|
(this is my article published this week...thought DU a good place to share it...)
Why I Turned Back from D.C. by Raymond Soulard, Jr
http://newhavenadvocate.com/gbase/News/content?oid=oid:40720>Published October 30, 2003 by the New Haven (Connecticut, USA) Advocate
I was walking to Union Station in New Haven last Friday to begin my trip to the D.C. demonstrations. I'd made my arrangements to get down there and back, via Amtrak and Greyhound. All was set. So what was feeling so seriously wrong?
By the time I got off the phone ranting to my girlfriend about it, I knew I wasn't going to D.C., and why.
I realized that, while I deeply opposed the Iraq war, I equally damn the anemic and simple-minded turn that the antiwar movement has taken since then.
I didn't go to the D.C. demonstrations, because I don't believe that withdrawal from that decimated country is the best course. Neither, of course, is continued occupation and likely exploitation of that country. Iraq deserves to be rebuilt, but not as a puppet to the interests of the Western Empire whose seat resides in D.C.
The war was wrong; the lies told to achieve it prove that. But what now? Iraq is a crushed place. We have pork barrel ideologues leading the supposed recovery of its basic systems ... and daily, deadly acts of resistance against Americans.
Some of the demonstrators want President Bush impeached. I want him defeated for re-election, kicked to the curb in the cleanest, most constitutional election imaginable--so when he slinks back to Texas or wherever he came from, there are no excuses. I hope for clear and legal repudiation of his empire-building ambitions. In the meantime, he needs to be held accountable for the nightmare that he and his gang of proto-fascist ideologues have wrought in Iraq.
When the progressive movement resurrected in the '90s, its best motto was "Another World is Possible." Then 9-11 created an unimaginable new world, and no progressive response since has fit. Sept. 11's message was clear: there are those who are indifferent to human suffering as a means to their end. There are those for whom nobody is innocent.
The Bush regime responded in kind--and nothing that happened in D.C. this past weekend will make any dramatic difference. Those holding the power on both sides--Western and Islamic--intend to play out their fanaticisms to endgame.
When fanatics are in power, they can be removed by assassination, invasion, coup d'état , or by the very power that installed them and upholds their reign--that of ordinary people. If there is to be any ridding the U.S. or the Middle East of its extremists, it will be by the mechanisms through which they finessed themselves into control.
Withdrawing from Iraq is not the right thing to do; we all share responsibility for the presence there of our occupying military forces. The Cold War ended and someone stupidly declared the U.S. the victor--what the mainstream press called the "last remaining superpower." With American policy based upon this belief, a new opponent would inevitably rise to the challenge. A long history of cozy American relations with despots like Saddam Hussein made the Middle East a very likely source of this new opponent. Sept. 11 was the message: everything that has happened since, and is happening now, has proven that last century's bloodbath of ideologies continues.
Against the world's wishes, the U.S. invaded Iraq--building its case for war on lies --and bombed this sanctions-crushed country into rubble. The U.S. has since pointed to Iraq's burned-out buildings and ruined houses of worship and said: "THERE. THERE IS YOUR ENEMY. HE IS CRUSHED. WE ARE SAFE."
Safe as a country that no longer respects our own laws or citizens, much less the laws or citizens of any other country. Safe as a populace that has grown used to the idea of trying on leaders and returning them if they don't fit right.
Meanwhile, we have a progressive movement both timid and shrill, like the scolding old lady at the end of the block rumored to have 50 cats and a shotgun--the cats because she is lonely and unloved; the shotgun because perhaps she is still dangerous.
This whole situation is shameful. Withdrawal is too simplistic, and solves nothing. Yet occupation for the benefits of oil whores is immoral. So what is to be done? The tens of thousands of demonstrators in D.C. want the U.S. to leave Iraq now.
I want the U.S. to cede to the U.N. the brunt of building a new society in Iraq made from Iraqi wishes--and the effort financed largely by U.S. dollars, since it was U.S. dollars that built the military might that destroyed Iraq. I think of this as an answer, not the answer.
While tens of thousands lit through the Capitol's streets last Saturday, media coverage--in both mainstream TV/newspapers and on progressive Web sites--was scant. Bombings in Baghdad continue. The Bush regime hypes the re-opening of a bridge in Iraq while those opposed to the U.S. occupation plan their next attack.
It will come today, and tomorrow, and a hundred tomorrows after that until something fundamentally different occurs there that involves both the will of the Iraqi people and the will of the world forged into what those in control in Washington do not wish for, and many in the progressive movement no longer ardently hope for: something translatable from slogans in a crowd to reality.
|