[Peace-discuss] Cockburn...

[C. G. Estabrook]

I think Cockburn is probably wrong about climate change, probably right 
about 9/11 -- in neither matter are his arguments stupid, though 
possibly erroneous -- but they have no bearing on his assessment of the 
peace movement, which seems to me unusual, accurate and helpful. --CGE

n.dahlheim at mchsi.com wrote:
> Cockburn is permanently on my bad list.  His spurious denial of
> anthropogenic climate change despite the reams of evidence and
> peer-reviewed studies of the data makes me sick.  I consider
> acceptance of the science on global warming a litmus test for living
> in the world of reality.  My second litmust test is accepting the
> reality that the Administration was the driving force behind the 9/11
> attacks.  I don't so much care what people's opinions are beyond
> those two points...  But, these two issues demonstrate whether a
> person is grounded in the world of verifiable facts as one would be
> if they were a forensic investigator or a well-trained scientist.
> 
> 
> ----------------------  Original Message:  --------------------- 
> From:    "C. G. Estabrook" <galliher at uiuc.edu> To:      Peace Discuss
> <peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> Subject: [Peace-discuss] The peace
> movement, the Democrats & the Iraqi resistance Date:    Mon, 27 Aug
> 2007 04:48:58 +0000
> 
>> [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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