[Peace-discuss] The peace movement, the Democrats & the Iraqi resistance

[C. G. Estabrook]

[From Alexander Cockburn]

...Right now I don't think the peace movement is advancing the end of 
the war in Iraq by a single day. In fact goodly chunks of it are 
effectively protracting it, by marching in lockstep with the Democratic 
Party whose overseers strive on an hourly basis to tamp down unseemly 
criticism of what the Party's congressional representatives could be 
doing. What they have substantively done since the Democrats took over 
the Congress is to have given the green light to the "surge", to 
continued funding for the war, to the next Pentagon budget.

Take the "netroots". The organizers of the recent Yearly Kos event 
wouldn't even schedule a strategy session on ending the war in Iraq. 
They denied John Stauber's request that they put on the official 
schedule a strategy session organized by Stauber's Center for Media and 
Democracy, featuring speakers from Iraqi Veterans Against the War. Set 
that wimp-out by MoveOn next to this paragraph from a New York Times 
news story from Des Moines, Iowa, published August 12. "Four years after 
the last presidential race featured early signs of war protest, 
particularly in the candidacy of Howard Dean, a new phase of the debate 
seems to be unfolding, with antiwar groups giving the Democrats latitude 
to take positions short of a full and immediate withdrawal. Neither 
MoveOn.org nor its affiliated group, Americans Against Escalation in 
Iraq, have sought to press Democrats here in Iowa to suggest anything 
short of ending the war immediately"...

The mass mobilizations of 2003 seem light years away. In 2005 UFPJ 
raised over $1 million and in 2006 it raised $575,000. Those budget
numbers were provided at a UFPJ conference. The difference came from
failure in small donations and internet donations. [In comparison, the 
front groups claim to be spending $12 million (Americans Against 
Escalation in Iraq) and $15 million (Freedom Watch). --CGE]

Of course there's no fizzle. People here aren't being driven crazy by 
the war the way we were by the slaughters and bombings of Vietnamese in 
the war then. The horrors pressed down on one every day. Of course 
people were ultras, which is where the long-march radicals should always 
start out The alternative is to come out of the womb squealing about 
"the excesses of the left" and spend the rest of your life like Todd 
Gitlin writing op eds to that effect.

It was even the same somewhat in the Central American interventions of 
the 1980s. You could read about contras disemboweling a rural organizer 
from the FSLN and tremble that it might be the same person you just met 
on a solidarity tour, either up here or down there...

Isn't it the ultimate in cynicism to use the Iraqi resistance's 
successes as a stick with which to beat George Bush and the Republicans, 
but not the Democrats, while simultaneously saying that you'd rather not 
think about the Resistance, because it seems Not Very Nice. If you are 
too scared to look, you'll never find out anything. In mid-July 
important Sunni-led insurgent organizations gathered in Damascus to 
prepare a negotiating position in advance of US withdrawal. Leaders of 
three of the groups met with Seumas Milne of the UK Guardian and 
denounced al-Qaida, sectarian killings and suicide bombings against 
civilians. You can either try to inform yourself of what exactly the 
elements in the Iraqi resistance are actually doing, or you can take the 
route Pollitt did in her hysterical outburst, where she stigmatized the 
resistance as composed of "theocrats, ethnic nationalists, die-hard 
Baathists, jihadis, kidnappers, beheaders and thugs". (The Nation 
1/13/07 <http://www.thenation.com/blogs/anotherthing?pid=213916>. How 
come she forgot to add "raghead"? I guess it wasn't PC.

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