In March 1965, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara addressed the first conference of Returned Peace Corps Volunteers. He told us, "We have 3-3/4 million people in the Defense Department, but I doubt very much that we have influenced the peace of the world as much as the small handful of you."
For decades now, People's Lobby's extensive polling has shown that mothers favor having their sons and daughters serve and be heroes in the mold of Dr. Schweitzer, Tom Dooley, Mother Teresa, etc., rather than as a jungle warrior, tank driver, or drone dropper.
Therefore, in 1989 mother and then Congresswoman Barbara Boxer introduced our American Soviet Peace Corps proposal as House Resolution 1807 of 1989 , which would have had American and Soviet Peace Corps volunteers train, live, and serve together for two years.
We had strong support from the Soviet Consulate in San Francisco, consistent support from the Consulate's #2 man, Sergie Aivazian, and plenty of attention and visits from agents working for Fuller Brush Incorporated. Then the Soviet Union disintegrated, nations left its realm, my friend Sergei, burdened with some anger over the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and his family went home, and HR 1807 went into limbo and passed away.
The decades have tumbled by, the Soviet Union lost states, their leaders tussled with a communist ideology, and a former KGB agent, whose size and horseback demeanor suggests he may idolize Napoleon, seems to have solidified power along with some oligarchs in the old USSR.
As 2013 was drawing down, Syria erupted causing Putin, who seems to like Bashar Assad, to butt policy heads with Obama, who dislikes the actions Assad has dropped on his people. Many PNACERS (Project for a New American Century) who are sure they "Got it right" from domino-scary Vietnam to the no-Osama Bin-here Iraq War, clamored that the so-called African-born baby, who precociously in utero forged his birth to Hawaii, should shoot, bomb, blow up something.
Instead, Obama pushed diplomacy and got Assad to slowly and maybe grudgingly give up his chemical weapons. Another PTSD-laden excursion by our tired troops was averted.
At that time, I forwarded Congressman Veeshun's solution to Biden and Obama. If the B&O Express shuttled it to Putin, they have yet to inform me, so I went back to my tried-and-true past-policy approach.
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