Waging War or Waging Peace?

It really is a never ending debate and I guess that's why we need to make sure we know about it and try to understand it. The latest example to me, is the President's nomination of Chuck Hagel as Secretary of Defense and John Brennan as the Director of the CIA. I have never been known as a barometer for mainstream thinking and that's probably true in this case. But there are some things that just strike me as strange.

Here we are with, I think, a majority of Americans sick of war and sick of the waste of life and expenditure of dollars while our economy falters and we have to make decisions about cutting programs vital to many people. We can certainly debate which of these programs should stay or go and I'm sure we will.  But here we are. The President nominates someone who fought in Vietnam as an enlisted soldier. Who has expressed, and I'm paraphrasing, that during war, it's the people in Washington who make the policy but it's the little guys who come home in body bags. This is a person who was wounded twice, who has seen war and experienced its horror. Someone who has questioned a foreign policy that leans heavily on a "let's get em" attitude. Quoting from his Library of Congress interview for the Vietnam Project, he, his brother Tom and others escaped an attack where he was wounded under heavy machine-gun fire. After being transported out, Chuck Hagel says he made a resolution. “I remember sitting on that track, another track, waiting for the dust-off [helicopter] to come and medical evacuation, and thinking to myself, you know, if I ever get out of all of this, I am going to do everything I can to assure that war is the last resort that we, a nation, a people, calls upon to settle a dispute,” he said. “The horror of it, the pain of it, the suffering of it. People just don’t understand it unless they’ve been through it. There’s no glory, only suffering in war.”

This is the nominee who's choice is being questioned and debated and who various senators are saying they will vote against, mainly because he questioned the war in Iraq.

On the other hand we have John Brennan, the President's nominee as Director of the CIA. Looks like a nice man and probably is, but he knew a few years ago that he should withdraw a similar nomination as Director of the CIA because he was aware that his involvement in what seems to be recognized as torture would muddy the waters. So he was heavily involved in the use and case made for torture and now is mainly responsible for determining which human targets will be hit by drones as he works out of an office in the White House. Some of these attacks will hit others and cause what we know as collateral damage.

The prediction is that he (Brennan) will breeze through the senate hearings on his nomination.

Now I think this is odd. I think values and priorities have gotten mixed up. Many of our elected officials just don't get it.

It just doesn't make sense that these two men are being viewed in such opposite ways. It doesn't make sense to me that in the process, we should be talking up more war in the mid-east. The debate will continue but ultimately people need to work hard at peace vs war.