Into the City of War strides the new President Barack Obama, proclaiming a compromise deployment - or sacrifice - of seventeen thousand more troops into the quagmire of Afghanistan, who are now supposed to "stabilize" the situation.
I'm having deja vu, big time, Barack. Maybe you're too young to remember, but we've been here before, not so very long ago. Stabilize, you say? Are you playing Big Brother, Barack, or what? Let's lose the Newspeak, shall we? Tell us now, just what is the big idea, Mr. Commander in Chief?
Campaigning for election last fall, you blustered about, threatening to send - yes - no fewer than thirty thousand more hapless hod carriers for the Kabul regime construction project. What's up with your new number? Are you opting for the Golden Mean? Are you striking a virtuous pose, replete with classical virtues of temperance, prudence, fortitude, and justice?
If so, I beg to differ.
This is not prudent, not just. True temperance, and due fortitude would rule out warfare in the first place, deploying diplomats, not destroyers to engage the world in peaceful solutions to whatever real threats might subsist. And I challenge the idea that any regional political movements, from the Mideast through Central Asia, are our enemies. We, not the alienated victims of our world-girdling military empire, are our own worst enemies.
It's not just the economy, stupid.
Start the task of reconstructing the political economy by decimating the American military-industrial complex. Slash away the brass hats at the Pentagon; burn out the institutional thickets of waste and larceny thriving there behind corridors of closed doors. Put the multitudes of undereducated American youths who have been, and otherwise will be suckered into Devil's work in the military class, into re-education and vocational rehabilitation programs oriented toward waging peace, not war.
Let's just stop manufacturing mountains of weapons to arm the whole world. A single executive initiative on the part of our new President could put an historic end to that evil enterprise. Instead, let's make enough silicon photovoltaic solar cells to roof the planet, to power pumps to raise deep groundwater to subsistence farm families all over the Two-Thirds World, to do every piece of life-sustaining work electricity without emissions could to to bring about the transformation of our whole world into a new world of peace and justice!
Make love, not war!
I, for one, am not too young to remember the powerful impact those words had on the imaginations of a generation too much reviled now, but still capable - if we all have the will - of saving the world. I still believe, and I'm not the only one. I hope one day you'll join us, Barack; let the Devils of War and Mammon take the hindmost!
