Aren't Left Business Observers who -- echoing the White House, Christopher Hitchens, et al. -- loudly protest that all or most resistance fighters in Iraq are Ba'athists, Islamists, Jihadist criminals, gangsters, etc. really *outliers,* i.e. an exception rather than the norm of the broadly defined left of the US political spectrum (ranging widely from liberal Democrats to Greens to religious pacifists to anarchists to socialists [whose politics in turn ranges wildly from CPUSA to the Spartacist League])?
Take a look at the following comment by Tom Andrews, a former Democratic congressmember from Maine and National Director of Win Without War <http://www.winwithoutwarus.org/>, which is a self-described "mainstream voice" of the anti-war movement and definitely the most politically cautious outfit among big national anti-war coalitions and organizations:
***** Renewed calls to bring troops home Archive Recent Editions 2003 Editions Dec 20, 2003 Author: Tim Wheeler, Washington correspondent People's Weekly World Newspaper, 12/20/03 00:00
. . . WWW [Win Without War] National Director Tom Andrews, a former Democratic congressmember from Maine, added, "The fundamentals of the quagmire in Iraq have not changed. Iraqi resistance to the U.S. military occupation is not simply the work of Saddam loyalists. It is being fueled by the widespread and deep-seated anger and frustration of the Iraqi people with the U.S. military occupation."
He cited heavy-handed tactics such as encircling villages in barbed wire, aerial bombing and strafing, raiding homes and personal body searches. . . .
<http://www.pww.org/article/articleview/4556/1/194> *****
Win Without War's political objectives -- i.e. elect Democrats and "transform the U.S. military occupation into 'a truly international effort to help the Iraqi people stabilize and rebuild their country while transferring authority to a legitimate Iraqi authority'" (Wheeler, <http://www.pww.org/article/articleview/4556/1/194>) -- differ from those of the anti-war coalitions and organizations to the left of it, but it doesn't appear that WWW stoops to the kind of over-the-top hate-mongering rhetoric that is favored on LBO-talk and that helps only Washington's propaganda machine. -- Yoshie
* Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>