'Boots on the ground' must put 'feet in the streets' [View all]

[unhappycamper]

http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/ed-tant/58450/boots-on-the-ground-must-put-feet-in-the-streets

'Boots on the ground' must put 'feet in the streets'
Peace & Justice | Social Justice and Activism
by Ed Tant | September 21, 2014 - 9:06am

“Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more,” bellowed Shakespeare’s King Henry V as he led his countrymen into a deadly and dubious war. Once more the United States is girding for war. Once more, fear stalks the land as this nation is goaded into more war in the Middle East by the sorry and sickening actions of the latest terrorist group, ISIS. Once more we drift toward another desert debacle as Democrats dither and Republicans rave.

President Obama, who ran as a peace candidate in 2008, is being dragged into more war in Iraq and the rest of the Middle East. On Sept. 12, The New York Times blasted both the president and what it called “the cowardice of Congress.” The Times endorsed Obama during both his runs for the White House, but in its editorial said, “Mr. Obama, who has spent much of his presidency seeking to wean the United States off a perpetual state of war, is now putting forth unjustifiable interpretations of the executive branch’s authority to use military force without explicit approval from Congress.”

In the same edition of the newspaper, Yale law professor Bruce Ackerman accused the president of betraying the Constitution and exceeding even his predecessor, George W. Bush, in “imperial hubris.” The storm clouds of war are gathering and if the United States is led into war once more, then this country’s anti-war movement must put “feet in the streets” of America if this nation puts “boots on the ground” in the Middle East.

It didn’t take long for former Vice President Dick Cheney to rattle sabers and push for more war in the Middle East. Cheney was a leading architect of the disastrous American war on Iraq and he was a major member of the neoconservative Project for the New American Century, which called for regime change in Iraq when the PNAC “think tank” set up shop in 1997.