More on the Democrats and the war
As a followup to my comments about the Democrats and their response to the Republican resolution on Iraq, ZNet has published an insightful commentary by Gilbert Achcar and Stephen R. Shalom on this subject. Here is a key part of the article:
Achcar and Salom hit the nail right on the head. The fact is that Murtha's resolution, while a step in the right direction, represented something different from what the antiwar movement is advocating. The devil is in the details, and the reasons behind his proposal are more practical than principled--the war is a failed implementation of an agenda that he still seems to support; so let's end the war, he seems to be telling us, but the imperial goals that lay behind the way are still worth pursuing. Let us not forget that he was a war hawk. His six month timetable is excessive and his goal of redeploying troops elsewhere in the mideast is just a continuation of US imperialism. The prowar Democrats--as well as people with muddled views on the war like Nancy Pelosi, who has herself refused to endorse an immediate withdrawal or to endorse Murtha's proposal at her Friday press conference--actually used the Republican resolution to duck behind, to avoid taking a real, principled stand against the war.
[T]he anti-war movement needs to be careful not to confuse Murtha's position with its own.
When Murtha says "redeploy" -- instead of withdraw -- the troops from Iraq, he makes clear that -- despite his rhetoric -- he doesn't want to really bring them home, but to station them in the Middle East. As he told Anderson Cooper of CNN:
"We ... have united the Iraqis against us. And so I'm convinced, once we redeploy to Kuwait or to the surrounding area, that it will be much safer. They won't be able to unify against the United States. And then, if we have to go back in, we can go back in."
Moreover, Murtha's resolution calls for the U.S. to create "a quick-reaction U.S. force and an over-the-horizon presence of U.S. Marines" to be "deployed to the region."
We strongly disagree. The anti-war movement cannot endorse U.S. military intervention in the Middle East, whether over or under the horizon. We don't want U.S. troops remaining in the region and poised to go back into Iraq. They don't belong there, period. Some -- though not Murtha -- suggest keeping U.S. bases within Iraq, close to the oil fields or in Kurdistan, in order to intervene more or less on the pattern of what U.S. forces are doing in Afghanistan. But this is a recipe for disaster, since the Iraqi view that the United States intends a permanent occupation is one of the main causes inciting the insurgency. Moreover, stationing U.S. forces in Kurdistan could only deepen the already dangerous ethnic animosities among Iraqis. In any event, if U.S. troops continue to be used in Iraq -- whether deployed from bases inside the country or from outside -- they will inevitably continue to cause civilian casualties, further provoking violence. Having a U.S. interventionary force stationed in Kuwait or in a similar location will continue to inflame the opposition of Iraqis who will know their sovereignty is still subject to U.S. control. As for the impact of keeping U.S. forces anywhere else in the larger region, it should be recalled that their presence was the decisive factor leading to 9-11 and fuels "global terrorism" in the same way that the U.S. military presence in Iraq "fuels the insurgency" there.
Murtha, we need to keep in mind, is not opposed to U.S. imperial designs or U.S. militarism. He criticizes the Bush administration because its Iraq policies have led to cuts in the (non-Iraq) defense budget, threatening the U.S. ability to maintain "military dominance."
Murtha's resolution calls for redeploying U.S. troops from Iraq "at the earliest practicable date" -- which is reasonable only if it means that the withdrawal should be started immediately and completed shortly after the December elections, with the exact details to be worked out with the elected Iraqi government. In his press conference, however, Murtha estimated it would take six months to carry out the "redeployment," which seems far longer than the "earliest practicable date." (Recall that U.S. troops were withdrawn from Vietnam in 90 days from the signing of the Paris Peace Treaty.) To set such a long time period for the evacuation of Iraq is all the more worrying given that the decision to withdraw the troops is not even being considered yet by the Bush administration or the bipartisan majority of the U.S. Congress.
Congressional Republicans, in a transparent ploy, offered a one-sentence resolution stating that the deployment of U.S. troops in Iraq be terminated immediately. Murtha called this "a ridiculous resolution" that no Democrat would support (Hardball with Chris Matthews, Nov. 18). In point of fact, the resolution was opposed by all of the pro-war Democrats and most of the anti-war Democrats, who (as the Republicans hoped) didn't want to be accused of "cutting and running." But actually the resolution wasn't ridiculous at all understood in the sense we have just explained.
Achcar and Salom hit the nail right on the head. The fact is that Murtha's resolution, while a step in the right direction, represented something different from what the antiwar movement is advocating. The devil is in the details, and the reasons behind his proposal are more practical than principled--the war is a failed implementation of an agenda that he still seems to support; so let's end the war, he seems to be telling us, but the imperial goals that lay behind the way are still worth pursuing. Let us not forget that he was a war hawk. His six month timetable is excessive and his goal of redeploying troops elsewhere in the mideast is just a continuation of US imperialism. The prowar Democrats--as well as people with muddled views on the war like Nancy Pelosi, who has herself refused to endorse an immediate withdrawal or to endorse Murtha's proposal at her Friday press conference--actually used the Republican resolution to duck behind, to avoid taking a real, principled stand against the war.
It seems to me that Democrats need a positive strategy for national security that recognizes that we cannot achieve security at the point of a gun. It must be said that the national security strategy of both parties since WWII has been an abject failure. It has wasted untold billions of dollars and untold thousands of lives and has made us less secure by every measure.
The gift of the neocons is their brazenness that makes the national security strategy of the political elite and its faults obvious. A Democrat worth his/her salt should state the obvious and outline a better vision for America's security
Posted by
Charles D |
12:32 PM
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