Fw: David Corn: troubling origins of the anti-war movement

Nathan Newman nathan at newman.org
Fri Nov 1 11:13:03 PST 2002


----- Original Message ----- From: "Doug Henwood" <dhenwood at panix.com>

Thomas Seay wrote:
>My point was, of course, that it does not matter that
>you call yourself Left or Right, if you support
>oppression, totalitarianism, etc: a rose is a rose is
>a rose.

-So why not the same common standard for being opposed to imperial war?

Max is trying to unite left and libertarians against the war in a new blog, but I have doubts about such negative coalitions, whether to the rightwing which shares none of our other international values or to the sectarian authoritarians like the WWP, who also share few of those values and none of our democratic ones. Tactical organizing on the war is especially not the point if our problem with the attack on Iraq is its role in broader hegemonic goals of the US. We need long term vision, not short term tactics, so incongruent alliances can be an impediment to that.

Here is what I wrote about the proposed left-right blog alliance.

"I've joined the mass group blog No War Blog put together by my friend Max Sawicky. The basic unity statement begins:

The members of Stand Down hold a wide variety of different and, indeed, conflicting political positions, but all are in agreement on a single proposition: that the use of military force to effect "regime change" in Iraq is ill advised and unjustified. We do not deny that the current Iraqi regime is monstrous, but we hold, following John Adams, that the United States need not go "abroad in search of monsters to destroy" unless they pose a clear and direct threat to American national security. More here.

I am actually intensely uncomfortable with this right-left kind of alliance on war or trade, since the motives of rightwing opponents draws too much from the old "America First" attitude of not giving a damn about brown people, whether Iraqi oppressors or Kurdish victims. I oppose war because too many innocent Iraqis would die to get rid of Hussein, but I actually have great sympathy for folks like Hitchens who see a pro-war perspective from the eyes of dissidents within Iraq. If I thought that the Bush administration really believed its rhetoric about democracy and human rights in the Middle East, I might not be antiwar -- I supported intervention in Kosovo despite the horror of some of my lefty compatriots. But Bush's continued blind eye to Saudi, Egyptian and Kuwaiti authoritarianism shows how empty his democracy rhetoric is.

I am an interventionist in the world. I just think that this war would be the wrong kind of needed intervention with the wrong purposes. But short-term tactical agreement on staying out of this war is still only half the issue. The other is the more explosive debate on what the real role of the US should be in this time of its omnipresent global power. As I often say, by enforcing its patent laws through economic threats in the third world, the US kills far more people through the deinial of needed drugs than it ever would kill in this war.

So a question to the antiwar movement. With millions dying of AIDS when cheap drugs and minimal investment in a medical infrastructure could save many of them, why can't we get 100,000 people to rally on their behalf? Why are rallies so easy to mobilize for "no war" but not for "yes to saving life"?

-- Nathan Newman



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