The Rag Blog

GALESBURG, Illinois (June 2) – Caisha Gayles graduated with honors last month, but she is still waiting for her diploma. The reason: the whoops of joy from the audience as she crossed the stage.

The school said the five students can still get their diplomas by completing eight hours of public service work, answering phones, sorting books or doing other chores for the district.

Gayles was one of five students denied diplomas from the lone public high school in Galesburg after enthusiastic friends or family members cheered for them during commencement.

About a month before the May 27 ceremony, Galesburg High students and their parents had to sign a contract promising to act in dignified way. Violators were warned they could be denied their diplomas and barred from the after-graduation party.

Many schools across the country ask spectators to hold applause and cheers until the end of graduation. But few of them enforce the policy with what some in Galesburg say are strong-arm tactics.

In Galesburg, the issue has taken on added controversy with accusations that the students were targeted because of their race: four are black and one is Hispanic. Parents say cheers also erupted for white students, and none of them was denied a diploma.

Earlier this week, the American Friends Service Committee asked me to speak about finding hope in hard times as part of an interfaith service to conclude their “Eyes Wide Open” display in Chicago’s Grant Park. The display arranged 3,438 soldiers’ boots to commemorate U.S. military people killed in Iraq, along with life sized pictures of Iraqi civilians and a collection of numerous civilian shoes to remember hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who have been killed in Iraq since 2003. I asked the audience to join me in recalling experiences I had while imprisoned at the Pekin Federal prison for “crossing the line” at Fort Benning, Georgia.

May 1, 2004, marked the first anniversary of President Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” speech aboard a U.S. aircraft carrier. I was in a prison library trying to write an article about that boastful declaration when several women prisoners urged me to hurry over to a TV room for the breaking news on CNN. “Kathy, you gotta come and see this,” they said, their eyes widened with alarm. “It’s awful, what’s going on over there in Iraq.” CNN was showing the first pictures that emerged from Abu Ghraib, images now indelibly embedded in peoples’ memories all over the world: the hooded man; the pyramid; the man on a leash; the man and the dog.

The women I knew in prison could readily identify with shame and fear felt by prisoners in Abu Ghraib. They understood all too well what it meant to feel humiliated, isolated and out of control. But the tears they shed that morning were fueled by their fundamental patriotism. “What’s happening to our country?” they asked.

In response, several women told the warden that they wanted to gather together on the oval track, each day, at sunrise and at sunset, for a special time of prayer. The warden agreed to this, and so began an extraordinary prayer circle.

Here are some of the prayers I recall: “I want to pray for my kids. I ask God to please look after them. And I just want to hold up the children in Iraq, because I know they’re suffering a lot.”

“I want to pray for my children and also for the children of the guards working in this prison.”

“Lord, I pray for all of the children of all of us here, and I pray for all of the U.S. military people in Iraq who are separated from their children.

“It’s so hard for parents and children to be far apart. I just want to pray for every family separated by this war and especially for the kids whose parents won’t ever come home.”

“I pray for parents who’ve lost their kids.”

Over the days and weeks, the prayer circle steadily grew. By the time I left the prison, close to one hundred women were regularly gathering to pray for peace, for freedom, and for an end to war.

I’ve done time in maximum security and minimum security prisons in the United States, and I still don’t know where they keep “the bad sisters,” but I surely know something about criminality. The most dangerous criminals in the United States today are those who profit from and prolong the war in Iraq.

Nobel economist Dr. Joseph Stiglitz calculates that the war in Iraq, if it continues another eight years, will ultimately cost the U.S. economy 2.2 trillion dollars. It’s shocking to think of what we’ve lost in dedicating this expenditure to war, rather than to domestic and foreign aid which could save millions of lives lost to hunger and illness, or, say, to renewable energy development which might save hundreds of millions from economic and environmental disasters now clearly on the horizon. Who are the criminals?

Many people argue that the troops are stabilizing conditions in Iraq. When I hear earnest concerns for Iraqi civilians, I can’t help but wonder why these concerns were so absent when economic sanctions against Iraq directly contributed towards the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children under age five. Have we now a new slogan? “No Iraqi child left behind!”

A May 8th, 2007 “Save the Children” report stated that in 2005, in Iraq, 122,000 children didn’t reach their fifth birthdays. Conditions can’t have improved in 2007 as we learn from the World Health Organization that 80 percent of Iraqi families have home sewage facilities that contaminate their water sources, and 70 percent of families don’t have regular access to clean water; as a result diarrhea and respiratory infections now account for two thirds of the deaths of children under age five. Twenty one percent of Iraqi children are now chronically malnourished. (New York Times, April 18, 2007). The report also notes that 70 percent of Iraqis who die in hospitals after violent injuries would have survived if the hospitals were adequately equipped.

From 1996 through 2003, Voices in the Wilderness delegations delivered duffel bags filled with medicines and medical supplies to Iraqi hospitals during the years when the US and the UK insisted on maintaining brutal economic sanctions against Iraq. The U.S. Treasury Department accused us of acting criminally. Recently, the New York Times noted that Chevron, the second largest U.S. oil company, paid $20 million dollars “under the table” to Saddam Hussein’s government in return for obtaining lucrative contracts, all in violation of the economic sanctions. (May 8, 2007) Condoleeza Rice, then a member of Chevron’s Board of Directors, chaired the corporation’s Public Policy committee when Chevron initially began paying the illegal surcharges. This was the committee charged with oversight of international contracts.

During a period when the Treasury Department hauled Voices in the Wilderness into court several times and ultimately fined us $20,000 dollars, (a sum we have refused to pay), they never went after Chevron.

We don’t want to see a single executive that has profited from economic and military war against Iraq go to jail. But we do want to see them rehabilitated.

The women in prison did what they could in response to feeling overwhelmed by the war in Iraq. They prayed for a kinder and saner world and in the very act of uttering prayers they helped build a more sane perspective on the horrific harms and risks incurred by ongoing war in Iraq.

When I left the Pekin prison, Sherrie, a prisoner trusted and esteemed by prisoners and guards alike, drove me to the bus station. As we passed the high security prison for men, where the median sentence length is 27 years, she placed her hand on mine. “I know you care a lot about those people over there in Iraq. At least our boys aren’t over there,” said Sherrie, an African American woman. “Our boys are all in there.” I don’t know if Sherrie’s words can be backed up demographically. But over the past few years I’ve puzzled over her words and I think I finally understand what she meant. I think she meant that even the darkness of spending decades in a prison is preferable to the risk of killing or being killed in a foreign war to protect criminal interests of an empire.

This summer, the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate will be asked to appropriate another $145 billion dollars to pay for ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Analysis of the Department of Defense Budget Materials shows that tens of billions of dollars will be spent on Humvees, Armored Security Vehicles, Bradley vehicles, Stryker vehicles, and Abrams tanks. The earliest expected date for delivery of these items is in 2009, by which time the U.S. people are becoming quite determined that U.S. troops should be home. (see www.vcnv.org for analysis of Iraq and Afghanistan Supplemental Spending, Fiscal year 2008).

I have in front of me two documents of despair, of disillusionment with the American political system that allows this criminal war to continue. Andrew J. Bacevich in his Washington Post op-ed column and Cindy Sheehan in her statement on her blog express despair over the failure of the Democrats placed in power by an antiwar electorate to take firm measures to end the war in Iraq. Sheehan declares, as she announces her departure from the spotlight that “hundreds of thousands of people are dying for a war based on lies that is supported by Democrats and Republican alike,” adding, “It is so painful to me to know that I bought into this system for so many years”

Professor Bacevich, now sharing Sheehan’s personal grief, calls his earlier hopes that he and others might force the country to change course “an illusion,” noting that “responsibility for the war’s continuation now rests no less with the Democrats who control Congress than with the president and his party.” “Money,” he notes bitterly, “maintains the Republican/Democratic duopoly of trivialized politics. It confines the debate over U.S. policy to well-hewn channels It negates democracy, rendering free speech little more than a means of recording dissent. This is not some great conspiracy. It’s the way our system works.”

If there is a positive aspect to this despair, it is this very realization: the system is the problem. It has not so much “failed” us as we have failed to understand what Sheehan and Bacevich are concluding: it isn’t designed to work for us but for but for them.

For those who can’t bring themselves to say that the war is not a “mistake” but a crime. For those who can’t call for immediate withdrawal in accordance with the wishes of the American and Iraqi people but talk about “benchmarks” for a gradual withdrawal. For those who want to shift the onus of the U.S. failure in Iraq to Iraqi politicians for their delays and bickering, and the Iraqi people for their bewildering Islamic sectarianism.

It serves those who vote in bipartisan fashion to further vilify and isolate Syria and Iran—the fools who do not know the first thing about Islamic history and the divisions between Shiites and Sunnis, secularists and Islamists. It serves those lining up to embrace the fear-mongering Islamophobic neocon agenda for more confrontation with the Muslim world. It serves those who fear AIPAC more than the consequences of a strike on Iran. It serves the Democrats who want to keep an attack on Iran on the table, but assure President Bush that his impeachment is off the table because it’s just too radical a prospect for them to consider.

This is indeed the way the system works.

“I am deemed a radical,” writes Sheehan, “because I believe that partisan politics should be left to the wayside” Having seen Sheehan speak on several occasions, I think rather she’s been deemed radical because her understanding of the war is too honest for the system’s hacks and political opportunists (including some who affect a liberal antiwar posture) to endorse. They cannot.

Nancy Pelosi cannot say, “This is an imperialist war to reconfigure the Middle East, allow the U.S. to control the flow of oil from the region, dot it with huge permanent U.S. military bases, advance Israeli aims in the region, and intimidate all potential rivals for decades. It is wrong, a clear violation of international law.” Harry Reid can’t say, “The lies of these war planners are so obvious. We need hearings now about the Office of Special Plans. We need to find out who forged the Niger uranium documents and who undercut our intelligence professionals in pushing that completely false case presented by Colin Powell to the U.N. We need to move on impeachment of both Bush and Cheney.”

That sort of honest talk is not normally allowed by the system to the “loyal opposition.” Only under circumstances of extraordinary duress, when it feels its very existence threatened, does the system make some concessions to the people it doesn’t work for. In the early ’70s our outrage over the war in Vietnam, compounded by disgust about the evolving Watergate Affair, forced Congress to cut off war funding (through the Case-Church Amendment passed on June 19, 1973), produced a wave of investigations that exposed the vicious Cointelpro Program, and produced the Freedom of Information Act. We’re not yet back to that level of outrage, but the number of people questioning the system itself — the money-driven “Republican/Democratic duopoly of trivialized politics” — is growing. As the Democrats drag their feet, ignore their mandate to end the war, and collude with moves against Iran and Syria bound to produce disastrous repercussions, disillusionment will no doubt mount, as it should.

“To be radical,” wrote Marx, “is to grasp the root of the matter. But for man, the root is man himself.” In other words, radicalism means thinking clearly about how and why people in general are oppressed by the “money” to which Bacevich alludes. By those who use their unconscionable wealth (= political power) to pursue their boundless “interests”—sacrificing other people’s children to do so. But Marx in the same work notes how people oppress themselves with delusional thinking. He refers to religion but might as well be speaking of delusions about contemporary American “democracy” when he writes, “The demand to give up illusions about the existing state of affairs is the demand to give up a state of affairs which needs illusions.”

Corporate media—and even some alternative websites, are blaring with headlines about Cindy Sheehan “quitting” the anti-war movement. It is true that Sheehan has stepped down as the consummate symbol of the ordinary, salt-of-the-earth American mother crusading against the empire for the end of the war that brought about her son’s meaningless death. But it is not true that Cindy is “quitting.” After years of sacrifice, incomprehensible losses, and several hundred stages of burnout, she has walked away from a role and the symbolism inherent within it, but even more significantly in my opinion, and reverberating through her article “Letter To The Democratic Congress,” she has rejected the Democratic Party and its pretense of offering an alternative to the politics of empire.

Last night I watched Keith Olbermann begin his “Countdown” show with the story of Sheehan’s “quitting” the anti-war movement, even including some quotes from her, but mentioning nothing about her leaving the Democratic Party. How could he do otherwise when he devoted the next twenty minutes of the program to interviewing Al Gore and communicating unmistakably to the viewers that the former Vice-President is unequivocally our “savior”? What else could we expect from corporate media?

Yesterday, I received emails which described Sheehan’s departure as “sad” and “unfortunate”, suggesting that she had been “worn” down. I understand the intent of these comments, but I emphatically disagree. Could we all please look more deeply into Sheehan’s decision?

What is it exactly that Cindy Sheehan walked away from? What did she “quit”? Certainly, it was not her feelings and opinions about the empire and its endless wars. What she resoundingly rejected was “hope”—that cousin to denial that so many “progressives” want to hang onto above and beyond all manifestations of reality to the contrary. One reason we treasure her and the one quality that has endeared her to us is her unmitigated courage and fortitude in standing toe-to-toe with the empire. Yet, many of us fail to see the courage in her decision to walk away from her most recent expressions of that courage and demonstrate courage on a deeper level. It is one thing to confront the empire with the Democratic Party and a throng of progressives invested in the Party and the rigged electoral process standing behind oneself in “support”, and it is quite another to turn around and face those so-called supporters and insist they are part of the problem.

What Cindy is saying is simply, “I no longer choose to embrace the teddy-bear illusion that I live in a democratic republic in which the rule of law and the Constitution prevail. I am no longer willing to believe that a two-party system exists in this empire, and I refuse to continue to ‘hope’ that one wing of the one-party system will ever significantly challenge or extricate itself from the other wing. I will not live in denial, even if it brings me adulation, inspires others to resist the empire, or nurtures within me a feeling of doing the right thing. I will open my eyes, and my mouth, and I will buy OUT of the current paradigm.”

Many of you reading these words have made the same decision Cindy has made, and many of you have also been called “quitters” or “purveyors of doom and gloom.” Others of you have not bought out of the illusion that the federal government, the Democratic Party, or some political, environmental, or spiritual movement can save the earth and its inhabitants, and you are still “hoping.” And of course, from the earliest origins of the Judeo-Christian tradition to Barack Obama’s “The Audacity Of Hope”, the culture is replete with moralizing aphorisms that instruct us not to give up hope. Yet, as any recovering addict will testify, it is only when we give up all hope that we can awaken with clarity and a deeper consciousness to the reality of our situation.

I do not mean to minimize the brutal losses beyond the pale that Cindy Sheehan has incurred. No other word than “tragic” can be applied to the loss of her son, the loss of her marriage, the enormous debt she is now facing—including her own personal hospital bills for a heat stroke, and the countless sacrifices she has made in order to speak truth to power and awaken the entranced citizens and politicians of empire. Has she been “worn down”? Unquestionably, and so have many of us who would not have otherwise walked away from empire and its delusional political process. American capitalist/consumerist/corporatist culture is so toxic, so seductive, so addictive, so soporific that few of us are capable of seeing through it without terrible, sometimes traumatic, loss and persecution.

WASHINGTON (June 1) – Detailed plans for the new U.S. Embassy under construction in Baghdad appeared online Thursday in a breach of the tight security surrounding the sensitive project.

Computer-generated projections of the soon-to-be completed, heavily fortified compound were posted on the Web site of the Kansas City, Mo.-based architectural firm that was contracted to design the massive facility in the Iraqi capital.

The images were removed by Berger Devine Yaeger Inc. shortly after the company was contacted by the State Department.

“We work very hard to ensure the safety and security of our employees overseas,” said Gonzalo Gallegos, a department spokesman. “This kind of information out in the public domain detracts from that effort.”

The 10 images included a scheme of the overall layout of the compound, plus depictions of individual buildings including the embassy itself, office annexes, the Marine Corps security post, swimming pool, recreation center and the ambassador’s and deputy ambassador’s residences.

U.S. officials said the posted plans conformed at least roughly to conceptual drawings for the new embassy, which is being built on the banks of the Tigris River behind huge fences due to concerns about insurgents’ attacks.

Dan Sreebny, a spokesman for the embassy in Baghdad, declined to discuss the accuracy of the posted images.

BAGHDAD, 29 May 2007 (IRIN) – Escalating fighting and sectarian violence are forcing hundreds of families in Iraq to flee their homes on a daily basis, aid agencies say.

According to a report released on Sunday by the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR), an estimated 822,810 Iraqis are now displaced within their country.

Muhammad Abdul-Yassin, 39, was forced to leave his home nine months ago after continuous fighting near his home and being targeting by militias. He said he had to change his place of residence more than four times.

“There are no safe places in Iraq. Militants or insurgents find you wherever you are,” Abdul-Yassin said.

“Each time we arrived in a new camp, dozens of other families arrived with us. Most of the places are full to bursting and some of the displaced families are forced to sleep rough on the ground without tents until aid agencies can give them some protection and food. In the camp where we are staying now, we were forced to sleep in the open air for three days and drink dirty water because the aid agencies couldn’t reach us,” he said.

Contaminated water

“Displaced families in Anbar, Baghdad, Karbala, Najaf and all the southern provinces are suffering from a shortage of potable water,” a spokesperson for the Iraq Aid Association (IAA) said. “Some are drinking contaminated water and children can be seen nearly starving, requiring urgent water and food.”

The UNHCR report confirmed the above, adding that there was an urgent need for shelter, food and non-food supplies, as well as jobs.

Aid agencies say they face difficulties accessing IDPs many of whom face severe water shortages.

Unemployment

Unemployment remains the main cause of growing poverty among IDPs, according to Professor Jamal Obeidi, a displacement expert from Baghdad University and an analyst in the Ministry of Displacement and Migration.

“If at least one person from each [displaced] family was working, they would have been earning money and been able to buy food for their families, despite the insecurity. The lack of jobs has put these families in the worst conditions,” Obeidi said.

Income and employment are reported as priority issues for 65 percent of IDPs, according to the UN-affiliated International Organisation of Migration (IOM).

Lack of food

Forty seven percent of displaced families in Iraq have no access to the national food programme, according to the country’s Ministry of Trade and the UNHCR.

“Lack of security has prevented families getting to warehouses and many others have moved to southern provinces which have been tardy in registering the newly displaced. Some areas cannot cope and lack food to give to the population,” said Maruan Muhannad, a senior official in the Ministry of Trade.

Obeidi recommended to the Ministry of Trade that it organise convoys to deliver food parcels directly to IDPs in displacement areas. “They could take the warehoused food which has no owner, fill a convoy and deliver directly to such families.”

“Our children are sick because they do not receiving enough food. They are eating badly because we cannot get our share of the national food programme since we got displaced a year ago and have lost our documents,” said May Kareem, 34, a displaced mother of three who lives on the outskirts of the capital.

It’s no news that George W. Bush and his handlers don’t know much about history, but their latest stab at pretending otherwise is among their most ludicrous.

At a press conference on Wednesday, White House spokesman Tony Snow said that President Bush thinks Iraq will develop along the lines of “a Korean model,” and defined that to mean a situation in which the United States “provides a security presence,” and serves as a “force of stability,” for “a long time.”

Let’s set aside for a moment whether the comparison is valid—much more on that to come—and ask why on earth Bush would make it. Huge numbers of U.S. troops have been in South Korea for 57 years. Do Bush and Snow really mean to suggest that U.S. troops will still be stationed in Iraq in the year 2060 and beyond?

Now back to the merits—or rather demerits—of the analogy. In 1950, the United States beat back North Korea’s invasion of South Korea, became embroiled in a Chinese-assisted guerrilla war, fought the Communists to a stalemate, and, in 1953, after suffering 54,000 combat deaths, negotiated a truce (but not a formal peace). Ever since, American troops—at present, 37,000 of them, stationed at 95 installations across the Korean peninsula—have remained on guard at the world’s most heavily armed border.

In 2003, the United States invaded Iraq, overthrew its regime (which posed a hypothetical threat), and, in the four years since, has kept about 150,000 troops in the country to kill terrorists (who weren’t in Iraq before the war), to train the Iraqi army (which the Bush administration, for still-mysterious reasons, dismantled at the occupation’s outset), and to keep a “low-grade” sectarian civil war (which erupted amid a vacuum of authority) from boiling over.

In the half-century-plus since the Korean armistice of 1953, just 90 U.S. soldiers have been killed in isolated border clashes in Korea. In the mere four years since the toppling of Saddam Hussein in 2003, more than 3,000 American servicemen and women have been killed, and the number rises every day.

To sum up, we intervened in South Korea as a response to an invasion and as part of a broad strategy to contain Communist aggression. We intervened in Iraq as the instigator of an invasion and as part of a broad strategy to expand unilateral American power. We remained in South Korea to protect a solid (if, for many years, authoritarian) government from another border incursion. We are remaining in Iraq to bolster a flimsy government and stave off a violent social implosion.

In other words, in no meaningful way are these two wars, or these two countries, remotely similar. In no way does one experience, or set of lessons, shed light on the other. In Iraq, no border divides friend from foe; no clear concept defines who is friend and foe. To say that Iraq might follow “a Korean model”—if the word model means anything—is absurd.

At times during Wednesday’s press conference, Snow seemed to recognize this absurdity. Take these passages from the transcript:

Q: So you’re not suggesting that U.S. troops would be there for over 50 years in a—

Snow: No, no, I’m not. I don’t know. It is an unanswerable question, but I’m not making that suggestion.

Q: You’re not suggesting that there’s a parallel between the Korean model today and the Iraqi model today, in terms of U.S. force posture?

Snow: No, what I’m saying is you get to a point in the future where you want it to be a purely support role. But no, of course, we’re in active combat …

Q: [W]hen you talk about this Korean model, would that kick in whether things are going poorly after the surge or going well after the surge? I mean, do you have to maintain a stability of some sort?

These days, Donald Buswell’s job is not as exciting or dangerous as it once was. For the past few months, his working hours have been spent taking care of some 40-plus wounded soldiers at San Antonio’s Fort Sam Houston medical center. The work is sometimes menial, even janitorial, but he doesn’t mind. After all, Buswell has been where these men are — three years ago, he too was recovering from wounds received in a battle zone in Iraq.

“I truly consider this an honor,” Buswell told his dad not long ago.

Still, it’s not exactly where Buswell expected to be after 20 years of well-respected service in the Army.

Since joining the Army in 1987, he had risen to the rank of sergeant first class, serving in both Gulf Wars, Bosnia, Rwanda, and Korea. He ended up with shrapnel scars and a Purple Heart and, back in the U.S. after his last tour in Iraq, a job as intelligence analyst at Fort Sam Houston.

He couldn’t have foreseen that one e-mail could derail his career and put him on his way out of the Army. One e-mail, speculating about events that millions of people have questioned for the last six years, was all it took.

Sgt. Buswell wants to know: What really happened on 9/11? And he said so in his e-mail. In the few paragraphs of that August 2006 message — a reply not to someone outside the service, but to other soldiers — Buswell wrote that he thought the official report of what happened that day at the Pentagon, and in the Pennsylvania crash of United Airlines Flight 93, was full of errors and unanswered questions.

“Who really benefited from what happened that day?” he asked rhetorically. Not “Arabs,” but “the Military Industrial Complex,” Buswell concluded. “We must demand a new, independent investigation.”

For voicing those opinions in an e-mail to 38 people on the San Antonio Army base, Buswell was stripped of his security clearance, fired from his job, demoted, and ordered to undergo a mental health exam.

(He was also ordered not to speak with the press. Information for this story came from documents, conversations with Buswell’s family members and friends, and sources within Fifth Army who asked not to be named.)

KANSAS CITY, Mo. (May 31) – An Iraq war veteran could lose his honorable discharge status after being photographed wearing fatigues at an anti-war protest.

Marine Cpl. Adam Kokesh and other veterans marked the fourth anniversary of the war in Iraq in April by wearing their uniforms – with military insignia removed – and roaming around the nation’s capital on a mock patrol.

After Kokesh was identified in a photo cutline in The Washington Post, a superior officer sent him a letter saying he might have violated a rule prohibiting troops from wearing uniforms without authorization.

Kokesh, a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War, responded with an obscenity.

Now, a military panel has been scheduled to meet with Kokesh on Monday to decide whether his discharge status should be changed from “honorable” to “other than honorable.”

“This is clearly a case of selective prosecution and intimidation of veterans who speak out against the war,” Kokesh said. “To suggest that while as a veteran you don’t have freedom of speech is absurd.”

Kokesh is part of the Individual Ready Reserve, a segment of the reserves that consists mainly of those who have left active duty but still have time remaining on their eight-year military obligations.

His attorney, Mike Lebowitz, said Kokesh’s IRR status ends June 18. He said at least three other veterans have been investigated because of their involvement at demonstrations.

Kokesh, 25, enlisted in the Marines while still attending high school in New Mexico. He was a reservist in an artillery unit, assigned to the November Battery, 5th Battalion, 14th Regiment of the 4th Division based out of Pico Rivera, Calif., near Los Angeles.

Kokesh said he had reservations about Iraq even before the United States invaded, but wanted to go there to help rebuild schools and mosques after Saddam Hussein ‘s regime was toppled. He even learned Arabic.

WASHINGTON (AP) – President Bush envisions a long-term U.S. troop presence in Iraq similar to the one in South Korea where American forces have helped keep an uneasy peace for more than 50 years, the White House said Wednesday.

The comparison was offered as the Pentagon announced the completion of the troop buildup ordered by Bush in January. The last of about 21,500 combat troops to arrive were an Army brigade in Baghdad and a Marine unit heading into the Anbar province in western Iraq.

Brig. Gen. Perry Wiggins, deputy director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said there are now 20 combat brigades in Iraq, up from 15 when the buildup began. A brigade is roughly 3,500 troops. Overall, the Pentagon said there are 150,000 U.S. troops in Iraq. That number may still climb as more support troops move in.

The administration warns that the buildup will result in more U.S. casualties as more American soldiers come into contact with enemy forces. May already is the third bloodiest month since the war began in March 2003. As of late Tuesday, there were 116 U.S. deaths in Iraq so far in May – trailing only the 137 in November 2004 and the 135 in April 2004. Overall, more than 3,460 U.S. service members have died.

Presidential spokesman Tony Snow said Bush has cited the long-term Korea analogy in looking at the U.S. role in Iraq, where American forces are in the fifth year of an unpopular war. Bush’s goal is for Iraqi forces to take over the chief security responsibilities, relieving U.S. forces of frontline combat duty, Snow said.

I have to admit that I was quite surprised when I read that Cindy Sheehan is leaving the peace movement. After reading her explanation for the move, I was less surprised, but still a bit disappointed. After reading the piece, it is clear that Sheehan has discovered that politics can be an ugly affair. When one is the focus of a political movement like Ms. Sheehan became, they become even uglier. Her departure will leave a hole, but it should not leave a vacuum. After all, there are thousands of US residents that have been hurt by the loss of a loved one in Iraq or Afghanistan, unfortunately. In addition, there are millions around the world that are just plain fed up and pissed off about these wars and the death and destruction they are causing.

Ms. Sheehan is planning to go home and raise her remaining children. That’s a good thing. Her screed makes it clear that she is burned out from her past two years of antiwar activism and doing something real like caring for children will surely put her back in touch with the better side of humanity. This move is similar to the retreat from politics and the streets that much of an entire generation underwent in the years following the government murders at Kent State and Jackson State in 1970 during antiwar protests. Another side of this retreat was the turn away from politics and towards cultural and religion. Unlike caring for one’s children, the latter two were mere escapism and somewhat solipsistic. One could argue that these phenomenon destroyed the potential for radical change in the United States, but a more appropriate analysis would merely claim that here in the US we had (and have) the luxury to stop fighting against the war because we do not live where the bombs are exploding and the assault weapons firing.

Ms. Sheehan makes it clear that she still opposes these wars and the power mongers who insist on continuing it. Indeed, she saves her harshest words of her farewell message for these men and women who “move them (US soldiers) around like pawns on a chessboard of destruction” and are ” worried more about elections than people.” Naturally, this includes the Democrats as well as the Republicans. And that, is the crux of Sheehan’s despair. She honestly thought that the Democrats were different. Now that they have proved they are not, she is ready to give it all up and, by doing so, hand the forces of war and reaction a victory that they will surely relish. Yeh, there will probably be some tentative cries from various Democrats telling Cindy that their party is not a war party and that she needs to hang in there. Those cries will most likely come from party rank and file, not its leaders or elected types, since the latter are much more concerned with the 2008 elections, as Sheehan clearly points out. Meanwhile, one can almost imagine the nasty jokes and high-fives going around George Bush’s breakfast table. They finally got rid of that pesky Mom whose son they killed. Maybe now they can get on with the war, especially since the Democrats caved like a cardboard box in a hurricane.

In another section of her letter, Sheehan directs her anger and frustration at the so-called leadership of the antiwar movement. Pointing a well-deserved finger at the movement and its divisions, she writes: ” I have also tried to work within a peace movement that often puts personal egos above peace and human life. This group won’t work with that group; he won’t attend an event if she is going to be there…. It is hard to work for peace when the very movement that is named after it has so many divisions.” What else can one say except, once again Ms. Sheehan has drawn an incorrect conclusion. As many others have written when addressing this issue, who cares about the pettiness of egos and power players in the movement? If one opposes the war, one gets in the streets and opposes it. Screw the fools jockeying for a future or a media spot. The war will be ended by the mass protest of the people who oppose it, not by getting a director’s job with MoveOn, UFPJ, or some other antiwar organization.

The most poignant paragraph in Sheehan’s statement begins with her sad acknowledgment that her son died for absolutely nothing. One can only imagine the emotions that come from this realization. Like many of her fellow citizens, Sheehan wants to believe that the United States is a good place and that the people who live there do believe in the principles espoused in its documents and by its greatest leaders. Her discovery that “(her son) Casey died for a country which cares more about who will be the next American Idol than how many people will be killed in the next few months” is a difficult thing to take. Yet, this is not a reason to quit. It is, instead, a motivation to change things at an even more fundamental level. One may not like being called a radical because they oppose the wars Washington has dragged us into, but one must also become aware that only radical analysis and action undertaken by millions will change a system that requires those wars to survive.

I recall a discussion I had with a friend during the buildup to the first Gulf War. We were talking about activist burnout and egotistical activists as we watched the antiwar movement in Olympia, WA. grow by leaps and bounds while it struggled with internal conflicts that were primarily ego-driven. I said to my friend that whenever I felt an organization couldn’t live without me, then it was time for me to step back from whatever high-profile position I happened to be in and go back to the grunt work of passing out leaflets and setting up stages. After all, it wasn’t me that mattered, but the movement.

Bedawi Camp is much like other Palestinian Camps: crowded, narrow streets winding between cement buildings hung with tangles of wire, the ground running with water, often muddy because it is not tarred. Small scooter motor bikes push their way between the people, children with clothes too small from them and holed at the knees running and playing ball and wanting to pose for photo after photo. But today Bedawi Camp is more crowded than usual as it is offering refuge to a people who are yet again displaced and are yet again fleeing conflict and are yet again having to leave everything behind them: clothes, food, mattresses and often brothers and husbands as well. They have come here with nothing and the Palestinian people in Bedawi Camp are opening their poverty-stricken homes to them.

It is not just Bedawi that is now sheltering the families who have been fortunate enough to escape the besieged and death-strewn streets of Nahr al-Bared Camp. Families have fled as far south as Beirut and some say even further. Shatila, witness to its own massacre, is now opening its homes to the 153 families who have so far arrived there. Aid is funneling into Bedawi but nothing is yet reaching Shatila. Many of the families here have escaped without so much as their IDs on them.

In Bedawi the injured and the well share the same piece of bread; in Shatilla the wife is without her husband and shares the same mattress as her three or four children, and often no mattress at all.

Many who have fled have no way of knowing how their men-folk are, still stuck within their besieged Camp. One woman told me how the last thing she saw as she left with her baby was her husband bleeding from a gun shot wound to his shoulder. She was weeping as she told me she couldn’t help wondering if she would ever see him again.

‘How do I know that Shatila is not going to be my home now forever? Maybe you can not understand what the life of the refugee is. Always fleeing, always living in a place that it temporary and always dreamingWhat do I dream for now you ask?

To return to Palestine? No, just to return to Nahr al-Bared and see that my husband is well.’

It is humbling to see how much the Palestinian people are giving to their newly displaced brethren. I have seen men donating $100.00, piling clothes into the central bin where we are collecting, giving blankets and of course the roof of their homes, when they themselves have so little. These people are living below the poverty line, in crowded and cramped camps with no stable income or prospect of a future and yet they are the ones donating and opening their arms to the victims of political complexities and international interference that is escalating out of control in this country.

As we were working in Shatila we received news that the Lebanese government has given Palestinian leaders 72 hours to solve the standoff in the north of Lebanon or they will storm the Camp with their US donated weaponry.

The Palestinian leaders must solve the problem with a group of extreme militants who are 70 per cent not Palestinian and who were armed in the first placed by the Siniora Government against Hezbollah, or else their people will be massacred and another Camp will be stained with a history of horror?