Remarks by U.S. Rep. Jim McDermott
Veterans for Peace 2003 National Convention
War Memorial Veterans Hall, San Francisco, CA
For Immediate Release - August 8, 2003

Veterans for Peace Executive Director Woody Powell wrote that 'if it takes lies to start a war, only the truth will end it."

Thank you for inviting me to share some time with you in this historic setting. 58 summers ago, the nations of the world, united in their war against fascism, came here to try to fashion workable multi-lateral arrangements to prevent more wars. And 58 years ago this week, the United States unleashed on Japan the ultimate weapon of the last century.

Our motivation then was fear, and indeed it is fear - real or illusory--that motivates all war, and, in this nuclear age, peace. So it's appropriate that we meet here this week to consider again all the questions that we must answer if ever we are to defeat militarism and overcome the politics of fear.

We are living in a difficult time. Not since the Nixon Administration 30 years ago have had war, a bad economy, and threats to our civil liberties converging to challenge us.

We can't trust our president, and he doesn't trust us.

We are angry with each other-closely divided between those whose patriotism consists in supporting the president, and those whose devotion is instead to the U.S. Constitution. For reasons both fair and unfair, much of the WORLD is mad at us.

Since 9-11-2001 we've asked ourselves 'WHY DO THEY HATE US?' President Bush answers very simply that "they hate our liberty and freedom."

I think the answer to The Question of the 21st Century lies in restoring to prominence our lost goal of the Common Good.

The United States suffered terrible losses in World War II. But the war was not waged here: Our infrastructure was not devastated, our economy quickly adjusted to robust consumer demand, and we did not walk away from our new role as a 'superpower.'

We approached the post-war world with a strong interest in our own prosperity and prerogatives, but we brought also a goal of achieving the common good for all nations. Our foreign policy took in the Marshall Plan, strong support for decolonization, and expanded foreign aid. Our domestic policies-the GI Bill for education, federal housing assistance, health care for seniors, liveable wages-brought prosperity undreamed of by earlier generations in our country.

Then, our objectives began to shift.

The Cold War contest between the US and the Soviet Union that stalemated at check points in Korea and Germany led us to intervene in a civil war in a little Southeast Asian country that was seeking its freedom from the remnants of colonialism.

Our arrogance led us to believe that we knew what Vietnam needed, so we exerted our military might to enforce our vision of democracy. By the end of our adventure in Vietnam, we had fallen away from both our search for the domestic common good, and from our comfortable belief in our military dominance in the international arena.

But did we learn the right lessons from our Vietnam era experience?

In my view we did not. We were misled into that war because we had been conditioned by the politics of fear, which was fueled by selective releases of 'intelligence' in the years before and during that war. It's an old story, and Cold War historians tried to remind us of that during last year's propaganda campaign to convince us we needed to fear Saddam Hussein.

In October, Fred Kaplan warned: "Intelligence analysis should be kept out of the hands of those who have a vested interest in the results." He reminded us of the classic cases of the 'bomber gap' and the 'missile gap' of the 1950s, in which misleading 'intelligence' caused us to spend billions to ensure our 'first strike' capability to deliver nuclear bombs.

Some of you may remember that John F. Kennedy used the concept of 'complacency' about the 'missile gap' in his campaign for president in 1960. When he later discovered the myth, Kennedy characterized himself as a 'patriotic and misguided man.'

And President Dwight Eisenhower, who understood it better than most, warned us to be wary of the 'military-industrial complex.' Vested interests-sometimes in the Pentagon, sometimes in Congress, sometimes in ideological think tanks-will use 'intelligence estimates' for their own ends.

The manufacture of crises to create a climate of fear-the selective use of fact and circumstance-has produced sorry episodes throughout our country's history: in the last century alone we had The Spanish American War, the internment of Japanese citizens, the domestic Red scares following both world wars, the Vietnam war.

In each instance intelligence was used and abused to justify a goal that betrayed our national principles and subverted the common good. Each instance bore the classic earmarks of secrecy and misuse of the media to induce the consent of the governed.

Twenty years ago, President Reagan convinced us that national defense meant military superiority and a missile shield. He convinced us that the UN is an ineffective forum for resolution of international disputes-that we should go it alone in the world. The end result was that we nearly bankrupted ourselves--fiscally and morally-as the Soviet Union imploded.

We were left with the world increasingly armed with weapons of mass destruction as other countries followed the example of the USA.

Reagan further undermined the goal of the common good by blessing the ethic that it is good to get as much as you can for yourself, and leave the poor to their own devices. President Reagan asked "Are you better off than you were four years ago?" Not "is our nation better off?" or "Is the world better off?'-but Are you alone, as an isolated individual without the privileges and obligations of community-better off?

During the Reagan Administration we participated directly or by proxy in military campaigns from Afghanistan and Lebanon to Grenada to El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and Panama.

The Gulf War accelerated our country's military predominance, and for many confirmed the goal of a global Pax Americana. But did it make us more secure? We were creating endless enemies.

Resentments kindled by our military adventures were evident in the 1990s terrorist attacks on our global outposts - Khobar Towers, the USS Cole, our African embassies-as well as in Oklahoma City.

President Bush decided that the lesson from Vietnam and afterwards was that military overcapacity is essential for security and that ignoring the domestic scene is alright as long as you can keep the eyes of the voters focused on tail-hook landings on the decks of aircraft carriers. Bush began the complete destruction of the common good for all Americans with tax cuts that depleted our treasury so that the needs of ordinary people could not be met while making a grotesquery of the common defense.

All of this was in motion before 9-11-2001. Those mind-bending, soul-shaking terrorist attacks on our own soil merely put all these forces into overdrive.

NOBODY felt secure. Fear was rampant.

Now-two years later, the War Department under Mr. Rumsfeld has laid waste to two weak countries-while our domestic situation both nationally and in most states went into steep decline.

Instead of calling for sacrifice and giving back for the common defense--to meet the demands of our 'war on terror'--the President gave back to a select few in the top tax brackets.

So far, we have not shown the spirit of the common good that we offered the Germans and Japanese after World War II. The people of Afghanistan and Iraq have cause to doubt the credibility of our President's promises, as do many Americans.

One of the most personally gratifying aspects of my attempts to hold the Bush Administration accountable to us and the US Constitution is hearing encouraging words from veterans-People like you-who oppose unilateral military adventurism and understand its necessary deceit and secrecy--and its inglorious consequences for the soldiers who carry it out in the name of our country.

One of you faxed me an excerpt from Major Smedley Butler's famous statement. A two-time Medal of Honor recipient, Butler understood that "war is a racket…something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. A racket," he said, "is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many."

We go along with it-at least initially--out of fear.

The events of 9-11 have unleashed primal emotions and suspended the innate skepticism of the American people. Out of fear, we have allowed ourselves to give away our liberties to the 'generals in charge' of homeland security .Americans are regularly asked to 'beware!'

And we learned that it is unpatriotic to question. Fear leads us to assent to policies that undermine the common good and make us less secure in an interdependent world.

I applaud the Veterans for Peace actions to expose the racket, to pierce the deceitful veil of secrecy that shrouds options to war. I'm here tonight to ask you to keep it up!

Lately, it seems, more Americans are rousing themselves from their fear-induced torpor to question the policies of the Bush Administration.

But we who dissent need to raise our voices about the lessons of history's 'credibility gaps' to underscore the dangers of the current heedless policies that make us less secure.

President Franklin Roosevelt asserted that 'The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.'

Fear paralyses. Fear blinds us to the dangers that arise from the very methods we use to defend ourselves.

The 'missile gap' of the 1950s-fear-mongering assessments of the enemy's capabilities-illuminates the racket behind this president's reckless multibillion dollar plunge backwards into biological and nuclear weapons of mass destruction.

International agreements that were negotiated out of the fear of mutually-assured-destruction-agreements that have kept our country secure for decades-now are unilaterally abandoned.

U.S. abrogation of the 1972 ABM Treaty is MAD-ness.

It will not make us more secure. It will not make the world secure. It does nothing for the common good.

North Korea got the message. Iran? Pakistan? India? None are sitting back. They are defending themselves-just like we are.

Yes-war is a racket-a seemingly mindless perpetual motion machine.

Consider the growing reliance on private corporations to carry on our military adventures.

Didn't we learn anything from Oliver North's misadventures in Nicaragua? Have we forgotten the more recent downing of a plane carrying American missionaries because of shoddy work by private CIA contractors?

We only know what gets reported-because private military contractors operate outside the rules and without much oversight.

Contracts for less than $50 million are exempt from Congressional notification. And now we're assembling a new coalition of those countries willing to barter with us to send their troops to Iraq.

Why DO they hate us?

As the world's superpower we must lead in a new direction. Our best path to the common good and our own security is to clean up six decades of mistakes: rather than spend trillions for space-based weapons, let's repair the havoc created around the world by landmines, Agent Orange, and depleted uranium munitions.

Rather than walk away from the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, Let's clean up 60 years of nuclear waste at labs and sites all over the world and in our country. Rather than abandon international biological weapons controls, we should be leading others to ban them from our planet.

As a people, we must hold our government accountable to seek the common good that is the cornerstone of the U.S. Constitution.

Our leaders must not endanger those they are sworn to protect without just cause. Our troops on the front lines around the globe deserve to know clearly that they are making the world safer for their countrymen.

Our national honor depends on it. The future of our children's children depends what we do today.

Defeating the folly of militarism by overcoming the politics of fear is the most critical campaign of this generation.

Thank you for your attention.