The lack of American debate and protest over the planned escalation of the war in Afghanistan – “Operation Enduring Freedom” – is deafening. As former anti-war Presidential Candidate Barack Obama vows to increase military presence – including bombing the country with unmanned “drone” planes and a surge of as many as 30,000 additional troops – the anti-war movement, largely built on opposition to the six-year-old war in Iraq, is virtually non-existent.

Many “progressive” voices have failed to provide any leadership. Moveon.org, whose membership was largely built on opposition to the war in Iraq, has not taken a position opposing the Afghanistan War. The Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) has not taken a position on the war in Afghanistan. Even the War Resisters League has qualified its opposition to this war. The Out of Iraq Congressional Caucus in the House of Representatives (chaired by Representative Maxine Waters) has been silent on the escalation.

The Dixie Chicks, the Pope, and anointed liberal-cause leader Bono have failed to publicly express the outrage that characterized much early opposition to the Iraq War. In fairness, Bono has never publicly opposed the War in Iraq or Afghanistan. The Dixie Chicks endured severe popular backlash for lead singer Natlie Maines’ 2003 stage banter:

“Just so you know, we’re on the good side with y’all. We do not want this war, this violence, and we’re ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas…”

The Dixie Chicks were pulled from radio station play rotations and record store shelves. “Patriotic” listeners publicly burned their records and, in some cases, ran them over with tractors to express their disgust with the Chicks. The band received death threats and were publicly boycotted. Lipton Ice Tea dropped its sponsorship of the band. And in June of 2006, American Idol Chris Daughtry returned to Greensboro, NC for a homecoming celebration sponsored by Classic Rock 92FM. A DJ announcement regarding free tickets for an upcoming Dixie Chicks concert was met with substantial booing from the crowd.

The planes which crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001 have been used as a political tool – from George Bush standing on a pile of rubble and human remains with a megaphone, stirring up bloodthirst (declaring to New York that “the people who knocked down these buildings will hear all of us soon”), to Rudy Giuliani’s single-minded presidential campaign. Despite the Bush administration’s lie saying so, the war in Iraq had nothing to do with what happened on 9/11. Iraq was not invaded to liberate a country, bring civil rights to women, or stabilize tremendous economic imbalance. Iraq was invaded, on its face, to eliminate the threat of a nuclear attack.

Bush himself addressed an angry, grieving country that had just been attacked, as its leader; explaining the need for military action in Iraq despite scant evidence which was largely manufactured and/or misrepresented, declaring that evidence was there, warning, that ”the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”

There were rallies where people adamantly opposed anti-war sentiment, strongly supporting the War effort in Iraq. Signs at so-called “Support the Troops” rallies read:

“Freedom is not free”

“Arrest the traitors”

“Peace is the result of victory”

“We love Bush”

“Make love after war”

“Hey, Boeing! Ignore these other idiots and keep the missiles coming!”

“Kill, kill, kill. Annihilate Iraq”

“Ending the Iraqi war will drag it back to our door”

“Veto France”

“God hates fag terrorists”

“If you don’t stand behind our troops why don’t you stand in front of them”

“Gitmo rocks”

“Got freedom? Thank the military”

They traveled to New York City where they organized and chanted “U-S-A! U-S-A!” in Times Square, explicitly to show support for the war.

Estimates of Iraqi civilian deaths in the war have ranged as high as 655,000 as reported in a 2006, according to an MIT study. For comparison’s sake, in 2006, the population of Alaska was 670,053. There were no weapons of mass destruction. There was no justification for the invasion or killing of anyone in Iraq.

There is a tendency on the East Coast to dismiss the politics of fear that led to the advent of “Freedom Fries” and the opportunistic Republican-hatched enactment of the USA PATRIOT Act on October 26, 2001 (officially the “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001”). In the 2004 presidential election, the first wartime election in America since 1972, the one state and the District that were attacked by “terrorists” voted in large numbers against George W. Bush and his policies.

In 2008 in a speech in Greensboro, NC, Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin displayed open hostility to the East Coast and, explicitly, Washingtonian D.C.-.ers:

“We believe that the best of America is not all in Washington, D.C. We believe…” (interrupted by cheers and applause) “…We believe that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hard working very patriotic, um, very, um, pro-America areas of this great nation.”

The hostility was nothing new, and was largely reflected in the absence of any real Republican concern for the prevention of future terror attacks after 2001.

In per capita terms, by 2004, New York State ranked 49th out of 50 states in Homeland Security funding. Fox news was accused of fueling hysteria and fear in the people of the Midwest, the West and the “red states.” These states had not been party to the attacks or even likely targets for attacks. Yet, this was the constituency which drove public policy by re-electing the Bush Administration in 2004. In 2004, when the New York Fire Department was still asking for radios that worked, the fire department in Zanesville, Ohio was learning to use federally funded thermal-imaging technology to find victims in dense smoke and test kits for lethal nerve gasses. Per capita federal Homeland Security funding in Wyoming and Guam dwarfed spending in New York.

In 2006, with the pointless search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq long over, and the Halliburton-Blackwater war-profiteering machine in high gear, Bush’s DHS actually cut federal funding for terror prevention in New York City and Washinton D.C., surging new funds into places like Omaha, Nebraska and Louisville, Kentucky. And while pro-war John McCain suggested, with no evidence, in 2001 on the David Letterman show, that the anthrax may have come from Iraq, the mailings all turned out to come out of New Jersey. The planes that hit the World Trade Center flew out of New Jersey as well. And New Jersey resoundingly voted against Bush in 2004 (and against McCain in 2008. The plain fact was that the anthrax, the planes and the terror were directly aimed – solely aimed – at those parts of the country that Palin and her constituency don’t consider a part of the “wonderful little pockets” of “real America.” Those wonderful little pockets were unwilling to accept that the war was based on a lie. That American soldiers were dying for motives that had nothing to do with the “mushroom cloud” Bush used to terrorize the living rooms of his own country.

While anti-war groups struggled to combat a popular U.S. war policy based on fear and the promise of revenge, champions like Bono failed to oppose the war in Iraq. The Associated Press reported in 2005, when he met with President Bush, that the reason Bono failed to oppose the war was because:

“the rocker admits that a certain diplomacy is necessary in order to accomplish his goals [of fighting poverty], which is why he keeps mum about the war in Iraq even though he disagrees with it.”

It’s clear that he has avoided the subject intentionally in order to gain access and photo appearances with world leaders like Tony Blair and George Bush. If one truly considers the merits of celebrity activism in the context of Bono’s failure to oppose war, it all appears as an ongoing unmistakably hollow publicity grab using the poverty and suffering of millions as the key to access. The 2005 Man of Peace award was given to a man who never demonstrated against any war and who owns a large stake of war-friendly Forbes Magazine.

Even Bono’s advocacy of helping the poor is belied by his personal tax avoidance behavior. While he advocates world governments spend millions to help the poor, the Irish singer has moved his publishing company from Ireland to the Netherlands to avoid paying a 12.5% tax rate to the Irish government and to avoid funding the projects he advocates to help the poor. Bono takes that money home. And Bono doesn’t understand. When he was criticized by a Christian Aid report in 2007 for ‘tax avoidance,’ he responded by saying:

“It hurts when the criticism comes in internationally. But I can’t speak up without betraying my relationship with the band – so you take the shit. People who don’t know our music – it’s very easy for them to take a position on us – they run with the stereotypes and caricature of us.”

It’s hard to imagine that someone who is a leading advocate for helping the poor could be so clueless concerning the damage done to “third world” nations by capital flight from their countries into schemes like he employs. Or as African law professor Issa Shivji, the former director of the Department of Constitutional and Administrative Law at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, put it:

“What the donors give is peanuts compared to the wealth that goes out.”

That wealth that goes out from the developing countries goes directly into tax avoidance centers, just like those used by Bono. A multi-millionaire cannot expect to be taken seriously when he advocates a worldwide moral obligation to fund aid programs to help the poor, but sees no moral obligation on himself to fund those programs though taxes.

Does an artist really want his or her political activism to be taken more seriously than, say, a cartoonish Elvis Presley meeting with President Richard Nixon?

Tags: bono, war