[lbo-talk] Re: Re: 3,000 Lights for 3,000 US Military Deaths

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

On 1/1/07, Jim Straub <rustbeltjacobin at gmail.com> wrote:
> > "Critical solidarity" has perhaps devolved to 99.99% criticism of
> > foreign governments and movements and 0.01% solidarity with
> > foreigners.  :->
> >
> > When we had a little discussion about our shares of political
> > responsibility for what's happening in Iraq, the only LBO-talk member
> > who stood up to claim responsibility was Ravi, an Indian man, the rest
> > insisting that their "hands are clean."  Just as many multinationals
> > have outsourced jobs to India, China, etc., maybe US leftists have to
> > outsource political responsibility to foreigners: hire foreigners to
> > hold candles for dead US soldiers!  :-|
> > --
> > Yoshie
>
> Oh come on Yoshie.  A smiley-faced emoticon doesn't make hyperbole any
> more useful.  99.99%, huh?  How'd you measure that?   When hating on
> the US left for addiction to failure (a habit I indulge in plenty
> myself), you might temper it with a reflection on how bunkering down
> in a university sitting on computers all day long doesn't really turn
> the tide either.  Not only do I believe myself and other residents of
> the US bear grave responsibility for the horror in Iraq, I happen to
> be fixated on it personally in a way that rarely leaves my mind.
> Almost all bile leftists sling among and between themselves about
> their collective failure/wrongness/responsibility/whatever, is on its
> face better spent motivating them to talk instead to non-leftists
> about these issues.
> :)

The Iraq War probably isn't the kind of war that will turn the tide in
America, as far as the fortune of leftists is concerned.  It's less
like the Vietnam War than the Korean War on the home front: during the
Korean War, sentiments eventually turned against the war, without
generating any big movement against it.  That means that Washington
will not withdraw all its troops -- it will leave new enduring bases
in the Middle East (either in the Kurdish region of Iraq or somewhere
else), just as the Korean War left a base in South Korea.

One thing that the Afghan and Iraq Wars definitively changed is the
pattern of overseas deployment of US troops: away from Asia, Europe,
and Latin America to the Middle East.  One can see this best in two
charts created by a Heritage Foundation man (of all people): see Chart
3 and Chart 5 of
<http://www.heritage.org/Research/NationalSecurity/troopsdb.cfm>.  The
struggle over the Middle East will define the next couple of decades.

As for academia, I am no longer affiliated with any university -- I
couldn't afford to accumulate any more debt -- but if US leftists were
smarter, they would try to grapple with and make the best of the fact
that educational institutions -- from primary school to community
colleges and universities -- are, along with religious institutions,
the last social institutions where working-class people are found en
masse: more working-class people spend time in religious and
educational institutions than trade unions, and educational workers
are among the best unionized sectors of workers.
-- 
Yoshie
<http://montages.blogspot.com/>
<http://mrzine.org>
<http://monthlyreview.org/>