The Way to a Just Foreign Policy - YES magazine

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Aaron Hughes spent the spring of 2003 transporting supplies from Kuwait to Iraq as a soldier in the Army National Guard. Today, he is an outspoken anti-war activist.

“I didn’t have an epiphany,” Hughes says of his turnabout. “I just continually hoped that I could help the Iraqi people, that my fellow soldiers would be respected as human beings by the military. And after one year and three months over there, that hope was shattered.” He thought his gun could be used to defend democracy only to “awake to my weapon pointed at the hungry, and I am the oppressor.”

Hughes is now an artist who makes videos, performance art, and drawings that capture his experience in the Iraq War. In one particularly moving performance, he stopped traffic by drawing on the pavement of a busy intersection in Champaign, Illinois, with a sign reading “I am an Iraq War veteran. I am guilty. I am alone. I am drawing for peace.” He likens his artwork to a spark of light. “In a desert you can see a match lit from miles away,” Hughes says. “Although it’s just a little match, it’s still being seen, and it can empower a lot of people.”

Aaron Hughes’ journey from war to peace mirrors the larger shift in the United States since 2003. What had once been the opinion of a vocal minority—that the invasion of Iraq was wrong—has become the position of a no-longer-silent majority. There are now many points of light, many matches in the desert. The U.S. public rejects the centerpiece of the Bush foreign policy, namely its doctrine of attacking any country that poses even a hypothetical threat. Americans support across-the-board change in our relationships with other countries on issues from climate and trade to arms control to cooperation on ending wars in the Middle East and Africa. After years of standing out in the cold, U.S. citizens want to rejoin the family of nations.

http://www.yesmagazine.org/article.asp?id=2680