Ready to Resist?

Having returned from the Philippines after eight years, I am alarmed that fellow citizens are not prepared to resist war. An embattled president with his back to the wall needs something to distract and unite the public against a common enemy. Absent public support, he might engineer an incident that unites the country. This has been done before.

The President might be thinking of business considerations. War is good for business, especially the large weapons businesses that supported him in the last election and might in the future.

We can look back on the Cheney administration and the wars it started that are still raging. It is hard to end a war started for profits. If, as many think, the wars in the Middle East were started to gain access to the largest reserves of oil, they were a mistake but continue despite the fact that new petroleum extraction methods have made U.S. energy self-sufficient.

I hope the citizens of the Santa Barbara area will band together against a war started by a President who was not elected by voters but by the Electoral College. There are many things we can do to make it more difficult for the president to take us to war. The Pentagon will expect to be able to call up local reservists and guard, and take them out of their jobs while, in many cases, expecting us to pay their wages while they fight the president’s wars. We need to organize to make this more difficult.