>It was at the mass meeting in New York of antiwar activists that the
>coalition was destroyed in the weeks after 911, because a minority
>refused to call for the 911 killers to be brought to justice under
>international law, since they argued that imperialists had no right
>to call for such justice. It was a sickening set of arguments then
>and hateful in the extreme. And most of the hundreds of people
>gathered at the time didn't return to antiwar organizing for another
>two years until the leadup to the Iraq invasion-- losing a lot of
>momentum that might have helped stop that war.
If Nathan's anecdote is an accurate report of what happened, it's one more example of the main problem of liberals in the United States. Liberals always blame their own failure on those whom they regard as "the Far Left." If liberals had wanted to organize themselves around a call to bring the 9/11 terrorists to justice under international law, they could and should have, but they didn't, due to their lack of willingness or competence or both. They have only themselves to blame.
The Right, in contrast, never makes liberals' mistake, as they know how to use the Far Right as its shock troops for its own ends. The Right are strategically smarter than liberals.
In any case, though, many liberals, to this day, are not opposed to the Afghanistan War, so I doubt that Nathan's anecdote is rooted in reality. About 90% of Americans, including 80% of Blacks, supported the Afghanistan War. Liberals only oppose wars that are likely to be too expensive and to have unpleasant repercussions damaging the American Empire in the long term. For them, the Afghanistan War was a cheap one, so they didn't bother opposing it, even though the war didn't make any sense as a measure to diminish the likelihood of future terrorist attacks against Americans.
The Afghanistan War gave the Bush Administration a great deal of momentum. If liberals had been capable of thinking in the long term, they might have opposed the Afghanistan War on the grounds that it would embolden the Bush Team to undertake more and bigger wars abroad and crush civil liberties at home _even though they had thought that the Afghanistan War was justified_, but liberals don't think strategically. -- Yoshie
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * Greens for Nader: <http://greensfornader.net/> * Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * OSU-GESO: <http://www.osu-geso.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/>