Tomgram

"A selfish, superstitious empire…"

Posted on

Remarkable, really. Opposition to the coming war, and increasingly to the Bush administration itself, is global, powerful, and deepening. Just note Naomi Klein’s brief summary of acts of resistance in a recent column in the Toronto Globe and Mail where she calls for serious thought about what kinds of ever more active resistance should be taken to stop this war:

“All week in Italy, activists have been blocking dozens of trains carrying U.S. weapons and personnel on their way to a military base near Pisa, while Italian dockworkers are refusing to load arms shipments. Last weekend, two U.S. military bases were blockaded in Germany, as was the U.S. consulate in Montreal, and the air base at RAF Fairford in Gloucester, England. This coming Saturday, thousands of Irish activists are expected to show up at Shannon airport, which, despite Irish claims of neutrality, is being used by the U.S. military to refuel its planes en route to Iraq. In Chicago last week, more than 100 high-school students demonstrated outside the headquarters of Leo Burnett, the advertising firm that designed the U.S. military’s hip, youth-targeted Army of One campaign. The students claim that in underfunded Latino and African-American high schools, the army recruiters far outnumber the college scouts.

“The most ambitious plan has come from San Francisco, where a coalition of antiwar groups is calling for an emergency non-violent ‘counterstrike’ the day after the war starts: “Don’t go to work or school. Call in sick, walk out: We will impose real economic, social and political costs and stop business as usual until the war stops. It’s a powerful idea: Peace bombs exploding wherever profits are being made from the war — gas stations, arms manufacturers, missile-happy TV stations. It might not stop the war but it would show that there is a principled position between hawk and hippy — a militant resistance for the protection of life.”

To read more Klein click here

Hers is typical of a rich range of antiwar writing (and thinking) springing up everywhere — of which I offer a taste below. As I’ve been saying for months, though the antiwar movement unsurprisingly remains a minority here in the heartland of the globe’s sole hyperpower, its roots are also remarkably deep and widespread. In recent days, for the first time in memory, the executive council of the AFL-CIO passed a resolution against presidential war policy, arguing against American unilateral action in Iraq. That may not sound like much, but this was a council notorious for supporting Nixon’s war in Vietnam.

According to a CNN report, “Bob Muehlenkamp, coordinator of the antiwar coalition U.S. Labor Against the War, called the resolution historic and said it was the first time ‘top leadership of the labor movement has opposed a U.S. president’s war policy.'” At the other end of the spectrum, according to a small piece in the New York Times today, “Students at hundreds of high schools and colleges nationwide are planning a walkout on Wednesday to protest the Bush administration’s plans for war in Iraq.”

In the Vietnam era, President Lyndon Johnson used to talk about how, if we didn’t stop “them” in Vietnam, the next thing you’d know, they’d be landing on the beaches of San Diego. Well, now it turns out that we’ve already taken the beaches of San Diego — for the theatrical creation of naked peace signs (see previous dispatch, “Baring Witness”); while in Athens, hardly less theatrically, a career diplomat quits his post over Bush war policy and issues a stinging, stirring letter, which I include below. (The phrase is in the title of this dispatch is taken from his letter.)

What’s missing then? Most obviously, the Democratic Party. No Democrat from the Senate has yet, as far as I know, even spoken at a demonstration and, Robert Byrd and Ted Kennedy aside, most of the other Democratic Senators and all the presidential candidates except Howard Dean have proved a sorry lot on the war. Alongside the chickenhawks, we should mount a list of plain old Democratic chickens and my first clucking nominee would be Senator Hillary (the silent) Clinton.

“The most ambitious plan has come from San Francisco, where a coalition of antiwar groups is calling for an emergency non-violent ‘counterstrike’ the day after the war starts: “Don’t go to work or school. Call in sick, walk out: We will impose real economic, social and political costs and stop business as usual until the war stops. It’s a powerful idea: Peace bombs exploding wherever profits are being made from the war — gas stations, arms manufacturers, missile-happy TV stations. It might not stop the war but it would show that there is a principled position between hawk and hippy — a militant resistance for the protection of life.”

To read more Klein click here

Hers is typical of a rich range of antiwar writing (and thinking) springing up everywhere — of which I offer a taste below. As I’ve been saying for months, though the antiwar movement unsurprisingly remains a minority here in the heartland of the globe’s sole hyperpower, its roots are also remarkably deep and widespread. In recent days, for the first time in memory, the executive council of the AFL-CIO passed a resolution against presidential war policy, arguing against American unilateral action in Iraq. That may not sound like much, but this was a council notorious for supporting Nixon’s war in Vietnam.

According to a CNN report, “Bob Muehlenkamp, coordinator of the antiwar coalition U.S. Labor Against the War, called the resolution historic and said it was the first time ‘top leadership of the labor movement has opposed a U.S. president’s war policy.'” At the other end of the spectrum, according to a small piece in the New York Times today, “Students at hundreds of high schools and colleges nationwide are planning a walkout on Wednesday to protest the Bush administration’s plans for war in Iraq.”

In the Vietnam era, President Lyndon Johnson used to talk about how, if we didn’t stop “them” in Vietnam, the next thing you’d know, they’d be landing on the beaches of San Diego. Well, now it turns out that we’ve already taken the beaches of San Diego — for the theatrical creation of naked peace signs (see previous dispatch, “Baring Witness”); while in Athens, hardly less theatrically, a career diplomat quits his post over Bush war policy and issues a stinging, stirring letter, which I include below. (The phrase is in the title of this dispatch is taken from his letter.)

What’s missing then? Most obviously, the Democratic Party. No Democrat from the Senate has yet, as far as I know, even spoken at a demonstration and, Robert Byrd and Ted Kennedy aside, most of the other Democratic Senators and all the presidential candidates except Howard Dean have proved a sorry lot on the war. Alongside the chickenhawks, we should mount a list of plain old Democratic chickens and my first clucking nominee would be Senator Hillary (the silent) Clinton.

Below, Ruth Rosen discusses the war’s growing “gender gap” and its significance in her regular column in the San Francisco Chronicle; Howard Zinn in this month’s Progressive magazine offers an eloquent consideration of why, unlike in 1991, even war itself is unlikely to silence this peace movement. Then, Chilean writer and poet Ariel Dorfman offers a poem against American policy in Pablo Picasso’s name that appeared at the openDemocracy website. Take a look.

A final note as I head off for two weeks of teaching in California during which this service could be a little more erratic than usual: We have never had an administration as extreme as this one, not in our lifetimes, not in memory. When we talk about “war” right now, we mean Iraq, but the fact is, this administration is at war with labor, the poor, pensioners, stockholders, you name it. It’s at war with the earth itself. It is creating us, whether it knows it or not. Tom

Do women want war?
By Ruth Rosen
February 27, 2003
The San Francisco Chronicle

We are a divided nation. A recent New York Times/CBS poll reveals that 59 percent of us want to give the United Nations and weapons inspectors more time. Buried within these numbers is also an emerging gender gap. Roughly 12 percent more women than men support a diplomatic solution, disapprove of military action without the United Nations and our allies, and don’t think the impending war is worth substantial American casualties.

The gender gap is back. Right after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001,
it disappeared. Worried about the safety of their families, women — in numbers equal to men — supported a military attack against the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Today, however, one of the most glaring divisions in our country is that women and men no longer see the impending war in Iraq through the same eyes.

To read more Rosen click here

The following is the text of John Brady Kiesling’s letter of resignation to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell. Mr. Kiesling is a career diplomat who has served in United States embassies from Tel Aviv to Casablanca to Yerevan.

Dear Mr. Secretary:

I am writing you to submit my resignation from the Foreign Service of the United States and from my position as Political Counselor in U.S. Embassy Athens, effective March 7. I do so with a heavy heart. The baggage of my upbringing included a felt obligation to give something back to my country. Service as a U.S. diplomat was a dream job. I was paid to understand foreign languages and cultures, to seek out diplomats, politicians, scholars and journalists, and to persuade them that U.S. interests and theirs fundamentally coincided. My faith in my country and its values was the most powerful weapon in my diplomatic arsenal.

It is inevitable that during twenty years with the State Department I would become more sophisticated and cynical about the narrow and selfish bureaucratic motives that sometimes shaped our policies. Human nature is what it is, and I was rewarded and promoted for understanding human nature. But until this Administration it had been possible to believe that by upholding the policies of my president I was also upholding the interests of the American people and the world. I believe it no longer.

The policies we are now asked to advance are incompatible not only with American values but also with American interests. Our fervent pursuit of war with Iraq is driving us to squander the international legitimacy that has been America’s most potent weapon of both offense and defense since the days of Woodrow Wilson. We have begun to dismantle the largest and most effective web of international relationships the world has ever known. Our current course will bring instability and danger, not security.

The sacrifice of global interests to domestic politics and to bureaucratic self-interest is nothing new, and it is certainly not a uniquely American problem. Still, we have not seen such systematic distortion of intelligence, such systematic manipulation of American opinion, since the war in Vietnam. The September 11 tragedy left us stronger than before, rallying around us a vast international coalition to cooperate for the first time in a systematic way against the threat of terrorism. But rather than take credit for those successes and build on them, this Administration has chosen to make terrorism a domestic political tool, enlisting a scattered and largely defeated Al Qaeda as its bureaucratic ally. We spread disproportionate terror and confusion in the public mind, arbitrarily linking the unrelated problems of terrorism and Iraq. The result, and perhaps the motive, is to justify a vast misallocation of shrinking public wealth to the military and to weaken the safeguards that protect American citizens from the heavy hand of government. September 11 did not do as much damage to the fabric of American society as we seem determined to so to ourselves. Is the Russia of the late Romanovs really our model, a selfish, superstitious empire thrashing toward self-destruction in the name of a doomed status quo?

We should ask ourselves why we have failed to persuade more of the world that a war with Iraq is necessary. We have over the past two years done too much to assert to our world partners that narrow and mercenary U.S. interests override the cherished values of our partners. Even where our aims were not in question, our consistency is at issue. The model of Afghanistan is little comfort to allies wondering on what basis we plan to rebuild the Middle East, and in whose image and interests. Have we indeed become blind, as Russia is blind in Chechnya, as Israel is blind in the Occupied Territories, to our own advice, that overwhelming military power is not the answer to terrorism? After the shambles of post-war Iraq joins the shambles in Grozny and Ramallah, it will be a brave foreigner who forms ranks with Micronesia to follow where we lead.

We have a coalition still, a good one. The loyalty of many of our friends is impressive, a tribute to American moral capital built up over a century. But our closest allies are persuaded less that war is justified than that it would be perilous to allow the U.S. to drift into complete solipsism. Loyalty should be reciprocal. Why does our President condone the swaggering and contemptuous approach to our friends and allies this Administration is fostering, including among its most senior officials. Has “oderint dum metuant” really become our motto?

I urge you to listen to America’s friends around the world. Even here in Greece, purported hotbed of European anti-Americanism, we have more and closer friends than the American newspaper reader can possibly imagine. Even when they complain about American arrogance, Greeks know that the world is a difficult and dangerous place, and they want a strong international system, with the U.S. and EU in close partnership. When our friends are afraid of us rather than for us, it is time to worry. And now they are afraid. Who will tell them convincingly that the United States is as it was, a beacon of liberty, security, and justice for the planet?

Mr. Secretary, I have enormous respect for your character and ability. You have preserved more international credibility for us than our policy deserves, and salvaged something positive from the excesses of an ideological and self-serving Administration. But your loyalty to the President goes too far. We are straining beyond its limits an international system we built with such toil and treasure, a web of laws, treaties, organizations, and shared values that sets limits on our foes far more effectively than it ever constrained America’s ability to defend its interests.

I am resigning because I have tried and failed to reconcile my conscience with my ability to represent the current U.S. Administration. I have confidence that our democratic process is ultimately self-correcting, and hope that in a small way I can contribute from outside to shaping policies that better serve the security and prosperity of the American people and the world we share.

A Chorus Against War
By Howard Zinn
The Progressive
March 2003

As I write this, it looks like war. This, in spite .of the obvious lack of enthusiasm in the country for war. The polls that register “approve” or “disapprove” can only count numbers; they cannot test the depth of feeling. And there are many signs that the support for war is shallow and shaky and ambivalent.

This Administration will not likely be stopped, though it knows its support is thin. In fact, that is undoubtedly why it is in such a hurry; it wants to go to war before the support gets any thinner.

The assumption is that once the soldiers are in combat, the American people will unite behind the war. The television screens will show “smart bombs” exploding, and the Secretary of Defense will assure the American people that civilian casualties are being kept to a minimum.

Howard Zinn, author of “A People’s History of the United States,” is a columnist for The Progressive.

To read more Zinn click here

Pablo Picasso has words for Colin Powell from the other side of death
By Ariel Dorfman

openDemocracy
February 25, 2003

When the US Secretary of State presented his case against Iraq at the UN Security Council on 5 February, the tapestry of Guernica that routinely hangs there was covered up. This symbolic denial of a supreme artistic response to war moved Ariel Dorfman to poetry.

Yes, even here, here more than anywhere else,
we know and watch what is going on
what you are doing with the world
we left behind

What else can we do with our time?

Yes, there you were, Mr. Secretary,
I think that is how they call you
there you were
standing in front of my Guernica
a replica it is true
but still my vision of what was done
that day to the men to the women
and to the children to that one child
in Guernica that day in 1937
from the sky

Not really standing in front of it.
It had been covered, our Guernica,
covered so you could speak.
There in the United Nations building.
So you could speak about Iraq.

Undisturbed by Guernica.

Why should it disturb perturb you?
Why did you not ask that the cover
be removed
the picture
be revealed?

Why did you not point to the shrieking
the horse dying over and over again
the woman with the child forever dead
the child that I nurse here in this darkness
the child who watches with me
as you speak
and you speak.
Why did you not say
This is why we must be rid of the dictator.
Why did you not say
This is what Iraq has already done and undone.
Why did you not say
This is what we are trying to save the world from.
Why did you not use
Guernica to make your case?

Were you afraid that the mother
would leap from her image and say
no he is the one
they are the ones who will bomb
from afar
they are the ones who will kill
the child
no no no
he is the one they them

from the distance the bombs
keeping us always out of sight
inside death and out of sight

Were you afraid that the horse
would show the world the near future
three thousand cruise missiles in the first hour
spinning into Baghdad
ten thousand Guernicas
spinning into Baghdad
from the sky

Were you afraid of my art
what I am still saying
more than sixty five years later
the story still being told
the vision still dangerous
the light bulb still hanging
like an eye from the dead
my eye that looks at you from the dead

beware

beware the eye of the child
in the dark

you will join us
the child and I
the horse and the mother
here on the other side

you will join us soon
you will journey here
as we all do

is that why you were
so afraid of me?

join us
and spend the rest of eternity
watching
watching>
watching
next to us
next to the remote dead
not only of Iraq
not only of

is that why you were
so afraid of that eye?

watching
your own eyes sewn open wide looking
at the world you left behind

there is nothing else to do
with our time

sentenced to watch
and watch
by our side

until there will be no Guernicas left
until the living understand

and then, Mr. Secretary,
and then

a world with no Guernicas

and then
yes then
you and I
yes then

we can rest

you and I and the covered child

To read this poem laid out visually as the author wanted at the openDemocracy site click here