> But my point is that the lack of organizing of that global solidarity and
> plan on how to help those resisting Hussein is exactly what strengthened the
> warhawks in arguing that their method was the only way to "liberate Iraq."
> In practice and in message, there was little or no message by the antiwar
> movement on how they were acting in solidarity with the oppressed folks
> within Iraq.
>
> And that was the fatal flaw of antiwar organizing.
I have to take issue with the presupposition here, which is that our inability ("our" meaning all the anti-war forces in the U.S., including Newman and Chuck0, and also in the rest of the world) to prevent the launching of the war on Iraq can be traced to a "fatal flaw" in our message.
I think this comes under the heading of the "illusion of control". It would be a comforting thing to believe. It would be comforting to believe that we can just go and stop imperialist wars whenever we want, if only we can get the "message" right and avoid "fatal flaws". If not this time, then next time for sure. It would be particularly comforting to Newman, since he can pose as the Cassandra of the Iraq war, and believe that if only everyone had just listened to Nathan Newman, the current war of conquest would not be taking place.
I think this is just a fatally flawed picture. It is not that easy to stop imperialist wars when they are really important to the imperialists. In fact, I would like to ask Newman if he can think of ANY example of an anti-war movement successfully preventing ANY U.S. imperialist war. I think you would have a hard time finding something better than the Boland Amendment, which, however, it proved possible to circumvent.
We just do not run this country when it comes to war policy.
Newman is approaching this as if we could have stopped the imperialist war if we had just gotten the clear majority of people of the U.S. into the anti-war column. The mechanism is, (a) Get the message right and devoid of "fatal flaws"; (b) Win over the clear majority of people of the U.S. against the war (this supposes that a correctly tuned message will make up for all the disparity in wealth and media control between ourselves and the imperialist bourgeoisie, but leave this shaky proposition aside for a moment); (c) That will prevent the war, because this is a democracy! Am I missing the step? But the UK is a democracy, and the clear majority of the people there were against the war before it started, and it didn't work there. It didn't work in Italy and Spain, with even larger majorities against the war.
What we were able to do before the start of the war, we DID do. We convinced the vast majority of the people of the world that the war was wrong. We prevented the U.S. from 'legitimizing' the war in the UN. We put serious political obstacles in their way. We undermined their evidence. We created a situation where going to war involved more costs and risks than they would have expected. However, they chose to bear those costs and risks and go to war anyway and they had the power to do it. I say that this is because, when all is said and done, we are living under the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Someone else might formulate it differently. But it's not just because we picked the wrong slogans and the wrong ad agency.
LP