No. 00004

date:Feb./16/2003

Coll to U.S. soldiers! (Our appeal to U.S. soldiers in Yokosuka)

Don’t Use Nuke on Iraqi Children !
No Blood for Oil !

American soldiers, sons and daughters of American working people! We, Japanese working people, are your brothers and sisters.
The war against Iraq is not a war of ordinary people of the U.S. It’s a war of big business, war for oil and world domination.
Government Of the Big Business, By the Big Business, For the Big Business
U.S. Government is not yours. It exploits your sweat and blood and then throw you out. And while the sons and daughters of the rich are spared from every war, the sons and daughters of working people are sent to battlefields. Even a very underestimating official statistics of the VA admits, “one in any given day, as many as 250,000 veterans are living on the streets and twice as many experience homelessness at some point during the course of a year.” American soldiers and their families! Are your lives — and lives of your parents, grand parents, uncles, aunts or cousins in your hometown — better now than ten years or twenty years ago? In spite of American people’s hard works, lives of ordinary people are much harder than decades ago. The rich become richer and the poor poorer. Even some of the middle ruin into homelessness. Top 1 percent of the American population owns one third of the national wealth. American Presidents, whether Democrat or Republican, are not your presidents. They are presidents of big business, of 1 percent, of imperialism.
Rushing to war on Iraq, Bush has declared another form of war against ordinary people at home. His tax reduction means extra gifts for the super-rich at the expense of ordinary people. Labor unions demanding restitution of their pensions robbed by Enron, WorldCom, Bush and co., and livable wage, social security, safer working places and dignity are harassed and attacked. Thus, for Bush and big business the war on Iraq is also an indispensable tool to divert attention from such robbery, and from insoluble bankruptcy of American capitalism.
Agent Orange and Depleted Uranium — Genocidal War Crimes
American soldiers! Don’t kill! Don’t be killed and injured in an unjust war! Remember what have Republican and Democratic administrations done in the Vietnam War and the Gulf War! They used Agent Orange — defoliant containing most toxic dioxin — to destroy whole life environment of Vietnamese. Vietnam Vets have been still suffering from Agent Orange — high rate of cancer and other internal, dermatological and neurological diseases. According to VA official source, 160,000 Gulf War Vets are receiving disability benefits; it shows an unprecedented proportion of delayed effects of war. In Gulf War, U.S. military used depleted uranium (DU) munitions — radioactive and chemically toxic material. 436,000 U.S. soldiers were exposed to DU. DoD denies, however, the link between DU and Gulf War Syndrome. DoD did not offer decent medical treatment nor any compensation. Even after the massive protests of Vets, DoD used DU munitions in Bosnia, in Kosovo and in Afghanistan.
Apparently Vietnamese people, soldiers and civilians, have been suffering much more from Agent Orange. Millions of Iraqi people living there have inhaled and ingested far more DU than U.S. Vets. Surprisingly numerous children suffer from cancer, “birth defects” and “disability.” Imagine how will people of the Middle East look at you, if you participate in the upcoming war!
War for Oil — “Shock and Awe”
Why the U.S. used such dirty weapons in the Gulf War? Because the war was not about “liberation of Kuwait from invasion of Iraq,” but about oil, about imperialist world domination. The Gulf War II will be also an imperialist war of plunder and much dirtier war. The Pentagon has prepared “Shock and Awe” strategy: “the magnitude of Shock and Awe Rapid Dominance seeks to impose is the non-nuclear equivalent of the impact that the atomic weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had on the Japanese.” Now, the word “non-nuclear” is about to be dropped.
American soldiers! Refuse to be accomplices of this tremendous crime! Refuse to be exposed to depleted uranium and nuclear fallout! Join enormous international anti-war movement! Millions of your fellow citizens are speaking out against the war in solidarity with oppressed nations — 500,000 in Washington D.C. and 200,000 in San Francisco on Jan. 18 for example. We, Japanese working people, are fiercely fighting against Japanese Government which sent already a Naval Forces including an Aegis destroyer to Arabian Sea and at the same time preparing a war on North Korea. We are struggling against Emergency Bills (Wartime Bills).
Soldiers and military families! You have a power to stop the war. You have the first amendment rights of free speech, association and assembly. You can act now against the war with vast majority of your fellow soldiers in your camp, in your ship, in your fleet. We stand together with your truly heroic actions and these of Japanese soldiers. You can make a history together with us.

(Feb./16/2003)