Subject: Re: [historiansagainstwar] Save the Date: SATURDAY, OCTOBER 25
Nick Turse wrote:
>FYI...
>
>Best,
>N
Since this message is sent FYI and I don't know Nick Turse I won't infer anything more than the indicated informational function. However, I would like to express opposition to HAW in any way endorsing this "day of action" in the terms outlined, and urge list members with affiliations to other groups to oppose their endorsing it too.
>> MASS MARCH ON WASHINGTON TO SAY:
>> - Bring the troops home now
>> - End the occupation of Iraq
>> - Money for jobs, education & healthcare - Not war
In particular, I oppose the implication that the sort of conservative isolationism masquerading as anti-imperialism in this call is acceptable. We failed to stop the war, and we failed before that to stop the sanctions (in fact, a good many of us initially called for sanctions as an alternative to war in response to the Hussein government's aggression against Kuwait). Our government has wreaked havoc on the Iraqi people over four generations, going back to Reagan's backing of Hussein. We did not stop any of them so acting in our name, and we ought as a nation through our public funds to pay for Iraq's reconstruction, at least in substantial measure.
I support most of the call's analysis of our domestic crisis, but am unwilling to accept therefore the grotesque caricature of anti-imperialism it surrounds and occludes.
A different approach to reconstructing Iraq is needed, that does not use inappropriate military methods and tools, and does not rely exclusively on expensive U.S. companies with featherbed contracts to do work that in many cases could be done cheaper and more effectively by local people, local and regional NGOs, or regional companies. But the basic message in the basic demands above is an appeal to American selfishness and
irresponsibility. At best it implies abandoning the Iraqis without resources they need and refusing to acknowledge a real U.S. moral debt to them, as has already occurred in Afghanistan. At worst it means abandoning them to civil war.
A progressive administration of Iraq's reconstruction ought to go on under United Nations auspices, in close collaboration with forces from Iraqi civil society to develop a broadly participatory process for devising a new constitution and determining issues such as the nature of the economic structures and policies desired by the Iraqi people. The largest share of funding should come from the U.S. This sort of demand is also important because the point is not just to oppose U.S. militarism but also the unilateralist, arrogant, bullying vision and attitude of the present administration towards the rest of the world, and its disdain for international legality except for moments of opportunistic convenience.
These demands reflect a different sort of "anti-imperialism," one shaped by the illusions and fantasies of the microsectarian left in the U.S., which is essentially cynical about international law, and also about human rights. The new situation of the world poses progressives with a choice -- are we going to take up "pure" postures for the sake of adherence to revolutionary fantasies, and oppose all transnational intervention for the sake of a purist "anti-imperialism"? Or are we going to recognize that when you live in the belly of the beast there are no clean hands, and that struggling for real but imperfect constraints on the misuse of American power and resources in an internationalist context is the real progressive anti-imperialist position?
To go further, I would point out that under the doctrine that anti-imperialism = anti-interventionism in all cases, and especially with the corollary that the U.N. is really just a puppet of the U.S. anyway (a position I believe the Worker's World Party behind the International Action Center and ANSWER holds), President Clinton was a hero of anti-imperialism when he not only refused U.S. intervention in Rwanda in 1994 but forced U.N. withdrawal and obstructed renewed U.N. engagement.
One of the difficulties with which progressives must struggle in the face of the new structures of informal empire is that among the abuses of U.S. power and resources are abuses of omission, of failure to use them, whether it is a matter of paying U.N. dues, paying fair shares of multilateral health initiatives on AIDS, malaria and TB, signing and ratifying international treaties that create obligations to workers, the environment, children, women and pose obstacles to the freedom of organized capital to act as it wishes, or contributing funds and troops to peacekeeping efforts that are not controlled by the U.S. military.
A little further comment below on one other particular passage.
>> As we continue the movement in opposition to the
>> occupation of Iraq, we must also oppose the daily
threats
>> against the people of Palestine, Afghanistan, Iran,
Korea,
>> Cuba, the Philippines, Colombia, Liberia, Zimbabwe,
and
>> all others that are targets of the Bush
administration.
Speaking as a leftist Africa advocate with a Ph.D. in African history, the idea that the daily threats to the lives of the people of Liberia come from the Bush administration rather than from the forces of Charles Taylor and those who are fighting against him is a sick joke. Interestingly enough, the official U.S. government position, that peacekeepers in Liberia ought to come primarily from Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) armies with U.S. financial and logistical backing, is also the position of at least one key leader of the Black Radical Congress.
The reasoning is different, and on the administration's part, essentially racist. But that raises a real question. If the reasoning for not intervening in the humanitarian crisis in Liberia is based on the assumptions that a) the U.S. has no interests in Africa and the lives of Africans, b) that to commit resources to saving lives means threatening the ability to use them in others, like, say, occupying Iraq the better to control its oil, and c) that top military leaders should have a veto over civilian leaders on the locations and type of missions to which U.S. military resources are put, had we not perhaps look a little harder at taking a position merely on the outcome without challenging those assumptions or proposing alternatives that address them?
Likewise with Zimbabwe. The idea that the Bush administration is the main threat to the Zimbabwean people is a different type of sick joke. The main threat to the Zimbabwean people is a corrupt and inept government led by a former genuine revolutionary hero who has degenerated into increasingly cramped and dictatorial outlooks. There is a very large popular movement, led by trade unionists, which opposes that government.
The hemming in of Zimbabwe by imperial neoliberalism that has contributed to Robert Mugabe's decline might well lead a popular trade-union based democratic movement also to fail, as it has in Zambia. But Mugabe and his coterie are no more real socialists than the former Soviet industrial bureaucrats who turned their positions into tools of expropriation and capitalist class construction (Mugabe by the way was supported by the Chinese, while his onetime rival Joshua Nkomo, whose followers became subject to quasi-genocidal massacres in Ndebele-speaking areas in 1983 at the hands of Mugabe loyalist special forces, was backed by the Soviet Union). So far most of Mugabe's so-called land reform amounts to transferring the fruits of colonialist primitive accumulation into the hands of top ZANU-PF leaders. For an analysis of the real nature of the Zimbabwean struggle, see a piece I wrote for _The Black Commentator_ at <http://www.blackcommentator.com/15_zim.html>.
The ANSWER call as written represents a phony and delusive anti-imperialism, derived in part from the wacky ideas of a deeply confused microsect. Creating a real anti-imperialism that really responds to the novelties of the new imperialism and proposes real progressive alternatives will require much harder work, beginning with recognition that a fetishized quest for ideological and moral purity is in itself an obstacle to progressive thought.
Christopher Lowe Portland, Oregon