STUFF TO DO… to help stop the war
STUFF TO DO
to help stop the war
Stan Goff
The war in Iraq is degenerating… a lot. For American troops, Iraqi police, and Iraqi civilians, the last two months have been filled with dread, death, and disfigurement. In spite of around-the-clock spin by the administration and show-dog obedience by the bouzhie-press, the reality of the war is filtering into the public’s consciousness. Certain phrases are haunting us: “weapons of mass destruction“… “yellow-cake uranium“… “al Qaeda connection“… “mission accomplished“… and “bring ‘em on“…
The Bush administration carries on with a brave face — being far removed itself from the smell of burning vehicles and bleeding bodies — secure in the knowledge that they cannot and will not have to run for re-election. The polls that show 60 % of Americans now believing the war was wrong have no effect on them, because they are securely situated in power, and they can continue for the next 3.7 years to roll the dice in Iraq with other people’s lives and hope for a miraculous breakthrough.
But there are 435 House and 35 Senate seats that could be contested in 2006, and many of them also staked their futures on this war, and they are watching these poll numbers with very grim faces indeed. Many are beginning to feel a little like the ballroom dancers on the Titanic, and while they praised her virtues yesterday, the icy fingers of self-preservation are clutching at their hearts and vanquishing superficial loyalties.
Nixon, they remember, was elected in a huge landslide in 1972. On August 9, 1974, he resigned in arrant disgrace and had to rely on the newly ascendent President Gerald Ford to pardon him on September 28 from all future criminal charges.
Some people’s eyesight is better than others, and they can read the signs along the road from further away. Representative Walter Jones, Jr., a North Carolina conservative Republican, has his driving glasses on. He is working with some Democrats and other Republicans on a resolution to name a departure date from Iraq. This is the same man who re-named oily fast-food potatoes “freedom fries,” after the French refused to co-sign the Bush war in the UN Security Council. He has two major military installations in his district, and his constituents, along with those troublesome poll numbers, are telling him enough is enough.
Like the white Southern segregationist politicians who had religious epiphanies after the Voting Rights Act passed, and abandoned their racial ideologies in exchange for those big pools of Black Belt votes, Jones has undergone a miraculous conversion on Iraq.
He may the first of many. In the same way that Democrats developed a public allergy to their own commander in chief, when the DNA was extracted from the blue dress and the presidential cigar… well… As the USS Bush begins to take on water in earnest, you can bet that more Republicans will be looking to the lifeboats.
This should also send a quiver of distress up the spines of the most Machiavellian Democrats.
In 2004, they could have their war and their anti-war voters, too. They had that special power to say, “We are all you’ve got.”
But what happens if Republicans begin to oppose the war? That is to say, what happens when the pressure of the American masses, slowly waking to the reality of the war “over there,” is such that the war becomes an issue? With two pro-war candidates, there was nothing left to the confused masses but Roe v. Wade on the one hand and the cherished homophobia of the right on the other. What if, these most guileful of Dems must ask themselves, there are more Walter Joneses, and antiwar voters can turn away from their Democrat-dependency to register their opposition to the war?
The polls that are increasing Maalox sales along Constitution Avenue not only showed that the Republican position of maintaining current troop levels in Iraq was unpopular, but that the most unpopular position was the very one articulated by the John-John Democratic Party ticket for 2004 — that is, send MORE troops. Ain’t life funny?
Suddenly, the masses have this period when a window of power, however small, has opened. Given the herd behavior of Congress generally, and the political shit-on-the-shoe that Iraq is now becoming, a flood of demands from the public to these intrepid politicos to end the war has what I like to call stampede potential.
I’m not talking about lobbying. Don’t think so. I’ve done lobbying before. That’s when you dress up in something “respectful,” due deference to their positions and all that, and ask them nicely to “please, sir” support my little pet-bill. They need a flood of emails, letters, telephone calls, and visits from people wearing shower shoes and cutoff jeans (hey, it’s hot, dammit!) demanding that they do everything in their power to get the US out of Iraq… yesterday! Lobbying gives them the power. They need to be harassed like stray cats caught in a schoolyard.
I’ll personally contact my jellyfish Democrat, David Price, and tell him that I’ll vote a Republican out of sheer delicious spite if he doesn’t overcome his issue-aversion. If he were a Republican, I’d tell him the same thing about a Democrat challenger. This is the year of the anti-war tidal shift, so it is the year to stoke the terrors of incumbency.
Republicans have their own fears to deal with. Bush is still in the White House, and none of his cabinet seem to be getting any smarter.
That’s my suggestion, just a starter suggestion. Every week from now on, write your Congress-hack (there are a few who don’t deserve this) and tell him (or her) that you are extremely disappointed in them for not having stopped the war. Get as many people as you can to do the same thing. Call them on the phone until they sign out a restraining order against you for stalking. Take delegations to her (or his) office.
Warning: This stuff is harder than whining, and requires a certain amount of time and effort.
Then organize at least two public events — one in July and one in September, no matter how small, in your local community — that explain why the war is wrong. If you want to know how to answer that business of “we broke it, we own it,” There are talking points available. That’s the next layer we have to win over — the people who didn’t want the war, who don’t want the war, but can’t conceive of how the US can simply leave.
Contact Veterans for Peace, Military Families Speak Out, Gold Star Families for Peace, September 11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, and Iraq Veterans Against the War, and have them contact local reps to attend these events. They have immunity from pro-war, patriot-baiting bullshit. At each of these events, badger people unmercifully to come to Washington DC on September 24-26 for a mass mobilization against the war. Don’t just badger them to come, badger them to get others to come. Badger them to pay for at least one person to come that can’t afford to come.
Because when a poll makes Walter Jones, Jr. abandon his “freedom fries” chauvinism in a district where the 2nd Marine Division lives, there is fear stalking the halls of the federal legislature, and we should exploit it without shame. It is now mid-June. We have over three months, around 95 days, in fact, in which to drown out the air conditioners droning in the offices of Wall Street’s political representatives. We have 95 days to pre-Nixonize George W. Bush, before we show up on their doorsteps and tell them, “Enough!”
Or we escalate…
dougnielson:
Stan is brilliant as usual. I just want to make sure that phrases like, “the icy fingers of self-preservation are clutching at their hearts,” and “more Republicans will be looking to the lifeboats,” don’t imply that these jokers are any less “far removed…from the smell of burning vehicles and bleeding bodies.”
17 June 2005, 4:07 pmThe only thing they might really suffer is a little less marketability when they go to take advantage of the revolving door between political power and the corporate power.
Stan:
I think about it this way. The decision to leave will come from the dimwitted prick in the White House… okay from his slightly less dimwitted consiglieris. There are three E-s that have any effect on hin/them at all.
Elections, Esteem, Efficacy. Describing each of them helps us to make a clearer assessment of how to bring pressure in each area.
Elections: Although George W. Bush is a lame-duck President, he is part of a political party that wants to hang onto its power, many members of which will have to run for re-election in both 2006 and 2008.
Anything that discredits Republicans generally by association with discredit brought upon the Bush administration itself is a threat to other Republicans. And while party unity is a high priority, it is not the ultimate priority. The party will attempt to distance itself from the Bush administration if the conditions are such that the entire party will be brought down with it. The Nixon administration is a case in point. Once its fall became inevitable, Republicans jumped off the sinking Nixon ship like rats.
There are several tendencies within the Republican Party’s coalition that are susceptible to pressure related to the war: Libertarians are uncomfortable with the USA PATRIOT Act and other population surveillance and control measures. Fiscal conservatives are unhappy with the growing national debt and budget deficit. Many Republican women are increasingly uncomfortable with the earlier talk of liberating women in the region and the reality that women suffer more under the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan than they did under the Taliban, and that there has been no move by the administration to seriously redress grievances brought by women in the military who have suffered from sexual assault by fellow service members. Military and former military who have previously supported the Republican Party are distressed about the rapid decline of the military as a viable institution under the pressure of the war.
These are just cracks now, but they can be opened into fissures, then breaks, which only has to threaten Republican majorities to become a factor in other Republican candidates withdrawing support from the Bush administration’s policy in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Esteem: Every president is looking not only at his current poll ratings but at how history will remember him. This public esteem is another factor that enters into any calculation of cost vs. benefit.
In the near term, ridicule directed at the President and his cabinet has hardened the positions of many Bush supporters, but that defensiveness has a limited life expectancy, especially if the weight of evidence for ridiculous-ness becomes overwhelming. Exposing stupidity on the part of the Bush regime remains critically important, especially in convincing military personnel to turn their back on the war.
Exposure of the criminality of the Bush regime has been relentless and effective, even if it didn’t garner an electoral victory (Remember that Nixon won by a landslide, and resigned a year later.). If the election was our strategic milestone, that was an error on the part of the movement, borne of impatience and simplistic ABB thinking. Exposure of violations of international and national law must continue, whether from detention centers or in the abrogation of the Constitution in the name of security (the very Constitution that soldiers swear to defend) or in the violation of the UN Charter, the Geneva Conventions (under which soldiers themselves are protected), or the Laws of Land Warfare.
Exposure of hypocrisy is essential in undermining the authority of the executive, and therefore undermining support within the general population. Already Bush’s approval ratings have fallen to historic lows, and 59% of the American public now says the Iraq invasion was a mistake. Never forget how damaged they were by “Bring ‘em on!â€
I never miss an opportunity these days to say, “Mission Accomplished.”
Efficacy: If the government or the military cannot function, they cannot carry out their agenda. The most damaging force to the Bush agenda right now is armed resistance in Iraq and Afghanistan (unreported in the news for the most part, between March and June, more US soldiers per capita were killed in Afghanistan than Iraq.). Our job is neither to support nor oppose nor take a position on the Iraqi resistance (whatever it is), contrary to the protestations of a number of lefter-than-thous. Our job with regard to the efficacy (ability to perform effectively) of the Bush administration is to disrupt it from the inside, both inside American society generally and (more specifically) to generate increasing resistance to the war from within the very institution designated to prosecute the war: the US Armed Forces.
Charley Richardson of MFSO once said we have to keep throwing sand into the war machine until it stops, even if we can’t know precisely when that will be. That is a good analogy. We are “sanding the machine.â€
Examples of disruptions are civil disobedience, street blockades, anything that forces additional expenditures or effort by the government in the conduct of the war, diversion of attention, and withdrawal or denial of material support (like new troops – think counter-recruitment).
The latter category, EFFICACY, is the special purview of Veteran/GI (family) organizing. Veterans, military families, and dissident troops occupy a special niche in the anti-war movement precisely because we can most easily and effectively reach into the military and sow discontent there. We are in the best position to convince the human beings who are bound by their service contracts to carry out the war to morally oppose, interfere with, speak out against, or even withdraw from that work altogether.
So use us relentlessly.
I have very schematically and alliteratively (again) identified three major categories of political action within the anti-war movement that are important, the 3 M’s: Media, Mass Action, and Military Disruption.
Media: By this, we mean the whole range of communications media, not just the big capitalist media. Media work involves everything from high-dollar media buys (used by well-financed, high-powered non-profits focusing primarily on policy fights and legislative agendas), to “earned†media where we use our own savvy to get coverage by the so-called mainstream media, to “alternative†media, to blogging and other newly emerging communications media – like the production of public education DVDs and CDs. Media serves primarily to get the movement’s message out and to enhance the visibility of its organizations. It is also where the anti-war movement stands or falls with regard to its credibility in the public’s eyes.
Mass Action: These are actions at the local, regional, and national level organized by groups, alliances, and coalitions. They can be anything from mass mobilization in Washington DC to a local press conference.
Military Disruption: Here is where we are deep deep into the efficacy category. We engage in media work and mass actions, but the strategic thrust of much work is to use these other forms of non-electoral political action to magnify our efforts to generate resistance to the war within and from the military itself, and to create disruptions of military activity.
I further break Military Disruption into three general categories, based on the dimension within which each category operates: Anti-base campaigns as international collaboration; Community-based efforts such as counter-recruitment and pressure on elected officials; and internal resistance within the military itself. [Anti-base campaigns are campaigns by people in other countries, like Okinawa and Mauritius and Puerto Rico (a territory) for the removal of US military bases.]
No illusions about where ther class interests of politicians lie. Until we are on the cusp of the big one, however, an exercise of power is to mobilize resistance in all these fields, and expand the basis of that resistance, until we can force decisions on the ruling class that are taken as a measure of self-preservation. This also builds organization ande consciousness for follow-on work. ‘Cause when we shut down this war, we are going to face some really tough issues to tackle here… where the contradictions haven’t held still while we fought for Iraq’s sovereignty.
We are at a point, I think, where it is time to take the power we have gained back since the electoral distraction (mainly by the further degeneration of the war) and aim it at the secondary targets (legislators) to cut off the ring for the primary target - the executive branch. And not by focusing on legislation. They will try to sidetrack us with that, to get back the power they lose. Campaign for HR12345 that will pull the troops out by January 2009. Bullshit! We don’t work for them.
And we are not going to be put off with Freedom Fries Jones’ shit about pullout in Fall 2006, just so they can move the finish line back. NOW means now.
Escalation of tactics, obviosuly, is part of the whole picture, and we need to have ways to judge when those tactics will strengthen and embolden the movement, or when they will scare everyone back into their houses. (Adventurism not welcome!) So aggressive public education to keep the outrage meters pegged is an essential and on-going piece of any larger strategy. Engender a fighting spirit in the masses.
17 June 2005, 4:58 pmSks:
Just a quick note:
The September 24 action was originally called by the ANSWER Coalition and there is no unified call.
http://www.internationalanswer.org/
So there will actually be two protests on September 24.
17 June 2005, 5:12 pmray-davison:
if I can’t go to the docktor (no spring chiken) cause all the development money’s going to the military then it violates whatever that amendent is about quartering soldiers on private citizens, might as well have a looter taking my pullets for their wasteful sunday dinner every year as they begin to lay. I’ve been through alot of sordid adventures to have eggs year around and soon I’ll not be able to eat them; the well’s being poisoned across the land. standing armies are the vision of hell those guys who used to ride around in tin cans peddle, you know, an easy way out. they’ll pay one for one’s soul, imagine that. anyway, I was 18 and out on the road in ‘74 so am, after an adventuress’ fashion, a veteran against the war as well. Increasingly one must rely on the honor of the men of the United States, every one them, the valour of women in the face of tyrany. Learned we are reliable ’cause had the good fortune to hang out with the Aymara for a couple of weeks, spring two thousand when they shut up shop & put grammarians on notice, the subjunctive’s back in town — god is great. nice photo, have you hung out in the Plaza San Francisco lately?
18 June 2005, 1:06 amSks:
I had not seen this until now… from the ultra-liberal, left-of-center Demohack blog http://www.1115.org/ …still this is telling of what Stan comments on.
Republicans Write Letters Too
Posted by matt on March 29th, 2005 at 7:15 am
**Ed. note: I don’t think the Terri Schiavo issue is enough to swing elections 18 months away, but with word that Bush flew back to the White House to sign the Schiavo bill in exchange for support for his sinking Social Security privatization scheme, it could well be the first domino.
Yesterday I was looking for evidence of eroding support Republicans might face for their little journey through private legislation-ville, and I found plenty. First came this Time poll showing that the Schiavo case would make 54% of those surveyed less likely to vote for representatives who supported federal intervention, with just 21% saying they would be more likely to vote for those representatives. The numbers are overwhelming, and if you spent any time over the weekend watching cable news, they may seem quite unbelievable.
The second piece of evidence comes from a very unlikely source. My father once bitched out my 92 year old grandfather in a restaurant for calling George W. Bush a “cowboy,†and remains a Republican despite my ever-increasing attempts to get him to switch. But he has no time for political grandstanding, and took a few minutes to write a letter to the editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette expressing his displeasure with the latest waste of time our elected officials have perpetrated.**
The following is a guest post by Cohen Sr.
To the Editor:
How ridiculous is it that the Senate and the House, along with the President are willing to work weekends to extend the so-called life of one vegetative citizen, when week after week they send hundreds of able-bodied young men and women to die in a war to which there appears to be no end?
We lost a generation in Vietnam, “fighting†a war with both hands tied behind our backs. We left a war unfinished in Iraq under George H. W. Bush. Now we are watching our youth come home in body bags from a war we were told would be fought with minimum losses in time, money, and lives even as it drags on with no end in sight - All to locate those fabled weapons of mass destruction.
The House and Senate have made priorities out of Terri Schiavo and the use of steroids by lame-brained professional athletes, yet they show no concern for the young men and women who are being killed half a world away, the families of these young people, and the loss of another generation to a war that makes us no safer than we were before it all began.
The thanks America gets for all of the death and destruction is higher and higher gas prices from the very countries in which our citizen soldiers are attempting to bring “freedom.†And neither the President nor congress demand anything for the blood of another generation of Americans.
Yes, our priorities are certainly in the right place:
Protect multi-millionaire athletes from themselves
Prolong the life of a woman who will never regain any reasonable life functions
Send more recruits and weekend soldiers to die in a guerilla war which is un-winnable
Which of the framers of our Constitution would sit in front of TV cameras and defend any of these actions? Not a one! As a history major, former history teacher and professor, a parent, a voter, and a Republican, I am disgusted and fully appalled by all that is taking place in my name and in the name of the United States of America.
As the world’s last, but embarrassed, superpower, I can not accept the actions of those we have elected, those they have appointed and those who claim to speak for the vast majority of us all. And with all of our technology and military ability, whatever became of Osama bin Laden and his inner circle of be-headers? Does congress even care about our inability to find those who were really responsible for 9-11?
It is now obvious that steroid use, baseball records and one woman in florida will prevent this nation from asking the hard questions about our ultimate safety and survival. At least that is what Congress, our President and his advisors are counting on. Is that what we really want? Is it what we really need?
Neil Cohen
18 June 2005, 4:40 amMorningside
luke:
with the Conyer’s Hearings exposing the LIES, and with 3 troops dying per day- why wait til September 24th?
95 (more days) x 3 = 285 more dead troops, ~ 500 fatherless American children and countless Iraqi casualties… why wait?
The Time is NOW.
ps- hey Stan- have you heard your fayetteville speech set to music?
http://www.archive.org/download/fayetteville-sg/fayetteville-stan_goff.mp3
i love the crowd response to, “coke-snortin piece of shit in the whitehouse…”
found the mp3 here
18 June 2005, 12:02 pmhttp://www.benfrank.net/troops/
ray-davison:
thanks luke, cheered this woman up, she would holler with pride at your articulated honorable outrage — god be with you in such kind acts. here’s a prize:
Isla del Sol
The Aymard live on the island,
(green and gold jaguar rising from blue water on top of the world)
the Inca were born there; the Inca are gone.
The Spanish are gone.
The Aymara remain, and they tell the story.
I’ve been visiting –
Riding atop a small slow creiser –
single layer of wood, hull, deck and cabin;
Matching steel and floral print vinyl
dinette set chairs are nailed down in ten rows below.
I sit on one of the raised planks curving along either side of the cabin’s roof.
A metal rail is helpful. I lean over it into the water, the sky, as I ride.
Like the Greeks would we hold to the
shore of Lake Titicaca, returning to Copacabana from Isla del Sol.
I am glad. With music I celebrate — union, ecstasy, release and resolution –
Stevie Ray Vaughn, on a CD.
As the disk plays I dissolve in sound
into light; moving between sky
and water like we moved between light and shadow in
the soft warm night of the past,into stillness; where I see:
Green shadow angled hills
rising from water into sky –
blues, grays and orange edged white
Broken by brilliant golden silver
glinting; the evening sun’s
broad triangle of shattered water.
Where I feel you; wherever you are.
We are known, us — thousands
With whom I have danced during nights past.
When we listen, dissolve in sound, into light,
We are not alone:
Two or more are gathered, love occurs.
God bless the musicians, grant them
peace. They sang simply
how life was.
We danced to the base: side stepped
with the lead guitar, an articulte
wrist, hand and neck should he
have made the space and asked us in.
Educated rednecks, Oakie drifters
trying to settle down with our
Celtic pride, African strength,
American courage and
Christian confidence that we could
know good; as we had known evil.
Oh, it was OK to feel, to dance, to document
with pattern of rhythmic breath
and movement our island of sound;
One of many in the wide world’s
18 June 2005, 5:53 pmWILD wave functions.
joanne:
Why doesn’t MFSO - or some group - start a central registry for people who’ve died as a result of their time in Iraq. If time/energy permit, injured & suffering from post-traumatic stress might be counted separately. That would cut through Wash lies & wake up Americans who don’t know about the games they’re playing w/the numbers, counting as killed in Iraq only those Am. citizens in the military who die on the ground in Iraq from bullet/bomb. Even then it could be difficult to get information on non-citizens & probably impossible to get much for “contractors” & mercenaries.
Similarly, it’d be helpful for them to publicize widely, via press releases etc, the actual number of casualties from BushDaddy’s Iraq Invasion. It’s my understanding that close to half the soldiers are now on permanent disability from after-effects of DU.
19 June 2005, 1:49 pmCalliope:
Great post.
HOWEVER, one thing is inaccurate. The Kerry-Edwards ticket did NOT advocate increasing the number of troops in Iraq. They did call for more active duty troops– BUT NOT IN IRAQ. Here is a quote from John Kerry’s acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention:
“We will add 40,000 active duty troops — not in Iraq, but to strengthen American forces that are now overstretched, overextended, and under pressure. We will double our special forces to conduct anti-terrorist operations.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A25678-2004Jul29.html
Just to clear that up.
26 June 2005, 4:56 pm