Just about anyone who has _half_ a political brain, on the left, right, and center, is interested in Iran, Islam, the Middle East. It's possible, though, that the opium of liberals and leftists has destroyed more than half the political brains of some of them.
After the 1990s, the pattern of overseas deployment of US troops changed dramatically: away from Asia and Europe (as well as Latin America and Africa) to the Middle East, with the deployment in the Middle East surpassing those in Asia and Europe _for the first time in post-WW2 US history_. One can see this best in two charts created by Tim Kane: see Chart 3 and Chart 5 of his "Global U.S. Troop Deployment, 1950-2003" at <http://www.heritage.org/Research/NationalSecurity/troopsdb.cfm>. Iran is the only remaining prize in the Middle East still out of Washington's grasp.
On 4/17/07, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
> Saadia Toor (Cornell University)
It's worth listening to what Saadia Toor says about Iran, Islamophobia, and Western LGBTQ human rights activism. You can listen to what Toor (as well as Kourosh Shemirani of Qiam) has to say about them at <http://outfm.org/images/stories/2007/03/070312_100001outfm-dst.mp3>. Note her emphasis on the importance of anti-imperialism.
On 4/17/07, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
> Yoshie has clearly embraced a "Maoist" view of the US working class
> as hopelessly deracinated and reactionary, with a material interest
> in imperialism. The revolutionary vanguard now consists of largely
> unemployed residents of slums in the Middle East who follow Islamist
> clerics - they're the logical successors to the various revolutionary
> subjects of recent decades - in Vietnam, then Latin America, then
> American prisons, etc. They always disappoint, so there always has to
> be a new revolutionary subject, and never one close by.
Why invent a disagreement even where none exists, on the fact that the US working class are very much quiescent*, and there is no sign of stirring in the streets at present? "It's not like there's a vigorous mass movement on this [climate change] right now," as you say yourself (at <http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20070402/007031.html>).
Recognizing this fact is not "Maoist,"*** nor is it to regard all US workers as by nature "hopelessly deracinated and reactionary" in perpetuity (though it looks like you see most of the religious US workers as reactionary at worst and hopeless at best). Those who totally disregard it sound very funny, though -- like your favorite newspaper Workers Vanguard and the IWW man John Kalwaic.
As for "a material interest in imperialism," that's a subjective rather than objective question as far as those who are not ruling classes are concerned, and, as I have been saying, it is not just in the North*** where some of those who are not of the ruling classes feel they have material and other stakes in the multinational empire. Parliamentary socialists and communists, of the South as well as of the North, can be also part of that, too.
* Quiescent in comparison to not only feistier workers of Iran, Egypt, Bolivia, Venezuela, etc. but also US workers' own past: <http://www.bls.gov/news.release/wkstp.t01.htm> Table 1. Work stoppages involving 1,000 or more workers, 1947-2005
** BTW, I don't dismiss those who participated in the (generally Maoist) new communist movements in the long sixties as all just silly beans, as you apparently do. There is much to be learned from that history, too, as Max Elbaum (cf. <http://www.revolutionintheair.com/>) reminds us, if we don't dismiss it out of hand.
*** See my hypothesis about how the multinational empire works: "'Cultural' Imperialism and $784 Billion Net Transfer from the South to the North": <http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20070319/005869.html>.
On 4/17/07, B. <docile_body at yahoo.com> wrote:
> And an article entitled
> "Solidarity with Iranian workers" urging US workers to
> oppose an invasion of Iran is "very funny" to her.
> Weird.
It's funny because few will respond to the urging in the sense of actually doing something. Besides, what's on the agenda right now, as far as Iran is concerned, is not a ground invasion but economic sanctions, covert actions (of the sort that Seymour Hersh has written about), and at most potential missile strikes. What have been US workers' response to those so far? Virtually nothing. -- Yoshie