Is the War in Iraq a Local Issue?

If you could choose how to spend the tax dollars that provide federal government funding for our nation’s needs would you have that money go toward a universal health care system, affordable housing units, elementary school teachers, public safety, transportation and infrastructure needs, or to the continuation of war and occupation in Iraq?

*According to a study issued by MoveOn.org, using estimates based on congressional budget allocations and supplemental funding bills the cost of the war/occupation was $456 billion in 2007. According to Internal Revenue Service records used to compute the costs at a local level, war spending included $1.33 billion of taxes collected in the 6th and 1st Congressional Districts, which comprises most of Sonoma County.

In Sonoma County we’ve seen funding diminished for our schools, hospitals, libraries, environmental protections, transportation needs and affordable workforce housing. Three of our county hospitals are in dire financial straits and face closing their doors. Tuition for Sonoma high school graduates applying to UC and UCS colleges is skyrocketing, ranging from $17,000-$24,000 a year, and loans for higher education are financially crippling many families and students. Despite the downturn in Sonoma housing prices, entry level housing for essential Sonoma workforce services – education, public safety, health care, etc. – is still prohibitive, forcing longer out-of-town commute hours, and increasing highway deterioration, air pollution and greenhouse gasses. Who in Sonoma County has not felt the financial and social impacts related to the cost of this war?

And then there are the unquantifiable and devastating impacts on Sonoma families and their communities when Sonoma’s sons or daughters are killed or grievously wounded in Iraq. Such losses are inestimable and lived with for a lifetime.

The war machine has deployed California’s National Guard to Iraq, as it has the other states, of which Sonoma County has 200 members or so. By so doing Sonoma county and other regions are left vulnerable to emergencies and natural disasters. Thus the prosecution and elongation of this war/occupation puts all Sonomans in greater jeopardy.

President Eisenhower famously said in his Cross of Iron speech:
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.”

Schools, homes, roads and hospitals. How do you get more local than that?


The “war on terrorism” with Iraq as ground zero has given rise to illegal warrantless secret government surveillance on American’s phone calls and mail. Government domestic spying has not just been relegated to international calls as we were led to believe, but to collecting phone call data from tens of thousands of citizens as reported in the N.Y. Times and other media. We in Sonoma are not immune to these abuses of Constitutional rights of privacy, just as we are subject to certain provisions of the U.S.A. Patriot Act’s incursion into library and bookstore records.

The Iraq war has resulted in the use and contracting of torture and clandestine renditions for that nefarious purpose, and the elimination of judicial due process. Unprecedented and incredible! Besides putting our military in extraordinary danger (if captured), this reprehensible violation of the Geneva Conventions disgraces the model of American democracy in the eyes of the world, as we are all, Sonomans included, tarred with that despicable brush.

The theme of this edition of the Peace Press is sustainability. One of the meanings of the word sustain is: to bear up under; suffer or undergo. This begs the question: how much longer can this occupation of a foreign land be sustained – by our fellow countrymen or we in Sonoma?

The late, great Molly Ivins said in her last published column, “We are the people who run this country. We are the deciders. And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war.”

*Sources: The Santa Rosa Press Democrat, 8/17/07, and National Priorities Project, 2007.