Report from Santa Fe; Phyllis Bennis

The National Education Association of New Mexico, an organization of professionals who believe that investing in public education is an investment in our state's economic future. And by a grant from the Healey Foundation, Tau's New Mexico. Hello, I'm Lorraine Mills and welcome to report from Santa Fe. Our guest today is Phyllis Benness. Thank you for joining us. Great to be with you, Lorraine. Well, you're here in Santa Fe as a guest of the Land and Foundation as part of their in pursuit of cultural freedom series, and you have been pursuing cultural freedom, especially in the Middle East for a very, very long time. Welcome.

Thanks very much. It's so great to be here. It's a privilege to be part of the Land and Family and to be here with you. Well, Igualimente, as we say in New Mexico, you are the Director of the New Internationalism Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, and it has a couple of cohorts won the Middle East and then won about the United Nations will get back to that. You're also a fellow at the Transnational Institute. So before we go anywhere, what is internationalism and what is the Transnational Institute? Well, the Transnational Institute was actually created by IPS, my institute in Washington, the Institute for Policy Studies, which is engaged in changing the world. A small job. And we believe that the world is changed through social movements. So our job is to turn ideas into action that link peace, justice, and the environment, all the major challenges of our day. And in about the 70s, long before I was involved in IPS, it's a very old institution, some of the members of IPS established the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam as an

international center, sort of north and south, and we have people now who are part of the fellowship who are from India and Brazil and Pakistan, China, from all over the world, as well as Europe, the United States, from Venezuela, from Iraq. And it's an incredible opportunity for me to, I travel there once or twice a year, we have meetings, we do books together. And it's just a great opportunity to sort of learn to see things globally. For me, the question of internationalism has to do with looking at the world from the vantage point of the whole world, and not from the vantage point of just people here. So when I look at the war in Afghanistan and why it's so deadly and what it's going to take to stop it and why we have to stop it, part of it is the cost to the United States, the financial cost, the human cost to our young soldiers. Part of it certainly is to the people of Afghanistan, the cost to Afghans civilians who are caught up in the fighting in such a devastating way.

But it's also what it means for the world, what it means in undermining international law, undermining the role of the United Nations. So those are all part of how I might fight for justice in Palestine or to end wars in Iraq or Afghanistan. It's not just about ending the war, but doing so in a way that serves international goals of equality and human rights for everybody. Well, you've written a very interesting kind of book. There's sort of primers. I want to show two of them. One is, since you just mentioned Afghanistan, ending the U.S. war in Afghanistan. And in effect, it's every question that one might have in a very succinct, clear format. If you're wondering about one part of it, how can we get out and how can we all say face and all that, it's all in here. And the same thing with an updated version of this book, understanding the Palestine Israeli conflict.

And this seems like a problem with no solution that goes on and on. And yet, you posit some ways out from the Quagmire. You know, when you pull back a little bit from the deluge of propaganda that passes as news in this country, it's not as complicated as it might be. You know, the issues of religion make it seem more complicated than it is. But at the end of the day, the issue of ending the war in Afghanistan or ending the conflict between Israel and Palestine, if you start from the vantage point of, again, international law, human rights, and equality, it's not as hard to figure out what it's going to take. What we tried to do with that series, the primers, was to figure out the hardest part, really, was not the writing of the answers of the questions. It's done as frequently asked questions. It's sort of a website in a book, really, a little book that fits in your pocket, is very convenient. But what we really tried to do was figure out what are the questions that people really have.

So on the question of Israel, Palestine, the questions are really very basic. Who are the Palestinians? Why are they in Israel? Who are the Israelis? Are all Jews Israelis? Are all Jews Zionists? What is Zionism? Very basic questions that sometimes people might not want to ask because they're a little embarrassed. Maybe they should know, although in this country it's not surprising they don't. So we try to answer those kinds of really basic questions. On the issue of ending the war in Afghanistan, we looked at things like, who is the Taliban? What did they have to do with September 11? Was the war in Afghanistan a legitimate war? Was it really self-defense? What does international law say about our war in Afghanistan? So it's those kinds of questions that I think help people who already want to change the world, who want to end the war, who want to stop the conflict between Israel and Palestine. It gives them talking points, it gives them tools, it gives them instruments to do their work better.

But the old, you know, knowledge is power. Exactly. I was so delighted at the, some of these questions are the dumb question. Afghanistan is afraid to ask. Right, exactly. So it's such a relief to find the answers to these questions. And there are no dumb questions. That part is true. You know, the fact is, if you grow up in this country, you have to be pretty exceptional to know the answers to all these questions. They're not stupid questions because we don't learn them in our schools. We don't learn them from the newspapers. We don't learn them from television, from popular culture, until recently where there's been a real shift in the discourse, particularly about Israel-Palestine, I think, the last four or five years, say, we've seen an incredible shift away from the kind of one-sided Israel can do no wrong, Palestinians are all terrorists, that kind of a frame that I think was dominant in this country for a very long time. The assumption was that any politician who would dare to criticize Israel was committing political suicide, and that's simply no longer the case. It's simply no longer the case.

The discourse shift has been incredible, but it's still a struggle. You still have to fight to get that information that you need. But as we're, you know, the rumors of war and the focus on Iran now, Israel is playing a huge role in that, and I think there's a level at which basic Americans are uncomfortable, what if Israel say attacks Iran before the election? This is a huge challenge that we face. Yes. And I think that you raised it in exactly the right way. It's a lot tied to the election cycle. The fact that there is an election in the next six months, eight months of this year, the Israeli government knows that they will never be able to pressure President Obama more than they can right now in a run-up to an election. When I said that there's been a huge shift in discourse, the challenge that we face, I think, is turning that discourse shift into a policy shift. That's the part that hasn't happened yet. You're seeing a shift in the media, a shift in the polls, a shift in Jewish public opinion,

a shift in broader American public opinion in all of those ways. And I can point to polls and books and articles, you know, you have mainstream articles suddenly coming out saying that the media consensus on Israel is collapsing. You have the Washington Post, one of the most pro-Israel newspapers in the national scene, creating an analytical article, not an op-ed, that says, time to re-evaluate aid to Israel. And the sky didn't fall. These are now parts of normal discourse in a way that they never were before. President Jimmy Carter's book, Palestine Peace, not apartheid. That played a huge role in making people understand things differently. But he would never have found a publisher for that book, ex-president or not, if we had not already changed some of the discourse. One of the organizations I work with is called the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation. And it's a coalition of almost 400 organizations, church groups, Jewish organizations, student

groups, Palestinian and Arab groups, everybody is in there. The focus is on changing U.S. policy. When we started that organization a dozen years ago, well, no, about 10 years ago, I guess, we had six member organizations, ten people sitting around a table being very nervous, saying, oh, what are we doing here? And suddenly we have, I think it's 380 something. It's almost 400 member groups, thousands of members around the country. That's a whole different scene. Jewish Voice for Peace is now one of the biggest Jewish communal organizations in the U.S. with over 100,000 members around the country. Well, in terms of changing the discourse, I'd like to move a little more to what's happening in this country with the Occupy movement. Yes. So they sort of went dormant over the winter. I do not know what consolation of how they're going to come out in the spring when they start, you know, reserting themselves.

But how do you think the Occupy movement has changed the discourse in this country? I think that movement did more in a shorter time than any equivalent movement we've ever had in this country. And just four months, they managed to change the entire overall dominant discourse away from this question of the deficit, as if that was the main threat to people, to inequality. The notion of the 99% versus the 1%, what a brilliant way of talking about the problem of our country, the fundamental problem of our country and our world. There's a global 1%, and there's an American 1%. In both cases, the 99% have a huge amount of work to do to challenge what the 1% are up to. I think, I see it a little bit differently, maybe, than what you said, Larry. And I don't think people were, from the Occupy movement, were really pulling back over the winter. They were, in most cases, kicked out of the encampments. And it got cold.

It's very cold. That got very difficult. But the work went forward in some places like in New York, Occupy Wall Street, the first. They moved to Occupy the Hood. And it went out all over the city. So in community centers and in apartment complexes and in public spaces all over New York City, you had Occupy groups that were mobilizing, that were working with trade unions, mobilizing against war spending, the whole range of issues that has come up. So I think that the discourse shift that you speak of that was so powerful in the Occupy movement is very much underway right now. One of the things we're seeing that's taking place this month is a plan by the 99% spring, it's called. The goal is to train 100,000 new activists in understanding the economy, understanding inequality, understanding military spending and the role it plays in inequality, and training them in street actions and non-violent civil disobedience and all the tactics that are

going to be needed for this next period. And if we can do that, if we can train another 100,000 new activists, this next year is going to be an incredible one. Well, there's just another side to that equation that someone needs to train the police in the bill of rights. Well, there's that. There's that. And we have a Supreme Court that's sort of leading us in the opposite direction. This new ruling that strip searches are perfectly acceptable, even for somebody who's riding a bicycle without a good bell. I mean, this is an outrage. This is putting our country in the position of countries like Kazakhstan and countries that are on the list of the UN special rapporteur against torture. You know, this is an outrage that I think requires President Obama to come out and speak forcefully and requires a huge movement to go back and challenge this. You have spoken about a year ago in February, you and Noam Chomsky did an event about ending

the wars and how to stop the wars and one perspective that you brought forth that I really want to have you speak to our audience about is about the war spending. There's a website called thenationalpriorities.org. Yes. So I was reading that last night. I thought, there's a lot of stuff I didn't know. Talk about, in this time of economic downturn for us, what the economic consequences of these endless wars is. You know, Lurian, when we went to war against Afghanistan and then soon against Iraq, for the first time a new U.S. war was not accompanied by a tax rise to pay for it. Instead, it was paid for with a credit card, mainly in debt to China. And one effect of that was that it wasn't felt immediately by people across the country except those who had family or loved ones in harm's way in the military.

And that was way less than 1% of our population. You know, one of the things that's so horrific about these wars is that besides being young, the single most important unifying factor among the casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan, which means the membership in the military is that they come from towns of less than 25,000. These are not volunteers. These are people drafted by poverty, drafted by lack of jobs, drafted by lack of options, lack of opportunities. So that's one aspect, but there's also a financial aspect. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan so far have already cost us $1.3 trillion. That's one of those numbers that is so high. It's almost impossible to imagine. You know, I had a teacher in, I think it was second grade, who came in to the classroom one day and put on the blackboard about six or eight feet of graph paper, the kind with the little tiny squares, 10 to an inch, and he put it up and he said, all right, you kids,

I want you to look at this because you're looking at a million little squares. You're never in your life going to see a million anything. You're going to hear the number a million and you're never going to know what it looks like. And I'm giving you the chance to see a million. And I've never forgotten that because a million is chum change when you're talking about the costs of war. A trillion, a billion is a thousand million and a trillion is a thousand billion. It's a thousand, thousand million. It's an impossible number. But if we bring it down to what it means in our communities, then we see what it really means. I looked at that website just the other day before arriving in New Mexico and one of the great things about it is they're like a cheat sheet for all of us who want to be able to talk to our member of Congress, our city council about what the cost of war means for us. So let's look at New Mexico for the cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars since the beginning since 2001.

The state of New Mexico, the taxpayers here, have paid four and a half billion dollars. That's just New Mexico. Now let's look at what they could have spent that amount of money on. The same amount of money for one year could have paid for 69,295 elementary school teachers. What would that do to the, to better the schools here? It could have allowed 5.9 million households to convert to all wind energy. It could have paid for 546,900 veterans to get a year's worth of veterans medical care. If we look just at the city of Santa Fe, small city here, just this year. Let's look at just the war in Afghanistan just for 2012. Santa Fe taxpayers have paid $15.7 million. That amount of money could have provided low-income children with health care for 6,330 children. It could have hired 355 firefighters.

It could have provided head start slots for over 2,000 children. What's going to keep us safer when we look at the use of that money? One other statistic, keeping one young soldier in Afghanistan just for one year cost a million dollars. It's not because the soldiers are overpaid. At the lower ranks, half of them qualify for food stamps. But because of Afghanistan being a landlocked country where everything has to be airlifted in, there's gasoline cost, the cost of the bullets, the cost of the air conditioners, everything it takes for that kind of an occupation 8,910,000 miles away, so far away that most people in this country can't even find it on a globe or on a map. It cost a million dollars to keep one soldier there. If we brought home one soldier, we could hire her and 19 more young soldiers for $50,000 a year jobs with that same money. Twenty people, a good middle-class union job, and instead we're wasting it on a war we

lost before the war began. And what any student of history will know, the Soviets couldn't win in Afghanistan, the British Empire feel in Afghanistan. We knew going in. They call it the burial place of empires, for a reason. It has been that, and it remains that today. We have lost this war. We have created a government that has no control outside of the capital and not even very much there. A government that has no domestic support so that it's true if our troops and our money disappeared, that government would probably not survive rightfully because it doesn't have any internal legitimacy, any internal credibility. This is a war we cannot win. And the question is how many more young American soldiers and how many more Afghan civilians have to die? Well, you talk about, when you go to the National Priorities Project, 50 percent of our budget, our national budget is for the military.

It's about 58 percent actually, okay, yeah. Once you get beyond the part that has to be paid of what's available, 58 percent goes to the military. It's shocking and people have no idea. And this is in a world, the Cold War is long over. We don't have a global coalition of countries that are about to invade us. We are safer than we've ever been before. Terrorism exists. It's a real threat. But does anyone believe that a military of hundreds of thousands of soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Marines and sailors and airmen and all of that, that that's what can be used to go against terrorism? You can't fight a war against terrorism. We didn't do that in Afghanistan. We were fighting a war against Afghanistan. The people who attacked us on September 11, they were not from Afghanistan, they were not Afghans, they didn't live in Afghanistan, they lived in Hamburg, they didn't train in Afghanistan, they trained in Florida, they didn't go to flight school in Afghanistan, they went to flight school in Minnesota.

But we attacked the country of Afghanistan because they were inspired by somebody who was then in Afghanistan, a Saudi who was then in Afghanistan. You know, this is something that flies in the face of international law, in the face of what it means to be part of the world, rather than a colossal, like, Rome standing astride the world. This is, you know, a very different world than I think most Americans want to live in. And then when you look at our priorities, you had said that we should be afraid of our country because all the money that's going into the military is not going into jobs, and to feed exactly, and to healing the sick, we should be afraid of our country turning into a hungry, uneducated, jobless people. And the people who come out of the military come out trained to kill. They're not coming out trained with job skills that can get them a good civilian job. And that's why we're seeing so many young soldiers coming out with such bad cases of post-traumatic stress disorder PTSD with traumatic brain injury, TBI, coming out and being

redeployed in some cases with those diagnoses and then coming back and what it's going to take aside from all the soldiers that are coming back with such horrific physical injuries. People are surviving now because of the incredible advances in military medicine. People are surviving injuries that they never would have survived. And yet they are going to now require 50, 60, 75 years of 24, 7 around the clock care. What does that mean for their families? What does that mean for our communities? What does that mean for our health care system? That's why we are already at the point where these wars are costing us over $3.5 trillion. We haven't spent it all yet, but we are obligated to it all already because of those who have already been injured. And one of the things that's so tragic here, we are hearing now a little bit more than we used to and that's good about the problem of soldiers coming home with PTSD, what that means in terms of domestic violence, the kind of eruptions of violence that we see on

military bases and elsewhere. And we hear about PTSD. Also the suicide rate. And then we hear about the suicide rate. We have now more soldiers have committed suicide. Veterans have committed suicide than were killed in the entire Vietnam War, 58,000. We have passed that marker. But look at what we don't hear about civilians in Afghanistan or in Iraq. We never hear the term PTSD applied to Afghan civilians. When an Afghan soldier turns his rifle on his U.S. trainer, his U.S. colleague or whatever we want to call them, we never hear, oh, he must have snapped. We only hear that for our soldiers when he leaves his base and goes and kills 17 civilians in Afghanistan, in tiny villages, nine of them, children, and we say, oh, he must have snapped. And he probably did. It seems he probably did have some version of PTSD or whatever.

Or he had a brain injury, or he had a brain injury. But he was trained to do exactly what he did that night, to kick down the doors, to treat anyone there as an enemy until proven otherwise, and to shoot first and ask questions later. We don't hear that Afghans, of whom the Afghan government, the Ministry of Health, in a UN-backed study, found that 66 percent of the population are suffering from mental disorders. This in a country with 42 healthcare professionals, 42 psychiatrists and psychologists for the entire country. They are getting no care. We can talk, and we should, about the insufficient care of our veterans. But Afghans, civilians who are facing 30 years of trauma, are getting no care. And what happens in their society? Well, you have touched upon so many things. I want our audience to know that here's another one of your books before and after about the war on terrorism, and you have another one calling the shots about the role of the

United States and the United Nations. So you have researches so much, and you can only come and give us, you know, a short percentage of that. I also wanted to show your other primers understanding the Palestine-Israeli conflict. And since you were talking about Afghanistan, ending the U.S. war in Afghanistan. So please give us a final word. Well, I'm very glad to have the opportunity to talk about this. We are facing the possibility of a new war in Iran. I have another primer called understanding the U.S.-Iran crisis. We must fight against that. This is now another war, possibly against another oil-rich country in the Middle East that does not have nuclear weapons, which our countries top officials all agree. It does not have nuclear weapons. It is not building a nuclear weapon, and it has not even decided to build a nuclear weapon. And yet we are hearing calls for going to war immediately, calls that there is no possibility of talking to that regime.

Everything is the only solution. There will be talks beginning very soon between the U.S. and its partners and Iran. It's very important that we understand that talks, diplomacy take a long time. If we don't see the response we want the first day, that doesn't mean it's a failure that now we have to go to war. It means diplomacy with a country we have not had relations with for 30 years take a long time. Making diplomacy is always better than fighting wars. The wars are worse for the people there. They are worse for us. They are too expensive in lives and in treasure. We can't afford any more wars. We need diplomacy. We need international law. We need to be basing our policy on human rights and equality, not on being better and bigger and more powerful than everybody else. And the role of just the normal voter and citizen is to press our governments to say you answer to us, you work for us. And when massive public opinion says it's time to end the war in Afghanistan not wait two more years, it's time to make clear that we are not going to war in Iran.

It is your obligation to reflect that. There is work going on in Santa Fe at the level of the city council. I think in other cities in New Mexico and throughout the country, there are efforts to get city councils to pass resolutions against war in Iran. And I think that we have an obligation to keep up the work with our members of Congress, to make clear to them that we will not vote for members of Congress who are committed to going to war when it's not necessary and it's not going to make us safer. They need to hear from us. We need to be in the streets. We need to be in congressional offices. We need to be writing letters to the editor, calling radio talk shows, and saying we are not prepared to simply sit back and wait for our elected officials to make their own decisions and we will accept them. Can we have something to say about it? Well, you, Phyllis Banis, have a lot to say about it and I'm so grateful that you've taken the time to be with us today. Thank you. It's been a pleasure to be with you. Our guest is Phyllis Banis, the director of the new internationalism project at the Institute for Policy Studies.

We hope to visit with you again. Thank you. I look forward to it. Thanks so much. And I'm Lorraine Mills. I'd like to thank your audience for being with us today in report from Santa Fe. We'll see you next week. Past archival programs of report from Santa Fe are available at the website report from Santa Fe dot com. If you have questions or comments, please email info at report from Santa Fe dot com. Report from Santa Fe is made possible in part by grants from the members of the National Education Association of New Mexico, an organization of professionals who believe that investing in public education is an investment in our state's economic future. Read by a grant from the Healey Foundation, Taos, New Mexico.