The End of War

This is Gwynne Dyer on the hope for a transformation from the world as a collection of independent states to the world as a global village

The End of War
Our Task Over the Next Few Years is to Transform the World of Independent States into a Genuine Global Village

by Gwynne Dyer

The good news for humans is that it looks like peaceful conditions, once established, can be maintained. And if baboons can do it, why not us?
— Frans de Waal, Yerkes Primate Center, Emory University

About 20 years ago, a disaster struck the Forest Troop of baboons in Kenya. There was a tourist lodge within their range, and the biggest and toughest males in the troop would regularly go to the garbage dump there to forage for food. Subordinate males, however, did not go — so when the brutal and despotic alpha males of Forest Troop all ate meat infected with bovine tuberculosis at the dump and promptly died, the less aggressive 50 per cent of the group's males survived. And the troop's whole culture changed.

Male baboons are so obsessed with status that they are always on a hair-trigger for aggression — and it isn't just directed at male rivals of equal status. Lower-ranking males routinely get bullied and terrorized, and even females (who weigh half as much as males) are frequently attacked and even bitten. You really would not want to live your life as a baboon.

Yet after the biggest, baddest males of Forest Troop all died off at once, the whole social atmosphere changed. When it was first studied by primatologists in 1979-82, it was a typical, utterly vicious baboon society, but after the mass die-off of the bullies the surviving members relaxed and began treating one another more decently.

The males still fight even today — they are baboons, after all — but they quarrel with other males of equal rank rather than beating up on social inferiors, and they don't attack the females at all. Everybody spends much more time in grooming, huddling close together, and other friendly social behavior, and stress levels even for the lowest-ranking individuals (as measured by hormone samples) are far lower than in other baboon troops. Most important of all, these new behaviors have become entrenched in the troop's culture.

Male baboons rarely live more than 18 years: The low-status survivors of the original disaster are all gone now. All the current adult males of the Forest Troop are baboons who joined it as adolescents after 1982, so by now the range of male personalities in Forest Troop must have returned to the normal baboon distribution. But the level of aggression has not returned to baboon-normal.

"We don't yet understand the mechanism of transmission," said Robert Sapolsky, a biology and neurology professor at Stanford University who co-authored the 2004 report on the Forest Troop phenomenon, "but the jerky new guys are obviously learning: We don't do things like that around here.'"

Human beings are less aggressive and more co-operative than baboons or even chimpanzees, and a thousand times more flexible in our cultural arrangements: Most of us now live quite comfortably in pseudo-bands called nations that are literally a million times bigger than the bands our ancestors lived in until the rise of civilization.

War is deeply embedded in our history and our culture, probably since before we were even fully human, but weaning ourselves away from it should not be a bigger mountain to climb than some of the other changes we have already made in the way we live, given the right incentives. And we have certainly been given the right incentives: The holiday from history that we have enjoyed since the early '90s may be drawing to an end, and another great-power war, fought next time with nuclear weapons, may be lurking in our future.

The "firebreak" against nuclear weapons use that we began building after Hiroshima and Nagasaki has held for well over half a century now. But the proliferation of nuclear weapons to new powers is a major challenge to the stability of the system. So are the coming crises, mostly environmental in origin, which will hit some countries much harder than others, and may drive some to desperation.

Add in the huge impending shifts in the great-power system as China and India grow to rival the United States in GDP over the next 30 or 40 years and it will be hard to keep things from spinning out of control. With good luck and good management, we may be able to ride out the next half-century without the first-magnitude catastrophe of a global nuclear war, but the potential certainly exists for a major die-back of human population.

We cannot command the good luck, but good management is something we can choose to provide. It depends, above all, on preserving and extending the multilateral system that we have been building since the end of World War II. The rising powers must be absorbed into a system that emphasizes co-operation and makes room for them, rather than one that deals in confrontation and raw military power. If they are obliged to play the traditional great-power game of winners and losers, then history will repeat itself and everybody loses.

Our hopes for mitigating the severity of the coming environmental crises also depend on early and concerted global action of a sort that can only happen in a basically co-operative international system.

When the great powers are locked into a military confrontation, there is simply not enough spare attention, let alone enough trust, to make deals on those issues, so the highest priority at the moment is to keep the multilateral approach alive and avoid a drift back into alliance systems and arms races. And there is no point in dreaming that we can leap straight into some never-land of universal brotherhood; we will have to confront these challenges and solve the problem of war within the context of the existing state system.

The solution to the state of international anarchy that compels every state to arm itself for war was so obvious that it arose almost spontaneously in 1918. The wars by which independent states had always settled their quarrels in the past had grown so monstrously destructive that some alternative system had to be devised, and that could only be a pooling of sovereignty, at least in matters concerning war and peace, by all the states of the world. So the victors of World War I promptly created the League of Nations.

But the solution was as difficult in practice as it was simple in concept. Every member of the League of Nations understood that if the organization somehow acquired the ability to act in a concerted and effective fashion, it could end up being used against them, so no major government was willing to give the League of Nations any real power.

Instead, they got World War II, and that war was so bad — by the end the first nuclear weapons had been used on cities — that the victors made a second attempt in 1945 to create an international organization that really could prevent war. They literally changed international law and made war illegal, but they were well aware that all of that history and all those reflexes were not going to vanish overnight.

It would be depressing to catalogue the many failures of the United Nations, but it would also be misleading. The implication would be that this was an enterprise that should have succeeded from the start, and has failed irrevocably. On the contrary; it was bound to be a relative failure at the outset. It was always going to be very hard to persuade sovereign governments to surrender power to an untried world authority which might then make decisions that went against their particular interests. In the words of the traditional Irish directions to a lost traveler: "If that's where you want to get to, sir, I wouldn't start from here."

But here is where we must start from, for it is states that run the world.

The present international system, based on heavily armed and jealously independent states, often exaggerates the conflicts between the multitude of human communities in the world, but it does reflect an underlying reality: We cannot all get all we want, and some method must exist to decide who gets what. That is why neighboring states have lived in a perpetual state of potential war, just as neighboring hunter-gatherer bands did 20,000 years ago.

If we now must abandon war as a method of settling our disputes and devise an alternative, it only can be done with the full co-operation of the world's governments. That means it certainly will be a monumentally difficult and lengthy task: Mistrust reigns everywhere and no nation will allow even the least of its interests to be decided upon by a collection of foreigners.

Even the majority of states that are more or less satisfied with their borders and their status in the world would face huge internal opposition from nationalist elements to any transfer of sovereignty to the United Nations.

The good news for humans is that it looks like peaceful conditions, once established, can be maintained. And if baboons can do it, why not us?

The U.N. as presently constituted is certainly no place for idealists, but they would feel even more uncomfortable in a United Nations that actually worked as was originally intended.

It is an association of poachers turned game-keepers, not an assembly of saints, and it would not make its decisions according to some impartial standard of justice.

There is no impartial concept of justice to which all of mankind would subscribe and, in any case, it is not "mankind" that makes decisions at the United Nations, but governments with their own national interests to protect.

To envision how a functioning world authority might reach its decisions, at least in its first century or so, begin with the arrogant promotion of self-interest by the great powers that would continue to dominate U.N. decision-making and add in the crass expediency masquerading as principle that characterizes the shifting coalitions among the lesser powers in the present General Assembly: It would be an intensely political process.

The decisions it produced would be kept within reasonable bounds only by the need never to act in a way so damaging to the interest of any major member or group of members that it forced them into total defiance, and so destroyed the fundamental consensus that keeps war at bay.

There is nothing shocking about this.

National politics in every country operates with the same combination: a little bit of principle, a lot of power, and a final constraint on the ruthless exercise of that power based mainly on the need to preserve the essential consensus on which the nation is founded and to avoid civil war.

In an international organization whose members represent such radically different traditions, interests, and levels of development, the proportion of principle to power is bound to be even lower. It's a pity that there is no practical alternative to the United Nations, but there isn't.

If the abolition of great-power war and the establishment of international law is truly a hundred-year project, then we are running a bit behind schedule but we have made substantial progress.

We have not had World War III, and that is thanks at least in part to the United Nations, which gave the great powers an excuse to back off from several of their most dangerous confrontations without losing face. No great power has fought another since 1945, and the wars that have broken out between middle-sized powers from time to time — Arab-Israeli wars and Indo-Pakistani wars, mostly — seldom lasted more than a month, because the U.N.'s offers of ceasefires and peacekeeping troops offered a quick way out for the losing side.

If you assessed the progress that has been made since 1945 from the perspective of that terrifying time, the glass would look at least half-full.

The enormous growth of international organizations since 1945, and especially the survival of the United Nations as a permanent forum where the states of the world are committed to avoiding war (and often succeed), has already created a context new to history.

The present political fragmentation of the world into more than 150 stubbornly independent territorial units will doubtless persist for a good while to come. But it is already becoming an anachronism, for, in every other context, from commerce, technology, and the mass media to fashions in ideology, music, and marriage, the outlines of a single global culture (with wide local variations) are visibly taking shape.

It is very likely that we began our career as a rising young species by exterminating our nearest relatives, the Neanderthals, and it is entirely possible we will end it by exterminating ourselves, but the fact that we have always had war as part of our culture does not mean that we are doomed always to fight wars.

Other aspects of our behavioral repertoire are a good deal more encouraging. There is, for example, a slow but quite perceptible revolution in human consciousness taking place: the last of the great redefinitions of humanity.

At all times in our history, we have run our affairs on the assumption that there is a special category of people (our lot) whom we regard as full human beings, having rights and duties approximately equal to our own, and whom we ought not to kill even when we quarrel.

Over the past 15,000 or 20,000 years we have successively widened this category from the original hunting-and-gathering band to encompass larger and larger groups.

First it was the tribe of some thousands of people bound together by kinship and ritual ties; then the state, where we recognize our shared interests with millions of people whom we don't know and will never meet; and now, finally, the entire human race.

There was nothing in the least idealistic or sentimental in any of the previous redefinitions. They occurred because they were useful in advancing people's material interests and ensuring their survival. The same is true for this final act of redefinition: We have reached a point where our moral imagination must expand again to embrace the whole of mankind.

It's no coincidence that the period in which the concept of the national state is finally coming under challenge by a wider definition of humanity is also the period that has seen history's most catastrophic wars, for they provide the practical incentive for change.

But the transition to a different system is a risky business: The danger of another world war which would cut the whole process short is tiny in any given year, but cumulatively, given how long the process of change will take, it is extreme. That is no reason not to keep trying.

Our task over the next few generations is to transform the world of independent states in which we live into some sort of genuine international community.

If we succeed in creating that community, however quarrelsome, discontented, and full of injustice it will probably be, then we shall effectively have abolished the ancient institution of warfare. Good riddance.

"You break it, you pay for it."

The US should leave Iraq for sure, and stop terrorizing the Iraqi people. However, they should "pay the bill." The have caused a lot of damage in an already devstatingly poor country, thanks to 10 years of oppressive sanctions which starved the Iraqi people. As Naomi Klein says, "You break it, you pay for it."

prisoner abuse -- Bush may have issued Executive Order

The American Civil Liberties Union has released a number of FBI documents that were declassified yesterday revealing details of prisoner abuse at Abu Graib and Guatanamo Bay prisons. One of them suggested that George Bush may have given an Executive Order authorizing inhumane interrogation techniques.

Russia-China partnership

Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern notes that Russia and China are participating in joint military exercises. He says that:

What seems clear is that, largely because of the U.S.-U.K. attack on Iraq, China and Russia intend to give each other meaningful political support if Washington embarks on a new military adventure -- against Iran, for example. And watch out. That same assurance of mutual support could embolden the Russians or Chinese to undertake adventurist actions of their own (vis--vis Taiwan or Ukraine, for instance), the more so as U.S. forces appear doomed to thrashing about in Iraq for the near future.

We may be seeing the beginnings of a major development resulting from the US policy of pre-emption and flouting of international law. Where it goes from here, who knows?

medals of (dis)honour

George Bush gave Presidential Medals of Freedom to three folks in what could only be considered a cynical, insulting joke on the rest of us. Bob Herbert of the New York Times explains:

On Tuesday, there was President Bush hanging the nation's highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, on George Tenet, the former C.I.A. director who slept through the run-up to Sept. 11 and then did the president and the nation the great disservice of declaring that it was a "slam-dunk" that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

It was a fatal misjudgment.

Another Medal of Freedom was given to Paul Bremer III, the chief civilian administrator of the American occupation, who made the heavily criticized decision to disband the defeated Iraqi Army and presided over an ever-worsening security situation. Thousands upon thousands have died in this unnecessary and incompetently conducted war, yet here was the president handing out medals as if some kind of triumph had been achieved. If these guys could get the highest civilian award, what honor is left for someone who actually does a good job?

A third medal was given to Gen. Tommy Franks, who led the invasion of Iraq, which Mr. Bush, in his peculiar way, has characterized as a "catastrophic success." It's an interesting term. Some people have applied it to the president's run for re-election.

By anyone's standards, terrible things are happening in Iraq, and no amount of self-congratulation in Washington can take the edge off the horror being endured by American troops or the unrelenting agony of the Iraqi people. The disconnect between the White House's fantasyland and the world of war in Iraq could hardly have been illustrated more starkly than by a pair of front-page articles in The New York Times on Dec. 10. The story at the top of the page carried the headline: "It's Inauguration Time Again, and Access Still Has Its Price - $250,000 Buys Lunch With President and More."

Read the full article here.

letter to Jeremy Hinzman

This is a letter I just sent in support of US army deserter Jeremy Hinzman. Check out his website, and send your own letter:

Dear Jeremy,

I am a Canadian Citizen, and look forward to the day when I can call you one as well. I'm am copying this letter to Paul Martin, and pasting a copy on my blog site.

Thank you for taking your courageous standing against the Bush administration's immoral, illegal, and unjustified war and occupation. As far as I am concerned, the soldiers in Iraq are the criminals here, through their association with the war crime that is the war and occupation of Iraq.

Pay no mind to those who attack you without cause, and lie through their teeth in the process. It has been very well established that this is the modus operandi of the warmongers in the US.

Thank you again for your courage. In these dnagerous times, the world needs more people like you.

All the best,
Stephen,
British Columbia

Building Peace in a time of perpetual war

An excerpt from a Medea Benjamin article in Common Dreams, in reference to where the US and global peace movements can go from here:

Our demands as a peace movement should be for the U.S. government to make a commitment to withdraw our troops by the end of 2005 at the latest; pledge that we will not maintain permanent bases in Iraq; and commit to ending the war profiteering by U.S. companies so that Iraqis have the opportunity to rebuild their own country.

So how do we build a peace movement that can put forward these demands in an effective way? Here are some practical things we can do.

1.Make real the human cost of the war on both U.S. and Iraqi lives. Since the US invasion in March 2003, the public in most countries throughout the world has seen the horrible pictures of Iraq war victims. The big exception is the US public, which has seen a sanitized version of the war. CNN International regularly shows footage of war victims in its worldwide broadcasts but not on domestic CNN. The world community demands to know the truth, and we should too. Write letters, call and email your local media demanding that they cover the victims of war. If they fail to respond, organize a community delegation to visit them. If they fail to respond to that as well, organize protests at their offices.

Invite an Iraqi-American to come speak to your community about the effects of the occupation. Contact Global Exchange Speakers Bureau for a list of Iraqi and American speakers on the war (www.globalexchange.org).

Regarding the cost of war for US soldiers, ask your local media to read or print a daily casualty toll. Do screenings in your school, church or houseparty of videos about US casualties. Two forceful videos are Arlington West (www.arlingtonwestfilm.com) and The Ground Truth (www.thegroundtruth.org).

If the public were able to see, on a sustained basis, the gory reality of this war-the children without limbs, the wailing mothers, the shivering refugees, the US soldiers coming home in body bags or incapacitated for life---support would plummet and the war would end.

2.Support military families who are speaking out against the war, and soldiers who are speaking out and refusing to fight. Military Families Speak Out (www.mfso.org) is a group of over 1,000 families with loved ones in the military. Help get their voices out on the media or invite one of them to speak in your community. Some of them are parents of fallen soldiers, such as Fernando Suarez or Lila Lipscomb of Fahrenheit 911 fame, and their testimonies are heart-wrenching and compelling.

In the case of Vietnam, dissent within the armed forces itself was critical in ending the war. There is now a new group of soldiers called Iraq Veterans Against the War (www.ivaw.org) that deserves our support. So do the soldiers who are refusing to serve. Over one-third of some 4,000 combat veterans have resisted their call-ups. One of the most public soldiers who refused to return to fight in Iraq is Camilo Mejia (see www.freecamilo.org), who is serving a one-year prison sentence after being convicted of desertion. "I witnessed the horror of war," said Camilo at his trial, "the firefights, the ambushes, the excessive use of force, the abuse of prisoners. Acting upon my principles became incompatible with my role in the military. By putting my weapon down I chose to reassert myself as a human being."

We also need to support counter-recruitment efforts, efforts that provide young people-particularly in poor communities-with a truthful picture of the risks of joining the military and of their other options for employment and education. See www.objector.org for a list of groups doing counter-recruitment, general support for soldiers (including a GI Rights Hotline), and advice for those who want to apply for conscientious objector status.

3. Pressure Congress to stop further funding, investigate war profiteering and cut Halliburton and other contractors from the government dole. A December 8, 2004 Associated Press poll found that the majority of Americans don't believe there will be stable, democratic government in Iraq and disapprove of George Bush's handling of the situation. More and more Americans are recognizing that this war is unwinnable and don't want to see billions more of our tax dollars wasted. We must now convince our Congressional representatives. In February, the Bush administration is expected to request an additional $70 billion for the military. This massive request includes money for building dozens of military bases in Iraq and the most expensive U.S. embassy in the world, as well as money for more troops. We must demand that our representatives oppose funding that further entrenches the U.S. presence in Iraq.

We must also call on Congress to stop government agencies from giving contracts to U.S. companies for "rebuilding" Iraq. Iraqis have some of the best engineers and builders in the world, and are totally capable of rebuilding their own country. The U.S. contractors in Iraq are plagued by incompetence, waste, corruption, cronyism and lack of accountability. They also take jobs away from Iraqis, contributing to the catastrophic unemployment rate of about 70% and the increasing Iraqi bitterness against Americans. We must demand that Congress stop giving new contacts to U.S. companies and that it investigate more fully the charges of war profiteering against companies that have been awarded high-dollar contracts, particularly Halliburton. In fact, there is an on-going FBI probe of Halliburton for war profiteering. We should demand that Congress stop all monies to Halliburton while charges are pending and if found guilty, ban Halliburton from receiving any future government contracts.

We should also demand a freeze on contracts to companies whose employees are accused of being involved in human rights abuses, such as CACI and Titan in the case of the Abu Ghraib prison.

4. Strengthen local peace work and bring the cost of the war home. The anti-war coalition must reach out to broader sectors of the community, especially religious groups, labor, communities of color and students. We must make clear the connections between the $200 billion squandered on Iraq and the cuts that communities across the US are facing in health care, education and vital social services. The amazing website www.nationalpriorities.org will give you an estimate of the cost of the war for your city and state.

Get local churches, labor unions, student governments and city councils to pass resolutions against the occupation. Hundreds of such resolutions were passed before the war began; we need to revive that energy in the call to bring the troops home. In November 2004, the city of San Francisco had a "Bring the Troops Home" measure on the ballot, and it passed by an overwhelming 63 percent. Similar ballot initiatives or resolutions could be passed in cities all over the country. For the text of the resolution, see http://www.smartvoter.org/2004/11/02/ca/sf/meas/N/.

It is also time to ramp up the anti-war activism with non-violent civil disobedience. This could include sit-ins at the offices of military recruiters or congresspeople or military contractors, blockades at military bases, or "sleep-ins" at schools or libraries to demand money for books, not for war. A great model is the "sleep-in" staged by students at the Boulder High School until they secured a meeting with their congressional representative to express their concerns about a draft (see www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1105-21.htm). Another great example is when the Kensington Welfare Rights Union took over their local Army Recruiters Office calling for "Money for Housing, Not for War!" (see www.kwru.org).

Local peace coalitions should work closely with the national umbrella group United for Peace and Justice (www.unitedforpeace.org). This is the organization that put together the largest anti-war rallies, including the massive February 15, 2004 rally that took place in New York City and hundreds of cities around the country-and the world.

5. Build the global coalition February 15, 2004 was indeed an amazingly powerful day when "the world said no to war." We need to strengthen the global anti-war coalition and not just organize joint rally days, but joint campaigns. These could be campaigns against companies profiting from war, or campaigns to get countries that are still part of the "coalition forces" to withdraw (by the end of 2004, at least 15 of the original 32 members of the coalition had either left Iraq or had announced their intention to leave).

Another possibility is to set up a Global Peace Camp on the Jordanian/Iraqi border. Since it is so dangerous for foreigners to travel inside Iraq, the border is an alternative site for Iraqis and international activists to meet, educate each other, and exchanges ideas. In stark contrast to the violence inside Iraq, the Peace Camp would be a real-life symbol of how people from different countries, religions and ethnicities can come together to build the kind of world we'd like to live in. If you are interested in this idea, contact peace@globalexchange.org.

We should consider a global campaign to push the United Nations-both at the Security Council and the General Assembly-to call for a swift timeline for the withdrawal of foreign military forces from Iraq.

6. Support efforts to decrease our dependence on oil. While the U.S. invasion of Iraq was not solely about oil, it is certainly true that if broccoli were Iraqi's main export, we would not have invaded. It's also true that until we get off our dependence on oil, we will continue to have policies in the Middle East that tie us to undemocratic regimes like Saudi Arabia or push us to invade countries like Iraq to control their oil.

There are plenty of ways to start breaking our oil addiction, including investing significant resources in solar and wind power (see www.appolloproject.org), promoting fuel efficient vehicles (see www.jumpstartford.org), and focusing on conservation and efficiency (see www.rmi.org).

George Bush took the 2004 election as a mandate to continue this illegal, immoral war in Iraq. It is up to us, the American people, to rebel against Bush's arrogant empire-building. It is up to us-as caring, compassionate Americans-to force the Bush administration to stop the killing, start respecting international law, and assume our rightful place as one among many in the family of nations.

Michael Moore letter

Here's a letter from Michael Moore which caught my attention:

It's Time to Stop Being Hit...a letter from Michael Moore

Dear Friends,

It is no surprise that the Republicans are sore winners. They have spent the better part of the past month beating their chests, threatening to send to Siberia any Republican who doesn’t toe the line (poor Arlen Specter), and promising everything short of martial law if the Democrats don’t do what they are told.

What’s worse is to watch the pathetic sight of the DLC (the conservative, pro-corporate group of Democrats) apologizing for being Democrats and promising to “purge” the party of the likes of, well, all of US! Their comments are so hilarious and really not even worth recognizing but the media is paying so much attention to them, I thought it might be worth doing a little reality check.

The most people the DLC is able to get out to an event of theirs is about 200 at their annual dinner (where you have to pay thousands of dollars to get in).

Contrast this with the following:

*Total members of Move On: More than 2,000,000
*Total Attendance at Vote for Change Concerts: An estimated 280,000
*Total Union Members in U.S.: Around 16,000,000
*Total Number of People Who Have Seen “Fahrenheit 9/11”: Over 50 million
*Total number of you reading this: Perhaps 10 million or more

The days of trying to move the Democratic Party to the right are over. We lost a very close election (a one-state difference) by running the #1 liberal in the Senate. Not bad. The country is shifting in our direction, not to the right. But the country was attacked and people were scared. They were manipulated with fear. And America has never thrown a sitting president out during wartime. That’s the facts. Oh, and our candidate could have run a better campaign (but we’ll have that discussion another day).

In the meantime, while we reflect on what went wrong, I would like to pass on to you an essay that a friend who works with abuse victims sent to me. It was written by a woman who has spent years working as an advocate for victims of domestic abuse and she sees many parallels between her work and the reaction of many Democrats to last month’s election. Her name is Mel Giles and here is what she had to say…

Watch Dan Rather apologize for not getting his facts straight, humiliated before the eyes of America, voluntarily undermining his credibility and career of over thirty years. Observe Donna Brazille squirm as she is ridiculed by Bay Buchanan, and pronounced irrelevant and nearly non-existent. Listen as Donna and Nancy Pelosi and Senator Charles Schumer take to the airwaves saying that they have to go back to the drawing board and learn from their mistakes and try to be better, more likable, more appealing, have a stronger message, speak to morality. Watch them awkwardly quote the bible, trying to speak the ‘new’ language of America. Surf the blogs, and read the comments of dismayed, discombobulated, confused individuals trying to figure out what they did wrong. Hear the cacophony of voices, crying out, "Why did they beat me?"

And then ask anyone who has ever worked in a domestic violence shelter if they have heard this before.

They will tell you: Every single day.

The answer is quite simple. They beat us because they are abusers. We can call it hate. We can call it fear. We can say it is unfair. But we are looped into the cycle of violence, and we need to start calling the dominating side what they are: abusive. And we need to recognize that we are the victims of verbal, mental, and even, in the case of Iraq, physical violence.

As victims we can't stop asking ourselves what we did wrong. We can't seem to grasp that they will keep hitting us and beating us as long as we keep sticking around and asking ourselves what we are doing to deserve the beating.

Listen to George Bush say that the will of God excuses his behavior. Listen, as he refuses to take responsibility, or express remorse, or even once, admit a mistake. Watch him strut, and tell us that he will only work with those who agree with him, and that each of us is only allowed one question (soon, it will be none at all; abusers hit hard when questioned; the press corps can tell you that). See him surround himself with only those who pledge oaths of allegiance. Hear him tell us that if we will only listen and do as he says and agree with his every utterance, all will go well for us (it won't; we will never be worthy).

And watch the Democratic Party leadership walk on eggshells, try to meet him, please him, wash the windows better, get out that spot, distance themselves from gays and civil rights. See the Democrats cry for the attention and affection and approval of the President and his followers. Watch us squirm. Watch us descend into a world of crazy-making, where logic does not work and the other side tells us we are nuts when we rely on facts. A world where, worst of all, we begin to believe we are crazy.

How to break free? Again, the answer is quite simple.

First, you must admit you are a victim. Then, you must declare the state of affairs unacceptable. Next, you must promise to protect yourself and everyone around you that is being victimized. You don't do this by responding to their demands, or becoming more like them, or engaging in logical conversation, or trying to persuade them that you are right. You also don't do this by going catatonic and resigned, by closing up your ears and eyes and covering your head and submitting to the blows, figuring its over faster and hurts less if you don't resist and fight back.

Instead, you walk away. You find other folks like yourself, 57 million of them, who are hurting, broken, and beating themselves up. You tell them what you've learned, and that you aren't going to take it anymore. You stand tall, with 57 million people at your side and behind you, and you look right into the eyes of the abuser and you tell him to go to hell. Then you walk out the door, taking the kids and gays and minorities with you, and you start a new life. The new life is hard. But it's better than the abuse.

We have a mandate to be as radical and liberal and steadfast as we need to be. The progressive beliefs and social justice we stand for, our core, must not be altered. We are 57 million strong. We are building from the bottom up. We are meeting, on the net, in church basements, at work, in small groups, and right now, we are crying, because we are trying to break free and we don't know how.

Any battered woman in America, any oppressed person around the globe who has defied her oppressor will tell you this: There is nothing wrong with you. You are in good company. You are safe. You are not alone. You are strong. You must change only one thing: Stop responding to the abuser.

Don't let him dictate the terms or frame the debate (he'll win, not because he's right, but because force works). Sure, we can build a better grassroots campaign, cultivate and raise up better leaders, reform the election system to make it fail-proof, stick to our message, learn from the strategy of the other side. But we absolutely must dispense with the notion that we are weak, godless, cowardly, disorganized, crazy, too liberal, naive, amoral, "loose,” irrelevant, outmoded, stupid and soon to be extinct. We have the mandate of the world to back us, and the legacy of oppressed people throughout history.

Even if you do everything right, they'll hit you anyway. Look at the poor souls who voted for this nonsense. They are working for six dollars an hour if they are working at all, their children are dying overseas and suffering from lack of health care and a depleted environment and a shoddy education.

And they don't even know they are being hit.

How true. And that is our challenge over the next couple of years; to hold out our hand to those being hit the hardest and help them leave behind a party that only seeks to keep beating them, their children, and the kid next door who’s on his way to Iraq.

Yours,

Michael Moore
www.michaelmoore.com
MMFlint@aol.com

neocon checklist

Jim Lobe reveals a checklist of US neocon foreign policy ambitions for the next four years, drafted by Frank Gaffney. Here's an excerpt:

What is common to almost all of these effusions is the sense that, while Iraq might not have gone quite as well as anticipated, the ''victory'' in Fallujah marked a turning point in the U.S. occupation and January's elections should permit Washington to begin drawing down its troop presence in Iraq not long afterwards.

And, while the United States should still be committed to Iraq for the long haul, it is time that it came to act on the threats posed by other ''evil'' regimes -- be it by military force, covert action, ''support for the opposition'', or simple intimidation.

At the top of the list, as they have been for so long, of course, are Iran and North Korea, whose possession of nuclear weapons is simply ''unacceptable'', as the administration itself has said. But others -- Syria, Venezuela, China, even Russia, and the latest target, the United Nations itself -- are still seen as requiring policies of active containment, if not ''regime change''.

Recent news reports that quote ''intelligence'' and sometimes ''military'' sources saying that Syria is now the financial, logistical and planning hub of the insurgency in Iraq have prompted right-wingers to resurrect their plans for Damascus, even as President Bashar al-Assad assures Washington and Israel he is ready for peace talks without conditions, and might even be willing to go to Jerusalem and negotiate an agreement with the United States to secure his border with Iraq.

''The president's goals in Iraq, and elsewhere in the region, will not be achieved until the Syrians are forced to halt all assistance to our enemies'', write three officials associated with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD), a neo-conservative group behind the recent re-creation of the Committee on the President Danger (CPD), in the 'Washington Times' this week.

Iran, of course, gets the most ink, with a constant drumbeat of columns underlining the duplicity/hypocrisy/naiveté of Britain, France and Germany for negotiating a nuclear accord with Tehran and the necessity of an ultimate confrontation, if not because of its nuclear program than because of the regime's alleged infiltration and subversion of Iraq.

While the hawks concede that a full-scale invasion of Iran is not a viable option, at least for the moment, they insist not only that well-targeted air strikes (by Washington or Israel) could, at the least, significantly retard Tehran's acquisition of a nuclear weapon.

Similarly, they seize on every report of discontent, such as this week's heckling by university students of President Mohammed Khatami, as evidence that, as in pre-war Iraq, Washington is wildly popular with theologically oppressed Iranian masses who will be eager, at the very least, to accept money and rhetorical support -- already in the works, according to recent reports -- from the Bush administration to put an end to the regime, perhaps as peacefully, even, as in Ukraine.

North Korea is another top-ranking target, with, as in Iran, right-wingers seizing on even more dubious reports of widespread and growing discontent with the government to bolster their argument for regime change and at least the preparation for military strikes, despite the fact that U.S. intelligence does not have the faintest idea where key nuclear facilities can be found.

Concern about China, whose failure to ''deliver'' North Korea, along with its recent multi-billion-dollar energy contract with Iran and persistent tensions with Taiwan are seen as evidence of potential enmity, is also being spurred by the hawks, who appear to have resumed their campaign against ''engagement'' with Beijing after a three-year hiatus.

Particularly notable in that regard, Dan Blumenthal, until recently Rumsfeld's senior country director for China and Taiwan, moved recently to Perle's American Enterprise Institute (AEI) where he resurrected the notion of China as a ''strategic competitor'' to the United States.

Venezuela's recent aircraft purchases from Russia have spurred a series of columns, particularly in the Journal and 'National Review', reminding readers how close President Hugo Chavez is to Fidel Castro and how determined he is to curb U.S. influence in the Americas.

But the newest and easiest target, of course, is the United Nations, beginning with Annan, whose resignation over the ''oil-for-food'' scandal is being sought by a growing number of Republican lawmakers in Congress and op-ed hawks whose hatred and contempt for the world body dates back decades.

Scott Ritter on oil-for-food

Here is Scott Ritter, shedding light on the real story of corruption behind the UN's oil-for-food program.

International Human Rights Day

Today is International Human Rights Day. A recognition of those rights is missing in many parts of the world. Sudan, Abu Graib, the State of the Children Report. So much work to do, and so little time. Please support Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

UNICEF report

According to a UNICEF State of the World's Children report, more than one billion children around the world are losing out on their childhood, due to poverty, disease, or conflicts. This angers me, particularly when I consider that it is all unnecessary. War mentality, greed, and ignorance are all playing a part in this tragedy. Please help.

Howard Zinn -- Harness that Anger.

Historian Howard Zinn says that instead of dwelling on the disastrous results of the US presidential election, the US citizens must harness their anger to fight for justice. I agree. We are living in the most dangerous time in history right now, and citizens not only of the US, but of the world, must stop this craziness before it is too late. Here is an excerpt from the article.

As I write this, the city of Fallujah has been turned into rubble by a ferocious bombing campaign. Photos are beginning to appear (though not yet in the major media, so cowardly are they) of children with limbs gone, an infant lying on a cot, one leg missing. It is the classic story of a military power possessing the latest, most deadly of weapons, trying to subdue the hostile population of a small, weak country by sheer cruelty, which only increases the resistance. The war in Fallujah cannot be won. It should not be won.


The movement here against the war must confront the horror of the situation by a variety of bold actions.


We will take up the classic instruments of citizens in the history of social movements: demonstrations (there will be a big one in Washington on Inauguration Day), vigils, picket lines, parades, occupations, acts of civil disobedience.


We will be appealing to the good conscience of the American people.


We will be asking questions: What kind of country do we want to live in?


Do we want to be reviled by the rest of the world?


Do we have a right to invade and bomb other countries, pretending we are saving them from tyranny and in the process killing them in huge numbers? (What is the death toll so far in Iraq? 30,000? 100,000?)


Do we have a right to occupy a country when the people of that country obviously do not want us there?


Election results deceive us by registering the half-hearted, diluted beliefs of a population forced to reduce its true desires to the narrow dimensions of a voting booth. But we are not alone, not in this country, certainly not in the world (Let's not forget that 96 percent of the Earth's population resides outside our borders).


We do not have to do the job alone. Social movements have always had a powerful ally: the inexorable reality that operates in the world impervious to the aims of those who rule their countries. That reality is operating now. The "war on terror" is turning into a nightmare. Whistleblowers from the Administration itself are beginning to reveal secrets. (A high CIA official writes of "imperial hubris" and then leaves the agency.) Soldiers are questioning their mission. The corruption attending the war--the billion dollar contracts to Halliburton and Bechtel--is coming into the open.


The Bush administration, riding high and arrogant, adhering to the rule of the fanatic, which is to double your speed when you are going in the wrong direction, will find itself going over a cliff, too late to stop.

National Missile Defense

Well, National Missile Defense, and the militarization of space, is coming to the fore as an issue right now. President Bush has a plan, and it is generally thought that Paul Martin will express his support for that plan. This is unfortunate. It must be opposed, and for many reasons. It hasn't been shown to work. Tests have been conducted without success. As well, rather than stabilizing the nuclear threat, it will increase it. It will put other countries on edge by placing them in a position where they will potentially be completely at the whim of the US government. This policy has nothing to do with maintaining a global military balance. The US already has more nuclear power than the rest of the world combined, and National Missile Defense will only increase that imbalance, thereby making the world a much more dangerous place for all, including the Americans. Finally, such imbalance, such total country over the world, will increase the ability of the US military to do whatever it wants in the global sphere, and as we have all seen in recent years through the US's actions in the Middle East, might certainly does not make right. This policy must be opposed at all costs. Here are a couple of sites to check out:

Global Network Against Nuclear Weapons in Space
CEASEFIRE