marcosolo, 22. Januar 2004 um 18:44:57 MEZ

Bush's Iraq an Appointocracy

by Naomi Klein > January 22 2004

"The people of Iraq are free," declared U.S. President George W. Bush in Tuesday's State of the Union. The day before, 100,000 Iraqis begged to differ. They took to the streets of Baghdad shouting "Yes, yes to elections. No, no to selection."

According to Iraq occupation chief Paul Bremer, there really is no difference between the White House's version of freedom and the one being demanded on the street. Asked Friday whether his plan to form an Iraqi government through appointed caucuses was headed towards a clash with Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani 's call for direct elections, Bremer said he had no "fundamental disagreement with him."

It was, he said, a mere quibble over details. "I don't want to go into the technical details of refinements? There are - if you talk to experts in these matters - all kinds of ways to organize partial elections and caucuses. And I'm not an election expert, so I don't want to go into the details. But we've always said we're willing to consider refinements."

I'm not an election expert either, but I'm pretty sure there are differences here than cannot be refined. Al-Sistani's supporters want every Iraqi to have a vote and for the people they elect to write the laws of the country - your basic, imperfect, representative democracy.

Bremer wants his Coalition Provisional Authority to appoint the members of 18 regional Organizing Committees. The Organizing Committees will then select delegates to form 18 Selection Caucuses. These selected delegates will then further select representatives to a Transitional National Assembly. The Assembly will have an internal vote to select an executive and ministers who will form the new government of Iraq. This, Bush said in the State of the Union, constitutes "a transition to full Iraqi sovereignty."

Got that? Iraqi sovereignty will be established by appointees appointing appointees to select appointees to select appointees. Add to that the fact that Bremer was appointed to his post by President Bush and that Bush was appointed to his by the U.S. Supreme Court, and you have the glorious new democratic tradition of the Appointocracy: rule by appointee's appointee's appointees' appointees' appointees' selectees.

The White House insists that its aversion to elections is purely practical: there just isn't time to pull them off before the June 30 deadline. So why have the deadline? The most common explanation is that Bush needs a "braggable" on the campaign trail: when his Democratic rival raises the spectre of Vietnam, Bush will reply that, the occupation is over, we're on our way out.

Except that the U.S. has absolutely no intention of actually getting out of Iraq: it wants its troops to remain, and it wants Bechtel, MCI and Halliburton to stay behind and run the water system, the phones and the oil fields. It was with this goal in mind that, on September 19, Bremer pushed through a package of sweeping economic reforms that The Economist described as a "capitalist dream."

But the dream, though still alive, is now in peril. A growing number of legal experts are challenging the legitimacy of Bremer's reforms, arguing that under the international laws that govern occupying powers - the Hague Regulations of 1907 and the 1949 Geneva Conventions - the CPA can only act as a caretaker of Iraq's economic assets, not as its auctioneer. Radical changes such as Bremer's Order 39, which opened up Iraqi industry to 100 per cent foreign ownership, violate these laws and could therefore be easily overturned by a sovereign Iraqi government.

This prospect has foreign investors seriously spooked, and many are opting not to go into Iraq. The major private insurance brokers are also sitting it out, having assessed Iraq as too great an expropriation risk. Bremer has responded by quietly canceling his announced plan to privatize Iraq's 200 state firms, instead putting up 35 companies for lease (with a later option to buy). For the White House, the only way for its grand economic plan to continue is for its military occupation to end: only a sovereign Iraqi government , unbound by the Hague and Geneva Regulations, can legally sell off Iraq's assets.

But will it? Given the widespread perception that the U.S. is not out to rebuild Iraq but to loot it, if Iraqis were given the chance to vote tomorrow, they could well immediately decide to expel U.S. troops and to reverse Bremer's privatization project, opting instead to protect local jobs. And that frightening prospect - far more than the absence of a census - explains why the White House is fighting so hard for its appointocracy.

Under the current U.S. plan for Iraq, the Transitional National Assembly would hold onto power from June 30 until general elections are held "no later" than December 31, 2005. That's 17 leisurely months for a non-elected government to do what the CPA could not legally do on its own: invite U.S. troops to stay indefinitely and turn Bremer's capitalist dream into binding law. Only after these key decisions have been made will Iraqis be invited to have their say. The White House calls this "self-rule." It is, in fact, the very definition of outside-rule, occupation through outsourcing.

That means that the world is once again facing a choice about Iraq. Will its democracy emerge still born, with foreign troops dug in on its territory, multinationals locked into multi-year contracts controlling key resources, and an entrenched economic program that has already left 60-70 per cent of the population unemployed? Or will its democracy be born with its heart still beating, capable of building the country Iraqis choose?

On one side are the occupation forces. On the other are growing movements demanding economic and voter rights in Iraq. Increasingly, occupying forces are responding to these forces by using fatal force to break up demonstrations, as British soldiers did in Amarah earlier this month, killing six. Yes, there are religious fundamentalists and Saddam loyalists capitalizing on the rage in Iraq, but the very existence of these pro-democracy movements is itself a kind of miracle: after 30 years of dictatorship, war, sanctions, and now occupation, it would certainly be understandable if Iraqis met further hardships with fatalism and resignation. Instead, the violence of Bremer's shock therapy appears to have jolted hundred of thousands into action.

This courage deserves our support. Last week, at the World Social Forum in Mumbai, India, author and activist Arundhati Roy called on the global forces that opposed the Iraq war to "become the global resistance to the occupation." She suggested choosing "two of the major corporations that are profiting from the destruction of Iraq" and targeting them for boycotts and civil disobedience.

In his State of the Union Address, President Bush said, "I believe that God has planted in every heart the desire to live in freedom. And even when that desire is crushed by tyranny for decades, it will rise again." He is being proven right in Iraq every day - and the rising voices are chanting "No, no U.S.A. Yes, yes elections."

 

... Link

marcosolo, 22. Januar 2004 um 17:39:59 MEZ

ONLINE-SYSTEM DES PENTAGON - Wahlfälschung programmiert?

Stolze 22 Millionen Dollar hat das Pentagon in ein Online-Wahlsystem für Soldaten im Ausland gesteckt. Von der Regierung zur Prüfung bestellte IT-Sicherheitsexperten empfehlen seine Abschaffung noch vor der Einführung: Das System sei so löchrig, dass man damit die ganze Wahl verfälschen könnte.

Es gibt Worte, die haben einfach einen guten Klang: "Online-Wahlen" etwa klingt nach Fortschritt, und "Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment" (Serve) Vertrauen erweckend. Dabei, befand nun ein Panel hochkarätiger, vom Weißen Haus mit der Prüfung des Pentagon-Wahlsystems betrauter IT-Experten, stimme an dem Namen dieses Serve-Systems anscheinend nur der letzte Namensbestandteil: "Experiment".

Dabei, finden die Experten, solle es auch bleiben, denn das sei gründlich in die Hose gegangen. Serve sei mit so vielen systeminhärenten Sicherheitsrisiken behaftet, dass das Wahlsystem für Auslandssoldaten geeignet scheine, die "Integrität der gesamten Wahl" in Frage zu stellen. In einem am Mittwoch veröffentlichten Bericht der Kommission heißt es, durch Serve verursachte Störungen der Wahl könnten "katastrophale Auswirkungen auf das öffentliche Vertrauen in Wahlprozesse" haben. Nun sei es das Beste, "das Serve-System gar nicht erst in Betrieb zu nehmen".

Das aber schmeckt dem Pentagon gar nicht. Serve sollte bereits im Rahmen der Vorwahlen zum Einsatz kommen und seine Sternstunde dann bei der US-Präsidentschaftswahl im Herbst erleben. Auch der letzte US-Soldat im Ausland sollte mittelfristig Gelegenheit bekommen, bequem sein Kreuz am rechten Fleck zu machen.

Und obwohl die Prüfungskommission befand, dass jeder an Serve angeschlossene Rechner durch diverse Trojaner-, Viren- und Hackattacken gefährdet sei, will das US-Verteidigungsministerium die Einführung durchziehen: Ministeriumssprecher Glen Flood bezeichnete die Einschätzung der Sicherheitsrisiken durch die Kommission als "überzogen": "Das Verteidigungsministerium steht zu Serve. Wir meinen, es ist in Ordnung, so wie es jetzt ist, und wir werden es nutzen."

Testfall Ernstfall?

Das meint auch Accenture, Hauptentwickler des Online-Wahlsystems. Die Prüfer sollten die Kirche im Dorf lassen, denn schließlich gehe es vorerst nur um "ein kleines, kontrolliertes Experiment".

Damit ist gemeint, dass Serve zunächst in sieben Vorwahlen zum Einsatz kommen und dabei von rund 100.000 Soldaten in 50 Staaten und Ländern genutzt werden soll. Das entspricht einem Zehntel aller potenziellen Wähler, die einmal über das armeeeigene Wahlsystem eingebunden werden könnten.

Pentagon und Accenture scheinen davon auszugehen, dass es innerhalb eines Clusters von 100.000 Stimmen zu keinen Wahl verfälschenden Effekten kommen könne. Dabei hatten bei der letzten Präsidentschaftswahl lang anhaltende Zählprobleme dazu geführt, dass schließlich der wahrscheinlich zahlenmäßig unterlegene Kandidat Georg W. Bush per Gerichtsentscheid zum Präsidenten gemacht wurde: Auch da kam es nur auf wenige hundert Stimmen an.

Die IT-Sicherheitsexpertin Barbara Simons kritisierte gegenüber der "Washington Post", dass es unverantwortlich sei, die Teilnahme von 100.000 Personen an einer echten Wahl als "Experiment" klein zu reden. Simons: "Wenn nachher Zweifel an der Legitimität der abgegebenen Stimmen aufkommen, könnte das die gesamte Wahl in Frage stellen." Man täte den Auslandswählern andererseits auch keinen Gefallen, wenn man ihnen nur das Gefühl geben würde, an der Wahl teilzunehmen, während ihre Stimmen am Ende nicht gezählt würden.

Ist das Expertenvotum nur "professionelle Paranoia"?

Der Expertenkommission ist all das Grund genug, vor dem Einsatz des Systems vehement zu warnen. Das Risiko sei systemimmanent: "Sicherheitslevel, die für den E-Commerce genügen mögen, reichen nicht aus für Wahlen. Man kann kein Online-Wahlsystem auf Basis von PCs von der Stange und dem Internet, so wie es heute aussieht, konstruieren", heißt es im Abschlussbericht.

Deshalb liege die Schuld für das offenkundige Scheitern des Serve-Programms auch nicht beim Pentagon oder bei Accenture, deren Arbeit an Serve als "innovativ und gewissenhaft" zu bezeichnen sei. Vielmehr sei es Zeit einzusehen, dass der Traum von der Schaffung eines wirklich sicheren Online-Wahlsystems über das Internet eine "grundsätzlich unmögliche Aufgabe" sei.

Darauf deute auch hin, dass eine vom kalifornischen Innenministerium beauftragte Expertenkommission schon im Jahr 2000 über das in Entwicklung befindliche Serve-Programm zu ganz ähnlichen Schlüssen gelangt sei. "Seitdem hat sich daran nichts Wesentliches geändert", sagt David Jefferson, IT-Wissenschaftler am Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory und Mitglied beider Kommissionen. Jefferson: "Nichts, was wir gesehen haben, hat uns überzeugen können, dass dieses System sicher gemacht werden kann."

Zu den im Bericht angeführten ignorierten Sicherheitsrisiken gehört das so genannte ARP-Spoofing, mit dem auch und gerade innerhalb von geswitchten Netzwerken jeder Datenverkehr abgefangen und verfälscht werden könne. Damit ließen sich sämtliche abgegebenen Stimmen verändern. Sicherheitslösungen, mit denen sich ARP-Spoofing anmessen lässt, gibt es nur wenige: Serve beinhaltet keine.

Selten ist Spoofing dagegen nicht. Entsprechende Programme, mit denen sich innerhalb von Firmen-, Universitäts- oder Militärnetzen sämtliche Passworte abfangen und Datenkommunikation verfälschen lassen, werden über Warez-Seiten im Web frei verteilt. Geredet wird über solche Risiken nur selten offen, weil sich über Spoofing so ziemlich alles knacken lässt: vom Online-Voting über Zahlungsabwicklungen bis hin zum Online-Banking.

Die Experten stehen zu ihrem harten Urteil

"Wir reden hier nicht über theoretische Konzepte", meint Aviel Rubinstein, Chef des Information Security Institutes an der Johns Hopkins University und Mitglied der Kommission der "New York Times". "Wir reden über Sicherheitsprobleme, die wir im Internet ständig beobachten." Sein größter Alptraum sei nun, dass Serve in diesem Jahr anscheinend erfolgreich getestet und dann bei der nächsten Präsidentenwahl landesweit eingesetzt werden könnte - mit dem möglichen Resultat massiver Wahlverfälschungen. Rubinstein: "Die Geschichte hat gezeigt, dass, wenn man Leuten die Möglichkeiten zur Wahlfälschung gibt, diese auch eingesetzt werden."

"Unter dem Strich", sekundiert David Wagner, IT-Professor in Berkeley, "haben wir das Gefühl, dass ein System, das die Risiken vergrößert, nur um mehr Bequemlichkeit zu erreichen, nicht die Lösung sein kann."

Jetzt kämpfen Accenture und Pentagon darum, den Ruf von ihrem Serve-Programm zu retten. Ein Schönheitsfehler des Expertenberichts ist, dass er nur von vieren der zehn Mitglieder unterzeichnet sei. Deshalb, so Pentagon-Sprecher Flood, handele es sich dabei um einen "Minderheitenvotum".

Ein Mehrheitsvotum gibt es allerdings nicht: Nicht nur, dass sechs der zehn Experten sich nicht äußerten, sie nahmen auch an den Sitzungen und System-Demonstrationen nicht oder nur unregelmäßig teil. Jetzt holen Pentagon und Accenture die fehlenden Stimmen per Telefonumfrage ein. Mit dem MIT-Professor Ted Selker fanden sie zumindest einen erheblich weniger aufgeregten Experten: Selker meint, der Abschlussbericht spiegele "die professionelle Paranoia von IT-Sicherheitsexperten" wider. "Das ist deren Job."

David Dill, der vierte Unterzeichner und IT-Professor an der Stanford University, will das nicht gelten lassen. "Was ich gesehen habe, hat mich überzeugt, dass niemals jemand über dieses System wählen sollte. Ich verstehe durchaus, wie problematisch es sein kann, sich aus dem Ausland an Wahlen zu beteiligen, und ich meine auch, dass wir es diesen Leuten viel einfacher machen müssen. Aber Serve ist dafür die falsche Lösung."

 

... Link

marcosolo, 19. Januar 2004 um 19:49:24 MEZ

Martin Luther King Jr. - called the United States "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today" and noted that "a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."

Guerrilla of the Week Editor's Pick,  January 19, 2004

Today, we celebrate the life of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Most Americans remember him for leading the Civil Rights movement. But he was much more. On April 4 1967, exactly one year before he was assassinated, King appeared at the Riverside Church in New York City. In speech that would become known as his "Beyond Vietnam" address, he outlined why he opposed the war in Indochina.

He called the United States "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today" and noted that "a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."

Declaration of Independence from the War in Vietnam. Delivered by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, April 4, 1967 at Manhattan's Riverside Church:

OVER THE PAST TWO YEARS, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam, many persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path. At the heart of their concerns this query has often loomed large and loud: Why are you speaking about the war, Dr. King? Why are you joining the voices of dissent? Peace and civil rights don't mix, they say. Aren't you hurting the cause of your people, they ask. And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment or my calling. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live.

In the light of such tragic misunderstanding, I deem it of signal importance to try to state clearly why I believe that the path from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, the church in Montgomery, Alabama, where I began my pastorage, leads clearly to this sanctuary tonight.

I come to this platform to make a passionate plea to my beloved nation. This speech is not addressed to Hanoi or to the National Liberation Front. It is not addressed to China or to Russia.

Nor is it an attempt to overlook the ambiguity of the total situation and the need for a collective solution to the tragedy of Vietnam. Neither is it an attempt to make North Vietnam or the National Liberation Front paragons of virtue, nor to overlook the role they can play in a successful resolution of the problem. While they both may have justifiable reasons to be suspicious of the good faith of the United States, life and history give eloquent testimony to the fact that conflicts are never resolved without trustful give and take on both sides.

Tonight, however, I wish not to speak with Hanoi and the NLF, but rather to my fellow Americans who, with me, bear the greatest responsibility in ending a conflict that has exacted a heavy price on both continents.

Since I am a preacher by trade, I suppose it is not surprising that I have seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision. There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle, and others, have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor - both black and white - through the Poverty Program. Then came the build-up in Vietnam, and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political play thing of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic, destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.

Perhaps the more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the young black men who had been crippled by our society and sending them 8000 miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in Southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would never live on the same block in Detroit. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.

My third reason grows out of my experience in the ghettos of the North over the last three years - especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through non-violent action. But, they asked, what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today, my own government.

For those who ask the question, "Aren't you a Civil Rights leader?" and thereby mean to exclude me from the movement for peace, I have this further answer. In 1957 when a group of us formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, we chose as our motto: "To save the soul of America." We were convinced that we could not limit our vision to certain rights for black people, but instead affirmed the conviction that America would never be free or saved from itself unless the descendants of its slaves were loosed from the shackles they still wear.

Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read "Vietnam." It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over.

As if the weight of such a commitment to the life and health of America were not enough, another burden of responsibility was placed upon me in 1964; and I cannot forget that the Nobel Prize for Peace was also a commission, a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for the "brotherhood of man." This is a calling that takes me beyond national allegiances, but even if it were not present I would yet have to live with the meaning of my commitment to the ministry of Jesus Christ. To me the relationship of this ministry to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I am speaking against the war. Could it be that they do not know that the good news was meant or all men, for communist and capitalist, for their children and ours, for black and white, for revolutionary and conservative? Have they forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the One who loved His enemies so fully that He died for hem? What then can I say to the Viet Cong or to Castro or to Mao as a faithful minister of this One? Can I threaten them with death, or must I not share with hem my life?

And as I ponder the madness of Vietnam, my mind goes constantly to the people of that peninsula. I speak now not of the soldiers of each side, not of the junta in Saigon, but simply of the people who have been living under the curse of war for almost three continuous decades. I think of them, too, because it is clear to me that there will be no meaningful solution there until some attempt is made to know them and their broken cries.

They must see Americans as strange liberators. The Vietnamese proclaimed their own independence in 1945 after a combined French and Japanese occupation and before the communist revolution in China. Even though they quoted the American Declaration of Independence in their own document of freedom, we refused to recognize them. Instead, we decided to support France in its re-conquest of her former colony.

Our government felt then that the Vietnamese people were not "ready" for independence, and we again fell victim to the deadly Western arrogance that has poisoned the international atmosphere for so long. With that tragic decision, we rejected a revolutionary government seeking self-determination, and a government that had been established not by China (for whom the Vietnamese have no great love) but by clearly indigenous forces that included some communists. For the peasants, this new government meant real land reform, one of the most important needs in their lives.

For nine years following 1945 we denied the people of Vietnam the right of independence. For nine years we vigorously supported the French in their abortive effort to re-colonize Vietnam.

Before the end of the war we were meeting 80 per cent of the French war costs. Even before the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu, they began to despair of their reckless action, but we did not. We encouraged them with our huge financial and military supplies to continue the war even after they had lost the will to do so.

After the French were defeated it looked as if independence and land reform would come again through the Geneva agreements. But instead there came the United States, determined that Ho should not unify the temporarily divided nation, and the peasants watched again as we supported one of the most vicious modern dictators, our chosen man, Premier Diem. The peasants watched and cringed as Diem ruthlessly routed out all opposition, supported their extortionist landlords and refused even to discuss reunification with the North. The peasants watched as all this was presided over by U.S. influence and then by increasing numbers of U.S. troops who came to help quell the insurgency that Diem's methods had aroused. When Diem was overthrown they may have been happy, but the long line of military dictatorships seemed to offer no real change, especially in terms of their need for land and peace.

The only change came from America as we increased our troop commitments in support of governments which were singularly corrupt, inept and without popular support. All the while, the people read our leaflets and received regular promises of peace and democracy, and land reform. Now they languish under our bombs and consider us, not their fellow Vietnamese, the real enemy. They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps where minimal social needs are rarely met. They know they must move or be destroyed by our bombs. So they go.

They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers destroy their precious trees. They wander into the hospitals, with at least 20 casualties from American firepower for each Viet Cong-inflicted injury. So far we may have killed a million of them, mostly children.

What do the peasants think as we ally ourselves with the landlords and as we refuse to put any action into our many words concerning land reform? What do they think as we test out our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe? Where are the roots of the independent Vietnam we claim to be building?

Now there is little left to build on, save bitterness. Soon the only solid physical foundations remaining will be found at our military bases and in the concrete of the concentration camps we call "fortified hamlets." The peasants may well wonder if we plan to build our new Vietnam on such grounds as these. Could we blame them for such thoughts'? We must speak for them and raise the questions they cannot raise. These too are our brothers.

Perhaps the more difficult but no less necessary task is to speak for those who have been designated as our enemies. What of the NLF, that strangely anonymous group we call VC or communists? What must they think of us in America when they realize that we permitted the repression and cruelty of Diem which helped to bring them into being as a resistance group in the South? How can they believe in our integrity when now we speak of "aggression from the North" as if there were nothing more essential to the war? How can they trust us when now we charge them with violence after the murderous reign of Diem, and charge them with violence while we pour new weapons of death into their land?

How do they judge us when our officials know that their membership is less than 25 per cent communist and yet insist on giving them the blanket name? What must they be thinking when they know that we are aware of their control of major sections of Vietnam and yet we appear ready to allow national elections in which this highly organized political parallel government will have no part? They ask how we can speak of free elections when the Saigon press is censored and controlled by the military junta. And they are surely right to wonder what kind of new government we plan to help form without them, the only party in real touch with the peasants. They question our political goals and they deny the reality of a peace settlement from which they will be excluded. Their questions are frighteningly relevant.

Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and non-violence, when it helps us to see the enemy's point of view, to hear his questions, to know of his assessment of ourselves. For from his view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition.

So, too, with Hanoi. In the North, where our bombs now pummel the land, and our mines endanger the waterways, we are met by a deep but understandable mistrust. In Hanoi are the men who led the nation to independence against the Japanese and the French, the men who sought membership in the French commonwealth and were betrayed by the weakness of Paris and the willfulness of the colonial armies. It was they who led a second struggle against French domination at tremendous costs, and then were persuaded at Geneva to give up, as a temporary measure, the land they controlled between the 13th and 17th parallels. After 1954 they watched us conspire with Diem to prevent elections which would have surely brought Ho Chi Minh to power over a united Vietnam, and they realized they had been betrayed again.

When we ask why they do not leap to negotiate, these things must be remembered. Also, it must be clear that the leaders of Hanoi considered the presence of American troops in support of the Diem regime to have been the initial military breach of the Geneva Agreements concerning foreign troops, and they remind us that they did not begin to send in any large number of supplies or men until American forces had moved into the tens of thousands.

Hanoi remembers how our leaders refused to tell us the truth about the earlier North Vietnamese overtures for peace, how the President claimed that none existed when they had clearly been made. Ho Chi Minh has watched as America has spoken of peace and built up its forces, and now he has surely heard the increasing international rumors of American plans for an invasion of the North. Perhaps only his sense of humor and irony can save him when he hears the most powerful nation of the world speaking of aggression as it drops thousands of bombs on a poor, weak nation more than 8000 miles from its shores.

At this point, I should make it clear that while I have tried here to give a voice to the voiceless of Vietnam and to understand the arguments of those who are called enemy, I am as deeply concerned about our own troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for our troops must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy and the secure while we create a hell for the poor.

Somehow this madness must cease. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam and the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to stop must be ours.

This is the message of the great Buddhist leaders of Vietnam. Recently, one of them wrote these words: "Each day the war goes on the hatred increases in the hearts of the Vietnamese and in the hearts of those of humanitarian instinct. The Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies. It is curious that the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the possibilities of military victory do not realize that in the process they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat. The image of America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom and democracy, but the image of violence and militarism."

If we continue, there will be no doubt in my mind and in the mind of the world that we have no honorable intentions in Vietnam. It' will become clear that our minimal expectation is to occupy it as an American colony, and men will not refrain from thinking that our maximum hope is to goad China into a war so that we may bomb her nuclear installations.

The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve. It demands that we admit that we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam, that we have been detrimental to the life of her people.

In order to atone for our sins and errors in Vietnam, we should take the initiative in bringing the war to a halt. I would like to suggest five concrete things that our government should do immediately to begin the long and difficult process of extricating ourselves from this nightmare:

1. End all bombing in North and South Vietnam.

2. Declare a unilateral cease-fire in the hope that such action will create the atmosphere for negotiation.

3. Take immediate steps to prevent other battlegrounds in Southeast Asia by curtailing our military build-up in Thailand and our interference in Laos.

4. Realistically accept the fact that the National Liberation Front has substantial support in South Vietnam and must thereby play a role in any meaningful negotiations and in any future Vietnam government.

5. Set a date on which we will remove all foreign troops from Vietnam in accordance with the 1954 Geneva Agreement.

Part of our ongoing commitment might well express itself in an offer to grant asylum to any Vietnamese who fears for his life under a new regime which included the NLF. Then we must make what reparations we can for the damage we have done. We must provide the medical aid that is badly needed, in this country if necessary.

Meanwhile, we in the churches and synagogues have a continuing task while we urge our government to disengage itself from a disgraceful commitment. We must be prepared to match actions with words by seeking out every creative means of protest possible.

As we counsel young men concerning military service we must clarify for them our nation's role in Vietnam and challenge them with the alternative of conscientious objection. I am pleased to say that this is the path now being chosen by more than 70 students at my own Alma Mater, Morehouse College, and I recommend it to all who find the American course in Vietnam a dishonorable and unjust one. Moreover, I would encourage all ministers of draft age to give up their ministerial exemptions and seek status as conscientious objectors. Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest.

There is something seductively tempting about stopping there and sending us all off on what in some circles has become a popular crusade against the war in Vietnam. I say we must enter that struggle, but I wish to go on now to say something even more disturbing. The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality we will find ourselves organizing clergy, and laymen-concerned committees for the next generation. We will be marching and attending rallies without end unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy.

In 1957 a sensitive American official overseas said that it seemed to him that our nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution. During the past ten years we have seen emerge a pattern of suppression which now has justified the presence of U.S. military "advisors" in Venezuela. The need to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the counterrevolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. It tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Colombia and why American napalm and green beret forces have already been active against rebels in Peru. With such activity in mind, the words of John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken, by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investment.

I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. When machines and computers, profit and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look easily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: " This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from re-ordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.

This kind of positive revolution of values is our best defense against communism. War is not the answer. Communism will never be defeated by the use of atomic bombs or nuclear weapons. Let us not join those who shout war and through their misguided passions urge the United States to relinquish its participation in the United Nations. These are the days which demand wise restraint and calm reasonableness. We must not call everyone a communist or an appeaser who advocates the seating of Red China in the United Nations and who recognizes that hate and hysteria are not the final answers to the problem of these turbulent days. We must not engage in a negative anti-communism, but rather in a positive thrust for democracy, realizing that our greatest defense against communism is to take: offensive action in behalf of justice. We must with positive action seek to remove those conditions of poverty, insecurity and injustice which are the fertile soil in which the seed of communism grows and develops.

These are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression, and out of the wombs of a frail world, new systems of justice and equality are being born. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before. "The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light." We in the West must support these revolutions. It is a sad fact that, because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and our proneness to ad just to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch anti-revolutionaries. This has driven many to feel that only Marxism has the revolutionary spirit. Therefore, communism is a judgment against our failure to make democracy real and follow through on the revolutions that we initiated. Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism.

We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and justice throughout the developing world, a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.

Now let us begin. Now let us re-dedicate ourselves to the long and bitter, but beautiful, struggle for a new world. This is the calling of the sons of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response. Shall we say the odds are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard? Will our message be that the forces of American life militate against their arrival as full men, and we send our deepest regrets? Or will there be another message, of longing, of hope, of solidarity with their yearnings, of commitment to their cause, whatever the cost? The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise we must choose in this crucial moment of human history.

Guerrilla of the Week Editor's Pick, January 19, 2004

Original: www.gnn.tv

 

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