If Doug was the sort of person who would come up with crisp definitive plans I doubt if LBO-talk could be as broad ranging a forum as it is. After all he is in good company: Marx's favourite motto was "doubt everything"
What I wonder is whether the next edition of Wall Street will have a picture of bullet holes through the street signs. Is that now going to be seen by his publishers as tactless. Should they be replaced with anthrax bacilli to symbolise the corruption of Empire? (Perhaps not.)
But Doug's general position I would have thought it clear: it is not a pacifist one, and it is not in favour of US hegemony and barbarism.
Anyway as Carl has also debated on this list, there is a problem that the great majority of the population of the US have gone through shock and cannot be confronted about their guilt and complicity in an appallingly unjust world order. (Put the dilemma another way - I agree that we cannot really discuss whether the victims of the WTC were totally innocent, although they will have enjoyed their share of concerned/cynical jokes about the world economy, will have noticed - no doubt with regret at times that "Africa seems to have fallen off the map" etc, and concentrated on internal office politics - how they can position themselves for promotion in the next restructuring, how can they avoid being on a redundancy short list? The real question is the innocence or not, of the *next* 5000 citizens of the US or Britain who are due to be killed. They are *at least* as guilty as the Germans who knew of the existence of concentration camps, and did nothing about it. More so, because by that stage the socialists and communists were in the concentration camps already, whereas the penalties against protesting against the injustice of the world today are considerably milder for the inhabitants of the imperialist heartlands.)
What is to be the plan then?
Doug has already contributed by hosting a list where different approaches to a plan can be debated. There will not be one definitive plan but there will have to be a convergence of progressive plans. This must include an active postive and radical agenda for the emerging Empire that is of course not just an endorsement of US hegemonic action. It must emphasise accountability to the United Nations. It must demand the US signs up to the International Criminal Court, as the UK has just done. It must insist on a settlement in Palestine as vigorously as Polly Toynbee has just done in the article Carl clipped. It must must include justice for the Chechens and for the Kashmiris. It must must must include a plan for economic justice and not just juridical justice - after all if George Soros can call for an issue of IMF special drawing rights for development, why can a fund not be established for the near and middle east?
It is wrong however, IMHO, for Carl neatly and wittily to suggest that leftists should never merely decline to support, or oppose only on principle. I could try to dig up the quote from Lenin, that self-appointed robust defender of a version of Marxist orthodoxy, that in practice the proletariat may not necessarily oppose a bourgeois initiative. The reality is before planning any demonstration, or even a letter, you have to decide what you are going to highlight, and by implication to what you will not draw attention. The enemy cannot be defeated all at once? Yes like Doug and Carl I do oppose the present imperialist campaign against terror, but not every aspect of it.
Did you oppose massive financial pressure on Indonesia to make it disgorge East Timor? Did you oppose massive EU pressure in the last fortnight on the Macedonian assembly to force it to agree a radical programme of civil liberties to the muslim minority?
The reason why the left has not got a better plan faster is that it is not grasping the agenda of world government. Those of us who demanded protection of the rights of muslims in the former Yugoslavia, did not welcome the imperialist nature of the war, and opposed the worst features. There is no point on these lists in being merely divisive, and I understand the reasons why progressive people from the USA will overwhelmingly approach a problem from the point of view of opposition to the crimes of their ruling class. But the reality is, that if we could articulate a radical and progressive plan for the Empire in Macedonia, Kosovo and the eastern Balkans...which we could easily in the shape of a number of key reforms of the existing imperial plan...then it would be much easier to have a radical campaigning plan for the control of terrorism and the building of the world on the basis of economic and political justice.
The obstacle to a serious plan actually above all comes from ultra-leftists who imply that any plan would be a compromise with the existing power structures. Of course. But a strategy of "No Compromises" is also a plan that is not there.
Chris Burford
London