[Peace-discuss] A new left/right antiwar movement?
C. G. Estabrook
galliher at illinois.edu
Tue Mar 22 17:52:03 CDT 2011
Remember that the Democrats in the House voted by a substantial majority just
last week AGAINST Kucinich's withdrawal resolution - i.e., they voted FOR more
war in Afghanistan (which of course is Obama's position as well).
On 3/22/11 5:28 PM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
> Blue Dog Democrat Heath Shuler Votes For Speedy Afghanistan Withdrawal
> First Posted: 03/22/11
>
> WASHINGTON -- When it comes to congressional alliances, progressive Rep.
> Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) and Blue Dog Rep. Heath Shuler (D-N.C.) aren't
> usually mentioned in the same breath. But last week, Shuler was among the 93
> House lawmakers who voted for Kucinich's ill-fated resolution calling for the
> speedy withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, one of the only
> conservative Democrats to do so.
>
> Kucinich's measure, H. Con. Res. 28, would have invoked the War Powers
> Resolution and directed President Barack Obama to remove troops from
> Afghanistan "by no later than the end of the period of 30 days beginning on
> the day on which this concurrent resolution is adopted," or by no later than
> Dec. 31 if that proved impossible.
>
> The Ohio Democrat introduced a similar resolution last year, when the House
> was under Democratic control, but garnered just 65 votes in support, including
> five Republicans. This year, his measure's 93 supporters included eight
> Republicans.
>
> For critics of the president's strategy, the vote from Shuler -- who last fall
> challenged former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) in her bid for the position
> of minority leader -- was among the most surprising and encouraging shows of
> new support.
>
> "It would be a great service to our country if someone like Rep. Shuler, a
> centrist or Blue Dog Democrat, would take a greater role in providing the
> President with other options for our country in Afghanistan," said Afghanistan
> Study Group director Matthew Hoh, who resigned from his post as a Foreign
> Service officer in Afghanistan in 2009 after concluding that the United States
> could not achieve its objectives there.
>
> Hoh, a former Marine captain, added: "If Shuler, who has proven himself
> already to be a leader within the Democratic Party, takes a bigger role or
> steps forward on this issue, he could bring along other centrist Democrats
> (and possibly Republicans) who understand that our current policy in
> Afghanistan costs far more than it benefits this nation."
>
> Shuler could not be reached for comment for this report, but said in a
> statement on his website that his vote was motivated by concerns about the
> costs of the war and the use of U.S. national security resources.
>
> "They [U.S. troops] have also worked tirelessly to develop a stable and
> responsive democratic government there," Shuler said in the statement. "That
> task, however, cannot be completed by American military action. It can only be
> accomplished by the Afghan people. Our nation is mired in debt and programs
> vital to the health and safety of American communities are on the budget
> chopping block. With more than $454 billion already spent on operations in
> Afghanistan and another $113 billion requested for the next fiscal year, the
> time has come for our troops to come home and for the Afghan people to stand
> up for their nation."
>
> In July, Shuler also voted for a defeated amendment that would have required
> President Obama to develop a plan and timetable to withdraw troops from
> Afghanistan, although it did not specify a deadline or pace.
>
> A large number of the new votes for Kucinich's resolution this year came from
> progressive Democrats such as Reps. John Conyers (Mich.), Mike Honda (Calif.)
> and Diana DeGette (Colo.) -- members who might have been expected to back a
> rapid withdrawal last year, as well. A staffer for one Democratic lawmaker who
> opposed the measure last year but now supports it said in an email, "Back then
> there were more options for progressives. Now, fewer options and we're closer
> to July date. Progressives getting fed-up, less tolerant."
>
> The three new Republican votes came from Reps. Jason Chaffetz (Utah), Howard
> Coble (N.C.) and Dana Rohrabacher (Calif.), all of whom have been outspoken in
> their criticism of the war's direction.
>
> Notably, both Coble and Shuler are from North Carolina, a state with a heavy
> military presence, including eight bases. Rep. Walter Jones (R-N.C.), who
> represents the district encompassing Camp Lejeune, has become one of the
> leaders of the effort on the Republican side to convince more lawmakers to
> explore alternative courses of action in Afghanistan.
>
> "I was disappointed that not more Republicans voted for it," Jones said
> regarding Kucinich's resolution. "I hope more and more Republicans out in the
> country will contact their members of Congress and ask them to join in
> bringing our troops home. Yes, we did get more votes from the year before, but
> I'm very disappointed we didn't get 15, 20 Republicans."
>
> Jones said he was particularly troubled by comments from Defense Secretary
> Robert Gates and Gen. David Petraeus indicating that U.S. forces will remain
> in Afghanistan even beyond 2014.
>
> "I don't know how any member of Congress -- particularly Republicans -- who
> are so concerned about the financial shape of our country want to spend $7 or
> 8 billion a month to prop up a corrupt government," he said, referring to
> Afghan President Hamid Karzai's regime. "It just doesn't make any sense to me.
> More important than that is the kids that will be killed and lose their arms
> and legs."
>
> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/22/heath-shuler-afghanistan-withdrawal_n_838646.html?ref=fb&src=sp#sb=56150,b=facebook
>
>
> On 3/22/11 11:02 AM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
>> "[Rep. Ron Paul] said his opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan give
>> him an edge over other Republicans and could help him defeat President Barack
>> Obama in a national election. At CPAC, Paul drew thunderous applause for bashing
>> the Patriot Act, US aid to foreign nations, and US military bases overseas
>> during his speech. The conservative group Young Americans for Freedom (YAF)
>> later announced that he would be expelled from the group's National Advisory
>> Board because of his 'delusional and disturbing alliance with the fringe
>> Anti-War movement.'"
>>
>> Rep. Ron Paul wins another Republican presidential straw poll
>> By Eric W. Dolan
>> March 21, 2011 @ 8:14 pm
>>
>> Texas Congressman Ron Paul beat out top Republican presidential hopefuls Mitt
>> Romney and Newt Gingrich in a straw poll for the second time this year.
>>
>> Nearly 18 percent of Republicans voted for Rep. Paul in the straw poll conducted
>> at a GOP Convention in Sacramento on Saturday.
>>
>> He was followed by former governor Mitt Romney, who received 10.9 percent of the
>> vote and 2010 president candidate Sarah Palin, who received 7.9 percent of the
>> vote. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich came in fourth place, with 6.9 percent
>> of the vote.
>>
>> The informal survey was conducted by the libertarian-leaning Republican Liberty
>> Caucus of California [1] (RLCCA).
>>
>> "Given that Congressman Paul and the RLC share a common commitment to individual
>> rights, limited government, free enterprise and constitutional principles we are
>> happy with the results," RLCCA Chairman John Dennis said. "In these times of big
>> government and even bigger deficits, it is exciting to see increased
>> conservative interest in candidates such as Paul."
>>
>> The results of the RLCCA poll reflect another presidential straw poll conducted
>> at the Conservative Political Action Conference [2] (CPAC) in February, where
>> Paul took 30 percent of the vote, followed by Mitt Romney with 23 percent.
>>
>> Paul describes himself as a libertarian and is hardly the party's typical
>> standard bearer.
>>
>> He has said his opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan [3] give him an
>> edge over other Republicans and could help him defeat President Barack Obama in
>> a national election.
>>
>> At CPAC, Paul drew thunderous applause for bashing the Patriot Act, US aid to
>> foreign nations, and US military bases overseas during his speech. The
>> conservative group Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) later announced that he
>> would be expelled from the group's National Advisory Board because of his
>> "delusional and disturbing alliance with the fringe Anti-War movement."
>>
>> URL to article:
>> http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/03/21/rep-ron-paul-wins-another-republican-presidential-straw-poll/
>>
>>
>> URLs in this post:
>>
>> [1] Republican Liberty Caucus of California:
>> http://www.rlc.org/2011/03/21/ca-gop-convention/
>> [2] straw poll conducted at the Conservative Political Action Conference:
>> http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/02/12/ron-paul-wins-cpac-presidential-straw-poll/
>>
>> [3] said his opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan:
>> http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/02/14/congressman-ron-paul-slams-obama-hes-a-warmonger/
>>
>>
>>
>> On 3/22/11 10:16 AM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
>>> The so-called Tea Party is as we know a mood rather than a movement, much less
>>> a party, and is even more various than the anti-war movement. Unlike the
>>> antiwar movement, it has moneyed interests (such as the Koch brothers) and
>>> traditional political groups that re trying to co-opt it.
>>>
>>> But we can't simply ignore the anti-war currents within the TP/Libertarians,
>>> e.g.
>>>
>>> ~ the Ron Paul movement: Paul won the straw poll for president at both recent
>>> CPACs; he's been consistently anti-war, anti-intervention, anti-Pentagon.
>>>
>>> ~ <antiwar.com>, one of the best sites on the web, is a Libertarian site.
>>>
>>> ~ paleo-conservative elements, such as the journal American Conservative, have
>>> been against the neo-con wars in principle from the beginning; Pat Buchanan
>>> has attacked the Libyan adventure as unconstitutional (which it is).
>>>
>>> For the anti-war movement itself, the co-option has already taken place, by
>>> the Democrats and Obama. We forget that the Democrats were given control of
>>> Congress in 2006 specifically to end the war, as they recognized. The firing
>>> of Rumsfeld after the election was the administration's recognition of the
>>> fact. But the Democrats quite consciously and cynically pissed it way - e.g.,
>>> with "timelines" - when they could have de-funded the wars (which required
>>> only 41 votes in the Senate) in the SE Asia and LA were finally defunded.
>>> Then the coup-de-grace was provided by Obama's smiling lies and the foolish
>>> trust that so many people who should have known better put in him.
>>>
>>> Remember that the antiwar movement of the 1960s grew up in opposition to both
>>> business parties. There were attempts to co-opt it, notably by Robert Kennedy
>>> and Richard Nixon. Nixon (whom Obama much resembles in this regard) was
>>> elected in 1968 as the "peace candidate" because in part it was widely
>>> believed that he had "a secret plan for ending the war."
>>>
>>> Events of this week have shown once again how much a new antiwar movement of
>>> that sort is required. The percent of the population opposed to the
>>> administration's wars is now about where it was in 1968.
>>>
>>> Regards, Carl
>>>
>>> On 3/22/11 9:13 AM, Corey Mattson wrote:
>>>> I support what Iraq Veterans Against the War did in Madison on March 12 ---
>>>> bring the anti-war cause to our natural allies, workers and students
>>>> /fighting/ the Tea Party. When I was in Madison February 19th, there were
>>>> about 1,000 Tea Party counter-demonstrators to our 80,000. Those 1,000 Tea
>>>> Party activists were way more than any of their number ever protesting the
>>>> war.
>>>>
>>>> An anti-war Tea Party movement? Where is it? Fledgling right-wing libertarian
>>>> groups clearly haven't been that successful in bringing them to the anti-war
>>>> cause. It's not worth diluting the substance of our opposition to the war to
>>>> attract a handful of libertarians who are opposed to the war for the wrong
>>>> reasons and are our enemy on practically every other issue. In the proposed
>>>> movement to "Stop the War, Stop the Spending," what are left-wingers supposed
>>>> to say when their right-wing partners attack the poor, bust our unions, and
>>>> make U.S. capitalism even more savage and inhumane?
>>>>
>>>> By the way, in the piece below, David Boaz gets the timeline wrong as to when
>>>> the anti-war movement weakened, and I believe he does it purposefully for
>>>> political points. The anti-war movement was already seriously weakened by
>>>> 2006, maybe as early as 2005, as demoralization set in. Surely hopes in a
>>>> electoral victory played a role, but there was no sudden death of the
>>>> movement upon Obama's election. If Boaz is going to blame the Democrats for
>>>> the movement's demise, he should at least get it right. I suspect that he
>>>> wasn't involved in the anti-war movement back then and wouldn't know what
>>>> happened.
>>>>
>>>> --- Corey
>>>> Bloomington-Normal Citizens for Peace and Justice
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Mon, Mar 21, 2011 at 11:29 PM, C. G. Estabrook <galliher at illinois.edu
>>>> <mailto:galliher at illinois.edu>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> [From a director of the 'libertarian' Cato Institute.]
>>>>
>>>> "...the $64,000 question — though these days it would have to be at least
>>>> a $64 billion question — could a new antiwar movement hook up with the
>>>> Tea Party movement in a Stop the War, Stop the Spending revolt?"
>>>>
>>>> What Ever Happened to the Antiwar Movement?
>>>> David Boaz - March 21, 2011
>>>>
>>>> About 100 antiwar protesters, including Daniel Ellsberg of Pentagon
>>>> Papers fame, were arrested Saturday outside the White House in
>>>> demonstrations marking the eighth anniversary of the U.S.-led war in
>>>> Iraq. It’s a far cry from the Bush years, when hundreds of thousands or
>>>> millions marched against the war, and the New York Times declared “world
>>>> public opinion” against the war a second superpower. Will President
>>>> Obama‘s military incursion in a third Muslim country revive the antiwar
>>>> movement?
>>>>
>>>> On a street corner in Washington, D.C., outside the Cato Institute,
>>>> there’s a metal box that controls traffic signals. During the Bush years
>>>> there was hardly a day that it didn’t sport a poster advertising an
>>>> antiwar march or simply denouncing President George W. Bush and the war
>>>> in Iraq. But the marches and the posters seemed to stop on election day
>>>> 2008.
>>>>
>>>> Maybe antiwar organizers assumed that they had elected the man who would
>>>> stop the war. After all, Barack Obama rose to power on the basis of his
>>>> early opposition to the Iraq war and his promise to end it. But after two
>>>> years in the White House he has made both of George Bush’s wars his wars.
>>>>
>>>> In October 2007, Obama proclaimed, “I will promise you this, that if we
>>>> have not gotten our troops out by the time I am president, it is the
>>>> first thing I will do. I will get our troops home. We will bring an end
>>>> to this war. You can take that to the bank.” Speaking of Iraq in February
>>>> 2008, candidate Barack Obama said, “I opposed this war in 2002. I will
>>>> bring this war to an end in 2009. It is time to bring our troops home.”
>>>> The following month, under fire from Hillary Clinton, he reiterated, “I
>>>> was opposed to this war in 2002….I have been against it in 2002, 2003,
>>>> 2004, 5, 6, 7, 8 and I will bring this war to an end in 2009. So don’t be
>>>> confused.”
>>>>
>>>> Indeed, in his famous “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to
>>>> slow” speech on the night he clinched the Democratic nomination, he also
>>>> proclaimed, “I am absolutely certain that generations from now we will be
>>>> able to look back and tell our children that . . . this was the moment
>>>> when we ended a war.”
>>>>
>>>> Today, however, he has tripled President Bush’s troop levels in
>>>> Afghanistan, and we have been fighting there for more than nine years.
>>>> The Pentagon has declared “the official end to Operation Iraqi Freedom
>>>> and combat operations by United States forces in Iraq,” but we still have
>>>> 50,000 troops there, hardly what Senator Obama promised.
>>>>
>>>> And now Libya. In various recent polls more than two-thirds of Americans
>>>> have opposed military intervention in Libya. No doubt many of them voted
>>>> for President Obama.
>>>>
>>>> There’s another issue with the Libyan intervention: the president’s
>>>> authority to take the country to war without congressional authorization.
>>>> As many bloggers noted over the weekend, in 2007 Barack Obama told
>>>> Charlie Savage of the Boston Globe,
>>>>
>>>> The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally
>>>> authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping
>>>> an actual or imminent threat to the nation.
>>>>
>>>> Candidate Hillary Clinton spoke similarly:
>>>>
>>>> If the country is under truly imminent threat of attack, of course the
>>>> President must take appropriate action to defend us. At the same time,
>>>> the Constitution requires Congress to authorize war. I do not believe
>>>> that the President can take military action – including any kind of
>>>> strategic bombing – against Iran without congressional authorization.
>>>>
>>>> And candidate Joe Biden:
>>>>
>>>> The Constitution is clear: except in response to an attack or the
>>>> imminent threat of attack, only Congress may authorize war and the use of
>>>> force.
>>>>
>>>> Fine words indeed. Will their supporters call them on their apparent
>>>> reversal?
>>>>
>>>> It’s hard to escape the conclusion that antiwar activity in the United
>>>> States and around the world was driven as much by antipathy to George W.
>>>> Bush as by actual opposition to war and intervention. Indeed, a
>>>> University of Michigan study of antiwar protesters found that Democrats
>>>> tended to withdraw from antiwar activity as Obama found increasing
>>>> political success and then took office. Independents and members of third
>>>> parties came to make up a larger share of a smaller movement. Reason.tv
>>>> looked at the dwindling antiwar movement two months ago.
>>>>
>>>> With his launch of a third military action, President Obama seems to have
>>>> forgotten a point made by Temple University professor Jan C. Ting: “Wars
>>>> are easy to begin, but hard to end.” Americans haven’t forgotten, though.
>>>>
>>>> Nearly two-thirds of Americans now say that the war in Afghanistan hasn’t
>>>> been worth fighting, a number that has soared since early 2010. Where are
>>>> their leaders? Where are the senators pushing for withdrawal? Where are
>>>> the organizations? Could a new, non-Democratic antiwar movement do to
>>>> Obama what the mid-2000s movement did to Bush? And the $64,000 question —
>>>> though these days it would have to be at least a $64 billion question —
>>>> could a new antiwar movement hook up with the Tea Party movement in a
>>>> Stop the War, Stop the Spending revolt?
>>>>
>>>> http://www.britannica.com/blogs/2011/03/happened-antiwar-movement/
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