- Think of a war as a violent center of a circle with concentric
rings of people surrounding it. At the center are the soldiers who have
to fight the war. In the next ring are the people whose loved ones are
doing the fighting. In the third ring, at a safe distance, are the politicians
who started the war.
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- The fourth ring includes journalists, to whom the war
is just another story. They get paid to write and talk about something,
and a war is a long-lasting topic.
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- The fifth ring includes the self-anointed experts, who
love to do sound bites on television and participate in panel discussions.
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- The sixth ring includes the arms industry, which, wisely,
keeps a low profile. Arms merchants, after all, view the war as a permanent
holiday sale. The longer it lasts, the more profits they make. There is
a distinct advantage in products that self-destruct with one-time use,
such as bullets, missiles, bombs and artillery rounds. Even the big-ticket
items like vehicles don't last too long.
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- The seventh and final ring of people includes the majority
of Americans, who have no direct interest in the war. They are not in the
military, they have no loved ones in the military, and they don't work
in the arms industry.
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- To these people, a war in a distant place is like a television
show that they can watch in the comfort of their living room. If they get
bored, they can make it go away with a flick of their remote control. The
war has no effect on their lives, which go on as if there were no war
as indeed there isn't, so far as they are concerned.
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- And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the problem with undeclared
foreign wars. The great majority of Americans are excluded from participation.
Politicians start wars, and politicians are the only ones who can end them.
The fewer people involved in the war, the less pressure there will be on
the politicians to end it. That leaves them free to posture on either side
of the issue without actually doing anything.
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- President Bush has no interest in ending the war. Before
the terrorist attack in 2001, he was at odds and ends and didn't seem to
know what he wanted to do. But now he enjoys being a war president. It's
given him a role to play. He's not going to give that up.
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- Congress, of course, could stop the war by cutting off
the funds. That is one of the great checks and balances the founders wrote
into the Constitution. Congress has 100 percent of the responsibility for
and control of all federal expenditures. There is nothing the executive
branch can do about it.
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- The soldiers can't declare peace. The people of Iraq
can't declare peace. Only the American politicians can end this war, and
they can't end it by sending more Americans to the killing fields. That
ploy didn't work in Vietnam, and it won't work in Iraq.
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- So, if you want to spare lives, bombard your representatives
with letters urging them to end the war now. In the future, we should insist
on a declaration of war with a 10 percent surtax on income and a 10 percent
war tax on goods and services, both to expire with the cessation of hostilities.
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- That would force everyone, even those in the seventh
ring, to participate in the war and give everyone an incentive to end it.
A pay-as-you-fight war would be whole lot less tolerable to most Americans.
As long as we force soldiers to bleed, we should bleed financially.
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- Charley Reese has been a journalist for 49 years.
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