Howard Zinn: Memo to Obama, McCain

[zenekar]

Memo to Obama, McCain: No one wins in a war
By Howard Zinn

July 18, 2008

https://www.zcommunications.org/zspa...mentaries/3558

BARACK OBAMA and John McCain continue to argue about war. McCain says to keep the troops in Iraq until we "win" and supports sending more troops to Afghanistan. Obama says to withdraw some (not all) troops from Iraq and send them to fight and "win" in Afghanistan.

For someone like myself, who fought in World War II, and since then has protested against war, I must ask: Have our political leaders gone mad? Have they learned nothing from recent history? Have they not learned that no one "wins" in a war, but that hundreds of thousands of humans die, most of them civilians, many of them children?

Did we "win" by going to war in Korea? The result was a stalemate, leaving things as they were before with a dictatorship in South Korea and a dictatorship in North Korea. Still, more than 2 million people - mostly civilians - died, the United States dropped napalm on children, and 50,000 American soldiers lost their lives.

Did we "win" in Vietnam? We were forced to withdraw, but only after 2 million Vietnamese died, again mostly civilians, again leaving children burned or armless or legless, and 58,000 American soldiers dead.

Did we win in the first Gulf War? Not really. Yes, we pushed Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait, with only a few hundred US casualties, but perhaps 100,000 Iraqis died. And the consequences were deadly for the United States: Saddam was still in power, which led the United States to enforce economic sanctions. That move led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, according to UN officials, and set the stage for another war.

In Afghanistan, the United States declared "victory" over the Taliban. Now the Taliban is back, and attacks are increasing. The recent US military death count in Afghanistan exceeds that in Iraq. What makes Obama think that sending more troops to Afghanistan will produce "victory"? And if it did, in an immediate military sense, how long would that last, and at what cost to human life on both sides?

The resurgence of fighting in Afghanistan is a good moment to reflect on the beginning of US involvement there. There should be sobering thoughts to those who say that attacking Iraq was wrong, but attacking Afghanistan was right.

Go back to Sept. 11, 2001. Hijackers direct jets into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, killing close to 3,000 A terrorist act, inexcusable by any moral code. The nation is aroused. President Bush orders the invasion and bombing of Afghanistan, and the American public is swept into approval by a wave of fear and anger. Bush announces a "war on terror."

Except for terrorists, we are all against terror. So a war on terror sounded right. But there was a problem, which most Americans did not consider in the heat of the moment: President Bush, despite his confident bravado, had no idea how to make war against terror.

Yes, Al Qaeda - a relatively small but ruthless group of fanatics - was apparently responsible for the attacks. And, yes, there was evidence that Osama bin Laden and others were based in Afghanistan. But the United States did not know exactly where they were, so it invaded and bombed the whole country. That made many people feel righteous. "We had to do something," you heard people say.

Yes, we had to do something. But not thoughtlessly, not recklessly. Would we approve of a police chief, knowing there was a vicious criminal somewhere in a neighborhood, ordering that the entire neighborhood be bombed? There was soon a civilian death toll in Afghanistan of more than 3,000 - exceeding the number of deaths in the Sept. 11 attacks. Hundreds of Afghans were driven from their homes and turned into wandering refugees.

Two months after the invasion of Afghanistan, a Boston Globe story described a 10-year-old in a hospital bed: "He lost his eyes and hands to the bomb that hit his house after Sunday dinner." The doctor attending him said: "The United States must be thinking he is Osama. If he is not Osama, then why would they do this?"

We should be asking the presidential candidates: Is our war in Afghanistan ending terrorism, or provoking it? And is not war itself terrorism?

Howard Zinn is author of "A Power Governments Cannot Suppress" published by City Lights Books.

[Lenny]

I am sure Heir Hitler had a definite notion of "winning" the war he started. Ask Poland, the Balkans, and other parts he marched into.

I am sure Mr. Zinn knows more about Korea than I, but I do know that had the Chinese won their military goals, along with the North, there would be about 50 million more South Koreans living with the same level of poverty as the North, which is subsistence starvation with reports of cannibalism.

I know that Mr. Zinn understands Viet Nam better than most; that is we did not "win" that war due to people like Mr. Zinn. He knows that militarily we were superior in ever sense and instance and snatched victory out of the jaws of defeat due to the real politics that occured here at home. He knows that the military activity by US in that country, from 1958 to 1975, were the longest our country had ever been in. He also knows that the losses suffered by US were the fewest, with the exception of the three years in Korea. He mentions the 2 million killed in warfare in Vietnam, but fails to mention the 7 million innocents killed in S.E. Asia (Cambodia) starting the same MONTH we fled 'Nam.

Mr. Zinn correctly notes that war is bad. As a soldier he knows that first hand, and none will dispute that fact. And part of the sadness is due to civilians dying in war. War is no longer between consenting adults, as was in times past, which makes the hell of war worse. We cannot get around that. However his notion discounts what has been historically known as "a just war", which is what the whole issue is about, and reasonable people may differ on that count.
And THIS current action in Iraq and Afghanistan, though Constitutionally illegal, is THE MOST civilian conscious war this country has EVER been in.
When civilians in this action are killed it is becaue the enemy decides to set up in hospitals, schools, and other public infrastructures containing civilian populations. We do not bomb those public places.
Again, Mr. Zinn askes a question so rhetorical in nature as to defy any definitions, let alone an answer, "Is not war itself terrorism?". But to stay in that vein, the answer is "Yes" The next question would be, "What is the alternative to those people that have officially declared war on US", such as Bin Laden did in 1997. Under Bin Laden's way everyone in Wacco would all be taking dirt naps.
Oh, BTW, Mr. Zinn is a puke, in my opinion if not in fact.