With winter coming, I love to go out when it snows and the air is so peaceful. I even like to shovel snow at night when it is a quiet time with few people outside and few cars. But in other places in the world there is no peace. People hear drones moving across the sky. There are American troops banging on their doors. There are battles raging still in Afghanistan and Iraq. The war on terror continues endlessly. Since 2001 there have already been over 100,000 people killed; some terrorists, some soldiers, some civilians.
What we have done so far has not stopped the terror. We need to remove all our forces from Afghanistan and Iraq. We need to not be doing anything in other countries that makes more people hate us. Too much money is being used to continue this endless war. Too much money is being used for military endeavors. I think it would be better to find the root causes of conflict and find non-violent ways to create conditions to defuse the hostility.
There are now bills in Congress to repeal the authorization for use of military forces, H.R. 2324 and H.R. 198. We need to support these bills. Since US citizens are war weary, this is the time to influence our Congresspeople. Then we need to turn to the UN Security Council to respond to global threats multilaterally.
[Reprinted, by permission of the author, from WILPF November 2013 newsletter]