Empire Notes

The occupation is a disaster and nobody outside of the extreme right wing is able to support it. The United States has repeatedly attacked entire towns because of the supposed presence of a handful of wanted people (taking Israeli methods of collective punishment and expanding them dramatically) and committed a serious of shockingly sadistic abuses on innocent Iraqis in their custody. When, in late April, Bush was forced to defend his “Mission Accomplished” stunt of the year before, he said, “Well, at least there’s no torture chambers, rape rooms, and mass graves in Iraq.

Except, of course, for the torture chambers, rape rooms, and mass graves

Across the political spectrum, people know that we were right and they were wrong. Yet there has hardly been a peep out of the antiwar movement. There RNC protest was great, but it was basically an anti-Bush protest -- there wasn’t even any messaging about the just-concluded offensive against Najaf in which probably 2000 or more people were killed.

There are many reasons for this collapse of the antiwar movement, but I’ll focus on two.

First, the drive to get Kerry elected. If this happens, it will be largely due to the efforts of a wide variety of progressive nonprofits and activist groups to do voter-registration and get out the vote efforts in the handful of “swing states” remaining in the country. Pro-Democratic operatives in key states like Pennsylvania and Florida are claiming a 2, 3, or more to 1 advantage over Republicans in registering new voters.

Massive amounts of resources have been devoted to this; for example, the Service Employees International Union is spending $65 million on such efforts.

Much of the core membership of United for Peace and Justice are doing the same thing, although at a vastly smaller scale.

Work like this is laudable and enables antiwar groups to build links with labor, communities of color, and others.

But this is not antiwar work. And if any progressives, up to and including the leadership of SEIU, think that Kerry will reward them if elected, they are living in the same fantasy world as George Bush. He will credit the militarism of the Democratic National Convention and his promise to go and personally kill every terrorist or would-be terrorist in the world. And, of course, his corporate and military backers.

A second reason is that, with regard to protest actions, we have dumbed down our message to the ultimate demand “Bring the troops home now!”

I have no problem with calling to end the occupation now. But we have to realize that even people who don’ support the war don’t look to us as some kind of spiritual authority. Nobody cares about our demands. People will listen to our arguments, information, and plans, but no longer to our ultimate demand.

We need responses to immediate political developments and transitional positions and campaigns. Otherwise, we appear out of touch; even now, as they’ve raided Samarra and started bombing Sadr City regularly, we have no response

Some groups have tried to imply that transitional demands imply dilution of the anti-imperialist agenda. This is as silly as saying that demands for living wage legislation imply dilution of an anti-capitalist agenda.

Everything that happens in Iraq should build our base. We must mobilize against bombing of civilian areas and build our base. We must mobilize against torture and build our base. Right now, we must mobilize against Bush administration plans to manipulate the January elections in Iraq (and the upcoming election in Afghanistan). Any election held under military occupation is illegitimate. But we can’t stop the elections in Iraq, Thus, we have to mobilize to ensure that the elections, while remaining illegitimate, are as free and fair as possible. In the process, we bring into the movement people who believe in democracy but were unsure about the occupation; we may even derail plans to fix the elections.

The occupation of Iraq will be a long struggle. The election will be over in a month, but the occupation is with us for years to come. We can’t affect it unless we build steadily over time. Mere repetition of “Bring the troops home now” won’t do it.