The Logic of Withdrawal

From the Progressive, leftist historian and author of A People's History of the United States Howard Zinn offers the eventual Democratic presidential nominee a stump speech on the Iraq war to be used in his candidacy:

What is national security? This Administration defines national security as sending our young men and women around the world to wage war on country after country--none of them strong enough to threaten us. I define national security as making sure every American has health care, employment, decent housing, a clean environment. I define national security as taking care of our people who are losing jobs, taking care of our senior citizens, taking care of our children.

Our current military budget is $400 billion a year, the largest in our history, larger even than when we were in the Cold War with the Soviet Union. And now we will be spending an additional $87 billion for the war in Iraq. At the same time, we are told that the government has cut funds for health care, education, the environment, and even school lunches for children. Most shocking of all is the cut, in billions of dollars, for veterans' benefits.

If I became President, I would immediately begin to use the great wealth of our nation to provide those things, which represent true security.

Later in the speech, Zinn echoes Martin Luther King's sentiments about the Vietnam War:

I believe that we should use our great power not for military purposes but to bring food and medicine to those areas of the world that have been devastated by war, by disease, by hunger. If we took a fraction of our military budget we could combat malaria, tuberculosis, and AIDS. We could provide clean water for the billion people in the world who don't have it and would save millions of lives. That would be an accomplishment we could be proud of. But how proud can we be of military victories over weak nations, in which we overthrow dictators but at the same time bomb and kill the people who are the victims of these dictators? And the tyrants we overthrow are very often the ones we have helped stay in power, like the Taliban in Afghanistan or Saddam Hussein in Iraq.

We are at a turning point in the history of our nation. We can go on being a great military power, engaging in war after war, in which innocent people abroad and our own men and women die or are crippled for life. Or we can become a peaceful nation, always ready to defend ourselves, but not sending our troops and planes all over the world for the benefit of the oil interests and the other great corporations that profit from war.

If only we lived in a reality where a Democratic nominee might actually make such a speech. Click here for the rest.

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