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  • From: "David R. Matusiak" <dave AT matusiak.org>
  • To: internetworkers AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [internetworkers] Fwd: 'An Open Letter to the Members of Congress' from The Nation
  • Date: Thu, 26 Sep 2002 16:05:26 -0400

might be of interest if you live on this planet...

Begin forwarded message:

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 26 Sep 2002 13:09:09 -0400
Subject: 'An Open Letter to the Members of Congress' from The Nation

If you like this article, please consider subscribing to The Nation at
special discounted rates. You can order online https://ssl.thenation.com
or call our toll-free number at 1-800-333-8536.

please, if you believe in true freedom and peace on earth, send this
email to everyone you know - especially to those you think won't agree.
let's start the debate - why aren't we all talking about this now, all
day, every day? because of this administration, their words and actions,
i fear for my future, my child's future, and the future of the entire
human race. what our president hopes to do is wage an unjustified war, a
"war on terror" that itself borders on terrorism. war without end is a
life without hope. peace now, i say, in our hearts and in our hands.
peaceforevermore. pass it on.

An Open Letter to the Members of Congress
by The Editors


Soon, you will be asked to vote on a resolution authorizing the
United States to overthrow the government of Iraq by military force.
Its passage, we read on all sides, is a foregone conclusion, as if
what the country now faces is not a decision but the disclosure of a
fate. The nation marches as if in a trance to war. In the House,
twenty of your number, led by Dennis Kucinich, have announced their
opposition to the war. In the Senate, Robert Byrd has mounted a
campaign against the version of the resolution already proposed by
the Bush Administration. He has said that the resolution's
unconstitutionality will prevent him from voting for it. "But I am
finding," he adds, "that the Constitution is irrelevant to people of
this Administration." The Joint Chiefs of Staff, according to the
Washington Post, oppose the war. Telephone calls and the mail to your
offices run strongly against it. Polls and news stories reveal a
divided and uncertain public. Yet debate in your chambers is
restricted to peripheral questions, such as the timing of the vote,
or the resolution's precise scope. You are a deliberative body, but
you do not deliberate. You are representatives, but you do not
represent.

The silence of those of you in the Democratic Party is especially
troubling. You are the opposition party, but you do not oppose.
Raising the subject of the war, your political advisers tell you,
will distract from the domestic issues that favor the party's chances
in the forthcoming Congressional election. In the face of the
Administration's pre-emptive war, your leaders have resorted to
pre-emptive surrender. For the sake of staying in power, you are
told, you must not exercise the power you have in the matter of the
war. What, then, is the purpose of your re-election? If you succeed,
you will already have thrown away the power you supposedly have won.
You will be members of Congress, but Congress will not be Congress.
Even the fortunes of the domestic causes you favor will depend far
more on the decision on the war than on the outcome of the election.

On April 4, 1967, as the war in Vietnam was reaching its full fury,
Martin Luther King Jr. said, "A time comes when silence is betrayal."
And he said, "Some of us who have already begun to break the silence
of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation
of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that
is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak."

Now the time to speak has come again. We urge you to speak--and, when
the time comes, to vote--against the war on Iraq.

The case against the war is simple, clear and strong. The
Administration calls it a chapter in the war on terror, but Iraq has
no demonstrated ties either to the September 11 attack on the United
States or to the Al Qaeda network that launched it. The aim of the
war is to deprive President Saddam Hussein of weapons of mass
destruction, but the extent of his program for building these
weapons, if it still exists, is murky. Still less clear is any
intention on his part to use such weapons. To do so would be suicide,
as he well knows. Democratic Representative Anna Eshoo of California
has reported that in closed session Administration officials have
been asked several times whether they have evidence of an imminent
threat from Saddam against the United States and have answered no.
She elaborated, "Not 'no, but' or 'maybe,' but 'no.'" On the other
hand, if he does have them, and faces his overthrow and possible
death at the hands of US forces, he might well use them--or, more
likely, give them to terrorist groups to use after his fall. He may
be doing so even now.

Some observers have likened the resolution under discussion to the
Gulf of Tonkin resolution of 1964 authorizing President Johnson to
use force in Vietnam. But that was passed only after a report was
received of two attacks on US naval forces. (We now know that the
first attack was provoked by a prior secret American attack and the
second was nonexistent.) The new resolution, which alleges no attack,
not even a fictional one, goes a step further. It is a Tonkin Gulf
resolution without a Tonkin Gulf incident.

Even if Saddam possesses weapons of mass destruction and wishes to
use them, a policy of deterrence would appear perfectly adequate to
stop him, just as it was adequate a half-century ago to stop a much
more fearsome dictator, Joseph Stalin. It is not true that military
force is the only means of preventing the proliferation of these
weapons, whether to Iraq or other countries. An alternative path is
clearly available. In the short run it passes through the United
Nations and its system of inspections, now more promising than
before because Iraq, responding to US pressure, has opened itself
unconditionally to inspectors. At the very least, this path should
be fully explored before military action--the traditional last
resort--is even considered. Such a choice in favor of
multilateralism, diplomacy and treaty agreements should be part of a
much broader policy of nonproliferation and disarmament of the kind
that has already enjoyed great success over the past several
decades. Under the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear
Weapons, for example, 182 nations have agreed to do without nuclear
weapons. The larger issue is whether proliferation--not just to Iraq
but to many other countries as well--is best addressed by military
or political means.

But the decision to go to war has a significance that goes far beyond
the war. The war is the product of a broader policy that has been
spelled out in the clearest possible terms by the Bush
Administration. Two other countries with nuclear programs--Iran and
North Korea--have already been identified by the President as
potential targets for military attack. The Administration's recently
published "National Security Strategy of the United States" sets
forth even larger ambitions. It declares a policy of military
supremacy over the entire earth--an objective never before attained
by any power. Military programs are meanwhile forbidden to other
countries, all of whom are to be prevented from "surpassing or
equaling" the United States. China is singled out for a warning that
by "pursuing advanced military capabilities," it is following an
"outdated path" that "threaten[s] its neighbors." The new policy
reverses a long American tradition of contempt for unprovoked
attacks. It gives the United States the unrestricted right to attack
nations even when it has not been attacked by them and is not about
to be attacked by them. It trades deterrence for pre-emption--in
plain English, aggression. It accords the United States the right to
overthrow any regime--like the one in Iraq--it decides should be
overthrown. (The President would like international support and he
would like Congressional support but asserts his right to wage war
without either.) It declares that the defense of the United States
and the world against nuclear proliferation is military force. It is
an imperial policy--more ambitious than ancient Rome's, which, after
all, extended only to the Mediterranean and European world. Nelson
Mandela recently said of the Administration, "They think they're the
only power in the world.... One country wants to bully the world."

A vote for the war in Iraq is a vote for this policy. The most
important of the questions raised by the war, however, is larger
still. It is what sort of country the United States wants to be in
the twenty-first century. The genius of the American form of
government was the creation of a system of institutions to check and
balance government power and so render it accountable to the people.
Today that system is threatened by a monster of unbalanced and
unaccountable power--a new Leviathan--that is taking shape among us
in the executive branch of the government. This Leviathan--concealed
in an ever-deepening, self-created secrecy and fed by streams of
money from corporations that, as scandal after scandal has shown,
have themselves broken free of elementary accountability--menaces
civil liberties even as it threatens endless, unprovoked war. As
disrespectful of the Constitution as it is of the UN Charter, the
Administration has turned away from law in all its manifestations and
placed its reliance on overwhelming force to achieve its ends.

In pursuit of empire abroad, it endangers the Republic at home. The
bully of the world threatens to become the bully of Americans, too.
Already, the Justice Department claims the right to jail American
citizens indefinitely on the sole ground that a bureaucrat in the
Pentagon has labeled them something called an "enemy combatant." Even
the domestic electoral system has been compromised by the debacle in
Florida. Nor has the shadow cast on democracy by that election yet
been lifted. Election reform has not occurred. Modest campaign reform
designed to slow the flood of corporate cash into politics, even
after passage in Congress, is being eviscerated by executive
decisions. More important, this year's Congressional campaign, by
shunning debate on the fundamental issue of war and peace, has
signaled to the public that even in the most important matters facing
the country neither it nor its representatives decide; only the
executive does.

Members of Congress! Be faithful to your oaths of office and to the
traditions of your branch of government. Think of the country, not
of your re-election. Assert your power. Stand up for the
prerogatives of Congress. Defend the Constitution. Reject the
arrogance--and the ignorance--of power. Show respect for your
constituents--they require your honest judgment, not capitulation to
the executive. Say no to empire. Affirm the Republic. Preserve the
peace. Vote against war in Iraq.


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