Over the course of this year’s race for Vermont Governor, Dennis Steele’s presence in the contest and debates has had the effect of forcing the issue of America’s crippling involvement in no-win wars half-way around the world into the discourse around the election. At one debate, Peter Shumlin, while hedging himself by claiming that the Governor lacks the power to have much impact on foreign policy, stated that he would use the bully pulpit of the Governor’s office to publicly oppose the wars.
As such, it was profoundly disconcerting that Mr. Shumlin should choose to have Iraq War cheerleader and Vice President Joe Biden come to Vermont today in order to stump for him. In 2002, Biden used his immensely powerful position as Chair of the Senate Foreign Policy Committee to shepherd the war authorization through the Senate, and his Committee’s hearings were widely criticized as more of a farcical propaganda campaign than a legitimate attempt to objectively assess the threat posed by Iraq. Joe Biden was one of the key Democrats in Congress whose collaboration made it far easier for the Bush Administration to sell the false premises of the Iraq War to the American People. (1)
If Mr. Shumlin is serious about his support for a foreign policy of peace, he owes Vermonters an apology for bringing a man whose hands are irrevocably stained with the blood of the 115 Vermonters (2) who’ve been killed or wounded so far in the illegal and immoral Iraq War. If he doesn’t have the strength of character to stand up for the people of Vermont against an influential member of his party, it will only go to show the shallowness of his commitment to achieving true justice for Vermont. It’s time to end the wars and bring our friends and neighbors home safe; to do so, we need a Governor who will stand up to the Federal Government, not one who’ll kow-tow to the very people who’re responsible for this mess. If you agree, please vote Dennis Steele for Vermont Governor tomorrow; Imagine… Free Vermont.
(1) http://www.fpif.org/articles/biden_iraq_and_obamas_betrayal
American Socialism for the Rich 
The Anti-War Movement and the Militia: Providing for the Defense of a Free Society
Given that the United States is engaged in the occupation of two countries, has a thousand bases spread across the globe, and its military budget is seven times that of its nearest competitor, it is clear that the anti-war movement of the past decade has been a profound failure. Though the majority of Americans are now against the wars, the movement has been dismally unable to translate those attitudes into a change in policy. Much of this failure, I believe, can be attributed to its inability to craft and communicate a realistic and specific alternative vision to the present order in which the American people can have both peace and security. Instead, for the most part, it has been a weak and reactive opposition that, at best, acts as a damper on the worst excesses of the American empire. While better than nothing, the chances of such a movement to achieve the peace its advocates so urgently desire is effectively nil.
Further damage has been caused by the aggressive exploitation of this deficiency by the advocates of foreign policy interventionism. While acknowledging the preferableness of peace as an ideal, such people commonly counter the anti-war position by observing the reality that there are bad people in the world who want to kill us. “How,” they inquire, “do peace advocates propose we deal with that situation?”
An extremely common anti-war response to this critique is that the “desire to kill us” has its origins in our own interventionism; for instance, by bombing a village to kill a terrorist leader, we initiate a cycle of violence by radicalizing the residents of the village who lost friends or relatives. Though true, this argument suffers from the fact that it is an abstract assertion: we can speculate on the effects that an action today will have on tomorrow, but we can never be certain. By contrast, the interventionist argument is concrete: there exist, now, people who want to kill us, and it is more important to respond to what is than it is to respond to what could be. Continue reading →
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