The Situation on the Ground

Our starting point has to be an obvious, but often overlooked fact. The US occupation of Iraq continues to stagger from failure to failure, with no sign of turnaround in sight.

The Bush administration's long term goals look increasing like mirages: (1) a US-dominated "Western-style democracy," (2) whose massive oil reserves give the US ruling class leverage over rival elites in Europe, China and Japan, and (3) whose government welcomes huge permanent US military bases to ensure decades of US dominance in the Middle East.

Instead, deep-seated and widespread hostility to the US occupation and to its local puppets have made democratic elections in Iraq something the Bush administration wants to postpone for as long as possible. Arrests of Saddam Hussein and most of the Ba'ath Party top leadership have produced neither peace nor stability. The country threatens to split into three smaller and antagonistic nations. Each section—Sunni, Shi'a and Kurd—has ignored US demands to disband its large militia.

On a global scale the US is seen as extremely dangerous, a trigger-happy superpower headed by an erratic and not-very-bright crew of liars and bullies.

The price is being paid by the people of Iraq in human lives and social decay. A year after the invasion they lack reliable electrical power, clean water, working sewage systems, basic medical care, and, above all else, jobs and personal safety.

US and "coalition" troops (and their families) face death at the rate of one or two a day, while the Bush administration conceals the frightening casualty rate. Many troops are held in uniform by what the Pentagon calls Stop Loss, arbitrary military orders which extend their tours of duty past their contracted date of separation by months or even years. Reenlistment rates are falling sharply. Exactly where will the Pentagon find the men and women to continue this occupation year after year? Do you feel a draft?

"Sovereignty" as Battleground

All of these problems will intensify as June 30 draws closer. That's the date suddenly chosen late last fall by the US-run Coalition Provisional Authority as the day when the occupation will be declared over and Iraq will be returned to Iraqi "sovereignty." It is doubtless true this date was picked in part so Bush and Cheney could try and declare the occupation over-and successful-as their re-election campaign heats up.

But there is much more at stake in "sovereignty" than that. Only a "sovereign," which is to say independent, Iraqi government can sign a "status of forces agreement" with the US permitting long-term basing of the US military in Iraq. Iraqi state assets, like its oilfields and refineries, its airports, its factories and urban real estate cannot be safely sold off to foreign capital by an Occupation Authority. Only deals cut by a sovereign Iraqi government will hold up to legal challenges.

There is a sharp battle underway over the looming declaration of sovereignty, with a whole cast of players fighting to advance their particular interests:

• For the US, the biggest immediate problem is how to make anyone believe that the occupation is over and Iraq is being run by its own people when there are still over 100,000 US troops sitting there and when whatever temporary ruling body they finally cobble together will be nothing but an expanded version of the Council the US put in place after the invasion last year.
  
  
• The United Nations seems most concerned with reestablishing its centrality in world politics after being dissed by the US, and it is holding a very high card—if the UN doesn't recognize the new "sovereign" government, neither will anyone else. Kofi Annan's main goal appears to be putting future elections under UN supervision, a prospect the US isn't too thrilled about.
  
  
• For the biggest puppets on the Iraq Governing Council, like Ahmed Chalabi, the main thing is to develop a legal and institutional base. They need a show of independence from the American occupiers, but not real independence, because that would spell their doom. And they need to put off elections as long as possible.
  
  
• For Kurdish leaders, the key thing is maximizing Kurdish autonomy in the temporary "interim constitution" being drawn up, because that law will, they figure, provide a template for the future Constitution of a sovereign Iraq.
  
  
• The shrewdest hand so far has been played by Ayatollah al-Sistani, the predominant leader of Iraq's Shi'ite Muslims, the long suppressed majority in the country. He flatly refuses to meet directly with US occupation officials, and has already forced them to scuttle a plan involving a new government being selected in "caucuses" hand-chosen by the US occupation in every province. His goal is democratic elections, through which the Shi'ite majority will become the dominant group in post-Saddam Iraq. He has pushed for UN-sponsored elections by January of 2005, a year earlier than the US was planning and to define the legitimate responsibilities of the post-June 30 "sovereign" government as largely limited to making preparations for those elections.

"Sovereignty" vs. Self-Determination

For those of us in the US working to end the unjust and unjustifiable occupation of Iraq, an important task will be cutting through all the mystification and media hype that will surround the coming "turnover of control." Iraq will not be sovereign until all the US troops are gone and until a new government is in place, chosen by the people of Iraq without the meddling of the Pentagon and the State Department.

We'll have to brace ourselves to deal with a lot of talk about "sovereignty" in the coming months. The fact that this is not a word that is even in the daily vocabulary of most Americans will make the process of mystification easier.

One counter to fuzzy "sovereignty" is clear talk about self-determination. This is a concept that resonates with many Americans. The people of Iraq must be free to determine their own destiny. And how, exactly, are the people of Iraq to do this with more than 100,000 foreign troops occupying their country?

As the Bush administration has settled on "bringing democracy to Iraq" as its fallback justification for the war, the idea of self-determination provides a useful yardstick for evaluating their deeds. Will parties and individuals be permitted to run on a platform of "Yankee, Go Home!"? If not, given the widespread anti-occupation sentiment in Iraq, the fraud of "sovereignty" should be easier to expose.

The concept of self-determination is useful for another reason as well. It counters and undercuts the idea that the US simply has to continue the occupation or all kinds of bad things will happen—internal strife leading to civil war, the rise of a Shi'ite theocracy like Iran, repression of women, economic collapse, the rise of a "new Saddam." This is not just an argument advanced by apologists for the occupation. Many people strongly opposed to the war and active in protesting the Bush administration are very much influenced by this kind of thinking.

There is a name for this kind of concern—"The White Man's Burden." The idea is that we in the US know better than the people of Iraq how their society should be organized, how their economy should be run, what should be taught in their schools, even how they should practice their faiths. It is a bankrupt idea, and one that feeds directly into the administration's rationalizations for an indefinite occupation. Our stand is simple—Iraq for the Iraqis. Let them decide what their future will hold.

Opposition to the Occupation Steps Up

The approach of the first anniversary of the invasion of Iraq has seen a heartening increase in the amount of anti-war, anti-occupation activity in the US. March 20 was initially envisioned by United for Peace and Justice as comprising 6 or 7 large regional demonstrations (and by International ANSWER as the traditional Big March on Washington with the usual backup bi-coastal, best-supporting-demo in San Francisco.)

Instead, local activists set out to organize their own thing—resulting in well over 200 events around the country on the weekend of the 20th ranging from vigils to marches, from forums to concerts, from teach-ins to memorial observances for those who have died since March 20, 2003. The largest marches—in New York, Chicago and the Bay Area—will draw in the tens of thousands coming from a wide radius. Some local events will do well to have a dozen. But it all adds up to the largest national outpouring of protest since the war began.

A New Opportunity

This new burst of activity creates more favorable conditions for the building of a broad anti-war, anti-occupation movement in the US. That movement doesn't exist yet, even though there is a strong current of opposition to the occupation of Iraq and deep skepticism about the Bush administration policies there.

There was extraordinarily widespread anti-war motion from November 2002 to the US invasion of Iraq in March of 2003. This didn't jell into a broad, stable, ongoing anti-war movement. There are several reasons why it didn't:

• Many were moved to action then by the hope that the irresistible weight of international public opinion, "the other superpower," would prevent the US invasion. This hope was brutally dashed.
  
  
• The relatively quick US victory in the conventional war made the whole thing seem like it was all but over, until the Iraqi armed resistance began to ramp up its activities during the summer.
  
  
• The Left, whose morale was also hit by the factors mentioned, pretty much folded, unable to really deal with the challenge of building a movement under the changed conditions. It was more than half a year before October 25 marked the re-emergence of the organized anti-war, anti-occupation movement on the national scene, and that was a fraction the size of the mobilizations on February 15. Internal squabbles also hindered progress.
  
  
• By fall, many of the center forces from the major anti-war motion had summed up that demonstrations weren't going to stop the occupation any more than they had stopped Bush's invasion. Instead, they drifted into the Democratic Party nominating and primary process. Many of these folks were local activists and not just first-time protesters, and they constituted an important part of the Deaniac phenomenon and also the Kucinich, Clark and Kerry campaigns.

Today, objective conditions are favorable for the growth of the independent, though relatively small and disproportionately left, movement that we have now. There is a window of opportunity to build it into more of a broad-based anti-occupation movement. Bush & Company are on the defensive about phantom weapons of mass destruction, his phantom service record, the progress of the occupation, the state of the US economy, etc. Folks who have opposed Bush all along are angrier than ever and many who had given him the benefit of the doubt are disillusioned. The campaign for the Democratic nomination is over and the actual election won't heat up until midsummer. Anti-war folk have suspicions about Kerry's stand on Iraq—they'll back him, but they want to do more.

Different Forces, Common Anger

Special note should be made of the increasingly important roles played by two very different groupings—disgruntled capitalists and military families.

For a growing section of the ruling class in this country, the problem of Iraq is a complex one, seen mainly in a broader context. To be sure, the occupation itself is a drain on resources, it is eroding US military strength, it fuels political unrest at home. More important to them is that Iraq clearly demonstrates the disastrous failure of the Bush administration's ideologically driven approach to US foreign policy—unilateralist, pre-emptive, nakedly hegemonist. That approach has alienated allies, has damaged international organizations and broken treaties that have served the bourgeoisie well for decades, and has made a global pariah of the US among a huge swath of the world's people.

This sector of the ruling class, strongly represented in finance capital (George Soros and Richard Rubin, for instance) is even more distressed about the economic policies of the Bush administration and fears the foundations of US economic hegemony are being eroded by the absence of long-term planning, ballooning deficits, and the erosion of working and middle class buying power.

To them, Bush & Company must be removed from office before the damage becomes insupportable. Still, these monopoly capitalists deal with the occupation only with great reluctance. They vastly prefer to maintain some kind of occupation of Iraq, but a more "legitimate, multi-lateral" one. And if that fails, they don't really have an exit strategy for Iraq any more than Bush does—at least one that keeps a strong foothold for the US in the Middle East—and they fear that a rapid and complete withdrawal will hurt US prestige.

Bottom line, though, they cannot pretend Iraq isn't happening or ignore the depth of the fissures it has created in the US body politic. While they will work to keep it from being the central issue in the Democratic Party campaign, they have encouraged much more media attention and criticism of every aspect of the occupation. Many in the media, angry and embarrassed at having been played by the WMD scam, don't mind giving the administration a swift kick or two. This is something for us to take maximum advantage of-both the exposures of the policy's failures and the coverage of anti-war activities.

There is about zero overlap between the wealthy and influential handful who are critical of the occupation and out to nail Bush, and the other social force whose role is growing more critical today—military families.

The impact of the growing movement of military families, organized in and given voice by Military Families Speak Out, scarcely requires comment. There has never been a comparable movement in this country, even during the Vietnam War. Its growth is, in no small part, due to the Internet. When the Washington Post did a front-page story on military families organizing in early March, the print edition reached the DC area, but web news services spread it nationwide. In one day, MFSO picked up more than 100 grateful new members, some of them from families who had lost loved ones in the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Though such families are not a majority, military families in general have an interesting and important commonality with those of us who are anti-war activists. Most Americans pay only sporadic and partial attention to Iraq. Families with children or spouses serving in Iraq or at risk of deployment there can't do that. Like us, they follow the news closely—it's a matter of life and death. And that close attention has helped fuel a new wave of families coming forward. MFSO has many families who opposed the war with Iraq before it began, but increasingly new members say things like "I am a registered Republican, I was for this war, I believed there were weapons of mass destruction. Now I want to know what I can do to get Bush out."

Here you have the most important point of intersection of the anti-administration capitalists and the military families—they both despise Bush. It is important that we not lose sight of the depth of anti-Bush sentiment among significant layers of every sector of this society. That hostility, fueled by Iraq more than any other single factor, will be a deepening influence on the anti-war/anti-occupation movement and on US politics in general this year.

Our Job

For internationalists and revolutionaries, our obligation is to oppose the crimes of our own rulers, US imperialism. This doesn't mean just to denounce them at the top of our little lungs. It means taking concrete steps to limit the harm that US imperialism is doing on a global scale. First and foremost, it means exposing and struggling against the occupation of Iraq. It also means addressing the closely related occupation of Afghanistan.

World public opinion in an abstract sense cannot end the occupation of Iraq. However, the stunning defeat of Aznar in the Spanish elections shows the force millions of angry people can have. The subsequent edging away from support for the occupation by other European leaders shows they are feeling the heat.

Still, the main force that is materially undermining US power today and that will eventually defeat the occupation is Iraqi resistance, in all its forms—from armed struggle to anti-US pop music, from union organizing to mass demonstrations for democratic elections and US withdrawal.

This must be accompanied and amplified by widespread and focused opposition right here in the United States. Growing opposition here threatens the sustainability and legitimacy of the occupation and pressures the powers-that-be to look for a way to cut their losses.

Today, Iraq is the weak link for US imperialism. It is where their efforts to find a new unilateral and pre-emptive strategic approach to world domination have run into a stone wall. It is where the people of the US are coming to question what interests their government is really serving. It is where the US imperialists are most over-extended. When progressives maintain a sharp focus on Iraq, it weakens the US Armed Forces, promotes division within the ranks of the imperialists and saps the will of their class as a whole. This is a major contribution to forestalling US intervention in Haiti, Korea, the Philippines, Syria, Cuba, Venezuela, or the many other potential targets the neo-conservative ideologues want to hit.

Building the Broadest Possible Movement

With traditional liberalism so spectacularly weak as a current in US politics, the organizing core of the anti-war movement is made up of radicals who oppose US imperialism in all its manifestations. What kind of a movement should we be working to build?

We have to place the activity and the movement of everyday people in their hundreds of thousands at the center. Without it, we will not even cause the ruling class serious discomfort, let alone force them to consider what changes are necessary to evade the growing pressure they feel from the people.

To build such a broad movement, the doorsill, the entry point, must not be too high for that crucial first step. In this case, if you want the occupation of Iraq ended, you should be able to find yourself a place in the organized movement. To insist, for instance, that people have to agree that all troops must be withdrawn immediately or that the UN is just a tool of US capital, is to exclude honest folks, maybe millions of them, who have been influenced by the argument that a rapid end to the occupation would result in a bloodbath, with the blood on "our" hands.

A more serious version of the same error comes from sectarian forces within the movement. The International ANSWER coalition, for instance, said its non-negotiable bottom line was that the main slogan for March 20 should be "End colonial occupations from Iraq to Palestine and everywhere." This actually conflates the different levels on which revolutionaries must work and mushes them together.

It is especially problematic, because it is possible to line many of the movement's best fighters up behind such an approach. To the extent that many activists already have a more developed understanding of the underlying questions, they want to unite and fight based on that understanding. But what the ANSWER approach winds up doing is uniting with those advanced fighters and taking them off by themselves, rather than uniting with them both to win over the those activists whose understanding is less developed and to counter the influence of the movement's more conservative wing. If you don't work systematically to have the most thoughtful and capable activists organize among broad sectors of anti-occupation folks around their actual concerns, you leave the less experienced participants in the hands of anti-war elements within the Democratic Party orbit, like Win Without War or MoveOn.com. To demand that the movement unite around anti-imperialist demands is to abandon the most basic task: building the broad movement.

Building Anti-Empire Sentiment within the Broad Movement

It is within this broader movement that we can take up our other tasks. Foremost among these is steering the mass movement towards an understanding that we are fighting not just against an occupation, but against the ruling class's drive to maintain and expand its empire.

A starting point is underlining in slogans, literature, speeches, conversations, etc. what lies behind this war—the geopolitical calculus of control over Mideast oil reserves and the drive to unilateral domination of the globe. Other interpretations do exist among the regular people who oppose the war—Bush taking revenge for Saddam's supposed attempt to kill his father, bad intelligence about what weapons Iraq had, blind hatred of Islam. Yet most people can fairly readily understand the role of military invasion and occupation in pursuit of profit and of advantage in global rivalry. Hammering at Halliburton and Bechtel are also helpful.

Another element of promoting an anti-empire understanding in the movement is exposure of the other military interventions the administration and its non-governmental mouthpieces have been threatening—from Syria to Iran to Pakistan—as well as the ones which are underway quietly in Korea, the Philippines, Venezuela, Colombia and most dramatically in Haiti. A very good avenue to build this understanding is through the work of solidarity organizations. At the October 25, 2003 march in Washington DC, one of the best-received contingents was made up of young people, organized in NY, from the Network in Solidarity with the People of the Philippines, the Vieques Support Committee, two Korean-American groups, an organization of largely Mexican and other Latino restaurant workers, and others.

Building an Independent Anti-War/ Anti-Occupation Movement in the Context of the Elections

The more conservative wing within the anti-war movement (like Win Without War, MoveOn.com) is made up of folks who have long been integrally tied to the Democratic Party. Within the Democrats, however, they have played an important role in weakening the hold of pro-war Clintonians/Democratic Leadership Council forces on the party's machinery.

In a united front like the anti-war, anti-occupation struggle, the point is to unite with the advanced to win over the middle forces and while neutralizing (or even winning over a section of) the most compromised, i.e. those advocating the UN take over the occupation. The point is not to drive them, and the folks under their leadership, away.

Ideally, demos like March 20 should have lots of Deaniacs, Kucinich folks, people with Kerry signs. This serves two purposes. First, it makes anti-war activism look more mainstream. Second, it "commits" the actual politicians to an anti-war position and puts tangible pressure on them from their base, no matter what pro-occupation or half-stepping statements they may have made.

Within the movement, we need to point out the hypocrisy and opportunism of the Democratic politicians. We do this to warn the masses, not to sabotage the Democratic campaign.

We must constantly and consistently call for and work to maintain the independence of the anti-war, anti-occupation movement from the elections. Right now, an independent movement mainly hurts Bush. In the future, it will keep the heat on whoever is elected president.

Haiti, Afghanistan, Palestine

While we build a movement whose central focus in ending the occupation of Iraq, we also have to confront the other acts of aggression and occupation the Bush administration has undertaken or underwritten around the world. The U.S.-sponsored coup in Haiti once again demonstrates vividly their contempt for democracy and world public opinion.

The latest outrage perpetrated by the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld crew is the coup in Haiti which overthrew the elected government of President Jean Bertrand Aristide. A one-two punch from a "political opposition" funded by the US National Endowment for Democracy and a band of paramilitaries with dismal records and US training and equipment set Haiti up for the knock-out punch. This was delivered by the US ambassador and a bunch of Marines who pushed Aristide onto a plane and into exile and a week of semi-captivity in Africa.

Haiti exposes the hollowness of the Bush administration's pious proclamations about democracy in Iraq and elsewhere. No one can claim that Aristide was not legitimately elected President by a huge majority of the Haitian people. In the early days of the crisis, US officials like Colin Powell declared that Haiti's elected government should not be permitted to fall. Within days, the tune changed. Aristide became a "failed president," an "autocrat," a tyrant," who had to go for the good of the Haitian people.

The shifting excuses and the direct US military intervention make Haiti look like a smaller, table-top version of Iraq. So does the growing Haitian resistance, the expanding US military presence, the lack of a thought-out plan for occupying the country and the absence of an exit strategy. Today, no one can say how long this new US occupation will continue or how many troops from an already overextended military it will require.

The US invasion stirred a hornets' nest of anger and opposition among African Americans, who recognize Haiti as the longest-standing independent Black nation in the world. The decisive role played by the Congressional Black Caucus in denouncing the coup and exposing the administration's role has been of critical importance in calling the whole enterprise into doubt among ordinary people.

Haiti has also fanned the flames of suspicion and resentment in Latin America and the Caribbean. Jamaica's defiance of US wishes by allowing Aristide to stay there, and Hugo Chavez' open denunciation of the coup, are resonating even among elites in the region – who got the message about their own fates if they defy the US, and didn't take it well. Among the masses in the region, US credibility and prestige has never been lower. The Bush administration's team for this coup is almost man-for-man the same crew who managed the Iran-Contra-Cocaine conspiracy, and as usual, they have not factored these masses into their political equations.

Here, too, our job is to demand an end to US occupation (and to fight against the white supremacist thinking that says the US has to stay in Haiti to help these poor, primitive Negroes who can't run their own society). Key immediate demands to raise are the return of Aristide to office for the remainder of his term, an end to human rights violations and the killing of working class and peasant mass leaders by the paramilitaries and opening the US borders to refugees from the US-inspired and financed civil strife there.

Afghanistan, too, stands as a dramatic example of the massive failure of the Bush administration's neo-conservative National Security Strategy. Right now, Afghanistan's main short term importance to them is as a base to chase Osama bin Laden (and Mullah Omar of the Taliban), whose capture Bush desperately needs to bolster his reelection campaign. In the long term, these bases in Southwest Asia are part of a geo-political repositioning to contain and control both China and Russia and to exert influence over the massive fossil energy resources there.

Beyond that, Bush & Company have a real problem. On the one hand, they are promoting the puppet government they installed as a model transition to a democratic government with a modern constitution. On the other hand, more than 80% of the country is run by local warlords, tribal chiefs and the Taliban, none of whom is much impressed by "President" Hamid Karzai (a US oil executive of Afghan origin) or this constitution. In the countryside, plantings of opium poppies are at an all-time high, guaranteeing that the world will be awash in cheap heroin for several years to come.

Far from a beacon of democracy, Afghanistan is on the verge of becoming a "failed state," a region where a nominal central government has no real effect on how people live and are ruled in most of the country. The Bush administration can ill afford such a striking failure for its muscular policies of world domination. On the other hand, neither can it afford the huge infusions of cash and the tens of thousands of troops that would be required to try and stabilize the new government for a while. In Afghanistan, as in Iraq and now Haiti, "nation building" is going nowhere.

And the situation for the people of Afghanistan remains dire. In a noteworthy example of where they fit in all this, the US military recently announced that it had concluded its investigation of an incident in which it blew up a house killing nine Afghan civilians, mostly women and children. The verdict: the US did nothing wrong!

The situation of the Palestinian people is desperate. Relentless Israeli strikes have reduced large sections of Palestinian cities to rubble. The giant wall Israel is rapidly erecting annexes much of the West Bank, destroys Palestinian agriculture and leaves whole communities isolated from each other in tiny ghettoes. All of this is being done with US approval or acquiescence by a government whose budget is dependent on billions of dollars a year in loans and grants from the US,

The longstanding tendency of many in the US peace movement to downplay or sideline the issue of Palestine has created conditions in which many Palestinian and other Arab and Arab American activists have angrily demanded that their struggle be placed on an equal footing with Iraq in anti-war/anti-occupation activities. First, we should, based on the centrality of the occupation of Iraq and the need to build the broadest possible movement, avoid the temptation for the reasons discussed to try and build a movement in which agreement with demands around Palestinian self-determination is made a pre-condition for participation. Second, we must conduct real education and build real struggles around the real particulars of the Palestinian struggle. A rally organized against the Wall, like those organized by United for Justice and Peace in the Boston area, does more than a slogan tacked on to a call to a larger anti-occupation march to promote the struggle. Third, we must target the US ruling class as specifically as we can. This means exposing and demanding an end to the billions in military and other aid the US pumps into Israel every year. Attacking that aid, cutting it, would be a most powerful campaign revolutionaries and other supporters of Palestinian self-determination in this country could undertake to support the Palestinian cause.

Bringing in the War at Home

It remains one of the movement's biggest challenges to hook up opposition to the invasions and occupations with what enrages people-particularly working class and oppressed people—in our own communities right here. This is easy to do in a leaflet or a speech at a demo. Everyone can agree with a "Money for Jobs (or Health Care, or Education, or Good Things In General), Not for War" formulation, but we have to make it mean something real and concrete. That means taking it up in the day to day struggles of the people, and it means building specific struggles which highlight the connection between what's going on in Iraq and what's going on here.

In Boston, anti-war activists are supporting a campaign, led by activists of color fighting environmental racism, against a bio-terrorism laboratory at Boston University near low-income neighborhoods. An alliance led by Black and Asian community activists, and including anti-war forces, progressive NGOs and elected officials is developing a petition campaign called "Fund the Dream." The petition demands a brake on Pentagon spending and increases for housing, schools, affirmative action. The Boston activists believe it can win broad community support and exert some pressure on the conventioning Democrats.

Another instructive example comes from Atlanta, where Black radio stations, Jobs with Justice and anti-war organizers brought people out when Bush dared to bring his war-mongering, racist self to Dr. M. L. King's tomb on King's birthday. And, reminding us not to fall into economism, this was no bread and butter issue, but was more about insulting the legacy of the Black freedom struggle. On the other coast, in Oakland, young organizers of Asian/Pacific Island descent have initiated "No Deportation Zone" block parties, in which Latino and Asian immigrants, US-born African Americans and Latinos, and others come out to unite against Ashcroft's raids and detentions. In Los Angeles, the Coalition for Educational Justice, which helped lead a successful struggle against a high school exit exam, is organizing against military recruitment in schools and targeting the military budget as it fights education budget cuts.

Still Gotta Build the Movement

We cannot afford to kid ourselves. The collapse of the pre-war plan for Iraq, the beating the Bush administration has taken around WMD, the defeat of a key ally like Aznar in Spain, the revival of anti-war/anti-occupation activity here, the problems Bush faces in his drive to re-election all go to show that the invasion of Iraq promises to become a historic setback for the US ruling class of a magnitude unequalled since Vietnam.

But that defeat won't come without a movement here, one that is stronger, is better organized and above all involves more people than the one we have now. And it will not happen overnight. We have a long struggle ahead of us, with twists and turns aplenty, so let's roll up our sleeves and get to work, building a movement that can do the job.

National Executive Committee,
Freedom Road Socialist Organization /
Organización Socialista del Camino para la Libertad

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