As we expected, we got a lot of e-mails today asking us if we think U.S. President Obama’s announcement that he plans to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan is a good idea.

Short answer: No.

Longer answer: The U.S. needs to stop this deceptive and catastrophic “War on Terror”. U.S. Americans have to be the ones to stand up against their own leaders’ imperialist desires. Out of Iraq. Out of Afghanistan. Now. And the U.S. needs to take responsibility for all of the death, destruction, and suffering its caused. Also, the leaders of the political establishment and business elite most responsible for carrying out and supporting these vicious policies must be held accountable and punished. These are the most basic, concrete first steps that can be done to address the ongoing disaster we are all guilty of accepting.

Must read: this Marjorie Cohn essay we noted in 2008.

We’ve been reiterating similar logic over and over for years now, but somehow we still receive a lot of e-mails every day asking us things like “How can we win in Afghanistan?” or “How can we withdraw from Afghanistan and still protect our national interests in the region?” To which I have to ask: Are we really speaking a language that is so difficult to understand?

Maybe U.S. Americans need their moral and political destiny framed in terms of what they seem to understand best: Money. For your consideration, here are a couple of resources specifically relating contemporary colonial warring to The Bottom Line:

Notes re: 2009 Federal Budget (from War Resisters League)

Data re: Military Spending (from International Peace Bureau)

And, just for comparison, the IPB also includes dollar estimates for achieving the following:

Shelter for every human being: $21 billion
Eliminate ALL Starvation and Malnourishment: $19 billion
Clean Safe Water for every human being: $10 billion
Eliminate ALL Nuclear Weapons: $7 billion
Eliminate ALL Landmines: $4 billion
Eliminate ALL Illiteracy: $5 billion
Relief for Refugees everywhere: $5 billion
Stabilize Human Population Growth: $10.5 billion
Prevent Soil Erosion Globally: $24 billion

[ source ]

So yes, war is bad, expensive, and, not surprisingly, also very wasteful. If Americans wanted to stop this ridiculous tragedy NOW, a good idea would be to pressure your so-called representatives to cut off war funding - the U.S. military would have to withdraw from Afghanistan near-immediately. Just shaking our tiny furry fists at it from a distance does absolutely nothing.

Bunny

[ note from Pinky: Thanks Bunny. I'd like to add one more link relating to the war and money, the National Priorities Project's excellent Afghanistan Fact Sheet: The Numbers Behind the Troop Increase. ]

This is kind of like a continuation of Bunny’s post from Wednesday about the war in Afghanistan.

Phyllis Bennis (the same Phyllis Bennis that explained the Iran thing to us last year) is really fantastic at making complicated foreign policy issues easy to understand. So I was happy to find an article at the Institute for Policy Studies website where she breaks down the speech President Obama gave the other day on Afghanistan. Please read it!

[ Go here to read the whole article! ]

For those of you who are too lazy to click a link, here is an excerpt:

“What Was Left Out [from President Obama's escalation speech]:

• The 18-month timeline references only the “beginning” of transferring U.S. troops out of Afghanistan; there was no reference to finishing transfer of all troops out of Afghanistan and ending the occupation. The words “exit” or “exit strategy” do not appear in the speech, and the word “withdraw” appears only in a reference to what the U.S. will NOT do.

• There was absolutely no explanation of how this year’s $30 billion additional costs for the 30,000 more troops, on top of the billions more already in the pipeline, would be paid for…

• The speech assumed Afghan support for the U.S. occupation, ignoring the massive evidence to the contrary…

• Obama paid no attention to the increasingly visible opposition to the Karzai government and the U.S. occupation from the majority Pashtun population — whose southern and eastern Afghanistan territory will be the operations center for the new troop escalation…

• There was no reference to the U.S.-paid mercenaries (both local and internationals, all paid through U.S. contractor corporations) in Afghanistan, whose numbers rose by 40% just between June and September, now totaling 104,101, and already outnumbering U.S. troops…

…Obama also did not acknowledge that about 30% of all U.S. casualties in the 8-year war in Afghanistan have occurred during the 11 months of his presidency. He did not remind us that the cost of this war, with the new escalation, will be about $100 billion a year, or $2 billion every week, or more than $11 million every hour. He didn’t tell us that the same one-year amount, $100 billion, could cover the cost of ALL of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals: clean water, health care, primary education and vaccinations for the people of every one of the poorest 21 countries in the world…”

The article’s very good, I hope you all read it. It’s rare for someone to carefully go point-by-point over an important speech and show exactly what is being said, and also what is not being said. Studying the difference between the two is a fun way to learn how politicians are very crafty at taking advantage of what the public doesn’t know or understand in order to accomplish dishonesty, often even without lying! They practice this constantly and the public doesn’t counter this with learning anything meaningful so of course the politicians win all the time.

In other news, I have been working on my own comic strip. It is called The Adventures of Super Bunny and Kim. The first one I drew was about how Bunny and I were at a store and I couldn’t reach something on a shelf but Bunny’s a lot bigger than me so she got it down for me. The hardest part for me is drawing the pictures.

Bye!

Kim

Big news! The Pinky Show is going to be the cover story in the Winter issue of FUSE magazine (website at www.fusemagazine.org)! FUSE is an art/culture/politics magazine published out of Toronto, Canada, and Bunny and I were interviewed by Canadian art curator Milena Placentile for the magazine a few weeks ago. I remember it was fun (talking with Milena is always fun) but unfortunately I don’t remember anything we talked about - hopefully we didn’t say anything too ridiculous. Anyway, today we got to see a preview of the cover:

Pretty neat, huh? As you can imagine Bunny is real happy with the cover!

The launch party for the winter issue is actually going to be held in conjunction with the opening of our Class Treason Stories exhibition at Toronto Free Gallery: Thursday, January 14, 2010, at 8pm. The exhibition runs till February 21 - everybody who can get to Toronto by February 21 please come see our show! But make sure you wear something warm - Toronto can get really cold in the winter!

TORONTO FREE GALLERY
1277 Bloor Street West
Toronto, ON M6H 1N7
tel. 416-913-0461

For more information, please read this.

Take care,
pinky