Letter to Democrats: Rein in the U.S. War Machine (Part One)
In Bellingham, Washington on Jan 28, 2024 the Washington State Democratic Central Committee passed a resolution calling for a less militarized foreign policy and for a “just transition” to a peace economy.
Resolution on the Urgency of Transitioning to an Economy Based on Peace
On Dec 7, 2023, the Washington State Democratic Progressive Caucus had unanimously passed nearly the same resolution (details below).
But though the Democrats give lip service to reining in militarism, most Democrats continue to support the wars and aggressive military actions in Ukraine and Israel, and they continue to support or endure preparations for war with China. This has got to change and will likely change if more people learn some facts about the background to the war in Ukraine.
Most Americans initially supported the wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, thinking that the wars were noble defenses of democracy.
Eventually, Americans learned that all three wars were far from noble and that the government had been lying about their progress.
Similar things can be said about the wars, proxy wars, and government overthrows in Iran (1953), Indonesia (1965-1966), Kosovo, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Gaza, throughout Latin America, and elsewhere.
Several million people died in the Vietnam War. Approximately 1 million people died in the U.S.-backed war in Indonesia. Hundreds of thousands died in U.S. proxy wars in Latin America, where U.S. meddling continues to this day.
According to Brown University’s Costs of War project, post-9/11 U.S. wars killed 900,000 people directly and another 3.5 million people indirectly.
These wars, overthrows, and associated economic sanctions caused refugee crises that destabilized governments throughout Europe and caused havoc at the U.S. border.
Virtually the only people held responsible for these disasters were whistleblowers who exposed U.S. war crimes and lies.
Yet not six months after the disastrous end to the disastrous war in Afghanistan, the U.S. was again at war: a proxy war with Russia in Ukraine.
The government and its compliant media told Americans that the Russian invasion was “unprovoked.” So most Americans believed that U.S. military aid for Ukraine was a noble defense of democracy.
How can so many Americans be naive enough to believe what the government says about Ukraine, given the history of US lies about wars?
While Russia’s 2022 invasion was criminal, the sad truth is that the U.S. is far from innocent in the crisis, and the U.S. has launched numerous and less justified wars worldwide far from its borders.
Senior U.S. diplomats, academics and journalists said that aggressive NATO expansion provoked the war in Ukraine and that the U.S. helped overthrow the government of Ukraine in 2014, allying with far-right groups Right Sektor, Svoboda, and Azov Battalion to do so. In much the same way, the U.S. allied with Muslim extremists to atack Kosovo, Libya, and Syria, where the U.S. currently occupies one third of the country with help from its proxy army, the Syrian Defense Forces.
The U.S. has a history of supporting extremist groups for geopolitical reasons and then facing dire blowback later. A case in point is U.S. support for the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, which contributed to the rise of the Taliban and al Qaeda. Going further back, one can point to the U.S. coup in Iran in 1953, which led to anti-U.S. sentiment in Iran and the evenutal Iranian hostage crisis and revolution.
The U.S. supported Nazis in Ukraine from right after the Second World War. (Source: CIA Archives)
It's not just the far left and far right who acknowledge U.S. partial responsibility for the crisis:
I know that all this is not a popular view in the current Democratic Party, which, amazingly, has become more hawkish than the crazy GOP.