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DEMOCRATIC
SOCIALISTS
OF
AMERICA
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October 26,
2007
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NEWS FROM DSA |
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DSA Releases October 27th Anti-War Message
 In solidarity with the participants in Saturday's
National Mobilization to End the War in Iraq demonstrations in Boston, Chicago,
Los Angeles, New Orleans, New York City, Orlando, Philadelphia, Salt Lake City,
San Francisco, Seattle and Jonesborough, Tenn., Democratic
Socialists of America  released a new anti-war message. The message
has been made into a flyer that can be distributed at anti-war events. A copy is
available in PDF format in the tool box section of DSA's Website. Click
here to view the flyer. DSA is a
proud endorser of the October 27 march. The complete text of the message
follows:
Ideology and
Oil Power the War
Seven of every 10
Americans support pulling U.S. troops and private security consultants out of
Iraq.
So why are they still there?
What keeps the war
raging?
And who benefits?
George W. Bush, perhaps the worst president the country ever produced, is chiefly responsible for using his imperial office to start and drag out this disastrous war. But a towel-snapping, cartoon-like frat boy's infirmities and chronic bungling can't explain a war that's lasted longer than any U.S. military action except for Vietnam.
Bush followed the lead of a group
of neo-conservative ideologues who believed in a new American century in which
American leadership and military might would reinforce free- market capitalism
and shape the world in our image. Iraq was to be rebuilt as a new democratic
outpost that would alter the regional political alliances and usher in a new
period of peace and stability in the Middle East. The ideological rigidity of
Bush, Cheney and company has turned the world against us at a cost of nearly
4,000 American lives and anywhere from 200,000 to 1.2 million Iraqi lives. And
then there is the oil.
It's not that the Iraqis want us there. As Lawrence Wright said in The New Yorker (Oct. 22),
American
military leaders say that the surge has reduced sectarian attacks to their
lowest level in more than a year, and yet the number of Iraqis
wanting the U.S. to withdraw has risen by 12 percent over the same
period of time. Anbar Province, which President Bush recently visited
because the surge had its greatest success there, has the highest concentration
of those saying America should leave immediately. ... As long as
we remain in Iraq, the Iraqi people will feel themselves to be
subjugated by a foreign power.
It's not because of the
gutlessness of the Democratic leadership in Congress. Too many Democrats share
the Bush administration's vision. Any resolution calling for immediate
withdrawal or even a highly justified impeachment would have failed, though the
House leadership's inability to deny funding for the war and "the surge" taints
the Democrats as a principled party of opposition and has given the war-makers
all they need to continue the slaughter. But it's a crass exaggeration to say,
as one writer put it, "the bulk of the antiwar movement has become subservient
to the Democratic Party and to the agenda of its prime candidates for the
presidency in 2008, with Hillary Clinton in the lead." Of all the Democratic
presidential contenders, only Clinton fails to rule out a nuclear assault on
Iran. This peace movement is a refutation of Hillary Clinton's neoliberalism,
not an enabler for her. It's also a wake-up call to supporters of John Edwards
and Barak Obama, who also hedge on a full U.S. pullout.
We are not
demobilized
The peace movement has not died, as some radical critics would have
it. Rejecting the fetid politics of the Iraqi opposition has not immobilized war
protestors or blunted opposition to U.S. intervention. Today's mobilization is
proof that no one is demobilized, that support for a radical change in U.S.
policy is growing, and that those demanding immediate withdrawal need not also
apologize or feel they are fronting for armed clerical reactionaries in the
Middle East. With the U.S.'s history of abetting governments and movements
temporarily allied to it that jail and murder secular leftist and union leaders,
why the surprise when the State Department and the CIA's own attack dogs turn on
them? Why blame the left for the growth of Islamic fundamentalism? Thank
the realpolitik maneuvering of administrations from Jimmy Carter to George W.
Bush for that. And why should the U.S. Left turn a blind eye to Islamic
reaction, let alone pretend yesterday's cold-war U.S. allies are today's
friends? We can oppose U.S. imperial aims and frustrate corporate interests
without giving a gram of political support to the Islamic fundamentalist
Right.
The war grinds on fecklessly planned and ham-handedly carried out. Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez' recent comments that the administration's conduct of the war was "incompetent" and "catastrophically flawed" is only the latest and most public reflection of what career officers believe?the war is serving a bottom-line objective: it prepares the ground for keeping a major oil producer within the reach of U.S. corporate interests. One subtext of "Mission Accomplished" is "It's the Oil, Stupid." And that mission is close to being finished.
Former Federal Reserve chair Alan
Greenspan let the cat out of the bag by admitting in his recent autobiography,
"I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone
knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil."
As Jim Holt notes in The London
Review of Books (Oct. 18), when looked at from the standpoint of long-term
corporate interests, the war is neither unwinnable, a quagmire, a disaster, nor
even much of a mistake. Iraq sits on a sea of oil, five times the reserves of
those in the U.S., and perhaps one quarter of the entire world's oil resources.
"The value of Iraqi oil, largely light crude with low production costs, would be
of the order of $30 trillion at today's prices. For purposes of comparison, the
projected total cost of the US invasion/occupation is around $1 trillion," Holt
writes.
No wonder the U.S. is so committed
to privatizing Iraqi oil holdings, or why the 26,000-member Iraqi Federation of
Oil Unions, the nation's largest labor group (and once banned and hunted by
Saddam's Baath Party government) opposes the planned "hydrocarbon law" sell-off,
or why the U.S.-backed Iraqi government called out the army to stop last June's
strike and arrest union leaders.
Iraqi unions resist
privatization
This isn't a new fight.
In 2003, when multinational corporation Halliburton sought control of the wells,
the union struck, exports were halted and Halliburton left. Similar actions
forced U.S. and other foreign firms to drop takeover plans for deep-water
shipping facilities. But passage of a new, U.S.-authored law, what the Bush
administration calls a "benchmark" for the Iraqi government, would leave just 17
of Iraq's 80 existing fields to the Iraqi National Oil Company. "The
rest - including all yet to be discovered oil - [would be] under foreign corporate
control for 30 years," writes Holt. Five permanent military super-bases, away
from urban areas and easily defendable, protect the oil infrastructure but not
the population.
Thus, a partition of the country,
proposed by presidential hopeful Sen. Joseph Biden, or even a significant
drawdown of U.S. troops, though not necessarily of Blackwater-type contractors,
would not change the thrust of U.S. policy: an oil grab. Nor would it interfere
with the ancillary strategic advantages of owning the largest single oil deposit
in the world.
That's why a total and immediate
pullout is necessary. Not because a radical stand by definition trumps a more
gradual approach. Not because American consumers won't benefit greatly from
access to cheaper oil as the supply increases, or because every industry from
travel and freight hauling to pharmaceuticals won't gain (the short-term domestic
consequences would be rosy, at least for business) but because the same system
that keeps American working people in economic peonage and politically powerless
will get a new lease on life if Iraq becomes a U.S. oil field.
If we want to end war, we need to
end the systemic compulsion for going to war. This war was not fought for
nation-building (the Bush administration early disavowed that claim) nor to end
terror. It was fought for strategic imperial advantages, from which most
Americans will not and cannot benefit, while it maintains a clique of super-rich
pirates in economic and political power. If war is politics by other means, then
peace has to be politics, too. We stand a better chance of crippling the power
of America's oligarchs and making the U.S. an economic, social and political
democracy again if, instead of being the world's behemoth, the U.S. acts as the
model of a nation with a democratic foreign policy.
Mark Twain, watching as U.S.
troops butchered native Filipinos in an adventure his day's aspiring
colonialists had the cheek to claim was merely the action of protectors,
concluded that "we have gone there to conquer, not to redeem. I am opposed to
having the eagle put its talons on any other land". The same talons the eagle
puts into Iraq today are dug deeply into Americans, too. An immediate cutoff of
military spending in Iraq and the withdrawal of every U.S. troop, private
military consultant and intelligence officer helps not just the Iraqis to
reconstruct their nation; it helps those of us at home to reconstruct ours,
too.
In solidarity,
National Director
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Paid for by the Democratic
Socialists of America PAC, 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 505, New York, NY 10038;
not approved by any candidate or candidate's
committee. |
