WAR – ONE MORE BARRIER

As the war over health care reform continues, another battle has heated up that deserves our equal attention. President Obama is poised to make a critical decision about our future role in Afghanistan. He is being pressured by his generals in the field, among others, to send more troops there to establish a stable government. Who are they kidding?

We have been at war in Afghanistan for eight years with little to show for it except lives and treasure lost and thousands on both sides seriously disabled. We have not captured Bin Laden, our original excuse for being there; we have not propped up our puppet, President Hamid Karzai, who is neck-deep in corruption and has just botched fixing his recent re-election; the country has never had a stable government that lasted any length of time; and the only thing that seems to unite it, at least temporarily, is the opportunity to make another empire crumble, first Alexander the Great, then Great Britain, then the USSR and now the USA.

It is time for Obama to commit us to an orderly withdrawal from the yawning grave in Afghanistan as he promised us he would in Iraq…and keep both of those promises. Even more important, it is time for him to commit to dismantling the American Empire, which has over 750 permanent military bases in over 120 countries around the world, protecting the interests of the transnational businesses that have controlled it for the last four decades and sapping the nation’s resources, badly needed here at home.

If you ask what qualifications this 75 year-old crip has to opine on a subject like this, I’ll tell you. As a diligent student of American foreign policy (my father taught the subject for 42 years), I know as much about it as most of the pundits bloviating about it elsewhere in the media;and, as the father of a son soon to be four, I have a vested interest in seeing this nation thrive again--and as a leader of the movement to bring social and economic justice to people with disabilities and other socially devalued groups, I have an obligation to provide that movement with the best thinking I can muster.

Those of us in the vanguard of that movement recognize that people with disabilities and our allies, current and future, have as great a stake in the issues of peace, economic equality, the future of the environment and health care reform as we do in improving and increasing the supports and human rights we are entitled to. In fact, we recognize that these issues are inextricably intertwined and must be addressed simultaneously.

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, symbols of our country’s misguided and failing imperialism, are sapping the resources we desperately need to restore and maintain our battered democracy. They are barriers to achieving the equality that democracy promises.

As a group that honed its activism by tearing down barriers, we call upon President Obama to lead us in an orderly withdrawal from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and to the creation of a society in which we can all live with pride as equals.