WMDs – it's not just about Syria

For the past few months, Peace Action has helped convene an ad hoc national coalition that successfully stopped a U.S. attack on Syria, at least for now. While this was quite a victory, much remains to be done. There is a chance congressional warmongers may try to revive a resolution authorizing the president to use military force if the chemical weapons disarmament agreement doesn’t come together quickly enough for them. So we’ll continue to press Congress, and the Obama Administration, to make diplomacy the priority.
We want your ideas on how to proceed on Syria, to help end the awful violence there. What would you like to propose for a “Syria Peace Platform?” For next steps to defuse tensions over Iran’s nuclear program? And finally, for a new, more sustainable, just, democratic U.S. foreign policy. Please share your wisdom with us by taking this short (only four questions!) Peace Action online supporters survey.

While we will remain vigilant for congressional backsliding on threats to attack Syria and propose better alternatives to end the awful anything-but-civil war there, we will pivot from a sole focus on Syria to WMDs in the U.S.: nuclear weapons. Next week the United Nations High Level meeting on Nuclear Disarmament (the first such meeting ever convened by the UN General Assembly) will be held on September 26, which we will be participating in as nongovernmental observers, and we’re helping convene an international strategy meeting the day after. Here’s your last chance to sign our petition to the Obama Administration calling for support for this and other multilateral nuclear abolition initiatives – please sign and circulate to your friends!

Back to Top

Over the next several weeks Congress will need to pass legislation to fund the government beyond the end of the month.  They will also need to raise the debt ceiling.  They will likely pass short term measures to keep the government going until the end of the year.  Republicans in the House will try to defund Obamacare as well as allowing the Pentagon to have more than its fair share.  Unfortunately, military hawks want to let the Pentagon steal resources from human needs like repairing bridges and helping the poor (cuts to food stamps are on the table).  Peace Action and its Move the Money campaign will keep up the pressure on Congress to spend our tax dollars in ways that more closely represent our values. We’ll be in touch soon with timely, specific action alerts on Congress’s budgetary tomfoolery. If you have friends, family or colleagues interested in these issues, tell them to sign up for our action alerts.

Back to Top

We have an exciting (and free!) offer for you.
Although you generally won’t find peace issues covered at any length in the U.S. mass media, there is a great deal of writing from a peace perspective scattered about in numerous publications.
For years, The PeaceWorker — once a print publication and now an online magazine produced by Oregon PeaceWorks, an affiliate of Peace Action — has pulled together these peace-oriented articles, plus some on other progressive issues, such as the environment and civil liberties.  Many of them are written by peace movement leaders and activists, including some from Peace Action.  Here are the articles that have appeared recently.
And now, Peace Action is happy to make the The PeaceWorker available to Peace Action members and supporters, free of charge.  You can subscribe directly by going to www.peaceworker.org and clicking on the “subscribe” button (top of page, third row of buttons).  You will then be given several options for subscribing.  Select the one you like and click the “subscribe now” button in the window.
Although The PeaceWorker is not an official publication of Peace Action, we think you will find it interesting, lively, and provocative – a magazine that will assist your efforts and ours in creating a better world.

Back to Top