May 2003

Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC.

From the editor's desk

Population of Iraq: 22 million; population of the United States: 290 million--a mismatch we would never for a minute accept in the school yard or the Little League game. Why then on the battlefield? As a people, we've never liked a bully. How is it that we don't grasp the fact that today the world's bully is us?

Of course, one at a time we're sensible, decent people and we do get it.

For Mother's Day 2003 © Ellen Shub

In this May Peacework, Vietnam vet Michel Uhl looks at veterans' organizations, which rank high among the respected "authentic groups" (to borrow Noam Chomsky's phrase) doing some of the difficult, patient work of persuasion, and sociologist Paul Joseph offers an historical perspective on the overall health of today's peace movement. "A Woman's Place" embellishes Professor Joseph's analysis, helping us to see the distance we have traveled in one sphere since the 1960s. But Tim Wise's sobering look at white privilege reminds us of the huge tasks ahead for the peace movement as well as the university admissions offices--to educate ourselves, our neighbors, and our government as we try to carry on the work of dismantling racism in America.

If this war shows the US to be a bully, it also puts on display our historic tendency to wage war most brutally against non-white peoples. Think about Nicaragua, think about the Philippines. Think, for that matter, about the First Americans.

We've brought you articles on some of the topics Americans need to face up to as we ponder what it can possibly mean to "win" such a war--depleted uranium as a weapon of mass destruction, treatment of prisoners of war, the scarring of the people on whose land that war is fought, the desecration of their heritage and ours.

The US strategy of full spectrum dominance has profound consequences well beyond the Middle East. Dena Montague, John Feffer, and Eduardo Galeano consider its footprint in Africa and Korea and the Caribbean. The controversy swirling within intellectual circles around Cuba's treatment of its US-affiliated "dissidents" echoes lessons still to be learned from the Prague Spring of 1968 and the Soviet-Nazi Non-aggression Pact of 1939.

Pay close attention to the photographs on pages 21 and 22--just two among thousands, clipped from daily newspapers. One shows a young Iraqi child, watchful and afraid, as his family tries to flee the fighting. The other shows a US soldier, herself little more than a child, also watchful and afraid. What are we doing to our children?

We put our colleague Arnie Alpert's Open Letter to the IRS at the end, in the place of honor. He manages to spell out, and act out, a lot of what many of us wish we would say and do these days. The cost of these misadventures is just too great, at home and in every corner of the world. It's time to stop paying.

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