OP-ED: NO FINER MEMORIAL by John P. Flannery

Uncle Charles Flannery and the author

 I remember as if it were yesterday my Mom crying, a soulful wound torn open upon hearing that my Dad’s brother, Charles, died of internal bleeding because years earlier he’d been shot in World War II. 

President Woodrow Wilson’s promise that World War I was the war to end all wars didn’t prevent World War II.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in WWII, said, “There is no glory in battle worth the blood it costs.”

We could therefore erect no finer memorial to our war dead than to rededicate our nation to peace.

Eisenhower, in his farewell address in 1960, told the nation, “We must learn how to compose differences, not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose.”  It is past time for us to reconsider his advice.

Our wars since World War II have been about property – the differences by and between communism, socialism and capitalism.  Also about ethnicity – over nationality, color, religion and region. 

The nation state now caught in the congressional and executive cross-hairs is Syria.

We insist our wars are honorable because we are fighting for individual freedom but those we would “save” all too often recoil at the definition of “freedom” we seek to impose.

We are hard-pressed to claim the high ground for freedom when the recent observable evidence, since 9-11, is that we distrust our citizens, frisk them, tape them, follow them, kill them with drones, kill innocent women and children in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and imprison innocents in Cuba without any formal charges or evidence.

Now we are ramping up to weigh in to Syria’s civil war, to spend funds we don’t have, perhaps even to add our own men and women to the 80,000 dead and million already displaced.

Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham want us to create safe zones for the Syrian rebels, arm the rebels, train them, conduct targeted air strikes, and deploy scud missiles.

Days ago, the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations voted 15-3 to arm and train these rebels. 

We are going to arm rebels that may include al Qaeda terrorists.  Radical Sunni preachers recently issued a call to jihad to support the rebels, spurring an influx of rebel fighters. 

Abu Sakkar, rebel leader of the Omar al-Farouq Brigade, should give us further reason to oppose intervention.  Abu cut out the organs of a dead Syrian soldier including his heart and liver, and bit down on one organ in a gruesome snuff video he filmed, while addressing the Syrian soldiers loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, saying, “I swear to God we will eat your hearts and your livers, you soldiers of Bashar the dog.” 

Virginia State Senator Richard Black has called upon the United States to “end its intervention in Syria.”  I agree.  Senator Black cited the cannibalizing of the soldier as one of several good reasons, and published reports that we were training and equipping the rebels.

Is there any hope for peace?

There are peace talks tentatively set for June.  The rebels have, however, interposed a speed bump on the road to peace, demanding, as a precondition, that the Syrian President resign.

A step toward a worthy memorial to our war dead is to work for peace without war-like intervention. 

This would build on what President Barack Obama said last week in a speech at the National Defense University. 

The President proposed that we turn toward peace, given we have and are ending our occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, after spending over a trillion dollars on these wars, after losing 7,000 Americans, after damaging many others irreparably. 

The President thought it time that we respect President James Madison’s warning that, “No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.” 

Acknowledging we still had to confront a “lethal yet less capable al Qaeda affiliates,” the President said, we must now supplement our military efforts and fight “to win a battle of wits, a battle of ideas.”  Eisenhower had similarly recommended “intellect and decent purpose.”

Robert G. Kaiser, a Washington Post editor, wrote that “the modern version of [congressional] culture is hostile to creative problem-solving.”  He said, “In the ‘world’s greatest deliberative body,’ there is little deliberation.”

We have to do better, because if we are not smart enough to make peace, then we may only make war, and thus shall we dishonor the memory of those war dead who served so this nation might be preserved and protected at peace.

GAZETTE COLUMN: THAT TAKES THE PRIZE by John P. Flannery

When President Barack Obama was awarded the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, everyone asked what had he done to deserve it?

Now we can all fairly ask what has he done to deserve to keep it?

In 2009, the Nobel Committee said that it was honoring Obama for his “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.”

Oh really.

Our peace president let fly many more drones into Pakistan, and made Afghanistan his war of choice, while remaining in the Iraq theater that he promised he’d leave.

President Obama signed an 007 shoot-to-kill death warrant, very James-Bond-like, on an American citizen (Anwar al-Awlaki) without any judicial review - and not so much as a rubber-stamping grand jury ever considered the charge or the Alice in Wonderland ?sentence-first-no-trial-to-follow.

President Obama sent missiles to kill crazy Qaddafi (a precedent for taking out heads of state that will yet have somebody trying to send drones into the West Wing).  Did I overlook to mention the carpet bombing we’ve unleashed on Libya?  We kill and destroy to save other lives.  At least, that’s how I understand our rules of engagement in a civil war that threatened us not at all.

I hate to imagine what a warring president would be like if this is the peace president.

Nor should my chortling friends in the Republican party take heart from this critique of the Democratic incumbent - as if their plowshares to weapons side show offers this nation any better hope of peace.

The Republican leadership and its candidates don’t want us out of Iraq. 

They can’t stand the thought of us reducing troops in Afghanistan.  They insist we are going to “win” that war in Afghanistan - when someone defines what “win” means.

The Republican’s beef about Libya - is that we don’t have “boots on the ground,” meaning putting more American service men and women at risk of life and limb in another war theater for an uncertain military objective when we have hardly the resources or treasure to continue the wars that we have elsewhere.

When we had imperial adventures in the recent past, the barely concealed message was that, we did so because we could - and no one had the chutzpah or resources to stop us.

By contrast, the Congressional Budget Office tells us that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could cost $2.4 Trillion and it’s costing us more because we are fighting these wars on the American family credit card.  

Think of that the next time you buy that product from China in its toxic card board wrapping; appreciate that you are funding our nation’s major creditor. 

The former chief economist of the World Bank and the winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics said more recently that it could cost us $3 Trillion.

Wow!

Our elected “leaders” are debating how to cut $3 Trillion dollars from the budget over the next decade. 

If it’s not from war spending, it will be from your Social Security, Medicare, Education, Infrastructure and other services now taken for granted.

We need a peace dividend to avoid a surplus of despair. 

Speak up now or regret at your leisure.