A group of internationally known figures, celebrated both for their talent and their dedication to human rights (Gino Strada, Paul Farmer, Kurt Vonnegut, Nadine Gordimer, Eduardo Galeano, and others), will soon launch a worldwide campaign to enlist tens of millions of people in a movement for the renunciation of war, hoping to reach the point where governments, facing popular resistance, will find it difficult or impossible to wage war.

There is a persistent argument against such a possibility, which I have heard from people on all parts of the political spectrum: We will never do away with war because it comes out of human nature. The most compelling counter to that claim is in history: We don’t find people spontaneously rushing to make war on others. What we find, rather, is that governments must make the most strenuous efforts to mobilize populations for war. They must entice soldiers with promises of money, education, must hold out to young people whose chances in life look very poor that here is an opportunity to attain respect and status. And if those enticements don’t work, governments must use coercion: They must conscript young people, force them into military service, threaten them with prison if they do not comply.

Furthermore, the government must persuade young people and their families that though the soldier may die, though he or she may lose arms or legs, or become blind, that it is all for a noble cause, for God, for country.

When you look at the endless series of wars of this century you do not find a public demanding war, but rather resisting it, until citizens are bombarded with exhortations that appeal, not to a killer instinct, but to a desire to do good, to spread democracy or liberty or overthrow a tyrant.

Howard Zinn | The Progressive (read more. . .)

Seymour Hersh warned a few months back that the Pentagon was going to be relying more on airpower in the next phase of the Iraq War.

Now there is more evidence to prove it.

Bradley Graham of The Washington Post reveals that the number of U.S. air strikes has gone up by a factor of five in the last year, with U.S. pilots now going on four sorties a day and dropping their 500-pound bombs.

Military analysts expect this reliance on air power to continue—or even to increase—as the U.S. withdraws some of its ground troops. Those sorties are killing civilians, though we’re not seeing the video on our nightly news and the Pentagon is not tabulating the deaths, or at least not making the tally public.

But “scores of noncombatants” have died in the U.S. offensive in western Iraq, many from U.S. airstrikes, Ellen Knickmeyer of the Post reports. Some of these noncombatants were children, and some died when they were in buildings that insurgents were also using, Knickmeyer reports.

The killing of children is nothing new in war, but we don’t hear Bush or Rumsfeld focusing on it.

No, that might detract from the story line, that might mar the saintly image that they paint of the U.S. in Iraq. But we, as citizens of the United States, can’t stand idly by as our country continues to bomb innocent young bystanders in Iraq. There will be many more bodies of youngsters in small graves in Iraq if we don’t insist on an immediate halt to this bombing.

Before the Vietnam War ended, one of the most powerful demands from the peace movement was to stop the bombing. We must make that demand again, as loudly as possible.

Matthew Rothschild | The Progressive (read more. . .)

I don’t like to play scary games where we all stay awake late at night, telling each other scary stories — but there’s a reason we have never given our government this kind of power. As the late Sen. Frank Church said, “That capability could at any time be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capacity to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide.”

And if a dictator took over, the NSA “could enable it to impose total tyranny.” Then we always get that dreadful goody-two-shoes response, “Well, if you aren’t doing anything wrong, you don’t have anything to worry about, do you?”

Folks, we KNOW this program is being and will be misused. We know it from the past record and current reporting. The program has already targeted vegans and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals — and, boy, if those aren’t outposts of al-Qaida, what is? Could this be more pathetic?

This could scarcely be clearer. Either the president of the United States is going to have to understand and admit he has done something very wrong, or he will have to be impeached. The first time this happened, the institutional response was magnificent. The courts, the press, the Congress all functioned superbly. Anyone think we’re up to that again? Then whom do we blame when we lose the republic?

Molly Ivins | AlterNet (read more. . .)

There is a name for a system of government that wages aggressive war, deceives its citizens, violates their rights, abuses power and breaks the law, rejects judicial and legislative checks on itself, claims power without limit, tortures prisoners and acts in secret. It is dictatorship.

The Administration of George W. Bush is not a dictatorship, but it does manifest the characteristics of one in embryonic form. Until recently, these were developing and growing in the twilight world of secrecy. Even within the executive branch itself, Bush seemed to govern outside the normally constituted channels of the Cabinet and to rely on what Secretary of State Colin Powell’s chief of staff has called a “cabal.” Former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill reported the same thing. Cabinet meetings were for show. Real decisions were made elsewhere, out of sight. Another White House official, John DiIulio, has commented that there was “a complete lack of a policy apparatus” in the White House. “What you’ve got is everything, and I mean everything, being run by the political arm.” As in many Communist states, a highly centralized party, in this case the Republican Party, was beginning to forge a parallel apparatus at the heart of government, a semi-hidden state-within-a-state, by which the real decisions were ade.

With Bush’s defense of his wiretapping, the hidden state has stepped into the open. The deeper challenge Bush has thrown down, therefore, is whether the country wants to embrace the new form of government he is creating by executive fiat or to continue with the old constitutional form. He is now in effect saying, “Yes, I am above the law-I am the law, which is nothing more than what I and my hired lawyers say it is-and if you don’t like it, I dare you to do something about it.”

Members of Congress have no choice but to accept the challenge. They did so once before, when Richard Nixon, who said, “When the President does it, that means it’s not illegal,” posed a similar threat to the Constitution. The only possible answer is to inform Bush forthwith that if he continues in his defiance, he will be impeached.

Jonathan Schell | The Nation (read more. . .)

American intellegence was proving itself inadequate to the challenge. The president appointed a special commission to make recommendations. The year was 1954. The commission chairman was James Doolittle, the retired bomber general who had led the first air raid against Tokyo.

”It is now clear,” he stated in his report to President Eisenhower, ”that we are facing an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination by whatever means and whatever cost. There are no rules in such a game. Hitherto acceptable norms of human conduct do not apply. If the United States is to survive, longstanding concepts of ‘fair play’ must be reconsidered. We must develop effective espionage and counter-espionage services, and must learn to subvert, sabotage, and destroy our enemies by more clever, more sophisticated, and more effective methods than those used against us. It may be necessary that the American people be made acquainted with, understand, and support this fundamentally repugnant philosophy.”

Sound familiar? Again and again, in the year now ending, the American people have been told by their leaders that strategies based on a new ”repugnant philosophy” are required if the nation is to survive the challenge facing it. Forbidden incendiary weapons must be used in urban settings. Prisoners of war must be deprived of Geneva protections. Aggressive interrogations of enemies must approach torture. Commitments to provide US combat forces with adequate protective gear must be forsworn. Extrajudicial kidnapping of bad people must be justified. Allies must be pressured into joining secret networks of detention camps.

Human rights standards must be jettisoned. Traditional obligations to the United Nations must be ignored. Treaties that limit action can be cast aside. Distinctions between foreign and domestic espionage must be left behind, with US citizens subject to unmonitored surveillance by military agencies. Public libraries must be regarded as government peepholes. The lawyer-client privilege must no longer be regarded as sacrosanct. The press must be recruited into the project of information management. Dissent must be labeled as treason.

A great American erosion has occurred this year, and only now are the contours of what is lost becoming apparent. Much more is at stake than the abandonment of ”longstanding concepts of ‘fair-play’ ” of which Doolittle wrote. To ‘’subvert, sabotage, and destroy” what threatens us, we have begun to subvert, sabotage, and destroy what protects us: the mutuality of solemn compacts abroad, fundamental safeguards of the Constitution at home. Because the justifying ‘’state of emergency” is an open-ended war, the trashing of ”hitherto acceptable norms of human conduct” will be permanent. Get used to it.

James Carroll | Boston Globe (read more. . .)

The story goes that when the nonviolent Jesus was born into abject poverty to homeless refugees on the outskirts of a brutal empire, angels appeared in the sky to impoverished shepherds singing, “Glory to God in the highest and peace on earth!” That child grew up to become, in Gandhi’s words, “the greatest nonviolent resister in the history of the world,” and was subsequently executed by the empire for his insistence on justice.

This weekend, as tens of millions of Christians across the country celebrate the birth of the Prince of Peace, the U.S. wages war in Iraq, Afghanistan, Colombia and elsewhere; crushes the hungry, homeless, elderly, imprisoned and refugee; and maintains the world’s ultimate terrorist threat–its nuclear arsenal.

Like Herod, Pilate and their soldiers, we have rejected the angels’ call for “peace on earth.” When Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and their warmaking supporters celebrate Christmas, they mock Christ and his steadfast nonviolence, and carry on the massacre of the innocents.

If the angels are correct, then Christmas requires us to welcome God’s gift of peace on earth. In such a time, that means we have to work for an end to war. Christmas calls us to become like Christ–people of active, creative, steadfast nonviolence who give our lives in resistance to empire and war.

John Dear | CommonDreams (read more. . .)

We have been handed yet another in an endless series of false choices. Those who don’t blindly trust the president are dismissed as amnesia victims. Americans who don’t connect the dots from 9/11 to Iraq or spying or torture are cast as actors living in a foolish, fearless, fantasy world. Indeed, 9/11 was the day the president became the commander in chief. The words he often repeats were spoken to him by a rescue worker at the World Trade Center: ”Whatever it takes.”

If there are Americans who have actually forgotten the attacks in all their searing horror, I don’t know any. I remember the weeks when I would wake up and reach for the remote to see if we’d caught Osama. When did that expectation fade? I remember the just pursuit of Al Qaeda into its safety zone, Afghanistan. And the satisfaction in overthrowing the Taliban.

But gradually, 9/11 became the all-purpose excuse for . . . whatever it takes. The war in Iraq was conflated with the war on terror, and preemptive strikes were launched against weapons of mass destruction that didn’t exist. In ”The Assassin’s Gate,” George Packer, a liberal hawk, tries to assess why the United States really did invade Iraq. ”It still isn’t possible to be sure — and this remains the most remarkable thing about the Iraq War,” he writes. ”Iraq is the Rashomon of wars” and all he can conclude is that it ”has something to do with September 11.”

As recently as last February, 47 percent of Americans still believed that Saddam had something to do with 9/11. Does the White House accuse its supporters of false memory?

And what of the president himself? In his news conference, he angrily attacked those who leaked the spy story. He asked reporters to guess what happened the last time there was a similar security leak. Then he stumbled over the answer, ”Saddam . . . Osama bin Laden changed his behavior.” Memory loss?

Ellen Goodman | Boston Globe (read more. . .)