ravi wrote:
>
> personally, i don't even buy (yet) into the logic of
> "withdraw now" (i still fail to see how letting the US off so easy, for
> what we have done to iraq, is a left cause). but i marched because i
> feel solidarity with the group.
Let's see.
1. The exact demands of the anti-war movement won't make a fucking bit of difference to the government, since we are not now nor will we ever be part of the military/economic/diplomatic bureaucracy that will carry out whatever general decision the u.s. makes.
2. No one is "letting the US off." The US is _not_, under any circumstances, going to repair _any_ of the terrible damage it has done, is doing, and will continue to do in Iraq. It will be appropriate at the time of the US withdrawal for leftists to demand that the U.S. make reparations, but we will do that not because we have any idea of the US actually doing so but because it will be a way to drive home to those still interested just how terrible the damage that Bush-Clinton-Bush-[DP president 2009]-[RP president 2112] has done and will have done by the time the U.S. finally pulls out. The more we have shilly-shallied on our present demands (and _any_ complicating of the Out Now will _in practice_ count only as shilly-shallying), the harder it will be to make that educational demand for US reparations when the time comes.
3. You simply can't build a mass movement around a text pretending to be an Act of Congress or Treaty to submit to the Senate. Those leftists who have muddied organizing with squeaks about will the demand of "Out Now" turn the electricity on and so forth have blood on their hands.
4. In our internal discussions we do need to complicate the demand _Out Now_ in many ways, but none of them have to do with sandbox politics about the details of a post-occupation Iraq. They have to do with educating ever more and more people about the aspects of u.s. foreign policy and, at a deeper level, of the nature of capitalism that have led to this disgraceful set of circumstances in which the ONLY way citizens can participate in our alleged democracy is with the simple loud demand, Out Now!
Carrol