Had Al Franken been a U.S. Senator the last seven years, would he have made a difference? Who will lead Minnesota into a better future over the next six years, Jack or Al? These are two questions that matter in choosing our next U.S. Senator.

Al Franken would not have made a difference in the course of the last seven years, had he been a US Senator because had Al Franken been US Senator in 2002, he would have voted to support the war against Iraq. Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer would have voted against the war. And just like the war, Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer is better in showing early wise leadership on our new breaking issues. (Detailed analysis under read more).

Al Franken first publicly expressed his support for invading Iraq on the Donahue Show in 2002, when President Bush was making his false case for war on Iraq. On September 10th of 2003 – 7 months into the war – appearing on “Topic A with Tina Brown,” Franken said, “There were reasons to go to war against Iraq … I still don’t know if it was necessarily wrong.” In fact, Franken didn’t clearly retract his war support until 2005, as carefully reconstructed by former StarTribune reporter Eric Black . It is logical, therefore, to grant that Al Franken would have followed most of his Democratic colleagues and voted to hand over Congress’s War Powers to President Bush, giving him both a carte blanche and a blank check to start the unjust and unnecessary war on Iraq. That vote would have put Al Franken in the same position as John Kerry, trying to explain he opposed the war before he supported it, and how he now opposes the war after he supported. In fact, that’s exactly what Al Franken is now trying to argue.

An unnecessary, and therefore unjust, war is considered by international law to be the supreme crime against humanity, akin to genocide. This is because an unjust war is a supremely violent act that not only directly causes death, but indirectly causes rape, torture, murder, kidnapping, robbery, ethnic cleansing, and personal, cultural and national theft. The initiators of an unjust war therefore bear guilt not only for the crime of aggression, but for all the attendant crimes that go with it. Every day for the last five years, these crimes have been committed in Iraq.

Al Franken is trying to position himself as a progressive candidate. But here’s the hard reality:

• You can’t say you support human rights and support a war that directly or indirectly kills as many as 1 million people*, and that has made torture an American policy.
• You can’t say you support women’s rights and support a war that leaves 1 to 2 million widowed women** in a society that strips away their freedoms and confines the fortunate ones to domestic slavery.
• You can’t say you support green, sustainable energy and support a war that even former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan says is solely about dominating global oil supply.
• You can’t say you support our troops and support a war that sends them to kill and die for a lie.
• You can’t say you support the middle class and support a war that allowed conservatives to strip away the most basic protections and services for struggling families.
• You can’t say you support civil rights or civil liberties and support a war that turned the USA into a surveillance state, where phone companies are enlisted to spy on citizens.
• You can’t say you support democracy and support a war that concentrates unprecedented policy-making power and responsibility for the national defense into the hands of unaccountable, profit-making corporations.
• You can’t say you support international cooperation and the rule of law and support a war waged in defiance of the UN, with the condemnation of the world’s religious leaders.

But Al Franken will object to this. He, like Hilary Clinton, and like John Kerry before them, says that he has changed his mind about the war and doesn’t support it anymore. It must be granted that Al has done better than they have in seeking atonement for this mistake. And he earned some measure of goodwill among Progressives by being an early channel of their anger at the Administration, though "early" here still means "years late".

Atonement, surely, is good for the soul. But does it give back 4,000 troops and 1 million Iraqis their lives? Does it give back 4 million Iraqi refugees their homes? Does it return to 8.5 million Iraqi women even the minimal freedom they had under Saddam Hussein’s regime, a regime that Iraqi women’s organizations bitterly admit was better than the savage misogyny unleashed by America’s invasion? Does it give 20,000 maimed troops back their limbs, their mental health, their marriages, their homes, their businesses, their jobs? Does it give back the opportunities stripped away from our children by cuts to their schools? The dignity of our seniors torn from them by cuts in their health care?

It’s important to recognize one’s mistakes. But to the people who have suffered and died because of an evil, it matters not so much whether you oppose that evil once it has finally become too obvious - and powerful - to ignore. What matters is whether you opposed the evil when it was less obvious, but also more vulnerable to resistance; that is, when opposing it might have prevented it from taking its first victims. You, Al Franken, did not. True Progressives since Martin Luther King, Jr have understood how one unjust war can slay a nation’s dreams. You don’t get to undo that. Only God can raise the dead.

What America needs in the new time we are entering are leaders who will not get bullied, bribed or lied into war. What we need is a person who will be the candidate of and for peace. In the race to become Minnesota’s next U.S. Senator, only Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer has shown the will to fight for what is right and true, no matter how entrenched the opposing powers. Unlike Al Franken, Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer – like Paul Wellstone – opposed the war in Iraq when such opposition in the Senate would have mattered.

It may be said that the Iraq War is past and what matters are the choices that remain before us. I disagree that the Iraq War is past. It is all too savagely present, and its brutal consequences will meet America and Iraq face-to-face for years to come. However, it is appropriate to look at the most consequential choices that face us now. This leads us the second, essential question: Will Al lead us better in the near future, or will Jack?

Of the challenges we face as a nation, there are two that will affect America’s very survival: Climate Change and Nuclear Proliferation. Health care, education, energy, and the economy are critically important, as are national security, but, unlike these, climate change and nuclear proliferation threaten our very existence. Furthermore, with the right leadership on these two, mortal threats to our nation and world, the important issues of health care, education, energy, the economy, and national security can likewise be transformed to serve an era of unprecedented peace, prosperity, and ecological balance.

On both climate change and nuclear proliferation, Al Franken’s judgment is the same as his judgment on Iraq: flawed and potentially fatal. Like Tim Pawlenty and Norm Coleman, Al Franken believes that Minnesota must increase its reliance on nuclear energy to address climate change.

Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer, on the other hand, is clear that “solving” climate change while at the same time increasing the risk of nuclear terror is an escape from the frying pan into the fire. Nuclear energy, wherever it is used, increases both the motivation and raw materials available for nuclear weapons. It also creates the kind of targets for terrorists that can go far beyond short-term killings. Furthermore, America has proven unable to carry out nuclear energy policy free from the most cynical kind of racism, which accounts for the way in which Native Americans have been forced again and again to turn their reservations into radioactive dumps, and so live on top of, or next to, the most lethal substances on the surface of the Earth.

Jack believes that climate change is the kind of mortal threat that can spur our country to become its greatest self. It is both urgent enough, and enormous enough to concentrate our collective mind, and gather our collective will to carry out the necessary transformations employing the whole of our unmatched national ingenuity and energy. Half measures, and flirtations with the nuclear delusion will squander this moment, and leave us with nothing but an unraveling empire.

Instead, Jack calls for massive investment in green energy, green industry, green business practice, and green infrastructure – what he calls a “Marshall Plan for the Make America Green”. Such a conversion will put tens of millions to work, give millions of small entrepreneurs new opportunities, as well as empower thousands of communities across the country – in our inner cities and spacious countryside – to experiment with cooperative energy, industry and agricultural projects, that will take power back for the people from the few corporate dominators of America’s economy.

It will certainly take investment, but we have the money. In fact, we’re already spending the money. But, we’re not spending it on a Green Marshall Plan. Instead, we’re spending it on wasteful, and largely aggressive weapons and military programs that have more to do with casting America’s military shadow across the world than defending the lives of Americans, or supporting our troops. Al Franken does not have the courage - perhaps he does not have the conviction - necessary to call for a conversion of parts of the military budget to a Green Marshall Plan. Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer has both.

That is why Jack, not Al, will be the best leader for Minnesota in the next six years.

* Research conducted by one of Britain’s leading survey groups, Opinion Research Business (ORB) recently concluded that between 946,000 and 1.12 million people in Iraq have died as a result of the conflict rather than natural causes. This tracks with the study published in October 2006 in The Lancet, Britain’s leading medical journal, which concluded that the conflict up until that time was responsible for an estimated 655,000 deaths.

** The Iraq Ministry of Planning report from mid-2007, put the number of divorcees and widows close to 1 million of a total of 8.5 million women aged between 15 and 80. Narmeen Othman, Iraq's acting minister for women's affairs, put the number as high as 2 million in a country of 27 million people .

Phil Steger
Former Executive Director of Friends for a Non-Violent World
Co-founder of Peace in the Precincts and Peace First!