>Luke Weiger wrote:
>
>>Well, yes, but for the party line to be broken down, very bad things have to
>>happen. I find it remarkable that opponents of the war are depressed that
>>it's end is in clear sight.
>
>What's depressing is that if things appear to go "well," Bush & Co. will
>be emboldened for further adventures. Syria, Iran, NK, Venezuela...
this is assuming that the "less than well" win folks hoped for would stop them. i'm not convinced that it would have. the things folks are typically appealing to as reasons why they might stop just don't matter to them. the loss of the UN? BFD! Alliances? BFD! Protestors? Comic relief. the Arab Street? BFD. World-wide antiwar protests? Good!
I ask again: what are the consequences to these ratfuckers otherwise? i'm trying to figure it out because i think we have to think about this if we are every going to figure out how to more effectively address these events.
philip ferguson may be right and once the US has its way in the world, everyone will realize that liberal democracy ain't what it's cracked up to be:
From: Philip Ferguson <plf13 at it.canterbury.ac.nz>
>Let's hope a new and more left-oriented Iraqi resistance movement
> will emerge as the occupiers continue to show their arrogance.
This last bit is what I am most interested in and counting on.
I think we may well go through a period of years in which the US continues to replace its old dictatorships with shiny new pseudo-democracies, and that they will win each such contest. We, as Marxists and anti-imperialists, have to oppose such future invasions, blockades and so on. But I think we are still in a political period where there is a clearing away of all the blockages to the world revolutionary process and we will end up in a few years where the world is overwhelmingly ruled by capitalist 'democracies' and then things will get really interesting.
Because the people in the non-imperialist world will then find that capitalist democracy is not all it's cracked up to be - especially for them. At that point, it is likely that new anti-imperialist movements will start to emerge in the Third World - in fact in some places they already are emerging in embryo - Chavez, for instance, represents an anti-imperialist mood among the Venezuelan masses; in Nepal there is a substantial Maoist insurgency; in the Philippines there is still a large, revolutionary national liberation movement.
In the case of Iraq, the removal of the Saddam regime is likely to make things stickier for the imperialists over the next few years. How are they going to create a new government in iraq that has much credibility?
How long is the US going to rule Iraq directly? What are they going to do when there are workers' demonstrations over economic issues or popular mass marches demanding real political rights? How long are the US going to keep some kind of military force there and how are the Iraqi masses likely to respond to that?
Now that Saddam is gone, I think the prospects for some serious people's resistance are a lot better. Blair and Bush are going to find that Iraq is not Afghanistan. Rather, there is a strong tradition of *secular* and *radical* nationalism/anti-imperialism in Iraq, that will be a lot harder to deal with in post-Saddam Iraq than the reactionary religious anti-imperialism of the Taleban and the warlords is in Afghanistan.
Philip Ferguson