[Peace-discuss] The half-dead anti-war movement

[C. G. Estabrook]

This piece is three weeks old, but the the situation it describes has 
only grown worse.  The end of the summer sees the almost complete 
co-option of the anti-war movement by the Democrats and the 
corresponding neutralization of last fall's antiwar votes.

The "anti-war" position has been re-formulated to mean support for 
Democrats in electoral politics -- while excluding the demand for 
withdrawal from Iraq, including "critical support" for Israel, and 
maintaining silence on the administration's proposed attack on Iran. 
That's hypocrisy and betrayal of a pretty sophisticated sort.

It illustrates the truism that "...American politics ... consists of the 
manipulation of populism by elitism."  Although the Democratic party is 
well to the right of the American electorate (as are the Republicans), 
they have manged to harness the the majority antiwar sentiment for their 
own purposes and successfully rein it in.  Any criticism of the general 
policy of American control of the Middle East -- supported by both 
Republicans and Democrats for generations -- has been quietly suppressed.

"The half-dead 'antiwar movement's' cringing captivity to the imperial 
Democrats is clear in the following pathetic comment from Moira Mack, a 
spokesperson for Americans Against Escalation in Iraq: 'we are in a good 
position when leaders are debating the best way to bring our troops home 
rather than whether or not to bring them home.'"  --CGE

=======================================

	Democratic Iraq Betrayal:
	Treachery on the Campaign Trail
	by Paul Street
	August 15, 2007


Following in the footsteps of similarly pseudo-progressive and 
corporate-imperial Democratic politicians like Bill Clinton, the current 
crop of leading Democratic presidential candidates can be counted on to 
make what Edward S. Herman calls “populist and peace-stressing promises 
and gestures that are betrayed instantly on the assumption of power” 
(Edward S. Herman, “Democratic Betrayal,” Z Magazine, January 2007).

Sometimes, however, the skids of betrayal are greased in advance of the 
attainment of the presidency, with no small assistance from a weak and 
myopic Left and power-worshipping “liberal” media.



Look, for example, at an interesting article that appeared on the first 
page of the most recent Sunday New York Times.  “Even as they call for 
an end to the war and pledge to bring the troops home,” Times reporters 
Jeff Zeleny and Marc Santora note, “the Democratic presidential 
candidates are setting out positions that could leave the United States 
engaged in Iraq for years” (Jeff Zeleny and Marc Santora, “Democratic 
Field Says Leaving Iraq May Take Years,” New York Times, 12 August, 
2007. p. A1).



“May take tears?” Interesting...A review of the leading Democratic 
presidential candidates’ campaign remarks about Iraq over the last six 
months leaves what Zeleny and Santora call “little ambiguity in their 
message: If the president refuses to end the war, they will” (Zeleny and 
Santora).



Lately, however, those “anti-war” candidates are saying something rather 
different.  John (“Support the Troops, End the War”) Edwards is citing 
the need to "prevent genocide" as a reason to keep US troops in Iraq.



Barrack (“It’s Time to Bring the Troops Home”) Obama says that the need 
to provide "security for American personnel" and to "train Iraqis" will 
require maintaining a military presence in Iraq.



Hillary (“I’m Sorry, it’s Over...if this president does not end the war, 
I will") points to the need to fight terrorism and stabilize the Kurdish 
section of Iraq as justifications for keeping the U.S. military in 
Mesopotamia into the next presidency.    “These positions,” Zeleny and 
Santora observe, “suggest that the Democratic bumper-sticker message of 
a quick end to the conflict — however much it appeals to primary voters 
— oversimplifies the problems likely to be inherited by the next 
commander in chief.”



Zeleny and Santora’s Sunday Times article is disturbing in at least four 
ways.  The first depressing thing is their suggestion that the desire 
for a rapid U.S. withdrawal from Iraq is limited to the nation’s 
Democratic primary voters.  In reality, the majority of all Americans 
support an expeditious U.S. withdrawal.



The second problem is the Times’ unsurprising failure to acknowledge 
that the leading Democratic presidential candidates’ duplicity on Iraq 
is thoroughly predictable in light of the richly bipartisan nature of 
the U.S. Global Dominance Project. As Tuft's University political 
scientist Tony Smith noted in the Washington Post last March, there's 
little if any real foreign policy difference between the Republicans and 
the Democrats when it comes to "doctrinal questions." The leaders of 
both parties are equally committed to U.S. world supremacy. Both wings 
of the narrow-spectrum U.S. party system strongly embrace U.S. 
interventionism, militarism and (when "necessary") unilateralism in the 
name of spreading "democracy" and "free markets."



If anything, the "neoliberal" Democrats' main foreign policy claim is 
that they can do a better job of conducting this imperialist foreign 
policy than the "neoconservative" Republicans. "We are the better, more 
effective and competent Men and Women of Empire" is the basic claim. 
Such was the essence of the John F. Kerry "Reporting to Duty" campaign 
in 2004.



Currently, Smith notes, aggressive militarist neoliberals (Hillary 
Clinton is an especially dangerous example) are probably more 
influential within the Democratic Party than aggressive militarist 
neoconservatives are inside the Republican Party. By Smith’s candid 
account:



“Although they now cast themselves as alternatives to President Bush, 
the fact is that prevailing Democratic doctrine is not that different 
from the Bush-Cheney doctrine...Many Democrats, including senators who 
voted to authorize the war in Iraq, embraced the idea of muscular 
foreign policy based on American global supremacy and the presumed right 
to intervene to promote democracy or to defend key U.S. interests long 
before 9/11, and they have not changed course since. Even those who have 
shifted against the war have avoided doctrinal questions.”



“But without a coherent alternative to the Bush doctrine, with its 
confidence in America's military preeminence and the global appeal of 
‘free market democracy,’ the Democrats' midterm victory may not be 
repeated in November 2008. Or, if the Democrats do win in 2008, they 
could remain staked to a vision of a Pax Americana strikingly 
reminiscent of Bush's” (Tony Smith, “It’s Uphill for the Democrats: They 
Need a Global Strategy, Not Just Tactics for Iraq,” Washington Post, 11 
March 2007, available online at www.washingtonpost. 
com/wp-dyn/content/article/ 2007/03/09/AR2007030901884_ pf.html).



The Democrats’ mealy-mouthed waffling on Iraq is predictable in light 
also of what a still left Christopher Hitchens once (in his 1999 study 
of Bill and Hillary Clinton) called “the essence of American politics. 
This essence, when distilled, consists of the manipulation of populism 
by elitism. That elite is most successful,” Hitchens explained, “which 
can claim the heartiest allegiance of the fickle crowd; can present 
itself as ‘in touch’ with popular concerns; can anticipate the tides and 
pulses of opinion; can, in short, be the least apparently elitist.” 
(Christopher Hitchens, No One Left to Lie to: the Values of the Worst 
Family [(New York: Verso, 2000], pp. 17-18).



The leading Democratic presidential candidates are walking the standard 
timeworn U.S. tightrope between their captivity and commitment to 
standard elite agendas (including imperial agendas) and their need to 
win enough popular support to gain and maintain power.



The third alarming thing about the Sunday Times article is Zeleny and 
Santora’s accurate observation that “antiwar advocates have raised 
little challenge to such positions by Democrats...Four years after the 
last presidential race featured early signs of war protest, particularly 
in the candidacy of Howard Dean,” Zeleny and Santora note, “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.”



The half-dead “antiwar movement’s’” cringing captivity to the imperial 
Democrats is clear in the following pathetic comment from Moira Mack, a 
spokesperson for Americans Against Escalation in Iraq: “we are in a good 
position when leaders are debating the best way to bring our troops home 
rather than whether or not to bring them home” (Zeleny and Santora, p.A15).



The fourth problem is the absence of any discussion of ways the U.S. 
might meet what the Times calls “America’s responsibility to Iraqi 
civilians” (Zeleny and Santora, A15) other than maintaining a bloody, 
widely hated colonial invasion.    Given the shockingly narrow moral and 
ideological parameters of acceptable debate in U.S. political culture, 
it is unthinkable that “our” “liberal” press and presidential candidates 
would honestly acknowledge the United States’ obligation to pay 
reparations to Iraq as compensation for decades of devastating, 
mass-murderous U.S. assault.



Those candidates and that press naturally accept as unassailable 
doctrine the basic precept that the invasion of Iraq was launched for 
the good of Iraqis and in pursuit of noble and idealistic goals of 
freedom and democracy.  Never mind that the occupation is widely and 
accurately understood around the world to be a brazenly imperialist 
effort to deepen U.S. control of super-strategic Middle Eastern energy 
resources and to advance the arch-plutocratic Bush agenda at home and 
abroad.



It’s all unmentionable.  Such, alas, is the profound moral and 
ideological poverty of the dominant political culture in the failing 
imperial-state “homeland” of the “world’s greatest democracy.”





Veteran radical historian, journalist, and activist Paul Street 
(paulstreet99 at yahoo.com) is a Left commentator in Iowa City, IA. 
Street’s latest book is Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis: A 
Living Black Chicago History (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007). 
Street is the author of Empire and Inequality: America and the World 
Since 9/11 (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2004), Segregated Schools: 
Educational Apartheid in the Post-Civil Rights Era (New York, NY: 
Routledge, 2005), and the semi-weekly Empire and Inequality Report.

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