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TechnoratiThe nationwide opposition to the Iraq War is based on a host of populist impulses. Some people hate it because they think lives are being sacrificed to pursue the oil industry's agenda. Some despise it because, without a military draft, the U.S. casualties -- 4,000-plus and counting -- are disproportionately working-class kids. Still others abhor the war because it drains scarce resources away from pressing priorities at home. And yet, despite this groundswell of antiwar sentiment, the campaign to stop the war is adrift and dysfunctional.
On the one side are groups like United for Peace and Justice, that head what progressive activist Matt Stoller has deemed "The Protest Industry" -- a clan "made up of those who decided that participation in the system was immoral" because they "have seen 'compromise' many times before and think they know where it leads."
At Protest Industry rallies against the war in Iraq, you will find no effort to hone a basic message. You will see a sea of signs demanding (1) the end to a war with Iran that hasn't happened, (2) the impeachment of President George W. Bush, (3) the arrest of Vice President Dick Cheney, (4) the elimination of the death penalty, or (5) the overthrow of the U.S. government by Maoists who reason that the "world can't wait to drive out the Bush regime."
These demonstrations are boisterous but ephemeral displays whose chaos and lack of message reinforce a self-defeating fringe image.
On the other side of the antiwar movement is a group of organizations and apparatchiks that have launched an operation called Americans Against Escalation in Iraq (AAEI) -- a coalition of mainly Washington, D.C.-based advocacy groups, pooling cash and staff for "a major, multimillion dollar national campaign to oppose the president's 'surge' proposal to escalate the war in Iraq," as its website says.
Within the uprising against the war in Iraq, AAEI and its allies are the "professional" side of the antiwar effort. Consider them The Players.
The Players imagine that the war will end not after a massive investment in long-term, on-the-ground local organizing against war, but by the short-term coordination of a few elite actors -- political consultants, donors, politicians and maybe one or two organization heads -- in front of a map of media markets and congressional districts.
The Players make their moves with campaign contributions, TV spots and PR campaigns -- the conventional weapons in a media war -- and they are playing their game in Washington for Washington. In contrast to the Protest Industry, they believe the only way to effect change is to play an inside game.
Hollywood for ugly people
Media coverage is currency in the nation's capital. There, celebrities are people like Washington Post columnist David Broder, MSNBC's Chris Matthews and Time magazine's Joe Klein -- people known to almost no one in the country at large.
Within the Beltway, however, they are influential celebrities because they appear on obscure chat shows, from C-SPAN's "Washington Journal" to Fox News' "Special Report" to MSNBC's "Hardball."
Our nation's capital has become Hollywood for ugly people.
Washington's self-absorbed fetishization of tiny-audience TV shows might be funny -- except that the Iraq War was largely started because of this closed-circuit media obsession.
In the march to war, neoconservatives, like The Weekly Standard's William Kristol, staked out beachheads on Fox News sets, while so-called liberal hawks, like The New Republic's former editor Peter Beinart, dug trenches in CNN studios. These pundits established support for the war as a criterion of political respectability and a mark of worthiness for media access.
Now, out in the real world, beyond the confines of the TV studios, it's all gone to shit -- all of it. The American public -- which was ambivalent about supporting the unilateral invasion -- is now firmly opposed to continuing the conflict.
Many of Washington's pro-war TV "celebrities" are trying to flee their previously televised warmongering. Klein of Time magazine, for instance, appeared on CNBC a month before the Iraq invasion to state, "War may well be the right decision at this point -- in fact, I think it probably is." By 2007, he claimed with a straight face, "I've been opposed to the Iraq War ever since 2002."
In light of this, The Players believe that by funneling money into organizations like AAEI, pulling PR stunts and putting attack ads on television against pro-war legislators in Congress, they can make this antiwar uprising successful without organizing millions of Americans into a cohesive long-term movement. They believe, in short, that if a war can be started because of Washington's obsession with television, it can be ended because of that same obsession.
Washington's rules
Both the Protest Industry chanting on the Mall and The Players scheming in their downtown Washington offices are necessary parts of an effective antiwar uprising. The outraged rabble provides the boots on the ground that can pressure lawmakers in their local communities. And that popular ferment could be enhanced by a professional presence playing the Beltway's media game.
The crippling problem for The Players is the increasing difficulty of operating in Washington without being corrupted by it. As blogger Chris Bowers says, "In Washington, D.C., for those who run the government, the public is quite distant and faceless."
If the rules of Washington were written down, the first one would say: Anyone wishing to play its games has to sign up big-name political consultants who are perceived to have "influence." That buys you instant credibility with politicians and reporters there -- "those folks who write the stories, and appear on television and radio to talk about the state of play in Washington," as the Washington Post's Chris Cillizza says. "Like it or not, the opinions expressed by these people tend to set the parameters of the debate when an election year rolls around."
As a Washington pundit, Cillizza's analysis inflates his own importance. But as biased as he is -- and as much as his statement reeks of elitism -- inside the Beltway his self-aggrandizement is a religious doctrine that creates a self-fulfilling prophecy.
This poses a problem for even the best-intentioned advocacy organizations in D.C. The same consultants they need to hire to play this Washington game and to influence these people who "set the parameters of the debate," are often simultaneously paid by the very politicians who should be in their crosshairs.
The result is that ideological organizations become fused to the partisan political structure they seek to pressure.
Hot Pocket politics
Take the leadership of AAEI. The group is guided by Hildebrand Tewes, a consulting firm named for its original partners, Steve Hildebrand and Paul Tewes -- both longtime Democratic Party operatives.
The firm is one of a new breed of companies that attempts to bring to uprising politics the ease of microwave TV dinners. Don't feel like making dinner? Throw a Hot Pocket into the microwave. Don't feel like doing the hard work of local organizing to build a sustaining, durable movement that lasts beyond the issue du jour? Put together a pile of money to hire a firm like Hildebrand Tewes and you can have your instant "uprising" -- one that provides about as much nutrition to your cause as microwaved junk food provides to your body.
While the firm is supposedly leading an independent antiwar uprising by pressuring politicians in both parties, about half its employees -- including the firm's two principals -- were staffers for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC), the re-election arm of the same Democratic U.S. senators that the antiwar uprising now needs to pressure to end the war.
But the conflict of interest only starts there.
At the same time Hildebrand Tewes is working with AAEI, the firm is being paid by various Democratic politicians for its services -- Democratic politicians who have a vested interest in avoiding attacks from the antiwar uprising.
The consequences of such incestuous overlaps between party and uprising are best exemplified by Brad Woodhouse, the Hildebrand Tewes consultant leading AAEI. He came directly to Hildebrand Tewes after years as the DSCC's chief spokesperson and a mouthpiece for Democratic candidates. This supposed antiwar champion is the same guy who, as a campaign staffer, bragged to newspapers just before the Iraq invasion that the Democratic U.S. candidate he was working for, Erskine Bowles (N.C.), was more pro-war than the Republican candidate.
"No one has been stronger in this race [than Bowles] in supporting President Bush in the war on terror and his efforts to affect a regime change in Iraq," Woodhouse fulminated in the Charlotte Observer in September 2002.
Woodhouse is no anomaly. His history closely mimics how many war-supporting politicians suddenly changed their positions when the political winds shifted.
Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.), whose record on Iraq has been abysmal, has undergone an improbable transformation into an antiwar candidate. And former President Bill Clinton showed a special kind of retroactive courage when he declared last November that he had opposed the war "from the beginning." But it is the partisan conflicts of interest, not the hypocrisy, that pose the real problem.
You would think the central focus of any antiwar organization -- whether inside Washington or out -- would be on forcing Democrats to use their constitutional power to end the war to do just that: end the war. But you would be wrong.
Almost all of AAEI's "multimillion dollar national campaign" is being spent on TV ads or publicity stunts attacking pro-war Republican politicians up for reelection in 2008 -- people like Sens. Susan Collins (Maine), John Sununu (N.H.), Norm Coleman (Minn.) and Mitch McConnell (Ky.), the minority leader who Woodhouse spent years attacking at the DSCC.
These are Republicans who Democrats (and thus Democratic consulting firms like Hildebrand Tewes) want to defeat in order to retain control of the Senate, regardless of whether the war ends.
Relatively few AAEI resources, by contrast, will be spent on ads attacking Democratic House and Senate lawmakers who have either repeatedly provided the critical votes to continue the war indefinitely, or who have refused to use all of Congress's power to end the war.
Beyond its mission statement, AAEI does not even try to hide its partisan biases. In one classic display, Woodhouse used his AAEI position to defend Democrats when they refused to stop a war funding bill.
"We're disappointed the war drags on with no end in sight," he told Reuters in June of 2007, "but realize Democratic leaders can only accomplish what they have the votes for."
No mention of Democrats' ability to use their majority to vote down war spending bills or to stop any funding bills from moving forward so as to cut off money for the war.
If you believe this ultrapartisan allocation of resources has nothing to do with the fact that the people guiding the spending decisions are former employees of -- and are still being paid by -- Democratic politicians, then I'm sure George W. Bush has another war to sell you.
As antiwar Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) has said, the battle to end the war is "us versus them" -- not in terms of Republican versus Democrat, but in terms of the uprising versus the "Washington inside crowd that sets the parameters of this debate."
In February 2007, Feingold told reporters, "The Washington consultants -- especially those that were part of the previous Democratic administration -- come into a room with Democratic congressional leadership and tell them, 'Look, if you propose a timeline or you try to cut off the funding, the Republicans will tear you apart.' " But, Feingold continued, "The power structure in Washington [is] desperately trying to figure out how to explain why they made one of the biggest mistakes in the history of our country. And that's why you gotta go right at them."
But you can't "go right at them" if your uprising is led by a tightly knit consultant class that has dual loyalties and has been part of the problem from the outset.
The McGovern Fable
Conservatives have extrapolated President Nixon's "silent majority" demonization of Sen. George McGovern and cultural critique of the anti-Vietnam War movement into a fantasy that supposedly explains every Republican victory in the last 30 years.
This McGovern Fable posits that the Left's open confrontation with the Democratic Party may have helped end the Vietnam War, but it also resulted in the 1972 presidential nomination of McGovern, whose landslide loss in the general election supposedly gave Democrats a "national security gap" in public opinion polls. According to the Fable, this gap is singularly responsible for giving America 20 out of 28 years of Republican presidents, and came about not because Nixon ran a smarter race or because McGovern's campaign tactically stumbled, but because McGovern opposed the Vietnam War.
But as scholar Mark Schmitt has noted, the McGovern Fable is a sham.
"The real reason the Vietnam War divided and discredited Democrats and splintered the liberal consensus was because -- let's not be afraid to admit it -- Democrats started that war," Schmitt wrote on his blog in 2006. "Opposition to the war didn't unify or define the party, it divided it. Nixon won the 1968 election because [Hubert] Humphrey was associated with the war [and] couldn't split with [Lyndon B. Johnson]."
In fact, Schmitt pointed out that in the 1974 mid-term election following that 1972 campaign, the 75 Democrats who won congressional seats were overwhelmingly antiwar.
Few debate that making the war into a campaign issue was critical to the Democrats winning Congress in 2006. However, the consensus in Washington is that all the American casualties and the killing of hundreds of thousands of civilians in Iraq would be acceptable had Bush just been a better military strategist. Some Democratic lawmakers seem to be saying this overtly.
With no ideologically antiwar voice in Washington, these Democrats are demanding that their party become ideologically "pro-war" -- that is in favor of violent conflicts as a standing principle, as long as the violence is managed properly.
"If we become the antiwar party, that's not beneficial to Democrats in 2008," Rep. Lincoln Davis (D-Tenn.) told reporters in July 2007, despite polls showing that two-thirds of Americans want the White House to start withdrawing troops from Iraq. Said Davis: "The kind of pro-war Democrat that we ought to be [is the one that supports] the war that we fight wisely, the ones that we engage in wisely."
Among The Players inside Establishment Washington, nobody -- not AAEI, not the much-vaunted "liberal" think tanks -- is making the opposite case, that Democrats have a moral and (as the insurgent campaign of Connecticut's Ned Lamont showed) political imperative to be the antiwar party, not just the sort-of anti-Iraq War party.
The Players have opposed the escalation of the war in Iraq, but there has been no antiwar drumbeat -- no larger argument made against wars as a concept or against the danger of the growing military-industrial complex. This means the next time a president wants to start an absurdly stupid war, he or she faces no ongoing antiwar uprising and just needs to do what Bush didn't do -- dot the "i"s, cross the "t"s and follow proper procedure. Put another way, favoring a narrow criticism of just the Iraq War over an attack on Washington's more general prioritization of war as a foreign policy tool has laid the groundwork for neoconservatives' next harebrained military fantasy.
As media critic Glenn Greenwald wrote at Salon.com in August 2007, "The Grand Beltway Consensus, one that encompasses both parties, is that War is how we rule the world. ... The only debates allowed are how many [wars] we should fight, where we should fight them, and how 'wisely' we prosecute them."
Say what you will about the anti-Cheney zealots, the pro-impeachment activists and other assorted Protest Industry followers, they may be utterly disorganized and lack real-world political strategies, but at least their activism is about more than a sporting event. They aren't just demonstrating to help one set of politicians defeat another set of politicians. And as importantly, they don't dream of stopping just one war because that's what is considered politically expedient.
They dream of changing society's long-term outlook on war itself.
Making them work for us
Like an exotic species at the zoo, true campaign junkies exhibit the same special markings: bags under eyes, graying hair, half-shaven beards (among the males) and expressions of permanent fatigue, like they could fall asleep at any moment because they need to catch up on shut-eye from 25 years of late-night envelope-stuffing sessions.
Steve Rosenthal exhibits all of these telltale signs.
Rosenthal heads They Work for Us, a group whose mission is to pressure elected Democrats to uphold the uprising's antiwar and economic agenda.
"There's a lot of swirling mass communications going on right now," he says between gulps of coffee as we eat breakfast at a hotel restaurant in downtown D.C. "But it really isn't personalized or organized, and it isn't particularly effective."
He is a rare hybrid of an insider and an uprising guy who got his start (like many 50-ish movement activists) first as a volunteer for George McGovern's 1972 campaign, then as staffer for Sen. Ted Kennedy's 1980 presidential bid. Today, Rosenthal is fed up with the substitution of Washington games for real grassroots organizing.
"It's the same thing I used to say about mail when we did a lot of mail in the labor movement," he says. "What happened over the years was that mail became a lazy way to communicate with people. It's much easier to hire a mail vendor and send out a lot of mail to union members than it is to organize people going workplace to workplace and setting up systems to deliver flyers and organize weekend walks. That's really hard stuff, and people now avoid doing it because it's hard."
He fills me in on all the different Democratic incumbents his group is looking at trying to unseat in primaries, and how he wants to "make them sweat and bleed and raise money so they have to think differently about things."
But beneath the strategy talk, he is worried. He fears that even on an issue as pressing as the war, partisan loyalties are going to trump everything. That's not just because of the intertwined Washington culture or the McGovern Fable, he says, but because a lot of the people in the uprising today don't really comprehend how power works.
"What many people don't understand is that these politicians carry more water for you as a result of being frightened," he says. "In other words, what are these politicians going to do in the face of a primary challenge? Say, 'Go fuck you guys because you might come after me'? No, it's going to be the other way around -- they'll try to appease us by being better, which is the point."
But, the flip side is also true.
If Democratic office holders know that no functional antiwar uprising is ready to punish them for their war support, then they will just preserve the status quo -- regardless of the TV ads against Republicans; regardless of the Protest Industry theatrics at rallies; regardless of The Players' appearances on obscure shows like "Hardball"; and -- worst of all -- regardless of American troops dying in Iraq.
David Sirota is a senior editor at In These Times and a bestselling author whose newest book, "The Uprising," will be released in June of 2008. He is a fellow at the Campaign for America's Future and a board member of the Progressive States Network-both nonpartisan organizations. His blog is at http://www.credoaction.com/sirota.
© 2008 In These Times
54 Comments so far
Show Allbarely human May 26th, 2008 7:29 pm
I guess there's only one thing to do then.
Don't vote. For anyone. At all.
God damn America!
Actually if everyone who is registered as an independent would vote independent we could have a revolutionary change in the direction of the country. Those who want 4 or 8 more years of the same will continue to vote Republican or Democrat.
Lobo Gris
A lot of truth in this write up. Thanks David, always look forward for your articles.
Question: How can you tell a democratic political operative from a repuglican political operative?
Answer: You can't, they all look alike, smell alike, act alike. Who needs them? Not the United States of War!!!
Mark Abram May 26th, 2008 10:07 pm
The basic reason the Democratic haven't been able to end the war by Congressional action is that while Democrats hold a majority, strongly anti-war Democrats, the kind who would vote to cut off funding or demand a date certain for withdrawal, and don't fear a voter backlash if they take such a strong position, are still a minority.
I agree. If anti-war Dims are a minority than pro-war Dims are in the majority. The Democratic Party is unwilling to end the war. That's why it's imperative to end with the Dims.
Democrats are also anti-democratic. Remember Florida and Ohio. They rolled over.
Issue: U.S. Democracy
Republicans: No position on democratic reforms. Republican Party supporters provided unaccountable voting machinery in key states like Ohio in 2004 Presidential election.
Democrats: Talk about making voting machinery auditable, but refused to participate in investigations of election fraud in 2004.
Greens: Call for major democratic reforms to strengthen citizen participation and minority representation, including proportional representation, ranked choice voting, monitoring of elections, and public financing of campaigns.
David Sirota does a serios disservice to United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ) in trying to portray it as some ultraleft, purist group that doesn't believe in working "within the system" because that would involve "compromise." That certainly doesn't describe the UFPJ that I know and have worked with. Instead of relying on someone else for a mischaracterization of UFPJ, Sirota might at least have made an effort to be a professional journalist by picking up the phone to call UFPJ, which routinely works on legislative issues to pressure Congress. UFPJ works with and yet remains independent of progressive Democrats and others in attempting to end both the war and the occupation. Sirota's use of the term Protest Industry is also an unfortunate pejorative implying that antiwar activists are little more than tee-shirt and protest sign vendors trying to make a buck. It's unfortunate that the antiwar movement is split and that most people rely on presidential elections every four years to make a change in policy, but UFPJ and others work every day to build a mass-based movement that will end this war and bring all the troops home, and they should be treated with respect, not derision.
Challenging the system means also chalenging the terms and language defining them. Iraq is an occupation and not a war. Everybody opposed to it needs to start calling it what it is; an illegal occupation.
I appreciate David Sirota's highlight on the inner workings of the D.C. political structure. It's where decisions are made. For another frightening view of those mechanisms I most highly recommend Matt Taibbi's new book The Great Derangement. Several chapters focus on how Congress (and the Senate) really work: all the relevant stuff is decided in committees where the chairman says: fuck y'all and proceeds to do what his corporate paymasters told him to do. It really is that bad, and it hasn't changed since the Congress is now dominated by Dems.
It really makes you wonder about the aforementioned option #5.
mwf is correct.
Also where does Sirota get off telling us our movement is basically useless. I agree organization is important and key to resistance but the real issue here is Amrican apathy. The hodge-podge protest groups which he misleadingly terms as 'protest industry' was the only true voice of the progressive community. Ive been in literally every single protest march here in SF/Oakland and while the organization was barely visible the energy was palpable. Armchair intellectualism apparently is a degenerative disease.
I totally agree with several of the commenters on this thread that it's the wrong "frame" around what we're doing in Iraq and Afghanistan to call these situations "wars." They are occupations clear and simple, and I have taken the pledge always to refer to them as such and the activist call should no longer be "stop the war" but "end the occupation." Or maybe it needs to be something even broader than "occupation:" Our varied incursions in the internal affairs of the likes of Somalia, Cuba, Venezuela, Pakistan, Gaza and god-knows-where are a kind of domination without physical occupation; and the shooting wars into which we get involved and sometimes wind up as occupiers are just "diplomacy" by other means, when our "peaceable" means of coercive diplomacy fail to deliver the goods. We'll never stop wars or occupations until we retreat from the "imperial hubris" which is, unfortunately, the basis of the very Washington Consensus that has seized both our major parties.
Lets be practical. If we want to end "war" we have to define "peace". Nobody is talking about the future of Iraq. We do have a responsibility to clean this up but I am not hearing any ideas. Here are a few I would like to discuss.
1. The Production sharing agreement for oil revenue is a no sale because it is a rip off. This is the biggest obstacle to "peace". The people of Iraq need a more equitable distribution of this revenue. If every citizen of Iraq received a monthly check and those checks got bigger as the killing stopped and revenue increased might that have an effect?
2. Lets talk realistically about semi-autonomous zones for each of the 3 rival factions. With full rights (and revenues) for all regardless of where they choose to live.
3. Turn the "Green Zone" into an international diplomatic zone with the embassies of all nations represented.
4. Turn over the permanent military bases to an international force to ensure the security of everyone in the region.
5. Stop hiring corrupt U.S. contractors and give those jobs to Iraqi citizens.
These are complicated issues and these ideas may not work but the point is to have ideas and talk about them. I haven't heard much discussion of the relevant issues here.
Any thoughts?
We have to make the political price for not ending the war higher than the political price for 'not supporting the troops.' The only way to deliver that message such that these people will understand it is to stop voting Democrat. Let them see election results where they get maybe 30% of the vote tops because the rest of us say "NO" by voting for candidates that really would end the war.
Its win-win for us. We get to vote for and support candidates who support our views. And in doing so, we follow the only method that would possibly change what the Democrats are doing.
Defeat is the only thing a politician understands. Lets start delivering that message.
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz!
Anything else?
Although 7 of 10 Americans oppose the Iraqi disaster, are they ready to change their lifestyle to end it? If and when we Americans are ready to stop warring by instead settling for less in all our dealings with other nations, I doubt very much that our elected leaders will do our bidding. More than 9 out of 10 people in the world don't want war, but our leaders cannot refuse the challenge of standing up for the homeland prosperity (security). Here is another option:
WORLD RIGHTS AMENDMENT
We,the People of the World,
Pledge our Nation and Government to:
Regard every citizen of the world with the same
Importance as we regard our own.
Require from every citizen of the world the same
Behavior required from our own.
Refuse to do anything to every citizen of the world
Precisely that which we refuse to do to our own.
Reaffirm for all citizens of the world the necessary
Right to defend oneself in a Court of Law.
Renew the Freedom of Religion and Belief for all
Ensuring it for others as well as ourselves.
Reward to every citizen of the world the same
Rights and respect we give to our own.
Recognize that the behavior defined herein can
Only be enforced and defended in the
World Court of Public Conscience.
It starts with respect for our fellow Americans to whom we collectively entrust the privilege of ruling ourselves!
So its back to plan 5 then.
(5) the overthrow of the U.S. government by Maoists.
Not much else will change the corporate ownership of Dems and Repubs and their wars to protect big business profits.
Might as well elect the most far right neo-conservative president imaginable. That way when they embarass themselves in Iran, and f'up in Venezuela.... after China has bought all US T-Bills, and the bread lines begin in America - we can say to the hick in Wyoming or West Virginia 'told ya so.'
But i'm sure even after all this, they'll blame either the illegal immigrants, or the homosexuals for America's demise (after all, didn't Ted Hagee, Fallwell, Pat Robertson blame America for 9-11).
It was a good run. I've been telling people that the only way this country can fall is from within. Year after year, this looks more to be the case.
Remember when they said they were going to end the war? Murtha said he would defund it. Obey yelled at a mother and said you don't know how to stop, let me do it.
It was obvious to anyone who cares to follow politics that these guys weren't going to do it. Most of these Dems aren't progressive. They allowed the war in the first place by following for all Bush and Cheney's lies and getting bamboozled by that ridiculous presentation Colin Powell gave at the U.N.---a talk by the way that was false as it came out of his mouth. So these same folks were all of a sudden going to turn into progressives and actually bring the war machine home?
But they had all these dailykos nuts convinced. I read post after post from these folks saying all we need to do is elect a Democratic Congress and the war is over.
The same clowns are saying all we need to do is elect Barack Obama and the war is over.
Ain't gonna happen.
It is really sad to me when progressives believe they are married to Democrats and can only vote for Democrats. Obama and Hillary both voted to fund the war. The Democratic leaders have refused to hold Dick and Bush accountable. The powers that be love it when you think your only hope is a Democrat. Your Democrats just funded the war though 2009 (70-26). Your Democrats have nothing to stem Dick Bush.
The problem is that Democrats are posers. They aren't really an opposition party, they only pretend to be and many of you buy it. If they are an opposition party than can you please make a short list of the important issues they have successfully opposed the Republicans on. Make a list of the number of times they stopped his appointments and policies. I guess people believe just what they want to believe.
Republicans: Claims the Iraq War is making the world safe from Global Terror; Leaving Iraq now would be "cutting and running".
Democrats: Can't develop a united position.
Greens: Stop the Iraq war and all foreign adventurism. We need a sharp reduction in military spending, with funds redirected into social and environmental needs.
Vote for the Green Party candidate Cynthia McKinney. When enough progressives dump the Dims then we can build a real opposition party and end the fable that Democrats and Republicans are in conflict. If anything the conflict is over who rules not how. When it comes to such life and death issues as imperialistic, illegal wars they are both united in support. Dump the Dims!
I think Samson and Canuckchuck are on the right trail looking at the money. But, I think it goes deeper. To end this war, the U.S. economy has to completely collapse. Wars (in this case, illegal occupations) are very expensive. Higher food and gas prices are the only beginning. This country needs to go into economic depression before tens of millions of people have suffered enough to take their anger and frustration to the streets.
Sirota is sophisticated about some aspects of what goes on in Washington, but his account is too schematic and misleading.
First, the "protest industry" is as chaotic as Sirota describes it, but the antiwar "players" are not serious power players. They are as unable to end the war as the street protesters, and everyone knows it. The progressive Democratic political movement is more influential, but won't be able to end the war until Obama is elected.
The basic reason the Democratic haven't been able to end the war by Congressional action is that while Democrats hold a majority, strongly anti-war Democrats, the kind who would vote to cut off funding or demand a date certain for withdrawal, and don't fear a voter backlash if they take such a strong position, are still a minority.
In view of that situation, pragmatists have decided to defer the issue to after the next election, and avoid taking any heat this time around for "not supporting the troops."
By now everyone knows the US is headed out of Iraq in the next administration, assuming it is headed by Obama. Two factors guarantee this. One is that Obama had promised to get us out, and has positioned himself as an opponent at least of the Iraq war. The other is that the Iraqi people themselves, both in the streets and in the Iraqi government, are going to rise up and demand we get out as soon as they see that Bush is gone.
The anti-war movement can now do nothing to alter this endgame scneario, but should work to keep the pressure on to ensure it unfolds this way.
A McCain victory would be another catastrophe. McCain would not only not end the occupation, he would certainly escalate the war and probably expand it, attacking Iran and/or Syria. John McCain did not survive five years in a Vietnamese prison and labor two decades in US politics only to become president and NOT preside over a major war.
No amount of street protest and no number of full-page ads is going to force Bush to pull out of Iraq, or Congress to impeach Bush now. History has taken over here. The outcome is going to be determined by the mass political processes both here and in Iraq, which are driven by more factors than just the war.
" Obama continues to threaten war with Iran.
Obama has loudly supported expanding the war to Pakistan.
Obama is a very strange anti-war candidate."
Exactly Samson. Not only that, he is already laying the groundwork for appointing Republicans to his cabinet. The Obama idea of unity is just another version of surrender to the forces of Fascism. Obama will not sever the head of Fascism, he will enable it.
The Democratic Party has always been known as the War Party. Woodrow Wilson brought us into WW I against Germany, for no good reason. FDR arranged us to get into WW II (and it was not to save the Jews, he was refusing refugees visas and even turned away ships that were filled with Jews, sending them back to Europe). Truman gave us the Korean War. LBJ gave us the Vietnam War.
The demise of the Republican Party led to the one party system we now have (Red or Blue). The synthesis is the war mongering of the Democratic Party (thesis), and the anti-socialist policies of the Republican Party (anti-thesis), so now we have the worst of both parties rolled into one, and Fascism has taken hold.
Fascism was another Democratic introduction with FDR and Swope (National Recovery Act). It was struck down by the Supreme Court, and only the New Deal thrown to the people as a bone to overlook the NRA was left. But it lingered and manifest itself in other ways, helped along by WW II, which brought industry together in ways that otherwise not have been possible.
I no longer have hope for this country. There seems to be no spark in the people, just acceptance and consent, victims no doubt of the MSM propaganda and our socialized educational system. We are now an instrument of the evil psychopathic neo-malthusian elite. Our fate will be ugly, I have no doubt of that.
These things do not just self-correct. If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal. And change for the better will not come from the top, the corruption is too great.
"The tyranny of a prince in an oligarchy is not so dangerous to the public welfare as the apathy of a citizen in a democracy"
Here's what I don't understand. First, why would he refer to the many protesters as an "industry?" What kind of a spin is he trying to put on us?
And second, why not actually suggest some meaningful strategies for us "industrials" to use? It's so easy to sit back and criticize us for ineffectiveness. It would require more thought to come up with some suggestions...or more humility to admit that he has none.
Popular demonstrations are meaningless. Why should power care what you do with your free time on a Saturday afternoon?
Same old two-party con game. What, you don't want the lesser of two evils?
But Sirota's right. Don't blame McGovern for the results of Democratic evils over the course of Vietnam. The Democrats are as much a part of the military/industrial complex as the Republicans.
"Hillary or McCain. There is no other choice!"
"And you are voting for McCain; WHETHER OR NOT YOU GET IT."
"You vote for a Democrat, you vote for war and genocide. They are the WAR PARTY. There's no two ways about it."
I guess there's only one thing to do then.
Don't vote. For anyone. At all.
God damn America!
You vote for a Democrat, you vote for war and genocide. They are the WAR PARTY. There's no two ways about it.
I am writing in Ron Paul this November and I am happy. The two branches of the war party do not interest me.
Insightful article in some ways, but what about a class perspective? The unifier of humanity still must be a rise of wage slaves to power, led by Lenninists.
'Progressives' must stop beating around the bush, and call for what we want: equality and unity for all of humanity! To call for anything less is treachery or amazing ignorance of political history.
canuckchuck
You may be onto something there.
LOL. I love that Sirota thinks that popular demos are meaningless. A pro in politics to the core. If he or someone like him isn't "organising" it, it doesn't count.
Mike Peters - No we're not looking for saints. If there were some, we'd have found them by now. We just don't want murderers to represent us. Get it?
Personally, I draw a line - long before absolute murder is involved. Supporting someone who has himself supported an illegal and unprovoked war, one that has resulted in the deaths of millions of innocent people - mostly children - is not something we should even be discussing. It should be a no brainer but the two-parties have manufactured the lessor of two evils trap for us. Break out now while there's still a chance!
"Mommy, I don't know who to vote for for class president. Johnny wants the position but then ... he recently gave Billy a gun with the direct instructions that Billy should shoot all the kids in class. And Billy did it."
"Stay away from both Johnny and Billy. I'll call the police!" cries the mother.
"But mommy, Sammy is the only other person who is running and he actually gave Billy two guns and enough ammo so that Billy ended up killing two classrooms full of kids! twice as many as Johnny killed." Mommy thinks this through and then she says to her son ....... (you write the ending)
We are digging in our heels! We are saying: NO MORE WAR! NO MORE WAR CANDIDATES! We have drawn the line. We won't be managed by politicians! We will no longer fall for the manufactured, destructive path of the "lessor of two evils" voting strategy. WE WILL SUPPORT THE BEST CANDIDATE! Period! And we're not going to throw in the towel after the election. We're going to save ourselves and our children. Sorry politicians, it's a new day in American politics!
We don't need MoveOn or the Democratic Party murderers. Sound harsh? It's time to call a spade a spade!
Speak about this everywhere you go! Blog about it! Form outdoor Forum groups in your neighborhoods, in the parks. Let's get out of our rut! Find support. Run a personal ad: Seeking progressives who are ready to dig in their heels. Let's get creative!
The simple answer to why the Democrats have failed to end the war is that they are profiting from it like everyone else in Washington.
Except for a few token moves meant only to appease the majority anti-war populous, they have done everything in their power to keep this debacle going.
They receive money from the same War Industry lobbyists that the Republicans do.
dont be fooled by their psuedo-anti war posturing.
The Democratic Party has only been 'anti-war' for a very brief period of time at the end of the Vietnam War. Otherwise, every other war between the Spanish-American war and the first Gulf War was begun by a Democratic President. This anti-war period was clearly a popular uprising that overturned the wishes of the Democratic Party leadership. The Democratic Party leadership has vilified McGovern ever since.
The whole notion of the Democratic Party being a vehicle for antiwar action is a myth.
One key reason why the fact of 70% of the American people being opposed to this war not being translated to the war ending is the mistake of believing this myth. Electing a pro-war party to end a war is obviously not going to work.
The key fact of this article is in the headline .... the Democrats will not stop the war. That means that the 'vast majority' of Americans who want these silly wars to end have no alternative but to support a different choice.
To me, the key bit is the money. For a portion of this article, Mr. Sirota touches on the incestuous ties to the money that wants this war to continue. That's the reason you see the constant lie from the Democrats. The money that backs the Democrats wants the wars to continue. The voters the Democrats must have to win want the wars to end. Thus you see the Democrats constantly spinning the lie that they are opposed to the wars while also taking all actions required to make sure they continue.
Not only at the Presidential level, but also in House and Senate races, the message is clear. If we want this war to end, voting Democrat is not the answer.
Here's Obama's message on the war.
-- In 2003, as a State Senator representing an urban district that opposed the war, Obama opposed the war.
-- By 2004 when he was running for the US Senate, he backed away from this statement. At the time of his speech to the 2004 Dem Convention, he was widely quoted as saying that there was then little to no difference between his Iraq policy and Bush's.
-- Obama voted to fund the war up until this last year. To me, this switch on the last vote can only be regarded as a political move for the election.
-- Obama has voted for every bloated Pentagon budget.
-- Obama's plans for Iraq are actually not very different from Bush's or McCain's. All promise to have US troops in Iraq in 2012. All talk about reducing the number of troops. The only differences seem to be in the rate of withdrawal, and maybe the spin put on the policy.
-- Obama's website is full of promises to increase the size of the military and to increase pentagon spending. If you think Einstein was right in saying that 'you can no simultaneously prevent and prepare for war', then Obama is clearly going in the wrong direction.
-- Obama continues to threaten war with Iran.
-- Obama has loudly supported expanding the war to Pakistan.
Obama is a very strange anti-war candidate.
As others have already pointed out, the USA is not now, nor has it ever been, in a state of declared "war" with Iraq. Or Afghanistan, for that matter.
Sirota, of all progressives, should know better.
People hear "war," they feel obligated to give the President the benefit of the doubt to the extreme. But when people hear ILLEGAL OCCUPATION which followed an ILLEGAL AGGRESSIVE INVASION that we now know - indisputably - was based on a multi-leveled propaganda campaign built from total lies, they get angry and demand justice.
Which leads to this: stop calling it the "anti-war" movement. No war, no anti-war movement. Try "anti-occupation," or "anti-mass massacre of innocents," or "anti-dictatorship" movement.
Side note: an "anti-war movement" implies there is a "pro-war movement," which there is not. Sure, there are a few greedy, power-crazed, bloodthirsty war-profiteers and their tiny cult of violence-lovin' fellow travelers, but, generally, there are not millions of Americans demanding we bomb the living shit out of any country we chose for reasons fake or real.
The truth is, the vast majority of American citizens would prefer our country is never, ever again involved in any military action anywhere unless absolutely necessary.
All the "anti-war movement" frame does is create the illusion that there are two equal groups of Americans who disagree on the issue of killing and maiming millions of innocent Iraqis, Afghanis and Somalis, when, in fact, there are not. There is one very, very large group of Americans who are anti-slaughter, and one tiny fringe of "kill 'em alls and takes their stuff."
The idea that the protest movement has been ineffective - if that's Sirota's point - is incorrect. We've heard a lot of the "What's wrong with us" message, mostly from Democratic Party pundits like Tom Hayden. The idea is that protesters should do the job for the Democratic Party to get more Democratic corporatists elected. Hence, the disappointment with the protest movement, calling them names, etc.
Here are the harder lessons:
* The Democratic Party supports the wars (occupations);
* Civil methods to shape the course of government are too weak or ineffective;
* A vote is worth less than a corporate campaign donation; and
* The media-created world can serve as adequate means of controlling public opinion, getting people to believe fictions that work against their own interests.
What signal does the Democratic Party really need to end the wars? The McGovern myth was created by Democratic Party operatives as an excuse for inaction.
The wars have been very good for some senators, like Senator Diane Feinstein, whose husband reaps war industry investment profits to the tune of millions. It's a war for millionaire elites to make the world safe for expanded overseas profits, even as local industry is outsourced at home. The Republican Party may represent unrepentant corporatists, but the Democratic Party just offer a less harsh delivery of much the same thing.
Naw, the protest movement is fine. It's just been ignored - by elected Democratic representatives. They've calculated that you have nowhere else to turn to, and they are right. Third parties have many obstacles and none of that corporate cash largesse that lards Democratic and Republican campaigns.
So, give them the purple finger this election. Or rather, the green finger. Vote third party and damn the cosequences. The two-headed hydra of the Democratic-Republican Party monster is still a monster, even if one of its heads is lopped off. Starve the beast. Don't support it.
David Sirota's discourses on the McGovern Fable and the beltway Players' openly partisan rationale for treating the Iraq War as Bush's War are the best parts of this perceptive analysis in my opinion. And I agree with Earthian and others that antiwar progressives should continually emphasize talk about ending the occupation rather than the war, even if this shift disingenuously casts it as the Bush Occupation.
Sure, I wish Barack Obama were much more emphatic in his stump speech condemnations of the Iraq war crime. But I'm willing to let him grasp the brass ring first, before confronting him with forceful reminders of the grassroots antiwar movement that he's politically beholden to. Once he's sworn in, a new administration will have control of the declassification of the Bush regime's document trail, and control of how honest whistle blowers within the federal executive branch bureaucracy are treated when they step forward.
Even the bluest of blue dog Democrats can relate to having a thorough Congressional investigation into war profiteering and related criminal wrongdoing that's been covered up by the Bush/Cheney regime. That process is the springboard to forcing wider, basic institutional changes upon the military-industrial-national security complex - the grandaddy of all the big beltway special interests, who pull too many strings when the Dems hold the White House, but who run absolutely amok when the GOP is in charge and the dogs of war are unleashed to run free.
Bill from Saginaw
According to Mr. Sirota, "nationwide opposition to the Iraq War is based on a host of populist impulses..."
Missing from his list are those of us who get depressed when we think about innocent, helpless children and other civilians being literally blasted to pieces in the privacy of their homes.
Maybe someone can explain to me how the U.S. can "lose" the "Iraq war" when the Iraqis never declared war on America, had no weapons of mass destruction, were never a threat, etc.
Thank you David, for the best explanation of the problem I've known.
Occupation vs war is important. We all seem to fall into the media's language trap but yea, progressives should keep this in mind.
Why do we need high paid consultants to get our dissent publicized when we have the internet? Because the Internet hasn't yet made the corporate media obsolete, though it now can and will provided we can maintain network neutrality.
USA. Dead Man Walking. The debt we are running up to prosecute this war/occupation that has no end will finish us off in the future.
The Democratic Party is not Anti-War.
If you are a registered Democrat, you are just as guilty as registered Rebublicans, for enabling war crimes.
Obama is not Anti-War, he wants to shift troops from Iraq to Afghanistan, and continue the death and destruction. I have not seen anyone challenge Obama on this point.
And that is why you should do as I have done. Leave the Democratic War Party and join the Green Party.
tetti_tatti: All we need is one Cindy Sheehan to be elected to send an incredibly powerful message. You are correct about human nature. Self preservation, however, is a stronger force than greed. If the corporate whores in Washington who "represent" us, feel that their jobs may be threatened, then we may begin to see some change.
War is American government policy. It has been for 90 years.
The intentions of our foreign policy are simple: to make the world safe for American corporations; enhance the financial statements of defense contractors at home who have contributed generously to members of congress and the WH; prevent the rise of any society overseas that might serve as a successful example of an alternative to the capitalist model; extend political and economic hegemony over as wide an area as possible, regardless of how many civilians might be mass-murdered in the process.
This will continue with Obama, McCain or Hillary as president.
Even if we get 50 Sheehans elected for congress, nothing will change. Power corrupts and greed prevails. Human nature doesn't change.
VOTE . . . . for anyone EXCEPT the Democrats and Republicans!
Right On . . . . Make change happen where you can . . .
I hope Americans aren't banking on anything changing after the next election.
alexnosal: Absolutely! Excellent!
The only solution is to get everyone out to vote... for anyone EXCEPT the Democrats and Republicans!
Most Americans may be sick of the war, but outside the liberal-left spectrum (especially outside the Northeast and West Coast) they are also obsessed with "supporting the troops," avoiding national humilition and the need to admit that we "lost." That is also why more voters trust McCain than Obama to handle Iraq. So DLC/Blue Dog/imperialist/simply chicken Democrats are either responding to or manipulating real emotions among the people. I suspect many in Congress are just hoping the next president will quietly bring home the troops, give them a parade and move on, sparing them the need to ever confront this issue head on. And that's just what Nixon did after his re-election in 1972. Early the next year our troops were out and the POWs came home. McGovern's loss didn't prolong the war at all.
Unfortunately, we can't count on such luck this time. History doesn't necessarily repeat itself. Nor do I consider Obama as reliably anti-Iraq war as I would like. I'm increasingly afraid that we are in a war that Washington DC and the people feel rather comfortable with. It's costing us a lot of money, but borrowed against future revenue rather than paid for now. We're losing a few lives every month, but not so many that Americans put this issue at the top of their list. At this rate we may not ever be free of this war, or Iraq free of the American occupation, until there's a more important crisis elsewhere or until Iraq's oil runs out--McCain's 100 Year War.
Sirota should change his framing of this issue, as Earthian says, from war to occupation. It began as an unprovoked invasion and irresistable devastation, and moved from there to prolonged occupation. It was never a "war," though it does qualify as a massive war crime perpetrated by Bush-Cheney and deserving of impeachment, trials before an international tribunal, imprisonment or execution. That the Democratic establishment, via the AAEI, Moveon (as Cindy correctly notes) and major Washington Players in government and media continue making excuses for this crime only implicates them further. But the professional antiwar activists clearly aren't going to get us out of Iraq, as neither Hillary nor Obama will. If we don't stop supporting the Democrats by voting for the eternally lesser evil, the the evil of war will never be off the official agenda.
Thank you David, another great article! Sure do miss you here in Montana.Peace,Love,Concord! Pamela
Challenge the system, which included Moveon, AAEI and the Democrats:
www.CindyforCongress.org
Peace
Cindy
(great article!)
I would't dignify the invasion of Iraq as a "war", they had about as much chance of defeating us in the field as Poland would.
The point about occupation is spot on. Thats what we are doing.
We need to withdraw, but very carefully so we don't create another Cambodia.
This article, while it has a progressive emphasis, makes a crucial mistake. David Sirota mentions "war" no less than 81 times. And he calls what is actually happening in Iraq—"occupation"— exactly zero times. This plays into the hands of the corporate Democrats and the Republicans. That's because their line is that we need to "win" and we shouldn't "lose" the war. An occupation cannot be won or lost, just maintained (unjustly) or ended (justly). The actual "war" ended in April, 2003 when Bush announced "Mission Accomplished" and the end of "combat operations."
Thom Hartmann, George Lakoff and many other expert progressive thinkers have made it clear that the inaccurate "war" frame hurts our progressive causes, yet Sirota doesn't seem to get it. Too bad. For his heart is in the right place even as he spews forth the corporate, militarist propaganda of the war frame.
David, love your articles and your first book. It is a real shame that we can't/won't see people like you and Amy Goodman on the cable "shows".
Peace, social and economic justice, and human rights.
www.carolmillercongress.com