Dear Friend:
Appended below is an open letter that is currently being circulated by the Radical Caucus of the Modern Language Association (MLA). It calls for an immediate end to the occupation of Iraq. We hope to gather some 1,000 signatures among academics from a wide range of fields, as well as non-academics. Our goal is to complete the signature-gathering by early October and publish the letter in the NYRB, Chronicle of Higher Education, or some other such venue that proves affordable.
We know that we all get many requests to sign letters and contribute to their publication. We think it particularly important, though, that antiwar people take a public stand against the US government's war policy now, during an electoral campaign that largely ignores the Iraq war, or subsumes it within the "war on terrorism."
We urge you to take a moment to read the statement below and, if you agree with it, sign on. You can simply cut and paste the text below, add your name and information, and send the text back to the cyber-addresses given below.
Please note that all signers should also send a check made out to the MLA Radical Caucus to the snail mail address given below. If you do not contribute financially to this project, we will not be able to include your name among the signers.
If you plan to join us, please don't put off doing so. Take a few minutes to sign the letter now and put the $$ in the mail. And if you know others who support the position we take in the letter, please forward it to them--all the usual suspects!
Best regards,
Barbara Foley Professor of English Rutgers University, Newark Campus
END THE OCCUPATION NOW
We call for withdrawal of all occupying troops from Iraq. Now.
Everyone but the Bush administration, Republican loyalists, and the Kerry wing of the Democratic Party agrees that the war on Iraq is failing catastrophically. April brought open, armed resistance, which grew more coordinated through May and June. Hundreds of U.S. troops and well over 1,000 Iraqi civilians were killed in those months. Thousands were wounded. U.S.troops are nowhere safe. They have given up on controlling neighborhoods and some whole cities. The Bush people,fearful of losing power at home, cobble together something called "sovereignty." Their efforts are disingenuous and doomed.
And far less popular than they were a few months ago, even in the U.S. Many voices now decry the torture and humiliation of prisoners, the racist contempt for Iraqi religion and culture, the slaughter of civilians fueled in part by that contempt, the military disasters, the diplomatic blunders, the sham of establishing "democracy." Is this, then, a war gone bad?
No: it was immoral and unjust and preposterous from the moment of its conception. Our leaders invented an Iraqi threat to the U.S. and trumpeted their righteous shock over Baathist rule, in order to advance a project designed long before 9/11. They wanted control of oil reserves and pipelines, military bases to dominate Iraq and the whole region, docile governments in Arab countries, a clear path for the Sharon gang to shut Palestinians up in bantustans forever. In short, they meant to buttress the hegemony of the U.S. government and its multinational corporate sponsors, with tough, mean, old fashioned, direct, military imperialism.
Iraq's miseries follow from that malign plan. Hostile occupation breeds resistance, turns the citizens into real or imagined enemies, unleashes the torturers, creates terrorists. The way to end these harms is to end the occupation. Now.
Arguments against doing so range from hollow to vile:
--As of June 28, "we" are not an occupying power? Hmmm. Except for the same 138,000 occupying troops, the permanent military bases now under construction, and the comprador government.
--"We" can't cut and run? I.e., can't show our leaders to have been fools? The whole world knows they are fools.
--"We" must finish the job? The job was a cynical fabrication to beginwith. War on terror, weapons of mass destruction: baloney.
--"We" must finish that other job, building a model democracy? With tanks and guns? Forget it.
--"We" must support our troops? The only lasting support is to bring them home.
--"We" can't leave Iraqis in perilous chaos? "Our" long record of helping them breeds little confidence.
We who sign this call are defectors from the "we" in that list of musts and can'ts--from the Bush clique and its corporate allies. What is our plan for ending the occupation? Plans abound. What stands in the way of withdrawal is not the lack of a plan, but the desperate tenacity of the Bush clique and the residual power of their lies and fantasies, in which both congressional parties have repeatedly acquiesced.
Let's take that power away. Join us in saying no. Out of Iraq!
NAME:
AFFILIATION:
ADDRESS:
EMAIL:
Circulated by members of the Radical Caucus of the Modern Language Association (MLA)
Cybersignatures should be sent to <iraqstatement at hotmail.com> and <bfoley29 at aol.com>.
Contribution checks should be made out to MLA Radical Caucus and sent to Barbara Foley, 5 Roosevelt Place, # 6-O, Montclair, NJ 07042. Full-time employed are asked to contribute $20; all others are asked to contribute $10. -- Yoshie
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * Greens for Nader: <http://greensfornader.net/> * Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * 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/>