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Reber Boult¼s response:
It's a fair question. Here's a rough draft of an answer I'd give if I were President. Except the job description disqualifies me from being President (The Thanksgiving dinner prayer given by young cartoon character Huey Freeman makes this point: "In this time of war against Osama bin Laden and the oppressive Taliban regime, we are thankful that OUR leader isn't the spoiled son of a powerful politician from a wealthy oil family who is supported by religious fundamentalists, operates through clandestine organizations, has no respect for the democratic electoral process, bombs innocents, and uses war to deny people their civil liberties. Amen."):
We created the Taliban in order to hurt the Soviet Union, fresh from our experience at being hurt by South Vietnam¼s Liberation Front. A result was to destroy Afghanistan. That chicken is home to roost. We¼re going to fix that:
We¼re removing our troops from the country of Mecca and Medina (and, incidentally, withdrawing support from that country¼s repressive regime).
We¼ll not sell any more arms, not a single bullet, to Israel until Palestinians are free and equal.
We¼ll send reparations to the Kurds who were hurt when we recruited them to help us and then we abandoned them.
We¼ll do our best to bring significant international figures who have committed war crimes to international tribunals. We¼ll start with Ariel Sharon, Henry Kissinger, and Osama bin Laden.
We¼ll put together an international coalition to root out government corruption and government sponsored terrorism.
Working through the United Nations, we¼ll seek rules to punish governments and their officials for stealing from their people and from businesses. Same for terrorism.
We¼ll ratify and join proposed agreements to establish an international criminal court.
We¼ll convene an international body to come up with a definition of terrorism that will cover government and non-government actors alike.
We¼ll establish a cabinet level Department of Peace, with a force of soldiers equal to that of the Department of Defense (f/k/a the War Department).
We¼ll cap military expenditures at the amount spent on humanitarian aid.
Our government will stop selling arms and will prohibit any arms sales by people and businesses in this country.
We will outlaw production and sale of land mines. We'll sign that treaty, too. We¼ll help to clear them from wherever they¼ve been laid.
We will use all means, including military, at our disposal to destroy all atomic, chemical, and biological weapons in the world.
We¼ll be reevaluating our relationships with all countries to make sure we aren¼t supporting repressive actions. In the Middle East and South and Central Asia this will have immediate impact on the governments of Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Uzbekistan, and Pakistan.
We will not impose or maintain prohibitions on shipments of food, clothing, or medical supplies to any country except when requested to do so by a well established liberation movement in that country.
We¼ll withdraw support from military and paramilitary goon squads.
We¼ll end Plan Colombia and all other programs that use drugs as a pretext to militarily meddle in other countries¼ affairs.
We¼ll strip the CIA and all the rest of our „intelligence¾ agencies of all functions except gathering intelligence. We¼ll make most of that intelligence public.
We¼ll reallocate our foreign aid. None of it will go for military uses. We will institute strict controls to keep it from going to the rich or to American financial institutions. We will allocate substantially more to countries where people have democratic liberties or elect their leaders, doubly more where both exist.
Send food, medicine, and propaganda.
We¼ll live up to the terms of all treaties and other international agreements to which we¼re a party. We¼ll rejoin all of those we¼ve withdrawn from in the last 20 years.
We¼ll pay our UN dues. With interest, including interest on past late payments.
We¼ll try our best to get all loans to distressed governments renegotiated.
We¼ll buy any firearm in Afghanistan for $500.
Cognizant that we¼ve had a lot of wars to end war but we haven¼t ended war, we¼ll try to implement the Buddhist concept that in order to have peace we must try to free all on this earth from suffering.
