 16 Jun 2007 @ 22:35, by Unknown
Be Not Silent!
i>The following is an extract from, "Be Not Silent," from her interview with James Kullander, published in the June 2007 issue of The Sun:
In a sense, the U.S. is the largest island in the world. We’re bounded by huge oceans to the east and the west and by a lightly populated country to our north and a poor country to our south. We have never felt our borders pressured. We sit in a kind of arrogant security and see ourselves as a messianic people, as liberators. We consider it obscene that anyone would resist us. But we are no longer perceived as liberators in the rest of the world. Years ago I was part of a number of delegations that went to the Soviet Union. At the time, the Soviet Union was this big black bear. Now we’re the big black bear.
(…)
I started traveling the world in the early 1970s. At that time, if you walked into a room in a foreign country and people knew you were an American, everyone wanted to talk to you about how wonderful the U.S. was and how grateful they were for what the U.S. had done. Now if they know you’re an American, they are wary and somewhat distant. And if you get into any kind of real conversation with them, they’re sure to let you know that something’s wrong with the way our country is behaving.
Kullander: When did this shift occur?
Chittister: When the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003—no doubt about it. People in the Middle East now see us as a rogue state.
They see us as the problem. It’s going to take a great change in attitude on the part of the U.S. government to rectify the situation.
(…)
I’m convinced there is a basic honesty in this country that operates beyond partisan politics, and we saw it come out in the last election. But there is also a basic innocence — if not ignorance — in the U.S. When foreigners come here
and see our news broadcasts, they are not only surprised, but shocked and insulted at the dearth of international coverage.
Kullander: We’re now at a point in this country where many more people are beginning to ask serious questions about our role in Iraq: how we got there, what we’re doing there, and how we’re going to get out. What do you think should be done?
Chittister: The fact is we should never have invaded Iraq in the first place. Now we have a terrible mess. And we cannot turn back this clock. We can only work with the situation as it is. As a start, here’s what we can do: Stop our own violence. Call together a council of Arab nations to help us rebuild the country. And change our policies toward Palestine, bringing some pressure to bear on Israel to negotiate with the Palestinians. This has to happen, and soon.
Kullander: It’s hard to imagine the Democratic majority in Congress getting us out of Iraq, since most of them voted
for the war to begin with.
Chittister: I was not happy about that. I know the Democrats in Congress were outvoted on the war, but they could have spoken against it. They should have been out in the streets with placards. They should have gone home to small towns across the nation and expressed their deep opposition to what was happening. Instead they repeated that silly old saw “We have to get behind the president in a time of war.” We do not elect a Congress to “get behind the president.” We elect a Congress to get behind the Constitution. I know of no other period in the history of this country when Congress abdicated its role the way it has over the last six years. Before George W. Bush was elected, I would have argued that something like this couldn’t happen in American politics. But it has happened: we have dismantled the checks and balances system.
Kullander: Why do you think the Democrats in Congress capitulated?
Chittister: I believe you’ll find corporate greed and political lobbyists at the bottom of it. I think there was a great desire to move into Iraq to control it. Why? First, we wanted to make sure that Iraq’s oil did not go anyplace we didn’t want it to go, even if we weren’t going to take it all. Second, we wanted a military foothold in the region so our troops could reach all points in the Arab world at any given moment. I remember flying over South Africa years ago. I had never seen cities laid out in such an orderly fashion. They are absolutely perfect grids. Not a single bend in the road. I was traveling with some South Africans at the time and I turned to them and said I’d been led to believe that theirs was a poor country — how could they build roads like these? And they said to me that the government had built the roads so that troops could get to the townships quickly in the event of an uprising. So here we are with big bases in the Middle East now, from which fighter planes and supply planes can take off in an instant and within half an hour reach any country in that part of the world. Do you think that doesn’t make Arab countries nervous, given what they’ve seen happen to Iraq?
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