[Peace-discuss] Why There's No Strategy to End This War

[C. G. Estabrook]

[The feckless of the Democrats -- and the kowtowing to them of
supposedly progressive anti-war groups -- is hardly a new
theme, but it's set out quite clearly here by Alex Cockburn. 
Expecting liberal Democrats to save us is pointless and self-
defeating.  They need to be exposed, not supported. --CGE]


Why There's No Strategy to End This War

My local town of Eureka in northwest California had a pretty
good peace rally on March 18, to mark the third anniversary of
the U.S. attack on Iraq. They've put them on every year,
including a big one just before the war started. It was a
total local affair. An ad hoc group called Communities for
Peace worked for eight weeks and, with the help of Veterans
for Peace, pulled 2,000 people into the municipal auditorium
on F street. There were plenty of young people and the crowd
sat a bit restlessly through three speeches before hitting the
streets. There were four marching bands.

They headed down to the square in Old Town, next to the
rehabbed waterfront, where your CounterPunch co-editor was the
designated final speaker. I cheered them all up by telling
them no one present should ever look in the mirror and tell
themselves they're not smart enough to run the country. They
are. The country is being run by morons.

I read out some of the more spectacular moron predictions from
2003, finishing up with Chris Mathews on MSNBC: "We're all
neo-cons now." and Vanity Fair's answer to Clausewitz,
Christopher Hitchens: "This will be no war -- there will be a
fairly brief and ruthless military intervention.... The
president will give an order. [The attack] will be rapid,
accurate and dazzling.... It will be greeted by the majority
of the Iraqi people as an emancipation. And I say, bring it on."

I told them that two out of three Americans now opposed the
war in contrast to maybe one out of 100 elected politicians.
The problem is not in the heartland. The problem is at the
national level. As popular opposition to the war across the
country has mounted, the demonstrations have got smaller!
There is no visible national strategy to end the war and bring
the troops home. I attribute this in considerable part to the
disastrous fealty of the leadership of some of the big
organizations to the Democrats. This explains why United for
Peace and Justice, for example, was missing in action for most
of 2004. It didn't want to rock the Kerry boat, even as
Captain Kerry was drilling holes in its hull.

Defenders of UPFJ said it register an antiwar presence at the
Democratic convention in Boston, and anyway, it couldn't get
too far ahead of the general mood of its base, which of course
raises the question of how much of a left exists in the
country these days. As your CounterPunch editors pointed out
last week, If it wasn't for Cindy Sheehan and Jack Murtha the
antiwar movement in this country would have all but
disappeared as a presence on the national political agenda,
from the late summer of 2005 on.

Even while I was speaking, the weekend news shows were
detailing the latest attack plan of the Congressional
Democrats. It's called "Real Security". And no, "security"
here doesn't mean a living wage, a pension, a health plan, and
no Stop Loss order for your kid to stay in Iraq. It means guns
and cops and lots of flag-wagging.

"Real Security" calls for Democrats to hinge the 2006 fall
campaign on how the Republicans have failed us on the issue of
national security. Harry Reid says Democrats should wrap
themselves in the flag, use tanks as backdrop and then try to
outflank the Republicans from the right with demands for
increased military funding, a better fought war, tighter
borders, and ports run by white American-born Christians,
preferably free of radical organizers from the ILWU.

As reported in the Washington Times, Reid's strategy memo
advises: "Ensure that you have the proper U.S. and state flags
at the event, and consider finding someone to sing the
national anthem and lead the group in the Pledge of Allegiance
at the start of the event." Next up was Joe Biden, standing
between two gold-fringed flags, and probably with Old Glory
underwear, telling the press that " to the extent that Bush
fails in Iraq, American interests are seriously damaged, and
I'm rooting for his success, not his failure." This is the man
who explained his 30-minute opening speech at the Alito
hearings by saying he wanted to put the nominee at his ease.

So what are we looking down the road towards, across the next
year or two? A bunch of national Democrats like Hillary
Clinton screaming about illegal immigrants and voting for
funding for a wall running from Corpus Christi to San Diego,
staffed by Israeli death squads. If the war gets mentioned at
all, it'll be back to the old winning Kerry formula: We'll
fight it better. They'll be drawing up Patriot Act 3, plus new
national ID cards and street cameras on every street corner,
just like they're installing in the UK.

Faced with this sort of challenge the Republicans will
probably win again. Good luck to them. Who wants Democrats to
get in, just to run a better police state, the way Blair and
New Labor have in Britain where, last time I looked, the
government was planning to gas every badger, from Lands End to
Cape Wrath.

Who wants Democrats to get in, to run a "better" Empire? In
the Bush years , Latin America is seeing a new dawn, with Hugo
Chavez publicly deriding our Commander in Chief as a drunk and
sending cheap heating oil to the poor in the North East. In
the Bush years two professors, from the University of Chicago
and the Kennedy School (which is now rapidly distancing
itself), have published a 80-page paper outlining exactly why
slavish deference to the Israel lobby is hurting America. I
don't think that would have happened in Clinton time.

A couple of days after the Eureka rally I heard from David
Simpson who, with his wife Jane Lapiner, was one of the
organizers, that there'd been some grumbling from Democrats in
the march at my attack on the ghastly performance of their
party. They evidently felt that I should have held my tongue
out of respect for unity that day. But how can one possibly
avoid commenting on the elephant in the room, namely the fact
that there is no credible opposition in Washington! The
Democrats in Congress have caved on everything. They caved on
the war, on immigration, on trade, on the Patriot Act, on the
NSA eavesdropping program, on the bankruptcy laws, on Roberts
and on Alito, and most recently on Feingold's motion of
censure of Bush, a president who's using the Bill of Rights to
clean up after his dog.

That doesn't mean there aren't Democrats in every county (or
at least those counties where the Democrats still exist)
fighting the good fight. David Simpson described going that
same weekend to a hall in Ferndale, 15 miles down the road
from Eureka, where Mike Thompson, our local US rep for
California's first congressional district, was having a
meeting with Humboldt county constituents. Thompson was
arrogant and impatient with critics from his left. When
someone asked what the Democrats were offering by way of a
program for the fall campaign, Thompson said brusquely, We're
working on that. Then a fellow got up and said that Democrats
of Humboldt country were working on a program to, and ticked
off a pretty radical list, starting with demands for impeachment.

The trouble is that there's no earthly prospect of such a
program getting any traction inside the Democratic Party. It's
as if some Prussian regional branch of the NSDAP in 1938 kept
virtuously passing motions calling on the national party to
condemn anti-Semitism and forswear territorial expansion. The
Humboldt Dems can pass terrific resolutions and draw up
wonderful plans and Rahm Emanuel will throw them in the trash,
along with all the advisories from Howard Dean. Look at what
they did to Christine Cegelis in Illinois, who narrowly lost
last week in the sixth congressional district primary to Tammy
Duckworth, parachuted into the district by Emanuel.

In the First District here Thompson is immune to pressure from
the left. As he comfortably informed his Ferndale audience,
Karl Rove could give his opponent a million dollars and it
would make no difference.

The national Democratic Party long since abandoned even the
pretense that the quadrennial national party convention is
there to formulate a party platform responsive to the demands
and programs of the party's base membership. Any talk about
resuscitating the Democratic Party has to address this issue.

Just look ahead. Russ Feingold will make a great showing in
the early primaries, then get creamed by the Democratic
machine. He'll give a powerful speech at the convention,
pledging allegiance to the candidate. And what will that
candidate be pledging? Here's a omen: "Let's be clear about
the threat we face now. A nuclear Iran is a danger to Israel,
to its neighbors and beyond. The regime's pro-terrorist,
anti-American and anti-Israel rhetoric only underscores the
urgency of the threat it poses. U.S. policy must be clear and
unequivocal. We cannot and should not-must not-permit Iran to
build or acquire nuclear weapons." Yup, HRC, the same woman ­-
as Justin Raimondo recently reminded us -- who told Bill to
bomb Belgrade, shouting at him down the phone, "What do we
have NATO for if not to defend our way of life?"
 
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