Kucinich: Mistaking Militarism For Statecraft, Empire For Democracy, & Debt For Prosperity

Authored by Dennis Kucinich via Scheerpost.com,

“Turning and turning in the widening gyre, the falcon cannot hear the falconer. All things fall apart. The center cannot hold.”

– W.B. Yeats, The Second Coming

As of May 2024, the United States has committed over $175 (borrowed) billion to escalating the proxy war against Russia, and, as in the case of the Iraq and Afghan wars, with little regard for accountability pertaining to tracking military hardware,  equipment, funding, or  fraud prevention.

One of the most grotesque moments in this bloody global Punch and Judy show preliminary to nuclear war, was the recent arrival of Vladimir Zelenskyy, former president of Ukraine, making a campaign stop at an ammunition factory in Scranton, Pennsylvania, where some of the three million 155mm artillery shells the US has given Ukraine are produced.   

Alongside Zelenskyy, in an incitement-op photo promising further escalation of war, the Democratic Governor of Pennsylvania autographed one of the high-velocity artillery shells which will be aimed at Russia. Pennsylvania, which is home to the City of Brotherly Love, was unwitting re-Christened by its top official, with a cursive flair, as the state of brotherly hate.  

The fervor of warmongering, fueled by machismo and high bravado illustrates the failure of leadership and a fatal ignorance of the diplomatic process. We should be exercising the science of human relations, not propelling a hubristic  and ego-driven brinkmanship which accelerates the dialectic of war. 

For decades I have led opposition to war and advocated for the transformation of America’s prevailing policy of “Peace through Strength” to a forward-looking  policy of “Strength through Peace.” 

I challenged the Bush II Administration’s foreign policies, and introduced Articles of Impeachment against President George W. Bush  and Vice President Dick Cheney over Iraq and the lies which led us into war. Illegal and unnecessary, the Iraq war (debt-funded and authorized by both Democrats and Republicans) has cost our nation over $3 trillion, and the loss of 5,000 of our brave men and women who serve and injuries to countless more troops.

The war caused the deaths of over one million Iraqis.  Let that sink in. One million Iraqis perished in a war based on lies. Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. The war further damaged America’s global reputation and set us upon a path where, since 9/11, America has borrowed $8 trillion to keep the war machine in tune as our own nation’s pressing domestic needs for housing, health care, education, child care, and retirement security have been set aside.

When I heard Vice President Harris brag about former Vice President Dick Cheney endorsing her candidacy, that put the exclamation point on the fact that the leaders of the Democratic party are for war.  I am not.    

Why else would Vice President Harris become the front person for such virulent bravado, invoking lethality abroad?

A paradox of this campaign is that the much-villainized former President Trump, (representing a party that has also taken us into unnecessary wars) is the one who speaks to the need to negotiate and to talk directly with potential foes in order to avoid war, or to end it.   

I ran for President twice, in 2004 and 2008, to bring a halt to endless wars,  to stop the hemorrhaging of our nation’s wealth and to redirect our attention to our needs at home. During the Obama Administration, I fought against his expansion of war, against attacks on Libya, and Syria. That Administration’s surveillance and state-sponsored black-ops reached new heights, drawing America  further into the depths of a murky military abyss. 

All believers in the Judeo-Christian ethic are taught the equivalency of thought, word and deed. . A sin is a sin is a sin. Words create worlds and actions, and, well, they also create reactions. 

Whether a missile arrives in Russia is separate from the fact that the news of the Pennsylvania governor signing a warhead reached the Kremlin instantaneously.  Congratulations Governor, you just made your state a target. 

It is a faulty military strategy which is based upon baiting one’s targets to have an excuse to attack preemptively. This type of thinking isn’t about taking care of and protecting our allies. I would call it lunacy but it happens far more frequently than once every full moon!  We need level-headed leadership, not political actors mindlessly playing in the flash of WWIII, pandering for votes or for cash from the military industrial complex.

The U.S. government’s endless quest to instigate, fulminate or otherwise set our nation on a path of either participating in or of funding endless war has become an inconscient force which is now sweeping up nations in its maw and, if left unchecked, with soon draw in American troops and inevitably a world war will come home in ways that no one in the continental United States has ever experienced, far exceeding the horrors of 9/11.

W.B. Yeats’ poem, written over one hundred years ago, also pertains to the present moment, the breakdown of international law, the slaughter of innocents, open genocide, mocking humanity for its primal human instincts and instead preferring a descent into the maelstrom of kill or be killed, of “do unto others before they do unto you.”  Our nation’s leaders have lost their capacity for diplomacy.  And we have lost many chances for peace.

Ronan Farrow, in his brilliant book “War on Peace, the End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence,”  traced the catastrophe of substituting militarism for statecraft.

So we arrive at a point where we fully fund war in the Middle East, and, astonishingly stand helpless, vainly begging the recipients of our billions of dollars, our weapons, “intelligence,” and of our strategic advice – not to expand the war we are paying for, not to visit death upon innocents.  

We call for cease fire, to come to terms, to end the conflict, while the bodies pile up, and tensions escalate with all nations. Our collective voice is muted.  We confess futility to effect events which we have set in motion, as a Sorcerer’s Apprentice, and when tidal forces break loose, no thought is given to an end game which could lead not only to the destruction of our closest allies but to the undoing of our own nation.

Like pre-programmed robots from a 1950s B-movie, blind to our own extinction drive, immune to the signs of failing empire, and with notions of exceptionalism justifying colonization, Democratic bosses proudly  escalate war against Russia, the country with 5,580 nuclear warheads, about 1/3 of which are “launch ready.”  

Two years ago, the US, with the back door machinations of Britain’s Boris Johnson, rejected a peace agreement which would have kept Ukraine neutral, restored the peace and spared the lives of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and Russians. 

Instead, we now trot out muddle-headed EU politicians and our NATO sock puppets to support advancing the war deeper and deeper into Russia, sending missiles with more and more destructive power, hyping the fantasy of capsizing the government of a country which remembers losing nearly 30,000,000 people in World War II, during which Russia was on our side.  

To create an enemy is to provoke fear everywhere.  To misjudge an “enemy” is to court disaster and destruction.  As we give freedom and fortune to the egocentric war mongers, the military industrial complex and those naive enough to think that war equals peace for Ukraine – – life and liberty are ebbing at home.

We help our “friends” aggress, and cynically celebrate their victimhood, actively preventing diplomatic resolution, putting our avowed friends at great risk of destruction. 

Do you remember how back in October 2022, thirty Members of the U.S. Congress’ Democratic Progressive Caucus signed a letter calling for President Biden to consider diplomacy, and then in a matter of hours were pressured to retract the letter? The Members were reprimanded by the Administration and the Democratic leadership for their advocacy of peace.

In that withdrawn, forbidden letter, the Progressive Members stated,

 “The risk of nuclear weapons being used has been estimated to be higher now than at any time since the height of the Cold War. Given the catastrophic possibilities of nuclear escalation and miscalculation, which only increase the longer this war continues, we agree with your goal of avoiding direct military conflict as an overriding national-security priority. Given the destruction created by this war for Ukraine and the world, as well as the risk of catastrophic escalation, we also believe it is in the interests of Ukraine, the United States, and the world to avoid a prolonged conflict. For this reason, we urge you to pair the military and economic support the United States has provided to Ukraine with a proactive diplomatic push, redoubling efforts to seek a realistic framework for a ceasefire.”

Later in April 2023, nineteen Conservative Republicans, including now VP candidate Senator J.D. Vance, similarly communicated to the Administration the perils of escalating the war without diplomatic strategy, stating in their letter: 

“Our military assistance goes beyond tangible assets to include military training and intelligence support. The extent of our aid makes it increasingly difficult to deny Russian accusations of U.S. complicity in a proxy war. Vladimir Putin’s advisors are already framing the conflict as “a military confrontation between Russia and NATO, and above all the United States and Britain.” Russian tolerance for fighting a proxy war with NATO could run out at any point. The decision to invade Ukraine should be evidence enough of Putin’s willingness to use military force and should give us pause in continuing to push the limits at the risk of catastrophe.”

Ukraine is a pawn, politicized for Democratic presidential electoral gain, blood for ballots. Ukraine should have been free to choose its own destiny, its own government, protect its own agriculture and precious resources, free to live without fear of an invasion and control from Russia or any other country. Instead, denied the promise of true sovereignty, it has been forced to sacrificed the flower of its youth to war.

While the people of the US are being played by politicians who are giddy with the notion of stuffing the November ballot box with bombs rockets, missiles, artillery shells and national debt, our government is also being played by the equally unstable and craven leaders of foreign countries.

And so, the U.S. forks over endless rivers of U.S. taxpayers’ cash for endless wars, without any thought of how this all ends, or how or who ultimately pays. Red or blue, there are no winners in a war devouring our lives, our blood and our national wealth.

There is madness to all of this.  Our so-called leaders are whistling merry tunes through the graveyard of history, mocking the dead of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, because it happened to THEM, not us. Because something like that could never happen to us. Because we are smarter and stronger and have God on our side.

It is time to wake up, America. It is time to stop this madness which presents as legitimate governance, and to think, to speak and to stand for peace, diplomacy and the continuation of life on our small planet.