It seems like our country cannot long exist without being at war with some other nation, or even with ourselves― a perpetual state of conflict. After ending or trying to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we almost immediately get dragged into the war to defend Ukraine. It seemed like a noble cause to defend a sovereign democracy against corrupt foreign invaders, Vladimir Putin and Russia.
Lest we forget we still have troops in Syria, Yemen and Somalia. All of these started off as honest attempts at peacekeeping but were often misguided in the intent or unintended consequences of our actions as the global “superpower.” And then there are our own conflicts — the culture wars, the Jan. 6 insurrection and let us not forget America’s longest war — the War on Drugs — started by President Richard Nixon. One of the best books on this subject, America’s Longest War: Rethinking Our Tragic Crusade Against Drugs 1994 by Steven B. Duke and Albert C. Gross, goes into great detail about the unintended consequences of that war, which are still playing out in our country with corrupting influences in politics, our courts and law enforcement and the high incarceration rate of minorities.
While a strong defense is necessary to defend our democracy against foreign powers that are opposed to the concept of a self-governing republic, war should be the action of last resort and not the first response.
This is the lesson that should have been learned in the Vietnam War and later in the War on Terror that launched both attacks on Afghanistan and then the lie that led us into Iraq. War shouldn’t be the first response nor maybe even the second or third. It should be the very last response after everything else has failed. And our leaders who lie us into wars should be the ones charged with crimes against the people and the Constitution. The goal should be how do we attain peace and justice, not how do we seek revenge first.
The war in response to our 9/11 terrorist attacks shouldn’t have been launched against a country, Afghanistan, which as it was reported was willing to give up Osama Bin Laden and his extremists backed by the Saudis, before the invasion. It took many long years to hunt him down and “neutralize” him at what cost in American lives and treasure? And there is still no justice for the families of the 9/11 attacks, only thousands killed and wounded, veterans coming home maimed and suffering from nearly 20 years of war. And wars by definition should be between nations, not with criminal entities.
Since the founding of this country we have been involved in 106 wars and currently four active ones. Many of these wars have been lost to memory and the fog of history, but from my perspective, as a life-long pacifist, there were only three wars for which our nation had no alternative but to fight in self-defense. The American Revolution to gain our freedom and sovereignty, the Civil War to preserve that democracy and to expand the rights of those freedoms, and World War Two to defeat fascism, which is an existential threat to all democracies.
What is happening now between Israel and Hamas is not our fight but one in which we have tragically taken a side historically. Not that Jews don’t deserve a homeland but then so do the Palestinians, something that often gets overlooked in the American media’s perspective.
There have been too many years in which America’s foreign policy towards this conflict has only exacerbated the conflict, like under Trump moving the American embassy into Jerusalem and ignoring the Zionist settlers moving into the West Bank territories and evicting Palestinians. The murder of Shireen Abu Akleh, a Palestinian-American journalist and acclaimed correspondent for Al Jazeera, on May 11, 2022, while performing her duty as a journalist reporting on Israel’s raid in the Jenin refugee camp is just one of many injustices perpetrated by Israeli Defense Forces with impunity. Yet there has been violence on both sides, not the least is the current one planned by Hamas, which can not be excused, but which was definitely provoked.
The current regime in power is the extremist Zionists who want a mono-cultural religious state. They are not unlike those white supremacists in our country who are calling for white Christian purity in the face of a growing multicultural pluralism.
However, there hasn’t been a U.S. president since Jimmy Carter who actually made an attempt to have a lasting peace in this Middle East hot spot. Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid is a book written by the 39th president of the United States, Jimmy Carter. It was published by Simon & Schuster in November 2006. During his presidency, Carter hosted talks between Menachem Begin of Israel and Anwar Sadat of Egypt that led to the Egypt–Israel peace treaty. Not much has been done to actually achieve peace since.
The chant from the Black Lives Matter protests got it right, “No Justice, No Peace” and as a country, I believe we are ill-equipped to provide either justice or peace both at home and abroad. In other words, both America and Israel seem to be their own worst enemies.