Although, I am certainly happy that this crisis has erupted thanks to France, Germany, Russia and China... I am only happy from a tactical point of view: it gives us more time (perhaps) to organize against the war. However, I have no illusions about France, Germany, Russian and China or, for that matter, the United Nations. They all want a police force to monitor Iraq, and while I am no friend of Sadaam Hussein, it will use that same police force to monitor real movements of liberation.
France, Germany, US, England, Spain, Russia, China, only disagree on the extent and method of policing Iraq. One mistake would be to place faith in any of these states and/or Big Mommy State, the United Nations.
-Thomas
--- loupaulsen at attbi.com wrote:
> I absolutely refuse to give up and accept that the
> invasion is going to happen
> and start planning for "post-invasion".
>
> (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.
>
> - - - - - -
>
> 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
>
>
>
>
===== <<Be like me! The Primal Mother, eternally creative, eternally impelling into life,
eternally drawing satisfaction from the ceaseless flux of phenomena.>>
-Nietzsche, "The Birth of Tragedy"
__________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Shopping - Send Flowers for Valentine's Day http://shopping.yahoo.com