(Courtesy of www.truthdig.com)
I have watched mothers and fathers keeningin grief over the frail corpses of their children in hospitals in Gaza
and rural villages in El Salvador, Bosnia and Kosovo. The faces of these
dead children, their bodies ripped apart by iron fragments or bullets
tumbling end over end through their small, delicate frames, appear to me
almost daily like faint and sadly familiar ghosts. The frailty and
innocence of my own children make these images difficult to bear.
A child a day dies in war-related violence
in Afghanistan. Children die in roadside explosions. They die in
airstrikes. They die after militants lure them to carry suicide bombs,
usually without their knowledge. They die in firefights. They are
executed by the Taliban after being accused, sometimes correctly, of
spying for the Afghan National Army. They are tiny pawns in a futile and
endless war. They are robbed of their childhood. They live in fear and
surrounded by the terror of indiscriminate violence. The United Nations,
whose most recent report on children in Afghanistan covered a two-year
period from Sept. 1, 2008, to Aug. 30, 2010, estimates that in the first
half of last year at least 176 children were killed and 389 more
wounded. But the real number is probably much, much higher. There are
big parts of the country where research can no longer be carried out.
We will not stop the war in Afghanistan and
Iraq, we will not end this slaughter of innocents, unless we are
willing to rise up as have state workers in Wisconsin and citizens on
the streets of Arab capitals. Repeated and sustained acts of civil
disobedience are the only weapons that remain to us. Our political
system is as broken and dysfunctional as that once presided over in
Egypt by Hosni Mubarak. We must be willing to accept personal
discomfort, to put our bodies in the way of the machine, if we hope to
expose the lies of war and blunt the abuse by corporate profiteers. To
do nothing, to refuse to act, to be passive, is to be an agent of
injustice and to be complicit in murder. The U.N. report estimates that
during the two-year period it studied almost 1,800 children were killed
or injured in conflict-related violence, but numbers can never transmit
the reality of such suffering.
On March 19, the eighth anniversary of the
invasion of Iraq, I will join a coalition of U.S. military veterans from
Iraq
Veterans Against the War, March Forward!,
Vietnam
Veterans Against the War and
Veterans for Peace who will
gather in Lafayette Park across from the White House. The veteran-led
action will result in numerous arrests, as did a Dec. 16 protest
organized by Veterans for Peace. It will seek, because it is all we have
left, to use our bodies to challenge the crimes of the state.
It does not matter if this protest or any
other does not work. It does not matter if we are 500, as we were in
December, or 50. It does not matter if the event is covered in the press
or ignored. It matters only that those of us who believe in the rule of
law, who find the organized sadism of war and militarism repugnant and
who seek to protect the sanctity of life rise up. If we do not defend
these virtues they will be extinguished. No one in power will defend
them for us. Protests are rending the fabric of the U.S.-backed
dictatorships in Tunisia, Yemen, Jordan, Egypt and Libya. They are
flickering to life in the U.S. in states like Wisconsin. And they are
beginning to convulse Iraq. Iraqis, for whom eight years of war and
occupation have brought nothing but misery and death, are surrounding
government buildings to denounce their puppet government. They are
rising up to demand jobs, basic services including electricity, a
reining in of our mercenary killers, some of whom have been used to
quell restless crowds, and a right to determine their own future. These
protesters are our true allies, not the hired thugs we pay to repress
them.
We are wasting $700 million a day to pay for the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan, while our teachers, firefighters and police lose their
jobs, while we slash basic assistance programs for the poor, children
and the elderly, while we turn our backs on the some 3 million people
being pushed from their homes by foreclosures and bank repossessions and
while we do nothing to help the one in six American workers who cannot
find work. These wars have taken hundreds of thousands of lives. They
have pushed millions into refugee or displacement camps. They have left
young men and women severely crippled and maimed. They have turned our
nation into an isolated pariah, fueling the very terrorism we seek to
defeat. And they cannot be won. The sooner we leave Iraq and Afghanistan
the sooner we will save others and finally save ourselves.