[Peace-discuss] Reflections by Paul Street

[Morton K. Brussel]

Maybe we should again invite Paul Street back…
Do we have a University of Illinois Antiwar committee to match that  
of Iowa?
--mkb


You Can Make a Difference: an Antiwar Speech

by Paul Street; September 11, 2007


Iowa City

College Green Park
September 9, 2007
Peace Fest


Thank you Iowans for Sensible Priorities and University of Iowa  
Antiwar Committee for inviting me to speak.

We are coming up on the sixth anniversary of 9/11 and in the so- 
called mainstream media pundits are asking when we will have finally  
and sufficiently commemorated the jetliner attacks of 2001.

I have a different question.  I want to know when enough Iraqi people  
will have died and when enough Afghan people will have died and when  
enough U.S. soldiers will have died at the hands of an American  
Empire whose chief operatives exploited 9/11 as an opening to  
escalate their quest for global dominance.  Those operatives and  
their allies are still using 9/11 as an opportunity to silence  
dissent and deepen inequality at home.

As many of you know, tomorrow David Patraeus, the leading U.S.  
General in Iraq and a man in whom George W. Bush says he’s placed his  
trust...in two days Patraeus is going to report on the supposed  
"progress" of the war on Iraq.

I think it is highly offensive that the Bush administration chose  
this anniversary period as the time when Congress and the nation is  
supposed to respectfully listen to Patraeus testify in support of  
this senseless policy.

It is offensive because of course Iraq had nothing to do with al  
Qaeda or 9/11.

It’s offensive because the Bush administration and its many enablers  
used 9/11 as a false pretext for launching what most of the world  
knows to have been a monumentally illegal and significantly oil- 
motivated invasion of that country.

And it’s offensive because this criminal occupation is fueling the  
fires of the very Islamic rage that gave rise to 9/11 and which will  
certainly generate future terrorist attacks on Americans at home and  
abroad.

We’ve already got a pretty good sense of what’s going to happen with  
Field Marshall Patraeus' big trip home. Patraeus is going to betray  
us and serve his political masters by telling Congress and the  
American people that “the Surge” is “working.”  By this he will mean  
to say that Washington’s escalation of the illegal and immoral war of  
aggression against Iraq is “reducing violence in Iraq.”

And the Democrats or at least most of them are going to fall in  
line.  They'll make some noise and pound their chests a little but  
they're basically going to go along to get along.  They’ll play ball  
with the Escalation, hold their breath and wait for the first Tuesday  
in November in 2008, continuing their betrayal of the popular antiwar  
sentiment they rode to majority power in the Congress last November.

As Paul Krugman noted in the New York Times last Friday, “Democrats  
will look at Patraeus’ uniform and medals and fall into their usual  
cringe.  They won’t ask hard questions out of the fear that someone  
might accuse them of attacking the military.  After the testimony,  
they’ll desperately try to get Republicans to agree to resolution  
that politely asks President Bush to maybe, possibly withdraw some  
troops, if he feels like it” (Krugman, “A Time to Take a Stand,” New  
York Times, 7 September, 2007. p.A29).

Never mind that the Invasion is a monumental, mass-murderous war- 
crime.  More than simply a “mistake,” it a great and brazenly  
imperial transgression that has killed probably a million Iraqis by  
now along with a US GI body count that has long ago surpassed the  
9/11 death toll.

Never mind that this crime has been sold on criminally fraudulent  
grounds from the beginning – from the false claims on “weapons of  
mass destruction” to the absurd claim that the U.S. invaded to export  
democracy and freedom to the preposterous claim that we are reducing  
violence and preventing civil war in Iraq.

Never mind that the violence is actually NOT abating in Iraq.   
“Estimates based on morgue, hospital and police records suggest that  
the daily number of civilian deaths is [now] almost twice its average  
pace from last year…A recent assessment by the nonpartisan Government  
Accountability Office [finds] no decline in the average number of  
daily attacks” (Krugman, “A Time”)

Never mind that General Patraeus has a well-known history of “making  
wildly overoptimistic assessments of [so-called] progress in  
Iraq” (Krugman).

Never mind that Republicans will accuse Democrats of being  
unpatriotic and soft on National Security no matter what the  
Democrats actually do.  As Krugman notes, “Democrats gave Mr. Bush  
everything he wanted in 2002; their reward was a [campaign] ad  
attacking Max Cleland, who lost both legs and an arm in Vietnam, that  
featured images of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.”

Never mind that any plan that depends on Dick Cheney or George W.  
Bush “recognizing reality” is a total fantasy.  Bush and Cheney are  
committed messianic militarists who actually think they can make  
reality up as the go murderously along. Bush probably seriously  
believes God has told him to wage an epic war against the people and  
nations of the Middle East.

And never mind that the American public hates the Iraq war and wants  
to see it ended as quickly as possible. As Krugman notes, “the  
American people are disgusted with the Democrats not because they  
think congressional leaders are too liberal, but because they don’t  
see Congress doing anything to stop the war."  The majority  
Demcoratic Congress's approval rating is actually lower than Bush's  
because of this great failure.

Anybody who thinks that we’re going to make everything okay and end  
the war and create peace and justice in Iraq and world by getting  
Democrats into power in Washington...anybody who thinks that needs a  
serious reality check.  Osama bin Laden may be a vicious  
fundamentalist mass murderer, but he was unfortunately correct when  
he told the American people last week that the Democrats have done  
nothing substantively really to end the war.  They’ve continued to  
fund it all along.

And I’m sorry to say this too, but bin-Laden – butcher that he may be  
– was right when he said that the Democrats are beholden to the same  
military industrial corporations that do so much to influence the  
Republicans in the direction of permanent war.

If he’d wanted to get really radical, bin-Laden could have gone  
further; he could have pointed out that the Bush doctrine of  
aggressive and unilateral interventionism is a very bipartisan  
affair.  The Democratic Party has long participated in the  
development of the doctrine over many years strategic imperial  
planning.   They might 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, have long embraced  
the idea of a militaristic foreign policy based on American global  
supremacy and the presumed right to intervene wherever and whenever  
the U.S. sees fit.

The ongoing four and a half year Iraq invasion is so bipartisan it’s  
not funny.

That’s part of why I encourage everybody here to take a properly  
skeptical attitude towards the upcoming presidential and  
congressional elections that we know so much about in Iowa because of  
the early Caucuses. I happen to agree with Noam Chomsky that we  
shouldn’t ignore American elections.  We should pay attention to the  
admittedly all-too limited spectrum of choices made available to us  
under the American system and try to make reasonably sensible choices  
on which candidates will do the least harm.  And we should not forget  
that one of the two business parties – the Republicans – is openly  
and strongly committed to “dismantling and destroying whatever  
progressive legislation and social welfare has been won by popular  
struggles over the last century.”

But at the same time, we should not think for one second that these  
limited-spectrum elections – especially limited in the realm of  
foreign policy – ought to be the primary focus of our political  
activities. As Chomsky notes, “the urgent task for those who want to  
shift policy in a progressive direction is to grow and become strong  
enough so that they can’t be ignored by centers of power.  Forces for  
change that have come from the grass roots and shaken the society to  
its core include the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the  
peace movement, the women’s movement and others, cultivated by  
steady, dedicated work at all levels, every day, not just once every  
four years...The main task it create a genuinely responsive  
democratic culture, and that effort goes on before and after  
electoral extravaganzas, whatever their outcome” (Noam Chomsky,  
Interventions [San Francisco: City Lights, 2007], pp. 97-100).

Don’t believe the bullshit artists in the dominant media and in the  
university world.  Don’t believe the know-it-all politicians and  
pundits and professors who tell you that your beliefs and actions are  
irrelevant when you struggle against this current war and the broader  
empire and global economic system of which this war is just one  
expression. Don’t believe them when they tell you that weighty  
matters like U.S. foreign policy are beyond your meaningful sphere of  
knowledge and influence.

All of us have the power before we leave to make the world a better  
place than when we entered it.  All of us have the power to fight  
meaningfully and significantly for peace, justice, freedom and  
democracy. We especially have that power when we act with others in  
solidarity, when we collectively resist concentrated power in  
organized, democratic and militant ways, remembering that popular  
government derives its only legitimate authority from the people and  
that the people, united can never be defeated. Thank you.


Paul Street is the author of Empire and Inequality: America and the  
World Since 9/11 (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2004).  Street's latest book  
is Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis (New York: Rowman &  
Littlefield, 2007). Street can be reached at paulstreet99 at yahoo.com
  
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