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NEWS & LETTERS, November 2002
EditorialStop Bush's war on Iraq, support Iraqi people!
The current anti-war movement has been notable for its
size and the unexpected speed with which it has been "organized."
Demonstrations against President George W. Bush's threatened war in Iraq have
been held across the U.S. and have been echoed around the world. The devastating terrorist attack upon the international
tourist town of Kuta in Bali, an atrocity on a level with the World Trade Center
attack, is a challenge to this movement. The attack probably wasn't timed to
coincide with the 50,000-strong march in Melbourne, Australia against a U.S. war
on Iraq, but it was during that march that word spread through the crowds of
Australians who were killed along with other tourists and Balinese workers in
the Sari nightclub bombing. This bombing showed what Timothy McVeigh and Osama bin
Laden had already proven: weapons of mass destruction are much more likely to be
used by terrorists (or state powers like the U.S.) than by a weakened and
closely monitored Saddam Hussein. This bloody spit-in-the-eye, whether by Al
Qaeda or its like-minded counterpart in Indonesia, also shows the utter
disregard they have for the internationalism and humanism that give birth to
anti-war movements. (Hopefully certain leftist pundits will spare us their
explanations of "why the world hates" the Australians or Balanese.) IMPACT OF PEACE MOVEMENT This new anti-war movement, which has to be
distinguished from the small segment of the Left that refused to condemn the
September 11 terrorist attacks last year, has made itself felt in the
calculations of all ruling powers. First it has forced Bush to look for a UN
mandate for his planned military action. In the end, he will perhaps be able to
work something out with the recalcitrant Russian and French rulers, but his
momentum has faltered in the weeks since his address. This is largely because of
the overwhelming UN opposition of the American people to any unilateral action
by Bush. The case for war against Saddam Hussein presented by the
Bush administration has been so threadbare that Secretary of State Colin Powell
has been reduced to stating that "We think the Iraqi people would be a lot
better off with a different leader, a different regime. But the principal
offense here is weapons of mass destruction, and that's what this [UN]
resolution is working on. The major issue before us is disarmament." So it is not the existence of perhaps the most grotesque
police state ever seen in the Middle East that bothers the U.S. administration,
a police state that could easily have been removed by the unhindered efforts of
the Iraqi people following the Gulf War in 1991. The uprising of the Iraqi
people that followed the war then is key to understanding what is happening now,
and this includes understanding the current anti-war sentiment. The lessons of
1991 have not been lost. TWO OF A KIND The first President Bush was able to steamroll the
anti-war movement of 1990-91 by virtue of Saddam Hussein's obvious aggression in
Kuwait and the confusion in the movement itself, with some unwilling to
criticize this aggression and others holding illusions in the efficacy of UN
sanctions. There was a distant echo of this in last year's small protests over
the war in Afghanistan. George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz and many
others think that the September 11 attacks have granted them immunity from any
anti-war movement of this kind. However the kind of sentiment expressed at the recent
rallies against the coming war is that, yes indeed, Saddam is bad and needs to
go but that George W. Bush is no friend to genuine democracy either. As one
Black woman at a Chicago demonstration put it, "Saddam is a dictator, but
knowing Bush he'll just replace him with another dictator and a lot of innocent
people will get killed in the process." The point is that this thinking is an expression of real
internationalist sentiment that begins from the high point of the previous
anti-war, anti-imperialist movement: the struggle for freedom and
self-determination of the Iraqis themselves. It is also informed by the last
decade of struggle and debate over the proper response to the genocidal attacks
by Slobodan Milosevic upon Bosnians and Kosovars. THE OTHER IRAQ TODAY The Bush administration, whether in attack or retreat
mode, is so out of touch with the real consciousness of people that it has
actually been outmaneuvered in the last week by Saddam Hussein. It was not the
absurd "100%" vote in favor of his continued presidency, but the
counterposition of his lies to the Bush administration's lies that buoyed him. Saddam Hussein could look George W. Bush in the eye and
see his own cynicism and brutality reflected back. In that moment he could feel
safe in a world that he owned and in which he belonged. It was also a moment of weakness, and a crack opened in
Saddam's world when he granted, as the lord of all he surveyed, an amnesty to
all prisoners except those convicted of "spying" for Israel and the
U.S. This resulted in scenes of jubilation as relatives of upwards of 150,000
prisoners were reunited with family members they had perhaps never expected to
see again. But it also resulted in unheard-of demonstrations
outside the prisons by thousands of Iraqis whose relatives did not emerge from
the prisons because Saddam's butchering regime had already murdered them.
Thousands of demonstrators had to be dispersed by riot police from the Ministry
of Information building in Baghdad. This is representative of the real bedrock
opposition to the regime in Iraq, and the most urgent necessity of the anti-war
movement is to connect with this other Iraq. Please see also Nationwide opposition to war in this issue. |
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