goedel

If one reads Winston Churchill's own account of the Dardenelles campaign of 1915, early in WWI, one can understand his motivation for the tragic, bloody failure. Tens of thousands of Australian, New Zealand and British soldiers were killed in a vain attempt to break the Turkish hold on the Straits. The British had reason to hope that by opening the Dardenelles to British supply ships, Russia could be assisted in its front against the Kaiser's army and keep him from concentrating his forces on the French front.

Churchill was blamed for the costly defeat, as the First Lord of the Admiralty and chief proponent of the Dardenelles campaign. He resigned from the cabinet and joined the British Army. He served well as an officer in France during the rest of the war. But it wasn't until 1938 and the failure of the appeasement policy of Neville Chamberlain that Winston Churchill was again able to return to esteem in the British government. He paid the price of exclusion from the highest councils government from 1916 to 1938, except for a disastrous advocacy of return to the gold standard in 1924, and well he should have, until he was recalled during Britain's darkest days.


The United States is in its darkest days since Pearl Harbor. Our leadership has lost the respect of our allies, and it has squandered the fear of and emboldened our enemies.

Our Treasury is de facto bankrupt: if China (no friend!), S. Korea and Japan refused to loan us more money (buy our Treasury paper) we could not pay the exorbitant salaries of our elected officials (more than they are worth!) or even for the lights on the Capitol dome. We could not pay our veteran's benefits nor our social security obligations. We are living on borrowed money.

Our military is overstretched. We have little, if any, reserves to meet real threats should they occur in the Far East, Africa or even on our Mexican border.

We are spending billions of dollars each day on a war that was unnecessary in the first place and from which we fear to exit.

We have liabilities at home in the form of citizens without health-care, homeowners losing their homes, hurricane victims of New Orleans uncompensated and uncared for, the worst public schools in the industrialized world, unfunded pension default liabilities, veterans of the Iraq War not receiving therapy and soldiers at the front without protective armor.

Afghanistan is two-thirds owned by the Taliban again. Pakistan is falling apart. Russia has become an adversary over our insistence on placing ABMs on its borders. In Latin America, we are facing increasing hostility from Venezuela, Cuba and friends, and we cannot control our own borders agains illegals nor figure out what to do with the illegals we now have.

Our Constitution's guarantees of due process (speedy trial, face our accusers), habeus corpus, freedom from unreasonable searches have been assaulted by the Bush Administration, and we are now branded internationally as a nation that tortures and holds people - even citizens - indefinitely without access to a magistrate or to legal counsel - against our own laws and ratified treaties.

All this has come to pass because Congress passed to the President in October 2002 the right to go to war as he sees fit. Any member of Congress who voted "Yea" for that bill had done far worse than the misjudgment of Winston Churchill in 1915. No such member deserves to be a candidate for the presidency in 2008, no matter Democrat or Republican. No one who voted for that outrageous shirking of constitutional responsibility ought have the gall to present himself (or herself) as a candidate. All who did should be removed not only as candidates but as members of Congress. They should have the decency, not just to admit "I was wrong", but to resign from office, even if that leaves us with an almost empty House and Senate. There is no excuse! It was not just misjudgment. It was cowardice. They were afraid to oppose the president after 9/11, even though there was ample information available to oppose the handover of power.

We are approaching a presidential election year with candidates, most of whom voted for for the war-powers. What a disgrace! This is our blackest day.

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Remembering Bertrand Russell