Mitchel Cohen

Bush is clearly gearing up for another “short” war before next year’s elections. Although many people have mentioned Cuba, Libya, and Korea as possible targets, it is likely he’ll go back into Iraq to “finish the job.”

Regardless of the location of the next “zap” war, however, anti-war activists in the U.S. have yet to seriously grapple with the inability of our movement to stop the last war. From the start of the “crisis” we were lied to by the government and corporate media, who carefully planned their deceptions to rouse the breast-beaters and militarize the public mind.

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For years, the U.S. government has denied that the Gulf War Syndrome exists, refusing to admit the severity of illnesses suffered by tens of thousands of veterans of that conflict. Recent studies, however, show that the soldiers’ illnesses are indeed real, and troops deployed to the Gulf were more than three times as likely as U.S. soldiers elsewhere to suffer chronic diarrhea, joint pain, skin rashes, fatigue, depression, and memory loss.

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In the old days, when the state hung somebody and the braided rope broke or the gallows came crashing to the ground it was taken by God-fearing men as a sign that a mistake had been made and the condemned soul was no longer theirs to take; the prisoner was reprieved.

Today’s wisdom, however, will abide no such mythology. Steeped in the profane religion of the New World Order, whose merchants of death trade haughtily in the machinery of holocausts, the only spirits that count are those that, indeed, count. Justice resides in the maintenance of profits, in preventing even for a moment the removal of pump from soil, head from noose.

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FE readers may remember the case of Danny Gillis [Fifth Estate #337, Late Summer 1991], a black man from Baltimore, who refused to board the Marine Corps bus to Saudi Arabia last December 17, and was beaten up (with his hands cuffed behind his back) under his Sergeant’s orders by four white Marines. Gillis required an operation on his shoulder due to injuries received during that attack, and is serving out his 18 month sentence.

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October 21, 1992 marked 25 years ago that a huge anti-war demonstration swept past the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. and over the bridges into Virginia, wave after wave of young anti-warriors crashing against the walls of the Pentagon.

GIs blocking entrance to the Pentagon, Oct. 21, 1967. Some demonstrators tried to levitate the structure while others put flowers in the soldier’s gun barrels. FE photo/Frank H. Joyce

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“To give food aid to a country just because they are starving is a pretty weak reason.”

—Henry Kissinger

Months before the United States sent troops to Somalia to supposedly protect food supply lines from the pilferage of “evil warlords,” Italy was completing arrangements to ship its toxic wastes to Somalia, with nary a protest from the U.S.

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Last December, Lawrence Summers the chief economist for the World Bank issued a surprisingly forthright memorandum to other senior World Bank staff in which he called for the distribution of toxic wastes and pollution away from the big industrialized nations and into relatively non-polluted areas of the world, as a means of rectifying the current toxic “imbalance.” “I’ve always thought,” Summers wrote, “that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly under-polluted; their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City.”

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Before the bombing of Iraq started, the paper of record—The Star (yes, that’s right, the supermarket tabloid)—reported that Sylvester Stallone had turned down an invitation from Marine Commandant Alfred Gray, Jr. to entertain the troops in the Gulf.

Said Rambo: “No, I won’t go... I don’t think what’s going on over there is right. So, why go over there and support it? Is the fact that we’re going to pay more for gas a situation which justifies sending 500,000 men over there to put their lives in jeopardy? Because Exxon is feeling the pinch?”

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