A movement in disarray
By Ron Jacobs
Sept. 15— It’s time the antiwar movement got off its
tail. The lackluster organizing currently going on will insure nothing
but more war and greater frustration. While one would be a fool to think
any antiwar movement can force Washington’s hand into pulling US
forces out of Iraq and Afghanistan before Inauguration Day 2005, I can
guarantee that unless we start organizing again right now to stop this
war, it will be like starting all over again the day after the inauguration,
no matter who is the US president.
Why is the antiwar movement in disarray? The most obvious answer is
the Anybody But Bush phenomenon. The personalization of the war around
George W. Bush has created a misguided belief among many people who
oppose the war and the imperial drive it represents that this war will
somehow end if Bush and his cohorts are given their walking papers.
Unfortunately, this is not the case. This war, as has been said many
times before, is more than Bush’s war; it’s a war for total
US domination of the world. That domination project is a project held
dear by the leadership of both the Democrats and Republicans and is
guided not by party politics but by the economic realities of the world
capitalist system. This system is dominated by the United States.
Why is it dominated by the United States? To be brutally frank, the
US dominates the world because of its military superiority. Sure, it
got to where it is today through a combination of economic and military
strength, but it sits at the top of the pile now solely because its
military is larger, better equipped with the most deadly weapons, and
trained to brutalize its opponents into total submission, Geneva conventions
be damned. This fact does not change when a Democrat is in the White
House. One need only look back to the bombing of Serbia and Kosovo in
1999 if they desire proof of this.
The Republicans have their Project for a New American Century (PNAC).
The Democrats have their own take on how to maintain and expand the
Empire. It is a plan that they call Progressive Internationalism: A
Democratic National Security Strategy. Its only discernible difference
from the GOP approach is a greater emphasis on using international organizations
like the United Nations and strategic alliances like NATO to keep those
opposed to the US’s dominance suppressed. Utilizing a Wilsonian
moralism, the Democrats’ document places the war on the world in
terms that are not much different than the GOP’s Project for a
New American Century. This one quote from the forward says it all: “Democrats
will maintain the world’s most capable and technologically advanced
military, and we will not flinch from using it to defend our interests
anywhere in the world.”
So why are at least two of the primary antiwar organizations in the
United States-MoveOn and United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ) promoting
the idea that John Kerry in the White House will mark a significant
change in US foreign policy, especially as it regards the war in Iraq?
Furthermore, why are they joined by dozens of activist spokespeople,
antiwar entertainers and other from the media world? Whether these groups
and people state openly that US voters should vote for anyone but Bush
or whether they tacitly encourage such an action, they are setting up
the millions of US residents who sincerely oppose the war in Iraq and
want the troops out of there now, not tomorrow.
What to do, then? To me, the answer is actually quite obvious. We need
to organize around a clear set of demands that reflect a conscious anti-imperialism.
This means that we should not get bogged down in discussions about the
United Nations or NATO, nor should we fall for the argument that a US
presence in Iraq or Afghanistan will bring democracy to those countries.
After all, it isn’t democracy that the United States wants to install,
it’s capitalism. Why else is Washington so keen on privatizing
every industry and service in Iraq that was previously state-owned?
If I were to present a potential set of organizing demands to a national
antiwar organization, they would read something like this:
We demand:
The US must begin the immediate and total withdrawal from Iraq, and
must publicly set the date by which all US military forces will be removed.
An immediate cease-fire between US forces and those in the Iraqi Resistance.
An end to the imposition of Allawi and other US-picked administrators
on the people of Iraq in order to insure their right to self-determination,
and so that all political prisoners currently incarcerated by the US
and its client regime can be released.
We support:
Elections in which all Iraqis can participate freely without the presence
of any foreign troops, unless invited in by all those Iraqis involved.
The discussion of procedures to guarantee the safety and political freedom
of those Iraqis who have collaborated with the US or with the US-supported
regime.
The incorporation of the freely elected Iraqi government into the international
community on terms freely negotiated by that government and the appropriate
international institutions.
A similar set of demands could be applied to Afghanistan, with some
tailoring to the situation in Afghanistan written in.
It is only when we in the antiwar movement decide to go beyond the stunted
thinking of those in the US political and economic leadership that we
will create the opportunity to end this murderous and destructive war.
The politicians are unable to think in terms that transcend their paymasters,
no matter how much they would like to. If we allow the agenda to be
set by their politics and elections, we will fail. It is up to us to
create a popular momentum that those in power cannot ignore. Only then
will they feel secure enough to look beyond their corporate masters
and actually do what the people want them to.
Source:Counterpunch
The optimism of uncertainty
By Howard Zinn
Sept. 8— In this awful world where the efforts of caring
people often pale in comparison to what is done by those who have power,
how do I manage to stay involved and seemingly happy?
I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that
we should not give up the game before all the cards have been played.
The metaphor is deliberate; life is a gamble. Not to play is to foreclose
any chance of winning. To play, to act, is to create at least a possibility
of changing the world.
There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment
will continue. We forget how often we have been astonished by the sudden
crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people’s
thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by
the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible.
What leaps out from the history of the past hundred years is its utter
unpredictability. A revolution to overthrow the czar of Russia, in that
most sluggish of semi-feudal empires, not only startled the most advanced
imperial powers but took Lenin himself by surprise and sent him rushing
by train to Petrograd. Who would have predicted the bizarre shifts of
World War II—the Nazi-Soviet pact (those embarrassing photos of
von Ribbentrop and Molotov shaking hands), and the German Army rolling
through Russia, apparently invincible, causing colossal casualties,
being turned back at the gates of Leningrad, on the western edge of
Moscow, in the streets of Stalingrad, followed by the defeat of the
German army, with Hitler huddled in his Berlin bunker, waiting to die?
And then the postwar world, taking a shape no one could have drawn in
advance: The Chinese Communist revolution, the tumultuous and violent
Cultural Revolution, and then another turnabout, with post-Mao China
renouncing its most fervently held ideas and institutions, making overtures
to the West, cuddling up to capitalist enterprise, perplexing everyone.
No one foresaw the disintegration of the old Western empires happening
so quickly after the war, or the odd array of societies that would be
created in the newly independent nations, from the benign village socialism
of Nyerere’s Tanzania to the madness of Idi Amin’s adjacent
Uganda. Spain became an astonishment. I recall a veteran of the Abraham
Lincoln Brigade telling me that he could not imagine Spanish Fascism
being overthrown without another bloody war. But after Franco was gone,
a parliamentary democracy came into being, open to Socialists, Communists,
anarchists, everyone.
The end of World War II left two superpowers with their respective spheres
of influence and control, vying for military and political power. Yet
they were unable to control events, even in those parts of the world
considered to be their respective spheres of influence. The failure
of the Soviet Union to have its way in Afghanistan, its decision to
withdraw after almost a decade of ugly intervention, was the most striking
evidence that even the possession of thermonuclear weapons does not
guarantee domination over a determined population. The United States
has faced the same reality. It waged a full-scale war in lndochina,
conducting the most brutal bombardment of a tiny peninsula in world
history, and yet was forced to withdraw. In the headlines every day
we see other instances of the failure of the presumably powerful over
the presumably powerless, as in Brazil, where a grassroots movement
of workers and the poor elected a new president pledged to fight destructive
corporate power.
Looking at this catalogue of huge surprises, it’s clear that the
struggle for justice should never be abandoned because of the apparent
overwhelming power of those who have the guns and the money and who
seem invincible in their determination to hold on to it. That apparent
power has, again and again, proved vulnerable to human qualities less
measurable than bombs and dollars: moral fervor, determination, unity,
organization, sacrifice, wit, ingenuity, courage, patience — whether
by blacks in Alabama and South Africa, peasants in El Salvador, Nicaragua
and Vietnam, or workers and intellectuals in Poland, Hungary and the
Soviet Union itself. No cold calculation of the balance of power need
deter people who are persuaded that their cause is just.
I have tried hard to match my friends in their pessimism about the world
(is it just my friends?), but I keep encountering people who, in spite
of all the evidence of terrible things happening everywhere, give me
hope. Especially young people, in whom the future rests. Wherever I
go, I find such people. And beyond the handful of activists there seem
to be hundreds, thousands, more who are open to unorthodox ideas. But
they tend not to know of one another’s existence, and so, while
they persist, they do so with the desperate patience of Sisyphus endlessly
pushing that boulder up the mountain. I try to tell each group that
it is not alone, and that the very people who are disheartened by the
absence of a national movement are themselves proof of the potential
for such a movement.
Revolutionary change does not come as one cataclysmic moment (beware
of such moments!) but as an endless succession of surprises, moving
zigzag toward a more decent society. We don’t have to engage in
grand, heroic actions to participate in the process of change. Small
acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world.
Even when we don’t “win,” there is fun and fulfillment
in the fact that we have been involved, with other good people, in something
worthwhile. We need hope.
An optimist isn’t necessarily a blithe, slightly sappy whistler
in the dark of our time. To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly
romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not
only of cruelty but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.
What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our
lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something.
If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where
people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act,
and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world
in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way,
we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future
is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human
beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself
a marvelous victory.
Zinn’s article is from the new collection of essays on hope
entitled The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen's Guide
to Hope in a Time of Fear edited by Paul Loeb
US military officers: Iraq war an unprecedented
disaster
By Sidney Blumenthal
Sept. 22—”Bring them on!” President Bush challenged
the early Iraqi insurgency in July of last year. Since then, 1,040 American
soldiers have been killed and 7,026 wounded, according to the Pentagon.
Almost every day, in campaign speeches, Bush speaks with bravado about
how he is “winning” in Iraq. “Our strategy is succeeding,”
he boasted to the National Guard convention on Sept. 14. But, according
to the US military’s leading strategists and prominent retired
generals, Bush’s war is already lost. Retired general William Odom,
former head of the National Security Agency, told me: “Bush hasn’t
found the WMD. Al-Qaida, it’s worse, he’s lost on that front.
That he’s going to achieve a democracy there? That goal is lost,
too. It’s lost.” He adds: “Right now, the course we’re
on, we’re achieving Bin Laden’s ends.”
Retired general Joseph Hoare, the former marine commandant and head
of US Central Command, told me: “The idea that this is going to
go the way these guys planned is ludicrous. There are no good options.
We’re conducting a campaign as though it were being conducted in
Iowa, no sense of the realities on the ground. It’s so unrealistic
for anyone who knows that part of the world. The priorities are just
all wrong.”
Jeffrey Record, professor of strategy at the Air War College, said:
“I see no ray of light on the horizon at all. The worst case has
become true. There’s no analogy whatsoever between the situation
in Iraq and the advantages we had after the second world war in Germany
and Japan.”
W. Andrew Terrill, professor at the Army War College’s strategic
studies institute — and the top expert on Iraq there — said:
“I don’t think that you can kill the insurgency.” According
to Terrill, the anti-US insurgency, centered in the Sunni triangle,
and holding several cities and towns, — including Fallujah —
is expanding and becoming more capable as a consequence of US policy.
“We have a growing, maturing insurgency group,” he told me.
“We see larger and more coordinated military attacks. They are
getting better and they can self-regenerate. The idea there are x number
of insurgents, and that when they’re all dead we can get out is
wrong. The insurgency has shown an ability to regenerate itself because
there are people willing to fill the ranks of those who are killed.
The political culture is more hostile to the US presence. The longer
we stay, the more they are confirmed in that view.”
After the killing of four US contractors in Fallujah, the marines besieged
the city for three weeks in April - the watershed event for the insurgency.
“I think the president ordered the attack on Fallujah,” said
General Hoare. “I asked a three-star marine general who gave the
order to go to Fallujah and he wouldn’t tell me. I came to the
conclusion that the order came directly from the White House.”
Then, just as suddenly, the order was rescinded, and Islamist radicals
gained control, using the city as a base.
“If you are a Muslim and the community is under occupation by a
non-Islamic power it becomes a religious requirement to resist that
occupation,” Terrill explained. “Most Iraqis consider us occupiers,
not liberators.” He describes the religious imagery common now
in Fallujah and the Sunni triangle: “There’s talk of angels
and the Prophet Mohammed coming down from heaven to lead the fighting,
talk of martyrs whose bodies are glowing and emanating wonderful scents.”
“I see no exit,” said Record. “We’ve been down that
road before. It’s called Vietnamization. The idea that we’re
going to have an Iraqi force trained to defeat an enemy we can’t
defeat stretches the imagination. They will be tainted by their very
association with the foreign occupier. In fact, we had more time and
money in state building in Vietnam than in Iraq.”
General Odom said: “This is far graver than Vietnam. There wasn’t
as much at stake strategically, though in both cases we mindlessly went
ahead with the war that was not constructive for US aims. But now we’re
in a region far more volatile, and we’re in much worse shape with
our allies.”
Terrill believes that any sustained US military offensive against the
no-go areas “could become so controversial that members of the
Iraqi government would feel compelled to resign.” Thus, an attempted
military solution would destroy the slightest remaining political legitimacy.
“If we leave and there’s no civil war, that’s a victory.”
General Hoare believes from the information he has received that “a
decision has been made” to attack Fallujah “after the first
Tuesday in November. That’s the cynical part of it — after
the election. The signs are all there.”
He compares any such planned attack to the late Syrian dictator Hafez
al-Asad’s razing of the rebel city of Hama. “You could flatten
it,” said Hoare. “US military forces would prevail, casualties
would be high, there would be inconclusive results with respect to the
bad guys, their leadership would escape, and civilians would be caught
in the middle. I hate that phrase collateral damage. And they talked
about dancing in the street, a beacon for democracy.”
General Odom remarked that the tension between the Bush administration
and the senior military officers over Iraq was worse than any he has
ever seen with any previous government, including Vietnam. “I’ve
never seen it so bad between the office of the secretary of defence
and the military. There’s a significant majority believing this
is a disaster. The two parties whose interests have been advanced have
been the Iranians and al-Qaida. Bin Laden could argue with some cogency
that our going into Iraq was the equivalent of the Germans in Stalingrad.
They defeated themselves by pouring more in there. Tragic.”
Source: Guardian (UK)
