August 12, 2007

By Harry T. Cook

The text of a speech given by Harry T. Cook before members of the Detroit Area Peace With Justice Network in Berkley, Michigan on August 9, 2007

In the documentary “NO END IN SIGHT,” one sees a news clip of Donald Rumsfeld’s resignation speech with Rumsfeld sucking up to his soon-to-be former boss (if that’s how that relationship actually worked)

congratulating him for his masterful conduct of the first war of the 21st Century. Dr. Freud was not at hand to analyze those seven simple words – only two of them with more than one syllable – but I fear it may have revealed something Rumsfeld knows even now that we don’t know.

Evidence to consider in that regard is the Statement of Principles of the Project for A New American Century dated June 1997 and signed by such people as our friend Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Jeb (but not George)

Bush, Paul Wolfowitz, Francis Fukuyama, Steve Forbes, the felon I. Lewis Libby and last but not least Dan Quayle. Just “google” it, and see for yourself.

We’re here to talk about your theme of the evening, “THE LAST ATOMIC BOMB,” by which we do not mean just the most recent one. We mean the last one ever. I think Rumsfeld meant that there would be more wars to come, that he had helped to plan them and wished he might have been able to stay around long enough to mismanage another one or two, maybe even using nuclear weapons.

Rumsfeld was fired the day after the election last November when George Bush saw his partisan majority in Congress become a minority. It took that hard-fought and hard-won election to penetrate just enough of the thickness of Bush’s Texas skull with the dim notion that maybe the American people were fed to the teeth not only with the immorality of the war in Iraq but with its mismanagement. He’s so clueless that he thought canning Rummy would calm us down. Has it?

After the 2000 election was stolen by big money and high-tech malfeasance and the one in 2004 demagogued by Karl Rove and his political Gestapo, enough voters finally got it through their heads that they were lied to about Iraq, that their leaders did not have the slightest idea what to do and not to do after they extracted Saddam from his rabbit hole and that the pre-emptive invasion had created a gigantic petri dish for growing a culture of terrorism and violence where none quite like it had been before.

Moreover, it occurred to a sufficient number of voters that the Bush Administration had done it all on purpose, made all that mess so that it would take years, maybe even decades to clean up while their buddies in the petroleum business figured out how to steal all that oil under the ground in Iraq.

That did it. By not a big margin, but by big enough, the War Party in Congress moved into smaller quarters and a baby-step was taken to restore some semblance of democracy in this country. Now there can be no easing off, no ebbing of the tide of protest, not a moment of relaxation – not if you would like the atomic bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki 62 years ago this day to be the last one.

Of course, the United States cannot control what Ahmadinejad or the Dear Leader may do. I suppose we could always send Colin Powell up to the United Nations to tell more lies. More to the point, maybe a year from this November, we could elect a President who won’t make incendiary speeches about North Korea and Iran being an “axis of evil.” (I wonder what kind of axis what’s left of the Iraqi people think George W. Bush represents.)

You and I will have accomplished nothing to prevent our nation from continuing to develop nuclear weapons at the same time that our so-called leaders shake admonitory fingers at Ahmadinejad for developing his if we go away from here tonight thinking we have done a wonderful thing. What we’re doing is having a good time preaching to the choir, and the choir is having a good time being preached to.

We have to take this thing into the streets, by which I don’t mean only our usual venues of protest. I mean into precinct caucuses where state and national party convention delegates are selected, into our and temples and mosques and churches, into neighborhood coffee shops and wherever people gather.

When the Michigan Coalition for Human Rights put on that free screening of “NO END IN SIGHT” at a Royal Oak, Mich., theater several weeks ago, I can tell you that the Republican Party would have had no luck recruiting new members that night. Because it was this same choir that filled those seats and groaned in unison at every idiotic thing Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld were seen to have done and heard to have said, and moaned in unison as the chaos and old night of what the war has made of Iraq unfolded upon the screen.

The awful truth of what that documentary documents needs to be spread Paul Revere-like from house to house, from door to door, from neighborhood to neighborhood, from town to town – the hope of such a campaign being to get and keep the attention of enough people that on August 9, 2008, the choir will have been augmented sufficiently that its call for disarmament and peace will be impossible to ignore or drown out.

Will Nagasaki turn out to have been the last use of an atomic bomb in the course of human conflict? I wouldn’t bet on it, but I challenge you to leave this hall tonight determined that it shall have been, and then to get as involved as ever in the political process to nominate, encourage and elect people to public office who share our hope, our conviction and our demand.

We people are part of We the People. We are neither supplicants nor beggars. We are citizens, and not only of the United States but of the world. We cannot, must not wait passively upon our national followers (how many of them are really leaders?) to deliver us from evil. We will act to do so ourselves if, in fact, we wish to assure that the United States of America will never again detonate an atomic bomb as an act of war.

© Copyright 2007, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.

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