If you would like to review the sad details of this lost "war," visit Rolling Stone's recent article, "How America Lost the War on Drugs." Thanks to new research, U.S. policy-makers knew with increasing certainty what would work and what wouldn't. The tragedy of the War on Drugs is that…
According to this article in Alternet, a British polling firm has concluded that "1.2 million Iraqis have met violent deaths since the 2003 invasion." More disturbing, Americans have no idea that their invasion has caused such misery and, for the most part, the American media doesn't care about reporting these…
What happens when you forget to mention something important to your spouse? When you are running late or distracted, for any number of reasons? Bills get paid late because you forgot to ask him to mail them, Johnny misses soccer practice because you forgot to tell Dad he needed to…
President Bush is going to send more than 20,000 more troops into Iraq and spend billions of more dollars to carry on a hideous war. Why? To protect Americans from terrorists, he tells us. Bush convinced Americans to invade Iraq by accusing Iraq of being responsible for the 9/11 attacks that killed 3,000 Americans. This argument suggests that the deaths of 3,000 people is a horrible thing.
Whenever 3,000 people die, it is a horrible thing. It might justify hundreds of billions of dollars, though certainly not the diversion of money from programs that save equal numbers of lives. 3,000 deaths justifies the deaths of more than 3,000 soldiers, we are told. I don’t agree with this. The political party that argues that there are clear moral rules (the Republicans) isn’t convincing me.
Does it make a difference that 3,000 innocent Americans die on the same day rather than over the course of a year? I wouldn’t think so. A death is a death, in my opinion. And 3,000 deaths are 3,000 deaths.
Therefore, shouldn’t the 16,000 murders that occur every year in the US require a response five times bigger than the invasion of Iraq? That’s 3,000 every ten weeks. Shouldn’t it require focused efforts to protect these victims? Shouldn’t it require a revamping of our entire criminal justice system, especially our prison system, which so often trains criminals to be even more vicious, rather than preparing them for ready for release? Where is our war on criminal violence? …
