(a) The Bush administration is making the statement that they will absolutely, definitely go to war no matter what, UN or no UN, public opinion or no public opinion, Pope or no Pope, etc. And certainly that's their wish. However, haven't we learned not to take their statements at face value? How do we know how determined and relentless they are until we actually put them to the test? They are going to project an implacable and unstoppable image - regardless- of what they are really thinking.
(b) It -looks- from the early stages of the Security Council debate that France, Russia, and China are willing to obstruct a UN invasion resolution one way or another. PERHAPS they will all cave in, but perhaps not. Certainly they have dug in on the 'give the inspections more time' position, and unless there is some change in the pretext, some new 'smoking gun', real or fabricated, they would all lose face by undigging and backing off.
(c) So the US might have to go to war without the UN, with only Blair and the 'coalition of the willing' in support. But the people in all of those countries are much more opposed to the war than in the US, especially without a UN resolution. Those governments might be unwilling to lend more than token support, when the crunch comes.
(d) Of course the US government CAN scrap the UN, it CAN invade Iraq alone, it CAN ignore public opinion here entirely. But there are consequences if they do those things. The US imperialists have gotten a lot of good use out of the UN over the years.
Furthermore, if the Security Council refuses to back the resolution, it will make the US invasion joltingly "illegitimate" within the context even of ordinary garden variety 'democratic' thought, both in the US and around the world, and that, in turn, will make legitimate all kinds of acts of protest and rebellion. There are plenty of people who would not confront the US over just any old war or conquest, but who will do it if it is seen as an "illegitimate" war. The US planners have to think about this too. The reputation of the US is part of their capital.
Now it is also true that they -need- to invade Iraq for many reasons, but when it actually comes down to the crunch, it is really not completely predictable what they will do.
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Those are not activist arguments, those are ordinary speculative pundit arguments. Now, here is another set of arguments:
(1) We are supposed to be having a huge wave of demonstrations tomorrow, and we will in fact be in pretty much constant agitprop-and-action mode for the foreseeable future. If we take our minds off that and start thinking about strategies for what happens "after the invasion", we are not giving full concentration to the immediate task at hand.
(2) I think that the impulse to think about 'what happens after the invasion' is mainly the coping mechanism of 'acceptance'. People want to distance themselves from the pain they expect to suffer if we "let ourselves get emotionally involved", if we work their hearts out to stop the war and then it happens anyway, and we have to think that thousands of people are dying "because we failed". People want to leap over that stage without living through it by writing Iraq off in advance.
However, the Iraqi people don't have that option. They don't have the luxury of being able to throw in their hand and go on to the next game. So we can't either.
(3) This is the age of the Internet which means that everyone can know a lot about what everyone else is doing. That means that people in Baghdad, Cairo, Karachi, etc. can find out how we here in the US, and in fact what we here on this list, are saying about them and how we are approaching the crisis. Now, those people are going to be standing up to US imperialism themselves, and they are going to be making choices about how to do it. WHICH IDEOLOGIES WORK, AND WHICH DON'T? Who is on their side, and who is not? Which ideologies give you the courage and mental tools to stand up to overwhelming odds, face down the United States, unite with your fellow human beings in other country, and keep the struggle going? There are some obvious choices out there: socialism, militant Islamicism, pacifism, "progressivism" (if that is the word to use for something common to the non-Marxist anti-imperialists on this list), and so on.
Now, speaking as a socialist, and having the FUTURE OF THE WORLD in view, I intend to do everything possible in these weeks and months of crisis to show what socialism is good for. That it is a reliable ally, that we are courageous, that we don't get discouraged, that we are not a slender broken reed or a fair-weather friend. That when a holocaust threatens Iraq, we do not look the other way. Don't those of you of other ideologies want to show off what you can do as well? Because let me tell you something for damn sure, the militant Islamicists are going to do that. You don't hear "Osama" (if that was him) talking about what to do after the invasion succeeds. You hear only confidence and a struggle attitude from him. I would like to avoid the situation of having people in Baghdad or Karachi (etc.) six months from now saying "Well, when it came down to it, the only people who were really with the Iraqi people 100% were al-Qaeda." I don't want my socialist comrades in the East to have to listen to jibes about how socialists didn't come through for Iraq in the pinch.
This is the time for fighting, not post-mortems.
Lou Paulsen Chicago