Reflection on world's state

For those of us in the peace, ecological and feminist movements, these are discouraging times. The American military that continues to occupy and kill civilians in Afghanistan, now is also occupying Iraq. The main pretext of the war, namely to find and destroy Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, is fading like snow before a rising sun. No such weapons were used in the war, the obvious time for the Hussein regime to use such weapons if they had them. It is unlikely that a large amount of such weapons that could match the exaggerated claims of the Bush and Blair administrations will be found.

Meanwhile the Bush administration and its subservient media are busy convincing most Americans, but hardly the rest of the world, that their main intent was to liberate the Iraqi people from a terrible dictator. Saddam Hussein was indeed a terrible dictator, but that was hardly the reason why the American government went to war against him. Anyone with minimal historical memory knows that the United States has regularly supported and, indeed, installed in power murderous dictators who tortured and killed their own people. One can only recall Rios Mott in Guatemala, the Samozas in Nicaragua, Pinochet in Chile and Saddam Hussein himself in the 1980s.

We can also look at the murderous dictators with whom the U.S. is presently allying, such as President Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan who tolerates no dissent from his vicious regime and regularly imprisons and torturers critics. The crimes that impelled the administration to attack Iraq and overthrow its leader were not his crimes against his own people, but his shift from being our client ruler to imagining himself as the focus of an independent power in the Middle East. If he remained the docile ally of U.S. policies, Dick Cheney would still be shaking his hand.

Our military adventures around the world in search of total American hegemony are deeply draining the American economy. At the height of the Cold War in 1989 our military budget was $200 billion. Today with no major rival it is moving toward $500 billion. Our federal and state budgets are being drained of any funds for education, health and welfare, as the central government concentrates on military might. At the same time our own democracy is being eroded even as we claim that we are occupying another country with our military in order to impose "democracy" upon it at gunpoint. Human and citizen rights are being eroded by a regime that claims the right to spy on everyone, including a person's library records, lest someone be reading something deemed subversive. Those seeking to enter our borders from places like Canada find themselves turned around and their visas confiscated because they are found to be carrying peace literature. One of our own seminarians at the Graduate Theological Union (GTU), a candidate for the Episcopal priesthood, was stopped at the airport in San Francisco this fall because the FBI had her on its list of subversives. Her crime? Being a leader in the campus organization, Seminarians for Peace.

The Bush administration is systematically eroding the legislation of throe decades to protect the environment in our country and globally. Among their many anti-environmental actions are the following:

* Exploitation of petroleum in the Arctic National Wildlife region

* Efforts to make inoperative sections of the Endangered Species Act

* Encouraging road building through wildlife habitats

* Supporting tax cuts for energy exploration on public land

* Total rejection of the Kyoto treaty on global warming

* Proposing new rules to allow mining companies to fill streams and valleys with toxic, mine tailings

* Sponsoring a campaign to open more public forest land to timber companies

* Mandating the EPA to allow older, dirtier plants to be exempt from the Clean Air Act.

While showing an indifference to the welfare of children after birth, the Bush administration pursues a policy of extreme vigilance over the rights of fertilized eggs from the first moment of conception. Women's reproductive rights are being systematically eroded, not only the right to abort, but even to birth control and basic reproductive education and information, both in the United States and around the world. With much fanfare President Bush announced his plan to provide funds to combat AIDS in Africa, only to take away with his left hand what he appeared to be giving with his right. The promised funds were only to be given to clinics which do not provide family planning, a provision that would be illegal within the United States and is a total refusal to recognize the plights of women in the AIDS crisis in Africa. Also right-wing judges, who are hostile to women's reproductive rights, are being installed throughout the U.S. judicial system

Yet these discouraging trends in our federal leadership should not be allowed to paralyze us with despair. There are also astonishing and wonderful counter trends in our land and around the world. One can count among these the worldwide peace movement that erupted and sustained its protest against the war in Iraq for many months prior to this war. This movement is still very much alive and regrouping for a new stage of struggle against the U.S. designs for ongoing military and economic aggression. But the peace movement is not limited to a critique of U.S. and British militarism in Iraq. It is rooted in a new movement that seeks a deeper and broader alternative to the social and economic patterns that are destroying our planetary life system and impoverishing the majority of the people on earth.