Note: Rich Whitney, like the Green Party generally, opposed the War in
Iraq before it began. Whitney spoke at anti-war rally in November 2002.
In early 2003, the Shawnee Green Party and other organizations
presented over a thousand petition signatures to the Carbondale City Council
urging the City to go on record opposing the invasion of Iraq. By a 4-3
vote, the Council declined to adopt the resolution. Whitney prepared
this statement, which he was denied the opportunity to present, along with
others who supported the resolution. However, it was later published in
a local newsweekly.

The Shawnee Green Party, along with the Southern Illinois Peace
Coalition and other concerned citizens, has been conducting weekly peace
vigils every Saturday at noon, at the Town Square Pavilion in Carbondale,
since the Winter of 2002-2003. Whitney has attended the vigils
regularly.

Statement in Support of the Resolution Opposing War Against Iraq
by Rich Whitney, for the Shawnee Green Party, 3/18/03

To the Carbondale City Council and Hon. Mayor Dillard:

I speak tonight as a representative of the Shawnee Green Party. In the
last general election, 21 percent of the voters in Carbondale cast
their vote for the Green Party in the race for state representative. The
Party has asked me to speak on behalf of that constituency tonight. The
values on which the Party is based include the values of non-violence
and grassroots democracy, and on that basis, we ask you to please vote in
favor of the Resolution.

That we oppose going to war against Iraq is no secret. But I would
like to focus tonight on the democratic principles underlying this
Resolution. It has been suggested by some proponents of war that true
patriotic Americans must rally around the President at this time and that
dissent is somehow anti-American. It has been suggested by at least one
member of this Council that this Resolution is inappropriate, because it
should be the City's role to support our troops, and telling the
President that we don't want them to be fighting this war will somehow
disrespect or undermine them.

If any of you hold these notions, I ask you to reconsider. For with
all due respect, these notions are profoundly mistaken, and go against
everything this nation is supposed to stand for.

In our democratic republic, it is the role of the people and their
elected representatives to ultimately determine whether the nation should
engage in war in the first place. Criticism of an executive decision to
go to war is not the same thing as criticism of the troops fighting it
and I think it insults the intelligence of our service men and women to
presume that they can't understand that clear and basic distinction. In
any event, the amended version of the Resolution makes that point
explicit.

It is most unfortunate that Congress has abdicated its own
Constitutional duty to declare or not declare war, and ceded it to the President.
However, our constitutional scheme presupposes that the people are the
fourth branch of government. The executive branch, including the
President and the armed forces, is supposed to be the servant of 'We The
People.' We fought a revolution to establish the right of the people to
have that control over government. It is not only our American right and
privilege, it is our duty to raise our voices and criticize our
government when it is in error. As Thomas Jefferson once warned, "Every
government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The
people themselves are its only safe depositories."

Another renowned President, Teddy Roosevelt, who was not exactly a
pacifist, agreed. He once proclaimed, "To announce that there must be no
criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president
right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally
treasonable to the American public."

And there is nothing more democratic or All-American as town-hall
meetings and resolutions like these to convey the message of the people to
the President and Congress when we come to the conclusion that their
actions are wrong.

These principles apply in times of war no less than in times of peace.
As Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., opined
recently, "Of all the decisions a free people must face, the question of
war and peace is the most crucial. Before sending young Americans to
kill and die in foreign lands, a democracy has a sacred obligation to
permit full and searching discussion of the issues at stake. There is no
obligation to bow down before an imperial presidency."

Schlesinger cited a number of examples of famous American
dissent against war, including Mark Twain's scathing criticism of the
Spanish-American War, and another one that should have special meaning to us:

In 1848 the House of Representatives itself resolved that the Mexican
War had been "unnecessarily and unconstitutionally begun by the
President of the United States." A few days later a young congressman attacked
the presidential justification for the war as "from beginning to end,
the sheerest deception." Explaining to a friend his opposition to the
war, Rep. Abraham Lincoln of Illinois challenged what is known today as
the Bush Doctrine of anticipatory self-defense: "Allow the President to
invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary to
repel an invasion... and you allow him to make war at pleasure." The
Founding Fathers, he continued, "resolved to so frame the Constitution that
no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us."

Of course, the current plan to attack Iraq is even less justifiable,
as there is no "invasion" for us to repel. And that really gets us to
the heart of the matter. For despite President Bush's best efforts to
rationalize it, there is no getting around the fact that he would have the
U.S. government attack and invade another sovereign nation that has not
attacked us - or attacked any other nation, for that matter, in 12
years. He would make us the aggressor, at a terrible human and economic
cost, disregarding international law and the U.N. process, inflaming world
opinion against us, and probably generating a good deal more of the
very terrorism that he professes to be fighting.

In this regard, we would do well to consider the words of the first
"George W" - George Washington - who once warned:

I have always given it as my decided opinion that no nation has a
right to intermeddle in the internal concerns of another . . . and that if
this country could, consistently with its engagements, maintain a
strict neutrality and thereby preserve peace, it was bound to do so by
motives of policy, interest, and every other consideration.

Mr. Mayor and Council, if you truly believe that there is
justification for our government to attack Iraq, then let us hear the justification
and debate it. But do not rest your argument on the ground that dissent
during wartime is un-American or unpatriotic. If we are correct that
our Chief Executive is jeopardizing human life for no good or just
reason, then our dissent is very much a part of a long and proud American
tradition, it is our moral and civic obligation, and it is more patriotic
than remaining silent.