[Peace-discuss] The Election and the Antiwar Movement (by Mark Harris)

[Ricky Baldwin]

[This says it better than I did.  It's also
interesting for its criticism of Nader, not the
standard complaint.  One caveat, though, Moore did not
'endorse' Wesley Clark to my knowledge; he wrote an
open letter asking Clark to run, but in it he made it
clear he wasn't sure who he'd vote for. - RB]
> 
> 
> May 4, 2004
> 
> The Election and the Antiwar Movement:
> John Kerry Won't End the War,
> But Independent Political Action Can
> 
> By Mark Harris
> 
> "What's incredible was the guy who was president
> then was Richard Nixon,
> which shows that when you build a big movement from
> down below, regardless
> of who's in the White House, you can bring about
> change."  -- Tony
> Mazzochi, former legislative director of the Oil,
> Chemical, and Atomic
> Workers Union, on passage of the first Occupational
> and Safety Health Act
> in 1970. (New York Times, Aug. 24, 2002)
> 
> Some of the more enthusiastic moments at the March
> 20 antiwar rallies
> around the country occurred when speakers raised the
> specter of President
> Bush being given the electoral equivalent of a
> one-way bus ticket back to
> Crawford, Texas, next November. It's an
> understandable reaction. The Bush
> Administration is arguably the single worst thing to
> happen at 1600
> Pennsylvania Avenue since the British torched it in
> 1812.
> 
> But the fires this time are those of an unbridled
> demagoguery and deceit
> and crass superpower nationalism. The White House
> war against Iraq was
> built on a house of lies and oil and imperial
> ambitions that left unchecked
> now threaten even worse conflagrations to come. With
> over 700 American
> soldiers and an estimated 10,000 Iraqi civilians now
> dead as a result of
> the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq (not to
> mention unspecified
> casualties of the former Iraqi army), it would
> hardly be an overreaction to
> suggest that the Bush Administration deserves not
> another term in the White
> House, but a war crimes tribunal.
> 
> Unfortunately, it is unlikely that international
> law, such as it is, will
> soon be bringing to justice the perpetrators of this
> war. That's because
> international law now is not much more than a polite
> term for what is
> otherwise the modern-day rule of clubs and cluster
> bombs. S Whoever has the
> most becomes judge, jury, and final arbiter of
> something supposedly akin to
> "justice" in this world.
> 
> It's also unfortunate that the upcoming U.S.
> Presidential election offers
> no likelihood whatsoever that an antiwar candidate
> will be elected who will
> do the principled thing and end the U.S. occupation
> of Iraq. At least not
> at their own initiative. Apparently, Senator John
> Kerry's run-away
> Democratic primary campaign has emboldened the
> Massachusetts politician
> only in the sense that he has stepped up his efforts
> to win support from
> those who share his friend Senator John McCain's
> (R-Ariz.) view that the
> occupation of Iraq remains a "noble cause."
> 
> As Tim Russert noted on NBC's Meet the Press, Kerry
> is sounding a lot like
> Bush these days when he talks about Iraq.
> Considering what a messianic
> ideologue of war Bush is, that's saying a lot. Asked
> if he thought the Iraq
> war was a "mistake," Kerry would only say that it
> was the way the President
> went to war that was a mistake. As he earlier
> declared in a February 2004
> speech at UCLA, "Whatever we thought of the Bush
> Administration's decisions
> and mistakes  -- especially in Iraq  --  we now have
> a solemn obligation to
> complete the mission, in that country and in
> Afghanistan."
> 
> Kerry's stay-the-course stance on Iraq is becoming
> more ironic by the day
> as support for the occupation plummets, both
> domestically and in Iraq. A
> recent New York Times/CBS News poll found 46 percent
> of Americans believe
> the United States should find a way to get out of
> Iraq. In Iraq itself, a
> poll taken by western news services just prior to
> the recent outbreak of
> violence in Fallujah found a majority of Iraqis --
> 57 percent -- want the
> U.S. military and its occupation allies out of the
> country ''in the next
> few months." Where the violence of recent weeks has
> since driven Iraqi
> opinion is not hard to surmise.
> 
> Actually, Kerry is somewhat less inclined on the war
> issue than the
> President to engage in all the claptrap rhetoric
> about bringing "freedom"
> and "democracy" to Iraq. His declared concern now is
> more the establishment
> of a stable, pro-U.S. (i.e., compliant) Iraqi
> government. And so it goes
> that the more things change, the more they stay the
> same: the same concerns
> for pro-western stability once led President Carter
> and the CIA to support
> the 1979 internal Ba'ath party coup that originally
> brought Saddam Hussein
> to power. The same concerns led the Republican
> administrations of
> presidents Reagan and later Bush, Sr. to remain
> steadfast in their fidelity
> to Hussein's dictatorial rule throughout the 1980s
> (the decade of his
> greatest military power and human rights crimes).
> 
> The same concerns also led President Bush Sr., to
> hold back from seeking
> the dictator's overthrow in 1991, even after a mass
> Shi'ite rebellion in
> the south in the aftermath of the first Gulf War
> threatened just that.
> Likewise, concerns for regional stability, not
> "freedom" and "democracy" or
> even "weapons of mass destruction," motivated
> President Clinton's
> unflinching support of U.N. economic sanctions
> against Iraq, designed as
> they were to weaken but not destroy the central
> government while creating
> devastating conditions for the civilian population.
> 
> Accordingly, it is no surprise that while President
> Bush and apologists for
> the occupation blather on about bringing "freedom"
> to Iraq, occupation
> authorities are also moving to bring back into the
> fold former Ba'ath Party
> officials and Saddamista military officers, to
> collaborate in the
> rebuilding of what is destined to be a new
> repressive political-security
> apparatus not essentially different from what Iraq
> has already known for
> decades.
> 
> What's a Progressive to Do?
> 
> The Massachusetts Senator's "Bush-lite" foreign
> policy undoubtedly
> disappoints many among the broad left-progressive
> milieu, such as it is,
> that supports him. Unless one believes criticizing
> the President's lack of
> "boldness" in rallying international allies to the
> occupation cause is
> somehow a galvanizing message, Kerry is offering
> "Anybody But Bush"
> supporters a rather tepid foreign policy
> "alternative" to rally around.
> 
> What Kerry's hawkish views should not do is shock.
> He has in his recent
> history been far more consistently conservative on
> military and security
> issues than the Republicans would like voters to
> believe. Kerry voted for
> the 2002 Congressional resolution authorizing the
> assault on Iraq. Kerry
> voted for the uncivil assault on civil and
> constitutional liberties
> legitimized under the Patriot Act. Kerry has been
> saying for a while that
> more troops are needed in Iraq -- approximately
> 40,000 more, for now. He
> says expect at least a six-figure presence of
> American troops to remain in
> Iraq a year from now -- when he hopes to occupy the
> White House.
> Nonetheless, the presumed Democratic nominee says we
> must elect him because
> he will do a better job at "internationalizing" the
> Iraqi conflict, mending
> relations with European allies and the United
> Nations for purposes of the
> imperial mission.
> 
> Of course, no matter how disappointing Kerry's
> campaign (Ruth Coniff writes
> for The Progressive that this may be the year Kerry
> finally loses the
> liberal label for good), the desire to defeat Bush
> will not deter many who
> have marched against the war from also voting for
> Kerry. Nor will it
> prevent some in the progressive media >from creating
> its own spin machine
> on the Democratic candidate's behalf. "The right to
> choose, environmental
> sustainability and economic justice will all be
> hanging in the balance on
> Nov. 2, 2004," wrote Don Hazen and Tai Moses for
> Alternet (March 5), the
> progressive, San Francisco-based, news service.
> "With positions, messages
> and values this starkly opposing, there won't be
> many undecided voters in
> this race."
> 
> Admittedly, Hazen, Alternet's editorial director,
> and Moses penned these
> words in early March, when some of the free-for-all
> rhetoric of the primary
> campaigns, with multiple candidates raking Bush's
> handling of the economy
> and WMD issue, was still fresh. But flash forward
> two months and Hazen is
> now interviewing a linguistics expert on the problem
> Kerry is having
> finding a defining theme for his campaign! Such is
> the Unbearable Lightness
> of Being a Progressive Apologist for Anybody But
> Bush.
> 
> Kerry's preeminence as the party's front-runner has
> had some time to hang
> in the air now, enough to begin to smog up some of
> the hype of pro-Kerry
> groups like MoveOn.org with the grimy reality that
> the election is shaping
> up as a choice between a bad, pro-war candidate and
> a really bad, pro-war
> candidate. Of course, there are differences on
> issues (there are always
> differences!). Kerry is pro-choice and Bush is not,
> for example. But the
> idea that the future of choice or justice or even
> survival itself "hangs in
> the balance" on November 4 is just not true. On the
> war issue, there's not
> much difference at all. It's also unlikely the great
> wash of non-voters
> (somewhere in the range of half the adult
> population!) will be motivated by
> the program of either of the two parties to begin an
> unprecedented rush to
> the ballot box.
> 
> If Iraq's weapons of mass destruction turned out to
> be illusory, no less so
> now will be the fantasies of Democratic Party
> critics that the Iraqi
> occupation can be transformed into a "socially
> responsible" occupation --
> United Nations-sanctioned or not. In this way,
> Democrats like left-leaning
> Illinois U.S. Senate candidate Barack Obama, who ran
> in the state's primary
> boasting of his antiwar credentials, are selling
> something even more
> insidious than the rank Republican rhetoric. These
> are the "antiwar"
> Democrats whose opposition in the build-up to the
> war melted into air the
> moment U.S. troops crossed the border into Iraq. Now
> they attempt to paint
> an increasingly brutal military occupation with the
> veneer of hopes for
> resuscitated American good intentions. As if it's
> possible for the U.S.
> presence in Iraq to transform into a benevolent
> mission! As if the United
> States (or the United Nations) has a track record of
> supporting democratic
> revolutions in the Middle East!
> 
> Of course, the wild card in the western debates over
> the fate of Iraq is
> the Iraqi people themselves. When asked in the New
> York Times/CBS poll if
> they saw the American military as "liberators" or
> "occupiers," 71 percent
> of Iraqis said occupiers. Yet the architects and
> apologists for the war
> cling to the delusion that the resistance reflects
> only politically
> isolated "regime remnants" and "terrorists" (the
> later professionals no
> doubt!). But with the city of Fallujah under a
> month-long American siege,
> soldiers and paramilitary security forces of the
> newly formed Iraqi Armed
> Forces have been deserting in droves, rather than
> fight, or even joining
> the rebels. It is a dramatic indicator of how
> military assaults by a
> foreign power on a city's neighborhoods must be
> registering with the wider
> Iraqi population. But then winning the hearts and
> minds of the locals can
> become problematic when you're also dropping
> 500-pound bombs on the
> neighborhood. It's somehow doubtful whether the
> victims of U.S. violence
> care whether those bombs are sanctioned by neo-con
> Republicans or
> "progressive" Democrats.
> 
> But with resistance and disaffection growing inside
> Iraq, it's more than
> the Iraqi security forces who are deserting the
> Americans. The Coalition of
> the Willing is fast becoming the Coalition of the
> Willing to Leave the
> United States in the Lurch. Internationally, the
> United States has never
> been more isolated before the court of world
> opinion. Spain has announced
> it is withdrawing its troops, while six other
> countries are now restricting
> their small regiments to their bases. Nor does the
> United Nations show
> signs of becoming anything more than what Naomi
> Klein in The Nation calls
> "the political arm of the continued US occupation."
> The desire now by many
> Democratic critics to push the United Nations, or
> even a NATO intervention,
> as some kind of salvation for the American war (even
> as a desperate Bush
> also turns to the U.N.) is under the circumstances
> of the nationalist
> uprising unlikely to succeed. As Klein notes, "The
> post-June 30 caretaker
> government being set up by UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi
> will be subject to all
> the restraints on Iraqi sovereignty that sparked the
> current uprising in
> the first place."
> 
> 'Anybody But Bush' - You Get What You Pay For
> 
> The "Anybody But Bush" vision now has most of the
> progressive milieu in its
> trance, but it is not a vision as much as it is a
> paucity of vision. Faced
> with a war sparked by the extremist right-wing
> politics of the Bush
> Administration, the best so many otherwise
> articulate and powerful voices
> for justice can muster is an insistence on
> supporting whoever happens to
> win the Democratic nomination. It's a telling sign
> now of how truly
> rudderless left-progressive politics is in the
> United States. It's also
> revealing just how desperate progressives are that a
> return to the
> Clinton-style politics Kerry embraces is now
> considered almost a god-send.
> 
> In fact, the social policy of the Clinton
> Administration was the most
> conservative of any administration since the end of
> World War II, as
> historian Howard Zinn reminds us in the revised
> edition to his "A People's
> History of the United States." The entire tenure of
> the Clinton
> Administration was defined by erosion of New Deal
> social policy, gutting
> welfare and other safety net programs, deregulating
> industries, union and
> environmental protections, and generally cozying up
> to the interests of
> silver spoon investors and corporate executives, the
> principal
> beneficiaries of the era's market prosperity. The
> campaign slogan of 1992,
> "Putting People First," came to mean "putting the
> bond market" first, as
> Edward Herman, Wharton School professor of finance,
> remarked a few years
> ago in a Z magazine round-up on the Clinton legacy.
> In this sense, the
> Clinton Presidency was but a stage-setting prelude
> to the Republicans Gone
> Wild nightmare of the current administration.
> 
> Is the only choice now one of the speed of the
> retreat from the promise of
> a better, more just society? Unfortunately, if the
> possibilities for
> political change are viewed only through the lens of
> Bush versus Kerry in
> November, then that is the sorry reality. But it's a
> mistake to view the
> election as the be-all and end-all of all our hopes.
> Let's instead get
> heretical in our thinking and declare that a neo-con
> Republican in power is
> not inherently less responsive to pressure from "the
> street" than a liberal
> Democrat. Historically, when has progressive social
> change ever depended
> more or even mostly on whether a Democrat or
> Republican is in office,
> rather than on what happens outside the corridors of
> power, in the
> workplaces, campuses, and neighborhoods, among the
> officially voiceless and
> disenfranchised or excluded? This is the story of
> the Civil Rights
> movement, when sit-ins and marches and a growing,
> relentless dissent
> compelled a bipartisan power structure, long
> comfortable with Jim Crow
> racism, to finally sit up and take action. This is
> the story of woman's
> suffrage, too, the Vietnam peace movement, and
> labor's long quest for the
> eight-hour day, benefits, and such civilized ideas
> like vacations. This is
> the story of the historical movement of democracy
> itself.
> 
> Think about this: In 1970 labor activists helped
> secure passage of the
> Occupational Safety and Health Act, viewed by many
> as "the most important
> pro-worker legislation of the last 50 years," as
> Steven Greenhouse noted in
> a 2002 New York Times profile of veteran labor
> leader Tony Mazzochi.
> Notably, the OSHA legislation was passed under a
> Republican administration.
> Those same Nixon years also saw an end to the
> military draft, and legal
> recognition of a woman's right to choose. Again, no
> thanks to Nixon or even
> to a "progressive" Supreme Court (it didn't exist),
> but to the popular,
> organized activism and mobilization of public
> opinion of millions of
> Americans. In this context, the million-plus March
> for Women's Lives on
> April 25 did more to secure women's reproductive
> rights than anything that
> will happen on November 4.
> 
> It might similarly be easy to credit President
> Clinton for passage of such
> legislation as the Family Medical Leave Act, but
> that leaves out the
> reality that the real impetus came from women's
> groups and unions, who had
> pushed for such legislation for years. Likewise, the
> belief that Clinton's
> early health care reform initiative failed because
> it was too liberal or
> visionary turns reality on its head. The proposal
> failed because whatever
> reformer's vision it could claim sank in the bog of
> endless reassurances by
> the Administration to sectors of the insurance
> industry that their profits
> would remain sacrosanct. But without a mobilized
> public movement, even that
> was not enough to ensure passage of the health care
> reform. This was not
> the case in Canada, where historically active public
> support for the
> independent, union-based New Democratic Party helped
> to eventually win
> passage of a single payer health system.
> 
> If Ralph Nader, an early endorser of the small Labor
> Party group founded by
> the late union organizer Tony Mazzochi, was actually
> running a campaign
> advocating Mazzochi's idea of truly independent,
> working-class campaigns
> for office, in opposition to the corporate-dominated
> two parties, it could
> at the very least set an example of the direction
> grass-roots organizing
> needs to go if independent political action is ever
> going to gain momentum
> in this country.
> 
> Unfortunately, that is not what Nader is doing. The
> Nader campaign seeks to
> oppose the Democratic Party while ostensibly trying
> to boost the party,
> hoping to pressure Kerry from the grass-roots left
> to take better positions
> on a host of issues. Accordingly, Nader thinks he
> can pull large blocs of
> disillusioned nonvoters, independents, and even
> Republicans into voting
> booths, blocs otherwise beyond Kerry's reach, who,
> the thinking goes, will
> then invariably translate part of their presence in
> the voting booth into
> backing for various progressive Democrats running
> for local and state
> offices. It's a confused, ambiguous strategy and it
> makes about as much
> sense as Michael Moore's endorsement of General
> Wesley Clark, who led NATO
> in bombing civilian targets in Belgrade in 1998, as
> a "peace" candidate for
> the Democratic nomination.
> 
> While Nader at least advocates getting out of Iraq
> (but in six months), the
> problem now with all the elite debates about the
> future of Iraq is the
> thorny problem of the Iraqi insurgency, which in one
> way or another, is
> likely to continue growing. Of course, it's possible
> the U.S. military may
> perpetrate a repression so thorough and bloody that
> it effectively puts
> down the rebellion. For now. But with weapons you
> can never obliterate the
> spirit of human resistance. They also cannot kill
> everyone. The spirit of
> nationalism is such that the Iraqi people will in
> the long run never
> countenance the ongoing occupation of their country,
> puppet government or
> not, especially with the current atrocities and
> killings becoming part of
> their collective memory. They will one way or
> another be the final arbiter
> of the future of Iraq.
> 
> More Protest, More Demonstrations
> 
> As a labor organizer, Tony Mazzochi understood that
> the type of progressive
> social change that endures always originates and
> grows from the grass
> roots, from the cellar floor, challenging the
> existing status quo as well
> as whatever conventional wisdom tells us about the
> limits of what is
> "practical" to achieve. Social change rather happens
> when the dissent in
> the air gets organized and visible and takes to the
> streets as well as the
> ballot box. And getting organized has never depended
> upon "lesser-evils" or
> benevolent elites. Our battle now is not just
> against a military
> occupation, but against militarism itself.
> 
> Undoubtedly, last year's antiwar protests lost some
> of their urgency
> following the quick military victory by U.S and
> British forces over Saddam
> Hussein's government. Yet mainstream American
> politics is as much a
> creature of paradox as it is mostly an exercise in
> sound bites and
> personality contests. It was thus perhaps at the
> moment of President Bush's
> most triumphal war posturing, when he paraded macho
> style in full flight
> uniform on the flight deck of a U.S. aircraft
> carrier, celebrating "Mission
> Accomplished" in Iraq, that a sense of the seismic
> credibility chasm the
> Administration was about to plunge into began to
> edge into fuller view.
> 
> The chasm has opened. What is unfolding now in Iraq
> is a political disaster
> for the United States. As reports surface from
> Fallujah of Marine snipers
> who shoot at ambulances, or civilians who step out
> of their houses, or of
> American soldiers who sadistically abuse Iraqi
> prisoners in the very prison
> Hussein once used for his own tortures, the evidence
> mounts of the utter
> moral collapse this war represents for the
> government of the United States.
> 
> What our political leaders have done is criminal.
> Under the guise of a
> phantom weapons threat, the United States government
> started a war that
> after one year of "liberation" has led not to
> dancing in the streets but
> street combat. The beginnings of a classic
> nationalist rebellion against
> occupation by a foreign power are now underway.
> Think Vietnam. Think
> Algeria. With the infrastructure still in crisis,
> electricity spotty,
> hospitals in disrepair, cities under siege,
> unemployment over 50 percent,
> union rights denied under the same Hussein-era laws,
> and world opinion
> largely in square opposition to U.S. policy, the
> corporate CEO-think that
> defines the Bush mind-set has proven its profound
> inability to lead. At
> least if political leadership still has anything to
> do with social justice,
> peace, and prosperity in the world. The Democratic
> front-runner John Kerry
> equally shows no signs of a fundamentally different
> mind-set.
> 
> The antiwar marches before the war and most recently
> on March 20 sent a
> vibrant, defiant message that international and
> domestic opposition to the
> U.S. war and occupation of Iraq runs deep. They must
> continue. Now more
> than ever. Louder than ever. Bigger than ever. No
> matter who is in office.
> The killing must stop.
> 
> Think Out Now. Bring the troops home now.
> 
> ***
> 
> Mark Harris is a Chicago-area journalist. You can
> write to him at
> TheEditorPage at aol.com
> 



	
		
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