United States Needs To Cease Being the Global Warlord

President Bush assured the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Salt Lake City last Monday that we must continue the war on terrorism and our troops must stay to bring freedom and democracy to Iraq. A steadily shrinking minority now support the president's view and methods.

More than 1,000 demonstrators in Salt Lake City's Pioneer Park disagreed with the current U.S. policy and demanded that our troops be brought home soon to end the destructive wars in the Middle East. Various speakers, veterans, parents of dead and injured veterans, Mayor Rocky Anderson, respected constitutional law professor Ed Firmage all strongly disagree with the idea of fighting terrorism and spreading democracy and freedom using aggressive war.

Using the horrendous violence and destruction of war to fight and defeat terrorism is obviously hypocritical and counterproductive. The gross injustice of aggressive or "preventive" warfare that kills and injures many more noncombatants - women and children - than combatants only fuels the hatred and the resulting increase in those willing to die fighting the United States and its allies.

Our behavior in Iraq and Afghanistan and in various detention centers involving torture of prisoners has seriously damaged our stature and possible role as champions of human rights, freedom and democracy. Instead of the sympathy we enjoyed as victims of violence after 9/11, we are now more likely seen as imperialists, aggressors, war criminals and gross offenders of human rights.

We have given our brave soldiers the impossible task of first destroying countries and killing thousands of their citizens and then acting as "therapist" to teach the traumatized survivors nonviolent methods of establishing democratic principles. It is particularly impossible as we do not speak their language, nor do most of us understand their culture and religion.

The idea that meeting terrorism and suicide bombers with greater military violence has been tried by Israel for more than 30 years and has been a spectacular failure. If it did not work in a tiny area of land where the military has overwhelming power, how could it work for the large areas of the Middle East, Indonesia and Africa?

We must consider alternative solutions to reduce and eliminate most of the terrorist threat facing the United States. That solution should begin with the withdrawal of our troops from foreign countries. We now have troops and training camps in more than 100 countries. In many cases we are supporting dictatorial regimes such as in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Pakistan, Uzbekistan and Egypt to name a few.

It is that support and the presence of our troops in Saudi Arabia that was one of the main reasons for the 9/11 attack.

Major bases in Europe and Japan, maintained decades after the possible rationale of fighting the Soviet and Chinese empires has disappeared, are no longer necessary. We need to cease being the global warlords or policemen. The maintenance of such bases not only antagonizes people in those countries but also adds to our trade deficit and tax burden.

A recent report by the conservative Cato Institute (Policy Analysis No. 539, 3/28/05) claims that we could reduce our active-duty military by half by eliminating our foreign bases without impacting our defense capability. It would also reduce our expenditures for personnel and operations by $84 billion per year.

We need to restore global respect for our country and the universal human rights enshrined in our own Constitution and the Charter of the United Nations. That restoration will start when we are perceived as supporting the rights of all people, their culture and religion.

It requires that we act in accordance with the globally accepted universal human rights and ethical rules based on the teachings of Christianity and most other religions. We will then be respected not out of fear of our overwhelming military power, but for the example we show to the world of how to run an effective democracy within our own borders and use nonviolent means to achieve peace and justice.
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Andy Schoenberg is a Road Scholar of the Humanities Council on the topic of "Just War Theory," leader of the Citizens for Global Solutions and emeritus professor at the University of Utah who taught the World Peace Seminar.