every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.
This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. ... Is there no other way the world may live?
-Dwight D Eisenhower
* Speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, "The Chance for Peace" (1953-04-16)
The litany of apologia for why we can't fully investigate and prosecute Bush era war crimes is an ever evolving, shape-shifting thing, it has seemed to me, that has spanned the gamut of arguments, from those made about facilitation and timing (too soon, DOJ not in place, he's playing 3-dimensional chess, you'll see!) , to the purely politically inexpedient. (too late, now! It will "cost" us.)
One of the more emphatic arguments has been that
the public would never support such a scenario and Democrats would be politically punished. I'm one that thinks we're about to be punished very hard anyway. Punished, however unfairly some may cry, on a hot seething riptide of anger about the economy, unemployment, HCR, the bankster bailouts, and Wall Street Fat Cats still living it up while more and more Americans are standing in line at food banks, one paycheck away from foreclosure, eviction or possibly living out of their cars- and surrounded by so many more that it's already happened to.
And we'll let that happen. Even though we know there is both a grave moral and economic case to be made to the American people about what these 10 years of war making have cost us. Every trip to the
Cost of War counter tells the sick-making tale, every minute of the day, every day after day: Another school we could have repaired or built, another desperately needed health clinic your town could have had, another family that could have had decent affordable housing, another college grant or scholarship that could have changed a life, another policeman, fireman or teacher or social worker whose job could have been saved from another round of layoffs... to the core for too many, a very theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
What if every single American really understood much better the ravages of these wars of the last 10 years, the heinous human and economic costs of it to the victims we waged it on? What if we'd demanded and had a free independent media that wouldn't look away and let most Americans look away? What if we'd had a involuntary draft of both freepers and chicken-hawk liberals that sent sudden objectors into the American streets day after day? What if they HAD released the rest of the torture photos being withheld? I'd not be the first or last to wager that these wars would have ended a long time ago. And I'd wager we as a public would have supported a lot more accountability and justice as a result.
And would even now. Maybe especially now, despite some we have some telling us we must believe that we can't, because it's too late.: "Because we need the government to do our business and that business is saving the economy first and foremost." I'm with everyone on the dire economy, but I say we must do both. We must. We have to come to terms with the fact that we
can't fix this hemorrhaging hole in our economy without ending the PermaWars that have enriched a precious few and sucked the rest of us bone dry. And we can't stop the mounting fear and rage at home over the economy until we confront, name, contain and punish our real enemies and abusers.
I'd love to be able to say there should never be a day Democrats let go by that they don't connect the straight lines for the American between the gruesome death and hell we've inflicted on others abroad and the sustained economic ravages we now get to experience as our own way of life crumbles and sinks all around us. It's maddening to me that the Democrats have put themselves in an impotent position, unable to make either case. If they could, and if they were brilliant and relentless in their clarity, teabaggers would be crushed like bugs in the muddy stampede to the polls to defund these wars and permanently jail, if not hang, some criminal bastards.
Far too many of them have decided they can't and won't, and we all know why.
Still, I know one thing. We must figure it out. It's delusional to believe there will never be another GOP style fascist in the White House, if and **especially** as long as there is no price to pay for past or future crimes.
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