PROTEST MUSIC AND ACTIONS AGAINST THE WARS IN IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN

FROM 2007, and unfortunately things are basically the same, though no doubt things would be worse if the fascist repiglican ticket would have won. STILL, we have a responsibility to rise up and protest against any administration in the name of peace and freedom and social justice and civil rights and civil liberties.

http://youtu.be/_tpwbv-LZLA 

http://youtu.be/OT_aR6H1pcs 

http://youtu.be/9fZDm1nSjAM 
 

A clinic’s landlord turns the tables on anti-abortion protesters 29MAR12

THIS is just too cool! Way to go Mr Stave!!!!

By Petula Dvorak

Regardless of how you feel about abortion, the way Todd Stave flipped the script on his bullies is pretty dang clever.
Stave is the landlord of a medical clinic in Germantown that offers abortions. Reproductive Health Services Clinic became a big focus of anti-abortion protesters when it was leased to LeRoy Carhart, one of the few doctors in the nation who acknowledges performing late-term abortions.
There are always protesters outside the office park property quietly praying or holding a vigil, with signs, rosaries, statues of Mary and bloody, gory posters of mangled fetuses.
“Totally appropriate. It’s their right. They are protected by the First Amendment. And outside the clinic is probably the most appropriate place for them to express their views,” he told me this week.
This has been a way of life for Stave. He’s not just a landlord. That office was his father’s clinic. Then his sister ran it.
“I’ve been a member of this fight since Roe v. Wade. Since I was 5 years old,” he said. The office was firebombed when he was kid, and protesters gathered outside his father’s home as he was growing up. So he’s no stranger to the harassment and bullying of doctors and their families.
It’s become routine for protesters to distribute fliers, posters and create Web sites with all of a doctor’s personal information and urge others to target them. Kansas doctor George Tiller was killed in 2009 and his protege, Carhart, had his farm burned to the ground.
The tactical twist — to focus on a clinic’s property owner — was also a clever move. Stave himself could take it. He’s pretty tough after all these years in this debate.
But his harassers crossed the line last fall, when a big group showed up at his daughter’s middle school on the first day of classes and again at back-to-school night. They had signs with his name and contact information as well as those awful images of the fetuses.
“What parent wants to have that conversation with an 11-year-old on the first day of school?” he fumed.
Soon after that, the harassing calls from protesters started coming to his home. By the dozens, at all hours. Friends asked him how they could help. He began to take the names and phone numbers down of anyone who contacted him with an unwanted call. And he gave those lists to his friends and asked them to call these folks back.
“In a very calm, very respectful voice, they said that the Stave family thanks you for your prayers,” he said. “They cannot terminate the lease, and they do not want to. They support women’s rights.”
This started with a dozen or so friends, then grew. Soon, there were more than a thousand volunteers dialing.
If they could find the information, Stave’s callers would even ask the family how their children were doing, and mention their names and the name of their school. “And then we’d tell them that we bless their home on such and such street,” giving them their address.
In some cases, the family of a protester who called Stave’s home could get up to 5,000 calls in return.
Harsh? Nope.
“We gave them back what they gave us,” he said. Do onto others, and so forth.
The supporters came so fast and in such big numbers, Stave founded a group, Voice for Choice . And now there are about 3,000 volunteers ready to make calm, reasoned calls to the homes of people who bombard doctors, landlords and families with their unsolicited protests at homes or schools across the country.
Stave is pretty rakish about explaining the tactic, clearly enjoying turning the tables after decades of not fighting back.
“What? They don’t want unsolicited calls to their homes?” he asked.
Still, there are calls they won’t make.
“Someone might call and say: “They’re protesting in front of my clinic. They’re praying, chanting, with their signs.’ And I say: ‘Are they harassing you? Harassing the patients?’” Stave said.
“And if they say ‘No’, then I say: ‘I can’t help you. There is no more appropriate place for them to do this than here. They are protected by the First Amendment.”
He is being called a hero and even received an award from NARAL at a big gala in California last week. And that’s when the trouble began again.
While he was out in California, his neighborhood was canvassed with fliers depicting Stave in a Nazi uniform, with graphic photos of Holocaust victims and mangled fetuses. And it had all of his contact information as well as phone numbers and addresses for other family members.
“It wasn’t random. They knew I’d be gone and they wanted my daughters and neighbors to find them,” he said.
On Monday, a protester showed up outside of his brother-in-law’s Rockville dental office, protesting abortion where molars were being extracted.
“How was your trip to San Francisco?” the protester asked Stave, when he arrived at the dental office to confront him.
Seriously? Confronting patients getting cavities filled with horrifying posters of a ripped up fetus is a reasonable protest tactic?
And these folks don’t seem to care if children are around for the show. One year, the March for Life protesters leaving the Mall poured into the playground of my child’s pre-K school, slapping stickers on their jackets and putting fliers into the hands of 4-year-olds . The police were called to get them out.
All of this is ridiculous.
People who want to stop abortion can make a difference with education, support, counseling and genuine efforts to prevent unwanted pregnancies and support childrearing.
They need to be working toward affordable and safe childcare for all, solid healthcare for children and generous workplace policies and family leave so that parenthood is not an onerous and difficult prospect in America.
In last year’s report “Failing its Families,” Human Rights Watch wrote that at least 178 countries have national laws guaranteeing paid maternity leave. The exceptions include Swaziland, Papua New Guinea and the good ole United States of America.
Working on real issues like this, that actually support the family values these protesters say they hold so dearly is one way to stop abortions.
But harassing schoolchildren — or even dentists — is not.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/a-clinics-landlord-turns-the-tables-on-anti-abortion-protesters/2012/03/29/gIQAThgwiS_print.html

EGYPT'S TIANANMEN SQUARE MOMENT & Egyptian Bloggers Report on New Unrest 26JAN11

VIDEO of an incredible act of bravery in the struggle for freedom and democracy in Cairo, Egypt and a report of the Egyptian protesters organizing via the internet and social media. And check out the audio report from a reporter from the Guardian on his being arrested and beaten while covering the protest.
By Michael Calderone michael Calderone – Thu Jan 27, 12:47 pm ET

Egyptian security forces have cracked down brutally on protesters since Tuesday, with more than 1,000 detained and six dead. But the government appears to be disrupting more than street demonstrations.
Over the past 48 hours, social media sites like Twitter and Facebook have been intermittently blocked as Egyptians rise up against Hosni Mubarak's authoritarian regime, which has ruled the country for nearly three decades. The power of social media—for both disseminating news and organizing protests in an authoritarian country—first drew significant attention during the 2009 protests of Iran's disputed election. More recently, Tunisian protesters utilized social media during the successful ouster of a corrupt president.
So as the Tunisian revolt spreads to Egypt (and Yemen), it's understandable that the government would want to disrupt any tools that could possibly be used to challenge state power. But despite some disruptions, the Internet has proven vital in making images and videos of the protests available to the world.
Twitter confirmed Tuesday night that the micro-blogging platform was being blocked in Egypt. And there were similar reports of Facebook being blocked, according to Herdict, a Harvard University project that tracks web accessibility through crowdsourcing. (The situation remains fluid, and some users report the social media platforms working again Thursday morning, in parts of the country.)
But even as Twitter's service is spotty (or nonexistent) in Egypt, users around the world have been able to keep tabs on the latest news from the country by following the the hashtag #jan25. In addition to on-the-ground reports, Twitter users have also linked to YouTube clips from the demonstrations that capture a perspective that few major media correspondents would be likely to get.
A YouTube clip from Tuesday, showing a protester standing in the path of a mounted water cannon, is already being described as Egypt's Tiananmen Square moment, a reference to the lone protester who faced off against Chinese tanks in 1989. You can watch the encounter below:

Meanwhile, many Egyptian bloggers have found ways around Internet restrictions to continue posting reports and videos of what's happening on the streets.  The New York Times' Lede blog rounded up several videos from this week's protests, including a chilling video of security forces chasing protesters Wednesday night in Cairo. See below:


Social media sites, when accessible, have been especially crucial in the Egypt crisis since a number of independent Egyptian newspapers have seen their websites shut down. The Committee to Protect Journalists condemned these instances of media repression on Wednesday.
Still, some journalists have found ways around the media crackdown and produced compelling reports.The Guardian's Jack Shenker, one of several reporters beaten this week by Egyptian security services, managed to produce an audio recording while he was trapped with dozens of protesters in the back of a truck en route to an unknown destination. Listen to Shenker's incredible recording here. (Note: includes profanity)
(Photo of Egyptian anti-riot police confronting activists outside a journalists syndicate in downtown Cairo, Egypt on Jan. 26, 2011: (AP /Ben Curtis)

Egyptian Bloggers Report on New Unrest

By ROBERT MACKEY

Video of Egyptian security forces uploaded to YouTube on Wednesday night by a blogger who said that it was shot above  Talaat Harb, a street in Cairo, at 9 p.m. local time.

Updated | Thursday | 9:30 a.m. Despite restrictions placed on the Internet and a ban on protests, Egyptians who oppose the continued rule of President Hosni Mubarak managed to post accounts and images of fresh demonstrations on the streets of Cairo online on Wednesday.
As my colleagues Kareem Fahim and Mona El-Naggar report, “In front of Cairo’s press and lawyers’ syndicate buildings, more than 100 people shouted slogans, outnumbered by a force of security officers.”
From outside the press syndicate, an Egyptian blogger who writes as Sandmonkey posted text accounts on Twitter and photographs on Yfrog.

Sandmonkey/Yfrog Egyptian protesters and riot police outside the press syndicate in Cairo on Wednesday.

The blogger confirmed to The Lede via Twitter that these images were taken on Wednesday, despite the somewhat confusing decision by Egyptian bloggers to use the hashtag #25Jan to refer to all demonstrations following the mass unrest that started on that date.

Sandmonkey/Yfrog Protesters are seen breaking through police barriers in Cairo on Wednesday.

Another Egyptian blogger, Mostafa Mourad, posted a link on his Twitter feed to an Associated Press photograph of a man he identified as a senior figure in the journalists’ syndicate being dragged away by the authorities.
Sandmonkey also posted a link to photographs that appeared to show a large police presence on a street near Egypt’s high court and tear gas being used against protesters.
Later in the day, a video blogger uploaded several clips to YouTube which appeared to show protests outside the lawyers’ syndicate and tear gas being used against protesters near the city’s high court on Wednesday:
(It is difficult to verify when this video was shot, but if any reader has more information about these clips, please contact us by writing in the comment thread below.)
Later on Wednesday, this video of clashes on the streets of Cairo, posted online by the independent Egyptian newspaper Al-Masry Al-Youm, appeared to show some of the same scene near the high court:

This clip, also uploaded to YouTube on Wednesday, comes with a title that says it was shot at the Tahrir bus station in Cairo:
(A reader named Tim later contacted us to say that he shot this video of clashes “beneath the 6 of October Bridge around 4 p.m. yesterday.”)
Video uploaded to a YouTube channel called MrPeopleNews — which features dozens of clips of the far larger protests on Tuesday — shows what the video blogger describes as protesters on Abd al-Khaliq, a Cairo street, on Wednesday:
Later on Wednesday, Sandmonkey reported on Twitter that the authorities were slowly letting demonstrators out of a confined space outside the press syndicate (perhaps using the British police tactic known as “kettling”) and he intended to make his way to Tahrir Square, the site of the largest protest on Tuesday.
On Wednesday evening, an Egyptian-American blogger and activist, Gigi Ibrahim — who had used her phone to post several eyewitness photographs of Tuesday’s protests online — texted this report to Twitter:

Tahrir square has unbelievable amount of security I am worried to take out my phone to take a picture I would get arrested.

Ms. Ibrahim later uploaded this photograph of protesters at another location, outside the lawyers’ syndicate:

Standing in Tahrir Square, though, the blogger had good reason to fear a violent reaction from Egypt’s security forces. Minutes earlier, she reported “beating and shootings on Ramses street” as police officers tried to enforce the ban on protests.
The night before, police had used tear gas and beatings to clear Tahrir (Liberation) Square of thousands of demonstrators, as seen in a YouTube clip and a video report from Egypt’s English-language Daily News shot late on Tuesday:
As Egyptian bloggers struggle with Internet restrictions, some video clips of Tuesday’s demonstrations outside Cairo continue to be posted online. Thanks to the reader who drew our attention to this video, said to show a march through the streets of Alexandria on Tuesday:
Another reader pointed to this clip, apparently showing security forces in Alexandria on Wednesday:
This clip is said to show protesters on the streets of Suez late on Tuesday night:
This video appears to have been filmed outide the morgue in Suez, where protesters, including relatives of a man reportedly killed by the police, attempted to retrieve his body. Reuters, citing medical sources, reported that the man, Gharib Abdelaziz Abdellatif, “died of internal bleeding after police shot him in the stomach on Wednesday.”
On Wednesday morning, Al-Masry Al-Youm reported that the Egyptian government had planned ahead of time to disrupt the Internet communications of its opponents:

Egyptian security authorities on Tuesday carried out a pre-planned block of Twitter, a social networking website, to impede wide-scale anti-regime protests across the country on 25 January, sources say.
A Facebook invitation earlier this month called for major protests during Egypt’s Police Day over rising prices, unemployment and reform, under the slogan “Day of Anger.”
Twitter users said they were unable to access their personal pages until Wednesday morning.

Late on Tuesday, Twitter posted a message on an official feed confirming that the service had been blocked from reaching at least some users in Egypt. The company wrote:

We can confirm that Twitter was blocked in Egypt around 8am PT today. It is impacting both Twitter.com & applications.
Re Egypt block: We believe that the open exchange of info & views benefits societies & helps govts better connect w/ their people.

Twitter also posted a link to a Web site that showed reports from Egypt documenting and complaining about the disruption to the service, which seemed to indicate that the problem continued for some users on Wednesday.
The Egyptian newspaper also reported:

Months ago, Al-Masry Al-Youm published the details of a meeting between security officials, [the government's National Telecommunication Regulatory Authority] and internet providers to lay down plans to block those websites which activists use extensively to coordinate their efforts.
Participants at the meeting also discussed ways to make page failures appear unintentional. These plans, however, were not implemented before the 25 January protests.

• • rma

Related Posts

From The Lede

• Interview With an Egyptian Blogger

• More Video of Protests in Egypt

• YouTube Video of Protests in Egypt

• Video of Protests in Yemen

• Video That Set Off Tunisia’s Uprising

KENT STATE 4MAI1970 & JACKSON STATE 14MAI1970 from NPR

I was 12 years old when the murders at Kent State took place, and I remember being angry at the pigs who murdered these students and the government and even a little at my father, because at the time he was your usual vet,  blue collar, union working man who believed in "America, love it or leave it" propaganda. He didn't express joy at these tragedies, but he did express the opinion that the students shouldn't have done what they did. Mom was a union member, working in the local hospital and she didn't say anything other than how sad it all was. I believe she was conflicted because her brother, Bud, was in Vietnam.That whole situation, the war, the 10s of thousands of American lives wasted, the millions of Vietnamese, Cambodian and Lao lives wasted, the politics, the protest....ugly days, ugly years....it is a wonder this country didn't explode in civil war. My mom's brother....he came back alive, thank God, after surviving the Tet offensive trapped in Pleiku, and died a horrible death from a bizarre form of leukemia from exposure to Agent Orange. Special note here, no thanks to the Army and the Vets Administration, any treatment Uncle Bud got from them he had  to fight for, I know the stress from their neglect hastened his death.

Click the header to go to the kentstate1970.org website.

by Noah Adams

May 3, 2010

Listen to the Story

Morning Edition

[7 min 46 sec]

 

Audio Slideshow: A Kent State Retrospective

View WKSU's Audio And Visual Look Back

Courtesy of John Filo via WKSU Mary Ann Vecchio screams as she kneels over the body of Jeffrey Miller after he was shot during an anti-war demonstration at Kent State University in Ohio on May 4, 1970. Four students were killed when Ohio National Guard troops fired at some 600 anti-war demonstrators. This photo, taken by John Filo, won the Pulitzer Prize.

May 3, 2010

Out in the world, when people talk about the shootings at Kent State University on May 4, 1970, they call it "Kent State." But in the small town of Kent, 35 miles south of Cleveland, and on the university campus, they call it "May 4th."
It was 40 years ago Tuesday that the shootings — which killed four people and wounded nine others — stunned the nation. Even at the height of the Vietnam War protests, no one imagined that government soldiers would fire real bullets at unarmed college students.
"I saw the smoke come out of the weapons, and light is faster than sound, and so I knew immediately [they] were not firing blanks. So it was almost instinctive to dive for cover," remembers Jerry Lewis, who was 33 and teaching sociology at Kent State in 1970.
Often, at tense times, Lewis served as a faculty marshal. He had some Army training and was worried about bayonet attacks and butt strokes with M-1 rifles. He hadn't thought about live fire.
Lewis says that when he takes people to the scene of the shooting on the Kent Commons, he likes to point out a particular mark — a perfectly round bullet hole in a steel sculpture.

Jackson State: A Tragedy Widely Forgotten

Just 10 days after the deaths at Kent State, shots rang out at a predominantly black college in the South. Two youths were killed and a dozen wounded in the shooting by police at Jackson State in Mississippi.

Little-known off Jackson State's campus, the tragedy came amid increasing racial tensions among students, local youths and law enforcement.

Read More

"This is what an M-1 bullet, .30-caliber bullet, does to steel," he says. "And the artist, to his credit, has refused to fix this. So, ironically, the [National] Guard created their own memorial."
A Lingering Question
Shots rang out for 13 seconds that day, killing Jeffrey Glenn Miller, Allison Krause, William Knox Schroeder and Sandra Lee Scheuer. More than 60 shots came from 28 guardsmen. Some fired into the ground; some fired high on purpose.
The students had gathered for an anti-war rally, and the Guard command had wanted them to go away. Tear gas was fired, and then the canisters flung back. The youths gathered were screaming insults, giving the guardsmen the finger. Rocks were thrown.
Then a group of guardsmen moved in formation to the top of a small hill. Some of them turned in unison, aimed and fired. They could have just kept going over the hill. Most of the students were in a parking lot downhill, more than 100 yards away.

Enlarge Courtesy of Kent State University via WKSU A scene from May 4, 1970, at Kent State University. It was 40 years ago Tuesday that the shootings stunned the nation.

Courtesy of Kent State University via WKSU

A scene from May 4, 1970, at Kent State University. It was 40 years ago Tuesday that the shootings stunned the nation.

For Lewis, after 40 years, that is still the question: Why did the Guard start shooting?
'The Worst Type Of People'
"Obviously, if you turn together in close quarters with bayonet, there must be some coordination, but I've always interpreted as that they planned to fire but fire high — because they were angry ... they were poorly led ... their tear gas masks didn't work properly," Lewis says. "But many people have used the turning together — and there were lots of eyewitnesses to that — as [a sign] that there was a rough agreement to do that, or that there was an order. But I haven't seen any evidence yet that there was an order."
The issue for the students that day became soldiers on their campus.

More From WKSU

Explore A New Online Archive Of Audio, Photographs And Video

More From Political Junkie

40 Years After Kent State: Remembering Ohio Gov. James Rhodes

The noontime rally had been scheduled to protest President Nixon's plan to expand the Vietnam War into Cambodia. That news came the previous Thursday. On Friday night, there was trouble, spilling out of the downtown bars. By Saturday night, when the campus ROTC building was set on fire, the National Guard was already on the way.
Ohio's governor, James Rhodes, a Republican running a law-and-order campaign for the U.S. Senate, was in town on Sunday morning. He was critical of the radicals traveling the country causing trouble.
"They're worse than the brownshirts and the communist element and also the night riders and vigilantes," Rhodes said. "They're the worst type of people that we harbor in America. And I want to say this: They're not going to take over a campus."
Teaching History

The first card that I opened up in the intensive care unit was a very nice-looking card ... but the note in it said, 'Dear communist hippie radical, I hope by the time you read this, you are dead.'

- Dean Kahler, who was paralyzed during the shootings

"The first card that I opened up in the intensive care unit was a very nice-looking card," recalls Dean Kahler, who was paralyzed during the shooting. "But the note in it said, 'Dear communist hippie radical, I hope by the time you read this, you are dead.' "
Kahler was a freshman at Kent State in 1970. He was from a farm family and wanted to be a coach. He was against the war, but on that day, he was mostly curious — about the Guard, about his rights.
When Kahler heard the shots, he lay on the ground. Then he was hit in the back. He has been in a wheelchair for the past 40 years.
After he graduated and became a history teacher, he would tell his high school students, "Go home and ask your parents about Kent State."
Many of the reactions were positive and supportive. Sometimes, a youngster would tell Kahler it was a bad idea: "They told me not to talk to you about it," the students would say.

Enlarge Noah Adams/NPR Dean Kahler, who was paralyzed during the shootings, went on to become a high school teacher and covered the events of May 4 in his classes.

Noah Adams/NPR

Dean Kahler, who was paralyzed during the shootings, went on to become a high school teacher and covered the events of May 4 in his classes.

"I said, 'Well, you know, I'm teaching American history, so we're going to touch on it,' " Kahler recalls. " 'If you need to be removed from my room and go to another teacher to talk about it, go see the principal and the guidance counselor immediately.' "
Moving On
As the 40th anniversary of the shootings approaches, the Kent student TV station has had stories to cover all over campus.
For Heather VacLav and Eric Snitil, two students who work at the station, the events of May 4, 1970, meant "not much" when it came to choosing a school. They were impressed with Kent State's academic reputation.
Snitil says he came for the broadcast journalism program — "it's one of the best in the country."
And VacLav believes the university has turned around what is kind of "Kent State's claim to fame" by being open and creating a memorial.
"The original May 4 was very sad and tragic," she says. "I think now, looking back at it, the university's kind of just taken something that was negative and tried to turn it into something positive."
On Monday night, students, faculty, family and friends will honor the four who were slain and the nine who were wounded four decades ago with a candlelight march and a silent vigil.

Jackson State: A Tragedy Widely Forgotten

by Whitney Blair Wyckoff

Enlarge Jack Thornell/AP Two students at Jackson State peer from a window that was shot out by police on campus in May 1970.

Jack Thornell/AP

Two students at Jackson State peer from a window that was shot out by police on campus in May 1970.

May 3, 2010

A group of angry students. A burst of gunfire from authorities. Young lives cut short.
It sounds a lot like the Kent State shootings on May 4, 1970, but it happened 10 days later at a predominantly black college in the South.
Police fired for about 30 seconds on a group of students at Jackson State in Mississippi, killing two and wounding 12 others.
The tragedy was the culmination of increasing friction among students, local youths and law enforcement. On the evening of May 14, African-American youths were reportedly pelting rocks at white motorists driving down the main road through campus — frequently the site of confrontations between white and black Jackson residents.
Tensions rose higher when a rumor spread around campus that Charles Evers — a local politician, civil rights leader and the brother of slain activist Medgar Evers — and his wife had been killed, according to Lynch Street: The May 1970 Slayings at Jackson State College. The situation escalated when a non-Jackson State student set a dump truck on fire.
Police responded to the call. A group of students and non-students threw rocks and bricks at the officers. Police advanced to Alexander Hall, a large dorm for women.
According to a 1970 report from the President's Commission on Campus Unrest, police fired more than 150 rounds. And an FBI investigation revealed that about 400 bullets or pieces of buckshot had been fired into Alexander Hall. The shooters claimed that there was a sniper in the dorm, but investigators found "insufficient evidence" of that claim.
The two young men who were gunned down in the melee were Phillip L. Gibbs, a junior at Jackson State and the father of an 18-month-old; and James Earl Green, a high school senior.
Jackson State Today
The event continues to leave a mark on the university. Even today, passers-by can see the bullet holes in the women's dorm. A plaza on campus commemorates the victims of the shooting.
All Jackson State students learn about the shooting in a mandatory orientation class, and professors evoke the event as a teaching tool.
C. Liegh McInnis, who teaches creative writing and world literature at Jackson State, says the story of the shooting is integrated into the curriculum of several liberal arts departments.
In McInnis' own freshman composition class, students are required to see the bullet holes in the women's dorm themselves while researching a critical analysis paper about the shooting.
On Thursday, Jackson State held a 40th anniversary memorial to pay tribute to the victims of the shooting. The event brought back 24 alumni who attended Jackson State in 1970, some of whom had been injured that night.
"The tragedy showed the resolve of the students," McInnis said.
McInnis said all of the alumni — who had traveled from places like Houston and Detroit — ended up being leaders in their fields and their communities.
"What the shooting did is that it showed, even through this heinous act, black intellect could not be stopped," McInnis said.

Related NPR Stories

Kent State Victim Claims Evidence Of Order To Fire May 1, 2007

The Kent State Shootings, 35 Years Later May 4, 2005

Kent State Remembered May 4, 2000

FOOD FIGHT AT THE WHITE HOUSE!!!!!!! (CHOPPIN BROCCOLI)

When George H W Bush decided to take us to war in the Gulf to save the theocratic dictatorship of Kuwait I participated in several non-violent anti-war protest at the White House. One of the funniest was when there were a couple hundred of us right at the fence of the WH grounds, and we all brought bunches of broccoli (because George H W Bush hates broccoli)and were throwing it over the fence onto the WH lawn. The WH security and all the cops on the other side of the fence were picking it up as fast as they could and throwing it back over the fence, and we were picking it up and throwing it back again. I had just picked up a big bunch, and just as I was throwing it back over the fence this big cop right on the other side of the fence from me stood up with a handfull and saw me just as I let my broccoli fly! I know I had that 'Oh Shit' look on my face because he burst out laughing and then threw his broccoli. This went on for about 30 min till more cops showed up to move us away from the WH fence. I still have my 'WHAT IF KUWAIT'S MAIN PRODUCT WAS BROCCOLI?' bumper sticker somewhere.......UPDATED 7NOV15 after the revelation of george h w bush's opinion of dick(less) cheney and (duh)donald rumsfeld and shrub's invasion of Iraq. The article is from +The Atlantic ,written by the the kind of neocons who took us into Iraq. jeb bush supporters take note as jeb's national security campaign adviser is none other than war criminal and neocon paul d wolfowitz.......

by Joseph S. Nye Jr. http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/91jul/nye.htm LET'S start with a puzzle. Why did a majority of the people living in the central part of North America think it in their interest to send half a million soldiers 6,000 miles away to the Persian Gulf? The simplest answer is one word: oil. To quote one of the better placards at a peace march, "If Kuwait exported broccoli, we wouldn't be there now." Like most slogans, however, that one oversimplifies the truth. Persian Gulf oil accounts for less than five percent of America's energy consumption. Japan, which is highly dependent on Gulf oil, did not send troops, while Britain, which exports oil, did send troops. So oil is not the whole answer. Other possible aspects of the answer include "a new world order," collective security, interdependence, prevention of regional hegemony, and reversal of American decline. But big words sometimes substitute for clear thought. Let us unpack the abstractions and see what they're made up of as we search for the national interest in the Persian Gulf. Defining the National Interest SOMETIMES geopoliticians act as though determining the national interest were an arcane science, or at least an occult art. But there is nothing mysterious about the national interest. It is simply the set of interests that are widely shared by Americans in their relations with the rest of the world. The national interest is broader than private interests, though it is hardly surprising that various groups try to equate their interests with the national interest. And despite what self-proclaimed realists say, the national interest is broader than protection against geopolitical threats. The strategic interest is part of, but not necessarily identical to, the national interest. In a democracy the national interest is what a majority, after discussion and debate, decides are its legitimate long-run shared interests in relation to the outside world.

Discuss this article in the Global Views forum of Post & Riposte. More on foreign policy from The Atlantic's archive. More on defense from The Atlantic's archive. From Atlantic Unbound: Flashbacks: "Iraq Considered" (October 1, 2002) Should the U.S. intervene in Iraq? Articles from 1958 to the present offer a variety of perspectives. Flashbacks: "The Intervention Question" (April 7, 2000) Atlantic articles from 1967 to 1996—by George McGovern, Ronald Steel, Jonathan Clarke, John J. Mearsheimer, and Robert D. Kaplan—take up the issue of American interventionism. Flashbacks: "Who Are the Kurds?" (February 17, 1999) Two Atlantic articles from the past decade put the "Kurdish problem" in perspective. Flashbacks: "Oil and Turmoil" (July 11, 1996) Three Atlantic authors tackle the issues of politics, oil, and the Persian Gulf.

What can Americans agree on? Most want a sense of security -- the absence of threats at home or abroad. Economic well-being is also high on the list. Many jobs that Americans hold and products they consume depend on the world beyond their borders. But Americans don't define themselves by bread alone. They also care about their identity, self-image, and moral values. Here the list becomes fuzzier, as people differ in the extent to which they want their governmeet's foreign policy to express their preferences for democracy, human rights, or a sense of national pride. Foreign-policy experts who call themselves realists often deny that such values can be part of the national interest. They prefer to identify the national interest with the strategic interest. The realists are right to warn about the strategic costs and pitfalls of indulging such moralistic preferences, but in a democracy the experts have no right to assert that their amoral preferences are the only correct way to define the national interest. Some analysts, myself included, say that the American people share an interest in world order. But order is instrumental, valuable only insofar as it serves the more basic shared interests in security, economic well-being, and identity. So why should Americans care about order in distant parts of the globe? The simple answer is that even distant disorder can have effects that hurt, influence, or disturb the majority of people living within the United States. The various ways in which these effects are transmitted are lumped together under the abstraction "rising interdependence." They add up to a world in which it is ever more difficult for us to isolate what happens inside the United States from what happens outside. There are various forms of interdependence: economic, military, social, and ecological. The changing technology of communications and transportation has had a revolutionary impact on economic interdependence. World trade has grown more rapidly than world product. Over the past few decades foreign trade has tripled its share in the U.S. economy, from five to 15 percent of the gross national product. A third of the growth in the U.S. economy over the past five years is attributable to exports. And international monetary flows, some twenty-five times as large as the world's flows of goods, have eroded the ability of national monetary authorities to control capital markets. Americans like to think that interest rates, so important to economic growth, are set by the Federal Reserve Board. But in practice they are also set by thousands of people watching little green screens all over the world, deciding whether or not the underlying conditions of the U.S. economy merit buying U.S. Treasury bills at the offered rates. Another trend that increases interdependence is the spread of the technology of destruction. At least ten poor countries have major weapons-export industries. Twenty countries have the capability to make chemical weapons; fifteen are working to produce ballistic missiles; nine probably have nuclear weapons. More will follow. Not only is there the prospect that hostile countries may try to use such weapons on the United States, but also, given the weak command-and-control capabilities in poor countries, there's the chance that such weapons will fall into the hands of terrorist groups. Ballistic-missile defenses built with American technology will be unable to stop the aircraft, ships, and smuggling that are the likely forms of delivery by weak states or terrorist groups. Along with economic and military interdependence, social and ecological interdependence have increased as well. A growing number of the issues in international politics are transnational in the sense that they have roots in many societies and their effects cross international borders. The radioactivity released from the Chernobyl reactor in the Soviet Union was a dramatic example, but threats to the ozone layer or to the global climate are rooted in the domestic practices of many countries. The solutions to such issues of transnational interdependence as ecological change, AIDS, and illicit trade in drugs will require cooperation among many governments. If governments are mired in chaos and too weak to deal with their end of a transnational problem, the U.S. government will be unable to influence them to minimize the damage done to Americans. In other words, behind the abstractions about rising interdependence are changes that make it ever more difficult to isolate the United States from the effects of events in the rest of the world. More concretely, there are two simple reasons why Americans have a national interest in reducing disorder beyond our borders. Things out there can hurt us, and therefore we will want to influence distant governments on a variety of issues, such as proliferation, terrorism, drugs, resources, and ecological damage. To do so, we will need power beyond just our good example. But there is sometimes another reason for concern about distant disorder. Some foreign violations of human rights are so egregious that they evoke a broad response among Americans. The majority vote in Congress for sanctions against apartheid in South America is a case in point. The Case of the Gulf EVEN if interdependence is rising and the United States has a national interest in some degree of world order in general, what were the widely shared American interests in the specific case of the Persian Gulf? How might Americans have been hurt if the United States had continued to have "no opinion" on inter-Arab disputes? The three most serious reasons for involvement were oil, order, and weapons proliferation. Oil is the most tangible interest, though not necessarily the most important. Oil provides about 40 percent of American energy, and about 45 percent of this oil is imported. Roughly a quarter of the imports come from the Persian Gulf -- so America's direct energy dependence on the Gulf is less than five percent. After the energy crises of the 1970s the U.S. government spent $20 billion developing a strategic petroleum reserve. By August of 1990 the reserve contained 600 million barrels, or approximately a year's supply of Persian Gulf imports. The direct physical effects of losing Gulf oil appear small, but it is a mistake to look only at the direct effects. The numerous editorials that compared America's five percent dependence on Gulf oil with Japan's 37 percent dependence were misleading, for they ignored the effects of global economic interdependence. Oil is a fungible commodity: it flows to the highest bidder. As long as the world market depends on the Gulf for a third of its oil, shortfalls there will jack up world prices and everyone, including the United States, will pay more for oil. Those higher prices are like a tax on the world economy, stimulating inflation and depressing demand, hurting rich and poor alike. Higher oil prices have two kinds of effects on the U.S. economy: a larger import bill (economists call this a change in the terms of trade), and shocks to the economy that interrupt growth (economists call these macro-economic effects). If Saddam Hussein had raised oil prices to $27 a barrel, the increase in our import bill would have been about $20 billion a year, or less than one half of one percent of GNP. The greater harm comes when sudden rises depress the economy, but this effect is harder to estimate. Some economists believe that a temporary oil price of $40 a barrel, for example, helped to trigger the recession, which represented a loss of several percent of GNP. If Saddam Hussein had gained control of Gulf oil and chosen a long-term sustainable price rise, the effects on the U.S. economy (through the terms of trade) would have been modest. If he had tried to extort money more quickly with a more dramatic price rise, the damage to the U.S. (and world) economy would have been considerably greater. If President Richard Nixon's old goal of energy independence could be achieved, the United States could reduce the terms-of-trade effects of global oil shortages on its economy, but not the larger macro-economic effects that would be transmitted from the shock of rapid price rises and depressed activity in the world economy. Moreover, energy independence has proved to be a chimerical goal. Increased drilling, a gasoline tax, and incentives for conservation are worthwhile efforts, but they will not replace our dependence on oil imports in this century at any reasonable level of costs. Of course, imported oil also has hidden costs that are not reflected in its market price. These include the costs of economic and military assistance as well as of military forces earmarked for the Middle East. These factors added $8.32 per barrel of imported oil in 1990, for a total still well below the costs of such alternatives as solar energy and synthetic fuels. By many accounts, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in large part because of oil. Only ten days later did he invoke the Palestinian cause. In 1988 he faced economic-reconstruction costs of $230 billion in the aftermath of his war with Iran; Iraq's annual oil revenues of $13 billion did not even cover current expenditures. As Saddam Hussein complained at an Arab summit in Mav of last year, every dollar drop in the price of oil cost Iraq a billion dollars a year Not only was annexing Kuwait like capturing a gold mine, but had Iraq's President gone unchallenged in his use of force, he would have been able to cow Saudi Arabia and the smaller states into cutting their oil production and jacking up the world price by the ten dollars a barrel or more that he had mentioned in May. Oil markets, of course, respond to price changes, and eventually increased conservation and production outside the Gulf would have set upper limits on price, though probably only after considerable damage had been done to the world economy. But even if the markets had prevented Saddam Hussein from extorting as much wealth from the world economy as he wished, his oil revenues would have increased dramatically. It would be nice to believe that the additional income would have been devoted to economic development, but that belief is inconsistent with the Iraqi President's past behavior, which has been aimed at turning Iraq into the dominant military power in the region. The additional revenues would have permitted a dramatic increase in Iraq's already impressive ability to import modern weapons and the technology necessary for producing weapons of mass destruction. Saddam Hussein had already demonstrated his chemical weapons capability, against Iran and against his own Kurdish civilians. In addition, he was developing biological weapons, extending the range of his ballistic missiles, and covertly importing components for a nuclear-weapons program. Despite alarmist reports by some pundits, at the time of the war Iraq was probably still at least five years away from having a deliverable nuclear weapon. If he aspired to be the Bismarck of the Arabs, eliminating those nations friendly to the West and finally confronting Israel, the next decade in the Middle East promised to be one of escalating violence and loss of life. Facing such a prospect, those who believed that a conflict with Saddam Hussein was inevitable concluded that sooner was better than later. Was a conflict with Saddam Hussein inevitable? The simple answer is no. Few things are inevitable in human affairs. For instance, he might have been overthrown before he achieved nuclear capability, or Israel might have pre-empted that capability again, as it did with its strike against Iraq's Osirak reactor, in 1981. Though not inevitable, however, higher levels of conflict looked likely. But would the United States have been drawn in? Probably so, given America's de facto alliance with Israel. Is support for Israel a national interest? It is if a majority of Americans consistently say it is. The United States being a nation of immigrants, it has long been legitimate for Americans with binational affinities to lobby for the support of particular countries, but support for Israel extends far beyond the American Jewish community. The support is based in part on the biblical beliefs of fundamentalist Christians, in part on a sense of historical guilt related to the Holocaust, and in part on admiration for Israeli democracy. In the Reagan years Israel derived strategic importance from the anti-Soviet focus of American diplomacy, but although that focus is less compelling in the post-Cold War era, strategists who believe that alliances are crucial to American efforts at world order nonetheless consider support for Israel to be important for the sake of the credibility of American commitments. None of this means that Israel's national interest is identical with that of the United States; depending on Israel's behavior, it is conceivable that Americans might someday decide to put greater distance between the two nations. But these factors suggest that it was predictable that the United States would be drawn into growing turbulence in the region. Moreover, given Iraqi threats against friendly Arab governments, the dangerous precedents set by the use of weapons of mass destruction, and the risk that such weapons would fall into the hands of subnational groups, the U.S. interest in stemming weapons proliferation in Iraq went beyond the question of threats to Israel. The most intangible of the American interests was the "new world order," a phrase that President Bush had begun using by February of last year to describe the end of the Cold War. Since the development of the modern state system, the structure or distribution of power in world politics has tended to be set by the outcome of major wars and the treaties associated with their settlement. For half a century the balance of power in world politics reflected the outcome of the Second World War. The preponderance of the United States and the Soviet Union was known as bipolarity. The standoff between the two superpowers meant that the collective-security provisions of the United Nations Charter of 1945 could not be fully implemented, but the Cold War balance provided a degree of order, if not justice. The decline of the Soviet Union meant the end of bipolarity and a weakening of constraints on the USSR's regional client states. Saddam Hussein publicly recognized the Soviet decline in a speech in Amman in February of last year, which tempts one to conclude that Kuwait was the first victim of the end of the Cold War world order. One of the open questions last August was whether the United Nations collective-security provisions would play a role in a post-Cold War world. If the UN had failed to respond to such a clearcut case of aggression and annexation, that would have suggested that UN collective security would not work in any case. Although the analogies to the 1930s were overdrawn, they were not completely farfetched. For the first time (with the exception of the UN response in the Korean War, a response that derived from a Soviet tactical mistake), the Security Council was not paralyzed on a collective-security issue by a veto. Nor were the UN resolutions simply a case of American manipulation. Many postcolonial countries with disputable borders saw a national interest in collectively rebuffing Iraq's claim that it was justified in its invasion of Kuwait. Even if the United States has a national interest in world order, as argued above, why not let the United Nations shoulder the burden? Why should the United States be the world's 911? The answer is that the United States should not be the world's policeman, at least not alone. Working through the United Nations and getting others to share the burden of maintaining order is part of foreign-policy wisdom. But to assume that the UN is a separate entity capable of imposing order by itself is a case of misplaced specificity. The UN is the sum of its member nations, and the United States is by far the largest contributor among those members. Economists have long noted about collective goods that because everyone can consume without necessarily helping to produce, there is always a temptation to take a free ride. And if the largest consumer fails to do its share, or sometimes even more, there is little likelihood that the goods will be produced by the others. The net result will be that everyone is worse off. That was the situation in the 1920s, when the United States emerged from the First World War as the strongest nation but refused to join the collective-security system of the League of Nations. The isolationist free-riding in the interwar period came back to haunt and hurt Americans by the end of the 1930s. One does not have to believe that Saddam Hussein is another Hitler (the latter was a far cleverer evil genius) to believe that the failure of the United States to support the UN collective-security system in the first major post-Cold War crisis would have come back to haunt us in the future. At the same time, using the UN rather than acting unilaterally set an important precedent that may help to limit any temptation for the United States to become overextended as a global policeman. And in retrospect it appears that other nations may have borne somewhere between 75 and 100 percent of the additional financial burdens imposed by the Gulf War. How Much Insurance to Buy? ASSERTING the existence of these three U.S. national interests in the Persian Gulf does not automatically justify all the actions that the United States took to promote them. Nor does a belief that the war was in the national interest require one to defend all American policies that preceded or followed it. A number of issues are open to debate. Could collective security have been enforced by sanctions alone, or would the international coalition have collapsed long before sanctions persuaded Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait? Was Saddam Hussein using the Soviet peace proposal as a delaying tactic so that his military could survive to fight at a later date, or was a ground war unnecessary? Could the United States have insisted that other countries' troops make up a higher proportion of the force as successfully as it insisted that others share the financial burden? Could an effective UN military command have been established, or would the inefficiencies of such a polyglot system simply have encouraged defeat or high casualties on the battlefield? My own guess is that the coalition would not have held together long enough for sanctions to have persuaded Saddam Hussein to leave Kuwait. After all, more than a month of bombing did not produce that effect. Nor do I think that the United Nations alone could have obtained and managed the forces needed to defeat Iraq's large army. The purpose of raising these questions is not to answer them here but to illustrate that even when there is agreement that national interests exist, how to advance them can still be debatable. This is true not only of the Gulf but also offoreign policy generally. Much of strategic analysis deals with events that would be disastrous if they actually occurred but that are very unlikely to occur. Deterring a Soviet nuclear attack over the past half century has cost us trillions. Americans have never fully agreed on how much deterrence was enough, but the majority have always wanted a margin of safety. In that sense foreign policy is like an insurance policy. Few people expect their house to burn down, but most want the security of adequate insurance. Just as homeowners can impoverish themselves by buying too much insurance, so countries can pay too much to promote their national interests. The problem of how much insurance to buy is inherent in the nature of issues that involve huge potential losses but have quite low or uncertain probabilities. And if the problem is hard for homeowners, it is doubly hard for democracies constructed on the basis of the separation of powers. Small wonder, then, that the eminent constitutional scholar Edward S. Corwin described the framework for making U.S. foreign policy as "an invitation to struggle." Lessons for the Future AS AMERICANS struggle to interpret the lessons of the Gulf War, nothing could be less fruitful than the exaggerations of neo-isolationism and global unilateralism. Since foreign policy involves trade-offs among several national interests, there is more to be said for seeking an Aristotelian mean than for the pursuit of blindingly clear solutions. As a people, Americans have a long history of swinging back and forth in their national mood between inward and outward orientation, between optimism and pessimism about their world role. The most recent example is the debate between declinists and revivalists over America's global role. In his best-selling book The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, the eminent Yale historian Paul Kennedy argued that the United States was suffering from "imperial overstretch," like other empires in the past, but was declining even more rapidly than could be expected. In my book Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power, I showed that the postwar decline in America's share of world product ended by the early 1970s, and that, contrary to theories of imperial overstretch, the burdens borne by the military are today less than half those borne at the height of the Cold War. This trend is not altered by the Gulf War. The defense budget continues to decline in real terms in fiscal 1992, and it is estimated that defense will cost around 3.5 percent of the gross national product by the middle of the decade. In 1989 polls showed that half the American people believed their country to be in decline. Early polls this year suggest that the Gulf War corrected this tendency to exaggerate American weaknesses. The danger now, however, is that American self-estimates will overcompensate -- will overshoot in other directions. If Americans learn the wrong lessons from the Gulf War, they can do real damage to their long-term national interests. Such would be the case if they were to conclude, for example, that the United States can police the world alone or that Americans can embark on moral crusades to impose their ways on other peoples, or if they neglect the pressing agenda of domestic issues. The problem for the United States -- and other countries -- in shaping a new world order lies less in the traditional danger of battles for first place in the rank of great powers than in the diffusion of power to weak states and private transnational entities in a world of increasing interdependence. Military power remains relevant in such a world. The trendy proclamations of early last year according to which Japan and Germany were new superpowers seemed fatuous after August. But in a world where the sources of power are more diffuse, military power alone will not be enough. America's capacity to promote its national interests will have to rest on both hard power and soft power. Hard power is based on the familiar resources of military and economic might. Soft power, the ability to co-opt rather than command, rests on intangible resources such as culture, ideology, and the use of international institutions to determine the framework of debate. In the Gulf crisis it was important to get the hard power of the military to Saudi Arabia quickly, but it was equally important to have the soft power to shape the UN resolutions that defined Iraq's entry into Kuwait as a violation calling for sanctions. Without such resolutions it might have been impossible for the Saudis to accept U.S. troops, for other Arab countries to send troops, and for allied countries to foot more than three quarters of the bill. And although America's hard power was critical to winning the war, winning the peace will require investments in such soft-power initiatives as a regional development fund to redistribute the oil wealth, efforts to further the Arab-Israeli peace process, and humanitarian relief for the many civilian victims of the war. The skillful combination of hard and soft power resources abroad, however, is only half the job Americans face after the Gulf War. In a world of rising interdependence the distinctions between domestic and foreign policy become blurred. Here the declinist warnings become more relevant, though not in the way their originators think. Analogies between the United States in the Gulf War and imperial Spain in the Thirty Years War or Edwardian England in the Boer War fail to note that Spain was in absolute economic decline and Britain had already slipped to third place in the world economy. For all its problems, the United States remains the world's largest economy, with the highest level of absolute productivity, and its share of global manufacturing exports has risen in recent years. But the United States is suffering from a low savings rate, a government deficit that eats up part of those savings, and an education system that is inadequate for the needs of an information-age economy. American decline could occur through a gradual, long-term cumulation of political decisions favoring consumption over investment. America's hard power and soft power to shape a better world order depend on addressing such domestic issues. The Gulf crisis showed that the declinists underestimated U.S. strength in both hard military and soft coalition-building power resources. But if the American people and their political leaders let postwar euphoria divert them from the domestic agenda, efforts to construct a new world order will become increasingly hollow. The American situation is not that of a Britain hard pressed by the rise of the Kaiser's Germany. The Soviet Union is in decline, and the United States is one of the most lightly taxed of all advanced industrial countries. There is no reason that Americans cannot both afford domestic reforms and contribute to international order in a post-Cold War world. President Bush will have to risk some of his popularity in hard slogging in the domestic trenches, and the Democratic opposition will have to resist letting its calls for domestic reform degenerate into neo-isolationism. In a world of interdependence Americans cannot afford to define the national interest in domestic or international terms alone. Copyright © 1991 by Joseph S. Nye Jr. All rights reserved. The Atlantic Monthly; July 1991; Why the Gulf War Served the National Interest ; Volume 268, No. 1; pages 56 - 64.