WORDS TO LIVE BY: Practical ideas for living and teaching peace.
Letters to the Editor
LETTERS: 1) “Lack of Draft Leads to Apathy” from Carla Mikkelson; and 2) A poetic letter, “Where Does the President Go?” from Virginia Bailey or Portland, OR.
New Afghan War Cost Analysis
JO COMERFORD: The president’s $30 billion figure for getting those 30,000-plus new surge troops into Afghanistan is going to prove a “through-the-basement estimate.†As for the dates for getting them in and beginning to get them out? Well, it’s grain-of-salt time there, too. According to Steven Mufson and Walter Pincus of the Washington Post, some of the fuel storage facilities being built to support the surge troops won’t even be completed by the time the first of them are scheduled to leave the country, 18 months from now.
Traumatized Soldiers Bring the War Home
ROBERT C. KOEHLER: There’s no armor, it turns out, for conscience. So our men and women are coming home from the killing fields wounded in their heads, used up, greeted only by the military’s own meat grinder of inadequate health care and intolerance for “weakness.â€
Are Americans a Broken People?
BRUCE E. LEVINE: Can people become so broken that truths of how they are being screwed do not “set them free” but instead further demoralize them? Has such a demoralization happened in the United States?
In War, Winners Can Be Losers
LAWRENCE S. WITTNER: Thus far, most of the supporters and opponents of escalating the U.S. war in Afghanistan have focused on whether or not it is possible to secure a military victory in that conflict. But they neglect to consider that, in war, even a winner can be a loser.