No, Mr. Obama, there is no "right war."

Mr. Obama, I supported you and voted for you – being for me, as Ralph Nader said, “the best of the worse” – but this time, my friend, you are wrong, dead wrong.

The United States military misdeeds in Afghanistan, and Pakistan, are not “the right war.” There is no “right war.” As a self-identified Christian, you should know that, better than most folks do. And you know as well as I do, although perhaps you would not admit it publicly, that the so-called “just war” rationales of modern and pre-modern Christian ethics are obsolete and impossible to justify in our post-modern world.

A genuine follower of the way of Jesus Christ would prefer (as Platonic ethics required too) to suffer injustice than to do unjustly unto others, would try to never do violence to anyone for any reason, and would rather choose the way of peace, as with St. Paul and St. Peter, “not rendering evil for evil, or railing for railing: but contrariwise blessing; knowing that ye are thereunto called, that ye should inherit a blessing.”


Furthermore, and again you know as well as I do, although perhaps you would not admit it publicly, that the supposed threat to U.S. national security posed by “Islamic terrorists” – whether located in Afghanistan or Pakistan, or Iraq or Iran, or Palestine or Somalia, or anywhere else in the world – is a convenient political fiction, a nightmare, a bete noir, a bugbear, used on behalf of this country’s plutocratic elites to falsely justify their imperialist crimes of transnational conquest.

I do not fear harm by “Islamo-fascist extremists,” but I do fear for the future if we do not begin to dismantle the military-industrial shadow government that rules the United States.

I believe I stand with a broad and diverse majority of the people of this country in an unequivocal demand to you as President-elect to withdraw U.S. military forces immediately, not only from Iraq, but from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and everywhere else in the world where they don’t belong, and aren’t required to protect our lives and properties – and I’m speaking for we, the people, not the military industrialists and plutocratic elites who have usurped our government!

We elected you to begin to undo the manifest evil visited on this country and the world by previous administrations, not to advance it and expand it.