Vincent Emanuele, 29, fought in the Iraq war, was forced to kill people and suffers post-traumatic stress. Yet he remains a leading activist with the US Iraq Veterans Against the War.
On tour through the eastern states of Australia, Emanuele told a Sydney public meeting jointly hosted by Stop the War Coalition, Marrickville Peace Group and StandFast, that the anti-war movement urgently needs to build resistance to the “insane system that leads to wars and drives ecological destruction”.
Emanuele will take part in the protests against the soon-to-begin Talisman Sabre “war games” in ecologically sensitive parts of Queensland. These take place in virtual secrecy every two years and involve 30,000 US and Australian troops.
The Barack Obama administration's “Asian Pivot” is the context — the US's decision to shift its focus away from Europe to focus on a “containment” strategy in Asia.
“This is an aggressive move, not only towards China, but other south-east Asian countries which continue to develop at a rapid pace”, Emanuele told Green Left Weekly.
“They hark back to the old Cold War policy of 'containment'.”
However, Emanuele added, the US desperately needs China.
“If China didn’t buy our debt we would collapse as a nation tomorrow.”
“China is also importing 50% of the oil being pumped out of Iraq's privatised oil industry.
“Right-wingers in the US are trying to launch scare campaigns, but other elites would like to work with China to exploit Africa and the Middle East. So it's a complex situation.”
The US is yet to emerge from its financial crisis, but most Americans are yet to make the connection between spending on the war and the economic crisis, Emanuele said.
The exceptions are the African American and Latin American communities who have been hit hardest.
“The US has one of the highest infant mortality rates in the industrialised world; we do not have public health care. We have the highest per capita use of anti-depressants in the industrialised world. We have have the second lowest social mobility rate in the industralised world.
"We don’t have universal education, nor is it subsidised — so people are racking up hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt to get a degree. We have the largest prison population in the industrialised world.
“The US empire is literally collapsing from within, and from wars abroad. We’re spending what the rest of the world combined spends on the military.”
Increasingly, it's the connection between the US military empire and climate change that is on Emanuele's mind.
“The US military uses more fossil fuels than about 99% of the nations on this planet. With about 1000 bases, more than 14 aircraft carriers, tens of thousands of tanks, helicopters, hummers and more — all that requires a tremendous amount of fossil fuel.
“This planet has finite resources, and we cannot treat the planet as if it was a gas station.”
Obama is just as beholden to the fossil fuel industry as previous US presidents, he said.
“He's appointed and continues to support lackeys from the fossil fuel industry. He's fast-tracking fracking projects, which will destroy people’s livelihoods, groundwater, soil and air. He’s going to fast track the Keystone XL pipeline.
“Just three weeks ago, we reached 400 parts per million carbon dioxide in the atmosphere — the marker we’d been warned about. For 450,000 years of history, it had never been above 270 ppm.
“If we don’t drastically change the way we live, if we don’t stop these economic and political systems from killing the planet, like retired NASA scientist James Hansen says, we are quite literally going to be leaving a living hell for our grandchildren.
“I don’t know how much more serious it can get. But I don’t see the level of urgency that’s needed.
“The oil companies are looking at the Arctic ice melts to see if they can get access to oil fields they could never have imagined before.
“The climate scientists are telling us that hundreds of millions of people are going to die by 2020 if we don’t change things. By 2030 to 2040, climate scientists and oceanographers say there won’t be any more large fish in the ocean. Monsanto and other agribusinesses are unleashing havoc on the soil because without an oil-based fertiliser GM [genetically modified] seeds will not grow.
“Some 98% of our old growth forests are gone; and 90% of prairies and grass lands are gone. This is ecological devastation at a level that people have never seen.
“The conclusion I’m coming to is that we need to change, abolish or overthrow, the institutions of death that dominate our lives — whether that be global financial capitalism or the US military empire.”
