[Peace-discuss] Parties and wars

[C G Estabrook]

Or, more reason not to give Democrats control of Congress

https://www.rollcall.com/news/politics/democrats-press-gop-quick-legislative-response-russia <https://www.rollcall.com/news/politics/democrats-press-gop-quick-legislative-response-russia>

Political parties in other countries are often dues-paying, class-based associations pressing for certain well-defined goals - so you can have, e.g., a bankers party, a farmers’ party, a working class party, etc. 

In contrast, in the US  parties are brands, trying to convince the largest number of voters that Coca-Cola is better than Pepsi-Cola, Cheerios better than Wheaties... (Do they still make Wheaties?) Thus the greatest US crime of the post-WWII world, the US invasion of SE Asia (the ‘Vietnam War’) was not ended by parties’ taking different sides, even though -  

“By 1969 about 70% of the public had come to regard the [Vietnam] war as ‘fundamentally wrong and immoral,’ not ‘a mistake,’ largely as a result of the impact of student protest on general consciousness. And that mass opposition compelled the business community and then the government to stop the escalation of the war.” [Chomsky]

We may ask, Will the Bush-Obama-Trump depredations on the Mideast be brought to end as the Kennedy-Johnson-Nixon assaults on SE Asia were? The answer is hardly clear: history, as has been said, doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme. Remember that Richard Nixon had a ‘secret plan for ending the [Vietnam] war’: he was the anti-war candidate in 1968 (as Trump was in 2016); in each case their opponents (Hubert Humphrey and Hilary Clinton) were leading members of the administrations making war.

The Vietnam war ended (to the extent that it did) for three reasons - in order of importance:
(1) the brave resistance of the Vietnamese people against US attack;
(2) the revolt of the American army in Vietnam (cf. ‘fragging’) - which compelled the sudden ending of the draft in 1973; &
(3) the ‘mass opposition’ of the US public (in fact, the least important of the three factors on US policy).

When it came to the Mideast (even more important to US government planners than SE Asia), US imperial policy was determined to avoid the ‘mistakes’ of Vietnam: 
(1) local resistance in the Mideast was widespread, but divided and inchoate (note that 9/11 was a counterattack to US actions); 
(2) the US military had been assuaged: the draft had been ended (because of US resistance) and only the economic draft was left, so the US fights its Mideast wars largely with foreign proxies, whom it finances (from NATO in Afghanistan to jihadists in Syria); then with drone assassinations. (Cf. “Noam Chomsky: Obama's Drone Program 'The Most Extreme Terrorist Campaign of Modern Times’”);
(3) the mass opposition to the US public to foreign wars - perhaps never greater than in 2003, with Bush’s invasion of Iraq - could be managed with lies and propaganda. Obama ran as the peace candidate in 2008. The anti-war movement that should have countered his lies was seduced by him instead, so in office he could immediately expand the war in Afghanistan that he’d attacked in the campaign.

The examples of Vietnam and the Mideast seem to make it clear that an anti-war movement today that actually deters US wars will not be based on the Republican and Democrat organizations. They are together part of the ‘war party’ that serves the world-wide economic interests of dominant social groups in the US (‘the one percent’) - not the interests of the population at large, who have to misled with ever more fantastic lies - now including ‘Russian aggression’ and ‘collusion.’

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