In the coming months, Washington DC, San Francisco, New York and several other cities will be the sites of a number of actions against the US war in Iraq. These protests, which include and encampment and march the week of September 22 - 29, a protest on September 15th in DC and Los Angeles, and a number of regional protests around the date of October 27th, are being called by a number of national organizations, including UFPJ, Troops Out Now, and ANSWER. In addition, the Iraq Moratorium Project is calling for nationwide locally organized actions across the country every month beginning on September 21st.
While these efforts are commendable and serve the purpose of rallying the committed forces, they also tend to dilute the potential power of the antiwar movement. Unlike many more cynical folks opposed to the US debacle in Iraq, I believe that the antiwar movement is a viable and growing movement. If it has a problem, it is not from the lack of numbers or the lack of commitment from the grassroots. After all, this movement has turned out in incredibly large numbers over the past five years despite the ever obstinate refusal of the White House to acknowledge the depth of opposition to its wars. No, the antiwar sentiment among us regular folk continues to grow, not diminish. Unfortunately, this has yet to translate into a cessation of US action and a withdrawal of US forces. Instead, we have seen an increase in US forces since January 2007 and a renewed determination by the Bush administration to sink US forces even deeper into the morass of war. In addition, the Iraqi and Afghani people have suffered the results of an increased use of military airpower as US planes strafe and bomb whole villages and city neighborhoods in their attempt to destroy the resistance. These air operations have caused untold numbers of civilian deaths and increased the local hatred for the imperial forces on the ground while increasing support for the resistance.
Why has the war escalated while polls show an increasing number of US residents oppose the war and want the troops to come home? (In fact, a recent poll by Harris Polling showed that 42% of US residents polled want an immediate and unconditional withdrawal). Of course, one can point to the man in the White House and his accomplice Dick Cheney and blame the entire phenomenon on their obstinacy and commitment to the ideology of the neocons. One could even speculate that George Bush has some kind of psychological complex that explains his inability to see things for what they are and exacerbates his stubbornness. Or, they could just say that he's so stupid he doesn't care about the facts. While all of these may have an element of truth to them, they do not explain why the US continues to occupy Iraq and bomb Afghanistan. What they do do, however, is obfuscate the other reasons the US military finds itself deeper in the Iraqi and Afghani quagmires in August 2007 than anyone in official Washington was willing to predict in 2006.
Those real reasons have much more to do with the role of Congress than the White House. It is Congress that provided Bush and Cheney with the legitimacy for the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the subsequent occupation of that country. It is Congress that provided the White House with the legal ability to invade Afghanistan in 2001 and it is Congress that continues to provide the legitimacy and the funds to continue the US military actions in that country. Furthermore, it is the US Congress that legitimized the US involvement in Somalia, its continued incursions into Pakistan and its covert operations inside Iran---operations that might erupt into full scale war if we are to believe the growing number of leaks from official Washington in this regard.
Congress is not just collaborating here, it is providing the White House and Pentagon with the funds and legal ability to carry out the Project for a New American Century. This is the case no matter whether the congressional majority is Republican or Democratic. Furthermore, the occasional outbursts of opposition that we have witnessed since the November 2006 elections have not only been fruitless, they have served to provide the prowar forces with the cover of democratic legitimacy because all of the bills even mentioning a withdrawal of forces have either been defeated or watered down to the point where they would have changed nothing on the ground in Iraq or Afghanistan. From where I sit, this does not appear to be an accident. Indeed, it looks more and more like this is what the Democratic leadership wanted all along--a pretend antiwar opposition to the war in Congress that would take the wind out of the movement in the streets of the United States and insure the continuation of the war in the streets of Baghdad. The next step in this plan would entail antiwar citizens involving themselves in the Democratic campaigns for president and after the leadership quashes all attempts to make the Democratic Party the party of immediate withdrawal by marginalizing those candidates who are on record supporting just such a move, then quashing any attempts to place any such demands in the party platform. This would then leave the antiwar movement with little choice but to vote for its candidate. Of course, as any observer of US party politics can foresee, that candidate will most likely be someone that is not for immediate withdrawal from Iraq and in favor of continued aggression in Afghanistan. For those of us with a sense of history, this scenario played itself out in 1968 and left many antiwar Democrats with the choice of voting for the prowar Humphrey or not voting at all.
So, what is to be done? Plain and simple, the antiwar movement must be wrested back from those who would sell it to the Democratic Party. This means, plain and simple, that antiwar actions must not champion presidential candidates at the expense of the stated goal of immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all US forces from Iraq. We must understand clearly that the only way to end US involvement in Iraq is by ending it once and for all. That means no more troops, no more CIA, no more mercenaries, and no more military actions from the air. It also means that the only monies that should be expended by the US in Iraq should be to expedite the withdrawal of all forces and for reparations once an infrastructure is created to insure those funds get to the people and communities that deserve them, not the corrupt Iraqi officials currently in control.
The only role that a political candidate should play in the antiwar movement is to endorse this position. No organization in the antiwar movement should endorse a candidate. It is up to them to endorse us. In order to precipitate this process, however, it will be necessary for the movement to gather its strength into a unified and powerful mass. Such a thing can only happen when the grassroots insists that the leadership set aside their political and personal differences and coalesce around one or two simple demands and back national actions that will demonstrate the strength and breadth of the US people's opposition to this war.
The antiwar actions coming up this fall are not contrary to this potential. Indeed, it might be useful to see them as the seeds of a movement like that outlined above. I believe the sentiment and determination exists among the American people to build a movement capable of ending these wars. My doubts arise only when I reflect on the fractured nature of the current national antiwar organizations and the seeming inability of those groups' leadership to put aside their differences for the greater cause of ending the US occupation of Iraq now.
The antiwar movement was able to help elect a Democratic majority last November because that is where it focused its energies. It can also get a million people in the streets demanding an immediate withdrawal. Now is the time to begin organizing such an effort.
http://stillhomeron.blogspot.com/
Ron Jacobs is a writer, library worker and anti-imperialist. He is the author of The Way the Wind Blew:A History of the Weather Underground (Verso 1997) His first novel, Short Order Frame Up, is now available at Amazon, and many other stores.
"The War that began in Texas, ends in Texas" so goes the slogan for the September 1 American People's Poll on Iraq rally in the conservative city of Fort Worth, Texas
www.texansforpeace.org/peoplespoll
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charlie jackson (9 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 10 comments)
on Wednesday, August 29, 2007 at 1:11:03 PM
1976 -- I was two weeks too young to vote for Jimmy Carter
1980 -- When the "radicals" were voting for John Anderson (who they made fun of because he would have added 50 cents to the price of gas (bringing it all the way up to nearly $1 a gallon) to fund research into alternative fuels) I was voting for Barry Commoner, the FOURTH PARTY candidate.
1984 -- Voted for Mondale.
1988 -- Voted for Dukakis (grew up in Brookline, Mass -- had to do it!)
1992 -- Voted for Clinton. First time in my life that the Presidential candidate I voted for actually WON.
1996 -- Voted for Nader. Wanted to "send a message."
2000 -- Voted for Gore as part of a vote swap for Nader.
2004 -- Voted for Kerry. What choice did I have? We HAD to get rid of Bush/Cheney before they destroyed everything that was good in America.
Bottom line? The Democrats KNOW that I'm a lifelong liberal and progressive and expect that when I sit down to vote, I will vote for them rather than any alternative and that I am NOT a threat to vote for the Rethuglican.
The little amount of money I can contribute ($50 to Kerry, that I demanded back when he conceded the next morning without even TRYING to get an honest count in Ohio) isn't of much importance to them.
The Democratic Party has 14 months to convince me that they DESERVE my vote. They need to begin to hold this corrupt and criminal administration accountable. If they don't, then I will not vote for ANYBODY for President in 2008.
My vote is no longer a guarantee to the Democratic Party. My Democratic Rep (who is opposed to H.R. 333) is not going to get my vote.
If I end up with a Rethuglican Rep that will be the price WE ALL PAY for Earl Blumenauer's failure to live up to his oath of office to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States of America.
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Charlie L (2 articles, 3 quicklinks, 1 diaries, 677 comments)
on Wednesday, August 29, 2007 at 2:00:11 PM
Realize that Bush and his Mafia Are at War with Us
What we have to realize is that Bush and his Mafia are at war with us. He does this by making us think that we are separate from, indeed enemies of, Moslems, Iraqis, Iranians, Afghans, and on and on. But this is the great lie. He and his kind are in the depths of exististential ignorance. We are actually all one, even including our benighted president. He has been slaughtering a part of our Greater Self for five years now, torturing, murdering, ruining countless expressions of ourselves.
Oh, well, this sounds all mystical and spaced out, doesn't it, you might say. No, not when you let your deeper intuition and feelings take over. That is why so many GIs are coming back totally f**ked up in the head and heart, because their intuition and feelings are surfacing, and they realize they have helped perpetuate a horror against humanity.
Here's a simple test. Assume that you are an independent, self-sustaining, separate entity and ego. Now try to hold your breath for five minutes and see how truly independent you are. Unless you are a trained pearl diver, you will soon start to turn blue and face asphixiation. In otherwards, you suddenly realize that you are totally dependent on your environment, indeed helpless without it. You are actually a part of your environment like a cell is part of a body.
Likewise, every other breathing human is also a cell of this same environment, or greater body. We all share this same atmosphere, are all breathing in and out together, so on the most fundamental physical, biological level, we are joined together, or One.
Well, we share the same cosmic energy, prana, chi, ki, orgone, whatever you want to call it as well, so we are connected in the depths, energetically speaking, and our energy runs through every particle of our being. So how are we not all one, and our egos and personalities but unique expressions of the One.
My argument is that Bush, and all war-mongers and Fascists, Red-Fascists, etc., are so deluded that they are turned against the very common life principle of the universe, against its essential interconnectedness, so that they cannot sympathize or empathize with humanity or even creation itself. They are dead men walking on the inside.
They can only devour humanity, like vampires. They have started their war against their projected demons "over there". Eventually they will begin to project their demons onto humanity back here in America, slaughtering us as well. Indeed, some of us believe they have already slaughtered thousands of Americans, dating back to 9/11.
Note how all homicidal types, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, did as much or more damage to their own people as they did to any external enemy. In reality, they are at war with themselves and are deeply, psychologically alienated from the rest of life. When you have bought into an ever threatening duality, you chain yourself onto an endless wheel of destruction and self-destruction as you vainly strike out against phantoms, killing instead, the innocent.
It is a matter of the preservation of humanity, our brothers and sisters, oursleves and all our loved ones globally and locally, that we therefore confront these benighted fools that temporarily hold the reins of power. We must unite and, once and for all, overcome them and their wretched institutions of death and destruction. If that means through the streets, through an Orange, or Red, of Green or Blue Revolution, then so be it. The time to act is now!
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Mac McKinney (42 articles, 69 quicklinks, 164 diaries, 1070 comments)
on Wednesday, August 29, 2007 at 11:25:47 PM
I agree with Ron Jacobs - throughout history, it's been the politicians who started wars. (Don't just believe me - read history books.) Anyone who is anti-war is wasting their time aligning themselves with self-serving political parties. There are a couple of decent politicians but the parties? They dance to their own agenda. If we ALL spoke up, increased our power with thousands of weekly demonstrations worldwide, letters to editors etc., the parties would have to listen to this group to big to ignore. Despite our Prime Minister supporting the war, most Australians don't - he's called "Bonsai" (little Bush!) New slogan for anti-war people, "WE ARE THE MAJORITY"
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Diana Madison (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 5 comments)
on Thursday, August 30, 2007 at 5:35:53 PM
4 comments
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