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OpEdNews Op Eds    H3'ed 12/21/15

An Open Letter to John Forbes Kerry

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Follow Me on Twitter     Message William P. Homans
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This is an open letter to John Forbes Kerry, who as co-chief policy formulator for the Obama Administration (along with his predecessor, and the officials of the other Party before that) has mired us in virtually inextricable wars against unbeatable local insurgencies AND jihadist fanatics, none of whom will ever surrender to the United States:
John Kerry, we need to withdraw our troops out of the Afghans'/Pashtuns/Arabs' own land, leave it to them. We cannot "pacify" or make a new western colony, uh, country, out of a place that has been kicking every invader's butt with guerrilla war for centuries. I mean, Afghanistan is as far as GENGHIS KHAN got. We can neither conquer Afghanistan nor remake it in our own image, no matter how bad we want the estimated trillions of dollars of non-renewable resources the land contains.
We cannot sort out the intractable divide between Sunni and Shi'ite Muslims. You, a Bostonian patrician non-practicing lawyer, sure enough can't do it.We cannot do it in Iraq, Syria or Libya, much less even try to neutralize the Shias of Iran (a country that has already demonstrated it can take our drones out of the sky) on behalf of our Sunni "allies".
The Secretary of State responsible for the news of these six American GIs dying iat Bagram once famously asked a Joint Congressional Committee-- it was April 23, 1971-- "Who wants to ask a man to be the last to die for a mistake?" Well, John Forbes Kerry, you have, 40-odd years later, answered your own plaintive question.
Now YOU are doing the asking, John. I marched with you when you were a Vietnam Veteran
Against the War.
Watermelon Slim at Hopson Plantation, Mississippi
Watermelon Slim at Hopson Plantation, Mississippi
(Image by self)
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I still am a VVAW, but you betrayed us in 1972 when eight of our members were facing agent-provocateur-generated conspiracy charges.
You disavowed your jailed brothers (found not guilty the next year in about half an hour of jury deliberation in Gainesville Florida's federal court). I took the phone call at your chapter office. Rather than stand with your brothers, you jumped into the race for the first office that came open, Fr. Robert Drinan's Massachusetts House seat.
You have been into nothing but self-aggrandizement within the Democratic Party, and maintaining the stability and continuity of the two party system (Democrats and Republicans may not be the same, but they are symbiotic. Each must have the other). You are one of the linchpins of the neoconservative cabal's grip on American foreign policy.
You and, sadly, Barack Obama, for whom my hopes were like those of hundreds of millions of Americans, continue to promulgate "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" war policies that only dig the United States deeper into the quagmire of conflicts which we can neither "win"-- there will never be any signing of unconditional surrender on the deck of a warship in these interminable asymmetrical wars-- nor control.
No matter how bad our mining and oil CEOs (our sheikhs in dark blue suits) want what's under all that middle eastern ground, without blowing them all the people there up, as theoretically American gambling magnate and advisor to Israel Sheldon Adelson has called on Israel to do to Iran over their nuclear capabilities, the Afghans and the Iraqis and the Syrians and the Kurds and all the various Arabs are still going to be there when we have done one of three things:
One: we come to understand that it is their land, even the ones who hate us the worst, and clearly see that the full-court-press Drill Baby Drill that American business owners want in the short term will in the moderate and long run be dangerous to our survival, and we will withdraw voluntarily.
Two: the fate of the US is the same as the former Soviet Union-- collapse under the financial burden of fighting protracted wars on several fronts at a time.: Eventually it couldn't afford to fight year after year in Afghanistan, and combined with a creaky and inefficient system, and the harshness of Marxist-Leninist dogma, it collapsed, and re-became the Russia it was before, though undeniably more democratic than either under the tsars or under communism, just as we will become something different than we are if the United States government should collapse.
Three: we can blow ourselves off the face of the earth, and our redundant weapons systems will make the rubble bounce.
Maybe you like playing at being a war-hawk, John Kerry. Given the common college heritage of you and George W. Bush-- Skull and Bones-- maybe you actually are getting off on playing global cloak and dagger, dispenser of arms and aid to people you think are "moderate rebels", or playing even a deeper game-- ensuring that American foreign policy conforms to Israel's. You're not known as a churchgoer, but maybe you actually get off on thinking apocalyptically.
If God is to be thanked for anything in the mess that first the Republicans-- the neocons were then in ACTUAL control-- and then the Democrats, who do now own the three war fronts we are now fighting on, and still run our foreign policy according to the neocon playbook, especially in Ukraine-- well, I thank him for Sergei Lavrov, who at least talked you and Big Ears in the White House out of full-scale assault in Syria months ago.
George Washington called for "no entangling alliances." If anybody was watching the last GOP candidates' debate, you saw 8 people all trying to show that they are the ones to go all over the world blowing people up (John Kasich actually said that it was time to "punch the Russians in the nose"!), plus Rand Paul.
The eight are calling themselves "conservatives." Well, interventionism, foreign-policy unilateralism, is not conservative, that is radicalism. Isolationism is true conservatism. Rand Paul is right in this, though libertarian economics falls apart upon application.He's the only actual conservative in that race.
And I say this, fellow Americans: everybody's making all this fuss in favor of turning the country back into the Wild West again, carrying around semi-automatic rifles openly et cetera. We are stuck between two strong currents of thought on guns: the desire not to see gun deaths rise, and the idea (never considered by the media, only by the NRA and other patriotic Americans, that Americans must not become a disarmed nation, because it will become a tyranny. I will admit that I see both points of view as valid.
I declare that American citizens should keep their guns, and that the United States should bring home its troops, and tell the world that if anyone wants to fight America, they should git after it and start swimming (the Taliban and Daesh and al-Qaeda have no navy or air force). It is many thousands of miles and the crossing of two oceans-- first the Indian, heading either south round the Cape of Good Hope and then turn north into the Atlantic Ocean and head for Cape West, or east through the South China Sea, and on across the Pacific Ocean.
We have LANDSAT supremacy; no invasion force can either leave its country of origin without being seen, much less get all the way across two oceans. Nor can any force sustain the logistical lines to support the invasion of America by even a platoon, much less battalions of Daesh fighters or Talibanites. No matter for Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik, the national security of the United States is not remotely threatened.
Russia is not threatening us. We have no business playing at regime change on its borders.
Let us resolve to fight any would-be attackers HERE, on these shores.,If somebody still feels froggy, they should hop on us here! let us be clear about one thing: there is no power, nor collection of powers, throw in all the jihadis for good measure, that can successfully invade a nation of 310 million people across the ocean We are impregnable, safe from any conceivable opponent.
Franklin D. Roosevelt's most famous quote was, "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself." Well, John Forbes Kerry, and all my other fellow American citizens, we MUST not be terrorized, and you, our candidates, must stop collaborating in the terrorization of the American people. Let the enemy come to us, if they think they have the guts, and we will whup them.
Let this government of, by and for the people declare peace. The American people can defend their own homeland just fine, thank you much!


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I've been in the fight against war, fascism, injustice and inhumanity for 47 years. I was at MayDay, 1971, and at the moratorium March the week before. I was one of the leaders of the Great New Jersey (more...)

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