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MOVEMENT ALIVE
Saddam Hussein’s Ba'ath Party from power and replace it
with a Bush sanctioned government.
Add to that the renewed American allegiance to brutal
dictators from Saudi Arabia to Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Georgia,
and all points between; a pointed campaign for America to
dominate energy resources in every country with Islamic
populations from Nigeria to Indonesia, to the Caspian Sea;
the reinstallation of power of Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance
warlords; and the targeting of Islamic minority communities
in the United States itself.
The Bush administration has already handed a wealth
of arguments to Islamic terrorist groups worldwide. As an Arab
diplomat recently told Reuters News Service, “With Bush as a
recruiting sergeant these people will be in business for another
generation.”
We need to remind people that the terrorists whose
attacks Bush has used to give his efforts legitimacy wear no
uniform, answer to no central authority, and work from no single
national state. And that their efforts were fueled in part by past
American actions, like supporting Osama bin Laden in Afghan
istan to oust the Soviet Union in the 1980s.
As a result, their efforts can ultimately be prevented,
not by war, but a combination of police work and persuasion —
ensuring that such tactics are embraced by dozens, not millions,
and then working to render those dozens as ineffectual as
possible. Ignoring this not only puts our soldiers in the Middle
East at risk, it risks the lives of ordinary Americans at home.
We need to talk about this. We need to be clear that those who
have rushed to war, not those of us who oppose it, are the real
betrayers of trust and security.
From its embrace of might-makes-right and preemptive
war, to its rejection of international treaties and norms, to its
crude taunting of elected leaders and populations of America’s
historic allies, the Bush administration has taken the United
States from being the object of the world’s sympathy and solid
arity to inspiring global resentment and anger.
That, in turn, not only helps isolate the U.S. from its
historic allies, it also incites the violent fringe who are willing to
kill more innocent American civilians. Facing crises that have
built on our own government’s actions, we have no magic
solutions to resolve every possible global problem. But at any
point our country can make the world safer or more dangerous,
more respectful or more brutal, more sustainable or more
environmentally destructive. And in every one of these choices,
this administration is inviting the worst possible consequences.
The more we elaborate this, the more we will have credibility
even if the nightmare scenario occurs and 9/11 turns out to be
just an opening act for further death and carnage.
But we can’t just appeal to fear. Two themes link the
millions who recently marched worldwide: They recognize that
war on Iraq is a practical and moral disaster. And they reject
the Bush administration’s attempts to impose their vision on
the world. Which means we also need to challenge this admins-
tration's raw arrogance, the contempt with which they view not
only those who challenge their vision, but also the process of
democracy itself.
We need to do this in a way that reaches even to those
who once called themselves administration supporters. Now
that Saddam’s armies have quickly folded, we need even more
to challenge the apostles of empire who insist that because
our armies dwarf those of every other nation, we have the right
to impose our will however we choose. We need particularly to
EUGENE MIHAESCO
resist scenarios where the U.S. turns military victory into region
al and economic dominance.
We might point out that Bush's disregard of world
opinion on Iraq has ample precedent. From the moment it took
office, this administration has sought more power and less
accountability than any U.S. administration in living memory.
The assault on democracy began with the 2000 election,
emerged early on through Enron-crafted secret energy policies
and massive wealth transfers masked as tax reform, and has
continued with the gutting of core civil liberties and laws
requiring government openness. Since this government’s
relationship to both the world and its own citizens is bullying
arrogance, we need to make challenging that arrogance a
central focus.
An ethic of accountability would link the casual way
this administration approaches this war's potential human and
political consequences, with the ease with which they make
other lives and communities expendable. We should connect
THE IRAQI CRISIS: WHAT NOW?
BY DAVID A. HOROWITZ
We are living in momentous times. At enormous
risk to global goodwill and its future security, the United States
has reclaimed the emancipatory mission of a historical identity
forged in the American Revolution, the Civil War and World
War 2. Governments do not take to arms without direct refer
ence to national interests. In the post-9/11 world, these are
framed by a determination that no dictatorial state be permit
ted to offer a potential base for international terrorists with
access to portable chemical, biological or nuclear weapons.
The broader lines of this policy have been outlined in Tony
Blair’s insistence that mass murderers be put on notice that
the world has the will and means to confront their ideological
fanaticism. The rapid fall of Saddam Hussein's bloody regime
under a unique set of circumstances signals the bankruptcy of
the delusionary posturing by which many of the Middle East's
religious and political autocrats have kept their populations
under sway and threatened world peace.
Many critics, myself included, hoped that the United
States would work with its European allies in pursuing a more
stringent weapons inspection regime as a prelude to United
Nations support for military action. Three factors contributed
to the Bush administration’s rejection of this approach. First,
the White House felt that UN inspectors could never find Iraqi
weapons without help from the regime's intimidated scientists.
Second, the French began to signal that under no circumstan
ces would they approve a Security Council resolution for
armed force. Third, military deployment in the region, which
gave credibility to inspectors, faced logistical complications if
intervention was extensively delayed. In the end, Resolution
1441 was sufficiently ambiguous about the use of force to
leave daylight for military action under international law. A
precedent for mobilization outside UN approval had been set
when NATO, not the Security Council, provided the umbrella
for Bill Clinton's use of troops and air power to end the geno
cidal ethnic cleansing of European Muslims in Serb-dominated
Bosnia and Kosovo.
Some observers (including myself) warned of possible
reverberations of an invasion of Iraq: fierce resistance by
nationalists and the horrors of urban warfare; huge civilian
deaths, refugee flows, and humanitarian disasters; the torch
ing of oil wells; bitter inter-ethnic fighting; interference by
Turkey or Iran; use of chemical weapons against coalition
forces; furious anti-American outbursts and resulting instability
among Middle East allies; irreparable strains in international
relations; and increased terror attacks within the United States
Other opponents of military action dismissed Gulf War 2 as an
imperial adventure by Washington right-wingers designed to
assure U.S. hegemony in the region, take control of Iraq’s oil,
and eliminate opposition to Israel. The cost, predicted one
Oregon peace publication, would be 500,000 Iraqi deaths,
460,000 refugees, and millions of famine-ravished civilians.
It now seems clear that the critics underestimated
the unpopularity of the Ba’athist police state as well as the
humane competence of the liberation forces. This may be a
result of the congenital aversion to military affairs in bastions
of liberal culture like Portland State University. Why else
would so many intellectuals fail to realize that military planners
learned from Vietnam that indiscriminate bombing and insens
itivity to local cultures can doom any campaign? Unofficial
estimates suggest there may have been as many as 2,000
civilian casualties in the Iraq war, although Saddam’s misfired
missiles, loyalist paramilitary executions, attrition among the
regime's irregular forces, and disinformation from Baghdad
make it impossible to determine the extent of U.S. responsi
bility. The loss of innocent life is an inevitable and terrible part
of war, but careful selection and omission of bombing targets
and cooperation with Iraqi locals on the ground most likely
spared thousands from this fate and kept the total relatively
low.
Much of the credit for the Iraq campaign belongs
to the well-trained and idealistic young men and women who
serve in the U.S. military, arguably the most successful multi
cultural, ethnically diverse and democratic institution in the
country, if not the world.lt is instructive to contrast the commit
ment of these ordinary citizens to the cynicism about national
goals and the depressive mentality that pervades much of
academic culture and the remnants of the peace movement
I have described antiwar protesters in a recent interview as
pathetic members of a “confessional cult" mainly engaged in
a conversation among themselves. Rather than celebrate this
development, I regret that the moral smugness, ideological
rigidity and marginalized nature of the peace lobby has left
American public discourse without a creditable opposition
that can reasonably examine the strategic choices that most
certainly await us down the road.
David Horowitz is professor of U S cultural and 20th
century history at Portland State University He is the author of
Beyond Left & Right Insurgency & the Establishment His most
recent article in the NOTE appeared in the Jan/Feb 2003 issue
( Peace Activists Must Broaden Their Honzons) His comments
are from a faculty panel and forum at PSU He and his wife Glona
Myers, also a writer and histonan. live in Portland and Arch Cape
the dots between Bush's tax cuts for the wealthiest, his cuts in
every program that serves the poor and vulnerable, and his
cavalier dismissal of every major environmental crisis that we
face. We need to highlight the broad-spectrum recklessness of
such choices, then challenge the distracted powerlessness that
makes too many citizens accept in resigned silence whatever is
handed down.
When we are not challenging this recklessness, we need
more than ever to express our vision in human terms, not with
abstract rhetoric, to put human stories and faces on the issues
we address. We need to do this without self-righteousness or
ideological abstraction, and with compassion for how easy it is
to feel overwhelmed by a world spinning out of control.We need
to stand up and not be intimidated
We need a long-term perspective for the perseverance
that creates real change Contrary to the prevailing myth, Rosa
Parks didn’t just step onto a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, but
had been an NAACP activist a dozen years, part of a supportive
community that taught people to persist despite every setback.
Because we can’t foresee every twist and turn, we need to view
our involvement as a long-term process. If we give up simply
because things get difficult, we create self-fulfilling prophecies
of despair.
It is particularly important to not berate ourselves or our
activist compatriots for having failed to stop the war in Iraq. We
did this during the first Gulf War. That was what burned people
out. We need the faith that if we keep on long enough and keep
raising critical questions, our actions will have an impact in ways
we can rarely foresee We need to remember this even when
our efforts appear utterly futile, when we seem to be rolling the
proverbial rock up a hill only to watch it roll back again and
again.
Even if we succeed we may never know when our
actions are mattering most. The heads of the Eastern European
police states insisted their hold on power was secure until almost
the moment peaceful revolutions erupted and the Berlin Wall
came down So did the white rulers of South Africa almost to the
moment Nelson Mandela was freed from prison. During Vietnam
Richard Nixon seriously considered using nuclear weapons and
at one point threatened their use, then backed down in the face
of the nationwide Moratorium demonstrations and a huge march
in Washington, D C. Publicly, Nixon responded to the protests
by watching a Washington Redskins football game and declaring
the marchers weren’t affecting his policies in the slightest, senti
ments that fed the frustration and demoralization of far too many
in the peace movement.
Yet privately Nixon decided the movement had, in his
words, so “polarized" American opinion that he couldn’t carry out
his threat Participants had no idea that their efforts may have
helped stop a nuclear attack.
Whatever the impact of our protest on an administration
drunk on its own power, it shows the rest of the world that vast
numbers of ordinary Americans disagree and helps deflect anti-
American sentiment, perhaps even violence, away from U.S
citizens Dissent gives us back our dignity as we resist attempts
to intimidate and silence us, and challenges and changes us at
a personal level
Global protests have handed the White House United
Nations setbacks, prompting daily anti-European tirades that
sound an awful lot like those of a petulant child finally being told
WO”. If enough ordinary citizens here at home have the courage
to keep saying “no” to reckless actions, there is no telling what
we can stop And if we accompany that “no” with a “yes” that
demands a world where humans are treated with respect, there
is no telling what we can create, for only by persisting do we
have a chance to break the cycles of endless enemies, retalia
tions and deaths of ordinary people caught in the crossfire.
Paul Loeb is the author of Soul of a Citizen: Living With
Conviction in a Cynical Time (St Martin’s Press) and three other
books on citizen involvement Geov Parrish is a columnist for
www workingforchange com, the Seattle Weekly and In These
Times