Peace Messenger

The Eschatological Meaning of the Iraq War

In "A Reckoning: The Price Tag for America's Wars," recently published by Commonweal magazine, Ronald Osborn asseses the economic, human, and moral costs of the Iraq War on the seventh year anniversary of the invasion.  The extensive body of evidence he presents is crucial foundation for the commentary on the meaning of it all, excerpted here from the latter part of the article:

...There is every reason to fear the United States has sown seeds of hatred, suffering, waste, and insecurity that will someday return to us in forms of violence we can barely imagine. It may be, as René Girard has recently declared in conversations with Benoît Chantre (published under the title Battling to the End), that we are living in the midst of an apocalypse already set in motion. The horrific violence of

How Close to Presidential Dictatorship?

Analysis and commentary on the Bush-era memos made public on Monday, March 2:

David G. Savage, "Bush Memos on Presidential Power Shock Legal Experts," Chicago Tribune, 4 March 2009: Legal experts said Tuesday they were taken aback by the claim in the latest batch of secret Bush-era memos that the president alone had the power to set the rules during the war on terrorism.

Yale law professor Jack Balkin called this a "theory of presidential dictatorship. They say the battlefield is everywhere. And the president can do anything he wants, so long as it involves the military and the enemy."...

Guided Missiles, Misguided Men

The American Way of War: Guided Missiles, Misguided Men and a Republic in Peril
by Eugene Jarecki
Free Press / 2008

Eugene Jarecki (pictured below) carries forward the exploration of the pervasive influence of the "military-industrial complex" in American culture presented in his powerful 2006 documentary Why We Fight.  The publisher describes The American Way of War as

a penetrating and revelatory inquiry into how forces within the American political, economic, and military systems have come to undermine the carefully crafted structure of our republic -- upsetting its balance of powers, vastly strengthening the hand of the president in taking the nation to war, and imperiling the workings of American democracy. This is a story not of simple corruption but of the unexpected origins of a more subtle and, in many ways, more worrisome disfiguring of our political system and society.

While in no way absolving George W. Bush and his inner circle of their accountability for misguiding the country into a disastrous war -- in fact, Jarecki sheds new light on the deepest underpinnings of how and why they did so -- he reveals that the forty-third president's predisposition toward war and Congress's acquiescence to his wishes must be understood as part of a longer story

In his farewell address 47 years ago, President Eisenhower identified the "conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry" as both new and far- reaching. Its influence was not just military but "economic, political, even spiritual" thus involving "the very structure of our society."

Bringing to light the connections through which the military-industrial complex extends its influence throughout American culture is what made the Why We Fight documentary so effective. The "spiritual" aspect -- broad but very real ways -- comes through with depth and poigniance. If The American Way of War reinforces and extends the quality of analysis found in the documentary, it will be an exceptionally valuable book.

Takoma Park Pacifists Targetted as Terrorism Suspects

Bob Drogin of the Los Angeles Times, reporting from Takoma Park, MD in "Spying on Pacifists, Environmentalists and Nuns" (7 December 2008):

To friends in the protest movement, Lucy was an eager 20-something who attended their events and sent encouraging e-mails to support their causes.

Only one thing seemed strange.

"At one demonstration, I remember her showing up with a laptop computer and typing away," said Mike Stark, who helped lead the anti-death-penalty march in Baltimore that day. "We all thought that was odd."

Not really. The woman was an undercover Maryland State Police trooper who between 2005 and 2007 infiltrated more than two dozen rallies and meetings of nonviolent groups.

Maryland officials now concede that, based on information gathered by "Lucy" and others, state police wrongly listed at least 53 Americans as terrorists in a criminal intelligence database -- and shared some information about them with half a dozen state and federal agencies, including the National Security Agency.

Among those labeled as terrorists: two Catholic nuns, a former Democratic congressional candidate, a lifelong pacifist and a registered lobbyist....

Read more at the LA Times web site or at Truthout.org.

Replacing Jesus With America

Empire's Workshop: Latin America, The United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism
by Greg Grandin

Holt Paperbacks / 2007

Historian Greg Grandin "locates the origins of the militarism that led to war in Iraq" in Central America during the 1980s.  There, he contends, the Reagan administration's policy first brought together the forces driving U.S. imperialism twenty years later.  Grandin identifies these forces as "punitive idealism, free market absolutism, and the mass fervor of right wing evangelicalism."  Most pertinent for our concerns, it was in the Central American was that "New Right Christian theologians joined forces with secular nationalism to elaborate an ethical justification for rejuvenated militarism" (6).

As the following excerpt from his conclusion shows, Grandin's analysis shines an intense light on the militarist idolatry that holds America in its thrall today:

...[A]ll of George Bush's abuses of power -- the manipulation of intelligence and the media, the building of an interagency war party that operated autonomously from Washington's foreign policy establishment, the illegal wiretaps, the surveillance of antiwar activists -- have their most immediate antecedents in Reagan's Central America policy, which in retrospect has to be understood as the first battle in the New Right's crusade to roll back restrictions placed on the imperial presidency in the wake of Vietnam, Watergate, COINTELPRO, and other scandals of the 1970s....