too bad the Chickenhawks in Washington have ignored the words of this old soldier

[MORTARDUDE]

http://www.interventionmag.com/cms/m...rticle&sid=647


It?s too bad the Chickenhawks in Washington have ignored the words of this old soldier.
By Mick Youther


Dwight D. Eisenhower was the first President I remember. I saw him as a doddering old bald guy; who played golf a lot, and suffered a heart attack sometime during his presidency. I didn?t have any idea of what he had done in WWII, nor did I care. Presidents were not really a top priority for me at that time. Since then, I?ve learned there was a lot more to Eisenhower, and that he had some very important things to say to America?then and now.

? ?We have arrived at that point, my friends, when war does not present the possibility of victory or defeat. War would present to us only the alternative in degrees of destruction.?-- 1954

? ?We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United State corporations. This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence--economic, political, even spiritual--is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the Federal government. . . . Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.?-- Farewell address, 1/17/61

? ?The problem in defense is how far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without.?

? ?Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea. Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well.?-- Farewell address, 1/17/61

? ?There is no way in which a country can satisfy the craving for absolute security, but it can bankrupt itself morally and economically in attempting to reach that illusory goal through arms alone.?

? ?If all that Americans want is security, they can go to prison. They'll have enough to eat, a bed and a roof over their heads?-- as president of Colombia University, 12/8/49

? ?May we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion.?

In 1955 Eisenhower had his opportunity to wage preemptive war against Communist China after China invaded some islands near Taiwan (Formosa). Congress gave Eisenhower approval to attack China at the time and place of his choosing. Instead of attacking, Eisenhower sent his ambassador, John Foster Dulles, to Europe to gain support for a war; but Churchill refused, and so did NATO. If we went it alone, Pentagon officials assured Eisenhower that we could destroy China?s military capability within three weeks.

So, what did Eisenhower do? Did he bribe together a ?coalition of the willing?, start handing out no-bid contracts, and mobilize the military? No, Eisenhower called together his top advisors and told them to find a diplomatic solution?which they did. There was no war.

? ?A preventive war, to my mind, is an impossibility. I don?t believe there is such a thing, and frankly I wouldn?t even listen to anyone seriously that came in and talked about such a thing.?-- Press conference in 1954

? ?When it comes to the matter of war, there is only one place that I would go, and that is to the Congress of the United States.? --January 1956 [A few months later, he explained]?I am not going to order any troops into anything that can be interpreted as war, until Congress directs it.?

No law says our President has to have been in the military, but such service would certainly make a better President. It would give (him) the perspective that is so lacking in the current flock of Chicken Hawks that are misusing our troops in their ill-conceived plan for world domination.

? ?Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil and you're a thousand miles from the corn field.?-- From an address at Peoria, IL 9/25/56 (The same can be said for war.)

? ?Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.?-- April 16, 1953

? ?I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.?



Mick Youther is an Instructor in the Department of Physiology at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, IL. You can email your comments to Mick@interventionmag.com