What
You're Missing in Our Subscriber-only CounterPunch Newsletter
Special Investigation: Why Did the
World Trade Towers Fall?
A scientific explanation
at last, from a physicist and mechanical engineer. P. Sainath recalls
Gandhi's 9/11, one hundred years ago; Chris Sands reports from Afghanistan on the rise
of the Taliban.What you just missed, but can still get, in our
last newsletter: Paul Craig Roberts on the Collapse of America. CounterPunch Online is read by millions of viewers
each month! But
remember, we are funded solely by the subscribers to the
print edition of CounterPunch. Please support this website by buying a subscription
to our newsletter, which contains fresh material you won't find
anywhere else, or by making a donation towards the cost of this
online edition.
Remember contributions are tax-deductible.Click
here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please:Subscribe
Now!
By every conceivable measure, the antiwar
movement in the United States should be a vibrant, mass movement.
Forty percent or less of the
U.S. population gives the Bush administration a favorable job
rating; other polls show that two-thirds of Americans think the
Iraq war was a "mistake"; and, most importantly, 80
percent of Iraqis want the U.S.-British occupation of their country
to end.
The increasing number of U.S.
war dead and the inadequate treatment of injured and disabled
veterans has infuriated many people in the U.S., while the exposure
of torture and war crimes by U.S. military personnel has wiped
away any "moral superiority" the U.S. claimed over
its former client Saddam Hussein.
When one adds this list to
the mounting social cost of paying for the war with increasing
cuts in social welfare programs, one has to ask: why is our antiwar
movement so passive?
The reasons for this are many.
The Democrats--the so-called "opposition" party in
the U.S.--have provided crucial support for the war and occupation
of Iraq and Afghanistan. There's also the hold of liberalism--which
from the time of FDR through Clinton has always supported an
aggressive U.S. foreign policy--on the U.S. left. The low level
of class struggle, despite the huge inequalities of U.S. society
and workers' growing alienation from the political establishment,
is another factor.
Another crucial reason for
the weakness of the antiwar movement is the political course
chosen by United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ), the largest and
most visible antiwar coalition in the U.S.
UFPJ's main claim to leadership
was the role it played in organizing the U.S. end of the worldwide
antiwar protests on February 15-16, 2003, a month before the
invasion took place.
Yet in the three-and-a-half
years since, UFPJ has organized only a very small number of national
mobilizations. And even these have not always been unambiguously
antiwar demonstrations. For example, the clear target of UFPJ's
protest outside the Republican National Convention in August
2004 was George Bush, not the war on Iraq, which has taken place
with bipartisan support.
This past spring, meanwhile,
some coalition leaders explicitly described the New York City
demonstration on April 29--which UFPJ cosponsored with a wide
array of liberal groups--as part of a broader mobilization behind
the Democrats in the 2006 election.
UFPJ's response to the major
crisis points for U.S. policy since the invasion--the leveling
of Falluja, the Abu Ghraib torture scandal, the threats to attack
Iran, the recent Israeli-U.S. assault against Lebanon--has been
feeble in terms of protest, while its emphasis on building support
for the so-called antiwar Democrats in Congress has grown more
distinct.
* *
*
ONE FACTOR in this strategic
orientation is the influence of the Communist Party (CP) USA,
which plays an important part in shaping the direction of UFPJ.
One of UFPJ's co-chairs and most active leaders is Judith LeBlanc,
who is publicly identified as a member of the Communist Party.
For the past 70 years, with
few exceptions, the CP has argued that it is essential for progressive
movements hoping to win social change in the U.S. to support
the Democratic Party against the Republicans.
Recently, Sam Webb, the national
chair of the CP, put forward the party's views on antiwar activism
and the 2006 election in an article titled "Ending the occupation,
the 2006 elections and tactics," published in the CP's newspaper,
People's Weekly World.
Webb devotes most of article
to attacking "some on the left" who "are against
any kind of strategy that isn't ëimmediate'"--an argument
apparently directed at organizations such as the International
Socialist Organization, the publishers of Socialist Worker, and
other voices of the antiwar far left, such as the CounterPunch
Web site.
This is not the first time
that Sam Webb has put pen to paper to criticize other left organizations.
In the run-up to the 2004 presidential election, Webb declared,
"The responsibility of left and progressive people is not
to spend their time bellyaching over [John] Kerry's shortcomings."
Webb seems to be referring
to those who argued that it was disastrous for antiwar activists
to support John Kerry, the Democratic Party's pro-war candidate
for president.
Like Bush, Kerry argued for
"pre-emptive" war--"Every nation has a right to
act pre-emptively if it faces an imminent and grave danger,"
he said. Kerry voted for a war resolution pushed by the White
House in October 2002, then later attempted to claim that he
didn't vote to give Bush the authority to wage a unilateral war--even
though the resolution he voted "yes" on was called
the "Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq."
During the campaign, Kerry
called for 25,000 more U.S. troops to be sent to Iraq. He voted
for every funding bill for the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan
and is an ardent supporter of Israel. He could by no stretch
of the imagination be called an antiwar candidate.
But Webb and the Communist
Party's support for Kerry in 2004 went beyond the traditional
"lesser evil" reasoning of the U.S. left--and the millions
of working-class Americans who see little difference between
the Democrats and Republicans, but hold their noses and vote
for the candidate they think will be "least harmful."
Webb demanded that the left
present Kerry as a "positive choice"--as he put it,
"to convince millions that there is a choice," because
the "biggest danger in this election isÖthat a substantial
section of voters still believe that it doesn't make much of
a difference who they vote for on November 2."
Far from being a "positive
choice," Kerry's campaign was so right wing and inept that
Bush--who four years before had to steal the vote in Florida
to take the White House--won easily with a 3 million vote margin.
The Democrats--who, before
and since the 2004 election, ducked every opportunity to challenge
the Bush administration's policies--got the unswerving support
of a large section of the left, including the Communist party,
to the detriment of the struggle against the Bush agenda.
* *
*
NOW, TWO years later, with
Bush's policies sinking still lower in public support--when the
anti-war movement should be pressing both parties for immediate
withdrawal from Iraq--Webb is arguing against it.
Instead, he proposes that antiwar
activists should support what he calls an "anti-occupation
bloc" in Congress and the various proposals put forward
by its members for "redeployment" of U.S. troops or
setting a deadline for their withdrawal from Iraq.
This "anti-occupation"
bloc is an interesting group of people. When the Republicans
called the Democrats' bluff and put forward a resolution last
spring calling for immediate withdrawal, only three House Democrats
voted for it. The rest voted against it--including Rep. John
Murtha, whose "redeployment' plan has been supported by
UFPJ, and Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), an "antiwar"
candidate in the 2004 Democrat primaries, who said the Republican
resolution was "a trick."
While Webb concedes that the
demand for "immediate withdrawal" position "may
be correct in the abstract, it is too inflexible as a political
approach." Webb proposes that the antiwar movement follow
the lead of Democrats, whom he describes as "center"
and "progressive" forces. "The most advanced demands
of the progressive and center forces--not the demands of the
left--are the basis for building the broadest possible mass unity
and a congressional majority to end the occupation," he
writes.
But most congressional Democrats
are opposed to setting a deadline for withdrawal, and even the
"antiwar" resolutions put forward by the "out
of Iraq" caucus contain qualifications and vague timetables.
The demands that Webb would have antiwar activists embrace, in
reality, are not to "end the occupation," but to continue
it in a different form.
Meanwhile, Rep. Cynthia
McKinney (D-Ga.), one of the three Democrats to vote for the
resolution for immediate withdrawal, was defeated in the recent
Democratic primaries by Hank Johnson, a virtual unknown. Johnson
was supported by a coalition of conservative Democrats like former
Georgia Gov. Roy and prominent Republicans like Home Depot co-founder
Bernie Marcus.
* * *
Contrast this Democratic opposition
to McKinney with the lavish support--from the likes of Bill Clinton
and rising liberal star Sen. Barack Obama--for Bush clone Sen.
Joe Lieberman in his failed campaign to win the Democratic Senate
primary in Connecticut.
What sense does it make for
antiwar activists to support a party that worked to defeat one
of tiny number of opponents of the Iraq War among its ranks?
The antiwar movement in the
United States needs to oppose the various phony "exit strategies"
put forward by the Democratic Party. Some are just election-year
posturing to fool voters disgusted by Bush and Rumsfeld, while
others--for example, Rep. John Murtha's "redeployment"
plan--are schemes for continuing the war on Iraq from outside
its borders, most likely by intensified bombing.
The demand for the immediate
withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq and Afghanistan is the only
principled and practical position that the antiwar movement can
take to end the misery brought to the region by the United States.
Support for the Democratic Party is pulling antiwar organizations
further from this principled position--and must be rejected.
Joe Allen writes regularly for CounterPunch,
the Socialist Worker and the International Socialist Review.
He lives in Chicago. Email: joseph.allen4@att.net
Now
Available
from CounterPunch Books!
The Case
Against Israel
By Michael Neumann
CounterPunch
Speakers Bureau Sick of sit-on-the-Fence speakers, tongue-tied and timid?
CounterPunch Editors Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair
are available to speak forcefully on ALL the burning issues,
as are other CounterPunchers seasoned in stump oratory. Call
CounterPunch Speakers Bureau, 1-800-840-3683. Or email beckyg@counterpunch.org.