“Our intelligence community does assess with varying degrees of confidence that the Syrian regime has used chemical weapons on a small scale in Syria, specifically the chemical agent sarin.”

I do assess with varying degrees of horror (some of the varying degrees rather high even) that a lot of people are going to die.  And how dare they die from chemical weapons when they should be dying from hellfire missiles and cluster bombs and napalm and depleted uranium and white phosphorous.  We have a responsibility to protect these people from dying of the wrong type of weapon and in too small numbers.

I’m in Dallas protesting the rehabilitation of our last criminal president because of the precedents he set for our current criminal president.  So, precedents are on my mind.  One precedent for an illegal humanitarian NATO war on Syria is, of course, the illegal humanitarian war on Libya two years ago.  And the pair of precedents (Libya and Syria) will put the target of the neocon/neoliberal cooperative war project squarely on Iran.

Syria will suffer, of course.  There will be no more an example of a humanitarian war that actually benefitted humanity after Syria than before.  The precedent will not be one of having accomplished something, but of having gotten away with something.

For some truly illuminating background on what was done to Libya, and some relevant discussion of what awaits Syria (if we don’t prevent it), I recommend Francis Boyle’s new book, Destroying Libya and World Order. 

Boyle served as a lawyer for the government of Libya repeatedly, over a period of decades, more than once successfully preventing a military assault by the United States and the United Kingdom.  Boyle details the aggression toward Libya of the Reagan administration: the lies and false accusations, the sanctions, the provocations, the assassination attempts, the infiltration, the blatant disregard for international law.

Boyle’s history brings us up to and through the 2011 assault, and traces its precedents to a very similar war over a decade earlier in Bosnia.  Boyle finds the unconstitutional and illegal assault on Libya a clear impeachable offense for President Obama.  And why would we think otherwise?  Only because we let Clinton and Bush get away with everything they got away with.  It would seem unfair now to impeach Obama for a crime his predecessors committed as well.

But past, as well as current, presidents can be impeached, censured, prosecuted, and/or publicly shamed.  Five of them came to Dallas today; there shouldn’t be any trouble finding them.  And the criminal attack on Libya can be treated as the crime it was.  The excuse of protection was used to quite openly pursue the overthrow of a nation’s government, bombing large numbers of civilians in the process, while arming brutal thugs and creating predictable blowback in neighboring nations as well.

In contrast, in Bahrain, nonviolent pro-democracy activists are left to their own devices as a U.S.-backed dictatorship jails, tortures, and murders them.

In Syria, the United States has worked against peace and for violence.  That violence is not a justification for further and heightened violence.  And every member of an intelligence “community” that announces that Syria might possibly have used a chemical weapon should be doing community service for the people of Fallujah and Basra and Baghdad, not prodding the world’s only stupor power into another genocide. Read the rest of this entry →

There’s a new Atrocity Prevention Board in town, and its chief tool for preventing atrocities will be . . . wait for it . . . atrocities!

Wikimedia Commons / U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Jesse B. Awalt

What a breakthrough! And this clown is forming a tentative life partnership with an unbelievably beautiful model from Libya.  The key word is “unbelievably.”

The Atrocity Prevention Board is rumored to still be married to World War II, but the primary reason to doubt the latest gossip is the grotesque hideousness of the Libyan Model with no makeup in the light of day.

One good resource for reviewing what’s occurred in Libya is “Arab Spring, Libyan Winter,” a new book by Vijay Prashad.  I don’t agree with all of it, and the bulk of it is historical background and context rather than the events of last year.  Yet it makes an excellent first draft of history — something that newspapers do not produce for us.

The United States and Europe had been arming and working with Gadaffi. U.S. and British spy agencies had worked with Gadaffi’s torturers and killers.  Sarkozy and Gadaffi may have been closer than Sarkozy claims.

Gadaffi had given up his nuclear program.  His subsequent fate (butchered and displayed in a meat locker in Benghazi), along with Iraq’s fate, sends a strong message to other nations already inclined to believe that only nuclear weapons will protect them.  Perhaps just once we should allow a nation to give up its nukes and then not bomb the bejeezus out of it.

But Gadaffi had displeased the West and displeased the Arab dictatorships.  He was unreliable.  He wanted too much of Libya’s wealth for Libyans.  He was too independent.  He even called the Saudi monarch the worst thing in the book: “made by Britain and protected by the U.S.”  And he said that in Qatar, which made him another enemy.

Read the rest of this entry →

The House of Representatives would be better off speaking Arabic. See if you can make heads or tails of this.

The House voted down a bill to end the Libya War.

At the same time, it passed a nonbinding House-only resolution that said the President “shall not” use ground troops in Libya, the war is unauthorized, and Congress could defund the war if it wanted to. The resolution requested that all kinds of information be reported to Congress by the President, much of which has not been reported by the specified deadline.

Next, the House passed an amendment blocking any funds, beginning in October, for troops or contractors on the ground in Libya.

At the same time, the House passed an amendment requiring that when the war is completed (and presumably the U.S. has control of Tripoli), the U.S. troops on the ground there must dig up the bodies of other U.S. troops buried there during a war 206 years ago.

Also at the same time, the House defeated an amendment that would have stripped out language dramatically expanding presidents’ power to launch wars — language eventually removed by the Senate.

Then the House rejected an amendment to a Homeland Security bill blocking use of its funds for wars waged in violation of the War Powers Resolution, passed the same amendment to a Military Construction and Veterans Affairs bill, and finally passed the same amendment to the Defense Appropriations Act, which kicks in in October. While that amendment may sound particularly meaningless, it might actually benefit a court case in which 10 members of Congress have sued the President to stop the war, on the grounds of its clear violation of the War Powers Resolution.

Then the House voted down an authorization of war in Libya.

At the same time, the House also voted down a proposal to limit the funding of that war to certain types of activities.

In the latest installment of this saga, the House has rejected an amendment that would have defunded the Libya War beginning in October.

At the same time, the House again has passed an amendment defunding ground troops.

At the same time, the House has passed an amendment to prohibit the use of funds for the Department of Defense to assist any group or individual (such as the Libyan rebels) not part of a country’s armed forces for the purpose of assisting that group or individual in carrying out military activities in or against Libya. The author of this amendment claims to have defunded the Libya War (as of October, if the Senate agrees, if the President doesn’t signing-statement it, etc.).

Also at the same time, the House has rejected an amendment that would have prohibited the use of funds to support military operations, including NATO or United Nations operations, in Libya or in Libya’s airspace.

And, just to make sure this is all fully meaningless, the House also rejected an amendment that would have removed the slush fund that allows presidents to fund wars without Congress. The House then proceeded to pass, yet again, a bigger military spending bill than last year.

So, the Libya War is unauthorized and has never been funded with a dime by Congress, but Congress does not object to this — unless perhaps it does.

Only it doesn’t really. If the House (the Senate is hopeless) objected, it would simply enforce existing laws. The War Powers Resolution — despite the President’s claim that bombing people’s houses is not “hostilities” — is actually crystal clear in comparison with recent Congressional communications. That law has been violated. The House could unambiguously block funding for this illegal war or impeach its architect. Nobody currently believes it will do any more than push the envelope of pretended war opposition, even to the point of confusing people as to what it’s up to.

On Wednesday in federal court, 10 members of the U.S. Congress sued President Obama in an attempt to end U.S. involvement in a war in Libya.

These are the plaintiffs: Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), Walter Jones (R-NC), Howard Coble (R-NC), John Duncan (R-TN), Roscoe Bartlett (R-MD), John Conyers (D-MI), Ron Paul (R-TX), Michael Capuano (D-MA), Tim Johnson (R-IL), and Dan Burton (R-IN).

According to a statement from Congressman Kucinich:

“The lawsuit calls for injunctive and declaratory relief to protect the plaintiffs and the country from (1) the policy that a president may unilaterally go to war in Libya and other countries without a declaration of war from Congress, as required by Article I, Section 8, Clause 11 of the United States Constitution;  (2) the policy that a president may commit the United States to a war under the authority of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in violation of the express conditions of the North Atlantic Treaty ratified by Congress; (3) the policy that a president may commit the United States to a war under the authority of the United Nations without authorization from Congress; (4) from the use of previously appropriated funds by Congress for an unconstitutional and unauthorized war in Libya or other countries; and (5) from the violation of the War Powers Resolution as a result of the Obama Administration’s established policy that the President does not require congressional authorization for the use of military force in wars like the one in Libya.”

I would have liked to see the Kellogg-Briand Pact and the United Nations Charter extend that list to seven items, but doing so would probably not have altered the result.  What will the result be?
Read the rest of this entry →

Speaker of the House John Boehner is expected to bring to a vote on Friday a remarkable resolution called H. Res. 292. This document restores a damaged U.S. Constitution to its full glory in much the way that a spray-on sunless tanning product could restore a collaterally damaged victim who had been liberated by white phosphorous.

Boehner has delayed a vote on a straightforward resolution (H.C.R. 51) that would end U.S. war in Libya. Here’s the full text:

“Pursuant to section 5(c) of the War Powers Resolution (50 U.S.C. 1544(c)), Congress directs the President to remove the United States Armed Forces from Libya by not later than the date that is 15 days after the date of the adoption of this concurrent resolution.”

Boehner’s reason for delaying a vote was that the resolution might pass. So, instead, we’re going to see a vote on a seven-page self-parody of a piece of legislation. H. Res. 292 quite verbosely acknowledges that the Libya War is illegal but allows its continuation. Much of this absurd document is devoted to listing the details that should be included in a report the President must make to Congress, including items required by the War Powers Resolution, a law already on the books for whatever that’s worth. After very bravely and decisively ordering up this report, the resolution concludes with two “findings”:

“(a) The President has not sought, and Congress has not provided, authorization for the introduction or continued involvement of the United States Armed Forces in Libya.

“(b) Congress has the constitutional prerogative to withhold funding for any unauthorized use of the United States Armed Forces, including for unauthorized activities regarding Libya.”

Finding (a) admits that the war is unconstitutional and in violation as well of the War Powers Resolution. The Constitutional remedy for such a situation is impeachment. Ruling that out for lack of any witnesses who’ve had sex with the President, Congress could choose to end the war. But the resolution to simply do that has been bumped in favor of this sorry substitute. Finding (b) notes that Congress can withhold funding, but Congress has never provided any funding. When the President has access to vast sums, Congress is compelled to pass a bill requiring that no funds be spent on the war. But H. Res. 292 does not prohibit the use of funds; it just asserts Congress’ power to do such a thing should it ever see fit.

In addition to requiring a report from the President, this legislation requires the Secretaries of Defense and State, and the Attorney General, to hand over any relevant communications. Presumably this is the point, to try to find something that makes Obama look bad, even as the war rages on. Or the point may simply be to give an impression of giving a damn while ensuring that the war rages on.

If the U.S. Constitution says one thing, a treaty ratified by the United States says another, a law passed by Congress yet another, and another law passed by Congress another thing still, while a signing statement radically changes that last law but itself differs with an executive order, all of which statements of law conflict with a number of memos drafted by the Office of Legal Council (some secret and some leaked), but a President has announced that the law is something completely different from all of this, and in practice the government defies all of the above including the presidential announcement . . . in such a case, the obvious but possibly pointless question arises: what’s legal?

The above theoretical example of legal confusion sounds extreme, but it is not far off the actual situation with regard to some of our most important public policies. Take the example of U.S. warmaking in Libya. Is that legal?

The U.S. Constitution says Congress must decide where and when to make war. Congress has not declared a war since 1941. Since that date Congress has put up a gradually diminishing pretense of involvement. In the case of Libya, Congress played no role whatsoever in launching the war. Is the law what the Constitution says, how the Constitution was interpreted for the first two-thirds of our national history, what presidents have gotten away with in recent decades, or what a president can get away with today? Wait, don’t answer that!

The Constitution also says that ratified treaties are the supreme law of the land. Does that include treaties passed almost a century ago, largely forgotten, and almost never discussed on television? Does it include only treaties that have been duplicated in U.S. statutes? Does it include only treaties the government is inclined to comply with? In this regard, we might wish to recall that theoretically the Kellogg Briand Pact is still one of our many supreme laws of the land. In 1928, the U.S. Senate ratified this treaty, which states:

“The High Contracting Parties solemly declare in the names of their respective peoples that they condemn recourse to war for the solution of international controversies, and renounce it, as an instrument of national policy in their relations with one another.”

The Senate tacked on a couple of modifications to the treaty, a practice of debatable legality itself. One reservation the Senate added was for cases of defense. The other was to clarify that the United States was not obliged to enforce the treaty by going to war against its violators. Since nobody has even claimed that Libya attacked the United States, and since the United States voluntarily went to war, the exceptions do not seem relevant. War is illegal. Period. At least if we go by Kellogg Briand. And why not? Aren’t ancient laws recalled and put to use when we need to expand corporate power or discriminate against gays or advance any other political agenda? So, why not Kellogg Briand? Because it’s been violated? What kind of reason is that?

The United Nations Charter, too, makes war illegal, with very limited exceptions that do not seem to apply. But the United Nations passed a resolution that the U.S. Justice Department, in a leaked/published memo, relies on heavily to justify the war. Does that resolution make the war in some way legal, even if the memo isn’t and the Constitution is still violated? And what if the war, in various ways, violates the resolution? The resolution was for a humanitarian intervention, a no fly zone, a cease fire, an arms embargo, and a ban on foreign ground troops. It was immediately used to bomb civilians, introduce arms, and employ foreign ground troops, not to mention drone bombings and an apparent assassination attempt — both practices of highly dubious legality. Is a war legalized by a resolution even if it violates the resolution, and even if it violates numerous other laws in doing so? Or is it internationally legalized while remaining domestically unconstitutional?

A U.S. law passed in 1973, the War Powers Act, if you read what it actually says, would have applied only if Libya had attacked the United States, which no one has ever claimed. But everyone pretended this law applied anyway. The War Powers Resolution requires that the President report information to Congress within 48 hours of launching a war, which Obama did — except that he didn’t include most of the information he was required to report. The War Powers Resolution also puts a 60-day limit on unconstitutional war, and that clock has expired. So is the war illegal because it violates both the Constitution and this weaker law? Or is it legal because there’s been such a pretense of complying with the law, to the extent of sending Congress a polite note when the 60-day clock ran out? And is this law somewhat less legal than other laws because it was passed over a veto and because some, but not all, presidents since its passage have declared that they object to it and hold it to be unconstitutionally strong — as opposed to being unconstitutionally weak, as the law appears to be?

Last week, the House of Misrepresentatives passed numerous amendments to the “Defense Authorization Act of 2012.” One amendment made clear that passage of the bill did not authorize war in Libya. (Arguably, the failure of Congress to fund any war in Libya also makes the war — you guessed it — illegal.) Another amendment prohibited the use of U.S. ground troops in Libya (unless employed through a department other than “Defense”). But another amendment required that, upon completion of the war, the U.S. military dig up and bring home the bones of U.S. sailors buried in Tripoli during an earlier war in 1804 (which Congress did not declare but authorized). How exactly is that going to happen unless the U.S. military gains control of Tripoli? And what is accomplished by refusing to authorize a war that is already underway, with another 90 days just announced by NATO, and with not a glimmer of a threat of holding anyone accountable for it? Is the idea to make a war “illegal” but watch it roll along?

Another section of the same bill (an amendment to strip it failed to pass) effectively gives presidents the power to make wars. This section (#1034) conflicts with the War Powers Act and the Constitution. It might also conflict with a congressional resolution ending or prohibiting a specific war. The President claims not to want this power, and a generous interpretation of a statement from his administration holds that he has threatened to veto the bill over it. While a veto strikes me as extremely unlikely, a signing statement seems somewhat more likely, if this amendment gets through the Senate. Here’s a situation in which the fundamental question of who has the power of war could have several answers. The Constitution will continue to say Congress, while the War Powers Act says mostly Congress, but this new legislation says presidents, and a signing statement says something different.

Why would President Obama signing-statement away more presidential power? Well, he probably won’t. But think about why he avoided asking Congress to declare or authorize war in the first place, when it probably would have. And why did he avoid asking Congress to declare or authorize war within 60 days? Why does he insist that the war is fought by NATO, rather than the United States, even though NATO and its role in the war would not exist without the United States? The goal seems to be expanding presidential power. NATO answers to the president but its abuses, as in Afghanistan, cannot be investigated by Congress. Asking Congress to play a role, even if it plays the desired one, means having to ask Congress again the next time. And allowing Congress to legislate that Congress has no role would mean that theoretically Congress could unlegislate that again. So, Obama could object to Congress having the gall to believe itself empowered to crown him king.

We could end up with a war illegal under the Constitution, legal and illegal under laws and treaties depending which we choose to consult, and illegal or legal under a signing statement depending how we try to make sense of it, but legal under the Justice Department’s memos. What’s legal?

A resolution to end the U.S. Libya war, HCR 51, will have to be voted on in the House by the week after next at the latest. If the vote is not held, in violation of the law, or if it is held and passes (and then passes the Senate too), will the war be thereby made even more illegal than it was, or illegal for the first time? What if the “Defense Authorization Act” passes the Senate and is signed into law with Section 1034 intact before the House holds its vote on ending the Libya war, or after? Can the crime of having violated the War Powers Act be retroactively treated to immunity? Can the same Congress legislatively and unwittingly deprive itself of the power to end a war it tries to end? What if Congress, frustrated in its effort to vote the war over, votes to ban the use of any dollars to fund the war? Then (and only then?) would continuation of the war be truly illegal? And what if a new memo or presidential decree in the meantime claimed the right to fund the war by other means, Iran-Contra-style or otherwise?

Or what if all measures went against the war’s legality? What if Section 1034 is rejected by the Senate, both houses vote to end the war, both houses vote to defund the war, the United Nations declares the war illegal, and so forth, but the war continues? Can a war be illegal and roll right along, like warrentless spying, procedure-free imprisonment, or assassination squads?

The White House/Pentagon is planning a secret briefing for Congress on the Libya War. Those who attend should be aware that the war in Libya appears to be a crime and that failure to report crimes that one witnesses is a felony. In this situation, can a Congress member be prosecuted both for revealing the contents of the meeting and for not doing so?

The only thing that seems clear here is that Thomas Paine’s notion of the law as king in this country isn’t holding up very well. Obviously the law is only king if we’re clear on what a law is and our government obeys it. If a law is any bill freely passed by Congress and signed or passed over a veto, provided the courts do not reject it as unconstitutional, and if the highest law is the Constitution and our treaties, then clarity might be possible. But then executive decrees and orders and lawless claims of secrecy and immunity would not be laws, signing statements would not be laws, and blatantly unconstitutional laws would not be laws. Persuasive arguments in secret meetings, and the whole regime of threats and bribes that the White House uses to manipulate the Congress would not be part of lawmaking.

Getting from where we are to there could be tricky. The Constitution itself proposes a way to do it that does not seem applicable. The tool that the Constitution provides the Congress is called impeachment, but obviously that cannot be discussed in this situation, since President Obama is not known to have been having sex with anyone.

Now we know why Obama has gone to such outrageous lengths to keep Bush’s lawyers out of prison, claiming powers of secrecy and immunity beyond Cheney’s wildest dreams and pressuring foreign nations to clamp down on any outbreaks of law enforcement.

If the Bush lawyers who “legalized” aggressive war, lawless imprisonment, and torture were not consulted on how to keep the war in Libya going in perpetuity, they were certainly the inspiration for the latest White House brainstorming session.

Remember when Alberto Gonzales claimed that the U.S. Constitution gives no one the right to habeas corpus by merely asserting that if you had that right it could not be taken away? Amateur work.

Remember when John Yoo and Jay Bybee explained that a man tortured but never tried had no rights due to his guilt? Child’s play.

Remember when Bush suggested he might get a war with Iraq started by painting airplanes with UN colors, flying them low, and trying to get them shot at? He was the warm-up act.

Obama’s relationship with the U.S. Constitution, U.S. treaty obligations, and the War Powers Act is a mature performance, a masterpiece for the ages.

The U.S. Constitution allows no president to launch a war. The War Powers Act makes an exception for cases in which the United States has been attacked by another nation. Libya did not attack the United States. So, the War Powers Act does not apply.

But Obama’s great legal minds decided to pretend it applied by submitting a report to Congress that pretended to comply with the reporting requirements of the War Powers Act. The pretense was pretty thin, as that law requires that certain items be reported, including “the estimated scope and duration of the hostilities or involvement,” that were not included in the President’s pretend report to Congress.

Obama’s “Justice Department” then leaked a memo that Bush’s gang would have been proud of but would have kept secret, a memo announcing more than arguing that Obama could make war in Libya if he damn well felt like it. We needed to defend regional stability, the DOJ argued, apparently forgetting what region we’re in. And we needed to defend the United Nations, they claimed, even while rejecting UN demands to visit Bradley Manning or to cease murdering Pakistanis with drones.

And now we come to the end of the first 60 days of bombing Libya. If you’re pretending to partially comply with the War Powers Act, then you’re pretending that you have 60 days in which to wage unconstitutional war. After that, you have to put your guns and other toys away or ask the first branch of our government to authorize what you are doing. Here are two of Obama’s schemes for getting around this law:

One:

“[An] idea is for the United States to order a complete — but temporary — halt to all of its efforts in the Libya mission. Some lawyers make the case that, after a complete pause, the United States could rejoin the mission with a new 60-day clock.”

This is the one that has John Yoo kicking himself with jealousy, assuming he didn’t provide it. You stop a war for a moment, and then restart it with another 60 days on the clock. If they could do this repeatedly, they could have permanent war while “complying” with the War Powers Act. Or perhaps they could just do it once, and in the interim Congress would pass its “Defense Authorization” including Congressman McKeon and Senator McCain’s amendment to give Obama and all future presidents blanket authorization to launch wars. That might work.

Two:

“One concept being discussed is for the United States to halt the use of its Predator drones in attacking targets in Libya, and restrict them solely to a role gathering surveillance over targets. Over recent weeks, the Predators have been the only American weapon actually firing on ground targets, although many aircraft are assisting in refueling, intelligence gathering and electronic jamming. By ending all strike missions for American forces, the argument then could be made that the United States was no longer directly engaged in hostilities in Libya, but only providing support to NATO allies.”

This is a curious idea. The United Nations investigator on extrajudicial killings has already declared U.S. drone use elsewhere illegal. The U.N. resolution that the U.S. Justice Department argues justifies the war forbids foreign ground troops and imposes an arms embargo. So, by halting one illegal action, the United States would “legalize” continuing others.

Except that NATO is not separate from the United States, but dominated by the United States, its largest member. Attributing atrocities to NATO puts them outside Congress’ purview. Assigning whole wars to NATO, as was done by former president Clinton in Yugoslavia, should not provide the same cover.

There’s nothing legal about this, and there wouldn’t be even if NATO were a non-U.S. entity, or even if Congress had declared war on Libya. As Marjorie Cohn points out:

“The UN Charter does not permit the use of military force for humanitarian interventions . . . . It is only when peaceful means have been tried and proved inadequate that the Security Council can authorize action under Chapter VII of the Charter.

Cohn also looks at what the Libya resolution says:

“Security Council Resolution 1973 begins with the call for ‘the immediate establishment of a ceasefire.’ . . . The resolution authorizes UN Member States ‘to take all necessary measures . . . to protect civilians and civilian populated areas’ of Libya. But instead of pursuing an immediate ceasefire, immediate military action was taken . . . . The military force exceeds the bounds of the ‘all necessary measures’ authorization. ‘All necessary measures’ should first have been peaceful measures to settle the conflict. Yet peaceful means were not exhausted before the military invasion began. A high level international team — consisting of representatives from the Arab League, the African Union, and the UN Secretary General — should have been dispatched to Tripoli to attempt to negotiate a real cease-fire, and set up a mechanism for elections and for protecting civilians. Moreover, after the passage of the resolution, Libya immediately offered to accept international monitors and Qadaffi offered to step down and leave Libya. These offers were immediately rejected by the opposition. . . . Obama, France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy and Britain’s David Cameron penned an op-ed in the International Herald Tribune that said the NATO force will fight in Libya until President Muammar Qaddafi is gone, even though the Resolution does not sanction forcible regime change.”

Even if you supported the initial “humanitarian” imposition of the “no fly zone” in Libya — and the laws be damned — you need a new reason to support the ongoing bombing of Tripoli and the West’s efforts to impose a puppet government on Libya by force. The International Criminal Court’s willingness to charge Gadaffi, but not Obama, with crimes is not a reason. Wars are not legally justified by a national leader’s criminality. You need a new excuse. And I’m ashamed of the ones the White House is coming up with.

If we are going to properly educate our children to evade substantive compliance with laws and moral standards, we need to show them how to do it right. The Yoo-Bybee model, now perfected by Obama and Hillary Clinton’s gang, still does not seem quite worthy of our position as world leader. I think we can do better, and I trust that our greatest legal minds are hard at work on the matter.

If something even more brilliant than “reset the clock” isn’t thought of soon, I wouldn’t be entirely shocked if a newspaper somewhere in the country thought to ask why Obama doesn’t just ask Congress to authorize his war. And I would consider it a real, if remote, possibility that a reader somewhere might actually stop and think about that question.

So President Obama has been quoted calling his war in Libya a turd sandwich, while Juan Cole calls it philanthropy, and Ed Schultz praises it as vengeance against this month’s Adolph Hitler. The last time we bombed this particular Hitler we took out his daughter, among other people.

How is Schultz’s spitting mad hatred as war justification squared with Cole’s humanitarian generosity? The answer is easy. They prefer different condiments on their turd sandwiches. Which is why wars are always packaged in multiple and mutually contradictory propaganda campaigns.

Obama’s advisors are almost certainly telling him that LBJ and Nixon were right to be terrified of “losing” a war. Of course refusing to “lose” a war cost both of them the presidency. Bush refused to “lose” in Iraq for years, handed that function to Obama, and credit for it is about all Obama has to ride on now. Two-thirds of Americans are demanding that we hurry up and “lose” in Afghanistan. Pollsters say Americans have turned against the Libya war faster than any previous war. And all Obama wants to know is whether he can supersize his turd sandwich.

This is the madness of militarism of which that gentleman spoke whom Obama told us had been wrong back in Oslo when the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize was being pissed on — to continue the theme of human waste. “I never intend to adjust myself to the madness of militarism,” said King. That’s OK, though, because it adjusted to him. A gun took him out, and a whitewashed history erased his opposition to wars and plutocracies.

That’s the logic to be found here: might makes right. War is peace. Non-combat troops do battle with armed civilians. Military aid is our leading charitable organization.

A UN resolution means we can disregard Congress. You go on recess, you lose. The war’s already started now. In fact, we’ve already declared mission accomplished. So, like Guantanamo and Iraq and investment scams and health insurance abuses, it’s “over.” So, don’t try to stop it! And if you do, warns Hillary, we’ll ignore you, just like my husband did a dozen years back. Then you’ll be as irrelevant as the UN in 2003, until we have a use for you.

Congress isn’t even needed for funding. The Pentagon has paused in its eternal screeching lamentations of poverty and near financial collapse to launch a billion dollar turd sandwich with its pocket change, in the same moment when the GAO spots another $70 billion the military has flushed away. And Obama has secretly directed the CIA to feel free to secretly arm the Contras — I mean the Rebels. Times might be tough, but an “intelligence” operation has enough spare cash lying around to arm an army sufficient to take out another army that we helped arm in the past (the past being a couple of months ago).

So the UN gets us around Congress, and the CIA gets us around the UN. But how is it still “us”? Isn’t it just Captain Peace Prize and Ed “I just swallowed a turd sandwich” Schultz? Or won’t it be soon? If we put the top guy at the CIA in charge of the military and the military’s star spokesgeneral in charge of the CIA, who’ll remember they aren’t the same thing? Probably the same 0.01% of Americans who notice that the War Powers Act doesn’t let presidents have wars for 60 days no matter how many times that horseshit is stuck between two slices of wheat bread. Or at least the 0.01% of THAT crowd who notice that the same bans on warfare apply even when it’s merely a kinetic military activity in support of an overseas contingency operation.

When it comes to believing your own overpriced lunch doesn’t smell, probably nothing tops the process through which war propagandists come to believe that taking out a single person will establish peace. How’d that work in Iraq? Demonizing one bad dude is wonderful propaganda for yahoos, but one bad dude only controls people who are willing to be controlled, and there are good chances they have motivations other than personal devotion.

Gadaffi’s strength is his nonsensical claim to opposing empire. Attacking him with imperial weapons is the ideal way to empower him to the greatest extent possible, and to empower any movement that survives his martyrdom.

Investment in weapons and bad governments is destroying the U.S. economy, and the U.S. government claims to be broke. Dumping more dollars into the same hole is the ideal way to further the collapse.

We call the result winning the future.

##

David Swanson is the author of a book that was written with the purpose of avoiding having to explain any more war lies: http://warisalie.org

Johan Galtung, sometimes called the father of peace studies, predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union and the refusal of Egyptian soldiers to attack civilians. His prediction of the collapse of the US empire in 2020 appears to be on schedule. So, it was noteworthy when he predicted on Tuesday at the University of Virginia that the war in Libya would last 20 years. If, however, NATO and the opposition were to kill Gadaffi, he said, the fighting could go on for more than 20 years.

This prediction came the day after Obama gave one of those speeches, like his speeches on Gitmo or Iraq, where he persuades you that something is already over without actually making that claim. How can the war (excuse me, humanitarian intervention) in Libya be over and have 20 years left to go?

Galtung argues that predictions of quick success in Libya depend on an ignorance of history and a reduction of broad social forces to the caricature of a single person. There are five forces at work in the Arab Revolution, Galtung argues: opposition to dictatorship (demand for civil rights), opposition to inequality and poverty (demand for economic rights), opposition to the U.S. and Israeli empires, the revolt of the youth, and the revolt of women. When a government is on the wrong side of all five forces, Galtung claims, it is doomed.

Egypt scores a negative 5; its government imposed/imposes dictatorship and inequality, supports the rule of the two empires, and suppresses youth and women. Tunisia, because of advances in women’s rights, scores a negative 4. To explain why Libya only scores a negative 3, Galtung goes back to 1915 when Arabs revolted against the Ottoman Empire with the aid of France, the UK, and Russia. France took over Lebanon and Syria. The UK took over Iraq and Palestine. The next revolt came in the 1950s and 1960s against the French and the British. This revolt was led by Gamal Abdel Nasser and then by Gadaffi. The United States became Israel’s patron and developed the current empire. Gadaffi gained the reputation of an opponent of the U.S. and Israeli, as well as French and British and Italian empires. In Galtung’s analysis, such a reputation lasts forever.

So, Gadaffi’s government gains points for holding an aura of anti-imperialism and for relatively little inequality. Similarly, Galtung gives the governments of Yemen, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia negative fives but suggests that Syria and Iran score better on the basis of past resistance to empire.

The opposition in Libya, according to Galtung, stands for the West. France, Italy, the UK, and the US are likely to invest huge sums in that opposition. On Monday Obama promised to transfer $33 billion in seized Libyan assets to “the people” of Libya; that means the opposition. What’s underway, Galtung says, is a civil war, not a no-fly zone protecting civilians. And killing Gadaffi would make him a martyr.

This analysis fits with some facts that aren’t paid enough attention to, I believe. Nonviolent campaigns against tyranny succeed more often than violent ones. Nonviolent campaigns succeed more often when violence is used against them. Too much violence can destroy them, but it takes more than is commonly imagined. Gadaffi’s military is not primarily foreign mercenaries. Prior to U.S. involvement, military forces were defecting to the rebel side; now one doesn’t hear of that happening. The leader of the rebels is a CIA creation. Going back to the U.S. liberation of Cuba and the Philippines, the U.S. military has stepped in to “help” dozens of countries and overstayed its welcome every single time without exception.

Galtung doesn’t predict that the United States will be at war in Libya for 20 years. He expects Western Europe to take over the poisonous role of empire from the current global power. China, he believes, even if it were powerful enough to step into that role, is not stupid enough to do so.

President Obama on Monday said he would “never hesitate” to use the U.S. military “unilaterally” to defend “interests” and “values,” including “maintaining the flow of commerce.” Fear of exactly that led the founders of this republic to give Congress the exclusive power to declare war. James Madison did not believe any single individual could be trusted with such power:

“The strongest passions and most dangerous weaknesses of the human breast, ambition, avarice, vanity, the honorable or venal love of fame, are all in conspiracy against the desire and duty of peace.”

In 1928, the U.S. Senate ratified the Kellogg-Briand Pact, banning all war. The Senate tacked on an exception for self-defense. That ban remains the Supreme Law of the Land under Article VI of the U.S. Constitution, and Libya did not attack the United States. No one, not even on Fox News, has claimed that Libya even contemplated attacking the United States. Nor would Americans consider the launching of hundreds of missiles onto U.S. soil something other and gentler than war. The U.S. government, 10 years ago, declared terrorists crashing airplanes into buildings to be an act of war on behalf of a nation that none of those terrorists were from.

In 1973, Congress legislated exceptions to the Constitution’s placement of the power to declare war solely in the hands of the Congress:

“The constitutional powers of the President as Commander-in-Chief to introduce United States Armed Forces into hostilities, or into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances, are exercised only pursuant to
(1) a declaration of war,
(2) specific statutory authorization, or
(3) a national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces.”

Now, it’s not hard to obtain specific statutory authorization. Just shout “terrorism!” and ask Congress to pass a bill. President Obama chose not to. And it’s certainly not hard to get U.S. troops or territories attacked or to claim they’ve been attacked. But nobody has so much as claimed that Libya had any interest in attacking the U.S. empire in any way. The fact that Obama’s letter to Congress last week pretending to comply with the War Powers Act failed to actually report all the information required (such as how long this action would last) is beside the point. The War Powers Act (quoted above) does not apply because none of the three conditions above has been met. Obama’s action in Libya, if left unchallenged, establishes the power of any future president to bomb any country. Obama’s claim on Monday to have consulted Congress doesn’t change this. Nor does it matter whether we call bombing Libya a war or a surgical humanitarian intervention; if Congress — the full Congress — doesn’t authorize it, it’s unconstitutional.

Obama gave a lovely speech Monday evening from the point of view of anyone unfamiliar with anything he was talking about. Gadaffi, we learned, has been a tyrant for more than four decades. And the United States, the President neglected to mention, was supporting and arming him for many of those years, including right up until the moment it switched sides. The U.S. government switched sides, or “intervened,” Obama explained, because Gadaffi attacked his people. As if the United States isn’t backing and arming dozens of governments that attack their own people! As if the United States isn’t attacking people in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq!

Obama replied to this predictable objection, saying that just because we usually do not halt the killing of civilians is no reason not to do so in Libya where, he claimed, the United States had a unique ability to stop the killing. But I’ve never heard anyone actually argue that we should permit murder on one occasion because we cannot stop it everywhere. I have, however, seen the inconsistency pointed to as reason to doubt the U.S. government’s stated motivations. That’s the “Obama Doctrine” — we’ll justify wars as humanitarian even though something completely unhumanitarian clearly motivates them. Obama’s is a propaganda doctrine. What exactly is unique about the United States’ ability to stop the killing of Libyans? Surely the United States has a unique ability to stop arming dictators in Bahrain, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere. Surely the United States has a unique ability to stop killing civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq. That opportunity might be even more unique. The United States could stop killing the civilians it is killing in Afghanistan by simply stopping killing them. The decision to stop arming Gadaffi was an extraordinary opportunity, although identical to an opportunity we are foregoing in several other nations in that region (a region in which the United States is already “intervened” everywhere). It’s what came almost immediately afterwards that people are objecting to.

Obama claimed on Monday to have tried to end violence without using force. He claimed to be acting in a coalition. He claimed to be transfering the mission to NATO to reduce the risks and costs. But where is the evidence that “force” was the only way to oppose “violence”? And does it hurt less or kill less if the violence is called “force”? No serious effort was made to organize diplomatic pressure for negotiations, to train nonviolent activists, or to communicate to Gadaffi or members of his military that negotiation was in their interest. What if the United States had announced the withdrawal of its military from all nations of the world, its commitment to no longer sell or give weapons to anyone, its intention to fund the training of nonviolent activists and truly democratic movements and governments, its decision to join the International Criminal Court, the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the Convention on the Elimination of All forms of Discrimination Against Women, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families, the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance, the General Assembly resolution on Permanent Sovereignty Over Natural Resources, the International Convention Against the Recruitment, Use, Financing, and Training of Mercenaries, the Landmine Ban Treaty, the Cluster Munitions Treaty, the Treaty on Preventing an Arms Race in Outer Space, and all of the other standards of law and decency on which the United States is a hold-out?  If putting those words on paper sounds crazy, while blowing up buildings sounds rational, we’re in real trouble.

Bringing in foreign military attacks is the ideal way to rally Gadaffi’s troops and entrench him in his position. You don’t hear about any defections anymore. And the coalition is the United States. NATO is the United States. The U.S. military is larger than all others in the world combined. Even the homegrown Libyan rebels are led by an American-made CIA asset. Obama promised to give $33 billion in frozen Libyan assets to the Libyan people. But which Libyan people? All of them, or a chosen puppet? And how has such puppeteering worked out in Iraq and Afghanistan thus far?

Obama wants Gadaffi overthrown with non-military means, he says. But he practices, preaches, and produces only violent means. A downed U.S. pilot, Obama said on Monday, was met by friends in Libya. The President did not mention that those friends were reportedly met with fire from a U.S. helicopter that shot first and asked questions later, reportedly killing six Libyans intent on helping the U.S. pilot.  Military attacks make nonviolence less, not more, likely to succeed.  Nonviolence needs to move Gadaffi’s soldiers to abandon him.  Violence moves them to stand by him and go down fighting.

WHAT WOULD MLK DO?

When President Obama speaks on why he needed to unconstitutionally bomb Libya, I keep in the back of my head what Martin Luther King, Jr., would have said – and done.

When President Barack Obama joined the ranks of Henry Kissinger and the other gentle souls who have received Nobel Peace Prizes, he did something that I don’t think anyone else had previously done in a Peace Prize acceptance speech. He not only said that a previous recipient (King) had been wrong, but he argued for war:

“There will be times when nations — acting individually or in concert — will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified. I make this statement mindful of what Martin Luther King Jr. said in this same ceremony years ago: ‘Violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem: it merely creates new and more complicated ones.’…But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by [King's and Gandhi's] examples alone. I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: Evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force may sometimes be necessary is not a call to cynicism — it is a recognition of history…. So yes, the instruments of war do have a role to play in preserving the peace.”

But, you know, I’ve never found any opponent of war who didn’t believe there was evil in the world. After all, we oppose war because it is evil. Did Martin Luther King, Jr., stand idle in the face of threats? Are you serious? Did King oppose protecting and defending people? He worked for that very goal! Obama claims that his only choices are war or nothing. He also likes to claim that war was the last resort, but no other resorts are ever considered, and he switched straight from backing Gadaffi’s government to bombing it. The reason people know the names Gandhi (who was never given a Nobel Peace Prize) and King is that they suggested other options and proved that those other approaches could work. This fundamental disagreement cannot be smoothed over. Either war is the only option or it is not — in which case we must consider the alternatives.

Couldn’t we have halted Hitler’s armies without a world war? To claim otherwise is ridiculous. We could have halted Hitler’s armies by not concluding World War I with an effort seemingly aimed at breeding as much resentment as possible in Germany (punishing a whole people rather than individuals, requiring that Germany admit sole responsibility, taking away its territory, and demanding enormous reparations payments that it would have taken Germany several decades to pay), or by putting our energies seriously into the League of Nations as opposed to the victor-justice of dividing the spoils, or by building good relations with Germany in the 1920s and 1930s, or by funding peace studies in Germany rather than eugenics, or by fearing militaristic governments more than leftist ones, or by not funding Hitler and his armies, or by helping the Jews escape, or by maintaining a ban on bombing civilians, or indeed by massive nonviolent resistance which requires greater courage and valor than we’ve ever seen in war.

We have seen such courage in the largely nonviolent eviction of the British rulers from India, in the nonviolent overthrow of the ruler of El Salvador in 1944, in the campaigns that ended Jim Crow in the United States and apartheid in South Africa. We’ve seen it in the popular removal of the ruler of the Philippines in 1986, in the largely nonviolent Iranian Revolution of 1979, in the dismantling of the Soviet Union in Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany, as well as in the Ukraine in 2004 and 2005, and in dozens of other examples from all over the world, including great progress with nonviolence in Tunisia and Egypt this year. Why should Germany be the one place where a force more powerful than violence could not possibly have prevailed?

If you can’t accept that World War II could have been avoided, there is still this crucial point to consider: Hitler’s armies have been gone for 65 years but are still being used to justify the scourge of humanity that we outlawed in 1928: war. Most nations do not behave as Nazi Germany did, and one reason is that a lot of them have come to value and understand peace. Those that do make war still appeal to a horrible episode in world history that ended 65 years ago to justify what they are doing — exactly as if nothing has changed, exactly as if King and Gandhi and billions of other people have not come and gone and contributed their bit to our knowledge of what can and should be done.

Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda to lay down its arms? How would President Obama know that? The United States has never tried it. The solution cannot be to meet the demands of terrorists, thereby encouraging terrorism, but the grievances against the United States that attract people to anti-U.S. terrorism seem extremely reasonable:

Get out of our country. Stop bombing us. Stop threatening us. Stop blockading us. Stop raiding our homes. Stop funding the theft of our lands.

We ought to satisfy those demands even in the absence of negotiations with anyone. We ought to stop producing and selling most of the weapons we want other people to “lay down.” And if we did so, you would see about as much anti-U.S. terrorism as the Norwegians giving out the prizes see anti-Norwegian terrorism. Norway has neither negotiated with al Qaeda nor murdered all of its members. Norway has just refrained from doing what the United States military does, although sometimes participating. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Barack Obama disagree, and only one of them can be right. In his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, King said:

“Civilization and violence are antithetical concepts. Negroes of the United States, following the people of India, have demonstrated that nonviolence is not sterile passivity, but a powerful moral force which makes for social transformation. Sooner or later all the people of the world will have to discover a way to live together in peace, and thereby transform this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. If this is to be achieved, man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression, and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.”

Love? I thought it was a big stick, a large Navy, a missile defense shield, and weapons in outerspace. King may in fact have been ahead of us. This portion of King’s 1964 speech anticipated Obama’s speech 45 years later:

“I refuse to accept the cynical notion that nation after nation must spiral down a militaristic stairway into the hell of thermonuclear destruction. I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality.…I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality and freedom for their spirits. I believe that what self-centered men have torn down men other-centered can build up.”

Other-centered? How odd it sounds to imagine the United States and its people becoming other-centered. It sounds as outrageous as loving one’s enemies. And yet there may just be something to it.

DON’T BELIEVE THE HYPE

There will be war lies as long as there is war. If the wars are launched without public process and debate or even public knowledge, we will have to force awareness and force debate. And when we do so, we will be confronting war lies. If we do not halt the war preparations in time, small wars will escalate, and we will be presented with a public argument for more war than ever before. I think we can be prepared to meet all war lies head- on and reject them. We can expect to encounter the same types of lies we’ve encountered before (see http://warisalie.org ), always with slight variation.

We will be told how evil the opponent in our war is, and that our choices are war or acceptance of evil. We should be prepared to offer other courses of action and to expose the real motivations of the war makers. They will tell us they have no choice, that this war is defensive, that this war is an act of international humanitarianism, and that to question the launching of the war is to oppose the brave troops not yet sent off to kill and die. It will be yet another war for the sake of peace.

We must reject these lies, in detail, as soon as they appear. But we need not and must not wait for the war lies to come. The time to educate each other about the motives for war and the ways in which wars are dishonestly promoted is right now. We should educate people about the nature of war, so that the images that pop into our heads when we hear about war resemble the reality. We should increase awareness of the incredible dangers of escalating wars, of weapons production, of the environmental impact, of nuclear annihilation, and of economic collapse. We should make sure that Americans know that war is illegal and that we all value the rule of law. We should create the educational and communications systems needed for all of this sharing of information (see http://davidswanson.org/book ).

If we work to expose secret warfare and to oppose ongoing wars, while at the same time working to shrink the military machine and build peace and friendship, we could make war as shamefully backward an activity as slavery. But we will have to do more than educate. We cannot teach that wars are illegal without prosecuting the crimes. We cannot interest people in making the right decisions about wars unless we democratize war powers and allow people some influence on the decisions. We cannot expect elected officials in a system completely corrupted by money, the media, and political parties, to end war just because we want it ended and because we have made strong arguments. We will have to go beyond that to acquiring the power to compel our representatives to represent us. There are a lot of tools that may help in that project, but there are not any weapons.

WHAT DO WE WANT? ACCOUNTABILITY!
WHEN DO WE WANT IT? NOW!

If our engagement is limited to opposing every proposed war and demanding that each current war end, we may prevent or shorten some wars, but more wars will be coming right behind. Crimes must be deterred, but war is currently rewarded.

Punishing war should not mean punishing an entire people, as was done to Germany after World War I and to Iraq after the Gulf War. Nor should we pick out a few low-ranking committers of colorful atrocities, label them “bad apples,” and prosecute their crimes while pretending that the war itself was acceptable. Accountability must start at the top.

This means pressuring the first branch of our government to assert its existence. If you aren’t sure what the first branch of our government is, get a copy of the U.S. Constitution and read what Article I is about. The whole Constitution fits on a single piece of paper, so this should not be a lengthy assignment.

This also means pursuing possible civil and criminal court actions at the local, state, federal, foreign, and international levels. It means sharing resources with our friends in other countries who are actively investigating their governments’ complicity in our government’s crimes or pursuing charges against our criminals under universal jurisdiction.

It means joining the International Criminal Court, making clear that we are subject to its rulings, and supporting the prosecution of others who there is probable cause to believe have committed war crimes.

And it means ceasing to arm and support murderous dictatorships in Bahrain, Yemen, Saudi Arabia and the rest of Western Asia, while pretending to “intervene” whenever turning against one of our puppets. The United States’ military and weapons industry is already intervened everywhere, and its first moral and legal duty is to un-intervene.

There are those among us who invent and promote war lies, those who give deference to authority and believe whatever they are told to believe, those who are fooled, and those who go along because it’s easier. There are government liars and volunteer liars helping out in the public relations industry or the news reportainment industry. And there are the great many of us who try our best to understand what is going on and to speak up when we need to.

We have to speak up a hell of a lot more, educate those who have been fooled, empower those who have kept quiet, and hold accountable those who create war lies.

DEMOCRATIZING WAR POWERS

The Ludlow Amendment was a proposed amendment to the U.S. Constitution requiring a vote by the American people before the United States could go to war. In 1938, this amendment appeared likely to pass in Congress. Then President Franklin Roosevelt sent a letter to the Speaker of the House claiming that a president would be unable to conduct an effective foreign policy if it passed, after which the amendment failed 209-188. The Constitution from its inception and still today requires a vote in Congress before the United States can go to war. What Roosevelt was telling Congress was either that presidents needed to be free to violate the existing Constitution or that a public referendum might reject a war whereas Congress, in contrast, could be counted on to do as it was told. Of course, the public was indeed more likely to reject wars than Congress, and a public referendum could not have been held on a moment’s notice. Congress declared war on Japan the first day after Pearl Harbor. The public would at least have been given a week to hold a referendum, during which time any sort of accurate knowledge might have been spread about by the sort of people White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs in 2010 scornfully derided as “the professional left.”

The public could conceivably vote for an illegal war, however. Then we would have a war approved by the true sovereigns of the nation, even though that war would have been banned by laws previously enacted through a process presumed to represent the public’s wishes. But that wouldn’t put us in any worse position than we are in now, with the people cut out of the loop and congress members answering to their funders, their parties, and the corporate media. If we amended the Constitution, through Congress or through a convention called by the states, we could also take the money out of the electoral system and recover the possibility of being listened to in Washington.

If we were listened to in Washington, a lot of changes would be made. Having Congress listen to us wouldn’t get us very far unless Congress took back some of the powers it has given to the White House over the centuries. We will need to abolish the CIA and all secret agencies and budgets for war, and to create real congressional oversight for the entire military. We will need to create in Congress the understanding that it can choose whether or not to fund wars, and that it must act in accordance with the public will. It wouldn’t hurt to strengthen the War Powers Act to eliminate exceptions and add time limits and penalties. It would also help to make aggressive war and war profiteering felonies in the U.S. Code, ban the use of mercenaries and private contractors in the military, get the recruiters out of schools, forbid involuntary extensions of military contracts, and various other reforms.

And then we’ll need to move on to reforming, democratizing, and funding the United Nations, with which — by the way — most Americans ultimately agreed about Iraq. The U.N. was correct when it mattered; a lot of Americans came around to believing the war was a bad idea years later. The U.N. authorization of war on Libya was not the result of a democratic process.

NO MILITARIZATION
WITHOUT REPRESENTATION

Compelling governmental reforms requires a great deal of organizing and risk taking beyond education and persuasion. The peace movement can demand huge sacrifices. The experience of being a peace activist is a little bit like the thrill of going off to war, the main difference being that rich people don’t support you.

The military reform being promoted with the most heavily funded campaign as I write is the effort to allow gay and lesbian Americans equal rights to participate in war crimes. Heterosexuals should be demanding equal rights to be excluded. The second biggest reform push at the moment is to allow immigrants to become citizens by joining the military, without offering them any non-violent alternative other than college, which most immigrants cannot afford. We should be ashamed.

We should be working, as many are, to build resistance within the military and to support those who refuse illegal orders. We should be strengthening our efforts to counter recruitment and assist young people in finding better career paths.

If you promise to set up a table outside a recruitment office, I’ll send you copies of this book ( http://warisalie.org ) really cheap. Will you give one to your library? Your congress member? Your local newspaper? Your brother-in-law with the “If you can read this, you’re in range” bumper sticker?

We need people energized about working to dismantle the war economy and convert it to peace. One of those missiles fired into Libya without a thought for the cost in dollars or blood could hire 26 elementary school teachers in the United States for a year. The billion dollars the US military will spend at an absolute minimum in Libya could pay for 25,000 teachers. It could pay for more than that if spent on useful things in Libya.

Stopping military spending not be as hard as it sounds when people find out that this is how we can create jobs and income. A broad coalition can and must be built to include those who want military funding reduced and war funding eliminated, together with those who want funding increased for jobs, schools, energy, infrastructure, transportation, parks, and housing. A coalition is beginning to come together (http://defundwar.org ) that includes on the one hand the peace movement (the people who knew where all the money is being misspent) and on the other hand labor and community and civil rights groups, housing advocates, and proponents of green energy (the people who knew where all the money is needed).

With Americans facing unemployment and foreclosure, their top priority is not ending wars. But a movement to move the money from the military to providing the human right to a home grabs everybody’s attention. Bringing activists focused on international issues together with those working on the domestic side has the potential to combine major resources with radical and aggressive strategy — never an easy fit, but always a necessity.

If we build such a coalition, the peace movement will be able to add its strength in an organized way to struggles for domestic needs. Meanwhile, labor and community groups, and other activist coalitions could insist that they want only federal funding (for jobs, housing, energy, etc.) that is clean of war spending. This would avoid the situation we saw in 2010 when funding for teachers was included in a bill to fund an escalation of the War on Afghanistan. The teachers’ unions apparently felt compelled to back any legislation that would keep their members employed for the time being, so they promoted the bill without mentioning that its biggest component was war funding, knowing full well that the war would keep eating away at our economy like a cancer while increasing the risks of terrorism — and the risks of additional wars.

How much larger, more passionate, principled, and energized would have been a unified front demanding money for schools instead of wars! How much larger would the available pot of money have appeared! A unified activist front would disarm the Congress. No longer could it push through war funding by tacking a little bit of disaster relief funding on top. Our collective voice would thunder through the Capitol Hill office buildings:

Use the money for the war to fund 10,000 times the proposed disaster relief, but do not fund the war!

For this to happen, groups that have shied away from foreign policy would have to recognize that that’s where all the money is going, that wars are driving politics away from domestic agitation for a better life, that wars are stripping away our civil liberties, and that wars endanger us all, whether we’ve been good little patriots and waved our war flags or not.

The peace movement would have to recognize that the money is where the action is. The wars have the money, and everybody else needs it. This would mean dropping the common focus on weak and arcane proposals for “benchmarks” or national intelligence estimates or unenforceable requests for unspecified “timetables” for withdrawal. It would mean focusing like a laser on the money.

To build such a coalition would require organizing outside the dominance of Washington’s political parties. Most activist groups and labor unions are loyal to one of the two parties, both of which back policies the American people oppose, including war. The benchmark and timetable sort of rhetorical legislation originates in Congress, and then the peace movement promotes it. The demand to cut off the funding originates out among the people and must be imposed on Congress. That’s a key distinction that should guide our organizing.

And the organizing should be doable. On October 2, 2010, a broad coalition held a rally at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. The organizers sought to use the rally both to demand jobs, protect Social Security, and advance a hodgepodge of progressive ideas, . . . and also to cheer for the Democratic Party, whose leadership was not on board with that program. An independent movement would back particular politicians, including Democrats, but they would have to earn it by supporting our positions. The peace movement was included in the rally, if not given top billing, and many peace organizations took part. We found that, among all of those tens of thousands of union members and civil rights activists who showed up, virtually all of them were eager to carry anti-war posters and stickers. In fact the message “Money for Jobs, Not Wars,” was immensely popular. If anyone at all disagreed, I haven’t heard about it. The theme of the rally was “One Nation Working Together,” a warm message but one so vague we didn’t even offend anyone enough to produce a counter-rally. I suspect more people would have shown up and a stronger message would have been delivered had the headline been “Bring Our War Dollars Home!” One speech outshone all others that day. The speaker was 83-year- old singer and activist Harry Belafonte, his voice strained, scratchy, and gripping. These were some of his words:

“Martin Luther King, Jr., in his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech 47 years ago, said that America would soon come to realize that the war that we were in at that time that this nation waged in Vietnam was not only unconscionable, but unwinnable. Fifty-eight thousand Americans died in that cruel adventure, and over two million Vietnamese and Cambodians perished. Now today, almost a half-a-century later, as we gather at this place where Dr. King prayed for the soul of this great nation, tens of thousands of citizens from all walks of life have come here today to rekindle his dream and once again hope that all America will soon come to the realization that the wars that we wage today in far away lands are immoral, unconscionable and unwinnable.

“The Central Intelligence Agency, in its official report, tells us that the enemy we pursue in Afghanistan and in Pakistan, the al- Qaeda, they number less than 50 — I say 50 — people. Do we really think that sending 100,000 young American men and women to kill innocent civilians, women, and children, and antagonizing the tens of millions of people in the whole region somehow makes us secure? Does this make any sense?

“The President’s decision to escalate the war in that region alone costs the nation $33 billion. That sum of money could not only create 600,000 jobs here in America, but would even leave us a few billion to start rebuilding our schools, our roads, our hospitals and affordable housing. It could also help to rebuild the lives of the thousands of our returning wounded veterans.” It’s also the amount of money Obama said he would give back to the people of Libya.

MAKING LISTS

Shifting our spending priorities and getting clean votes in Congress on funding all the things we want also gets us straight, unencumbered (I can’t say clean) votes on the war funding. And those votes provide us with two lists: the list of those who did what we told them and the list of those who did not. But these lists cannot remain, as they are today, lists of congress members to thank and lists of congress members to go meekly whining to. They have to become the lists of whom we are going to reelect and whom we are going to send packing. If you won’t send a politician packing in a general election because of the party they belong to, then replace them in a primary. But send them packing we must, or they will never heed our demands, not even if we win over 100 percent of the country and reject every lie the day it’s uttered.

Pressuring elected officials in between elections is going to be needed as well. Nonviolently shutting down the military industrial congressional complex can communicate our demands very strongly. But we can’t sit in elected officials’ offices demanding peace while promising to vote for them, no matter what they do — not if we expect to be heard.

If sitting in congress members’ offices and voting them out of office strikes you as exhibiting a naïve faith in the system, and if you want us to instead march in the street and appeal to the president, our views may not be as far apart as you imagine. We do need to march in the streets. We also need to create democratic media outlets and impact every segment of our culture and population. And we need to march in the suites, too, to disrupt what it happening and grab the attention of those responsible by letting them know that we can end their careers. If that’s “working with the system” I certainly hope nobody tries working like that with me. We can neither ignore our government, nor obey it. We have to impose our will on it. That requires, in the absence of millions of dollars to “donate,” millions of people dedicated to applying pressure. Those people need to know where to press. One important answer is on the public checkbook.

Appealing to presidents doesn’t hurt. Really, that’s just another way of saying that we need to reach everyone everywhere. And we do. But we have far less power over presidents than over members of the House of Representatives — and that’s saying something! If we accept the idea that presidents, and only presidents, have the power to begin and end wars, we will guarantee ourselves a lot more wars from a lot more presidents, if the world survives that long.

The power of war must belong to us. If we can find a way to directly control presidents’ war making, that will certainly work. If we can do so by controlling and re-empowering Congress, which seems at least slightly more likely, that will also work. As long as you’re trying to influence someone away from war or toward peace, whether it’s a congress member, a president, a weapons maker, a soldier, a neighbor, or a child, you are doing work worthy of the highest honors on earth.

PEACE IS A TRUTH

In November 1943, six residents of Coventry, England, which had been bombed by Germany, wrote to the New Statesman to condemn the bombing of German cities, asserting that the “general feeling” in Coventry was the “desire that no other people shall suffer as they have done.”

In 1997, on the 60th anniversary of the bombing of Guernica, the president of Germany wrote a letter to the Basque people apologizing for the Nazi-era bombing. The Mayor of Guernica wrote back and accepted the apology. Murder Victims’ Families for Human Rights is an international organization, based in the United States, of family members of victims of criminal murder, state execution, extra-judicial assassinations, and “disappearances” who oppose the death penalty in all cases.

Peaceful Tomorrows is an organization founded by family members of those killed on September 11, 2001, who say they have,

“united to turn our grief into action for peace. By developing and advocating nonviolent options and actions in the pursuit of justice, we hope to break the cycles of violence engendered by war and terrorism. Acknowledging our common experience with all people affected by violence throughout the world, we work to create a safer and more peaceful world for everyone.”

So must we all.

Please get involved at http://WarIsALie.org

Please ask your representative and senators to curtail funding for war in Libya here http://RootsAction.org

David Swanson is the author of “War Is A Lie” from which this is excerpted and adapted.