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Iraq War Set to Be More Expensive then Vietnam

Read it and weep, friends. We’ve got work to do.

And if you havn’t seen the film Sir No Sir!, hopefully it’s playing in your city (all info on website). The film is a truly inspiring tale of the heart of Vietnam war resistance, the troops themselves. Essential viewing for any of us concerned about building broad-based opposition to the current Iraq debacle…

The Iraq war has already cost the United States $320bn (£180bn), according to an authoritative new report, and even if a troop withdrawal begins this year, the conflict is set to be more expensive in real terms than the Vietnam War, a generation ago.

The estimate, circulated this week by the non-partisan Congressional Research Service (CRS), can only increase unease over the US presence in Iraq, whose direct costs now run at some $6bn a month, or $200m a day, with no end in sight.

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Easy, Accessible, Web-Based Tools to Use

“On-demand” is used to describe the trend towards software companies delivering robust, web-based applications that respond rapidly to their customers needs. An on demand business has four key attributes: it is responsive, variable, focused, resilient and based on flexible software delivery to power the business. [Wikipedia]

Salesforce.com is considered one of the preeminent examples of on-demand. As is the ever growing Google empire.

The term On Demand Nonprofit has started to get thrown around a lot lately. Sonny Cloward does a great roundup of what this means, and what specific tools can be leveraged for NPO use (including a few up-and-comers that seem very cool).

The trend is just beginning, and as web-based software applications get stronger, more diverse and easier to integrate, I think we’ll see some amazing benefit for this sector.

At the same time, having my entire operation dependent on an internet connection, with all my data stored off-site, does come with its own set of concerns. It’s my inner ludite.

The web-based tools I depend on havn’t failed me yet. But then, in my experience, technology always fails, at some point…

Movement Building and Dr. King on War

In one of my other lives, I sing with an acapella trio. Last night we were invited to sing at a simple event honoring Martin Luther King and his opposition to the vietnam war. April 4 was not chosen by accident, as he was shot this day almost 40 years ago.

While the event wasn’t hugely attended, there was something very special about it.

The organizers divided his speech into readable chunks, and we all took turns at the mic — high-school students, professionals, artists, religious leaders, a former candidate for the local board of supervisors… the small crowd was remarkable in its diversity.

It reminded me of the potential of community-based organizing. And also how hard it is, here in 2006, to build a movement for (or against) anything. We were such a small and dedicated crowd, gathered to remember. But it’s not enough… and what will it take?

If you’ve never come across Dr King’s big “anti-vietnam” speech, it’s very worth taking 10-minutes to read. He got a tremendous amount of criticism for his public stance at the time. And his words are painfully relevant to our present situation.

An excerpt:

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.

A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, “This is not just.” It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, “This is not just.” The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.

A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, “This way of settling differences is not just.” This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

Go to Full Speech (with audio)