As the US entered World War I in 1917, Hiram Johnson, a US senator from California, issued a warning that goes to the heart of our current predicament. “The first casualty when war comes is truth,” he explained. Although he didn’t mention it, the second casualty is just as obvious: freedom. Since Sept. 11, both have been offered up eagerly as the national media stokes primal fears, setting the stage for the most dangerous rollback in basic rights since the 1950s.
With all the hoopla surrounding the decision by US Senator James Jeffords to bolt the Republican Party and become an independent, his home state of Vermont has lately attracted considerable attention. As a result of this break away, the Democrats have a fresh chance to effectively challenge the Bush agenda, and the president-select may be forced to deliver on some of the promises he made during his campaign. Meanwhile, pols and pundits have struggled to explain away this unprecedented development as the action of a quirky politician from an equally quirky place.
In London recently to promote the latest installment of his memoirs, Henry Kissinger stormed out of a widely heard radio interview when the questioning turned to his complicity in war crimes. Radio 4 host Jeremy Paxman had asked the former secretary of state whether he felt like a fraud for getting a Nobel Peace Prize after plotting a coup in Chile and orchestrating slaughter in Cambodia. Kissinger denied everything, of course, and said his host was woefully misinformed, yet declined to show up for a BBC roundtable discussion scheduled for later that day.
Plans to bomb Iraq may be on hold — for awhile. But the anti-war activists who took over Vermont Gov. Howard Dean’s office on Monday Feb. 23 don’t trust the government any more than Bill Clinton trusts Saddam Hussein. Thus, even after learning that UN chief Kofi Annan’s eleventh hour agreement had been cautiously accepted, 18 people refused to leave until the governor endorsed their peace program. Even if Dean hadn’t been in Washington, DC, with other state leaders, however, that wasn’t in the cards. Fortunately, both the protesters and the cops opted for nonviolence, and no one got hurt.
As troops and planes headed toward Afghanistan, few people questioned the reasons for military engagement. An enemy that didn’t hesitate to sacrifice thousands of civilian lives had ruthlessly attacked the nation’s capital and brought down New York’s tallest buildings. The identity of the chief "evildoer" also seemed self-evident: Osama bin Laden, whose al Qaeda network had struck the US before and was being sheltered in Afghanistan by the Taliban. In the wake of such an outrage, could anyone doubt that a "war on terrorism" should begin there?
Copyright Toward Freedom 2019