--- Nathan Newman <nathan at newman.org> wrote:
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Doug Henwood" <dhenwood at panix.com>
>
> As I was against the first
> Gulf War. But it was
> during that first war back in 1991 that I first
> realized how intellectually
> and morally bankrupt the sloganeering of antiwar
> organizing had become,
> failing to deal with the realities of changing
> conflicts in way that was not
> just ineffective but counterproductive in alienating
> potential allies driven
> to the other side by it.
>
> I still think Barney Frank had the most succinct
> statement of the biggest
> difference between the Vietnam War and more recent
> conflicts. Ho Chi Minh
> was on the right side back then. Today's tyrants
> aren't, so the issue of
> war is more ambiguous, much more balancing the costs
> of wars against the
> gains of displacing the thugs. But that is a
> pragmatic empirical
> calculation, not the moral high-ground the Left had
> with the Vietnam War and
> many other colonialism struggles.
I think the problem is the opposite. The strength of antiwar movements and of the left generally has been diminished by the decline in anti-imperialist politics. For instance, during the first Gulf War, a section of the movement, mostly liberals and pacifists, raised the slogan of "sanctions not war" against Iraq. It is now fairly well-known that UN sanctions have killed hundreds of thousands of people and forced ordinary Iraqis to live under siege since '91. The liberals who raised this slogan genuinely wanted peace, but their failure to understand the role of US imperialism-- how, for instances, the US wields the decrees of the UN as weapons when convenient, ignores them when inconvenient-- meant that in practice these activists fostered dangerous illusions. We have to be for the principle self-determination. It's not ambiguous. The only people who have the right to "displace the thugs" in Iraq are the Iraqi people. If you want to get rid of a small-time crook, it does not make sense to call in the mafia don-- he'll only shoot up the whole neighborhood. And, often enough, let the crook himself off scot free. It's up to the neighborhood to clean its own house. That goes for us most of all. Like Karl Liebknecht said, the main enemy is at home.
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