Stan Goff, North Carolina
Two hot little controversies are brewing among progressive and anti-war Americans. One is the question of how much energy we — if there is a "we" — put into the 2004 US elections, and in what way.
The other is the question of whether the anti-war movement — if there is one movement — should continue to put forward the demand "Bring the troops home now", the word now being the bone of contention. I think these are related.
The 2004 elections will determine two things: Which party will control the executive branch and whether the Democrats will be able to wrest control back in either the US Senate or the House of Representatives.
For reasons that could take us far afield here, there are real and differing consequences that accompany these electoral outcomes. But with regard to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, looking at the executive branch, it seems fairly certain at this point (at least to me) that Howard Dean will win the nomination for the Democrats.
Dean has not given the slightest indication that he intends to withdraw from Iraq. He has said he would reach out to bodies like the UN (and maybe, it is whispered by some, the Arab League), and internationalise the occupation. Sounds great on paper to someone, I'm sure, but I have a news flash for the obtuse — what is going on in Iraq is not merely an occupation; it is a very active war.
So long as there is a guerrilla war going on in Iraq, neither the UN nor the Arab League nor anyone else with a shred of common sense will have anything to do with it. The prevailing attitude toward the US, quite sensible from certain perspectives, is "You fucked it up, you fix it".
The multi-form Iraqi resistance is making it clear to anyone with eyes and ears that they are united around at least one thing — they do not want to be occupied. So this UN "internationalising" thing is a pretty predictable demagogic device by Dean to get elected.
Dean is pandering to two beliefs that have taken root in the American mass consciousness: (1) That the Bush administration is slightly mad and has abandoned something sane called multilateralism, and (2) that someone other than Iraqis has to oversee their future to prevent some amorphously defined but nightmarish post-Baathist reckoning.
The first notion about Bush lunacy and multilateralism fails to understand what the actual history and nature of so-called multilateralism is. Multilateralism was the form of cooperative imperialism agreed upon when the Marshall Plan was being carried out.
Multilateralism gave us savage neoliberalism, with the International Monetary Fund as a global loan shark, and for billions of people, multilateral imperialism is precisely what has underwritten the suffering that corresponds to their dollar-a-day existence.
The break with multilateralism is not some break with a noble past; it is a falling out amongst gangsters as the turf dries up.
The second assumption — the people living within the former boundaries of the former state of Iraq must have outside oversight to put them on the proper path — is a dressed-up form of something that used to be called the "white man's burden".
This racist assumption is exhibited about Iraq with amnesia about the scale of death and destruction visited on "those people" by 13 years of war and sanctions, and with a dissociative disorder about the present — with violence already part and parcel of every day there, violence provoked by the presence and actions of the occupiers.
Perhaps — as a counterweight to this perennial liberal racism — we should be more forceful about making the point that Iraqis are at least as smart as us, and a lot smarter about how to go forward in the wake of the Anglo-American aggression.
There may be some civil strife. That happens. But Iraq is subdivided into relatively homogeneous regions, and it will not be the cataclysm that thrives in the lurid Islamaphobic American imagination.
Elections didn't stop the Vietnam War. The anti-Vietnam War movement stopped the war in spite of electoral results.
Republicans and Democrats are maintained in power by the same class. But they are not the same, because the popular bases upon which they can draw are different, and that is a real difference.
If the Republicans get elected again, it is a direct reflection of the enduring power of US white supremacy. So the elections matter. But they probably won't change the situation in Iraq. That's a major point.
Aside from the US military, stuck there in Iraq rotting internally from Donald Rumsfeld's neglect and stupidity, there are two players who will determine the outcomes in Iraq — the international anti-war movement and the Iraqi resistance. The latter has the dominant role, because of three things — they are there, they have weapons, and they have the battlefield initiative. All they have to do to win is endure.
The Bush administration, on the other hand, is retrenching daily, managing the spin as best they can, and talking about something happening before July to "restore Iraqi sovereignty", though, of course the troops will stay.
They are now in a situation where it is "politically impossible" to leave, but it is militarily impossible to win. This is the central contradiction we have to consider if anti-war forces are to understand what the political situation is.
Political crises in the United States happen when the intangible becomes tangible, and that is in the form of a legitimacy crisis.
Legitimacy crises are not created by elections. On the contrary, elections are designed to legitimise the rule of the dominant class. After each election, political pundits and think-tank spokespersons all get together and puff up on TV to congratulate America for another peaceful transition, even as 2 million people rot in prison, crappy factory jobs that pay $13 an hour become crappier fast-food jobs that pay $6 an hour, cops turn Miami into a paramilitary zone, thousands of women are beaten half to death by controlling spouses, and whole neighbourhoods look more and more like the Third World.
Legitimacy crises are provoked by demands from the people that are real demands. A demand that is really a request — this is what the faux-radical "reformer" presents — is an acceptance at the outset that the power relation will remain unchanged.
A real demand does not seek to make itself respectable or "realistic". A real demand is an exercise of power that says we are not going to accept, we are not going to shut up, we are not going to compromise, we are not going to obey, and we are not going away. It is not based on what we might be granted, but on the conditions we demand be created before we stop struggling.
So here at last I come to the issue of the slogan, "Bring the troops home now!" If we allow ourselves to be drawn by these charlatans and gangsters into a discussion of how a decision will be implemented as a precondition to the decision being made, then we have written them a nice, fat blank cheque. We will have entered into negotiations before our most fundamental demand is met. We will have surrendered the initiative.
Our demand is not how the decision will be implemented. That is a practical matter in any case, the circumstances of which cannot be foreseen. Our demand is for the decision to end the occupation. We will discuss the implementation of the decision only after it is made.
This is the "demand position": "We don't care whether it is politically 'impossible'. We are not interested in your political survival. Bring them home. Bring them home now. We are not going anywhere, and we do not consent to be governed by you."
[Abridged from <http//www.counterpunch.org>. Stan Goff is a member of the Bring Them Home Now! coordinating committee, a retired US Special Forces master sergeant, and the father of an active duty soldier.]
From Green Left Weekly, January 28, 2004.
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