Reagan Carney, a really fine young man with whom we go to church, told me a few days ago that the University of Tennessee Young Republicans had a board on which members could express their opinions about the war in Iran.
The board had only one question: “Is the Iran war putting America first?” At that point, 10 had signed under the Yes; 70 had signed under the No.
This confirmed a story which ABC News ran on March 7 quoting Jack Posobiec of Turning Point USA and the conservative publication, Human Events.
Posobiec said: “For the younger end of the spectrum inside MAGA, foreign intervention is just off the radar….They see it as prioritizing foreign interests….” He said MAGA is split by age with more support for the Iran war among older conservatives.
The ABC story led this way: “President Donald Trump’s decision to carry out strikes on Iran has further exposed a fracture among some of the President’s fiercest supporters inside MAGA world—one that many supporters say will only widen with every week the conflict continues.”
Like the Tennessee students, the great majority realize this war is being fought at the insistence of Israel at tremendous expense for US taxpayers. This is Israel’s war. Iran’s total military budget is only a little over one percent of ours. Iran was no threat to us at all.
In 1999, Charley Reese was voted as the most popular columnist in a vote by thousands of C-Span viewers. Unfortunately, he passed away in 2013, but many things he wrote are just as true today.
In 2002, he said in a column: “The truth is this: The terrorist attacks against the United States are a direct result of our one-sided support of Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians.”
He added: “The big pushers for war with Iraq are the usual suspects—Americans with a long record of pretending to speak about America’s interests when in fact they are pushing an Israeli agenda.” Today, switch the word Iran for Iraq.
In 2005, Reese wrote: “Propaganda aside, our actions have created the almost universal hostility toward the United States in the Arab world. Our actions have been to support Israel 100 percent while it kills and brutalizes the Palestinians….” Think Gaza where many thousands of little children were starved and killed.
In Washington, you should always follow the money. Today, silence has been bought by massive campaign contributions either for almost every member of Congress or fear of contributions against them. If any other country had been doing all the bombing, starving and killing Israel has done over the last many years, the Congress would have been rushing to pass resolutions of condemnation.
However, members know there is an unwritten but ironclad rule: You can criticize our own government, but you cannot criticize Israel.
Today, the only national public criticism in this country is coming from people too powerful to silence, like Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson, Megan Kelly, Ron Paul, Tom Woods, Jeffrey Sachs, Dave Smith, David Stockman and a few others. As gas prices go up and our economy goes down, opposition is growing fast among the general public.
President Trump said in his Inaugural Address: “We will measure our success not only by little battles we win, but also by the wars that end, and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into.”
I think he realizes that if gas prices double or triple and he allows Netanyahu to drag us and thisg war into the fall, Republicans will suffer big losses in the November elections.
I also wish he would realize that our two greatest war leaders who later became President—Washington and Eisenhower—were both very antiwar.
Washington warned against “overgrown military establishments which, under any form of government, are inauspicious to liberty and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty.”
His farewell address has been read on the floor of the US Senate every year since 1862 near his birthday. In it, he also warned against “entangling alliances” and added these words: “A passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists…betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification.
Eisenhower’s farewell address is very well known, and, like Washington, he also warned against “the grave implication of our immense military establishment and large arms industry.”
Then he added these famous words: “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
Not as well known is his speech on April 16, 1953, to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, which may be the most antiwar speech ever given by an American President. I wish everyone would read it.
Finally, in a speech broadcast from London in 1959, Eisenhower said: “I think people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it.”
