Sunshine, Swanson, Delahunt and Afghanistan

___ The sun was shining, the flowers were in bloom . . . and more than 200 people packed the Morse Pond School auditorium to hear a range of perspectives on the nearly nine-year-old war.

Moderating the discussion was US Representative William D. Delahunt (D), who local anti-war activists hope will vote against a $33 billion supplemental war funding bill, which the House of Representatives is expected to consider by mid-month.

Panelist David Swanson, founder of Defundwar.org, lauded the congressman for his October 2003 vote against a bill funding the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and called on him to apply the same logic to his vote on the current war supplemental.

“You do not exit a war by escalating it,” Mr. Swanson said, noting that 68,000 troops are now in Afghanistan, as well as 121,000 “contractors or mercenaries . . . The fact that the escalation has, predictably, already begun cannot be treated as a fait accompli, unless we’re going to tell the American public that we were all played for a bunch of fools,” he said.

American presence in Afghanistan is not unlike the 10-year Soviet occupation, Mr. Swanson said, and continued killing of civilians only compounds decades of war and poverty in the country. “You cannot win an occupation. You can only end it,” he said.


read more: http://www.capenews.net/communities/falmouth/news/336

thanks for posting