Howard Zinn on Withdrawal from Iraq

[DemBones DemBones]

Zinn is a columnist for The Progressive, where this appears (January 2004 edition.)

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"The Iraqi people are happy to be rid of Saddam Hussein, but now they want to be rid of us. They do not want our military to occupy their country. If we believe in self-determination, in the freedom of the Iraqis to choose their own way of life, we should listen to their pleas, leave their country, and allow them to work out their own affairs."


"I would, therefore, as President, call for an orderly withdrawal of our troops from Iraq and Afghanistan. I would remove our troops from elsewhere in the Middle East. Only the oil interests benefit from that military presence."


"I am proposing a fundamental change in the foreign policy of our country. This Administration believes that we, as the most powerful nation in the world, should use that power to establish military bases all over the world, to control the oil of the Middle East, to determine the destinies of other countries."


"I believe that we should use our great power not for military purposes but to bring food and medicine to those areas of the world that have been devastated by war, by disease, by hunger. If we took a fraction of our military budget we could combat malaria, tuberculosis, and AIDS. We could provide clean water for the billion people in the world who don't have it and would save millions of lives. That would be an accomplishment we could be proud of. But how proud can we be of military victories over weak nations, in which we overthrow dictators but at the same time bomb and kill the people who are the victims of these dictators? And the tyrants we overthrow are very often the ones we have helped stay in power, like the Taliban in Afghanistan or Saddam Hussein in Iraq."

more. . .

http://www.progressive.org/jan04/zinn0104.html

[indepat]

1. Does Howard Zinn not sum up the big difference between a bleeding-heart

liberal and a hard core conservative?: the use of our wealth and power to bring food and medicine to areas of the world devastated by war, by disease, by hunger rather than building military bases around the world to control oil and the destinies of those nations. The choice seems clear enough. Sadly there may be enough hard-core, true-believers and the ignorant, the stupid, and the apathetic to give us four more years: by that time we will likely either be bankrupt or be pushing our dollars to the store in a wheelbarrow just to buy enough bread, beans, and potatoes to subsist on for a while.

[mike1963]

2. I just sent the link to this, to all the Dem candidates & suggested they

might consider contacting Mr. Zinn for rights to use it.