Green Party of New York State
http://www.gpnys.org/
Hawkins for US Senate
Media Release
For More Information:
Howie Hawkins 315-425-1019, hhawkins@igc.org
May 14, 2006
No War on Iran
Statement of Howie Hawkins, a Green candidate for US Senate
Mother's Day, May 14, 2006
Mother's Day was created by Julia Ward Howe in 1870 as an antiwar holiday in response to the terrible bloodshed of the United States Civil War. She
wrote:
"Arise then women of this day! Arise all women who have hearts! We women of one country will be too tender of those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure others. From the bosom of the devastated Earth a voice goes up with our own. It says 'Disarm, Disarm!'."
For thousands of American mothers, this Mother's Day will serve as a reminder of their grief and sorrow for their lost their sons and daughters in Iraq, Afghanistan and other countries where American soldiers are engaged in war. And many more mothers worldwide will grieve for their loved ones who have died in war this year.
In the spirit of Julia Ward Howe's original call for Mother's Day, I urge all the candidates for US Senate in New York State, starting with Hillary Clinton, to join me in opposing the initiation of a new war against Iran by the United States. So far, Clinton has gone in the other direction, criticizing the Bush administration for not being more aggressive in confronting Iran.
It was the CIA in 1953 that engineered the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Iran, initiating a disastrous half-century US policy of supporting reactionary monarchists and Islamic fundamentalists against secular nationalist pro-democracy movements throughout the Middle East. Then, as now, the prime motivation of the United States was the control of oil as the means of global domination.
War with Iran should not be an option. As deceptive, immoral, and costly as the illegal invasion of Iraq has been, an attack Iran could unleash a far more devastating wave of destruction and waste of human lives. Diplomacy is what our nation must use - not bombs and invasions.
We need to stop invading other countries because we covet their oil supplies. We need to understand that democracy means allowing people to make decisions for themselves, not installing compliant rulers that serve as junior partners to US military and corporate elites.
Oil, not the potential for the development of nuclear weapons, is the prime motivation for the pending US attack on Iran. After the misleading statements about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, we need to be wary of US government claims about Iran's nuclear capacity. Most international experts believe Iran is five to ten years away from having nuclear weapons capability. Let us not forget that the Bush administration recently agreed to further expand the nuclear weapons capability of India because the US wants them as an ally in the coming showdown with China that the US made clear it is planning in two key policy documents released this year: the White House National Security Strategy and the Pentagon's Quadrennial Defense Review.
It is the US - not Iran - that is engaged in nuclear warfare today in the form of depleted uranium shells. The radioactive dust from depleted uranium shells devastated Iraq and American veterans as a result of the 300 tons of depleted uranium used in the first Gulf War in 1991. One-third of the more than 800,000 US veterans of the first Gulf War developed Gulf War Syndrome, which many researchers believe is caused by depleted uranium radioactivity exposure. A 1998 study found as a result of exposure to depleted uranium a five-fold increase in cancers among Iraqis, including a ten-fold increase in uterine cancer, a sixteen-fold increase in ovarian cancer, and very high incidences of still births, congenital deformities, and childhood leukemia.
The US has used ten times more depleted uranium in the current Gulf War than in the first Gulf War, with over 3,000 tons used in Iraq and over 1,000 tons used in Afghanistan since 2002. With a half-life of 4.5 billion years, as long as Earth has been in existence, the use of depleted uranium by the US is nothing less than genocide and ecocide.
Instead of spreading more resentment throughout the world against the United States by starting another aggressive war against Iran, we need to spread good will toward the United States by converting $300 billion a year in US military expenditures into a global public works program to rewire the planet for clean, renewable energy systems, creating a global engine of job creation and sustainable economic development that renders nuclear power as well as oil obsolete and unneeded.
As a first step toward this realizing this Peace Dividend, I urge President Bush and Senator Clinton to use Mother's Day this year to announce that they support bringing our troops home from Iraq.
