Brave Souls

In contrast to the presidential candidates who have lost their souls to the Israel Lobby, (see previous blog entry), there were a few brave souls at the recent debates. At the first Democratic debate on 4/26, Mike Gravel declared that other candidates frighten him. "When you have mainline candidates that turn around and say that there's nothing off the table with respect to Iran, --that's code for nukes, nuclear devices!" He reminded us that "the entire deaths of Vietnam died in vain, and they're dying in vain right now this very second. And you know what's worse than a soldier dying in vain, it's more soldiers dying in vain." He also noted that "we are mischaracterizing terrorism. Terrorism has been with civilisation from the beginning, and it will be there till the end." He explained that we have to change our foreign policy: the Iraq invasion created terrorists. Dennis Kucinich stated, "The global war on terror has been a pretext for aggressive war. As president of the US, I intend to take America in a different direction, rejecting wars as an instrument of policy.....I'd also put on the front of the agenda peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians because I can play an evenhanded role in reaching out to bring those peoples together." In the second Democratic debate on 6/3, Kucinich spoke out against state-sponsored assassination, "I don't think that a president of the US who believes in peace and wants to create peace is going to be using assassination as a tool." In the second Republican debate on 5/15, Ron Paul pointed out that we were attacked on 9/11 as blowback from our foreign policy. Later he referred to "The 9/11 Report" as confirmation of this fact. In the third Republican debate on 6/5, answering a question as to what is the most pressing moral issue in the US right now, Paul said, "it is the acceptance just recently that we now promote preemptive war. I do not believe that's part of the American tradition. We had in the past always declared war in defense of our liberties or to go to aid somebody, but now we have accepted the principle of preemptive war. We have rejected the just-war theory of Christianity, and now tonight we hear that we're not even willing to remove from the table a preemptive nuclear strike against a country that has done no harm to us directly and is no threat to our national security. I mean we have to come to our senses about this issue of preemption and go back to traditions and our constitution and defend our rights but not think that we can change the world by force of arms and to start wars."