WMD

Here we go again! We’re takin’ the show on the road again! Getting’ our feet wet again! All for the ol’ WMD...  I’ll get serious. War rides upon the wind again!
by Charlie Leck

I want to believe Secretary of State John Kerry. I think I do believe him. He is an honest and honorable man. However, I believed Colin Powell as well. And, I remember the night that the planes flew over Bagdad, raining down terror and destruction, and began our horrible war against Iraq. In the coming months the air cleared and certainties became less certain and then less and less certain; and finally they became not only uncertain but untrue. Colin Powell did not lie. He is too good a man to do that. He was fed erroneous and misleading information, however.

It has turned out, in the eyes and minds of most reasonable people, that our invasion of Iraq was one of the most serious foreign policy mistakes ever made by our nation.

It now seems certain that America will take military action against Syria. The promise is that it will be very limited. We claim that it will be supported by our allies. Yet, the British parliament has denied permission for Prime Minister David Cameron to get involved. France is cool. Germany is silent. Russian is angry!

You are watching the news as intensely as I. There is no need for me to get analytical here. I write only to express my trepidations and fears.

Isn’t there some way to pressure the leaders of the government of Syria that would not require military actions? Must there always be violence? Why doesn’t the United Nations function more successfully? Must there always be madness? Why aren’t we involving the Nonviolent Peaceforce?

Secretary of State Kerry gave clear reasons for our coming attack. The Syrian government crossed a red line that had been drawn for it by our president. It was clear that Kerry was telling us that we, as a government, cannot let that happen. If we let it happen here, then we would be forced to let it happen anywhere.

Oh, my! The madness of it all!

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On the Verge of Peace

America seems always to be walking nervously, on shaky legs, along the ledge of war. Wherever we turn as a nation there are, at any given time, the possibilities of war.
by Charlie Leck

What say you about Egypt? Syria? Shall we involve our troops? [Troop is such an impersonal noun isn’t it? It is a man – that troop – or perhaps just a boy or a young woman.]

There seems always the temptation to get involved. Some presidents – perhaps most of them – have been unable to avoid the entanglements of war. When I look at my life time alone, no president has been free of its draw; not Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush or Barack Obama.

Does that not seem remarkable to you? Incredible, perhaps? Throughout my life-time the nation has been almost constantly at war (even when we tried calling them other things, like police actions). There have only been some short periods of lull when it seemed our nation was not engaged in war. And even in those years there was the constant, tense and formidable threat of war.

The fool says...
...the United Nations has certainly done no good in the matter. The wise man counters that it would have been immensely worse – these last hundred years – without the U.N. to broker peace.

Let the United Nations make decisions about Syria and Egypt! We should not be unilaterally deciding to send weapons and/or troops into any of these engagements or places of disruption. These are not decisions for Senator John McCain to make – nor for President Obama, for that matter. Let the nations of the world decide what is right and just amongst nations and within nations.

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Peace on Earth

One of the great dreams of peace lovers everywhere was that the United Nations would be the way toward understanding between nations and the evidence shows that it has helped; but the great challenge today has to do with internal conflicts in so many nations on earth.
by Charlie Leck

This morning’s NY Times displayed an unsettling photograph on its front page. A large and aged cargo truck was jammed with citizens of the Northern Kivu Province of the Congo and someone on the ground was handing up a nearly naked baby to be added to the crush of people seeking to escape the violence that wracks their nation. Over the last several weeks rebels have taken control of Goma, Kivu’s capital. Another photo that heads the story of the violence in the Congo shows a boy (of ten or so) in a hospital bed, recuperating from a gunshot wound he suffered when the rebels took control of Goma.

“GOMA, Democratic Republic of Congo — The lights are out in most of Goma. There is little water. The prison is an empty, garbage-strewn wasteland with its rusty front gate swinging wide open and a three-foot hole punched through the back wall, letting loose 1,200 killers, rapists, rogue soldiers and other criminals.”

The fierce and troubling wars of our times are happening within nations as they struggle for a semblance of freedom and the kind of human rights that you and I know in this country. We forget – most of us do, anyway – how rare are such rights to free speech and free assembly around the world.

We concentrate on the well-told stories of civil unrest in Syria and Egypt and forget about places like the Congo (I hesitate to call it by its established name, the Democratic Republic of the Congo).

Joseph Kabila is the President of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and he is quite universally despised.  Riots are commonplace all across the nation – in places with names we’ve heard nothing or very little about over the years – in Bukavu, Kinshasa, Butembo, Kisangani and Bunia.

Billions of dollars of aide have poured into the Congo for peacekeeping purposes. In spite of the funds, the nation has descended into a frenzied and uncivilized place. The Congo is essentially ruled by various criminal organizations, each headed by classic godfathers who are at war with each other over pieces of turf that these criminal organizations want to control.

And, the United Nations seems helpless in its efforts to solve this violence. There are no central leaders or diplomats with whom to negotiate – no governments with which to plead for mercy.

The Congo is only one of the places where such internal unrest is threatening the lives and sanity of peoples who live there… there is also the Ivory Coast, Sudan, Jordan, Syria, Yemen, Bahrain, Algeria, Lebanon, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Burma, Somalia and Libya. It is a volatile world right now and it is frankly more than the United Nations can handle.

If you think it is petty to pray for peace, God help us all! This is a time for peace-keepers and for great thinkers to find ways out of this chaos. It is time for all of us to pray for such peace-keepers.

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