[R-G] Only Nader Is Right on the Issues

[Richard Menec]

"For in every city these two opposite parties (people vs aristocracy) are to 
be found, arising from the desire of the populace to avoid oppression of the 
great, and the desire of the great to command and oppress the people....For 
when the nobility see that they are unable to resist the people, they unite 
in exalting one of their number and creating him prince, so as to be able to 
carry out their own designs under the shadow of his authority." - Niccolo 
Machiavelli, 1469-1527 (quotation from The Prince, 1513) 
http://booksinternationale.pbwiki.com/Niccolo+Machiavelli

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<http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20081103_only_nader_is_right_on_the_issues/>

Only Nader Is Right on the Issues

Posted on Nov 3, 2008

By Chris Hedges

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist who has covered many 
wars around the world. His column appears Mondays on Truthdig.

Tomorrow I will go to a polling station in Princeton, N.J., and vote for 
Ralph Nader. I know the tired arguments against a Nader vote. He can't win. 
A vote for Nader is a vote for McCain. He threw the election to George W. 
Bush in 2000. He is an egomaniac.

There is little disagreement among liberals and progressives about the Nader 
and Obama campaign issues. Nader would win among us in a landslide if this 
was based on issues. Sen. Barack Obama's vote to renew the Patriot Act, his 
votes to continue to fund the Iraq war, his backing of the FISA Reform Act, 
his craven courting of the Israeli lobby, his support of the death penalty, 
his refusal to champion universal, single-payer not-for-profit health care 
for all Americans, his call to increase troop levels and expand the war in 
Afghanistan, his failure to call for a reduction in the bloated and wasteful 
defense spending and his lobbying for the huge taxpayer swindle known as the 
bailout are repugnant to most of us on the left. Nader stands on the other 
side of all those issues.

So if the argument is not about issues what is it about?

Those on the left who back Obama, although they disagree with much of what 
he promotes, believe they are choosing the practical over the moral. They 
see themselves as political realists. They fear John McCain and the 
Republicans. They believe Obama is better for the country. They are right. 
Obama is better. He is not John McCain. There will be under Obama marginal 
improvements for some Americans although the corporate state, as Obama 
knows, will remain our shadow government and the working class will continue 
to descend into poverty. Democratic administrations have, at least until 
Bill Clinton, been more receptive to social programs that provide benefits, 
better working conditions and higher wages. An Obama presidency, however, 
will make no difference to those in the Middle East.

I can't join the practical. I spent two decades of my life witnessing the 
suffering of those on the receiving end of American power. I have stood over 
the rows of bodies, including women and children, butchered by Ronald 
Reagan's Contra forces in Nicaragua. I have inspected the mutilated corpses 
dumped in pits outside San Salvador by the death squads. I have crouched in 
a concrete hovel as American-made F-16 fighter jets, piloted by Israelis, 
dropped 500- and 1,000-pound iron-fragmentation bombs on Gaza City.

I can't join the practical because I do not see myself exclusively as an 
American.  The narrow, provincial and national lines that divide cultures 
and races blurred and evaporated during the years I spent in Latin America, 
Africa, the Middle East, Europe and the Balkans. I built friendships around 
a shared morality, not a common language, religion, history or tradition. I 
cannot support any candidate who does not call for immediate withdrawal from 
Iraq and Afghanistan and an end to Israeli abuse of Palestinians. We have no 
moral or legal right to debate the terms of the occupation. And we will 
recover our sanity as a nation only when our troops have left Iraq and our 
president flies to Baghdad, kneels before a monument to the hundreds of 
thousands of Iraqi war dead and asks for forgiveness.

We dismiss the suffering of others because it is not our suffering. There 
are between 600,000 and perhaps a million dead in Iraq. They died because we 
invaded and occupied their country. At least three Afghan civilians have 
died at the hands of the occupation forces for every foreign soldier killed 
this year. The dead Afghans include the 95 people, 60 of them children, 
killed by an air assault in Azizabad in August and the 47 wedding guests 
butchered in July during a bombardment in Nangarhar. The Palestinians are 
forgotten. Obama and McCain, courting the Israeli lobby, do not mention 
them. The 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza live in a vast open-air prison. 
Supplies and food dribble through the Israeli blockade. Ninety-five percent 
of local industries have shut down. Unemployment is rampant. Childhood 
malnutrition has skyrocketed. A staggering 80 percent of families in Gaza 
are dependent on international food aid to survive.

It is bad enough that I pay taxes, although I will stop paying taxes if we 
go to war with Iran. It is bad enough that I have retreated into a safe, 
privileged corner of the globe, a product of industrialized wealth and 
militarism. These are enough moral concessions, indeed moral failings. I 
will not accept that the unlawful use of American military power be politely 
debated among us like the subtle pros and cons of tort law.

George Bush has shredded, violated or absented America from its obligations 
under international law. He has refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol, backed 
out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, tried to kill the International 
Criminal Court, walked out on negotiations on chemical and biological 
weapons and defied the Geneva Conventions and human rights law in the 
treatment of detainees in our offshore penal colonies. Most egregiously, he 
launched an illegal war in Iraq based on fabricated evidence we now know had 
been discredited even before it was made public. The president is guilty, in 
short, of what in legal circles is known as the "crime of aggression."

(Page 2) The legacy of the Bush administration may be the codification of a 
world without treaties, statutes and laws. Bush may have bequeathed to us a 
world where any nation, from a rogue nuclear state to a great imperial 
power, will be able to invoke its domestic laws to annul its obligations to 
others. This new order will undo five decades of international 
cooperation-largely put in place by the United States-and thrust us into a 
Hobbesian nightmare. The exercise of power without law is tyranny.

If we demolish the fragile and delicate international order, if we do not 
restore a world where diplomacy, broad cooperation and the law are 
respected, we will see our moral and political authority disintegrate. We 
will erode the possibility of cooperation between nation-states, including 
our closest allies, and see visited upon us the evils we visit on others. 
Obama, like McCain, may tinker with this new world, but neither says they 
will dismantle it. Nader would.

Practical men and women do not stand up against injustice. The practical 
remain silent. A voice, even one voice, which speaks the truth and denounces 
injustice is never useless. It is not impractical. It reminds us of what we 
should strive to become. It defies moral concession after moral concession 
that leaves us chanting empty slogans.

When I sat on the summit of Mount Igman in my armored jeep, the engine 
idling, before nervously running the gantlet of Serb gunfire that raked the 
dirt road into the besieged city of Sarajevo, I never asked myself if what I 
was doing was practical. Forty-five foreign correspondents died in the city 
along with some 12,000 Bosnians, including 2,000 children. Some 50,000 
people were wounded. Of the dead and wounded 85 percent were civilians. I 
drove down the slope into Sarajevo, which was being hit by 2,000 shells a 
day and under constant sniper fire, because what was happening there was a 
crime. I drove down because I had friends in the city. I did not want them 
to be alone. Their stories had become mine.

War, with all its euphemisms about surges and the escalation of troops and 
collateral damage, is not an abstraction to me. I am haunted by hundreds of 
memories of violence and trauma. I have abandoned, because I no longer cover 
these conflicts, many I care about. They live in Gaza, Baghdad, Jerusalem, 
Beirut, Kabul and Tehran. They cannot vote in our election. They will, 
however, bear the consequences of our decision. Some, if the wars continue, 
may be injured or killed. The quest for justice is not about being 
practical. It is required by the bonds we share. They would do no less for 
me.

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