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Five
thousand antiwar protesters in Washington, D.C., and 3000 in both San
Francisco and Los Angeles, mobilized on March 20, the 7th anniversary
of the murderous U.S. war against the Iraqi people, to demand the
immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all U.S. troops and
mercenaries from Iraq and Afghanistan.
Groups from throughout the eastern United States chartered
buses to Washington, and many organized colorful contingents in the
march. The San Francisco and L.A. demonstrations had a similar regional
character. Large numbers of youth, people of color, and immigrants
joined the protests. Many brought signs and banners linking the wars to
the cutbacks in education and social services at home.
The highly spirited demonstrations were spearheaded by the
ANSWER Coalition (Act Now to Stop Wars and End Racism) with the support
of a number of antiwar, veterans, military families, Arab-American,
labor, and social justice groups. The demonstrations were supported by
the National Assembly to End the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and
Occupations (National Assembly).
The National Assembly has worked to broaden the forces
currently active in the antiwar movement. This has resulted in the
recent announcement of the United National Antiwar Conference (UNAC) in
Albany, N.Y., July 23-25. UNAC sponsors include After Downing Street;
Arab American Union Members Council; Black Agenda Report; Campaign for
Peace and Democracy; Campus Antiwar Network; Code Pink; Iraq Veterans
Against the War; National Assembly to End the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars
and Occupations; Peace of the Action/Cindy Sheehan; Progressive
Democrats of America; The Fellowship of Reconciliation; U.S. Labor
Against the War; Veterans for Peace; Voices for Creative Nonviolence;
Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom; and World Can’t
Wait.
March 20 demonstration demands included “Free Palestine!” as
well as “Reparations for Haiti!” and opposition to sanctions against
Iran. Many speakers focused on linking the demand “Money for Jobs,
Education and Health Care” to the distorted priorities of the Obama
administration and its record of spending more money for war than the
previous administration of George Bush.
The Obama “surge,” associated with the sending of an additional
30,000 troops to Afghanistan to raze and ravage its cities and peoples,
has resulted in a dramatic increase in the slaughter of the Afghani
people and a doubling of the kill rate of U.S. soldiers. No doubt when
U.S. strategists are faced with the task of defeating the Afghani
resistance by employing massive bombing and search-and-destroy
ground-based missions across most of the country, an increase in the
loss of American lives is inevitable.
Unlike previous U.S. efforts in Afghanistan, when massive
bombing raids were employed to destroy entire villages and towns and to
drive all present into the countryside, today the U.S. warmakers have
proclaimed that the bombings will be followed by a more extensive and
long-term U.S. ground occupation, during which time an Afghani army
will supposedly be armed and trained to “defend” the country.
Meanwhile, President Obama paid a surprise visit to Afghanistan
on March 28, where he publicly reprimanded President Hamid Karzai and
his “government” while insisting that progress be made “on the civilian
process” with regard to “corruption and the rule of law.” As with Iraq,
U.S. officials are pressing Karzai, whose election to the presidency
last year was universally condemned as a fraud, to form alliances with
elements of the very Taliban resistance forces that the U.S. drove from
power eight years ago and are currently fighting.
Meanwhile, Karzai, while utterly dependent on U.S. support to
remain in power, has expressed discomfort at being portrayed as merely
an American proxy. The New York Times, on March 29, cited
Afghani sources concerning a speech that Karzai gave at the
Presidential Palace in Kabul in January. One person who heard the
speech told the newspaper that Karzai “believes that America is trying
to dominate the region, and that he is the only one who can stand up to
them.”
The Times continued: “Mr. Karzai said
that, left alone, he could strike a deal with the Taliban, but that the
United States refuses to allow him. The American goal, he said, was to
keep the Afghan conflict going, and thereby allow American troops to
stay in the country.”
It was clear to the thousands present in Washington, D.C., and
on the West Coast on March 20 that the U.S. has no intention of winding
down or withdrawing from Iraq or Afghanistan. Indeed, a week after the
protests and the announcement of the results of the U.S.-conducted
Iraqi elections, The New York Times reported, “The secular party
of Ayad Allawi, a former interim prime minister [in 2005] once derided
as an American puppet, won a wafer-thin victory in Iraq’s election,
setting the stage for a protracted period of political uncertainty and
possible violence that could threaten plans to withdraw American
troops.”
Of course, the U.S. “plans to withdraw,” including negotiated
time lines and dates that were designed to defuse mass antiwar
sentiment in the U.S. and in Iraq, contained as many loopholes as
necessary to maintain U.S. troops in Iraq indefinitely.
The “unexpected” results of the Iraq election gave Allawi’s
“secular” coalition 91 seats in the 325-seat Parliament, far short of
the majority needed to establish a government. The results were
immediately challenged by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, whose
“State of Law” coalition, a poor name for a government that is renowned
for corruption, received 89 seats. Maliki had previously governed by
patching together a coalition of Shiite parties. Third place went to
the overtly anti-U.S. Moqtada al-Sadr, whose Shiite-based National
Alliance won 70 seats. The Kurdish party received 43 votes.
The competing factions are not expected to agree on a majority
government for several months. If Allawi fails to form such a majority
government, the Maliki forces may yet form a Shiite coalition that
suffices to rule. Regardless, while the contending forces negotiate as
to who will rule and who will control the greater portion of Iraq’s
oil, there is no doubt that the U.S. will have a hand in the outcome.
Washington is not indifferent to how Iraqi oil will be divided up among
the warring factions as well as the contract language necessary to
preference U.S. imperialist interests as opposed to its competitors,
who also seek a stake in the booty.
As in Afghanistan, the U.S. “solution” centers on massive
military force accompanied by brokering deals, sometimes with its worst
enemies, to cool the majority opposition to the U.S. war and
occupation. It is clear that this occupation is far from ending and
that the war against Afghanistan also has no end in sight. Further,
U.S. drone plane bombing attacks in Pakistan, as well as U.S.
death-squad killings, remain the order of the day and threaten to
destabilize that country too.
Imperialist war in the modern era has taken on new forms that
daily undermine the declining proposition that we live in a civilized
world that operates on a rational, if not humane, basis. The U.S. war
in Iraq includes the largest percentage of privatized forces
(mercenaries) ever. These include paid assassins who operate outside
the parameters of military authority. It includes depleted uranium
weapons (with a dose of even more lethal plutonium included) capable of
mass destruction on a scale unknown in past wars, as well as drone
planes operated with precision from halfway around the world that
deliver bombs on unsuspecting targets.
Central to the perverse mentality that permeates U.S. imperial
policy and its military commanders in the field is the notion that
America has the moral, political, and economic right to control the
world and bend it to its will regardless of the cost in human lives,
not to mention environmental destruction. The U.S. is embroiled in two
wars that cannot be won without murdering vast portions of the occupied
populations.
A similar logic was employed in Vietnam, where saturation
bombing, napalm, and deadly agent orange defoliation of vast areas of
the country’s jungles and forests were employed to provide better
visibility of the “enemy.” Four million Vietnamese were slaughtered.
Millions more today suffer the terrible after-effects of dioxin and
other carcinogens saturating the soils and water of that country.
Meanwhile, Vietnam vets, 45 years later, are still denied compensation,
with specious arguments that their horrific diseases are unrelated to
the chemical and biological warfare experiments on a whole people.
The U.S. was forced to withdraw from Vietnam because its people
would not submit, because American soldiers rejected the logic of mass
murder and became unreliable instruments of U.S. policy, and because a
massive, independent antiwar movement that mobilized millions in the
streets brought into question the legitimacy of the system itself.
Today’s antiwar movement remains deeply divided, with important
sectors ceasing to exist as viable entities, as is the case with United
for Peace and Justice (UFPJ). This was a significant coalition but with
a fatal flaw. It measured its success by its capacity to fight the
Republican “Bush’s War.” With the election of Democrat Barack Obama,
UFPJ’s leaders saw its mission as being in conflict with its
orientation to Democratic Party “lesser evilism.” It could not bring
itself to mobilize in the nation’s capital against the wars now taken
on by Obama and his equally imperialist cohorts. UFPJ remains as a
diffuse network focused on opposition to nuclear weapons.
The same could be said for several other formations that have
yet to understand the dire necessity of constructing a united and
independent antiwar movement—that is, a movement that fights all
the wars, occupations, and interventions of imperial America.
There is little doubt that there are other factors that have
qualitatively reduced the size and breath of the present antiwar
movement. The massive attacks on working people arising out of the
capitalist economic crisis have had a demoralizing effect on the
antiwar and most all other social movements. There is mass opposition
to U.S. wars but not yet mass protests on the order of the hundreds of
thousands that mobilized in 2001-2005.
Similarly, there is mass opposition to the attacks on the labor
movement and working people more generally; there is mass opposition to
the proven climate crisis threats to the environment, to the horrors
that immigrant workers are subjected to, to the attacks on women’s
right to choose, to the rising racist and scapegoating sentiments
generated from within both established capitalist parties.
In 16 short months, the Obama administration has registered a
string of broken promises and implemented reactionary policies on
numerous critical social and political issues. It has bailed out the
corporate elite and its banks, insurance companies, and corporations to
a degree unprecedented in U.S. history. And it has taken these
trillions out of the pockets of working people as never before. It has
mortgaged the nation’s future in a mass of unpayable debt, running its
printing presses full speed to spew out trillions in Treasury bonds and
cash to pay for endless wars and interventions at the expense of the
vast majority.
It is only a matter of time until the gap dissolves between the
mass opposition to these policies and a concerted fightback, resolving
the contradictions of the present moment. The ability of the broad
antiwar and other critical social forces that have the experience and
will to unite the millions in massive actions to stop all U.S. wars and
end the attacks on all working people will prove critical in the months
and years ahead. The July 23-25 United National Antiwar Conference in
Albany, N.Y., will be a good place to begin.
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