The following commentary
originally appeared in Counterpunch.
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 elections, and in what way.
The
other is the question of whether the movement – if there is ONE movement – should continue
to put forward the demand that we "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 actually
real and differing consequences that accompany these electoral
outcomes. But with regard to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
(odd how Colombia and the Philippines have fallen off our maps
even as they both crawl with Green Berets), 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 internationalize
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 to 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 "internationalizing" thing
is a pretty predictable demagogic device by Dean to get elected.
Dean seems to be a pretty smart guy, so he probably doesn't believe
this simplified bullshit any more than some of us do. He is pandering – as
politicians are wont to do – to two beliefs that have taken root
in the American mass consciousness:
The
first notion about Bush lunacy and multilateralism fails
to understand what the
actual history and nature of so-called multilateralism is,
which is a form of cooperative plunder by the Euro-American
and Japanese North waged against the under-developed global
South. Multilateralism was the form of cooperative imperialism
agreed upon when the Marshall Plan was being carried out – a
Cold War relic now – in which the US served as Big Daddy Umpire.
Multilateralism – dear
people – gave us savage neoliberalism, with the (US dominated)
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. Bush's cohort is not insane.
They are responding quite logically to the exigency of a post-Cold
War conjuncture with the forestalled crisis of profit back
upon them, the dollar-a-day natives pissed off, and hydrocarbon
energy preparing to exit the world stage.
"Progressives," whatever
the hell that means, need to quit listening to NPR and confusing
it with critical analysis... "this program underwritten
by Archer-Daniels-Midland, Supermarket to the Universe, and
Lockheed-Martin, designing technology for the Aryan Future."
The
second assumption – that
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:" a notion that
no-one is entitled to make their own history except white Euro-Americans,
with the rationalization that "those people" are
incapable of self-governance. This racist assumption is exhibited
about Iraq with amnesia about the scale of death and destruction
visited on "those people" by thirteen 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. Civil
strife and even civil war is part of history. The United States
unleashed the most spectacular bloodletting in history up to
that time to resolve the struggle between a system of chattel
slavery or one of "free" labor when the precocious
Northern child rose up to conquer its Southern mother.
That same racialized
American history leads us back to the question of electoral
politics and the anti-war movement.
At the height of the
homegrown resistance to the Vietnam War, we have to remember,
Richard Nixon was re-elected. The antiwar candidate George
McGovern was defeated in a landslide. Nixon was elected on
the basis of his appeal to white supremacy, which remains strong
among the majority of whites in the US, and Republicans have
been working that angle successfully ever since: the same white
supremacy that still today underwrites even so-called progressives'
disbelief in the capacity of Iraqis to determine their own
future.
Elections didn't stop
the Vietnam War. The anti-Vietnam War movement stopped the
war in spite of electoral results. That administration crumbled
from the inside. Yesterday, John Ashcroft recused himself in
the Wilson-Plame affair. But I digress...
You cannot have a
credible discussion of US politics or of war, unless you are
willing to put race right there in the center of it.
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. There are some
very good reasons why African Americans will not vote for Republicans,
even when everyone knows how invertebrate and treacherous the
Democrats can be. When a party bases itself so fundamentally
on white supremacy the way the Republicans do, it matters.
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 as the institution of the military
rots internally from 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 preposterous claims to the contrary aside).
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. This is their dilemma. 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 do not take the form, at least not yet, of
a domestic security crisis (even if Tom Ridge is trying to
create the impression of one). The Republicans and Democrats
are not going to take up arms against each other. Dennis Kucinich's
guerillas are not building IED's to ambush Republican convoys.
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 legitimize 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 2,000,000 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 neighborhoods look
more and more like the Third World.
Legitimacy
crises are provoked by demands from the people that are real
demands,
not yassa-massa requests respectfully submitted to elected
officials with our hats in our hands. 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.
Everyone
has heard the old Frederick Douglas quote, that "power concedes
nothing without a demand." People love to repeat it, and
they slap it on bumper stickers and open conferences with it
on the program to prove they are down... but they have seldom
studied it. And what he said merits study.
Here's
what he said: "Let
me give you a word of the philosophy of reform. The whole history
of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions
yet made to her august claims, have been born of earnest struggle...
"Find
out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have
found out
the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed
upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with
either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants
are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress."
What?
"These will continue
till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with
both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance
of those whom they oppress." Put THAT in your next foundation
funding request!
He didn't say find
the limits of what the powerful are willing to do. He didn't
say THEY draw the line. He said that WE draw it. It is only
when it is proven that state power cannot stand us down, when
their impotence is on display, that we will have mid-wifed
the crisis of legitimacy that translates into a real change
in the relations of power.
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 check. 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. That is the "demand-position." That is how
WE draw the line.
"We don't care
whether it is politically 'impossible.' We are not interested
in your political survival. [It is the "impossible" demand
that gives birth to the crisis.] Bring them home. Bring them
home now. We are not going anywhere, and we do not consent
to be governed by you."
Our
job in the US is not to direct the history of Iraq. It is
to take our own
history in hand right here at home, by prescribing "the
limits of tyrants."
Stan
Goff is the author of "Hideous
Dream: A Soldier's Memoir of the US Invasion of Haiti" (Soft
Skull Press, 2000) and of the upcoming book "Full
Spectrum Disorder" (Soft Skull Press, 2003). He
is a member of the BRING THEM HOME NOW! coordinating
committee, a retired Special Forces master sergeant, and
the father of an active duty soldier. Email for BRING THEM
HOME NOW! is [email protected].
Goff can be reached
at: [email protected]