This really deserves a decent essay but I haven’t time.

Here’s the deal. “Swords into Ploughshares” is a pretty obvious phrase. Turn war into peace.

So how do you do that?

Well, one way I can think of is having better information about those you’d otherwise be fighting. For example: if you can have good intelligence on a country you can find out if that new installation is just a fancy swimming pool for the president’s new lover, or a misile installation that could wipe you out in seconds.

There’s plenty of examples through history of war being started that could have been prevented by better information. One way to collect said information is through spy stations… like the one attacked this week.

My second point relates to the Gulf War. That war was stoped on the basis of a cease fire deal.

The guts of that deal was: we (the American lead coalition) agree not to invade and topple Saddam if he agrees to disarm, this included getting rid of all long range missiles, and his WMD.

To cut a long story short, it was failure to keep his end of the deal (yea, the WMD “weren’t found” but the UN inspectors did find missiles that breached the condition and were destroying them – it was all over the news at the time).

In other words, Iraq was invaded because of their failure to “Beat Swords into Ploughshares”. Well, there is no chance of Iraq invading another country now, or a mushroom cloud popping up over Israel with Iraq’s name on it. (Iran on the other hand…)

As one of the activists walked into the back of the court, he called out “one million dead in Iraq”. It’s true that a lot of people have died there, though one million is a figure that’s likely inflated by people bent on a certain political agenda. The vast majority of people killed were killed by terrorists, and more again were terrorists. The US should take credit for the latter, but to blame them for the former is to negate the actions of men who enjoy the pastime of the exact opposite conversion process to our protesters.

So please excuse me if I don’t join in congratulating the “ANZAC Ploughshares” group. I would consider their actions to be against the cause of peace in at least the two ways I’ve outlined. I’m sure there are more.

Press Release

“Claims by Prime Minister Helen Clark that yesterday’s action by peace activists at the Waihopai Spy Base near Blenheim was nothing more than ‘a senseless act of vandalism’ show how totally out of touch the Labour government is with reality,” according to Workers Party national organiser Daphna Whitmore.

“Instead of complaining about the damage caused by the peace activists, Helen Clark and the Labour Party should be more concerned about the suffering being inflicted on the people of Afghanistan and other parts of the world as a result of the so-called ‘War on Terror’. Spy bases such as the one maintained at Waihopai play an integral part of that war.”

“Currently millions of dollars are spent each year on maintaining an intelligence network one of whose central aims is to aid in the repression of political activists and movements which threatened the interests of Western imperialism,” Ms Whitmore said.

“The Workers Party, which intends to contest the party vote for the first time in the upcoming 2008 general election, calls for the immediate withdrawal of New Zealand from all Western military alliances and the dismantling of repressive agencies such as the GCSB and SIS. As such we fully support the actions carried out yesterday by the three members of Anzac Ploughshares at Waihopai and call on all workers and progressive people to do likewise,” she added.