The US occupation of Iraq has been a slow-motion train wreck from day one. Now, it has accordioned into a catastrophe so enormous that no amount of Bush administration happy talk or Fox News cheerleading can cover it over.
Partially masked by the hoopla of the presidential election, a deadly serious debate is underway in ruling circles about the urgency of settling on and executing an exit strategy before the damage gets worse.
In this critical situation, the US anti-war/anti-occupation forces have before us our most crucial role to date. We are entering a period, probably a prolonged one, in which the rulers of this country, no matter which front man is elected, will be twisting and turning to try and avoid the consequences of this episode of their drive to global domination - or at least to salvage something, anything, from the disaster.
As they make their calculations and debate their options, a key factor will be the mood of the people here in the US. That depends in great part on the determination of anti-war forces and on our ability to reach the tens of millions of women and men who are awakening to the mess we have been landed in. The better we do our work, the more the ruling class's options are cut off.
The administration is in deep trouble, but a cornered predator is sometimes more dangerous than one running free. The weight that our actions can put onto the scale of history may mean the saving of tens of thousands of additional Iraqi lives, or the thwarting of some hideous new scheme like the double-or-nothing attack on Iran currently being promoted by some neo-cons.
2. The Occupation Unravels
The Iraqi armed resistance is the main factor in unraveling the US military occupation, but the rejection of the occupation is nearly universal, including among the educated, secular middle class who have reason to fear for their futures in an Iraq dominated by conservative religious figures.
The main exception is the Kurdish enclave in the northern quarter of the country. And the aspirations of Iraqi Kurds for independence are vastly complicating not only US occupation efforts to cobble together a workable puppet regime, but also US relations with a key NATO ally, Turkey.
Here in the US, it can be damn hard to tell what's going on in most of Iraq. Partly this is because much of Iraq is a no-go zone not only for soldiers but reporters and other foreigners as well.
A few things are clear though. Ordinary Iraqis tend to blame all the chaos and disaster in Iraq today - disorder and crime, beheadings and kidnappings, filth and disease, poverty and insecurity - on the US, and rightly so. Iyad Allawi is considered a puppet of the occupiers. US intelligence estimates leaked to the media contain grim estimates of the future of the occupation, with the collapse of Iraq into civil war one of the most likely scenarios.
And things won't be getting better for the masses of the Iraqi people any time soon. The US is shifting billions of dollars appropriated for "reconstruction," which has been a big bust so far, to "security." This means more fighting as the US military try to beat back the insurgencies that have taken several key cities and a third of Baghdad out of their control.
And the shift is not just financial. What is happening is urban guerrilla warfare. For the US occupiers, winning hearts and minds can't help but take second place to military operations planned to bring death and destruction to neighborhoods. Nearly every single day for weeks, military spokespeople, for instance, have reported bombing runs by US jets targeting homes in Fallujah, where no "coalition" troops dare go. Invariably these air raids are described as precision attacks on insurgent "safe houses."
This is hogwash. Of course, the military will, to the extent it can, hit concentrations of resistance fighters, but what is happening is the systematic destruction of a big chunk of Fallujah to soften it up for a "Coalition" offensive as soon as the US elections are over. If the place is made unlivable first, local people, whether fighters or supportive civilians, will be forced to flee. This is just a large-scale case of "In order to save the village, it became necessary to destroy it."
The Bush Administration has made the calling of "democratic elections" in Iraq by the end of January the centerpiece of its strategy and its PR campaign. This puts them in an almost impossible bind. To hold down US casualties during the election campaign here, the Pentagon chose not to seriously contest Resistance control of much of the "Sunni Triangle" or of Sadr City in the capital, Baghdad. After the US election, they will have less than three months to dislodge a deeply rooted, well-equipped and popularly supported guerrilla force - without causing civilian casualties that will fuel the insurrection and make elections even harder to hold.
This is why many heads of state, including those of France, Pakistan, and Jordan have said the January elections are not viable given the situation on the ground. This sentiment is being echoed - albeit more quietly - even by some US military commanders. This reality is a huge complication for the Bush administration, because it cuts off the option of declaring victory at some point after January and pulling out, as some administration figures are arguing internally.
3. "Well, We Can't Just Cut And Run, But…"
Signs of the debate in the ruling class have popped up in public on an increasing number of occasions recently. The leaks of internal intelligence documents mentioned above reflect an intra-governmental battle that pits the "realists" of what the media call "the intelligence community" and the CIA in particular against the fantasists of the Bush administration. Bush's stunning dismissal of the CIA's analysis - "They were just guessing as to what the conditions might be like" - practically ensures more leaks and other sabotage by the realists.
The British newspaper The Financial Times, no liberal publication, recently called for ending the war ASAP. A host of top retired military officers and other experts on war have declared the war in Iraq unwinnable. The Sunday NY Times Week in Review section just front-paged an article on the growing controversy.
Most startling of all, conservative columnist Robert Novak (the one who outed Valerie Plame as a CIA agent) ran a column at the end of September explaining that the Bush administration is planning to start full withdrawal of troops by June of next year, a seemly interval after the scheduled Iraqi elections. Though it is possible this is disinformation calculated to hang onto Republican voters disenchanted with the occupation, more likely it reflects a serious debate in the administration on how to respond if the situation continues to worsen, as the National Intelligence Estimate suggests it will. The very fact that they feel they have to float the idea shows how mainstream it has become.
Two key questions underlie this debate in ruling circles: Is continuing possible? And can the US afford to leave?
Those who argue for ending the occupation pronto point out that there is no plan or program for making it work, and they emphasize that there simply aren't enough troops to do anything militarily effective against the armed resistance, especially without, in effect, recruiting hundreds of thousands more fighters for them.
In fact, they say, dragging the occupation out is destroying the combat capacity of the military overall. The 1000 troops dead is just the tip of the iceberg. Sixteen thousand have come home with wounds, disease, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Enlistments are slipping, especially in the National Guard, and reenlistments are approaching free fall - to the point where the brass at Fort Carson, CO have openly threatened some soldiers with redeployment to Iraq for the remainder of their enlistment if they don't reenlist, even if that means a summary reassignment to another unit slated to go.
Those arguing the other side point out how damaging a loss in Iraq will be to US global interests. Having discarded "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind," in favor of unilateralism and preventive war, for the US capitalist class to come out of that war with nothing to show for it but a badly battered military machine would be a bitter pill to swallow.
And now that the disaster is well underway, much of what the high-level stay-the-course catastrophists publicly fret about has, in fact, come true: al Qaeda-type fundamentalists will be emboldened to strike at US interests worldwide, the sway of US hegemony in the Middle East will be vastly weaker, Iraq will be a center of regional instability for years to come, nuclear proliferation will continue, and so on. But these things will be true if the US withdraws now or if it hangs on for years to come. There is no way for the US to "win." Still, it will take time, and even more setbacks, before the rulers of this country decide they have no option but to limit their losses and, as some of them have suggested, "Cut and walk fast."
A major factor in this part of the debate is what we might call the global pre-election polls. If the world's people were permitted to vote in the US election (and the outcome of the election here may well affect their future more than voting for their own country's leaders) Bush would lose in a landslide. It's not that Kerry is particularly popular or even known in Jakarta or Nairobi or La Paz, but the masses and the ruling elites alike in such places feel Bush should be stopped before he does more harm and should be punished for his arrogant rejection of world public opinion and the fragile structures of international law, flawed as they are.
Interestingly, the debate in the ruling class has not yet paid much attention to the domestic costs to them of the occupation, in terms of the public's faith in the government, the deepening split in the American body politic and the governability of the country. There is what Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci termed "a crisis of legitimacy" creeping up on the system, and one way of thinking about our tasks is that our work is to deepen and focus that crisis.
Vietnam is the specter that is haunting this occupation, and everyone knows it. The anti-war movement and the left have been fairly good at drawing these lessons, but there is one we had better not forget: On the way out of Vietnam, the Nixon administration set out to make the victory of the Vietnamese liberation forces there an example that other countries would think twice about following. High altitude "strategic bombing" in the North and carpet bombing in the South, free-fire zones, defoliation with Agent Orange, the destruction of crops and herds, whole villages and provinces laid waste.
Anyone who doesn't believe that the US government will do this again must have missed the first days of the occupation when the looting of the entire country (except the heavily guarded Ministry of Petroleum) took place with a wink and a nod from the US High Command.
4. The Grizzly In the Living Room
As the US election campaign enters the home stretch, both the similarities and the differences between the Republicans and Democrats over Iraq policy have become clearer. Neither party, nor its candidate, wants to give up Iraq - the nice puppet government in the heart of the Middle East, the chain of existing and planned military bases, US military oversight of the Iraqi oil tap, and the billions of dollars to be made in reconstruction. And, very significantly for the power relations in the region and the concerns of the Arab masses, neither party is willing to challenge Ariel Sharon's project of erecting an apartheid wall and putting the Palestinian people into bantustans.
Furthermore, both Kerry and Bush are framing their policy about Iraq in terms of fear - scaring people with the prospect of another terror attack on US soil. Bush and Cheney say the situation is too risky to change leaders. Kerry is saying that Bush's stubbornness and pre-emption policy will greatly enhance the chance of another attack and that his own policy of consulting first with allies and "passing the global test" is the way to make such attacks inside the US less likely.
And, to be sure, neither Republican nor Democrat elites want to see the myth of American military invincibility shattered. This is already a most damaging outcome of the Iraq War for the US. The power to intimidate has been significantly eroded, and with it one of the keys to maintaining the empire.
Despite this underlying unity, the bipartisan consensus about Iraq has begun to break down in the face of social reality.
More of the rich and powerful than before realize that their government is in dire straits and something has to be done. With Bush proclaiming that the only mistake on his watch was that the invasion was too successful and that he'd land on the aircraft carrier and declare "Mission Accomplished" all over again, the idea of somebody else running the show for them becomes more attractive.
Meanwhile, the electoral base of the Democratic Party is against the war. While Bush has been throwing his base red meat - anti-gay marriage amendments, fantasy tax cuts, school vouchers, etc. - Democratic voters have been left to try and convince themselves that their guy actually is an anti-war candidate and didn't really mean what he said about sending more troops and staying the course. But developments in Iraq have changed the political calculus: winning over swing voters now appears less important than turning out the base.
Most importantly, the war in Iraq is in play in the campaign at last because it's the big old grizzly bear sitting in the living room. It's there, and to discuss the next four years in this country without acknowledging it just doesn't work. The efforts of anti-war activists since 9/11, and especially since the fall of 2002, have helped bring this situation into being.
In fact the anti-war/anti occupation movement can count as a major victory the belated anti-draft posturing of the Kerry/Edwards campaign. Edwards has been pledging at every opportunity that if elected they will never restart the draft, and Kerry claims that a Bush victory will insure the return of the draft.
Granted, perhaps the number-one lesson of Vietnam for any US candidate for national office and any smart top military commander is "Don't bring back the draft." As military commentator Stan Goff has pointed out, "Donald Rumsfeld fears the draft more than he fears al Qaeda." Even so, by raising it as a campaign pledge, Kerry and Edwards have reinforced popular nervousness and opposition to the draft and in doing so limited the options facing the High Command and whatever administration is in office come January.
In practical terms, a draft would take so long to pass, gear up, and reorganize the Army to deal with that it couldn't put any boots on the ground in Iraq for at over a year at minimum. But the absence of a draft will increase pressure among the brass to end the occupation before their Army simply evaporates out from under them.
5. Our Tasks Now
It's high time we get it together again, folks.
Many who are deeply involved in the anti-war/anti-occupation struggle and most of our allies have been involved in the Presidential election to some extent - by and large supporting Kerry (admittedly with varying degrees of enthusiasm), some backing Nader and some Green Party candidate David Cobb. Almost everyone has been keeping at least one eye on the media coverage, the polls and the debates.
Even with these pulls on its resources and attention, the anti-war/anti-occupation movement has nevertheless managed to maintain its independent existence and its initiative better than most other progressive movements. Forces like the liberal women's movement, the environmental movement and most of the trade unions have been largely subsumed in the Democratic campaign for most of 2004. The focus of anti-occupation forces on immediate withdrawal and the essentially pro-war stand Kerry has taken combined to render a similar liquidation almost impossible for us.
But having avoided dissolution is not enough. In November, the election will be over. The occupation won't.
We have to ramp up the movement, to remind the powers-that-be and the people alike that we're still here and that we won't stop fighting until the intervention is over.
And we have to stay a broad, wide-open movement, so that new people can overcome the force of habit and received stereotypes about "crazy protesters" to join our ranks.
It is important that the movement swing into action in the weeks immediately after the election, to state powerfully that we are still here, are still fighting, and are not going away.
Ideally, these actions should be both nationally linked and deeply local. Nationwide links, forged through forces like United for Peace and Justice and the alliance of veterans and military family groups planning actions around Veterans Day, build up the fighting spirit of the movement and act as a megaphone to deliver a common message.
Local activities provide a point of entry for people coming our way and maximize the range of alliances we can build and tactics we can use. Film showings, vigils, care caravans, concerts, teach-ins, counter-recruitment leafleting, mural painting and plenty of other activities give us far more possibilities than travel to big regional or national demos once or twice a year to accommodate local realities and increase the tempo of our actions. Tight, agile, aggressive and creative local organizations are vital to making this work.
One central challenge is to link what can be called, in shorthand, the war at home and the war abroad. The linkages have two aspects. One is the way that the invasion and occupation of Iraq have worsened living conditions for masses of people here. For example, a stretched federal budget means less money for public schools and colleges, health care and other public services; Homeland Security laws have meant erosion of workplace rights in certain sectors; etc. The other aspect is the similarity and interconnection between what the US imperial state does to people of color and other oppressed people here and to people in targeted Third World countries, e.g. domestic police brutality and high incarceration rates and Abu-Ghraib; privatizing and de-unionizing of public sector jobs here and in Iraq.
While both sets of linkages may seem obvious in theory to us in the movement, in practice it hasn't been so easy to go beyond rhetoric and make connections that really draw in new forces. We can cite several reasons why: the relative weakness of the domestic movements themselves, especially the oppressed-nationality movements that have been the motors of progressive change in the US; the domination of domestic organizing by NGOs which tend to be narrowly focused, reformist, and funder-driven; and the predominance of very particular, local demands in movements that have an active base (i.e. unions may organize around keeping their members' health benefits but too few people are really organizing for "health care for all," etc.)
This means there may not be a general, national formula for linking the war at home and the war abroad; it will take patient, thoughtful and long-term work. We have to start at the local level, by looking at the real contradictions that people face and joining the real struggles they are engaged in, building trust and ongoing relationships. There is much to be learned from groups like Boston's United for Justice with Peace, who have joined with the struggle of Black and immigrant community groups against the building of a bio-terror lab in their neighborhood. And new developments have created more favorable conditions for making connections - particularly the excellent work of US Labor Against the War and the adoption by five of the larger US unions of resolutions against the invasion/occupation of Iraq.
6. Veterans, Military Families and Our Slogans
One of the most striking features of the anti-war/anti-occupation movement has been the emerging role of military families and veterans. Previous FRSO commentaries have dealt with the crucial role played by formations like Veterans For Peace, Vietnam Veterans Against the War and Military Families Speak Out. Today this is almost universally understood in the movement, as shown by the assignment of the lead contingent role at the August 29 march at the RNC to vets and families. But the potential contribution of these groups is far from exhausted.
In mid-September, a woman named Sue Niederer disrupted a campaign speech by Laura Bush, denouncing the President for killing Seth Dvorin, her son, in Iraq. Her action was widely reported in the media. Some coverage mentioned in passing that Sue is a member of Military Families Speak Out. MFSO was immediately inundated by hundreds of emails asking how to join, more than a few from families whose loved ones are also numbered among the 1000-plus troops already killed.
Out of the work of veterans and military families has grown the most important new development in the anti-war/anti-occupation struggle - the formation of Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW). These young troops are the most powerful voices against the occupation because they have lived through it, because they can shove the phony patriotism of pro-war stay-at-homes down their throats, and most importantly because they provide a voice for their brothers and sisters who are still in the ranks and forbidden to speak out for themselves, even as the demands on the troops multiply and their morale craters.
To support this development, the movement should keep focused on slogans like "Support The Troops - Bring Them Home Now!" Agreement with even such a basic demand should not be a test for admission. There remain those who are queasy about the "now," although they opposed the invasion and are highly critical of the occupation, because they think the US has to stay until some (mythical) United Nations force takes its place. However dwindled their ranks, they should not be cut out of the movement.
On the flip side, it would be an error to elevate the unquestionable right of the Iraqi people to self-defense and self-determination in the teeth of a brutal imperial occupation into our main slogan. "Support the Iraqi Armed Resistance" may sound militant and righteous, but it will do little to mobilize the millions who are just coming to question this unjust and unjustifiable occupation or to raise their doubts publicly. (Frankly, it also does little to directly help the resistance if it is not accompanied by the kind of material aid program that, so far, has not shown up anywhere that we know of.) And if support is meant not in a material sense but in a traditional sense - agreeing with the program, strategy and tactics of a political organization - the various resistance forces are so diverse no one could agree with all of them.
Those who insist on raising "Support the Iraqi Armed Resistance" as a central slogan certainly have as much right to be in the movement as anyone else who opposes the occupation. Still, we have to struggle for a movement that is as broad as possible, with the lowest possible sill to enter the door through.
The most important thing we can do around concretely supporting the struggle of the Iraqi people against occupation and for self-determination is education. Specifically, we have to flip the script and challenge folks - "What would you do if the US were occupied like this?" The recent column by Mideast expert and internet blogger Juan Cole, entitled "If America Were Iraq, What Would It Be Like?" is a fine model for this practice.
7. After the Election
The results of the November election won't change our tasks or our focus, but they will affect the conditions under which we take them up.
If Bush wins, there will be more continuity and less of an adjustment for us to make. It will stir deep emotions in the ranks of honest people who have developed a deep loathing for him. The biggest danger here will be defeatism and demoralization. The anti-war/anti-occupation movement can combat this tendency and provide a positive outlet for the other main emotion we will see, anger. It is very important that the movement not wait until the inauguration to step up its activities. A three-month lag will likely result in the erosion of our forces, an increase in fatalism among the masses, and a spike in isolated ultra-militant tactics among deeply frustrated activists.
If a Bush victory is the product of chicanery again, like the theft of the election in Florida in 2000, there is certain to be a powerful upsurge of protest around democracy and the right to vote, and the movement should be in the frontlines of this. To the extent that the defense of democracy targets the outrageous racist attacks on the right to vote, this could be an important way of uniting with the Black community and other communities of color facing systematic disenfranchisement.
If Kerry wins, there will be a new and somewhat different set of conditions facing the movement. Many of those who have marched, prayed, signed petitions, argued against the occupation with their neighbors, bookmarked anti-war websites on their computers will be inclined to drop back, saying, "Let's give Kerry a chance to show what he's going to do."
The anti-war/anti-occupation movement cannot afford to take this stand, obviously. Bush will surely close out his term by deepening the mess he hands to his successor, and we will have to expose and protest whatever he does. More important, John Kerry is not a peace candidate. Period. Most of his campaign was devoted to positioning himself as better equipped than Bush to pursue victory in Iraq. As the campaign entered its final month, his main promise on the occupation was that he would complete the US withdrawal from Iraq by the end of his first term - 2009!
The anti-war/anti -occupation movement will have to keep the heat on Kerry from the start. With so many opponents of the war putting their main energy into getting out the vote for Kerry, those who remain focused on building the movement are well aware of this need for independence. Actually, one current danger is that this recent narrowing of the movement will skew the movement toward positions too far left or too ideological - whether toward militant anti-imperialism, or "all armed conflict is wrong" pacifism. That could compromise our ability to gear our slogans, our analysis, our literature and our tactics to a level that not only accommodates but also welcomes and instructs newcomers.
8. Time To Step It Up!
We all remember the incredible hopefulness that marked the planet-wide "World Says No To War" demonstrations on February 15 of 2003, the feeling that perhaps this unprecedented mass outpouring of global opposition would stop the war. There was, as events proved, not much chance of that.
That optimism, that hopefulness, has not returned. Nor will it. There are too many dead - soldiers and civilians - too much destruction, too many ominous portents of future chaos.
But we can take the determination, the dogged fighting spirit which kept organizing and protesting after the invasion started, and make of it a new kind of hope, a grittier hope, perhaps, and one more deeply rooted in reality - and more deeply rooted in our communities and workplaces and schools.
Sooner or later, the occupation of Iraq will end. The people of Iraq will see to that. What we in the US anti-war/anti-occupation movement do, now and in the months to come, will have a real effect on how that future unfolds.
Our work, our actions, our outreach will help determine how much more the people of Iraq have to suffer, to what extent the imperialist rulers of the United States are constrained by their defeat, and what the people of this country sum up about what the US global empire really means for them.
Time to step it up.
National Executive Committee,
Freedom Road Socialist Organization /
Organización Socialista del Camino para la Libertad
