in the latter half of the nineties. In the wake of the WTC bombing he reenlisted his expertise with the bin Laden unit as a Special Advisor to the Chief. He held this position from September 2001 to November 2004. In 2004, Scheuer resigned his position with the CIA and released his New York Times bestselling book Imperial Hubris. It criticizes the western worlds tunnel visioned assumptions about the motivating factors for Islamic terrorism. According to Scheuer, “the greatest danger for Americans confronting the Islamist threat is to believe-at the urging of U.S. leaders-that Muslims attack us for what we are and what we think rather than for what we do.”

As far as conventional warfare is concerned, we have won every battle of our war with “terror.” We have the training, equipment, and production capacity to fight a multi-front war against the toughest of enemies. We have a volunteer force of both fulltime and reserve service personnel. The idea that we are losing this war is very peculiar to many of us, especially those that are part of the establishment. But how can we use military might to defeat an idea? The truth is that we are not fighting a sovereign body in this conflict. Although there are plenty of sovereign nations in this world that are just as jilted by our world affairs as the extremist that attack us, there has been no formal declarations against us by any of them. We are not being attacked by Islam, any particular ethnicity, because of our acceptance of different belief structures, or because of our varied ethnicities. We are being attacked because of our federal government’s aggressive foreign policy.

All that has been asked of us by our enemy is to stop meddling in their affairs. It is as simple as that.

In October of 2001 in an interview with Tayseer Allouni, a Kabul correspondent of Al-Jazeera, Tayseer asked bin Laden about the killing of innocent civilians. He responded by saying,

“Killing innocent civilians like Americans and other educated people say, is something very weird to be said. I mean, who is the one that said that our children and our civilians are not innocents, and that their blood is permissible [mubaah] ? In the case we kill their civilians, the whole world yells at us from east to west, and America would start pushing its allies and puppets. Who is the one that said that our blood isn’t blood and their blood is blood? Who is the one that declared this? What about the people that have been killed in our lands for decades? More than 1,000,000 children died in Iraq and are still dying, so why don’t we hear people that cry or protest or anyone who reassures or anyone who gives condolences??!?”

In March of 1997 in an interview with Peter Arnett, a 1966 Pulitzer Prize winning Reporter, bin Laden was asked about what it would require to end his jihad against us.

ARNETT: Mr. Bin Ladin, will the end of the United States’ presence in Saudi Arabia, their withdrawal, will that end your call for jihad against the United States and against the US?

BIN LADIN: The cause of the reaction must be sought and the act that has triggered this reaction must be eliminated. The reaction came as a result of the US aggressive policy towards the entire Muslim world and not just towards the Arabian Peninsula. So if the cause that has called for this act comes to an end, this act, in turn, will come to an end. So, the driving-away jihad against the US does not stop with its withdrawal from the Arabian Peninsula, but rather it must desist from aggressive intervention against Muslims in the whole world.

There is nothing that can be said to justify the terrorist attacks being committed by these extremist groups. They are murdering innocent civilians all across the globe and will be brought to justice. However, despite the fact that they are wrong to commit such acts, that doesn’t change the fact that we have been committing atrocities against them for decades. We should not change our aggressive foreign policy out of fear; we should change our foreign policy because it is the right thing to do. When we fund the aggressions of one nation against another we are essentially acting as the aggressor. When we impose naval blockades on trade we are committing acts of war. We have bombed, starved, and politicized the people of the Middle East for too long. Our government may not want to admit it because of pride, but I will proudly say that it is time to see some real change from the establishment!

It is time to return to our roots and start respecting the constitution.

By Rep. John J. Duncan, Jr. (R-Tenn.)

There is nothing conservative about the war in Afghanistan. The Center for Defense Information said a few months ago that we had spent over $400 billion on the war and war-related costs there. Now, the Pentagon says it will cost about $1 billion for each 1,000 additional troops we send to Afghanistan. One Republican Member from California told me recently that we could buy off every warlord in Afghanistan for $1 billion.

Fiscal conservatives should be the ones most horrified by all this spending. Conservatives who oppose big government and huge deficit spending at home should not support it in foreign countries just because it is being done by our biggest bureaucracy, the Defense Department.

We have now spent $1.5 trillion that we did not have–that we had to borrow–in Iraq and Afghanistan. Eight years is long enough. In fact, it is too long. Let’s bring our troops home and start putting Americans first once again.