To: "Jerry
Lobdill" <lobdillj@charter.net>
Subject: W. R. Pitt 8-10-03 We Stand Our Ground--right up there with the
Gettysburg Address
Editor's Note | I delivered the following
comments as the keynote speaker at the Veterans for Peace National Convention
in San Francisco. - wrp
We Stand Our Ground
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Sunday 10 August
2003
I must begin by saying that standing here before you
is, simply, one of the greatest honors of my life. I have never served in the
armed forces in any capacity. My father, however, did. He volunteered for
service in Vietnam in 1969. The changes that war wrought upon him have
affected, for both good and ill, every single day of my life. Vietnam did not
only affect the generation that served there. It affected the children of those
who served there, and the families of those who served there. That war is an
American heirloom, great and terrible simultaneously, handed down from father
to son and from mother to daughter, from father to daughter and from mother to
son. The lessons learned there speak to us today, almost thirty years hence.
Let me tell you a quick story about my father. His
call to the freedom bird came while he was still out in the field. He arrived
at Dulles Airport to meet my mother still dressed in his bush greens, still
wearing the moustache, with the mud of Vietnam still under his fingernails and
stuck inside the waffle of his boot sole.
A few days earlier, he had come across a beautiful old
French rifle. It was given to him by a Vietnamese friend, a former teacher with
three children who had been conscripted permanently into the military. My
father managed to bring this rifle home with him, and sent it on the flight in
the baggage hold along with his duffel.
My father and my mother stood waiting at the baggage
claim for his things to come down. The people there - and this was 1970,
remember - backed away from him as if he was radioactive. They knew where he
had just come from. If the greens were not a giveaway, the standard issue muddy
tan he and all the vets wore upon return from Vietnam was. When the rifle came
down the belt, not in a package or a box, just laying there in all its reality,
the crowd was appalled and horrified. My mother and father looked at each other
and wondered what these people were thinking. What did they think was happening
over there? What did they think it is that soldiers do? Did they even begin to
understand this war, and what it meant, what it was doing to American soldiers,
to the Vietnamese soldiers like my father's friend, and to the civilians caught
in the crossfire?
The looks on those people's faces there said enough.
The answer was no. They didn't know, and apparently didn't want to know. Now,
thirty three years later, we are back in that same place again, fighting a war
few understand that is affecting soldiers and civilians in ways only those
soldiers and civilians can truly know. Ignorance, it seems, is also an American
heirloom to be passed down again and again and again.
Many of you know, far better than I do, what my father
felt that day in Dulles. That is why I am honored to speak to you tonight. If
the American people fully knew what this war in Iraq was really about, if they
fully knew what it means today to be a soldier in that part of the world, they
would tear the White House apart brick by brick. If the people had but a taste
of the horror and the lies, they would repudiate this administration and all it
stands for. The don't know, because they have been fed a glutton's diet of
misinformation and fraud. Changing that is why we are here.
The first of August saw a very interesting article
published in the Washington Post. The title was, "US Shifts Rhetoric On
its Goals in Iraq." The story quotes an unnamed administration source - I
will bet you all the money in my wallet that this "source" was a man
named Richard Perle - who outlined the newest reasons for our war over there.
"That goal is to see the spread of our values," said this aide,
"and to understand that our values and our security are inextricably
linked."
Our values. That's an interesting concept coming from
a member of this administration. We make much of the greatness and high moral
standing of the United States of America, and there is much to be proud of. The
advertising, however, has lately failed completely to match up with the
product.
Is it part of our value system to remain on a
permanent war footing since World War II, shunting money desperately needed for
human services and education into a military machine whose very size and
expense demands the fighting of wars to justify its existence?
Is it part of our value system to lie to the American
people, to lie deeply and broadly and with no shame at all, about why we fight
in Iraq?
Is it part of our value system to sacrifice nearly
three hundred American soldiers on the altar of those lies, to sacrifice
thousands and thousands and thousands of innocent civilians in Iraq on the
altar of those lies?
Is it part of our value system to use the horror of
September 11 to terrify the American people into an unnecessary war, into the
ruination of their civil rights, into the annihilation of the Constitution?
Is it part of our value system to use that terrible
day against those American people who felt most personally the awful blow of
that attack?
Is striking first part of our value system?
Is living in fear part of our value system?
It is not part of my value system. It never will be.
This new justification for our war in Iraq is yet
another lie, an accent in a symphony of lies. The values this administration
represents play no part in the common morality of the American people, play no
part in the legal and constitutional system we adore and defend. One of the
worst things ever to happen to this country was allowing the people within this
administration to use words like "freedom" and "justice"
and "democracy" and "patriotism," for those good and noble
words become the foulest of lies when passing their lips.
For the record, the justification for war on Iraq was:
The procurement by Iraq of uranium from Niger for use
in a nuclear weapons program, plus 26,000 liters of anthrax, 38,000 liters of
botulinum toxin, 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agents - 500 tons, for
those without calculators, is one million pounds - almost 30,000 munitions
capable of delivering chemical agents, several mobile biological weapons labs,
and connections between the Iraqi regime and al Qaeda that led directly to the
attacks of September 11.
None of these weapons have been found. The mobile
weapons labs - termed "Winnebagoes of Death" by Colin Powell - turned
out to be weather balloon platforms sold to Iraq by the British in the 1980s.
The infamous Iraq-al Qaeda connection has been shot to pieces by the recently
released September 11 report. And the Niger uranium claim was based upon
forgeries so laughable that America stands embarrassed and ashamed before the
judgment of the world. This is all featured on the White House's website on a
page called 'Disarming Saddam.' The Niger claims, specifically, have yet to be
removed.
Lies. Lies. All lies.
That Washington Post story, however, reveals a deeper
truth here. Now that the original and terrifying claims to justify this war
have been proven to be utterly and completely phony - Niger recently asked for
an apology, by the way - the administration is falling back upon the
justification for war that these men have been formulating for years and years
and years.
They call it Pax Americana, a plan to invade Iraq,
take it over, create a permanent military presence there, and use the oil
revenues to fund further wars against virtually every nation in that region.
This we call bringing our "values" over there. Norman Podhoretz, one
of the ideological fathers of this group of neoconservatives who now control
the foreign policy of this nation, described the process as "The
reformation and modernization of Islam." That's a pretty fancy phrase. I
am a Catholic, and can therefore call it by its simpler name: Crusade. We know
all about those.
This is the Project for a New American Century, the
product of a right-wing think tank that, in 1997, was considered so far out
there that no one ever thought its members would ever come within ten miles of
setting American policy. One broken election, however, vaulted these men into
positions of unspeakable power. Their white papers, their dreams of empire at
the point of the sword, have become our national nightmare, and the nightmare
of the world. I speak of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard
Perle, John Bolton, Lewis Libby, and the rest of these New American Century men
who have taken our beloved country and all it stands for it and thrown it down
into the mud.
You will note that I did not name George W. Bush, for
blaming Bush for the gross misadministration of this government is like blaming
Mickey Mouse when Disney screws up. He is not in charge. Truman said "The
buck stops here," and so we point to Bush as a symbol of all that has gone
wrong. But he is not in charge. These other men, these New American Century
men, have delivered us to this wretched estate, and by God in Heaven, there
will be a reckoning for it.
But is it all ideology for these men? Of course not.
There is the payout. Have you ever heard of a company called United Defense,
out of Arlington, Virginia? Let me introduce you. United Defense provides
Combat Vehicle Systems, Fire Support, Combat Support Vehicle Systems, Weapons
Delivery Systems, Amphibious Assault Vehicles, and Combat Support Services.
Some of United Defense's current programs include:
The Bradley Family of Fighting Vehicles, the M113
Family of Fighting Vehicles, the M88A2 Recovery Vehicle, the Grizzly, the M9
ACE, the Composite Armored Vehicle, the M6 Linebacker, the M4 Command and
Control Vehicle, the Battle Command Vehicle, the Paladin, the Future Scout and
Cavalry System, the Crusader, Electric Gun Technology/Pulse Power, Advanced
Simulations and Training Systems, and Fleet Management. This list goes on and
on, and includes virtually everything an eternal war might need.
Who owns United Defense? Why, the Carlyle Group, which
bought United Defense in October of 1997. For those not in the know, the
Carlyle Group is a private global investment firm. Carlyle is the eleventh
largest defense contractor in the US because of its ownership of companies
making tanks, aircraft wings and other equipment. Carlyle has ownership stakes
in 164 companies which generated $16 billion in revenues in the year 2000
alone. The Carlyle Group does not provide investment or other services to the
general public.
Who works for the Carlyle Group? George Herbert Walker
Bush works for the Carlyle Group, has been a senior consultant for Carlyle for
some years now, and sits on the Board of Directors. This company is profiting
wildly from this war in Iraq, a tidy gift from son to father.
And then, of course, there is Dick Cheney's
Halliburton, profiting in the millions from the oil in Iraq. Halliburton
subsidiary, Brown & Root, is also in Iraq. Their stock in trade is the
building of permanent military bases. Here is your permanent military presence
in Iraq, and all for an incredible fee. Cheney still draws a one million dollar
annual check from Halliburton, what they call a 'deferred retirement benefit.'
In Boston, we call that a paycheck.
Pax Americana. That which President Kennedy spoke so
eloquently and specifically against when he said, "What kind of a peace do
we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced upon the world by our weapons of
war." This is now the rule of law for this nation. It must be stopped, and
we must be the ones to stop it.
This is America. At bottom, America is a dream, an
idea. You can take away all our roads, our crops, our people, our cities, our
armies - you can take all of that away, and the idea will still be there as
pure and great as anything conceived by the human mind. I do very much believe
that the idea that is America stands as the last, best hope for this world.
When used properly, it can work wonders.
That idea, that dream, is in mortal peril. You can
still have all our roads, our crops, our people, our cities, our armies - you
can have all of that, but if you murder the idea that is America, you have
murdered America itself in a way that ten thousand September 11ths could never
do. The men and women within this current administration are murdering the idea
that is America with their Patriot Acts, their destruction of civil liberties,
their lies, their daily undermining of even the most basic tenets of decency
and freedom and justice that we have tried to live up to for 227 years.
That, and that alone, should be enough to get you on
your feet with your fist in the air, whether or not you believe we have any
chance of stopping all this. We may not win, but we damned well have to fight
them. If we don't, we are the traitors some would say we are.
When you stare into the obsidian darkness of the
Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC, it stares back at you. The stone of
the monument is jet black, but polished so that you must face your own
reflected eyes should you dare to read the names inscribed there. You are not
alone in that place.
You stand shoulder to shoulder with the dead, and when
those names shine out around and above and below the person you see in that
stone, you become their graveyard. Your responsibility to those names, simply,
is to remember.
Remember what that dream, that idea that is America,
is supposed to be. Never forget it. Never let your children forget. Hand it
down, generation after generation, because it is the most valuable heirloom we
all possess. If we lose it, we have lost everything.
When all else fails, I fall back on the words of the
extraordinary anti-war activist, Daniel Berrigan. A friend of Berrigan's,
Mitchell Snyder, was for years an advocate and activist for the homeless in
Washington DC. Snyder became despondent over the fact that his government could
spend billions on bombs and planes and guns, but could not seem to find the
money to help the homeless. Snyder became so despondent that he committed
suicide. Daniel Berrigan penned these lines in memory of Snyder, and it is in
these lines that I find my hope and strength when the darkness creeps too
close.
Some stood up once, and sat down
Some walked a mile, and walked away
Some stood up twice, then sat down, "I've had
it" they said,
Some walked two miles, then walked away. "It's
too much," they cried.
Some stood and stood and stood.
They were taken for fools,
They were taken for being taken in.
Some walked and walked and walked.
They walked the earth,
They walked the waters,
They walked the air.
"Why do you stand," they were asked,
"and why do you walk?"
"Because of the children," they said,
"And because of the heart,
"And because of the bread,"
"Because the cause is the heart's beat,
And the children born
And the risen bread."
The cause is the heart's beat. This cause is my
heart's beat. It is yours. May it be there for all time, until that day comes
when we can, once again, stand in awe and pride before our flag and our
government and our nation, when we can once again revel in the rescued dream
that is America.
Until then we are at the barricades, and on the
streets, and in the faces of all those who would spend the precious blood of
our men and women on lies and profit and greed. The obsidian darkness of that
memorial demands this of us. The golden ideals of this nation demands this of
us. The laws of our forefathers demands this of us. Most importantly, we demand
this of ourselves.
They can take nothing from us that we are not willing
to give, and we are not willing to give this great nation up. Let them be
warned. We stand our ground.
Thank you.
William Rivers Pitt
is the Managing Editor of truthout.org. He is a New York Times and
international best-selling author of three books - "War
On Iraq," available from Context Books, "The
Greatest Sedition is Silence," available from Pluto Press, and "Our
Flag, Too: The Paradox of Patriotism," available in August from
Context Books.