How to Turn Ploughshares Into Swords

Dear Mr. President,

What’s wrong with this picture? The Pentagon plans to spend more than $1 billion to upgrade Camp Lemmonier in Djibouti (Washington Post, “U.S. moves drone fleet from Camp Lemonnier to ease Djibouti’s safety concerns,” September 24) but Detroit has to go begging to charities and scrounging for government grants to scrape up $300 million to pay firefighters and cops, keep the streetlights on and the buses running (today’s NYT, “$300 Million in Detroit Aid, But No Bailout” p. A1). The NYT characterizes the $300 million as “the fiscal equivalent of looking under sofa cushions for spare change.” Meanwhile, Camp Lemonnier will be upgraded to serve as a regional hub for Special Forces in Africa, the Arabian Peninsula and the Indian Ocean. The base is in the capital, Djibouti (pop. 567,000) next to the single-runway international airport which is jammed with military fighter jets, cargo planes and commercial flights. (Putting military installations in populated areas has always been decried when countries like Syria, Libya and Iraq do it.) Until this month, Lemonnier also housed drones which flew over Yemen, Somalia and elsewhere in the region but after the fifth crash in the past 2½ years, the latest near a neighborhood in the capital, their government asked the U.S. to move the drones to Chabelley Airfield in the desert, so the Pentagon asked Congress for an emergency $13 million to build temporary facilities there. $13 million for a drone base in Djibouti? No problem. $1 billion for Special Forces in Djibouti? No problem. Detroit needs help? Sorry, Charley. Detroit’s not part of the Global War on Terror. Go look under the couch cushions. Bailouts for Wall Street? No problem. Bailouts for Banksters and corporate moguls? No problem. But Americans whose pensions have been gutted or children whose health programs have been cut or families who depend on food stamps or underwater homeowners and those whose homes have been foreclosed on—legally or illegally by the very banks the government bailed out—sorry, not part of the War on Terror. These days the business of America is War and nothing but war. This is insane, Mr. President, self-destructive, soul-destroying national insanity and you’ve fostered it. The hawks in Congress—including my own representatives, Pelosi, Feinstein and Boxer—are complicit for going along with it, but it’s your legacy: the Nobel Peace Prize winning president who turned ploughshares into swords and humanity suffers for it.