Read on March 19, 2008 at Montgomery and Market Streets in San Francisco as part of the Words Against War, a City Lights Books and Direct Action to Stop the War sponsored read-out of poets and writers on the fifth anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq (actagainstwar.net).
Five years ago and more, many of us vehemently, passionately opposed the war in Iraq. We opposed it by marching in the streets on February 16, 2003, in one of the biggest marches in this city’s history, part of the biggest demonstration in world history with people standing up on February 15, 2003, against war on every continent-including the scientists in Antarctica, small towns in Inuit Canada, South Africa, New Mexico, Turkey, Bolivia…. We were right, and now sheepishly, fudging their change of heart, everyone from Hillary Clinton on is busy erasing the memory of being for the war, of buying lies, of dismissing deaths, terrible deaths, the deaths of so many children, so many mothers, so many brothers, the deaths long ago of far more Americans than died on September 11, 2001, the unrelated event used to justify these five long years of slaughter and destruction, the destruction of the fragile psyches of the young, the ancient landscape of Iraq, the bodies that survived this war mutilated and disabled and shaken to need our care for decades to come. Five years ago we opposed this war, and we were right that it would be ugly, a quagmire, an international disaster, that it would make nothing safer, that it was about oil and geopolitics and never ever about justice and utterly unrelated to September 11, 2001. Five years ago here in San Francisco we shut down this business district to show how passionately against the war we were as it began. The war has been terrible, begetting the atrocities of Abu Ghraib, the deaths of hundreds of thousands and a new generation of veterans saved by modern medicine from death–but for what life with their shattered bodies and minds?
We the international movement against this perfiditous war were right. And our actions reshaped the war-delayed its start, created dialogue, dissuaded potential allies from joining up or convinced them-like Spain, like Australia after progressives won power-to quit the coalition of the coerced, gave comfort to Iraqis and others in the middle east that we were not all clamoring for blood and indifferent to their deaths. The United States has begun in part to awaken from the long bad dream of its romance with conservatism and belligerence, was woken up by the savage catastrophe that was Hurricane Katrina, by the endless grinding sorrow of casualty lists of US soldiers and estimates of Iraqi dead, by the increasingly obvious inadequacy of the far right to do anything but destroy. We stand at a moment of rich uncertainty. Ten years ago, the ideology called neoliberalism promised to privatize the planet. Since the Seattle WTO in 1999, the countering ideologies-of what could be called democracy, localism, populism, anticorporate activism-have remade the world, so much so that nearly all Latin America has undergone an amazing liberation not only from political tyranny but from neoliberal domination by institutions like the World Bank and the IMF. This year the sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein wondered in print whether neoliberalism was dead.
We are at the end of a long hard road, the road out of the era of Ronald Reagan, of the post-Soviet romance with the free market, of the belief in American military invincibility even though that belief should have died in the jungles of Vietnam. When the war broke out, so many of the people in the streets with me here believed that somehow Bush had won. Had won everything, forever, that we had lost, that because we had failed to stop the war, we had failed to achieve anything, had never achieved anything, had no power at all. Dismayed by that despair and the amnesia and confusion behind it, I began writing about hope, speaking more directly to the hearts and imaginations of readers than I ever thought I could, to talk about the strange, unlikely routes that change takes, the unpredictable timelines on which it unfolds, the examples that shine like stars in the dark night of history, of for example of the amazing development in the twentieth century of nonviolence as a powerful tool for social change, one that has toppled world powers and dictatorships from the Philippines to Poland, that is at work in Burma and Tibet today. For guns and bombs destroy, but they don’t convert or conquer; the people of Iraq are not conquered, the war is not winnable, and truth is not the property of the strong but of the fearlessly honest.
In the struggle against this war, I saw extraordinary things at Camp Casey on Bush’s front door in 2005, I made new friends through the antiwar movement, I learned about sorrow and about the destruction of the human soul by torture-destruction of the torturers as well as the tortured, I rethought the relationship between the environment and human rights, between belief and action. I wrote, and I want to end by reading you a little of what the outbreak of war prompted me to write five years ago, the opening passage of my book Hope in the Dark:
On January 18, 1915, six months into the first world war, as all Europe was convulsed by killing and dying, Virginia Woolf wrote in her journal, “The future is dark, which is on the whole, the best thing the future can be, I think.” Dark, she seems to say, as in inscrutable, not as in terrible. We often mistake the one for the other. Or we transform the future’s unknowability into something certain, the fulfillment of all our dread, the place beyond which there is no way forward. But again and again, far stranger things happen than the end of the world.
Who two decades ago could have imagined a world in which the Soviet Union had vanished and the Internet had arrived? Who then dreamed that the political prisoner Nelson Mandela would become president of a transformed South Africa? Who foresaw the resurgence of the indigenous world of which the Zapatista uprising in Southern Mexico is only the most visible face? There are times when it seems as though not only the future but the present is dark: few recognize what a radically transformed world we live in, one that has been transformed not only by such nightmares as global warming and global capital, but by dreams of freedom, of justice, and transformed by things we could not have dreamed of. We adjust to changes without measuring them, we forget how much the culture changed. The US Supreme Court ruled in favor of gay rights on a grand scale in the summer of 2002, a ruling inconceivable a few decades ago. What accretion of incremental, imperceptible changes made that possible, and how did they come about? And so we need to hope for the realization of our own dreams, but also to recognize a world that will remain wilder than our imaginations.
It’s always too soon to go home. And it’s always too soon to calculate effect. Cause and effect assumes history marches forward, but history is not an army. It is a crab scuttling sideways, a drip of soft water wearing away stone, an earthquake breaking centuries of tension. Sometimes one person inspires a movement, or her words do decades later; sometimes a few passionate people change the world; sometimes they start a mass movement and millions do; sometimes those millions are stirred by the same outrage or the same ideal and change comes upon us like a change of weather. All that these transformations have in common is that they begin in the imagination, in hope. To hope is to gamble. It’s to bet on the future, on your desires, on the possibility that an open heart and uncertainty is better than gloom and safety. To hope is dangerous, and yet it’s is the opposite of fear, for to live is to risk.
I say all this to you because hope is not like a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. I say this because hope is an ax you break down doors with in an emergency; because hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you havee to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth’s treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal. Hope just means another world might be possible, not promised, not guaranteed. Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope. Anything could happen, and whether we act or not has everything to do with it. Though there is no lottery ticket for the lazy and the detached, for the engaged there is a tremendous gamble for the highest stakes right now. I say this to you not because I haven’t noticed that this country has strayed close to destroying itself and everything it once stood for, in pursuit of empire in the world and the eradication of democracy at home, that our civilization is close to destroying the very nature on which we depend-the oceans, the atmosphere, the uncounted species of plant and insect and bird. I say it because I have noticed: wars will break out, the planet will heat up, species will die out, but how many, how hot, and what survives depends on whether we act. The future is dark, with a darkness as much of the womb as the grave.
The war is not over. War is not over. Peace is not over either, nor is truth, or justice, or solidarity, or hope. There are terrible forces at work in the world today, and beautiful ones. And there is no neutral position. We are all taking sides every day in every act we choose. It’s not over. This terrible war will end someday, but our work will never be done as long as there are human beings on earth. Our work as activists, as dreamers, as makers, as noncooperating resistance matters; it is one force that shaped the world the last five years, and it will continue shaping this world long after the war is over. What you do still matters, so don’t stop now.
Rebecca Solnit, a recipient of the Lannan Literary Award, is the author of twelve books, most recently Storming the Gates of Paradise, and lives in San Francisco.
Is global media the recipe for peace?
I guess it depends on what type of media it is.
Except for the internet,
everything I see, hear, and read
is owned by a few media companies
That’s why I spend my time online.
As more people spend time online
we will see, hear, and read
more images, voices and messages
from around the world.
I like that.
As we hear more voices
and see more places
Peace on Earth
will become reality
The plan I am sending you has been approved by many prominent thinkers and
activists in the field. Which includes: Benjamin Ferencz, Chief Prosecutor
at the Nuremburg Trials, Ken Livingstone-Mayor of London,
Bishop Thomas Gumbleton of Detroit, Tom Hayden, Richard Falk, Matthew Rothschild, Anthony Arnove, Danny Schecter, Tony Benn- Former Member of the British parliament ,Reggie Rivers,Frida Berrigan,
Robert Jensen, Andrew Bard Schmookler, Burhan Al-Chalabi and others.
I formulated this plan in September 2004, based on a comprehensive
study of the issues. For my plan to be successful it must be implemented
with all seven points beginning to happen within a very short period of
time.
I have run up against a wall of doubt about my plan due to its
rational nature ,and due to its adherence to placing the blame on the
invaders, and then trying to formulate a process of extrication which would
put all entities in this conflict face to face, to begin to finally solve
the dilemmas that exist.
If you read my plan you will see that it is guided by a reasonable
and practical compromise that could end this war and alleviate the
internecine civil violence that is confronting Iraq at this juncture in its
history.
I am making a plea for my plan to be put into action on a wide-scale.
I need you to circulate it and use all the persuasion you have to bring it
to the attention of those in power.
Just reading my plan and sending off an e-mail to me that you received
it will not be enough.
This war must end-we who oppose it can do this by using my plan.
We must fight the power and end the killing.
If you would like to view some comments and criticism about my plan
I direct you to my blog: sevenpointman
Thank you my dear friend,
Howard Roberts
A Seven-point plan for an Exit Strategy in Iraq
1) A timetable for the complete withdrawal of American and British forces
must be announced.
I envision the following procedure, but suitable fine-tuning can be
applied by all the people involved.
A) A ceasefire should be offered by the Occupying side to
representatives of the Sunni insurgency and the Shiite and Kurdish communities. These
representatives would be guaranteed safe passage, to any meetings. The
individual insurgency groups and communities would designate who would attend.
At this meeting a written document declaring a one-month ceasefire,
witnessed by a United Nations authority, will be fashioned and eventually
signed. This document will be released in full, to all Iraqi newspapers, the
foreign press, and the Internet.
( The inclusion of Kurdish communities in this sub-section was added in early September 2006-
as an attempt to define the goals of parity and fairness and to avoid any sectarian splitting
of Iraq.)
B) US and British command will make public its withdrawal, within
sixth-months of 80 % of their troops.
C) Every month, a team of United Nations observers will verify the
effectiveness of the ceasefire.
All incidences on both sides will be reported.
D) Combined representative armed forces of both the Occupying
nations and the insurgency organizations and major community factions. that agreed to the cease fire will
protect the Iraqi people from actions by terrorist cells.
E) Combined representative armed forces from both the Occupying
nations and the insurgency organizations/community factions will begin creating a new military
and police force. Those who served, without extenuating circumstances, in
the previous Iraqi military or police, will be given the first option to
serve.
F) After the second month of the ceasefire, and thereafter, in
increments of 10-20% ,a total of 80% will be withdrawn, to enclaves in Qatar
and Bahrain. The governments of these countries will work out a temporary
land-lease housing arrangement for these troops. During the time the troops
will be in these countries they will not stand down, and can be re-activated
in the theater, if the chain of the command still in Iraq, the newly
formed Iraqi military, the leaders of the insurgency/community factions, and two international
ombudsman (one from the Arab League, one from the United Nations), as a
majority, deem it necessary.
G) One-half of those troops in enclaves will leave three-months after they
arrive, for the United States or other locations, not including Iraq.
H) The other half of the troops in enclaves will leave after
six-months.
I) The remaining 20 % of the Occupying troops will, during this six
month interval, be used as peace-keepers, and will work with all the
designated organizations, to aid in reconstruction and nation-building.
J) After four months they will be moved to enclaves in the above
mentioned countries.
They will remain, still active, for two month, until their return to
the States, Britain and the other involved nations.
2) At the beginning of this period the United States will file a letter with
the Secretary General of the Security Council of the United Nations, making
null and void all written and proscribed orders by the CPA, under R. Paul
Bremer. This will be announced and duly noted.
3) At the beginning of this period all contracts signed by foreign countries
will be considered in abeyance until a system of fair bidding, by both
Iraqi and foreign countries, will be implemented ,by an interim Productivity
and Investment Board, chosen from pertinent sectors of the Iraqi economy.
Local representatives of the 18 provinces of Iraq will put this board
together, in local elections.
4) At the beginning of this period, the United Nations will declare that
Iraq is a sovereign state again, and will be forming a Union of 18
autonomous regions. Each region will, with the help of international
experts, and local bureaucrats, do a census as a first step toward the
creation of a municipal government for all 18 provinces. After the census, a
voting roll will be completed. Any group that gets a list of 15% of the
names on this census will be able to nominate a slate of representatives.
When all the parties have chosen their slates, a period of one-month will be
allowed for campaigning.
Then in a popular election the group with the most votes will represent that
province.
When the voters choose a slate, they will also be asked to choose five
individual members of any of the slates.
The individuals who have the five highest vote counts will represent a
National government.
This whole process, in every province, will be watched by international
observers as well as the local bureaucrats.
During this process of local elections, a central governing board, made up
of United Nations, election governing experts, insurgency organizations, US
and British peacekeepers, and Arab league representatives, will assume the
temporary duties of administering Baghdad, and the central duties of
governing.
When the ninety representatives are elected they will assume the legislative
duties of Iraq for two years.
Within three months the parties that have at least 15% of the
representatives will nominate candidates for President and Prime Minister.
A national wide election for these offices will be held within three months
from their nomination.
The President and the Vice President and the Prime Minister will choose
their cabinet, after the election.
5) All debts accrued by Iraq will be rescheduled to begin payment, on the
principal after one year, and on the interest after two years. If Iraq is
able to handle another loan during this period she should be given a grace
period of two years, from the taking of the loan, to comply with any
structural adjustments.
6) The United States and the United Kingdom shall pay Iraq reparations for
its invasion in the total of 120 billion dollars over a period of twenty
years for damages to its infrastructure. This money can be defrayed as
investment, if the return does not exceed 6.5 %.
7) During the interim period all those accused of crimes against the Iraqi people,
or against international law will be given access to a fair trial.
The extent of the implications of the international nature of the crime, and the
security standards which exist in Iraq will dictate the place of the trial, and its subsequent procedures.
All defendants will have the right to present any evidence they want, and to
choose freely their own lawyers.
If they are found guilty they will be given all necessary appeals provided for by the jurisdiction
of their trials, and will be sentenced in Iraq, after all these appeals are exhausted.
If they are found not guilty they will be released and given protection under international law,
with the strict adherence to these laws by the judicial organs of a sovereign Iraq.
Yes we were right and they were wrong. Our country along with Iraq and Afghanistan have been destroyed. The only real question is, was this their plan all along or just the fact that they are vicious and stupid?
We see them running the country into the ditch and ruining it fiancially as a way to walk away from the contract of the Social Security system. We see them enriching themselves and their cronies through government contract’s. We see them give the wealthy ever increasing tax breaks. We see the ruining of our manufacturing base. We see the media controlled by a few.
We see our corporations salivating at the prospect of controlling Iraq’s oil resources and controlling the shipping routes for Caspian Sea oil through Afghanistan. I could go on and on, you get the picture>
Most of the people that support this war are sideline cheerleaders. They have no intention of ever becoming part of it, they throw flowers at the feet of the ‘valiant soldiers’, sing songs, and play instruments. They will never be the ones to go though.
Since this war is so friggin popular with the Republicans, they should be the ones to fight it. The second that bush leaves office, he should be ordered to report for military training and sent straight to Baghdad. “There’s no end in sight sir, and your country needs you!”
Once you put guns into the hands of the sideliners and ship them to the front, they’ll stop cheering for the war. Once that happens it will be a great deal easier to hear the voices of opposition.
I fully support the war for those that want it. Give ‘em a rifle, slap ‘em on the back, and ship ‘em off to hell. Let’s see how bloody cheerful about it they are then.
Obama gave a great speech, and the New York Times wrote an editorial of praise about it.
Still, this didn’t cover the Times’ collective ass on the subject of its non-coverage of “Winter Soldier,” which also happened during the five-year anniversary.
As someone pointed out, the emphasis at the Times was not on soldiers willing to tell us first-hand what actually was happening in Iraq and Afghanistan, but on interviews of some of the same politicoes who got us into the senseless war– people who ever since have religiously kept it perking along, ever inducing more gratuitous death and destruction.
And then, today, the actual anniversary, the Times moved on with its Baghdad Bureau series
to do what The Press loves best: Interview The Press.
Within this short piece is the reason why these people have not been stopped in these last five years.
http://oakcreekforum.blogspot.com/2008/03/blog-post_18.html
The problem is, why does the folly still continue? It seems that most of those who have the power to end it, have blinkers on. So they cannot see the future, and cannot see the present carnage. In fact the occupation of Iraq is treated as a management problem by a bunch of bureaucrats at a safe distance away. It provides them with an ongoing occupation, renumeration, and a set of problems that are guaranteed to remain with them for at least their job lifetime. The profit leaching corporations are likewise happy. As long as the thousands of personal dollars keep rooling in, they will not notice the billions burning elsewhere. Perhaps when the price of bread in the US becomes more than the lowest of their salaries, maybe they will wonder why. And with personal responsibility over the smallest little bits of paperwork and machine parts that will never be seen by them smeared with blood and blasted human bits, they can blithely shut off any relationship to mass murder.
People who remain indifferent to the suffering caused by their actions are called psychopaths, and there is potential for murder in every human being. That murderous tendency shouldn’t ever be licensed. Until the members of the bureaucratic machines wake up and down pens and tools, or actively sabotage their role, their part in the killing and destruction in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere will continue as part of the human machinery of the empire of death, even as the empire dies economically. The culpability is real.
Five years later:
“In 11 weeks, Bush has spoken at 11 Republican fundraising events, which have brought in at least $27 million — a pace of $346,000 per day including Tuesday’s two events.”
Truly scary psychotic…
I too have been protesting for far too long and my thoughts are that maybe our targets are wrong.
I think we should be protesting in small groups at the homes of our fair weather reps. around the clock. Lets put the heat where it will hurt the most.
This war or occupation will continue come hell or high water until GWB is safely back on the ranch enjoying his well-earned retirement with millions to play with and nothing to do but plan his glorious library.
If there is anything left of the country he and his pals have turned upside down, then there might be a small chance of repairing some of the damage. Getting back where we were when Bushism began could take decades as it is much easier to tear things up than to fix them.
That noise? Like a jet engine under the ground? That is George Orwell spinning in his grave. Yesterday’s victory speech was perfect 1984: “Saddam Hussein who was always our enemy was defeated. We won despite the fact we have to dedicate more and ore troops and money and when our vice-president visited Baghdad there were only 2 mortar attacks on the Green Zone (which he couldn’t leave because the rest of the country is SO peaceful).”
“The future is dark, with a darkness as much of the womb as the grave. . . .
There are terrible forces at work in the world today, and beautiful ones. And there is no neutral position. We are all taking sides every day in every act we choose.”–Rebecca Solnit
“Here’s the plain truth, folks: Hope is not a consumer product. You have to generate your own hope. You do that by demonstrating to yourself that you are brave enough to face reality and competent enough to deal with the circumstances that it presents.”–James Howard Kunstler
The most sinister use of FBI NSL power has been to create local,state, and Federal spy network watch groups.
They come into a community,pick out a suspect,real or not, use NSLS to create fear in the community about an individual, then help the community build an organized ,24/7 gang stalking survielence unit. You can not have a Nation wide spy network if you do not build one from fear.
Thier goal is to indoctrinate,train, and build a loyal group of brain washed SUPERMAN type followers.People who feel they are helping to keep America safe.These people are not very bright or independent, and can easily be fooled into false service
They actully where superman shirts,superman vanity car plates,and spiderman shirts.Drive cars with misalinged headlights,honk horns to signal each other.It is a sick bunch of poeple that become addicted to the thrill of trashing the targtes life.Sometmes the target comit suicde.But the group has been told that the target is dangerous and unstable, so they don’t know that they are the ones that have created the self destruction.
This is no joke.
Thousands of Americans are being victomized daily 24/7 by over zealous,right wing , religous do gooders, that play a large role in these groups.
They are often led by Firefighters and Paramedics, that use there truck sirens to warn gang stalkers groups of any movemnet by suspects as they leave thier home.
They make no effort to conceal thier survielence, thier goal is to disrupt , psychologicaly destroy thier victom while training thier Natzi spy network.
Firefighter and Paramedics are a logical choise for thier leadership, they are trained as first responders, natural super hero types, they have the time to orchestrate the survielence when they are not serving the public .
I believe if you check the USA Patriot Act , they have been given the power to do what I have described above.
America is in Deep trouble , a black cloud is over us,being held in place by right wing religous zealots.This is being done to control us , so that the corporate eliete can justify the war and any thing else they want to do.
America is not the land of the Free, it is the land of Spys.
God ,help Americans Save the constitution, once we have done so , he will bless us all.
Stop this War, trash the Patriot Act, it is anything but that, and jail this Natzi network.
WAKE UP AMERICA !!!!!
Washington is death. Evil exists in splendor there. Spring does not follow all winters, some hearts and spirits remain dead. There are marches other than the march of progress. Evil can reign and extract it’s terrible price.
Life is a rare and precious gift. Death gives life meaning. Evil illuminates the path to love. The prospects of extreme negativity force us along the path of hope. As long as darkness exists, we must give balance to darkness with light. We do this through the power of Spirit. Like the first firefly of summer lights the darkness, hope is reborn and millions light up the night as beauty is reborn.
I’m hoping that Ray Kurzweil’s vision of the future might become manifest during my lifetime, where I can plug in digitally and shape my own virtual world and leave this nightmare behind. No more Bushies, no more Osamas, no more Paris Hiltons, no more of anything I don’t like.