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March 17, 2003
President Bush has announced his intention to begin war against Iraq within 48 hours, assuming Saddam Hussein does not voluntarily relinquish power. This is a sad day, as it represents a blatant United States abandonment of multilateral international cooperation on behalf of peace. But this is not a day for the movement for peace and justice to surrender.
President Bush has ignored the voices of millions of Americans and even more millions of people throughout the world. In the past few months an enormous movement for a peaceful solution to the Iraqi crisis sprang up across the globe. A movement strong enough that it altered the policies of numerous governments from acquiescing to the will of the world's lone superpower to opposing it or engaging in active non-cooperation.
That is a tremendous achievement and everyone who helped build this voice for sanity should be proud of their contribution. Those of us who demanded the peaceful containment of the Iraqi regime were more realistic than those who pushed for war. The advocates of war are expecting that the onset of conflict will demobilize the peace movement or at least a section of it. In fact efforts will be redoubled over the next forty-eight hours and beyond to stop a war or to shorten one that begins.
The war planners expect a speedy "victory," and they may well get that. But the movement for a peaceful and democratic foreign policy will continue to grow, as there is no clear end-game for the resulting United States occupation nor are there any clear limits to further wars in the name of United States security.
The simple fact is that the President has taken the country in a wrong and dangerous direction — a direction that can only be changed by political means. And by conflating the "war on terrorism" with a "war on terrorist states" the administration threatens to destroy intelligence service and diplomatic cooperation that between our government and those in the Islamic world.
This is not a limited military campaign that can be won on the battlefield and forgotten. This military campaign is the first of the new wars the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive strikes is intended to justify. The war will be followed by an occupation led by Americans and a reconstruction led by American corporations rather than international humanitarian organizations. There are new targets for action: Iran and North Korea are already being discussed.
Since 1996 a small group of right wing policy operatives, gathered under the name of the Project for a New American Century (led by William Kristol Richard Perle, and Paul Wolfowitz, to name a few), have articulated the view that the 21st century should be an American Century in which United States military and economic power would dominate the world, making it safe for free markets and "democracy" (read any government favorable to American global interests). Globalization backed by American power would make the world safe for "the American way of life" (or the neo-liberal model of globalization. The influence of this group and their policy centers has been so profound and so obvious that Bush officials in key positions, such as Secretary of State Powell, have found it necessary to deny its influence.
This war and those that could well follow it do not flow from any direct threat to the United States. Even in his speech tonight President Bush talked about a future threat. There is no smoking gun. There are no demonstrable ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda. The CIA admits that Iraq is many years away from developing a nuclear device, yet alone the capacity to deliver one. And the horrible use of Iraqi chemical and biological warfare is not a threat to the United States, but rather to an Iran that used comparable weapons of mass destruction in the Iran-Iraq war from 1981 to 1990.
Of course, in that war, the United States consciously sided with secular, nationalist Iraq against fundamentalist, Shiite Iran. We aided and abetted the Iraqi development of chemical and biological weapons and refused to condemn the Iraqi use of these weapons against its own Kurdish population. Despite Bush administration use of the oppression of the Kurds to justify our invasion this very same administration is willing to sanction the Turks sending 50,000 troops into northern Iraq, a move whose only aim would be to disarm the Iraqi Kurds.
Bush's war is a political war in favor of a new ideological doctrine of imperial dominance. Thus, this war can only be defeated politically, by a regime change in the United States. The peace movement if it is to end this conflict and prevent the next conflict must begin now to challenge the underlying doctrine. Our message must become more than "no war." We must provide an alternative vision of a just United States foreign policy.
The war against Iraq is an ideological assertion of the right of the American Empire to use brutal force to restructure the globe in its own image. This is a systemic view of a right-wing administration that conceives of the "free world" as consisting of governments that follow neo-liberal economic development policies and support United States foreign policy aims. Thus, such noted "democracies" as Saudi Arabia and Pakistan remain in the United States' camp of "freedom."
Bush's National Security Doctrine says the United States can "preventively" attack any nation that it conceives to be even a "long-run threat" to United States interests anywhere around the globe. The doctrine is a misnomer, as it moves well beyond the "just war" doctrine of a "pre-emptive" military strike being justified when an about-to-be-attacked nation can only defend itself successfully if it attacks first. It is a vision of imperial arrogance mirrored in the United States' disregard for both world public opinion and the majority of the UN Security Council. It is a doctrine that threatens to negate the very principle of national sovereignty that underpins global stability. And this doctrine of unilateral United States supremacy precludes the development of truly multilateral global norms and institutions to prevent genocide, terrorism, nuclear proliferation, and international human rights violations.
If Iraq is first, will Iran be next? What of North Korea? Pakistan? Venezuela? Colombia? Brazil? And how can a United States that has violated numerous international treaties (Kyoto, the International Criminal Court, the ABM treaty) caution a Pakistan or India (or an Egypt or Israel) not to engage in "pre-emptive" strikes against one another?
The logic of the doctrine of "pre-emptive" wars has stunning implications. First and most frightful is that it promotes nuclear proliferation. If possessing nuclear weapons is what it takes to avoid a United States preemptive strike than every state that is threatened will want one. And if a credible delivery system is necessary and missiles are not available, than the intelligence operatives, or worse, non-governmental para-military groups associated with threatened regimes, will undertake to deliver such weapons to our shores.
We must begin to challenge the Bush doctrine in the aftermath of this war. The anti-war movement must create ongoing institutional structures and movement strategies that will build long-term opposition to the new National Security Doctrine. Even if the United States wins a short-term military victory, the struggle for a just peace in the Middle East will not end. We must fight not only for a balanced US foreign policy committed to secure statehood for both the Palestinian and Israeli peoples, but also for a democratic, independent Iraq.
Thus, the peace movement should agitate for United Nations' — and not United States — administration of post-war Iraqi economic and military reconstruction. We should oppose United States support for any Iraqi regime that ignores the need for guaranteed autonomy for the Kurdish minority and full political and civil rights for the Shiite majority. Many in the Bush administration would be glad to turn over Iraq to a Sunni ex-Baathist general who could preserve the "national integrity" of Iraq and maintain the flow of oil. We must demand that Iraqi oil be owned and controlled by a democratic Iraqi government and used to benefit the Iraqi people — and not to pay for the United States military expedition and occupation. And of course we must bring our troops home.
The unilateral attack on Iraq is part and parcel of the Reagan-Bush worldview that conceives of the United States as the sole force for good in the world. In this parochial world-view, the US neo-liberal economic model must be forced upon the nations of the world and American military power must both defend the interests of the United States and bring peace to the world community.
Educating the public as to the dangers of this arrogant ideology of American exceptionalism necessitates building a peace and social justice movement for the long-run, a movement that fights for an alternative vision of a just America and a just world. Much of the peace movement is already committed to this direction.
The struggle against US militarism abroad is also a fight against the neo-liberal economic policies of gutting the public sector, redistributing income and wealth to the rich, and deregulating the global economy. In DSA's daily work in the anti-war movement, we must calmly put forth our commitment to building a mainstream peace movement that can speak to ordinary Americans who do not already concur with our alternative vision. Only by doing so, can we help build a anti-war movement that can bring about the "regime change" at home necessary to constructing a truly global, post-Cold War international community.
Frank Llewellyn
National Director, DSA
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