[Peace-discuss] Almost anti-war...

[C. G. Estabrook]

[Hesitancy at best (subversion at worst) in the anti-war movement is 
described by <http://amleft.blogspot.com/>.  --CGE]


On Thursday, I observed how United for Peace and Justice was sponsoring 
a major antiwar rally without mentioning Iran. On Friday, I received an 
e-mail message from UFPJ, as did many others. It explained UFPJ's 
position on the proposed war against Iran, as set forth on the UFPJ website:

     "United for Peace and Justice opposes any military action against 
Iran, as well as covert action and sanctions. We reject the doctrine of 
'preventive war.'  All diplomatic solutions must be pursued.

     "Send a clear message to the Bush Administration: Don't Attack 
Iran! As a first and immediate step, we urge you to add your signature 
and comments to AfterDowningStreet's petition to President Bush and 
Vice-President Cheney opposing an attack on Iran.

     "Many UFPJ member groups, including AfterDowningStreet, Gold Star 
Families for Peace, CodePINK: Women for Peace, Progressive Democrats of 
America, Democracy Rising, and others, are all promoting this petition. 
UFPJ encourages you to circulate this message and help expand the 
growing list of signers.

     "Efforts to resolve any dispute with Iran should include promoting 
negotiations –- including Israel –- on a Weapons of Mass Destruction 
Free Zone in the Middle East. We call for the global elimination of 
nuclear weapons. The United States should stop blocking negotiations on 
abolition and demonstrate leadership by taking steps to fulfill its own 
nuclear disarmament obligation. We call for the development and 
promotion of sustainable energy alternatives. We need to stop going to 
war for oil. And we need to address climate change. But nuclear power is 
not the answer: Every nuclear power plant is a potential bomb factory 
and a source of radioactive waste that will remain deadly forever. 
Additional Iran resources and action items will be available shortly on 
the UFPJ website. And, be sure to join us in New York on April 29 in the 
national March for Peace, Justice and Democracy."

And, UFPJ confronts some of the underlying assumptions that are used to 
justify a "preemptive attack":

     "An attack on Iran would be an act of aggression, barred by the UN 
Charter and prosecuted at Nuremberg. If executed, U.S. military action 
would apply the Bush doctrine of 'preventive' war in an unprecedented 
way that would set the template for years or decades of regional and 
global violence, unrestrained by law. U.S. use of nuclear weapons 
against Iran would be an atrocious act violating the existing near taboo 
that has held since the U.S. devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That 
would in turn make it far more likely that the weapons will be used 
elsewhere as well -- including against cities in the U.S.

     "While Washington accuses Iran of seeking nuclear weapons under 
cover of a civilian nuclear power program, in violation of its 
obligations as a non-nuclear nation under the Nuclear Nonproliferation 
Treaty (NPT), the U.S. is itself in blatant violation of its own NPT 
obligation to eliminate its vast and sophisticated nuclear arsenal. 
There is no evidence that Iran has a nuclear weapons program. The U.S., 
however, retains a nuclear arsenal of more than 10,000 weapons, some 
2,000 on hair-trigger alert. With nearly 500 tactical nuclear weapons 
deployed in 6 NATO countries, the U.S. is the only country with nuclear 
weapons deployed on foreign soil. And the U.S. is modernizing its 
existing nuclear weapons and publicly making plans to develop and 
produce new ones."

Meanwhile, as Norman Solomon observes, MoveOn.org remains unwilling to 
oppose anything other than a nuclear attack. Here's the weak response 
that Solomon received when he inquired about it:

     "A response came on April 13 from Eli Pariser, executive director 
of MoveOn. Here is his three-paragraph reply in its entirety:

     'As you know, our focus is on bringing people together around 
points of consensus. We build our advocacy agenda through dialogue with 
our members. Since we haven’t done any work around Iran thus far, we saw 
the prospect of a nuclear attack as a good way to begin that 
conversation -- something everyone can agree was nuts.

     'As I mention in the ["Don’t Nuke Iran"] email, a conventional 
attack poses many of the same risks as a nuclear one. But just as our 
Iraq campaign started with a position that attracted a broad membership 
-- "Ask Tough Questions," in August 2002 -- and then escalated, so we’re 
trying here to engage folks beyond the "peace" community in a national 
discussion about the consequences of war.

     'We wouldn’t have had the membership to be able to run ads calling 
for an Iraq exit today if we’d confined our Iraq campaign to the true 
believers from the very beginning.'”

In other words, MoveOn.org had to wait until thousands more Iraqis were 
killed, thousands more detained and tortured, while corporados 
associated with the Bush Administration looted the country for billions 
before it could take a stand in support of ending the occupation, and 
should pursue a similarly ponderous discussion about Iran without 
urgency. But such an analysis naively takes a disingenous reply at face 
value. Solomon asserts, probably accurately, that the overwhelming 
majority of MoveOn.org members oppose military action against Iran.

So, what we really have here is the effort of the self-described 
MoveOn.org Political Action Team to stall, to avoid taking a principled 
stand, as a means of relieving pressure on congressional Democrats, 
until it can no longer be avoided, as they previously did to evade an 
open declaration against the occupation. It was a rather strange 
coincidence, they apparently came out against the occupation as 
congressional Democrats began to openly consider a phased withdrawal 
from Iraq. Indeed, I can't even confidently say when it happened, the 
announcement gently brushed the public consciousness, most assuredly 
lacking the Zen-like prospect of transformation associated with a 
butterfly moving its wings.

Yet again, instead of providing leadership, the "action team" is 
actually an impediment, a barrier that MoveOn.org members must overcome 
to have their true opinion expressed. There is an old saying, "History 
repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce." In this instance, we 
can more accurately say, "History repeats itself, ever more 
ludicrously." People with even longer memories about the mendacity of 
MoveOn.org recall how it created a safe harbor for congressional 
Democrats before the Iraq war, by stating that the war was wrong, unless 
authorized by a UN resolution.

By doing so, MoveOn.org accomplished two critical objectives: (1) 
allowing congressional Democrats to support the war in the unlikely 
event that Bush obtained a UN resolution; and, more importantly, (2) 
allowing congressional Democrats to engage in the hypocritical display 
of supporting the occupation as a purportedly grim necessity while 
parading their pre-war credentials of opposition. As already noted, 
MoveOn.org members eventually rebelled against such transparently 
cynical politics, but it took a long time for them to overcome the 
political manipulation of the "action team", if they did so at all, 
given the yellow light of cautious approval from congressional Democrats 
for a change in policy.

Hence, with Iran, we hear the same nonsense, MoveOn.org needs to educate 
and consult. A national discusssion is needed. Nonsense, because 
MoveOn.org is clearly an organization run from the top down, purveying 
the illusion of mass participation. Liberals love to bash ANSWER as some 
kind of Maoist/Stalinist/Trotyskite vanguardist organization (an 
organization with which I have had no personal experience, being 
philosophically more of an anti-globalization, direct action type), but 
isn't it odd that they have no problem with MoveOn.org, an organization 
that actually operates consistent with such an approach? Meanwhile, 
let's hope that we don't live through the entirety of an 
incomprehensibly violent war in the Middle East, provoked by 
conventional airstrikes upon Iran, before MoveOn.org completes the 
charade of a "national discussion".

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