Bush’s contempt for democracy
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So, Bush wants civil disobedience?

By Naomi Klein

At the Pentagon, they call it the Voilà Moment.

That’s when Iraqi soldiers and civilians, with bombs raining down on Baghdad, suddenly scratch their heads and say to themselves: “These bombs aren’t really meant to kill me and my family, they are meant to free us from an evil dictator!” At that point, they thank Uncle Sam, lower their weapons, abandon their posts, and rise up against Saddam Hussein. Voilà!

Or at least that’s how it is supposed to work, according to the experts in “psychological operations” who are already waging a fierce information war in Iraq. The Voilà Moment made its first foray into the language of war last Monday, when a New York Times reporter quoted an unnamed senior US military official using the term.

This peppering of military jargon with bon mots could be Colin Powell’s latest plan to win over the French on the Security Council. More likely, it’s the product of the Bush administration’s penchant for hiring advertising executives and flaky management consultants as foreign policy advisers (doesn’t the Voilà Moment sound suspiciously like the Wow Factor — sold to millions of corporate executives as the key to building a powerful brand?).

Wherever it came from, the Pentagon has Voilà in its sights, and it is sparing no expense to hit its target. Airborne transmitters are flying over Iraq broadcasting radio propaganda. Iraqi business, military and political officials have been bombarded with e-mails and phone calls urging them to see the light and switch sides. Fighter planes have dropped more than eight million leaflets informing Iraqi soldiers that their lives will be spared if they walk away from their military equipment. “It sends a direct message to the operator on the gun,” says Lieutenant-General T. Michael Moseley, commander of allied air forces in the Persian Gulf.

According to the senior military official quoted in the Times, Central Command will know it has reached Voilà when “we see a break with the leadership.” In other words, the US military is advocating nothing less than mass civil disobedience in Iraq, a refusal to obey orders, or to participate in an unjust war.

Will it work?

I’m skeptical. There was, after all, a Voilà Moment during the last gulf war, when many Iraqis living near the Kuwaiti border believed US promises that they would be supported if they rose up against Saddam Hussein. It was followed shortly after by a Screw You Moment, when the rebels watched US forces abandon them to be massacred by Saddam Hussein.

But all this Voilà talk got me thinking: The civil disobedience the US military is hoping to provoke in Iraq is exactly the sort of thing the anti-war movement needs to inspire in our countries if we are really going to stop, or at least curtail, the pending devastation in Iraq. What would it take for large numbers of people in the United States, the United Kingdom, Italy, Canada — and any other country assisting with the war effort — to truly break with our leaders and refuse to comply? Can we create thousands of Voilà Moments back home?

That is the question facing the global anti-war movement as it plans its follow-up to the spectacular marches on Feb. 15. During the Vietnam War, thousands of young Americans decided to break with their leaders when their draft cards arrived. And it was this willingness to go beyond protest and into active disobedience that slowly eroded the domestic viability of the war.

What will today’s conscientious objectors and military deserters look like? Well, all week in Italy, activists have been blocking dozens of trains carrying US weapons and personnel on their way to a military base near Pisa, while Italian dockworkers are refusing to load arms shipments. Last weekend, two US military bases were blockaded in Germany, as was the US consulate in Montreal, and the air base at RAF Fairford in Gloucester, England. This coming Saturday, thousands of Irish activists are expected to show up at Shannon airport, which, despite Irish claims of neutrality, is being used by the US military to refuel its planes en route to Iraq.

In Chicago last week, more than 100 high-school students demonstrated outside the headquarters of Leo Burnett, the advertising firm that designed the US military’s hip, youth-targeted Army of One campaign. The students claim that in underfunded Latino and African-American high schools, the army recruiters far outnumber the college scouts.

The most ambitious plan has come from San Francisco, where a coalition of antiwar groups is calling for an emergency non-violent “counterstrike” the day after the war starts: “Don’t go to work or school. Call in sick, walk out: We will impose real economic, social and political costs and stop business as usual until the war stops.”

It’s a powerful idea: Peace bombs exploding wherever profits are being made from the war — gas stations, arms manufacturers, missile-happy TV stations. It might not stop the war but it would show that there is a principled position between hawk and hippy — a militant resistance for the protection of life.

For some, this escalation of the war against war seems extreme. There should simply be more weekend marches, bigger next time, so big they are impossible to ignore.

Of course, there should be more marches, but it should also be clear by now that there is no protest too big for our politicians to ignore. They know that public opinion in most of the world is against the war.

What our politicians are carefully assessing before the bombs start falling, is whether the anti-war sentiment is “hard” or “soft.” The question is not “do people care about war?” but how much do they care? Is it a mild consumer preference against war, one that will evaporate by the next election? Or is it something deeper and more lasting — a, shall we say, Voilà kind of care?

On one end of the caring spectrum, Levi’s Europe has decided to cash in on the anti-war fad by releasing a limited-edition teddy bear with a peace symbol attached to its ear. You can clutch and hug it while watching the scary terror alerts on CNN.

Or you could turn off CNN, refuse to be a soft and cuddly peacenik, get out there and stop the war.

Naomi Klein is the author of No Logo and Fences and Windows.

Source: Globe & Mail (Toronto)

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Bush’s contempt for democracy

By Robert Jensen

Many around the world are skeptical when George Bush says he wants to use war to help create democracy in Iraq. As a step toward bolstering his credibility, Bush might start taking seriously democracy in the rest of the world, and at home.

US reaction to the weekend news that Turkey’s parliament had rejected a proposal to accept the basing of US troops for an Iraq war only confirmed what has long been obvious: The Bush administration believes democracy is wonderful — so long as it doesn’t get in the way of war.

Let’s remember the basic notions behind democracy: The people are sovereign. Power flows from the people. Leadership is beholden to the people.

If those ideas are at the core of democracy, Bush’s recent reaction to the will of the people suggests he has contempt for the concept.

Bush has a habit of praising as “courageous” those leaders who most effectively ignore their people. In the UK, polls show more than half the public against the war, and close to a million people turned out for the Feb. 15 protest in London. In Spain, two million hit the streets of Barcelona and Madrid, and 74 percent oppose the war. But Bush has praised the courage of prime ministers Tony Blair and Jose Maria Aznar in remaining fanatically pro-war in the face of massive public opposition.

Silvio Berlusconi is another favorite of Bush. The Italian prime minister has to ignore the 80 percent of his people who object to the war, and on Feb. 15 the largest demonstrations in the world were in Rome, where police put the crowd at one million and others estimated two to three times that many.

But perhaps the most courageous leader in Bush-speak is the prime minister of Turkey, Abdullah Gul.

The Bush team found that it took some convincing (and $15 billion) to secure the ruling Justice and Development Party leadership’s support for US use of bases for a war. In that effort, as a former Pentagon planner and ambassador to Turkey explained, “the biggest problem is that 94 percent of the Turks are opposed to war.”

After winning over the key leadership, US officials faced another problem: The Turkish constitution requires a vote of parliament to allow those new US troops. With tens of thousands of Turks protesting in the streets during the debate, the proposal failed by a narrow margin.

The State Department, expecting a favorable vote, had prepared a statement of congratulations. Because the initial reports out of parliament suggested the proposal had won, that statement was released and — you guessed it — it applauded the Turkish government for its “courageous leadership.”

US officials hope to reverse the vote later this week. No doubt Bush’s people will be tough negotiators, but the Turks also can expect understanding of the problems that Gul and his party face. During earlier negotiations between the United States and Turkey, one US official explained the process was time-consuming because, “We are dealing with a new and inexperienced [Turkish] leadership that is feeling very much caught by the situation.”

“Experience” in this context means the ability to ignore and override the will of the people, an endeavor in which US politicians have considerable experience.

And what of democracy at home? When asked about his reaction to the hundreds of thousands of Americans who rallied on Feb. 15 to oppose a war, Bush brushed them off as irrelevant. To pay attention to the largest worldwide political event in recent history, he said, would be like governing by focus group.

Of course, political movements — people coming together because of shared principles to try to affect public policy — are not quite like focus groups, which are convened by folks in advertising and marketing to test out their pitches. Demonstrations are real democratic expressions of the strong commitments of people; focus groups are a research tool used to craft manipulative slogans and advertising strategies in order to subvert real democracy. But let’s put aside the president’s confusion and go back to his assessment of how the system should work:

“The role of a leader is to decide policy based upon the security — in this case, the security of the people,” Bush said.

That’s all well and good, but beside the point. The question is, does Bush think “the people” have any ideas about their own security that are worth considering?

Robert Jensen is an associate professor of journalism at the University of Texas at Austin, a member of the Nowar Collective, and author of the book Writing Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream and the pamphlet “Citizens of the Empire.”

Source: CounterPunch

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