[IP] "The Reason Why" by George McGovern

[Dave Farber <dave@farber.net>]

Title:   "The Reason Why" by George McGovern

------ Forwarded Message
From: Ted Kircher <tkircher@earthlink.net>
Organization: Information Age Consulting
Reply-To: Ted Kircher <tkircher@earthlink.net>
Date: Mon, 07 Apr 2003 11:51:56 -0400
To: Dave Farber <dave@farber.net>
Subject: "The Reason Why" by George McGovern

Dave,
 
I hope you consider this worthy of passing on to IP.
 
Ted Kircher

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  The Reason Why
    by George McGovern
   The Nation, April 3, 2003

   "Theirs not to reason why,
   Theirs but to do and die."
      --Alfred, Lord Tennyson
      "The Charge of the Light Brigade"
      (in the Crimean War)

    Thanks to the most crudely partisan decision in the history of the
    Supreme Court, the nation has been given a President of painfully
    limited wisdom and compassion and lacking any sense of the nation's
    true greatness. Appearing to enjoy his role as Commander in Chief of
    the armed forces above all other functions of his office, and
    unchecked by a seemingly timid Congress, a compliant Supreme Court,
    a largely subservient press and a corrupt corporate plutocracy, George
    W. Bush has set the nation on a course for one-man rule.

    He treads carelessly on the Bill of Rights, the United Nations and
    international law while creating a costly but largely useless new
    federal bureaucracy loosely called "Homeland Security." Meanwhile,
    such fundamental building blocks of national security as full
    employment and a strong labor movement are of no concern. The nearly
    $1.5 trillion tax giveaway, largely for the further enrichment of
    those already rich, will have to be made up by cutting government
    services and shifting a larger share of the tax burden to workers and
    the elderly. This President and his advisers know well how to get us
    involved in imperial crusades abroad while pillaging the ordinary
    American at home. The same families who are exploited by a rich man's
    government find their sons and daughters being called to war, as they
    were in Vietnam--but not the sons of the rich and well connected.
    (Let me note that the son of South Dakota Senator Tim Johnson is now
    on duty in the Persian Gulf. He did not use his obvious political
    connections to avoid military service, nor did his father seek
    exemptions for his son. That goes well with me, with my fellow South
    Dakotans and with every fair-minded American.)

    The invasion of Iraq and other costly wars now being planned in
    secret are fattening the ever-growing military-industrial complex of
    which President Eisenhower warned in his great farewell address. War
    profits are booming, as is the case in all wars. While young
    Americans die, profits go up. But our economy is not booming, and our
    stock market is not booming. Our wages and incomes are not booming.
    While waging a war against Iraq, the Bush Administration is waging
    another war against the well-being of America.

    Following the 9/11 tragedy at the World Trade Center and the
    Pentagon, the entire world was united in sympathy and support for
    America. But thanks to the arrogant unilateralism, the bullying and
    the clumsy, unimaginative diplomacy of Washington, Bush converted a
    world of support into a world united against us, with the exception
    of Tony Blair and one or two others. My fellow South Dakotan, Tom
    Daschle, the US Senate Democratic leader, has well described the
    collapse of American diplomacy during the Bush Administration. For
    this he has been savaged by the Bush propaganda machine. For their
    part, the House of Representatives has censured the French by
    changing the name of french fries on the house dining room menu to
    freedom fries. Does this mean our almost sacred Statue of Liberty--a
    gift from France--will now have to be demolished? And will we have to
    give up the French kiss? What a cruel blow to romance.

    During his presidential campaign Bush cried, "I'm a uniter, not a
    divider." As one critic put it, "He's got that right. He's united
    the entire world against him." In his brusque, go-it-alone approach
    to Congress, the UN and countless nations big and small, Bush
    seemed to be saying, "Go with us if you will, but we're going to
    war with a small desert kingdom that has done us no harm, whether
    you like it or not." This is a good line for the macho business.
    But it flies in the face of Jefferson's phrase, "a decent respect
    to the opinions of mankind." As I have watched America's moral and
    political standing in the world fade as the globe's inhabitants
    view the senseless and immoral bombing of ancient, historic
    Baghdad, I think often of another Jefferson observation during an
    earlier bad time in the nation's history: "I tremble for my country
    when I reflect that God is just."

    The President frequently confides to individuals and friendly
    audiences that he is guided by God's hand. But if God guided him into
    an invasion of Iraq, He sent a different message to the Pope, the
    Conference of Catholic Bishops, the mainline Protestant National
    Council of Churches and many distinguished rabbis--all of whom
    believe the invasion and bombardment of Iraq is against God's will.
    In all due respect, I suspect that Karl Rove, Richard Perle, Paul
    Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice--and other sideline
    warriors--are the gods (or goddesses) reaching the ear of our President.

    As a World War II bomber pilot, I was always troubled by the title of
    a then-popular book, God Is My Co-pilot. My co-pilot was Bill Rounds
    of Wichita, Kansas, who was anything but godly, but he was a skillful
    pilot, and he helped me bring our B-24 Liberator through thirty-five
    combat missions over the most heavily defended targets in Europe. I
    give thanks to God for our survival, but somehow I could never quite
    picture God sitting at the controls of a bomber or squinting through
    a bombsight deciding which of his creatures should survive and which
    should die. It did not simplify matters theologically when Sam Adams,
    my navigator--and easily the godliest man on my ten-member crew--was
    killed in action early in the war. He was planning to become a
    clergyman at war's end.

    Of course, my dear mother went to her grave believing that her
    prayers brought her son safely home. Maybe they did. But how could I
    explain that to the mother of my close friend, Eddie Kendall, who
    prayed with equal fervor for her son's safe return? Eddie was torn in
    half by a blast of shrapnel during the Battle of the Bulge--dead at
    age 19, during the opening days of the battle--the best baseball
    player and pheasant hunter I knew.

    I most certainly do not see God at work in the slaughter and
    destruction now unfolding in Iraq or in the war plans now being
    developed for additional American invasions of other lands. The hand
    of the Devil? Perhaps. But how can I suggest that a fellow Methodist
    with a good Methodist wife is getting guidance from the Devil? I
    don't want to get too self-righteous about all of this. After all, I
    have passed the 80 mark, so I don't want to set the bar of acceptable
    behavior too high lest I fail to meet the standard for a passing
    grade on Judgment Day. I've already got a long list of strikes
    against me. So President Bush, forgive me if I've been too tough on
    you. But I must tell you, Mr. President, you are the greatest threat
    to American troops. Only you can put our young people in harm's way
    in a needless war. Only you can weaken America's good name and
    influence in world affairs.

    We hear much talk these days, as we did during the Vietnam War, of
    "supporting our troops." Like most Americans, I have always supported
    our troops, and I have always believed we had the best fighting
    forces in the world--with the possible exception of the Vietnamese,
    who were fortified by their hunger for national independence, whereas
    we placed our troops in the impossible position of opposing an
    independent Vietnam, albeit a Communist one. But I believed then as I
    do now that the best way to support our troops is to avoid sending
    them on mistaken military campaigns that needlessly endanger their
    lives and limbs. That is what went on in Vietnam for nearly thirty
    years--first as we financed the French in their failing effort to
    regain control of their colonial empire in Southeast Asia, 1946-54,
    and then for the next twenty years as we sought unsuccessfully to
    stop the Vietnamese independence struggle led by Ho Chi Minh and Gen.
    Vo Nguyen Giap--two great men whom we should have accepted as the
    legitimate leaders of Vietnam at the end of World War II. I should
    add that Ho and his men were our allies against the Japanese in World
    War II. Some of my fellow pilots who were shot down by Japanese
    gunners over Vietnam were brought safely back to American lines by
    Ho's guerrilla forces.

    During the long years of my opposition to that war, including a
    presidential campaign dedicated to ending the American involvement, I
    said in a moment of disgust: "I'm sick and tired of old men dreaming
    up wars in which young men do the dying." That terrible American
    blunder, in which 58,000 of our bravest young men died, and many
    times that number were crippled physically or psychologically, also
    cost the lives of some 2 million Vietnamese as well as a similar
    number of Cambodians and Laotians, in addition to laying waste most
    of Indochina--its villages, fields, trees and waterways; its schools,
    churches, markets and hospitals.

    I had thought after that horrible tragedy--sold to the American
    people by our policy-makers as a mission of freedom and mercy--that
    we never again would carry out a needless, ill-conceived invasion of
    another country that had done us no harm and posed no threat to our
    security. I was wrong in that assumption.

    The President and his team, building on the trauma of 9/11, have
    falsely linked Saddam Hussein's Iraq to that tragedy and then falsely
    built him up as a deadly threat to America and to world peace. These
    falsehoods are rejected by the UN and nearly all of the world's
    people. We will, of course, win the war with Iraq. But what of the
    question raised in the Bible that both George Bush and I read: "What
    does it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his own soul,"
    or the soul of his nation?

    It has been argued that the Iraqi leader is hiding a few weapons of
    mass destruction, which we and eight other countries have long held.
    But can it be assumed that he would insure his incineration by
    attacking the United States? Can it be assumed that if we are to save
    ourselves we must strike Iraq before Iraq strikes us? This same
    reasoning was frequently employed during the half-century of cold war
    by hotheads recommending that we atomize the Soviet Union and China
    before they atomize us. Courtesy of The New Yorker, we are reminded
    of Tolstoy's observation: "What an immense mass of evil must
    result...from allowing men to assume the right of anticipating what
    may happen." Or again, consider the words of Lord Stanmore, who
    concluded after the suicidal charge of the Light Brigade that it was
    "undertaken to resist an attack that was never threatened and
    probably never contemplated." The symphony of falsehood orchestrated
    by the Bush team has been de-vised to defeat an Iraqi onslaught that
    "was never threatened and probably never comtemplated."

    I'm grateful to The Nation, as I was to Harper's, for giving me
    opportunities to write about these matters. Major newspapers,
    especially the Washington Post, haven't been nearly as receptive.

    The destruction of Baghdad has a special poignancy for many of us. In
    my fourth-grade geography class under a superb teacher, Miss Wagner,
    I was first introduced to the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, the palm
    trees and dates, the kayaks plying the rivers, camel caravans and
    desert oases, the Arabian Nights, Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp (my
    first movie), the ancient city of Baghdad, Mesopotamia, the Fertile
    Crescent. This was the first class in elementary school that fired my
    imagination. Those wondrous images have stayed with me for more than
    seventy years. And it now troubles me to hear of America's bombs,
    missiles and military machines ravishing the cradle of civilization.

    But in God's good time, perhaps this most ancient of civilizations
    can be redeemed. My prayer is that most of our soldiers and most of
    the long-suffering people of Iraq will survive this war after it has
    joined the historical march of folly that is man's inhumanity to man.

This article can be found on the web at:
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030421&s=mcgovern <http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030421&amp;s=mcgovern>

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