The Antiwar Movement
Scott Ritter has written an interesting blog entry about the problems besetting the antiwar movement. One of the important points he makes is that the causes of US militarism are rooted deep in our political and economic culture, and only if the antiwar movement successfully addresses these root causes will it ever have any success. In particular, he notes that the Bush regime is plagued by widespread popular dissastisfaction over the war in Iraq--but this is only because the war has gone badly. Had the war gone well, most Americans would at this point have been fully in favor of the war.
What Ritter is criticizing is what is essentially a practical, rather than a moral, view of imperialist war adventures. Ritter is right. Only until the morality of imperialist aggression is part of the political debate in the US will Americans begin to look beyond whether a war is quick, relatively painless, and "successful". An imperialist war should be wrong whether it is quick and easy, or nasty and devolves into an unending catastrophe. The problem is that this "pragmatic" view of war--that all that matters is whether the war is managed well--is precisely what the opposition Democratic Party has been advocating in recent years. John Kerry's campaign in 2004 was all about running a more competent war than Bush was doing; Kerry would have sent more troops, would have used more force in Fallujah, would have kept better control of munitions supplies, and so forth. Kerry never ran an antiwar campaign, and yet many in the antiwar movement blindly followed lockstep in the Democratic Party path and voted for him anyway.
As Ritter says,
What Ritter is criticizing is what is essentially a practical, rather than a moral, view of imperialist war adventures. Ritter is right. Only until the morality of imperialist aggression is part of the political debate in the US will Americans begin to look beyond whether a war is quick, relatively painless, and "successful". An imperialist war should be wrong whether it is quick and easy, or nasty and devolves into an unending catastrophe. The problem is that this "pragmatic" view of war--that all that matters is whether the war is managed well--is precisely what the opposition Democratic Party has been advocating in recent years. John Kerry's campaign in 2004 was all about running a more competent war than Bush was doing; Kerry would have sent more troops, would have used more force in Fallujah, would have kept better control of munitions supplies, and so forth. Kerry never ran an antiwar campaign, and yet many in the antiwar movement blindly followed lockstep in the Democratic Party path and voted for him anyway.
As Ritter says,
Take the example of Congressman Jack Murtha. A vocal supporter of President Bush's decision to invade Iraq, last fall Mr. Murtha went public with his dramatic change of position, suddenly rejecting the war as un-winnable, and demanding the immediate withdrawal of American troops from Iraq. While laudable, I have serious problems with Jack Murtha's thought process here. At what point did the American invasion of Iraq become a bad war? When we suffered 2,000 dead? After two years of fruitless struggle? Once we spent $100 billion?Actually, it is worth pointing out that Murtha did not call for an "immediate" withdrawal, but rather one taking place over six months, and it wasn't a withdrawal from the region, but rather a redeployment of troops elsewhere in the area where they could be used for further militaristic adventures. But the point remains that the US is, as he says, "pre-programmed for war", and as long as the focus in our political system is on the competence of warmaking rather than the morality of it, we will never see our way out of the woods.
While vocalizing his current opposition against the Iraq War, Congressman Murtha and others who voted for the war but now question its merits have never retracted their original pro-war stance. Nor have they criticized their role in abrogating the Constitutional processes for bringing our country into conflict when they voted for a war before the President had publicly committed to going to war (we now know the President had committed to the invasion of Iraq by the summer of 2002, and that all his representations to the American people and Congress about 'war as a matter of last resort' and 'seeking a diplomatic solution' were bold face lies). The Iraq War was wrong the moment we started bombing Iraq. Getting rid of Saddam Hussein is no excuse, and does not pardon America's collective sin of brooking and tolerating an illegal war of aggression.
The reality is, had our military prevailed in this struggle, the American people for the most part would not even blink at the moral and legal arguments against this war. This underlying reality is reflected in the fact that despite our ongoing disaster in Iraq, America is propelled down a course of action that leads us toward conflict with Iran. President Bush recently re-affirmed his embrace of the principles of pre-emptive war when he signed off on the 2006 version of the National Security Strategy of the United States, which highlights Iran as a threat worthy of confrontation. This event has gone virtually unmentioned by the American mainstream media, un-remarked by a Congress that remains complicit in the war-mongering policies of the Bush administration, and un-noticed by the majority of Americans. America is pre-programmed for war, and unless the anti-war movement dramatically changes the manner in which it conducts its struggle, America will become a nation of war, for war, and defined by war, and as such a nation that will ultimately be consumed by war.
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