JFK would not have sent hunter-killer teams to Yemen

Reprinted from my article at ConsortiumNews.com.

It was rather horrifying to wake to hear that the Obama administration is considering sending hunter-killer teams into Yemen in hopes of seeking out and killing suspected terrorists.

First, there’s no guarantee that the people the CIA has identified are, in fact, terrorists. There is no court for assessing evidence and no appeal process if mistakes are made. If some CIA analyst decides someone is a terrorist, that’s it. That’s horrific to me, as a lover of truth and justice.

Second, imagine telling your children that if they have a disagreement with another child at school, they shouldn’t talk, they shouldn’t appeal to higher authorities, they should just kill them. That’s essentially what the United States is doing and teaching by these actions. Shame.

Third, I’ve been reading a lot about President John F. Kennedy’s foreign policy in the last few weeks. He knew that you’d never win a war by firepower alone. If your enemy is hungry, first feed them, then seek common ground. Violence only ever begets more violence.

I talked to someone whose hardcore Republican parents nonetheless talked with great fondness for President Kennedy and felt he was the best president we ever had.

Why? They were immigrants from El Salvador, and remembered how where Reagan had sent guns, Kennedy had sent care packages – caritas – of food to give away to the starving people. That bought more goodwill for America than violence ever did.

His “Alliance for Progress” started as a program to bring economic support to Latin America. The perversion of that program to include police and military training came about after Kennedy’s death. (You can read Kennedy’s original vision for the program, as outlined in this speech, given in the first 100 days of his administration.)

In Indonesia, Kennedy created a plan of economic stimulus and support, which was reversed after his assassination.

Kennedy was so certain that the way to a better future came from educating and feeding people, rather than killing them, that he created the Peace Corps with the goal of doing just that.

Yemen is so poor its capital city may run out of water within a decade. A third of its population is malnourished. I can’t think of anything more likely to breed terrorism than a population that has no choice but to kill to survive.

That kind of terrorism I understand. I certainly don’t condone it, but I understand that terrorism does not feel like a choice when people are that desperate.

Where Kennedy would have sent food and water, the Obama administration is considering sending “hunter-killer” teams. And the fact that the media can talk so openly about this shows how far we’ve fallen from Kennedy’s vision of America as a benevolent leader. Where is the outrage?

And does it even make sense that anyone in Yemen would be trying to attack the United States?

Yemen is already in conflict with its neighbor, Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia is rich, so it would at least make sense that Yemenese terrorists would target their rich neighbor in the hope of winning concessions.

It makes little sense that they would instead take whatever tiny resources they could scrape together in an effort to target the U.S. half a world away. [Indeed, the director of Yemenia Airways has denied that any UPS cargo plane or packages had left Yemen in the 48 hours prior to the alleged bomb shipment.]

I suspect this latest counter-terrorism operation isn’t about trying to end terrorism, which has supplanted “anticommunism” as the excuse du jour for enacting whatever policies Washington wants overseas. As with anticommunism, counter-terrorism is the excuse used for going after other countries’ resources.

When the CIA helped overthrow Iran’s democratically elected leader Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran in 1953, the explanation at the time was that he was suspected of being a communist, but the CIA’s official history gives the first reason as Mossadegh’s nationalization of Iran’s oil industry.

When the CIA then overthrew Guatemala’s democratically elected leader Jacobo Arbenz, another non-communist, it was to reclaim nationalized farmlands for American businesses and to show Latin America that further nationalizations would not be tolerated.

In 1990, after Saddam Hussein got an apparent “green light” from President George H.W. Bush’s ambassador to invade Kuwait, the Iraqi invasion became an excuse to put U.S. troops permanently in the oil-rich region.

But President George W. Bush’s “war on terror” changed everything. While the United States used to do its empire building covertly, now it’s just a bald imperialist power, trying to establish military bases in other countries all over the world and not surprisingly upsetting many of the locals.

Imagine if China established a military base on American soil. Would Americans become sudden fans of the Chinese? Or would we be angry, fearing our nation had been in part taken over by a foreign power we never invited in? How is it that Americans do not understand that nearly every “victory” abroad won with guns ensures a long-term loss for America?

The Democratic Party’s severe losses on Tuesday were in part a reflection of President Obama’s failure to follow the moral vision President Kennedy once outlined. He showed Americans how to lead with our hearts and thus how to win the hearts of people from other nations.

Unfortunately, those who feel that the only way to lead is with guns now run the show.

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Remembering RFK's call on the anniversary of his last day of life

Forty-one years ago, on the morning of June 4, 1968, reporter Jack Newfield rose early and drove around Los Angeles before the sun came up, before the polls for the California primary opened. What he saw contradicted the conventional wisdom that people of color and poverty didn’t vote. He saw long lines of people in some of the poorest areas of the city lined up to vote for Senator Robert Francis Kennedy. In fact, more people would vote in Watts and East LA than in Beverly Hills in that election.

A great part of Robert Kennedy’s appeal came from his authenticity. Unlike most people in politics, he didn’t focus on the politically expedient. Kennedy campaigned for gun control in pro-gun Oregon. He chided medical students seeking Vietnam War draft deferments because he didn’t feel it was fair to put the burden of fighting the war solely on the backs of the poor. He complained many times about welfare, feeling that it caused dependency, when what the people really needed were jobs. In South Africa, he denounced apartheid and wondered aloud, “What if God is black?”

As a Senator, frustrated by the slow pace of the legislative process, he became a community organizer, rounding up leaders in both the activist and business communities to turn an economically disadvantaged New York neighborhood into the nation’s first community redevelopment program, the Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation. As Newfield wrote in his memoir “RFK,” “Kennedy seemed to believe in moral outrage as public policy. He felt that the ‘unacceptable’ – like living conditions in Bed-Stuy – had to be changed, not just deplored in speeches.”

Kennedy became a fierce opponent of the war he and his brother helped to start. Under pressure from Tom Wicker on “Face the Nation” as to his contradictory stance of opposing the Vietnam War while refusing (at that point) to challenge President Lyndon B. Johnson for the Democratic party presidential nomination, Kennedy breached his own dam, saying:

“…we’re killing innocent people because we don’t want to have the war fought on America soil, or because they’re 12,000 miles away and they might get to be 11,000 miles away. … Those of us who stay here in the United States, we must feel it when we use napalm, when a village is destroyed and civilians killed. This is also our responsibility. This is a moral obligation and a moral responsibility for us here in the United States. And I think we have forgotten that. … I think we’re going to have a difficult time explaining that to ourselves.”

The day after Kennedy’s now famous speech in the wake of Martin Luther King’s assassination, Kennedy spoke these words at a luncheon in Cleveland:

“What has violence ever accomplished? What has it ever created? … [W]e seemingly tolerate a rising level of violence that ignores our common humanity and our claims to civilization alike. We calmly accept newspaper reports of civilian slaughter in far-off lands. We glorify killing on movie and television screens and call it entertainment. We make it easy for men of all shades of sanity to acquire whatever weapons and ammunition they desire.”

Kennedy also spoke of “another kind of violence, slower but just as deadly, destructive as the shot or the bomb in the night. This is the violence of institutions, indifference and inaction and slow decay. This is the violence that afflicts the poor, that poisons relations between men because their skin has different colors. This is a slow destruction of a child by hunger, and schools without books and homes without heat in the winter.”

But Kennedy’s strongest words could well be repeated today when considering the terrible conflict between the Palestinians and the Israelis, our battles in Iraq and Afghanistan, or even the rhetoric of hate radio, for that matter:

“When you teach a man to hate and fear his brother, when you teach that is a lesser man because of his color or his beliefs or the policies he pursues, when you teach that those who differ from you threaten your freedom or your job or your family, then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens but as enemies—to be met not with cooperation but with conquest, to be subjugated and mastered. …

“We must admit the vanity of our false distinctions among men and learn to find our own advancement in the search for the advancement of all. We must admit in ourselves that our own children’s future cannot be built on the misfortunes of others. We must recognize that this short life can neither be ennobled or enriched by hatred or revenge. Our lives on this planet are too short and the work to be done too great to let this spirit flourish any longer in our land.”

Kennedy’s own life was short indeed. He lived only eight more weeks after that speech before an assassin’s bullet took him down in the pantry in Los Angeles.

Kennedy was asked by the British TV host David Frost just a month before his death how he would like to be remembered.

Kennedy responded, “Something about the fact that I made some contribution to either my country, or those who were less well off. I think back again to what Camus wrote about the fact that perhaps this world is a world in which children suffer, but we can lessen the number of suffering children, and if you do not do this, then who will do it? I’d like to feel that I’d done something to lessen that suffering.”

Whose suffering can you lessen today? Will you do it? There are so many ways. If you don’t see a direct path, consider contributing money to a charity. If you have no money, consider volunteering at a homeless shelter. Write a letter to your Congressperson asking them to create more jobs. Do something today, in honor of one of the best leaders this country never got the chance to have at the helm.