It offers at least half a dozen different topics for further discussion.
Carrol
Iraqi public opinion Sun, 31 Aug 13:21:18 Doug Henwood
Maria Gilmore wrote: Something I think I heard Christian Parenti say on Doug's show yesterday was, a big reason Iraqis are not eager to take up arms as a people against their occupation would be the simple fact that one way or another their society has been at war for over 20 years now. They've had enough of it. That also helps explain the pleas to Americans to take the oil, just get the power back on and clean water flowing and some semblence of order and then...leave them alone!...
Ah, the Iraqis - they just don't understand. They should move to Columbus, Ohio, or Bloomington, Illinois - everything would become so much clearer. - Doug @@@@
Chomsky: The U.N. Learns to Behave Sun, 31 Aug 11:04 Yoshie Furuhashi
[Lengthy excerpt on U.S. misbehavior the post-cold war u.n.'s docility as a U.S. agent] @@@@
Sun, 31 Aug 11:16:04 -0500 Carrol Cox
Doug Henwood wrote: Which will get the electricity and water running in Iraq, right?
And Paul wrote yesterday: "The specifics of the mandate and arrangements are key, but these are not things around which one can mobilize a mass movement."
Nothing __NOTHING whatever_ that might be done or said within the struggle to build a mass movement at this time will have any effect whatever, absolutely not effect whatever, on whether or not the electricity and water start running again in Iraq in the next six to twelve months.
Anything that leftists can do or say at the present time can conceivably actually change public policy only in (say) 2005 at the earliest.
So I really don't see what is the usefulness, to anyone, of what Doug is saying here.
Now I said exactly the same thing roughly 32 months ago in reference to getting food and medical supplies to the people of Afghanistan. I was told then that I was merely giving up. But of course all the wails from "practical" leftists in November 2001 did absolutely nothing to help the people of Afghanistan that winter, while the labors of people like Yoshie that time (and in fact some of my own activity at that time) substantively increased the number of people who are now busy talking to others about building a sustainable mass movement that at some point has at least a remote chance of making a difference in the world, in actually saving a few lives in the mideast or elsewhere.
Paul and I probably have differences, perhaps even sharp ones, but such differences are quite secondary to this profound shared viewpoint or point of departure for our political thinking: Build the Mass Movement.
I would like to dream up labels for these two different perspectives within the left. Perhaps we could call Doug's perspective the ChalkBoard Tendency, Paul's perspective the Leaflet Tendency. :-) Carrol @@@@
Sun, 31 Aug 15:57:10 Yoshie Furuhashi
[Doug wrote:Which will get the electricity and water running in Iraq, right?]
No; the General Assembly, however, would sooner come to the conclusion that the business of running Iraq belongs to Iraqis than the Security Council would. It's not as if Iraqis didn't know how to get electricity and water running:
***** The New York Times HEADLINE: AFTER THE WAR: THE RUMOR MILL; G.I.'s Have X-Ray Vision. Of Course.
. . . Frustration seems to feed many of the rumors. Why would the builders of smart bombs and X-ray sunglasses take longer to restore power than Mr. Hussein did after the 1991 Persian Gulf war? The Americans must be withholding electricity as revenge for the attacks on soldiers. People swear there have been Army vehicles driving around with signs announcing that power will be restored when the attacks stop. . . . ***** - Yoshie @@@@
Sun, 31 Aug 16:17:50 Doug Henwood
Yoshie Furuhashi wrote: It's not as if Iraqis didn't know how to get electricity and water running:
That's when Iraq had a strong and functional state. Ugly, but it did keep the electricity flowing. The U.S. destroyed that, nothing works, and people are at each other's throats. The conditions are completely different.- Doug @@@@
Chomsky: The U.N. Learns to Behave Sun, 31 Aug 16:36 Doug Henwood
Shane Taylor wrote: Carrol's rejoinder that what an anti-war movement says or does is irrelevant because it won't change policy comes to mind here. But that's a cop-out. Whether or not an anti-war movement gets any traction with US public opinion is *inseparable* from what it says and does. He and Yoshie are in fact calling to abandon Iraqis to social disintegration, and will rightly received as doing so. Such a position from the anti-war movement would further marginalize it, even discredit it fully. There's no point where you're so weak that you can't act self-destructively. This insistence on the impotence of the anti-war movement only clouds its culpability for what it says and does.
Yes, exactly. Almost no one could take Carrol's position seriously - i.e., the nothing we say could matter, therefore we should say nothing. What political organization could be taken seriously if it took a "no comment" position on some of the most important political issues of our time? Ditto any political intellectual, in conversation with acquaintances, workmates, or curious onlookers? You'd be dismissed as a crank or a joke. - Doug @@@@
Sun, 31 Aug 19:07:12 Yoshie Furuhashi
[Doug] That's when Iraq had a strong and functional state. Ugly, but it did keep the electricity flowing. The U.S. destroyed that, nothing works, and people are at each other's throats. The conditions are completely different. -Doug
By that logic, the United States government, or any other government with a powerful military for that matter, can destroy any functional state, create a mess, become a belligerent occupier, and continue the occupation on the pretext that now there is no functional state because it destroyed it.
In any case, no one but Iraqis themselves is capable of unifying the nation of Iraq and building a new state that enjoys legitimacy in the eyes of the majority of the Iraqi people. The process of nation-building and state-building will not be pretty -- the United States itself, before creating a functioning republican government not controlled by slave-owners, had to fight two bloody wars: the American Revolution and the Civil War, the wars held up by many Americans as shining examples of noble struggles for liberty, rather than as arguments in favor of the British Empire's hold on North America. - Yoshie