At one point, I spent quite a bit of time, both online and in the real world, trying to win US leftists and liberals to an immediate withdrawal of US and other foreign troops from Iraq and to get ANSWER and UFPJ to work with each other. Now I regard that sort of effort as a waste of time. ANSWER and UFPJ are too sectarian to ever make even a tactical alliance for a short term productively, and each is limited in its own way, now probably more an obstacle than a necessary evil that both once were. As for the cause of withdrawal, reality of escalating violence, not what anyone said, has changed the minds of US leftists and a large segment of liberals, but now it is too late: Iraq is FUBAR, and if Washington withdraws its troops any time soon, it will only do so to start another war, this time against Iran.
At this point in time, US leftists are either in small sects or loose cannons, and neither amount to anything. So, far be it from me to try to get them to embrace any idea in the short term, least of all about Iran, about which there is solid bipartisan consensus among the US power elite (see the case of the Iran Freedom Support Act, <http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/furuhashi290606.html>), for which US leftists are no match.
I'm saying what I am saying about Iran in case conditions change later, hard as it is to imagine they will, in which case the sort of sources that I provide may become useful to activists, though, if conditions change, the change will probably come too late to make any difference for anyone.
In the end, though, there won't be any mass movement on the Left here unless and until people here begin to fight for what they need and want for themselves, not for any altruistic concern for people in faraway places.
In the meantime, online debates might be a little more fun if all concerned realized that there would be no short-term real-world consequence of them. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>