How
To Save a Life
by
John S. Phillips White Buffalo Production
jsp95@verizon.net
jsp95@post.harvard.edu
"At the close of the invective against the religious leaders
(Matthew 23) he again outlined this historical process, in which the ruling
class of the past had always silenced the living voice of God, but managed to
utilize them posthumously among the decorative elements and authorities of
religion. He warns his own generation that they were on the point of repeating
this sin by persecuting the new prophets whom he would send. Thereby they would
prove that they were "sons of them that slew the prophets"; they would "fill up
the measure of their fathers"; and would bring upon themselves "all the
righteous blood shed on earth"
Walter Raushchenbusch
A
Theology for the Social Gospel[i]
It isn’t very
often that a President is humble enough to ask for suggestions concerning how to
proceed in Iraq, and in the War on Terrorism. And we should all welcome this
needed change in philosophy if it is genuine. We have been repeatedly warned
since 9/11, we are in an all out war against Terrorist. A war that according to
most military leaders including the President could last for many generations.
Since 9/11 the US has embarked on an unprecedented crusade to fight fundamental
Islam; a war to end all war or a final clash of civilizations as the Christian
commentators like to call it. This war will eventually cost more than a
Trillion Dollars at conservative estimates, more than the Vietnam War.
It has also resulted in
the deaths of over 3000 American soldiers and the deaths of countless Iraqi
civilians, according to some estimates as many as 600,000 innocent people many
women and children. The military describes these deaths as Collateral Damage.
And there has been little discussion about how living human beings have now
become collateral damage in our modern view of warfare. What does that say
about American’s philosophy of Life?
The rest of the
civilized world realizes that the amount of collateral damage is unacceptable.
In many circles including people in the US, they call this level of collateral
damage war crimes and violations of the International Law. There is now a
petition being circulate so the US can join the World Court allowing it to
investigate charges of war crimes and abuses outlined in the Nuremberg Treaty.[ii]
We have recently
set our sites on re examining our policy in Iraq without examining our first and
foremost policy disaster. The killing of innocent civilians is murder not
collateral damage. In the eyes of most of the world, we are the terrorists.
Every time we kill innocent women and children, we create more people so
desperate for salvation that they are willing to strap bombs to themselves to
kill anyone they see associated with the final assault on their freedom. Iraq
has proved beyond any shadow of a doubt that bombing a country with Shock and
Awe is not away to institute regime change or establish a Democracy for that
matter.
The Presidents current
idea to increase troop strength is only going to lead to one thing, more
innocent blood shed. Are there any other avenues that he might pursue? The
founding fathers of our great democracy stumbled upon a powerful scientific
concept: the key to an enlightened society was the free flow of information.
This was the guiding principle on which our Republic was founded. Information,
as it turns out, is the key to our salvation. We are at a crossroads and must
decide whether we want a society based on war or peace. Albert Einstein, Time
Magazine’s Man of the Century, explained it best, man can not simultaneously
prepare for war and peace. Only with the correct information can the American
people make the right choices for America’s future.
There are some very hard
lessons to be learned from our failures in both the War on Terrorism and the War
in Iraq. The US policy of shipping weapons whether Biological, Chemical, or
conventional has repeatedly come back to haunt our nation. In the current
situation US Weapons manufactures and their agents made maybe $10 Billion
Dollars in profits on weapon sales, and the US taxpayers end up having to spend
several trillion dollars cleaning up the mess. There are major foreign policy
implications in what has been a failed policy of trying to use weapons as a
means of establishing peace in many hostiles region of the world.
To understand how to
defuse the international tension surrounding these issues, we must first
recognize how we ended up where we are. What policies did we previously
institute that may have been failures. Understanding those policy failures, we
can then proceed to seek solutions with all the facts on the table.
In the early 1980’s
William Casey, CIA director under Ronald Reagan began to fund the Mujahadeem
rebels in the war against the Soviet invaders. The key player in this
organization became Osama Bin Laden, known in FBI documents as Tim Osman who
traveled in the US to look at different weapons option the Mujahedeem might
purchase.[iii]
The US taxpayers eventually supplied over $25 Billion in support of this
project.
Why is this important
many might ask? Because the United States government acting through the CIA and
ISI Pakistani intelligence started and funded Al Qaeda from the first day of its
existence.[iv]
On July 10, 2005 British Foreign Secretary confirmed that “Al-Quaida(sic)
literally 'the
database,' was originally the computer file of the thousands of mujahideen who
were recruited and trained with help from the CIA to defeat the Russians." The
database was maintained by Bin Laden's Maktab al Khidimat (MAK) recruiting
organization, which had its headquarters at the Bait al Ansar guest house in
Peshawar, Pakistan and maintained offices in Detroit and Brooklyn in the 1980s.”[v]
It is almost impossible
to believe that at this point in the debate the US media was failed to
investigate to adequately educate the public about this fact. And it is only
half the story. From the onset the international weapons trade has been largely
funded through the sale of illegal drugs. It is time to educate the public
about the other side of the international weapons trade, what I like to call
America’s dirty little secret.
And remember we are
talking about the 1980’s and the Reagan Administration is simultaneously setting
up covert operations to supply weapons to Iran, Iraq, and the Contras. We now
have firmly established in the public record that the CIA used drug profits to
fund what we know as the Iran Contra Affair. Congress unfortunately refused to
ask the hard questions after this revelation, a few of many being, How much
money are we talking about? Who else profited from the sale of illegal drugs?
And how did the agencies responsible for monitoring illegal drugs sale respond
to the fact that their own government was involved in the illegal drug trade?
In Afghanistan the
situation was the same only the drug was not cocaine, William Casey and his
comrades were helping to set up a heroin distribution network. How successful
was the program? Before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Golden Crescent
(Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan) supplied less than 20 tons of heroin to the
world.
[vi]
Since then the Golden Crescent has become the major supplier of heroin for the
world, and this year’s crop was estimated at over 200 tons.
It is important to
understand that the support for what became a new breed of Islamic Warrior’s
ready for jihad, did not only include money, weapons and drugs. Writing for
Global Research just one day after the 9/11 tragedy,
Michel
Chossudovsky, ‘The Truth
behind 911: Who Is Osama Bin Laden?”
explains how:
The CIA actually helped
create training manuals in which the "Predominant themes were that Islam was a
complete socio-political ideology, that holy Islam was being violated by the
atheistic Soviet troops, and that the Islamic people of Afghanistan should
reassert their independence by overthrowing the leftist Afghan regime propped up
by Moscow."[vii]
With the active encouragement of
the CIA and Pakistan's ISI [Inter Services Intelligence], who wanted to turn the
Afghan jihad into a global war waged by all Muslim states against the Soviet
Union, some 35,000 Muslim radicals from 40 Islamic countries joined
Afghanistan's fight between 1982 and 1992. Tens of thousands more came to study
in Pakistani madrasahs. Eventually more than 100,000 foreign Muslim radicals
were directly influenced by the Afghan jihad.[viii]
This madrassah program with full support from Saudi Arabia trained children as
young as 7 for holy war against the invaders. So the US was responsible for the
creation of what I will call the Myth of Jihad. And seeing how comprehensive
the program was, it is not such a big surprise that we are spending Trillions of
Dollars to clean up the biggest scandal in US government history.
The story in Iraq in the 1980’s is
more of the same. Reagan fearing that Iran might over throw the government of
Iraq begins to supply a steady stream of weapons to the regime of Suddam
Hussein. “On
October 27, 1992, the Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs held
hearings that revealed that the United States had exported chemical, biological,
nuclear, and missile-system equipment to Iraq that was converted to military use
in Iraq's chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons program. Many of these
weapons -- weapons that the U.S. and other countries provided critical materials
for -- were used against us during the war.”[ix]
Many of those same weapons
are now being used to kill US soldiers in Iraq today. Proving once and again
that to supply weapons to countries to try and institute peace and prosperity
has failed every time it was tried during the last hundred years. The only
people who have prospered are the members of the Military Industrial Complex
that Eisenhower warned American’s about in the late 1950’s.
Having firmly established that in
fact it is the policies instituted during the Reagan Administration that are at
the root of our current international crisis, How might we proceed differently?
Well the
President has frequently sited the fact that he is inspired by Gods purpose, so
maybe we might want to try Christian Values for a change. And there has been a
recent example of great Christian Love in the paper recently so maybe we could
use it as an example.
In October 2005 a crazy
gun man stormed into an Amish School in Lancaster County Pa and killed 5
innocent children. How did the Amish respond? By reaching out to the shooters
family with love and raising money for the children’s future without a father.
The Amish are a great example because they embodied many of the wonder values
that have been lost by modern Christians. Anabaptist, as they were originally
called, originated in the early part of the 16th century. They
believed that an individual shouldn’t be baptized until they were old enough to
understand the meaning of God work, and that putting water on an infant’s head
was not a means of redemption. Anabaptist also rejected the use of weapons and
warfare, and believed that charging interest on money was a grave sin. Many
Anabaptists were eventually rounded up and beheaded or hung by member of the
Catholic Church hierarchy. They eventually fled to the United States are years
of persecution to live in a country with Freedom of Religion.
So when faced with
tragedy, the murder of their innocent children, the Amish sought to put their
good Christian values forward and forgive the past. They chose to move into the
future. As everyone with the slightest bit of common sense recognizes, there
are many guilty parties involved in the war in Iraq and in the war on terrorism
on both sides of the debate, and there is no arguing about this point. But if
someone wants to put forth their best Christian values, one starts by openly
admitting their mistakes. And we can all agree that if we knew in the spring of
2003 what a mess we were getting ourselves and the Iraqi people into, we would
not have proceeded as we have. So we need to admit our mistake to the Iraqi
people and the world, and ask for their forgiveness. Having cleared away our
spiritual burden, how then might we proceed when faced with what seems like a
hopeless situation of endless warfare.
The simple first step in
Iraq is a pull back and an immediate cease fire. This cease fire could be
instituted by simply getting all parties involved in the war to sit down and
negotiate a settlement. And that means all interested parties. This settlement
could include a time table for withdrawal of US troops and their replacement
where needed with UN forces from a variety of nations. The establishment of an
economic rebuilding program controlled by the Iraqi’s, not US Corporations.
Most importantly it should include a re-purchase of weapons; in reality
turning swords into plowshares. A model program for other areas in the world
where there is havoc due to the proliferation of the arms trade.
Many will ask, Why would
we want to negotiate with people who we consider to be terrorist? If the public
knew about the role the US Government played in the creation of Al-Qaeda and the
rise of fundamental Islam, they might feel a lot differently about how to
proceed in the war on terror and in Iraq.
Our attention must then turn to how
and de-program tens of thousands of militant Islamic fundamentalists who we
helped train and inspire. This is going to be no easy task. But it could start
with an international symposium where all parties involved in the war on
terrorism on both sides sit down and plan a peaceful solution to hostilities.
There are a great many resources to accomplish this task within the US academic
community. After 6 years the Bush administration has failed to use this
valuable resource during his administration. Ultimately we must re-engineer
the training program instituted by the CIA, and turn it into an educational
campaign about why Islamic nations and Christians can live side by side. The
cornerstone of this re-education should be based on the
founding principle of
Democracy, freedom of religion. You can’t create a democratic society without
it. It is time to use the American example to demonstrate to people around the
world how people of many faiths can live together.
Do we want another 100 years of war
or should we finally decide to prepare for peace.
And finally there is no more
important task for Congress than to reopen investigations into what we should
know call the Iran-Iraq-Contra-Al-Qaeda affairs. It is time to address
America’s dirty little secret.
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