The JvL Bi-Weekly
James van Luik
Publisher & Editor
Tuesday, April 08, 2003
Volume, 2, No. 7
4 Articles
1. Advancing Down the Road from Nineveh
2. From Hannah Arendt
3. Mesopotamia. Babylon. The Tigris and Euphrates
4. Now that the War Is Going On…..It’s Time to STEP UP, Not Water Down, the Opposition
1. ADVANCING DOWN THE ROAD FROM NINEVEH
BY
ANDREW MOTION
(The Poet Laureate of Great Britain)
“Advancing down the road from Nineveh
Death paused a while and said, Now listen here
You see the names of places round about
They are mine now and I have turned them inside out.
Take Eden further South
At dawn today I ordered up my troops to tear away
Its walls and gates so everyone can see that gorgeous
fruit which dangles from its tree.
You want it don’t you? Go and eat it then and lick your
lips and pick the same again.
Take Tigris and Euphrates.
Once they ran through childhood-colored slabs of sand and
sun. Not any more they don’t. I have filled them up with
countless different kinds of human crap.
Take Babylon
The palace sprouting flowers which sweetened empires in
their peaceful hours.
I have found a different way to scent the air. Already it’s
a by-word for despair.
Which leaves Baghdad, the star-tipped minarets, the marble
courts and halls, the mirage heat.
These places and the ancient things you know you won’t know
soon. I am working on it now.
2. FROM HANNAH ARENDT
SOME REMINDERS FOR OUR TIMES
The reflection that you yourself might have done wrong under the same circumstances may kindle a spirit of forgiveness, but those who today refer to Christian charity seem strangely confused on this issue too. Thus we can read in the postwar statement of the Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland, the Protestant church, as follows: “We aver that before the God of Mercy we share in the guilt for the outrage committed against the Jews by our own people through omission and silence.” (Quoted from the minister Aurel v. Jüchen in an anthology of critical reviews of Hochhuth’s play—Summa Iniuria.) It seems to me that a Christian is guilty before the God of Mercy if he repays evil with evil, hence that the churches would have sinned against mercy if millions of Jews had been killed as punishment for some evil they committed. But if the churches shared in the guilt for an outrage pure and simple, as they themselves attest, then the matter must still be considered to fall within the purview of the God of Justice.
The slip of the tongue, as it were, is no accident. Justice but not mercy, is a matter of judgment, and about nothing does public opinion everywhere seem to be in happier agreement than that no one has the right to judge somebody else. What public opinion permits us to judge and even to condemn are trends, or whole groups of people—the larger the better—in short, something so general that distinctions can no longer be made, names no longer be named. Needless to add, this taboo applies doubly when the deeds or words of famous people or men in high position are being questioned. This is currently expressed in high-flown assertions that it is “superficial” to insist on details and to mention individuals, whereas it is the sign of sophistication to speak in generalities according to which all cats are gray and we are all equally guilty. Thus the charge Hochhuth has raised against a single Pope—one man, easily identifiable, with a name of his own—was immediately countered with an indictment of all Christianity. The charge against Christianity in general, with its two thousand years of history, cannot be proved, and if it could be proved, it would be horrible. No one seems to mind this so long as no person is involved, and it is quite safe to go one step further and to maintain: “Undoubtedly there is reason for grave accusations, but the defendant is mankind as a whole.” (Thus Robert Weltsch also in Summa Iniuria)
Another such escape from the area of ascertainable facts and personal responsibility are the countless theories, based on non-specific, abstract, hypothetical assumptions—from the Zeitgeist down to the Oedipus complex—which are so general that they explain and justify every event and every deed: no alternative to what actually happened is ever considered and no person could have acted differently from the way he did act. Among the constructs that “explain” everything by obscuring all details, we find such notions as “ghetto mentality” among European Jews; or the collective guilt of the German People derived from an ad hoc interpretation of their history; or the equally absurd assertion of a kind of collective innocence of the Jewish people. All these clichés have in common that they make judgment superfluous and that to utter them is devoid of all risk. And although we can understand the reluctance of those immediately affected by the disaster—Germans and Jews—to examine too closely the conduct of groups and persons that seemed to be or should have been unimpaired by the totality of the moral collapse—that is, the conduct of the Christian Churches, the Jewish leadership, the men of the anti-Hitler conspiracy of July 20th, 1944—this understandable disinclination is insufficient to explain the reluctance evident everywhere to make judgments in terms of individual moral responsibility.
3. MESOPOTAMIA. BABYLON. THE TIGRIS AND EUPHRATES
BY
ARUNDHATI ROY
How many children, in how many classrooms, over how many centuries, have hang-glided through the past, transported on the wings of these words? And now the bombs are falling, incinerating and humiliating that ancient civilization.
On the steel torsos of their missiles, adolescent American soldiers scrawl colorful messages in childish handwriting: For Saddam, from the Fat Boy Posse. A building goes down. A marketplace. A home. A girl who loves a boy. A child who only ever wanted to play with his older brother’s marbles.
On March 21, the day after American and British troops began their illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq, an “embedded” CNN correspondent interviewed an American soldier. “I wanna get in there and get my nose dirty,” Private AJ said. “I wanna take revenge for 9/11.”
To be fair to the correspondent, even though he was “embedded” he did sort of weakly suggest that so far there was no real evidence that linked the Iraqi government to the September 11 attacks. Private AJ stuck his teenage tongue out all the way down to end of his chin. “Yeah, well that stuff’s way over my head,” he said.
According to a New York Times/CBS News survey, 42 per cent of the American public believes that Saddam Hussein is directly responsible for the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. And an ABC news poll says that 55 per cent of the Americans believe that Saddam Hussein directly supports al-Qaida. What percentage of America’s armed forces believe these fabrications is anybody’s guess.
It is unlikely that British and American troops fighting in Iraq are aware that their governments supported Saddam Hussein both politically and financially through his worst excesses.
But why should poor AJ and his fellow soldiers be burdened with these details? It does not matter any more, does it? Hundreds of thousands of men, tanks, ships choppers, bombs, ammunition, gas masks, high-protein food, whole aircrafts ferrying toilet paper, insect repellent, vitamins and bottled mineral water, are on the move. The phenomenal logistics of Operation Iraqi Freedom makes it a universe unto itself. It doesn’t need to justify its existence any more. It exists. It is.
President George W Bush, commander in chief of the US army, navy, air force and marines has issued clear instructions: “Iraq. Will. Be. Liberated.” (Perhaps he means that even if Iraqi people’s bodies are killed, their souls will be liberated.) American and British citizens owe it to the supreme commander to forsake thought and rally behind their troops. Their countries are at war. And what a war it is.
After using the “good offices” of UN diplomacy (economic sanctions and weapons inspections) to ensure that Iraq was brought to its knees, its people starved, half a million of its children killed, its infrastructure severely damaged, after making sure that most of its weapons have been destroyed, in an act of cowardice that must surely be unrivalled in history, the “Allies”/ "Coalition of the Willing” (better known as the Coalition of the Bullied and Bought) – sent in an invading army!
Operation Iraqi Freedom? I don’t think so. It’s more like Operation Let’s Run a Race, but First Let Me Break Your Knees.
So far the Iraqi army, with its hungry, ill-equipped soldiers, its old guns and ageing tanks, has somehow managed to temporarily confound and occasionally even outmaneuver the “Allies”. Faced with the richest, best-equipped, most powerful armed forces the world has ever seen, Iraq has shown spectacular courage and has even managed to put up what actually amounts to a defense. A defense which the Bush/Blair Pair have immediately denounced as deceitful and cowardly. (But then deceit is an old tradition with us natives. When we are invaded/colonized/occupied and stripped of all dignity, we turn to guile and opportunism.)
Even allowing for the fact that Iraq and the “Allies” are at war, the extent to which the “Allies” and their media cohorts are prepared to go is astounding to the point of being counterproductive to their own objectives.
When Saddam Hussein appeared on national TV to address the Iraqi people after the failure of the most elaborate assassination attempt in history – “Operation Decapitation” – we had Geoff Hoon, the British defense secretary, deriding him for not having the courage to stand up and be killed, calling him a coward who hides in trenches. We then had a flurry of Coalition speculation – Was it really Saddam, was it his double? Or was it Osama with a shave? Was it pre-recorded? Was it a speech? Was it black magic? Will it turn into a pumpkin if we really, really want it to?
After dropping not hundreds, but thousands of bombs on Baghdad, when a marketplace was mistakenly blown up and civilians killed – a US army spokesman implied that the Iraqis were blowing themselves up! “They’re using very old stock. Their missiles go up and come down.”
If so, may we ask how this squares with the accusation that the Iraqi regime is a paid-up member of the Axis of Evil and a threat to world peace?
When the Arab TV station al-Jazeera shows civilian causalities it’s denounced as “emotive” Arab propaganda aimed at orchestrating hostility towards the “Allies”, as though Iraqis are dying only in order to make the “Allies” look bad. Even French television has come in for some stick for similar reasons. But the awed, breathless footage of aircraft carriers, stealth bombers and cruise missiles arcing across the desert sky on American and British TV is described as the “terrible beauty” of war.
When invading American soldiers (from the army “that’s only here to help”) are taken prisoner and shown on Iraqi TV, George Bush says it violates the Geneva convention and “exposes the evil at the heart of the regime?. But it is entirely acceptable for US television stations to show the hundreds of prisoners being held by the US government in Guantanamo Bay, kneeling on the ground with their hands tied behind their backs, blinded with opaque goggles and with earphones clamped on their ears, to ensure complete visual and aural deprivation. When questioned about the treatment of these prisoners, US Government officials don’t deny that they’re being ill-treated. They deny that they’re “prisoners of war”! They call them “unlawful combatants”, implying that their ill-treatment is legitimate! (So what’s the party line on the massacre of prisoners in Mazar-e-Sharif, Afghanistan? Forgive and forget? And what of the prisoner tortured to death by the special forces at the Bagram air force base? Doctors have formally called it homicide.)
When the “Allies” bombed the Iraqi television station (also, incidentally, a contravention of the Geneva convention), there was vulgar jubilation in the American media. In fact Fox TV had been lobbying for the attack for a while. It was seen as a righteous blow against Arab propaganda. But mainstream American and British TV continue to advertise themselves as “balanced” when their propaganda has achieved hallucinatory levels.
Why should propaganda be the exclusive preserve of the western media? Just because they do it better? Western journalists “embedded” with troops are given the status of heroes reporting from the frontlines of war. Non-“embedded” journalists (such as the BBC’s Rageh Omaar, reporting from besieged and bombed Baghdad, witnessing, and clearly affected by the sight of bodies of burned children and wounded people) are undermined even before they begin their reportage: “we have to tell you that he is being monitored by the Iraqi authorities.”
Increasingly, on British and American TV, Iraqi soldiers are being referred to as “militia” (ie: rabble). One BBC correspondent portentously referred to them as “quasi-terrorists?. Iraqi defense is “resistance” or worse still, “pockets of resistance”, Iraqi military strategy is deceit. (The US government bugging the phones lines of UN security council delegates, reported by the Observer, is hard-headed pragmatism.) Clearly for the “Allies”, the only morally acceptable strategy the Iraqi army can pursue is to march out into the desert and be bombed by B-52s or be mowed down by machine-gun fire. Anything short of that is cheating.
And now we have the siege of Basra. About a million and a half people, 40 per cent of them children. Without clean water, and with very little food. We’re still waiting for the legendary Shia “uprising”, for the happy hordes to stream out of the city and rain roses and hosannas on the “liberating” army. Where are the hordes? Don’t they know that television productions work to tight schedules? (It may well be that if Saddam’s regime falls there will be dancing on the streets of Basra. But then, if the Bush regime were to fall, there would be dancing on the streets the world over.)
After days of enforcing hunger and thirst on the citizens of Basra, the “Allies” have brought in a few trucks of food and water and positioned them tantalizingly on the outskirts sof the city. Desperate people flock to the trucks and fight each other for food (The water we hear, is being sold. To revitalize the dying economy, you understand.) On top of the trucks desperate photographers fought each other to get pictures of desperate people fighting each other for food. Those pictures will go out through photo agencies to newspapers and glossy magazines that pay extremely well. Their message: The messiahs are at hand, distributing fishes and loaves.
As of July last year the delivery of $5.4bn worth of supplies to Iraq was blocked by the Bush/Blair Pair. It didn’t really make the news. But now under the loving caress of live TV, 450 tonnes of humanitarian aid – a minuscule fraction of what’s actually needed (call it a script prop) – arrived on a British ship, the “Sir Galahad”. Its arrival in the port of Umm Qasr merited a whole day of live TV broadcasts. Barf bag, anyone?
Nick Guttmann, head of emergencies for Christian Aid, writing for the Independent on Sunday said that it would take 32 Sir Galahad’s a day to match the amount of food Iraq was receiving before the bombing began.
We oughtn’t to be surprised though. It’s old tactics. They’ve been at it for years. Consider this moderate proposal by John McNaughton from the Pentagon Papers, published during the Vietnam war: “Strikes at population targets (per se) are likely not only to create a counterproductive wave of revulsion abroad and at home, but greatly to increase the risk of enlarging the war with China or the Soviet Union. Destruction of locks and dams, however – if handled right – might … offer promise. It should be studied. Such destruction does not kill or drown people. By shallow-flooding the rice, it leads after time to widespread starvation (more than a million?) unless food is provided – which we could offer to do ‘at the conference table’,”
Times haven’t changed very much. The technique has evolved into a doctrine. It’s called “Winning Hearts and Minds”.
So, here’s the moral maths as it stands: 200,000 Iraqis estimated to have been killed in the first Gulf war. Hundreds of thousands dead because of the economic sanction. (At least that lot has been saved from Saddam Hussein.) More being killed every day. Tens of thousands of US soldiers who fought the 1991 war officially declared “disabled” by a disease called the Gulf war syndrome, believed in part to be caused by exposure to depleted uranium. It hasn’t stopped the “Allies” from continuing to use depleted uranium.
And now this talk of bringing the UN back into the picture. But that old UN girl – it turns out that she just ain’t what she was cracked up to be. She’s been demoted (although she retains her high salary). Now she’s the world’s janitor. She’s the Philippino cleaning lady, the Indian jamadarni, the postal bride from Thailand, the Mexican household help, the Jamaican au pair. She’s employed to clean other peoples’ shit. She’s used and abused at will.
Despite Blair’s earnest submissions, and all his fawning, Bush has made it clear that the UN will play no independent part in the administration of postwar Iraq. The US will decide who gets those juicy “reconstruction” contracts. But Bush has appealed to the international community not to “politicize” the issue of humanitarian aid. On the march 28, after Bush called for the immediate resumption of the UN’s oil for food program, the UN security council voted unanimously for the resolution. This means that everybody agrees that Iraqi money (from the sale of Iraqi oil) should be used to feed Iraqi people who are starving because of US led sanctions and the illegal US-led war.
Contracts for the “reconstruction” of Iraq we’re told, in discussions on the business news, could jump-start the world economy. It’s funny how the interest of American corporations are so often, so successfully and so deliberately confused with the interests of the world economy. While the American people will end up paying for the war, oil companies, weapons manufacturers, arms dealers, and corporations involved in “reconstruction” work will make direct gains from the war. Many of them are old friends and former employers of the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Rice cabal. Bush has already asked Congress for $75bn. Contracts for “re-construction” are already being negotiated. The news doesn’t hit the stands because much of the US corporate media is owned and managed by the same interests.
Operation Iraqi Freedom, Tony Blair assures us is about returning Iraqi oil to the Iraqi people. That is, returning Iraqi oil to the Iraqi people via corporate multinationals. Like Shell, like Chevron, like Halliburton. Or are we missing the plot here? Perhaps Halliburton is actually an Iraqi company? Perhaps US vice-president Dick Cheney (who is a former director of Halliburton) is a closet Iraqi?
As the rift between Europe and America deepens, there are signs that the world could be entering a new era of economic boycotts. CNN reported that Americans are emptying French wine into gutters, chanting. “We don’t want your stinking wine.” We’ve heard about the re-baptism of French fries. Freedom fries they’re called now. There’s news trickling in about Americans boycotting German goods. The thing is that if the fallout of the war takes this turn, it is the US who will suffer the most. Its homeland may be defended by border patrols and nuclear weapons, but its economy is strung out across the globe. Its economic outposts are exposed and vulnerable to attack in very direction. Already the internet is buzzing with elaborate lists of American and British government products and companies that should be boycotted. Apart from the usual targets Coke, Pepsi and McDonald’s – government agencies such as USAID, the British department for international development, British and American banks, Arthur Anderson, Merrill Lynch, American Express, corporations such as Bechtel, General Electric, and companies such as Reebok, Nike and Gap – could find themselves under siege. These lists are being honed and refined by activists across the world. They could become a practical guide that directs and channels the amorphous, but growing fury in the world. Suddenly, the “inevitability” of the project of corporate globalization is beginning to seem more than a little evitable.
It’s become clear that the war against terror is not really about terror, and the war on Iraq not only about oil. It’s about a superpower’s self-destructive impulse towards supremacy, stranglehold, global hegemony. The argument is being made that the people of Argentina and Iraq have both been decimated by the same process. Only the weapons used against them differ: In one case it’s an IMF checkbook. In the other, cruise missiles.
Finally, there’s the matter of Saddam’s arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. (Oops, nearly forgot about those!)
In the fog of war – one thing’s for sure – if Saddam’s regime indeed has weapons of mass destruction, it is showing an astonishing degree of responsibility and restraint in the teeth of extreme provocation. Under similar circumstances, (say if Iraqi troops were bombing New York and laying siege to Washington DC) could we expect the same of the Bush regime? Would it keep its thousands of nuclear warheads in their wrapping paper? What about its chemical and biological weapons? Its stocks of anthrax, smallpox and nerve gas? Would it?
Excuse me while I laugh.
In the fog of war we’re forced to speculate: Either Saddam is an extremely responsible tyrant. Or – he simply does not possess weapons of mass destruction. Either way, regardless of what happens next, Iraq comes out of the argument smelling sweeter than the US government.
So here’s Iraq – rogue state, grave threat to world peace, paid-up member of the Axis of Evil. Here’s Iraq, invaded, bombed, besieged, bullied, its sovereignty shat upon, its children killed by cancers, its people blown up on the streets. And here’s all of us watching. CNN-BBC, BBC-CNN late into the night. Here’s all of us, enduring the horror of the war, enduring the horror of the propaganda and enduring the slaughter of language as we know and understand it. Freedom now means mass murder (or in the US, fried potatoes). When someone says “humanitarian aid” we automatically go looking for induced starvation. “Embedded” I have to admit, is a great find. It’s what it sounds like. And what about “arsenal of tactics?” Nice!
In most parts of the world, the invasion of Iraq is being seen as a racist war. The real danger of a racist war unleashed by racist regimes is that it engenders racism in everybody – perpetrators, victims, spectators. It sets the parameters for the debate, it lays out a grid for a particular way of thinking. There is a tidal wave of hatred for the US rising from the ancient heart of the world. In Africa, Latin American, Asia, Europe, Australia. I encounter it every day. Sometimes it comes from the most unlikely sources. Bankers, businessmen, yuppie students, and they bring to it all the crassness of their conservative, illiberal politics. That absurd inability to separate governments from people: America is a nation of morons, a nation of murderers, they say, (with the same carelessness with which they say, “All Muslims are terrorists”). Even in the grotesque universe of racists insult, the British make their entry as add-ons. Arse-lickers, they’re called.
Suddenly, I, who have been vilified for being “anti-American” and “anti-west”, find myself in the extraordinary position of defending the people of America. And Britain.
Those who descend so easily into the pit of racist abuse would do well to remember the hundreds of thousands of American and British citizens who protested against their country’s stockpile of nuclear weapons. And the thousands of American war resisters who forced their government to withdraw from Vietnam. They should know that the most scholarly, scathing and hilarious critiques of the US government and the “American way of life” comes from American citizens. And the the funniest, most bitter condemnation of their prime minister comes form the British media. Finally they should remember that right now, hundreds of thousands of British and American citizens are on the streets protesting the war. The Coalition of the Bullied and Bought consists of governments, not people. More than one third of America’s citizens have survived the relentless propaganda they’ve been subjected to, and many thousands are actively fighting their own government. In the ultra-patriotic climate that prevails in the US., that’s as brave as any Iraqi fighting for his or her homeland.
While the “Allies” wait in the desert for an uprising of Shia Muslims on the streets of Basra, the real uprising is taking place in hundreds of cities across the world. It has been the most spectacular display of public morality ever seen.
Most courageous of all, are the hundreds of thousands of American people on the streets of America’s great cities – Washington, New York, Chicago, San Francisco. The fact is that the only institution in the world today that is more powerful than the American government, is American civil society. American citizens have a huge responsibility riding on their shoulders. How can we not salute and support those who not only acknowledge but act upon that responsibility? They are our allies, our friends.
At the end of it all, it remains to be said that dictators like Saddam Hussein, and all the other despots in the Middle East, in the central Asian republics, in Africa and Latin America, many of them installed, supported and financed by the US government, are a menace to their own people. Other than strengthening the hand of civil society (instead of weakening it as has been done in the case of Iraq), there is no easy, pristine way of dealing with them. (It’s odd how those who dismiss the peace movement as utopian, don’t hesitate to proffer the most absurdly dreamy reason for going to war: to stamp out terrorism, install democracy, eliminate fascism, and most entertainingly, to rid the world of evil-doers”.
Regardless of what the propaganda machine tells us, these tin-pot dictators are not the greatest threat to the world. The real and pressing danger, the greatest threat of all is the locomotive force that drives the political and economic engine of the US government, currently piloted by George Bush. Bush-bashing is fun, because he makes such an easy, sumptuous target. It’s true that he is a dangerous, almost suicidal pilot, but the machine he handles is far more dangerous than the man himself.
Despite the pall of gloom that hangs over us today, I’d like to file a cautious plea for hope: in times of war, one wants one’s weakest enemy at the helm of his forces. And President George W Bush is certainly that. Any other even averagely intelligent US president would have probably done the very same things, but would have managed to smoke-up the glass and confuse the opposition. Perhaps even carry the UN with him. Bush’s tactless imprudence and his brazen belief that he can run the world with his riot squad, has done the opposite. He has achieved what writers, activists and scholars have striven to achieve for decades. He has exposed the ducts. He has placed on full public view the working parts, the nuts and bolts of the apocalyptic apparatus of the American empire.
Now that the blueprint (The Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire) has been put into mass circulation, it could be disabled quicker than the pundits predicted.
Bring on the Spanners.
NOW THAT THE WAR IS GOING ON…..IT’S TIME TO STEP UP, NOT WATER DOWN, THE OPPOSITION
BY
ROBERT AVAKIAN
If you try but fail to stop a monstrous crime before it is committed, should you support it, or be more “restrained” in opposing it, now that it is being committed?
In the March 29th edition of the New York Times there is an article whose title is a tip-off to its purpose: “Antiwar Movement Morphs from Wild-Eyed to Civil.” The Heart of this article is its claim that the antiwar movement is becoming more “moderate” now that it has failed to stop the war. What is done with this article is very similar to what is done with the never-ending, ever-present polls: people are told what to think by telling them it is what they already do think—or what they ought to think because most everybody else thinks that way. (If there had not already been literally millions of people in the US itself, as well as millions more around the world, protesting the war, even before it began, is there any doubt that those who are running this war—and running “the polls”—would be claiming that something like 90 percent of Americans support his war? But in the face of the massive opposition, they couldn’t get away with a blatant lie to that degree, so instead we are told that “the polls show” that something like 60 or 70 percent support the war.) As the Chuck D/Public Enemy song says: “Don’t Believe the Hype.” And don’t believe it when things like this Times article tell the antiwar movement what it should do by pretending to “report” what it is doing.
One of the great strengths of this movement has indeed been its tremendous breadth—involving huge numbers of people of many different viewpoints. But that breadth and diversity has had strength exactly because it has been united in clearly opposing the war, in rejecting the government’s rationalizations for this war, and in its determination to stop this war. Now, just at a time when it is becoming evident that this war will not be the quick and easy victory that the government/media led people to believe it would be, things like this Times article are attempting to influence the movement to “water down” its stand, and to slide down a slippery slope into a position of basically accepting this war, with whatever horrors it brings, and at most engaging in weakened rituals of protest.
Think about the title of this Times article in light of the reality in Iraq: There is nothing whatsoever “civil” about the war that the US government is waging on Iraq, and the continuation of this war will mean even greater death, destruction and suffering for the people of Iraq. So why should the antiwar movement tone down and water down its basic stand and its determination to stop this war?
And what is the logic that this Times article is attempting to promote? Well, the antiwar movement did not succeed in preventing the war from happening…so therefore it should be less firma and resolute in its opposition, now that the war has started? Huh?…what kind of logic is that!? Of course, this is said to be necessary in order to appeal to, or not to alienate, the “mainstream.” Once again, the fact is that the movement which aimed at stopping the war, before it started, was truly massive—it was unprecedented in the outpouring of people from all walks of life—precisely on the basis of its clear and firm stand of opposing and resisting this war. The problem, the reason this movement did not succeed in preventing this war, is clearly not that the movement was not broad and large-scale.
The reason and the problem is that decision-making in the US does not follow the popular will but is dominated by a small group of people--heads of corporations and their political representatives—whose interests are fundamentally different from, and opposed to, those of the masses of “ordinary people.” This ruling capitalists not only monopolizes and control the economy but also the politics and the key institutions of American society and government. They preside over a network of global exploitation. Which has to be maintained through threatening to use, and actually using, massive military force. As the New York Times columnist has bluntly put it: the hidden hand of McDonald’s cannot prosper without the fist of McDonnell Douglas. And the fact is that the clique now sitting at the core of power in the US has been planning to wage this war on Iraq and determined to wage it for years--going back well before September 11th…well before the “election” of George W Bush. This war is part of a whole strategy of extending US imperial domination in the world through massive military force—a strategy that Cheney and others like him have been working on since “the end of the Cold War.”
To stop this war of mass destruction on Iraq and turn things away from this whole course will require not lowering but raising the level of opposition. It will require mobilizing even more massive outpourings of protest and resistance, of many different kinds, in unity with people all over the world who are opposing and resisting this war. The aim must be nothing less than transforming the political terrain and the terms of things in society, so that continuing with this war, and with this whole direction, would land the rulers of the US into a profound political crisis.
This does mean that even greater numbers of people need to be won over. But that is just the point--they need to be won over. The way that pressure will become even broader, and at the same time more powerful, is not by watering down the basic position of opposition and not by trying to avoid “offending anyone”: To win people over means challenging them. It means reaching out to them, yes but also struggling with them, in a good way. It means explaining, with concrete facts and meaningful analysis, what is really going on--exposing the lies that the government/media repeatedly drum at people, and bringing them the truth of why this whole war of mass destruction is being waged on Iraq, why the US, and the world, is being dragged in this direction, whose interests this does and does not serve, and why this must be firmly opposed. And it will be ever more possible to continue winning over more people if at the same time the great numbers of people who already are against this war continue to mobilize in powerful opposition to it.
In the face of the determination of the “rogue state” in ‘Washington to proceed with this war and this whole course, what is needed is for the movement of opposition to be not “wild-eyed” but clear-eyed, and to be even more determined.