'War is the Enemy'

In 1942, just after the U.S. entered World War II, and the propaganda machines rallied Americans to the cause of the “Good War,” A..J. Muste, a devout and articulate pacifist, wrote a pamphlet addressed to his fellow Quakers.

In it, he proclaimed the on-going need to speak out against war during war time. His pamphlet carefully and rationally lays out why.

I came across Muste’s essay on line after watching a recent PBS Newhour segment featuring First Lt. Paul Rieckhoof, who heads Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. Rieckhoof told the TV audience that more US military personnel engaged in the Iraq an Afghanistan conflicts are now dying by suicide than are dying in the fighting.

Last year, 468 suicides occurred throughout the armed forces. Of those, 301 were in the regular Army, Reserves, and National Guard, up more than 20 percent from the year before.

As Rieckhoof pointed out, the problem of war-related suicide is even bigger than these figures indicate. “We're not even tracking the 2.3 million veterans who have come home and have cycled out of the military since 9/11."

The PBS story grew out of the President’s announcing a policy change regarding presidential letters of condolence. The President has decided to add the families of military personnel who died by their own hands to all families receiving the letters.

Mounting suicides, the civilian deaths and the damage caused by the post-traumatic stress of war all reveal how, even after the fighting stops and the enemy retreats or is vanquished, the shock, pain and grief never end for those who have experienced war.

The words that immediately came to me were “War is the enemy.”

Certainly, I thought, this phrase couldn’t be original. I searched for it on line and up popped Muste’s nearly 70-year-old essay.

Its title...“War is the Enemy.”

The link to it is HERE.

Europe to Gates (and Obama): Peace is the way

A.J. Muste’s familiar saying, “There’s no way to peace; peace is the way,” is being questioned by none other than America’s very own Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

Last week he publicly bemoaned what he described as Europe’s “demilitarization,” saying that the coolness for fighting was jeopardizing the war in Afghanistan.

Jeopardizing war? That sounds like what Muste had in mind. The way to peace is — peace.

A New York Times story on Feb. 23 noted that polls in Europe show that the Afghanistan war “has grown increasingly unpopular in nearly every European country.”

As Gates noted, NATO members just aren’t putting enough money into guns. The story had Gates complaining that “only five of 28 countries have reached the defense spending target of 2 percent of gross domestic product. Here in the USA — where we still have underfunded schools, miserable health care and a crumbling infrastructure — we spend more than twice that percentage on fighting or preparing to fight.

Indeed we spend more on “defense” than all the other nations on the planet combined.

One nice thing about small democratic countries is that what the people want they get — health care, education etc. Here, we leave it to corporations and the defense industry to call the shots. Vis. the recent Supreme Court decision on corporate political contributions.

So Europe, a cluster of relatively small nations, which feel the impact of Islam’s presence far more than we do, is turning thumbs down on Mr. Gates’ (and President Obama’s) war.

The counter to Gates (and Obama), of course, is Muste (and Gandhi and King and Jesus).

If you want peace, don’t fight wars.

With regard to Afghanistan, there’s a long conversation that Mr. Gate should have with the Russians and the British of the 20th Century. The problem is this: that was then and this is now.

History is not on Mr. Gates’ side. Nor, it would seem, is Europe.