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Cost of the War in Iraq
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We present these sites with the hope of expanding the discussion of the war that has come to dominate the news and much of our lives. Despite the title to this page, we understand that the issues are not simple. Good men and women can and do hold strong opinions, making them neither right or wrong, good or bad. But there are differences and each has the "right" to make a case. Scroll down for Official government sites, groups opposed to the war and comments on the war. Send comments to the editor, above.
Just added If you're interested in knowing where your tax dollars are going, click the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA).
Official Government sites
If you're interested in knowing where your tax dollars are going, click the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA).
From Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, Military Families Speak Out is an organization of people who are opposed to war in Iraq and who have relatives or loved ones in the military. Formed in November, 2002 the organization has an international presence with military families around the world. The site includes photographs of family members, letters to political leaders and information on service members who have served or will serve on the battlefront. E-mail to mfso@mfso.org
Without just cause for war, we say bring the troops home now! Not one more troop killed in action. Not one more troop wounded in action. Not one more troop psychologically damaged by the act of terrifying, humiliating, injuring or killing innocent people. Not one more troop spending one more day inhaling depleted uranium. Not one more troop separated from spouse and children. This is the only way to truly support these troops, and the families who are just as much part of the military as they are. From BRING THEM HOME NOW! a site associated with Veterans for Peace in St. Louis of military families, veterans, active duty personnel, reservists and others opposed to the ongoing war in Iraq. Their mission is to mobilize military families, veterans, and GIs themselves to demand: an end to the occupation of Iraq and other misguided military adventures; and an immediate return of all US troops to their home duty stations. The site includes an extensive forum, updates
on military news, information on campaign events and through fact sheets on
important aspects of the war and our troops on the front lines in Iraq. Antiwar.com is a large site offering opinions and the latest news from a wide variety of sources. United for Peace is a new national campaign that brings together a broad range of organizations throughout the United States to help coordinate our work against a U.S. war on Iraq. At an initial meeting in Washington, DC on October 25, more than 70 peace and justice organizations agreed to form United for Peace. MoveOn
is working to bring ordinary people back into politics. With a system that today
revolves around big money and big media, most citizens are left out. When it
becomes clear that our "representatives" don't represent the public,
the foundations of democracy are in peril. MoveOn is a catalyst for a new kind
of grassroots involvement, supporting busy but concerned citizens in finding
their political voice. Our nationwide network of more than 600,000 online
activists is one of the most effective and responsive outlets for democratic
participation available today. Iraq Peace Pledge SPONSORS: American Friends Service Committee, Brethren Peace Fellowship, Education for Peace in Iraq Center, Fellowship of Reconciliation, Interfaith Network of Concern for the People in Iraq, Lutheran Peace Fellowship, National Network to End the War Against Iraq, Pax Christi USA, Peace Action, Quixote Center, Resource Center for Nonviolence, Voices in the Wilderness, War Resisters League, Women's International League for Peace and Freedom.
Boston
Mobilization is a progressive community organization that educates,
empowers, and Worcester
Peace Works, a grass roots formation that came together after the International A.N.S.W.E.R. (Act Now to Stop War & End Racism) Central
Vermont Non Violence Group Peace Resource Center of Bennington is a grass-roots, community-based group of concerned individuals who strive for a peaceful and sustainable world in which to live. We share the belief that through education, advocacy, community building, and non-violent social action that we can help to address local and global issues caused by the war, racism, intolerance and social injustice. Peace Action Maine Our Mission Statement: Peace Action Maine is a voice of education and a center for all people committed to disarmament and creative responses to conflict. The state's largest peace organization has worked for 19 years to promote peace through grassroots organizing, citizen education, and issue advocacy. The Project on Defense Alternatives is a think tank in Cambridge, Massachusetts that was founded in 1991 to adapt America's military and security needs to the post-Cold War world. As an independent research center, the organization provides often contrasting views of current conditions and future security from official sources. $71 Billion and counting...Cost of the War in Iraq provides a visual presentation, in constant dollars, of the war's cost. The site is the result of "intergenerational cooperation" of Niko Matsakis, in Boston, and Elias Vlanton, in Takoma Park, MD. New Englanders, and any one else, can use the site to learn what their communities have "spent" in dollars on the war effort. The site's cash clock, just under $72 billion when last we looked, is based on evaluations and reports by the Congressional Budget Office. New Hampshire Peace Action is ordinary people working together to end the humanitarian crisis in Iraq, eliminate nuclear weapons, reduce defense spending to responsible levels, support global peacemaking, and restore the well-being of our planet. The Rhode Island Peace Mission is a coalition of religious, academic, and community groups organized for the purpose of engaging in dialogue with the Rhode Island Congressional delegation on the issues of US foreign and military policy, defense spending and its impact on programs of social uplift, and alternative approaches to achieving international security. The Peace Mission operates from the premise that we live in a world in which the political rights, economic well-being, and religious and cultural sensitivities of nations and peoples are so closely interrelated that everyone must be secure for anyone to be secure. Genuine global peace must be founded on justice, mutual respect, and the recognition that war, a very dangerous option, is not inevitable. Veterans for Common Sense seeks to inject the element of Common Sense into debates over war and national security. In an age when the majority of public servants have never served in uniform, the perspective of war veterans must play a key role in the public debate over national security issues in order to preserve the liberty veterans have fought and died preserving Comments on the War Send comments
Below is a letter that was in the news of late. It is well worth reading. U.S. Diplomat's Letter of Resignation The following is the text of John Brady Kiesling's letter of resignation to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell. Mr. Kiesling is a career diplomat who has served in United States embassies from Tel Aviv to Casablanca to Yerevan. February 27, 2003 Dear Mr. Secretary: I am writing you to submit my resignation from the Foreign Service of the United States and from my position as Political Counselor in U.S. Embassy Athens, effective March 7. I do so with a heavy heart. The baggage of my upbringing included a felt obligation to give something back to my country. Service as a U.S. diplomat was a dream job. I was paid to understand foreign languages and cultures, to seek out diplomats, politicians, scholars and journalists, and to persuade them that U.S. interests and theirs fundamentally coincided. My faith in my country and its values was the most powerful weapon in my diplomatic arsenal. It is inevitable that during twenty years with the State Department I would become more sophisticated and cynical about the narrow and selfish bureaucratic motives that sometimes shaped our policies. Human nature is what it is, and I was rewarded and promoted for understanding human nature. But until this Administration it had been possible to believe that by upholding the policies of my president I was also upholding the interests of the American people and the world. I believe it no longer. The policies we are now asked to advance are incompatible not only with American values but also with American interests. Our fervent pursuit of war with Iraq is driving us to squander the international legitimacy that has been America's most potent weapon of both offense and defense since the days of Woodrow Wilson. We have begun to dismantle the largest and most effective web of international relationships the world has ever known. Our current course will bring instability and danger, not security. The sacrifice of global interests to domestic politics and to bureaucratic self-interest is nothing new, and it is certainly not a uniquely American problem. Still, we have not seen such systematic distortion of intelligence, such systematic manipulation of American opinion, since the war in Vietnam. The September 11 tragedy left us stronger than before, rallying around us a vast international coalition to cooperate for the first time in a systematic way against the threat of terrorism. But rather than take credit for those successes and build on them, this Administration has chosen to make terrorism a domestic political tool, enlisting a scattered and largely defeated Al Qaeda as its bureaucratic ally. We spread disproportionate terror and confusion in the public mind, arbitrarily linking the unrelated problems of terrorism and Iraq. The result, and perhaps the motive, is to justify a vast misallocation of shrinking public wealth to the military and to weaken the safeguards that protect American citizens from the heavy hand of government. September 11 did not do as much damage to the fabric of American society as we seem determined to so to ourselves. Is the Russia of the late Romanovs really our model, a selfish, superstitious empire thrashing toward self-destruction in the name of a doomed status quo? We should ask ourselves why we have failed to persuade more of the world that a war with Iraq is necessary. We have over the past two years done too much to assert to our world partners that narrow and mercenary U.S. interests override the cherished values of our partners. Even where our aims were not in question, our consistency is at issue. The model of Afghanistan is little comfort to allies wondering on what basis we plan to rebuild the Middle East, and in whose image and interests. Have we indeed become blind, as Russia is blind in Chechnya, as Israel is blind in the Occupied Territories, to our own advice, that overwhelming military power is not the answer to terrorism? After the shambles of post-war Iraq joins the shambles in Grozny and Ramallah, it will be a brave foreigner who forms ranks with Micronesia to follow where we lead. We have a coalition still, a good one. The loyalty of many of our friends is impressive, a tribute to American moral capital built up over a century. But our closest allies are persuaded less that war is justified than that it would be perilous to allow the U.S. to drift into complete solipsism. Loyalty should be reciprocal. Why does our President condone the swaggering and contemptuous approach to our friends and allies this Administration is fostering, including among its most senior officials. Has oderint dum metuant really become our motto? I urge you to listen to America's friends around the world. Even here in Greece, purported hotbed of European anti-Americanism, we have more and closer friends than the American newspaper reader can possibly imagine. Even when they complain about American arrogance, Greeks know that the world is a difficult and dangerous place, and they want a strong international system, with the U.S. and EU in close partnership. When our friends are afraid of us rather than for us, it is time to worry. And now they are afraid. Who will tell them convincingly that the United States is as it was, a beacon of liberty, security, and justice for the planet? Mr. Secretary, I have enormous respect for your character and ability. You have preserved more international credibility for us than our policy deserves, and salvaged something positive from the excesses of an ideological and self-serving Administration. But your loyalty to the President goes too far. We are straining beyond its limits an international system we built with such toil and treasure, a web of laws, treaties, organizations, and shared values that sets limits on our foes far more effectively than it ever constrained America's ability to defend its interests. I am resigning because I have tried and failed to reconcile my conscience with my ability to represent the current U.S. Administration. I have confidence that our democratic process is ultimately self-correcting, and hope that in a small way I can contribute from outside to shaping policies that better serve the security and prosperity of the American people and the world we share.
Empire of Reason or just another empire
Henry Steele Commager nearly filled all of the last century, living from 1902 to 1998. He was an American historian of the first order, with many books to his credit who was also able to bring his work to the general public, writing for magazines and newspapers.
In 1978 he wrote The Empire of Reason: How Europe Imagined and America Realized the Enlightenment. It is a wonderful book.
He wrote the book when things were not well for the Republic. We had just suffered the defeat in Vietnam, a president had resigned in disgrace and the invisible hands of economic forces were having an all too visible impact on the lives of Americans. In 1978 we seemed to have forgotten what we were about.
Commager's book was a reminder. It recounts the excitement that was the idea of America for Europe's thinkers before and just after the Revolution. They were enthused over the prospects for the new nation as it groped with the enlightened ideals that were used to form the foundations of our government and society.
What hits one from reading The Empire of Reason is the youthful vitality of the country where all things were possible. Many Europeans, looking at themselves in comparison to the New World, saw a corrupt, bloated, uninspiring collection of worn out states whose glories were long since past. They looked with envy, those who stayed behind, at this new place of ideas where they believed, reinvention would be a model for the planet.
America was not weighted down by platitudes. We were built on principles that begat rules of law. Europe worked from rules and custom that evolved into hardened and unquestioned dogma. It was possible here for men like Franklin and scores of others, to invent, cultivate, discover, classify, rework, imagine, print, publish and build wealth and influence simply from the strength of intellect and hard work. We were young and free to imagine.
Europe and the ancient world had empires built on might. We, as Commager writes, were building an empire of reason.
These heady days were more than two centuries ago. We no longer are young and untried. The empire of reason that excited much of the world, is now much less of an inspiration. We have become, for good or ill, an empire of might.
One has to ask if, as with all the empires of the past, is this our unquestioned zenith the first step of our decline? If so, what can we do to rediscover the idea of American reason and enlightenment?
Perhaps we should revisit and reexamine who we were, what we stood for and why tens of millions left old empires and came here.
Peter Roberts From New England Notes Word from Senator Ensign The nation is now officially and irrevocably divided John Ensign is a Republican senator from Nevada who wrote for the Op-Ed page of the Washington Post on Sunday, August 3. The Senator compared criticism of President Clinton's air campaign against Iraq, while he was undergoing impeachment proceedings, with the scrutiny that President Bush now endures. He suggests that those who defended Clinton's actions but now question Bush's war are hypocrites. More ominously, he equates critics of the war with political partisanship who seek to profit from American blood shed in Iraq. I am
dismayed that so many feel free to engage in partisan attacks on the commander
in chief in the midst of war. They risk the appearance of seeking political
advantage from the deaths of American soldiers -- something most Americans
would find unseemly. We were waiting for this line of reasoning to officially rear its head and we thank the senator for finally saying what had only been hinted at previously. We also thank him for introducing "hypocrisy" into the national discussion. It seems he knows of what he speaks. His logic, if that's the proper word, stems from the necessity to justify the war and its subsequent and continuing human and financial costs, in light of the original arguments made to the world and the American people. These emphasized an immediate danger to our country and to our friends from Iraq. From the president, the vice president and many others, our invasion was portrayed as an honorable, necessary and prudent action of self defense. There was no time for more UN inspections, we were told, because Iraq was hording stockpiles of terrible weapons. It was also in league with international terrorists to attack this country. Skeptics, both here and overseas, were derided. Congress voted last fall to authorize the use of force in Iraq to forestall these obvious, lethal and immediate threats to our people and our way of life. We know now that these arguments were not true. To be more exact, they were lies. Not white lies that one hears during election campaigns and in political commercials, but lies of extraordinary scope that sent this nation to war. There were no weapons of mass destruction ready for instant use against us or our friends in Iraq. The UN inspection process had worked and was working. Iraq was not readying a nuclear bomb-dirty or otherwise-and even if huge stockpiles of biological or chemical weapons are found tomorrow, none would have posed an immediate threat to this country. Just before the war, UN inspectors had questions about Iraq's weapons and were pursing the legal inspection processes allowed by the United Nations. Difficult as these efforts were, they involved no invasion or bombing and took no American, British or Iraqi lives. The senator and the right wing leadership know, and as is dawning on more and more Americans, that the invasion of Iraq and our self-inflicted role of nation building, was unnecessary. So he, no doubt with the President's consent, is "reinventing" the reasons for the war. This reinvention now includes the concept that questioning President Bush or the war is providing aid and comfort to the enemy. Callously, they want to use the men and women serving in Iraq as insulation from facing up to the lies and hypocrisy that was inflicted on the people of the United States before the start of the war. To bolster the "support our troops" line, they've added the suggestion that opponents to the president and the war equates to supporting the brutal regime that our soldiers and marines have removed. They suggest that to question President Bush on the war in Iraq means one is on the side of evil. To question means you're an appeaser. The nation is now officially and irrevocably divided. Rather than own up to its mistakes and seek accommodation and reconciliation, the right wing has determined that the 2004 election will be purchased with lies, deceptions and patriotic "hypocrisies" of the highest order. Persons with a memory of recent events are revisionists. There are some of us who've been in our nation's military and we bleed anew, with all Americans, when we hear of yet another soldier's death in Iraq. To suggest that any American who questions the reasons we went to war is pursuing a political agenda is, as we used to say in the Army, puzzle place bs. (On their side, CYA also comes to mind.) It is more than just insulting. It is an offense against the principles we hold in the United States of America and an evil that is just as horrendous and malevolent as any this nation has seen before. It makes wider the great divide in this nation. More and more, our country is separated not by party or class or race or even wealth. These divisions are real but only make more dramatic the real division among us: that of a compact core of the powerful within and among the government and a largely powerless and divergent assembly of the governed, whom we call in The Constitution, the people. Peter J. Roberts New London, CT August 4, 2003
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