The United States can do anything it wishes, at least until a consortium of the decent governments of the world decides they won't take it anymore.

Our government lied to the world and to its own citizens to get into Iraq. Yes, there were some very few of us who expressed horror at the prospect, but most lapped it up or sat jaw agape and allowed the process to proceed. Some could hardly wait for the actual invasion to wave the flags and "Support Our Troops," apparently innocently blind or obtuse to the treachery and the consequences.

Now more than 4200 of those celebrated troops, mostly youngsters have been destroyed as a consequence of those lies, as well as over a million Iraqis, for the most part innocent civilians. Millions more Iraqis have emigrated to escape the perils of the U.S. "spreading freedom and democracy" across their country.

But now – we are told – things are going more our way, apparently as indicated by a declining kill-rate. To any decent person of reasonable intelligence – having over the past six years detected no scintilla of benefit to himself, our country or humanity – this would appear to be a great opportunity for the flies to get off the flypaper, i.e. to spare the further slaughter of human beings (both ours and theirs) and stanch the Katrina-like flood of treasure cascading from our national coffers. But, not so we are told. Why? "Wull, you know, we can't just cut and run!" And lo and behold, in large part, the jaw-gaping re-commences.

Can't just cut and run? You bet your sweet bippy we can, our choices being cutting-and-running or staying-and-more-suffering. The same masters who got us into this mosh pit of slaughter now want us to stay in it, even with the inevitability that things in Iraq will again get worse, the kill-rate re-ascend, and our treasure will in greater flood seep to disappear into that desert two oceans away from our shores, except for that generous portion that flows into the vaults of those who profit from treachery, the lust for oil and the business of war.

What we actually just can't do is to permit the lying greed and power meisters to abuse us and humanity for their own base purposes any longer. And our first step must be to remove all of our troops from Iraq now. No nonsense, no obfuscation, no manipulation: ALL OUT NOW !

Will there be strife in Iraq after we leave? Absolutely. But leaving yields two advantages, the first of which is that we'll no longer be in the crossfire while paying for the carnage in American lives and treasure, and the second is that the Iraqis will themselves finally get the opportunity to struggle for and to earn the government they deserve, which -- as history is our guide – is the inescapable fate of all peoples. Now – just how do we cut and run? Completely and expeditiously, but certainly not without regard to the safety of our troops nor in complete disregard for the Iraqis. The various scenarios proposed thus far are not acceptable, including:

(1) A President McCain's plan: By 2013 (and beyond?)

(2) Various of the generals: In three years, or perhaps never.

(3) President Obama's: First it was 16 months, then twenty-odd months, and leaving a residual "non-combat" force of 50,000 (No, these would not be nurses and chaplain's assistants, but whatever in the world would be 50,000 non-soldiering soldiers stationed in a desert two oceans away from the shores of their homeland?)

A prudent plan for the safe evacuation of all of our troops from Iraq requires ten weeks, with the timeline to start upon the order of the most powerful person in the world, the only person who can command a withdrawal, and the only person who contrarily can command that the troops remain, and that person is, of course, the President of the United States. Such an order we will consider as Phase A of the withdrawal plan. The order may be made today or in ten years, but nothing will happen to change anything until that order is pronounced.

Once the presidential order is given, Phase B commences. Phase B is the actual preparation for withdrawal, including the immediate notification to the Iraqi government and our allies, such assistance that we can provide within Phase B to help the Iraqis prepare for their fuller responsibilities of governance, the transfer of facilities and the maximum of our productive equipment and materiel to the Iraqis, the withdrawal of a bare minimum of equipment we consider highly sensitive to our interests, the withdrawal or destruction of lethal equipment and material (e.g. depleted uranium weaponry and chemical and biological agents), a plan for the logistics and equipment required for the personnel evacuation, the determination of the airbases to be used for the personnel evacuation, the designation and preparation of the safe havens required to minimize danger to the troops, and a determination of the phased maneuvering required for progressively concentric troop movements into those safe havens and ultimately to the airports of debarkation.

Nothing in the five weeks of Phase B can be excused or allowed to delay the total ten-week program.

Phase B completed, now start the five weeks of Phase C, the actual air evacuation of our troops. This will require fifty 747 aircraft or aircraft of similar passenger capacity. 747's have a capacity of up to 550 passengers. For our purposes here, we will use a conservative capacity of 400 troops and their personal luggage.

There will be 50 of these aircraft required. And they ARE ABUNDANTLY AVAILABLE at the beckoning of the President.

Each of these 50 aircraft will make two round-trips per week, each trip out of Iraq with a minimum of 400 passengers, that will be a total of 200,000 passengers in the allotted time – comfortably more than our troop force in Iraq, and a capacity that can be used – as strictly authorized – to transport a sizeable number of non-military Americans and others we would wish to remove.

There is the withdrawal program: Ten weeks from presidential command to withdrawal of all American military personnel, conservatively structured to incur no risk incremental to the program. The risk, in fact, is not in withdrawing from Iraq, but in remaining, and we would do well to prepare ourselves to defend this position in readiness for the attack we can surely anticipate from the liars, greed mongers power meisters and madmen who got us into this historically treacherous debacle in the first place.

It's time to leave. President Obama told us "to make" him do what we want. It's time to raise our voice, tell him clearly what we want, tell him what America and humanity demand – to get ALL American troops out of Iraq NOW!

-- Rafe Pilgrim
Speech originally given 04/04/09
subsequently published in OpEdNews

The theme of this rally is Beyond War: A New Economy Is Possible – The Legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Continues. I would like to add that a new economy is not only possible, it is absolutely necessary in order for this nation to survive both economically and morally.
Ray McGovern, a former military intelligence officer and CIA analyst of 27 years, started his recent article entitled Welcome To Vietnam, Mr. President with the following statements, "I was wrong. I had been saying that it would be naïve to take too seriously presidential candidate Barack Obama's rhetoric regarding the need to escalate the war in Afghanistan. I kept thinking to myself that when he got briefed on the history of Afghanistan and the oft proven ability of Afghan 'militants' to drive out foreign invaders-from Alexander the Great, to the Persians, the Mongolians, Indians, British, Russians-he would be sure to understand why they call mountainous Afghanistan the 'graveyard of empires.'"

McGovern continues, "And surely he would be fully briefed on the stupidity and deceit that left 58,000 U.S. troops-not to mention 2 to 3 million Vietnamese-dead in Vietnam. John Kennedy became president the year Obama was born. One cannot expect toddler-to-teenager Barack to remember much about the war in Vietnam, and it was probably too early for that searing, controversial experience to have found its way into the history texts as he was growing up."

The US’s addiction to perpetual war, perpetually increasing pentagon budgets including Obama’s recent increase, perpetual stockpiling of nuclear and conventional weapons of mass destruction while telling other nations they can have none, and perpetual prioritizing of empire-building over the needs of the workers and the dispossessed of this country has brought us to our economic and moral knees and will soon wipe us out completely if we, as a people, don’t stand up and demand a more responsive government of, by and for the people.

Many in this country have already died from lack of access to affordable health care. More die every day.

Many students suffer from lack of teaching materials, crumbling schoolhouses and underpaid teachers.

Tens of thousands of Americans go to bed hungry every night, including children and the elderly.

More people become jobless every day while our corporations ship jobs overseas with impunity to boost their bottom lines no matter what the cost to our families and our communities.

Tent cities are popping up all over the country as millions of hard-working families lose their homes to the financial executives who swindled and deceived their way to riches and pulled our economic foundation and the social safety net out from under us.

While our planet heats up to outrageous temperatures that have already caused the loss of some life forms and is causing the polar ice caps to melt even faster than expected, corporate executives pocket tens of millions of taxpayer dollars for having failed miserably at their jobs, all with a wink and a nod from the conspiracy between our two-party political puppets, corporate news anchors, and the financial titans of Wall Street.

What is going on right under our noses is insane, corrupt, indefensible, criminal, unjust, immoral and just plain stupid. All this in the so-called richest and most powerful nation on earth. Something is terribly wrong with this picture.

It’s as if we were about to sit down to a nice dinner of rice and beans and vegetables and all of a sudden a gigantic robotic arm operated by the CIA from an undisclosed location crashes through the roof of our house, smashes our plates and bowls and tables and chairs, steals our food and then takes all these resources, transforms them into ever more lethal devises of death, ships them overseas and kills innocent and destitute civilians in their war-torn communities and nations. Stealing from workers here to kill the poor there while reaping obscene profits in the name of some euphemistic and illusive "national security" while in actuality making us much less safe.

Obama’s escalation in Afghanistan, his bombing of Pakistan and his leaving of many permanent military bases and troops in Iraq legitimizes Bush’s wars. These actions also prolong and exacerbate our deadly serious economic calamity.

We’ve been deceived and betrayed by the slick game-players of the two-party system, their heinous public relations firms and lobbyists, the too-big-to-fail corporate giants and the mainstream media.

The two parties pretend to be oppositional forces but in fact work for and answer to the same war-profiteering corporations that funded their electoral campaigns and got them into cushy positions of power and wealth in the first place.

While defense contractors’ waste, abuse and fraud cannot account for billions of our tax dollars, our elected representatives do not even launch an investigation into where all the money has gone, let alone call for an independent investigation of the causes of our financial collapse or an investigation of the perpetrators of the serial war crimes committed under Bush and continuing under Obama. Of course they don’t want to clean house and investigate. They themselves would be implicated by the evidence and the façade would crumble. Heaven forbid we should have anything but business as usual.

While the war in Iraq continues to cost us over 10 billion dollars a month, a cost that’ll rise even as troops are transferred to Afghanistan, our government refuses to even invite proponents of a single-payer health care system to the table despite the fact that the majority of people these politicians are paid to represent are solidly in favor of such a system.

We not only need to move beyond the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we need to withdraw all of our troops from all of the 750 US military bases in all 150 countries that we occupy with over a half million military personnel. This would allow the hundreds of billions of dollars each year spent on empire to be used to save lives, improve the quality of life and help millions of homeless, sick, hungry and jobless US citizens right now

The American Empire must be downsized if we are to survive. The Empire will be downsized and pressing domestic needs will take priority only if we take responsibility to insure that it happens.

We must trust our instincts and not allow ourselves to be confounded by the perpetual confusion machine that keeps itself in power by constantly wagging the dog and keeping us distracted from what is truly important and vital while it sells us war after war.

We must keep the pressure on our elected officials, the public servants we pay to represent us and our best interests while they instead plan and fund war after war.

We must do justice to the legacy of Dr. King and continue to educate a bamboozled public by infiltrating the media with a non-stop barrage of letters to editors stating that peace cannot be won with a militaristically aggressive and violent foreign policy.

We must talk with anyone who will listen about the urgency of the situation and the ways in which the powers that be try to keep us powerless and in line.

We must present alternatives to the status quo and speak clearly against the convoluted political psycho-babble and obfuscated mumbo-jumbo of the idiot talking heads that accost us at every turn including so-called progressive organizations and think tanks like MoveOn and The Center For American Progress.

We can and must withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan now. Rafe Pilgrim, fellow Veterans For Peace member, will tell you exactly how in a matter of weeks that could be done.

US Labor Against The War lists as one of its goals in its mission statement, "To develop and encourage member education that establishes the inherently contradictory relationship between meeting the needs of working people and their communities…and current public policies that keep increasing government spending on the military, operating bases and installations around the world, and investing in military-related production and research of conventional and nuclear weapons systems."

In closing, as MLK stated 42 years ago today, exactly one year before he was assassinated for speaking truth to power, "Tonight… I wish not to speak with Hanoi and the NLF (we can substitute Baghdad or the Taliban), but rather to my fellow Americans, who, with me, bear the greatest responsibility in ending a conflict that has exacted a heavy price on both continents. We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for victims of our nation and for those it calls enemy, for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers."

Now is the time to act to stop these needless and debilitating wars. Now is the time to prioritize domestic needs at the top of our national agenda.

St Augustine People for Peace and Justice was formed six months before the illegal invasion of Iraq in October, 2002. Back in the day, we had hundreds at rallies and demonstrations. When I came to St Augustine 3 years ago, at the candlelight vigil in 2006, on the 3rd anniversary of this immoral and illegal invasion, we had 50 people. This year, March 19, 2009, we got 25 people to show up and about half were not even our members. We’re still around; we still demonstrate monthly. We still have death, destruction and despair. So what has happened? What has changed?
I started a garden this spring, determined to learn how to grow my own food. I needed a lot of help, did a lot of reading and talking to gardeners and it struck me how much a seed depends on so many factors to grow and thrive. Then I started thinking about the peace movement and wondering why IT isn’t growing and thriving.
HOW CAN THIS BE, when the steady drenching rain of tears forces our seed to germinate and break through the surface to grow towards the sun of truth and justice?
HOW CAN THIS BE, when the slow dripping irrigation of the blood of our kids and innocent Iraqis and Afghanis draws our roots down deeper and stronger into the soil of anger?
HOW CAN THIS BE, when the ravaged compost of dead children’s bodies enriches the ground of our rage?
HOW CAN THIS BE, when the winds of economic hurricane batter us and force us to strengthen both our roots and our resolve?
HOW CAN THIS BE, when the sunlight of the true human cost of these “wars” energizes us to grow new branches and produce ripe fruit full of new seeds?
HOW CAN THIS BE?
We are those seeds. We are and always have been the seeds of peace. We have everything we need to grow strong and propagate our message. This is our time; the ground is fertile with rage, death and despair. When spiny thorns and insidious roots of weeds of derision and dissent try to crowd out our vitality, we fight back and grow stronger. This is the ground where peacemakers grow. This is where we will prevail, propagate and bear the fruit of peace. This day, this hour, this minute is our season to plant and grow. We must not wilt, we must not wither, we must not succumb to the weeds of despair. This is a harvest we cannot afford to lose. Plant your roots deep in the soil of anger, spread your branches wide to the truth, throw your seeds onto the winds of the apathetic and the ignorant and multiply the message of peace a thousand times. We must spread the peace, one seed at a time. Only this harvest will save our world.

Mary Lawrence at the Florida March For Peace
Melbourne, FL - 03/19/09

How many Obama-ordered civilian deaths in foreign lands will you tolerate before speaking out and taking action? Three Pakistani children are three too many for me.

In a blatant and unmistakable act of war against a sovereign nation, Barack Obama, four days into his administration on Friday, January 23, 2009, as commander in chief of US armed forces, ordered the US military to launch Hellfire missile strikes on homes in northwest Pakistan, killing dozens of civilians including at least three children. The military was aiming to bomb al Qaeda and Taliban “suspects,” but there was some unfortunate “collateral damage”. Oops.

Bomber pilots who leisurely drive to work each day, safely ensconced on military bases in the United States, fired the Hellfire missiles on civilians in Pakistan from unmanned, electronically controlled Predator drone aircraft. “Predator” plus “Hellfire” translates into the remote controlled explosion of children’s fragile bodies half a world away. Oh the joys of joystick bombing, the thrill of commuter combat killing, out of sight, out of mind, out of corporate US media.

The illegal air strikes and subsequent murder of civilians prompted mass protests against the US in Pakistan (a nuclear-armed nation!) and, in all likelihood, created hundreds more very angry people who are ready to do anything, anything, to defend their country, their families, and their deep sense of honor.

According to Pierre Sprey, a former Pentagon official and fighter aircraft designer, “…what happens on the ground is for every one of those impacts you get five or ten times as many recruits for the Taliban as you've eliminated. The people that we're trying to convince to become adherents to our cause have turned rigidly hostile to our cause in part because of bombing and in part because of other killing of civilians from ground forces.”

So, in a spirit of bipartisanship and fair play, mindful that in the country I serve no one is above the law, I call for the impeachment of Barack Obama for war crimes, crimes against humanity, violations of the Geneva and Hague Conventions and the Nuremberg Tribunal Charter, and numerous U.N. General Assembly resolutions, just as I had called for the impeachment of Bush/Cheney for committing the very same crimes.

Anyone who doesn’t think Obama should be impeached who supported the impeachment of the previous administration for these same crimes is dealing in double standards and hypocrisy. Everyone who voted for Obama has blood on his hands, especially after he made repeated campaign promises to increase already bank-busting military spending, double the number of US forces in the unwinnable US war and occupation of Afghanistan, continue to develop and deploy Reagan’s Star Wars missile “defense” system, and to “go after suspected terrorists wherever they are.”

Thanks to Democratic and Republican administrations alike, as well as to resource grabs inside developing countries by many Western nations, terrorists are now all over the world striking out against the continuing exploitation and occupation of their lands. Is Obama going to “go after” them all? With hawk-lady Clinton as Secretary of State and so many of Obama’s cabinet choices steeped in generations of promoting US aggression, I don’t doubt it.

Clinton’s appointment of Richard Holbrooke as US special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan is viewed by many as a recipe for disaster. Says Scott Ritter, former Marine Corp intelligence officer and U.N. weapons inspector, “The cause-and-effect relationship between what the United States does inside Afghanistan and what occurs inside Pakistan cannot be ignored by American policymakers. He [Holbrooke] tends to seek military solutions to difficult ethnic-based problems, and he is likely to argue for the deployment of even more U.S. troops to that war-ravaged nation. That would be a historic mistake.”

Obama, by surrounding himself with foreign policy hawks, is falling into the same old savage mindset: bomb first, analyze later.

As for the tens of millions of Americans who expect the Obama administration to hold Bu$hCorp responsible for it’s murderous multiple felonies, don’t hold your breath. With Obama engaged in the very same activities that enraged us and the world about Bush’s neocon plans for “total global dominance” (this exact phrase appears throughout Department of Defense literature), do we really expect justice?

It speaks volumes that Obama brazenly nominated defense contractor Raytheon lobbyist William Lynn as Deputy Secretary of Defense, already waiving his own policy of not nominating industry lobbyists with conflicting interests for positions in his cabinet. So much for the “hope” to “change” the D.C. insider revolving door of military/corporate/government collusion and their perpetual war influence peddling.

Raytheon designs and manufactures some of the planet’s most barbarous devices of death and destruction that have killed hundreds of thousands of civilians and made Lynn a very rich man. Raytheon makes cluster bombs that explode on playgrounds in children’s faces long after they’ve been dropped, the Patriot anti-missile system, the Tomahawk cruise missile, Paveway laser-guided bombs, and the errant “smart bomb’ that missed its target in Baghdad in 2003 and killed at least 62 Iraqi civilians. Oops.

The Pentagon rewards Raytheon with tens of billions of our tax dollars each year to make these and newer, more lethal WMD. Lynn has been on Raytheon’s payroll since 2002. That this nomination hasn’t sent up blinding red flags and caused progressives to scream out in protest is beyond me. As long as the American Idle allow such conspicuous and flagrant travesties of justice and crimes against the peace, we, the sheeple, will continue to get exactly the government we deserve.

While Obama is making an honest attempt to deal with our many domestic crises, his foreign policy is nothing but a continuation of US imperialistic, genocidal misadventures masquerading as “homeland security” that are in actuality weaponized offenses designed to control as many of the world’s resources as we can get our grubby little hands on.

It is this material aggression and the sense of American exceptionalism for which Obama must now be held accountable. Hey – he wanted the job! Our job is to fire him if he commits crimes in the process of perpetuating the wanton greed of American empire and its supremacist, bigoted, unsustainable way of life. He has already committed the ultimate crime. Just ask the parents of those Pakistani children.

We must reach across the aisle, condemn the continuing US murder of civilians on their own soil, confront our racist attitude that our lives are worth more than theirs, and do what is right. Impeach Obama and stop the mass murder of civilians! And then continue to immediately impeach every commander in chief that commits crimes against humanity. America will be safer for it, and fewer veterans will commit suicide, and more money will be available to help the tens of millions of Americans falling into the craters of capitalism’s collapse (half of your federal tax dollars go directly to the Pentagon), and the world’s people won’t hate us so much, and precious, brown-eyed babies won’t get blown to smithereens in our name, and we might sleep a little better.

What if we wake up one day and realize that the terrorist threat is a predictable consequence of our meddling in the affairs of others?

What if propping up repressive regimes in the Middle East endangers both the United States and Israel?

What if occupying countries like Iraq and Afghanistan – and bombing Pakistan – is directly related to the hatred directed toward us and has nothing to do with being free and prosperous?

What if someday it dawns on us that losing over 5,000 American military personnel in the Middle East since 9/11 is not a fair trade-off for the loss of nearly 3,000 American citizens, no matter how many Iraqi, Pakistani, and Afghan people are killed or displaced?

What if we finally decide that torture, even if called “enhanced interrogation techniques,” is self-destructive and produces no useful information – and that contracting it out to a third world nation is just as evil?

What if it is finally realized that war and military spending is always destructive to the economy?

What if all wartime spending is paid for through the deceitful and evil process of inflating and borrowing?

What if we finally see that wartime conditions always undermine personal liberty?

What if conservatives, who preach small government, wake up and realize that our interventionist foreign policy provides the greatest incentive to expand the government?

What if conservatives understood once again that their only logical position is to reject military intervention and managing an empire throughout the world?

What if the American people woke up and understood that the official reasons for going to war are almost always based on lies and promoted by war propaganda in order to serve special interests?

What if we as a nation came to realize that the quest for empire eventually destroys all great nations?

What if Obama has no intention of leaving Iraq?

What if a military draft is being planned for the wars that will spread if our foreign policy is not changed?

What if the American people learn the truth: that our foreign policy has nothing to do with national security and that it never changes from one administration to the next?

What if war and preparation for war is a racket serving the special interests?

What if President Obama is completely wrong about Afghanistan and it turns out worse than Iraq and Vietnam put together?

What if Christianity actually teaches peace and not preventive wars of aggression?

What if diplomacy is found to be superior to bombs and bribes in protecting America?

What happens if my concerns are completely unfounded – nothing!

What happens if my concerns are justified and ignored – nothing good!

Please watch the 5-minute video of Rep. Ron Paul's "What If?" speech given on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives on February 12, 2009 linked on line and read the transcript of the speech below.  As Americans, let us take these questions posed by Dr. Paul and discuss them with our fellow Americans ... our friends, our family, our co-workers, our neighbors, our ministers, our "representatives" in all levels of our servant governments, the editorial boards of our local newspapers, our favorite talk show hosts on radio and television, the persons next to us at the gas pump or in the checkout line at the grocery.

"There comes a time when our silence is betrayal, and that time has come for us in relation to Vietnam." - Martin Luther King, Jr., from his "Beyond Vietnam - A Time To Break Silence" speech given to the CALC on April 4, 1967 at Riverside Church in NYC
For 56-minute audio and text of MLK speech, click here: http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkatimetobreaksilence.htm

Has the time come to take Dr. King's statement above and apply it to the U.S. government's bogus "Global War On Terror" which is totally based on a well documented pre-existing, pre-9/11 plan by the PNAC (look it up) to invade and occupy selected sovereign nations in the Middle East and Central Asia and which has been and continues to be sold and propagated to the American people by the lies told by the corporate-controlled media?  Has our overall silence as a people reached the point of betrayal?  If so, what will "we" do about it.  "We", two or more … starting with ourselves and the person we see in the mirror.

Click on this link to watch and listen to Dr. Paul’s 5-minute "What If?" speech: http://www.wimp.com/ronasks/