[Peace-discuss] NoEscalation.org: Can the Peace Movement Reach President Obama?

[Robert Naiman]

Swanson has it wrong (not for the first time.) The Lee bill, whose
co-sponsors are featured on the site, which urges callers to support
it, prohibits funding for more troops.


On Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 2:19 PM, C. G. Estabrook <galliher at illinois.edu> wrote:
> [This is fine as far as it goes, but as David Swanson points out below,
> "Blocking Escalation (Is) Not Good Enough." He writes, "United for Peace and
> Justice and a new anti-escalation coalition have both refused to host a list
> of congress members committed to voting No on war funding or even escalation
> funding."  We seem to have another example -- there have been too many in
> recent years -- of presumed war opponents working within the limits of
> allowable debate established by liberal war-makers. (Remember "Americans
> Against Escalation in Iraq," the Democratic party front group?) The
> administration should be opposed from the Right and the Left and condemned
> for its war policy. --CGE]
>
>
> Why is it that every time we elect "peace" candidates we defund the peace
> movement, stop calling for an end to wars, and limit our demands exclusively
> to opposing war escalations?
>
> In 2006 we voted into Congress the candidates who looked most likely to end
> the war in Iraq. We congratulated ourselves on a job well done. Then we
> mildly urged them not to escalate the war they'd been elected to end, and
> they escalated it anyway.
>
> In 2008 we voted into Congress and the White House the candidates who looked
> most likely to end the war in Iraq. Candidate Obama promised to pull out two
> brigades per month for sixteen months. Here we are in month 10 and that
> withdrawal has yet to begin. And what in the name of all that is true, good,
> and free-of-hope are we doing about it? Not a god damned thing.
>
> Meanwhile Obama promised, much less noisily, to escalate a war in
> Afghanistan and has done so with no resistance, even as the American people
> have (at least in polls) turned against it. Now party leaders in Congress
> have given Obama the go-ahead for a larger escalation, and what have we
> done?
>
> To begin with we've accepted the terms of the debate that our government
> officials always impose on us following an election: Are you for an
> escalation or do you think the current troop/mercenary levels are adequate?
> There is no room in that debate for arguing that the entire enterprise is
> illegal, barbaric, self-destructive, and must be immediately replaced with
> civilized acts of aid and diplomacy.
>
> Of course we should oppose an escalation, just as we should prefer a "public
> option" to no healthcare reform at all. But self-censoring our demand for
> single-payer shifts the debate so far right that we can't even pass a public
> option. And self-censoring our demand for an end to wars shifts the debate
> to a point where the middle ground becomes an escalation of half the largest
> size anyone proposes -- and the war in Iraq is not even mentioned.
>
> Well-meaning peace groups are pointlessly urging us to lobby the president,
> and are publicly whipping congress members on the following items:
> sponsorship of a bill that would require some sort of non-binding exit plan
> for Afghanistan if actually passed by the House and Senate and signed by the
> president, and sponsorship of a bill that would deny funding for an
> escalation in Afghanistan if actually passed by the House and Senate and
> signed by the president. But getting either of those bills through the
> Senate is going to be significantly more difficult than getting the House to
> stop funding the wars, and thus far no organizations have begun building a
> public list of House members committed to voting No on war money.
>
> In June, because all the Republicans were voting No on the war money for
> their own crazy reasons, we only needed 39 Democrats to vote No to block it,
> and we managed to get 32. We could easily line up 39 right now if we worked
> at it. Then we could begin building from there in the direction of 218. Even
> if all you wanted to oppose was escalation, the way to actually do so would
> be to build a whip list of House members committed to voting No on war
> funding bills that did not limit troop levels in Afghanistan to the desired
> level. Nobody is doing that. The next supplemental spending bill will
> probably come by spring, and it'll come sooner the greater the escalation,
> but peace coalitions tell me they think it's smarter not to prepare for such
> fights ahead of time.
>
> FireDogLake, which hosted our whip list in June, is fully immersed in
> healthcare struggles. United for Peace and Justice and a new anti-escalation
> coalition have both refused to host a list of congress members committed to
> voting No on war funding or even escalation funding. So, I'm going to
> provide, not a replacement for the anti-escalation campaigns, but a
> necessary addition to them. I'm going to post a list at the top of
> http://afterdowningstreet.org and encourage you to ask these 32 heroes from
> back in June (plus a very short list of Republicans) whether they are
> committed to voting against further funding for the wars in Iraq and
> Afghanistan. Please phone them at (202) 224-3121 and post your responses on
> the website.
>
> Tammy Baldwin
> Michael Capuano
> John Conyers
> Lloyd Doggett
> Donna Edwards
> Keith Ellison
> Sam Farr
> Bob Filner
> Alan Grayson
> Raul Grijalva
> Michael Honda
> Marcy Kaptur
> Dennis Kucinich
> Barbara Lee
> Zoe Lofgren
> Eric Massa
> Jim McGovern
> Michael Michaud
> Donald Payne
> Chellie Pingree
> Jared Polis
> Jose Serrano
> Carol Shea-Porter
> Brad Sherman
> Jackie Speier
> Pete Stark
> John Tierney
> Nikki Tsongas
> Maxine Waters
> Diane Watson
> Peter Welch
> Lynn Woolsey
>
> Ron Paul
> Walter Jones
>
> http://afterdowningstreet.org/node/47250
>
>
> Robert Naiman wrote:
>>
>> If there were ever a time when the peace movement should be able to
>> have an impact on U.S. foreign policy, that time should be now. If
>> there were ever a time for extraordinary effort to achieve such an
>> impact, that time is now.
>>
>> National peace advocacy organizations are launching such an
>> extraordinary effort. At the joint website noescalation.org, we're
>> posting the phone numbers of every Congressional office, and what is
>> known so far about where they stand on the proposal to send 40,000
>> more U.S. troops. We're asking Americans to call Congressional offices
>> and search the media for information on where each Member of Congress
>> stands. And we're asking for that information to be reported back to
>> the website noescalation.org.
>>
>>
>> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-naiman/noescalationorg-can-the-p_b_329878.html
>>
>> http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/10/22/102552/68
>>
>> http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/47234
>>
>> http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/node/378
>



-- 
Robert Naiman
Just Foreign Policy
www.justforeignpolicy.org
naiman at justforeignpolicy.org