Is
Our Peace Activists Learning?
By David Swanson
27 May, 2007
Countercurrents.org
Over
the past two months of repeated Congressional votes to fund the occupation
of Iraq, culminating in President Bush's signing the bill on Friday,
what – if anything – have we learned? Have we learned anything
about individuals or political parties or activist organizations to
trust or despise, or have we learned better what to demand of them regardless
of such emotions? Have we learned anything about policies to support,
battles to lose, pyrrhic victories, or how to talk about ending the
occupation?
A clear and growing majority
of Americans wants to end the occupation. Yet many people are opposed
to defunding it. So, not enough of us have learned that you cannot end
this occupation without defunding it. And far too few of us fully understand
that ultimately we'll need impeachment before the occupation actually
ends.
Because we don't grasp the
need for impeachment, we focus on asking Congress to oppose the war
but ignore Congress' failure to investigate the lies that launched the
war (and we call it a "war," giving credence to the notion
that it is something that can be won or lost). http://afterdowningstreet.org/node/22933
Because we haven't faced up to a choice between continuing the occupation
and defunding it, we allow Congress Members to make anti-occupation
gestures and then fund the occupation, not in order to prolong the occupation
and fund its profiteers, but "for the troops."
As long as we allow the pretense
to continue that wars are fought on behalf of the young men and women
sent to fight them, we will never see a serious effort on the part of
the Democratic leadership in Congress to end the occupation of Iraq.
One thing many people have gradually come to realize is that we have
not seen such an effort yet, only pretenses of it. Certainly, some who
now disapprove of what the Congress just passed still think they were
right to support what it was doing two months ago, and it's less important
to return to that debate than to get our act together from here on out.
But we are more likely to make wise decisions in the future if we learn
the right lessons from our mistakes. So, a quick review may be in order.
Two months ago, peace activists
were pushing hard for the House to allow a vote on an amendment by Barbara
Lee to end the war. Numerous activist groups sided with Speaker Pelosi
and the Democratic leadership and opposed the Lee amendment in favor
of a supplemental spending bill to end the war. The push back from principled
peace activists against the supplemental was muted by concerns that
if the Lee amendment passed, then the supplemental would be a good thing.
On March 22nd, the Democrats
decided not to allow a vote on the Lee Amendment. http://afterdowningstreet.org/node/20355
So the debate became clearly one for funding the occupation or not funding
the occupation, but there was only one day to lobby before the vote,
and numerous groups were pushing the idea that the bill was the best
we could get and actually took serious steps to end the occupation of
Iraq.
This flew in the face of
the simple fact that no bill at all would have been better than this
one, not to mention that the bill promoted the theft of Iraq's oil,
failed to use the power of the purse to end the war, and allowed Bush
to "waive" other measures he might not like. The Democratic
leaders themselves didn't pretend this was a bill to end the war, so
much as a bill to move the war to Afghanistan. But the media lapped
up the astroturf-roots talk about peace and standing strong against
to Bush. Here's a video of Rep. Lynn Woolsey opposing the bill in a
debate with Bob Borosage who promotes it as the best antiwar bill possible:
http://afterdowningstreet.org/node/20356
But even Woolsey, and Congresswomen
Waters and Lee, played along with the game. They planned to vote No,
but promised Pelosi they would not ask any other members to follow them.
http://afterdowningstreet.org/node/20370
Only Congressman Dennis Kucinich pledged to vote No and urged his colleagues
to join him. Peace activists demanded that standard from other members
http://afterdowningstreet.org/node/20376
and an unfortunate split developed between those taking such a strong
position for peace and those activist groups following Pelosi's lead
– a split that may be healing as the Democrats' position has worsened
ever so slightly over the past two months.
But this history lesson could
begin much earlier. Pelosi's plan for her first 100 hours as speaker
didn't even mention Iraq. She pledged that defunding the occupation
and impeaching the warmakers were both "off the table." Democratic
Party-led activist groups take her "off the table" pledge
seriously on impeachment, but pretend the one on the funding of the
"war" never happened. This is an advantage because it means
more people lobby her to end the war. But it's a disadvantage if we're
insufficiently skeptical about what she's doing.
Pelosi used every dirty trick
imaginable to badger Congress Members into voting for this spending
bill, including threatening to take away chairmanships and to back primary
challengers and deny election support. On March 23rd, the House passed
the supplemental. http://afterdowningstreet.org/heroes
The corporate media and the groups following Pelosi called this a vote
against a war, not a vote to continue funding an occupation. This made
the position of peace activists almost incomprehensible, because we
opposed the Republicans who voted no in opposition to the little bells
and whistles and nonbinding deadlines, we opposed the two Republicans
who voted yes to fund the occupation, we opposed the bulk of the Democrats
who voted yes to fund the occupation, and we praised the eight Democrats
and two Republicans who voted No for the right reasons. The media was
completely incapable of telling this story, but Congress Members and
the leaders of activist groups heard it quite clearly from constituents.
By March 27th, the Democratic
leadership had announced its willingness to compromise with Bush and
weaken further the weak bill that had just been voted on. http://afterdowningstreet.org/node/20532
But activists' eyes were moving to the Senate … and devising a
new way to get distracted. We focused on urging Senators to pass Jim
Webb's amendment to discourage an attack on Iran http://afterdowningstreet.org/node/20502
We failed to focus strongly on opposition to the money that could fund
an attack on Iran, money that is now in Bush's pocket. On March 29th,
the Senate passed the supplemental and did not even vote on an Iran
amendment. http://afterdowningstreet.org/node/20655
Again, the media called this a vote against the "war."
On April 25th and 26th the
House and Senate passed a compromise version supplemental, which had
been watered down further from what both the House and Senate had originally
passed. http://afterdowningstreet.org/node/21833
And on May 1st Bush vetoed the bill.
Now, here's where things
get really weird. Even though the bill funded the occupation, required
stealing the oil, permitted an attack on Iran, and contained nothing
useful with any teeth in it, the story line had been spread so effectively
that this was a good bill, that even the peace groups that had opposed
its passage supported protesting its veto. And of course the veto was
objectionable. Bush opposed the tiny impositions in the bill on his
dictatorial power. But once you've protested the vetoing of a bill to
fund an occupation of someone else's country, you pretty well have got
yourself stuck promoting a new bill to do the same. And you can either
back a bill with the same or greater likelihood of being vetoed, or
you can back one less likely to meet that fate. And there can be no
question which route the Democratic leadership will take. So, the question
becomes whether you are yet ready to break with them, even if –
as it turns out – they break with themselves and oppose their
own bill after they support it.
But there was an important
act left in this drama before we reached that deus ex machina. On May
7th the progressive Democrats in the House cut a deal with the leadership.
They would be permitted to vote on a good bill to end the occupation
(which the leadership would not whip for and which would fail), and
in exchange they would turn around an hour later and vote to fund the
occupation with an even weaker bill than last time. http://afterdowningstreet.org/node/22239
The new supplemental did
not contain even a hint of a deadline to end the war, and for most of
the month of May almost no one noticed or remarked on this state of
affairs. Media coverage by May 8th had completely dropped any mention
of the absence of a deadline in the bill. The focus was all on "benchmarks"
and how many months of the occupation would be funded at a time. It
was as if the presence of even a nonbinding deadline in the vetoed bill
had been completely eradicated from history and memory, even though
that deadline had been Bush's primary professed reason for vetoing the
bill. The story now was of the Democrats getting tough and standing
up to Bush with "benchmarks" even though this meant sending
him exactly what he wanted, a bill with no deadline, and even though
he supported all of the "benchmarks." http://afterdowningstreet.org/node/22284
So, what did peace groups
and other activist groups do? They promoted Yes votes on Jim McGovern's
bill to end the occupation, and almost completely ignored the vote coming
an hour later on funding additional months of "war". So, on
May 10th, a huge number of Democrats (169) voted for McGovern, and then
all but 10 of them turned around and voted to fund the war. And then
we thanked them. They had played us like a fiddle. http://afterdowningstreet.org/node/22334
The Senate was far less slick.
It didn't hold its votes an hour apart, but separated them by two weeks.
On May 16th, the Senate voted down an amendment by Russ Feingold to
end the occupation. http://afterdowningstreet.org/node/22540
The vote for the money was still to come, and who had voted right on
Feingold would be forgotten by then.
Meanwhile, something quite
unusual and dramatic happened. By May 23rd, Congress Members Pelosi
and David Obey had turned against their own bill. They were going to
make sure it came up for a vote and passed, but they were going to vote
against it. http://afterdowningstreet.org/node/22817
Once this happened, Pelosi-following activist groups, too, turned against
the bill. And the absence of a deadline in the bill reemerged in the
media with a vengeance. Now everyone suddenly noticed that the bill
no longer had any sort of, even nonbinding, deadline in it. This was
a bill for endless war. The "benchmarks" were forgotten. The
short-term funding talk was forgotten. And people were even beginning
to see through the game.
While Pelosi was "opposing"
the bill, she was also beginning to take heat from all sides for having
brought the bill up for a vote and assured its passage. She voted No,
but she did not whip, cajole, threaten, or bribe her colleagues to join
her against the occupation as she had done to get them to join her for
it. During the debate on the floor prior to the vote, Pelosi, Obey,
and others made clear that they wanted the bill to pass and considered
it necessary "for the troops." Obey remarked on the floor:
"I hate this agreement.
I'm going to vote against the major portion of this agreement even though
I negotiated it."
Then he went on to defend
his record of "funding the troops" and blamed Bush's veto
for preventing money from getting to the troops. There was no chance
Obey would let this bill be voted down.
No one mentioned that not
a single troop gets a single dollar because the occupation continues,
or that the Congressional Research Service said in April that the occupation
was already funded through July, or that polls of troops in Iraq last
year found that a strong majority wanted to end the occupation last
year, or that most of the money goes to occupation-profiteers.
Republicans attacked Obey
for voting against his own bill. Nobody criticized him for introducing
it in the first place. But activists and the media were waking up to
the game. http://afterdowningstreet.org/whip
And Bush's statement after signing the bill containing his own "benchmarks"
the next day was along the lines of "I was born and raised in this
here briar patch." http://afterdowningstreet.org/node/22944
From the left to the center,
everyone got this one right as soon as it was too late. Pelosi had joined
the Republicans to put a Republican bill on the floor, had allowed right-wing
Democrats to assure its passage, and then had pretended to rejoin the
Democrats in voting against it. Reactions ranged from planning for the
next vote, to a demand for protests and phone calls, to a plan to recruit
primary challengers against the most pro-war Democrats http://www.democrats.com/primary-2008
, to a demand that all peace-loving souls reject the entire Democratic
Party and either back the Green Party or (if you don't care about poor
people or think that right now keeping people alive has got to take
precedence) support the Ron Paul Republicans.
There's only one Democrat
in Congress with a completely clean record through this process: Dennis
Kucinich. He argued against invading Iraq prior to the 2003 vote that
authorized it. He published his case against it and helped persuade
many of his colleagues to vote No. Kucinich challenged the legality
of the war in court in an effort to prevent it. He proposed a detailed
plan to end the occupation of Iraq over three years ago. His current
plan is found in his bill HR 1234.
Kucinich is the only Democrat
who has voted against every new funding bill for the occupation and
always urged his colleagues to vote against the occupation as well.
He was one of only seven who voted against the Rule to bring the latest
Supplemental to a vote.
Kucinich is the only member
who has repeatedly raised the topic of oil theft in the Democratic Caucus'
meetings. And after Obey screamed as him for it and defamed him in the
media, Kucinich obtained 60 minutes on the floor of the House to speak
to the topic. (A result that seems sadly unlikely to convince Obey to
stop screaming at people.)
Now, in March when Pelosi
was threatening to not support or to challenge incumbent Democrats in
the next election if they wouldn't back her occupation spending bill,
nobody called her a traitor or drummed her out of the Democratic Party.
But on Friday I had to take a leave from my part-time consulting to
Kucinich's presidential campaign, because the Cleveland Plain Dealer,
which has hated Kucinich for decades, began complaining that in my other
job I was promoting challengers to pro-occupation Democrats. I told
the reporter, Sabrina Eaton, and she refused to print, that I believed
contested primaries were healthy for any party, and that participation
in them was a pro-Democratic Party position at a moment when a lot of
people were fed up and quitting the party in protest.
But Eaton operates under
the common delusion that participation and challenges in primaries must
be stifled so as not to nominate candidates too far from the middle
to win general elections. That is to say, this is her rule for Democrats,
not necessarily Republicans. And she compounds this with the false position,
which is almost a matter of definition, that peace cannot be a centrist
position.
But I favor peace candidates
in primaries in every party, including Democratic, Republican, Green,
and any other. And I favor a strong Green challenge to the Democrats
for the same reason I favor strong primary challengers to Democrats,
to influence the Congress now. To the amazement and frustration of some
Green partisans I have not learned from the past two months or the past
few decades that the entire Democratic Party is an evil plot that must
be purely opposed. While Kucinich may be the best Democrat, others are
relatively great, good, and mediocre. I'm not trying to identify roll
models. I'm trying to end a war and reestablish the rule of law.
And to the amazement of many
Democratic real politikers I do not accept that promoting Greens is
a dangerous temptation that will only give us more Republicans. I've
seen virtually nothing over the past five months of Democratic rule
that was superior to what we had under the Republicans. A few embarrassing
hearings, but no enforcement of subpoenas, no impeachment. A partial
correction to the minimum wage, but no end to the steady march of corporate
trade deals. A hell of a lot of rhetoric, but no end to the occupation
of Iraq, in fact no end in sight, and no resistance to attacking Iran.
Ron Paul has done more for peace than Pelosi. And if we don't make clear
to pro-occupation, pro-Cheney-immunity Democrats that we will vote Green
or Republican or stay home, then we should never bother leaving our
homes.
I do hope that some people
have learned not to be loyal to the leadership of any party when it
requires setting aside their own views or those of the people they represent.
I was never loyal to Pelosi and Reid, but I have learned more in recent
weeks about the depths they will sink to. Politics for politicians is
all about friendships and loyalties. For activists it is not, and if
Kucinich supports a pro-war candidate for president I will not support
him in that. But I will urge everyone now to do the one thing most likely
to influence Congress toward peace: fund Kucinich's presidential campaign.
The optimistic view of this
story is, I think, as follows. We have finally had a vote for money
in which a Yes vote was understood to be a Yes vote, and a No vote was
understood to be a No vote, and 140 Congress Members and 14 Senators
voted No, rejecting the absurd Orwellian dictum on "funding the
troops." More and more activists and other Americans understand
that story. More and more people are willing to demand of Congress what
we know is possible rather than what they tell us is possible. And we
know that Congress can, if it chooses, bring up a bill right after Memorial
Day break to ban any future spending on the occupation of Iraq beyond
September, require the withdrawal of all troops, mercenaries, and contractors
by that date, turn Iraq's territory, oil, bases, and our world's largest
"embassy" over to the Iraqi people, and make it a felony for
Bush to violate these terms.
We have a duty to learn not
to compromise until we need to, to ask up front for what we really want,
to treat every member of Congress as if they work for us rather than
the reverse, to stop calling an occupation a war, and to insist that
the only harm done to US troops is done by those who fail to bring them
home.
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