[Peace-discuss] Why Obama isn't anti-war

[C. G. Estabrook]

	April 27, 2007
	What Comes After Withdrawal?
	Moving Beyond Anti-War Politics
	By PHYLLIS BENNIS and ROBERT JENSEN

As Congress sends its bill requiring partial troop withdrawals from Iraq 
to the White House for a certain veto, it has never been clearer that 
mobilizing against this war is necessary, but not enough.

Congressional Democrats may be willing to stop there, but demanding the 
withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq is only the first of our obligations 
to help create the conditions for real justice and peace in the Middle 
East and around the world. It's crucial that we also advocate for an 
entirely new foreign policy based on opposition to the long U.S. drive 
toward empire.

That first step is, of course, crucial. When 78 percent of the Iraqi 
people oppose the presence of U.S. troops and 61 percent support attacks 
on those troops, it's clear that our presence in the country is causing 
-- not preventing -- much of the violence. Pulling out U.S. troops 
(including the 100,000-plus mercenaries who back the U.S. military) 
won't eliminate all Iraqi-on-Iraqi violence, but it will remove the 
reason many Iraqis are fighting. That would take away the protective 
umbrella that the widely supported anti-occupation violence currently 
gives the real terrorists -- those engaged in killing civilians for 
political or sectarian reasons. Once U.S. forces are gone and the reason 
for the legitimate resistance to foreign occupation is eliminated, the 
ugly terrorist violence will be exposed for what it is and it will be 
possible for Iraqis themselves to isolate the terrorists and eliminate 
them as a fighting force.

But what comes after a U.S. withdrawal? We clearly owe the Iraqi people 
massive reparations for the devastation our illegal invasion has 
brought. Only in the United States is that illegality questioned; in the 
rest of the world it's understood. Equally obvious around the world is 
that the decision to launch an aggressive war was rooted in the desire 
to expand U.S. military power in the strategically crucial oil-rich 
region, and that as a result the war fails every test of moral legitimacy.

As we organize against the occupation, we also must work to end U.S. 
support for Israeli occupation and try to prevent an aggressive war 
against Iran. But all of this is part of a larger obligation of U.S. 
citizens: We must challenge U.S. empire. The U.S. troop withdrawal and 
reparations should be accompanied by a declaration of a major change of 
course in U.S. foreign policy, especially in Iraq and the Middle East. 
We need a new foreign policy based on justice, relying on international 
law and the United Nations, rather than the assertion of might-makes-right.

This takes us beyond a critique of the mendacity of the Bush 
administration, to recognize that similar dreams of conquest and 
domination have animated every administration, albeit in different 
forms. From the darling of the anti-communist liberal elite (John F. 
Kennedy) and the champion of so-called "assertive multilateralism" (Bill 
Clinton), to the crude Republican realist (Richard Nixon) and the patron 
saint of the conservative right (Ronald Reagan), U.S. empire in the 
post-World War II era has been a distinctly bi-partisan effort.

In his 1980 State of the Union address, President Jimmy Carter called 
for domination of the Middle East: "An attempt by any outside force to 
gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault 
on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an 
assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military 
force." In other words: We run the region and control the flow of its oil.

George W. Bush took earlier administrations' power plays to new heights 
of reckless militarism and unilateralism, seizing the moment after 9/11 
to declare to all nations: "Either you are with us, or you are with the 
terrorists. From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor 
or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile 
regime." In other words: We demand global capitulation.

The only way to transcend this ugly history is through an honest 
national dialogue and a promise of a sea change in U.S. policy.

Look around the world at the results of U.S. strategies. Rhetoric about 
democracy and free trade has masked the enforcement of political and 
economic subordination to the United States and U.S.-based multinational 
corporations. The people of Latin America, much of Africa and the Middle 
East, and many parts of Asia can offer compelling testimony to the 
impact of those policies, enforced now through more than 700 U.S. 
military bases spread across the globe in over 130 countries.

Such empires are typically brought down from outside, with great 
violence. But we have another option, as citizens of that empire who 
understand how this pathology of power damages our country as well as 
the world. Imagine what would be possible if we -- ordinary citizens of 
this latest empire -- could build a movement that gave politicians no 
choice but to do the right thing.

Imagine what would be possible in the world if an anti-empire movement 
were strong enough to make it clear that ending military violence 
requires a just distribution of the resources of this world.

Imagine what is possible if we work to make inevitable one day what 
seems improbable today -- the justice that makes possible real peace.

Phyllis Bennis is a Fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies and 
author of Challenging Empire: How People, Governments and the UN Defy 
U.S. Power. She can be reached at pbennis at ips-dc.org.

Robert Jensen is a professor of journalism at the University of Texas at 
Austin and author of  . He can be reached at rjensen at uts.cc.utexas.edu.