Wheels of Justice

Yesterday afternoon, we arrived in Lawrence, Kansas where we’re scheduled, today, to join the local witness against war taxes.

This morning, the Lawrence Journal World carried an AP report about U.S. Senators and Representatives who are troubled that Iraqis might experience windfall surpluses of revenue generated by rising oil prices while Americans bear the burden of paying for war in Iraq. Several lawmakers are considering proposals that would require Iraq’s government to partially fund U.S. combat operations in Iraq and also assist with reconstruction in Afghanistan.

“Next they’ll ask Iraqis to rebuild the levees in New Orleans,” murmured a fellow bus traveler, Nora Barrows Friedman, shaking her head in disbelief as she read the news.

A spate of recent news reports suggest that Iraq now has a large surplus of funds because of rising oil prices. It’s helpful to consult comments of people who’ve been paying close attention to Iraq’s energy resources. On April 11, 2008, UPI’s Energy Editor Ben Lando clarified that:

“Iraq would not make $100 billion in oil sales this year … unless the price of oil went substantially higher, like nearing $200 per barrel. And the “surplus” would be anything beyond the $50 billion 2008 budget, which at current oil prices will give it just about a $10 billion surplus.”

But, before U.S. lawmakers begin spending Iraq’s $10 billion dollar surplus, shouldn’t we ask about the “rights” of an aggressor nation that illegally invades another country. The U.S. waged an unprovoked war of choice against Iraq, a country which posed no threat whatsoever to U.S. people. Did Iraq have any “rights” after it invaded Kuwait? Under the Nuremberg principles, an aggressor nation has no rights. Period. Commenting on suggestions, within the U.S. Congress, that the U.S. impose financial obligations on Iraq, Lando writes:

“This begs the question as to whether a country can invade another country – which inherently destroys the capital, political and societal infrastructure – poorly spend both occupying and occupied funds, unilaterally create conditions of chaos requiring ongoing security and reconstruction funds, and then bind the occupied country to make reparations and take out loans from the occupying country?”

Part of our work, on the Wheels of Justice tour, is to help people empathize with and better understand what Lando summarizes as “conditions of chaos requiring ongoing security and reconstruction funds.” This bus tour began eight years ago as part of efforts to awaken U.S. people to the suffering endured by Iraqis as the U.S. waged brutal economic warfare against them by imposing sanctions that wrecked Iraq’s infrastructure, caused widespread impoverishment and directly contributed toward the deaths of over one half million children under age five. Today, the available statistics about the impact of U.S. invasion and occupation and the ensuing chaos that has engulfed many areas of Iraq speak of misery nearly unimaginable to most people in the U.S. One out of six Iraqis has been displaced from their homes. 70% of the population lacks access to potable water. A March 2007 report from Save the Children, a credible NGO, stated that 122,000 Iraqi children didn’t reach their fifth birthdays in the year 2005 alone. With the World Health Organization reporting that 1 out of 3 Iraqi children are malnourished and one out of four are afflicted with acute malnourishment, should we expect improvements in health care for Iraqi children? 55% of Iraq’s doctors have fled the country.

Who could blame people with resources for taking their families to relatively safer environs in neighboring countries? The flight of approximately 2.2 million people away from Iraq has caused a “brain drain” which severely impacts Iraq’s capacity to rebuild. Those who remain face daily shortages of electricity and fuel. Many must also endure the terror of living in a country wracked by three civil wars. (See Juan Cole’s April 13th analysis in The Boston Globe) (http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/04/13/theiraqwars/)

In the past year, there has been a fivefold increase in U.S. aerial bombardments of Iraqi neighborhoods and the number of Iraqis incarcerated in U.S. prisons in Iraq has doubled. Should Iraqis then be asked to pay for the combat expenses of their occupiers?

Perhaps news of proposals requiring Iraqis to pay for U.S. combat expenses will spur Iraqis presently aligned with U.S. forces to stop aiming their weapons against other Iraqis and to instead find common cause to use all means of nonviolent resistance to defy the U.S. occupation.

But we’ve really no right to prescribe actions that Iraqis might or might not take in response to the illegal, immoral war that has turned U.S. taxpayers into collaborators with war crimes. What the U.S. government wants from most of us, in order to continue this war, is our money. This tax day, the best prescription I can imagine for a war weary U.S. public is to draw energy from a simple, doable act. Plan now to eliminate at least $100 of spending for war from your personal budget. You can do this by planning to refuse, for one year, at least $100 of your federal income tax. It’s a small step to take which incurs a small risk. The money can be redirected to assist Iraqis with acute medical needs and also to help survivors of Hurricane Katrina whose most basic needs are still unmet. (see www.nwtrcc.org)

Hopefully, my companions and I were among many people who felt outraged, reading the morning paper, over the notion that Iraqis should pay for combat expenses of U.S. troops fighting in Iraq. But our best hope lies in awakening the U.S. public to resist payment for ongoing war against Iraq.

Kathy Kelly (kathy@vcnv.org) is a co-coordinator of Voices for Creative Nonviolence. She hasn’t paid federal income tax since 1980.

March 31, 2008

Rawlins, Wyoming

We’ve been stuck in Rawlins, Wyoming for more than 24 hours now, as the highway has been alternately open and closed with lots of snow, wind, and accidents. The good thing about the bus, though, is that whether we are giving presentations or not, and whether we are even in the city we’re supposed to be or not, our message is always out there for the world to see.

I joined the bus in Salt Lake City last week, and have given several presentations and spoken informally with several people since then. Audiences have been mostly small but engaged and receptive. It’s interesting that no matter where in the country I go, when I introduce myself as a Jewish American it brings connections. At my first presentation a man approached me afterwards and thanked me as a fellow anti-Zionist Jew. At my second, the son of a rabbi used the time to try to work through his own positions and past connection to Israel, stating that he now knows that rights should not be based on religion and ethnicity. At the next presentation, a woman told me she comes from a Jewish background and has just been ignorant about Palestine all her life.

The bus’s ability and effort to go into small communities is a wonderful complement to the many events and activities about Palestine and Iraq in cities and larger towns. One community at a time, we are doing our small part to educate and activate the US public.

    -- Hannah Mermelstein<br class="clear" />

A group of peace and justice activists rolled onto campus and parked their Wheels of Justice bus in the Union Free Speech Area on Thursday.

The traveling organization aims to promote discussion about the situation in the Middle East and create student awareness of the war in Iraq.

The group’s mission is to protest without violence and educate the public about the conflicts between Palestine and Israel. Group members travel around the country in the blue, green and yellow bus with “War is not the Answer” written on the outside. The group spent a week in Utah, and their stop at the U was the last in the state before they headed to Riverton, Wyo.

During their visit, members of the organization gave a presentation detailing the conflict in the Middle East along with their experiences in the region. Ed Kinane, a group member and peace activist from Syracuse, N.Y., spoke about his experience in Iraq. He has been to the country on numerous occasions before and after the United States declared war. He spent most of 2003 taking medical supplies overseas and guiding U.S. residents through Iraq to witness the violence firsthand. He said that although shuttling American tourists to Iraq was illegal, he wanted to give them a personal view of the War on Terror. Being there was the only way to “puncture myths” about the war, he said.

“If I’m going to be working for peace, I should know something ‘bout war,” said Kinane, who is also a member of the group Voices for Creative Nonviolence. “That’s why we stayed.”

Justin Kramer, a senior in Middle East studies and international relations at the U, said that if Americans had been more aware about the war’s toll, peace could be achieved much sooner. The military’s count of American service members killed in Iraq rose to more than 4,000 during the weekend, according to Associated Press reports.

“It’s not the government failing, it’s that people aren’t standing up to protest the war,” Kramer said. “Until they do that, it’s not going to happen.”

Back home, Kinane and group members try to educate the public about what the Middle East is like. Through videos and picture slideshows, they also try to define the groups commonly found in the region around the West Bank, Israel and Gaza Strip.

Hannah Mermelstein, a Wheels of Justice group member, explained that although they sometimes intertwine, the Jews, the Israeli and the Zionists are different. The Jewish identity is related to a faith or lineage.

The Israeli identity is an obtained citizenship, and Zionists come from a political movement that aims to preserve the Jewish identity, Mermelstein said.

“When I researched these things fully, I suddenly had to unlearn all the values that I learned in life,” said Mermelstein, who is a Jewish American from Philadelphia. “Turned out, things were not the way I viewed them at all.”

She told a story about how when she was younger, she used to donate quarters through a synagogue program that pledged to plant more trees in what she was told was the war-torn, run-down city of Saffourien. The city, which is now named Tzippaei, is a forest, which isn’t a good thing, Mermelstein said.

“They covered up the Palestinian history,” she said. “They said the only building standing was an ancient Roman ruin. They are not acknowledging that anything ever happened there.”

Neither Kinane nor Mermelstein said they would be going back to Iraq any time soon. Instead, they plan to continue touring with the Wheels of Justice. Kinane has been touring with the bus on and off for the last eight years.

“Now, it would have been more dangerous to return to Iraq,” Kinane said. “There is too much hostility.”

I talk about Palestine a lot. Sometimes I worry that might be all I talk about. I fear I’m going to become that old guy in the back of the room at a presentation like this one, filled with anger, disillusion pouring through, poetry long since waxed and in its place the vitriol of apartness. I watch Salam. His strength and stature belie the soft humanity beneath. I’ve told my stories. They’ve lost their connection to the soul that collected them. They are facts. Smeared newsprint on my fingers, nothing more.

In front of me, a generation of men who learned the meaning of war. They killed. For honor, for god, for country, they killed. My breath is suddenly unable to escape. In but not out. Building. Preparing. I look up from shaking hands to the eyes of the men in front of me. I turn away. They are too ready to hear this, too ready to understand. Unlike my closest friends, they never mistake Palestine for Pakistan.

I start to speak and choke. Where did these tears come from? Were they not long dried by the wind and burning sun of that refugee camp, what’s it called? Did my trauma find its way home, was it searching me out all along? I cannot speak. My voice is hoarse from endless speaking but tonight is the night it fails. I turn in my chair, pivot, scramble for the walls that protected me so long. They, like so much else, are gone. I reach for the glass of water on the table and bring it to my lips in utter disbelief that feeling has returned after so many months. The water falls into my lap, the embarrassment of men crying mercifully abated by a more practical kind.

These veterans get it. Bill gets it. We share something bought with lives. I know how blood pooling in a gutter smells. I know what the barrel of an M16 tastes like. The faces of those who died never leave you. Not for a day, not for an hour. They are there when you fall asleep and they will greet you again if you wake. This universal truth bridges the divide of generations, of patriots and rebels.

This bus and I are the same age. 1979. A life ago and a life to go still. In Idaho Falls, two eighteen-year-old boys spray paint ‘war’ on stop signs and become convicted felons. A student in Salt Lake learns for the first time how to find Iraq on a map. In Portland, the parents of a murdered friend read their daughter’s journal to strangers. A congressional aide in Boise admits he was doing covert reconnaissance in preparation for war two years before September eleventh.

This tour taught me a simple fact. That which connects us is infinitely stronger than that which separates. From Iraq to Palestine, Vietnam to Salt Lake, we will discover ourselves in each other, and we will continue.

mark t., Wheels of Justice