Join Nebraskans for Peace in calling for a withdrawal from Afghanistan
President Obama’s announcement that he will withdraw 10,000 troops from Afghanistan by the end of the year (with another 23,000 slated to come home by September 2012) will only lower the force numbers in that country to the Bush/Cheney Administration’s deployment levels — to where they were before the ordered troop 'surge' in 2009.
Read morePosted In: Anti-War & International Law
The writer is president emeritus of Nebraskans for Peace. He is a retired University of Nebraska-Lincoln professor.
The war in Afghanistan is 10 years old. Our longest war, it’s also one of our most futile.
Read morePosted In: Anti-War & International Law
On April 8, the prestigious “Woodrow Wilson International Center” in Washington, D.C. quietly released an analysis by two senior special assistants to the Department of Defense’s “Joint Chiefs of Staff” on America’s strategic role in the 21st century.
Writing under the pseudonym of “Mr. Y” and claiming to speak for no one but themselves, Navy Captain Wayne Porter and Marine Colonel Mark “Puck” Mykleby outlined in “A National Strategic Narrative” what Foreign Policy magazine described as “the Pentagon’s secret plan to slash its own budget.”
As the preface to the 13-page “Y” article openly asserts, for the United States to become “the strongest competitor and most influential player in a deeply inter-connected global system,” we must “invest less in defense and more in sustainable prosperity and the tools of effective global engagement.” Our priorities must shift “from deterrence and defense to civilian engagement and competition.”
Read morePosted In: Anti-War & International Law
Former Nebraska Republican U.S. Senator Chuck Hagel — who single-handedly broke the Republican consensus over the Bush/Cheney Administration’s ‘War on Iraq’ — was back in the news this past week with advice for Barack Obama about the war in Afghanistan. As Hagel stated in a Lincoln Journal Star story, the death of Osama bin Laden provides the president with an opportunity “to start winding this down… He’s got to start heading toward the exits.”
The longer the U.S. stays in Afghanistan, Hagel warned, the worse for Americans as military casualties mount, resources are squandered and Americans become increasingly viewed as occupiers and oppressors. “The worst thing we can do is get bogged down [with] no way of getting out… We have lost our purpose, our objective. We are in a universe of unpredictables and uncontrollable,” he stated.
Once again, Chuck Hagel’s public comments about the White House’s conduct of the ‘War on Terror’ are providing a long-awaited opening for anti-war critics. In his current capacity as co-chair of the president's intelligence advisory board, Hagel is positioned to offer both an authoritative and bi-partisan critique of the war in Afghanistan.
Read morePosted In: Anti-War & International Law
Friday's Lincoln Journal Star opinion noted that Congress was finally "getting serious about national debt", but chided them and the president for not proposing changes to Social Security: "Why ignore that issue?"
Indeed. I am curious as to how the Editors could write an editorial about getting serious about national debt without mentioning the real elephant in the room -- our soaring expenditures on military activity. Earlier last week, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) reported that $ 1.6 trillion was spent world -wide on military activities, with the United States alone spending just under half that amount. They went on to report that "The United States has increased its military spending by 81 percent since 2001. At 4.8 percent of gross domestic product, U.S. military spending in 2010 represents the largest economic burden outside the Middle East."
Read morePosted In: Anti-War & International Law
