Our friend Ed Flaherty spoke at a 9/11 commemoration in Iowa City yesterday.  Here are his remarks.

We all speak today of healing, understanding and peacemaking.

The images of Sept. 11, 2001 are etched in our minds.  But we need to be more concerned with what we have done with 9-11 than with 9-11 itself.  Yes, we mourn the loss of so many innocent victims, we laud the heroism of the firefighters and so many others, and  we will always be outraged at the inhumanity of the attackers.

But I don’t think that the 2977 victims of 9-11  died to usher in a period of perpetual war.  We must remember that the tragedy of 9-11 was used as an opportunity for war – how to initiate war on Iraq was on the lips of our leaders the day after.    We need to add to our minds’ images the 6,236 US armed services personnel who have  died in Iraq & Afghanistan, the 40,000+ who bear visible wounds, the 400,000+ who bear the invisible wounds of PTSD and TBI, and, yes,  the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Afghan dead.

We must remember it all if we are to heal.

We must do more than remember. We must honor the victims of 9-11 by welcoming home ALL of US troops currently in Iraq by the end of this year.  We must honor the victims of 9-11 by proclaiming loudly that  the ten year , $300 million per day war in Afghanistan, the longest in our history, has gone on long enough.  Honor the victims of 9-11 by saying NO to a US military budget that is nearly equal to that of all other countries combined.

In the words of President Eisenhower, “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.”  Or earlier words, “wheresoever your treasure is, there your heart is also.”

Wars are much easier to start than to end.  Let us take up the heavy sweet burden of waging peace.

Ed Flaherty is President of Chapter #161, Veterans for Peace, and also a board member of PEACE Iowa, and a member of other suspect groups.