Democrats have no good options on Iraq
Nov 16, 2006
Democrats have no good options on Iraq
By Walden Bello
The recent US election was an exercise in redemption. At a time when many throughout the world had written off the US electorate as lifeless putty in the hands of top White House aide Karl Rove, the voters woke up to deliver the Republican Party its worst blow in the past quarter of a century. Not only independents and centrists voted to repudiate Republican candidates, but a third of
evangelicals - President George W Bush’s fundamentalist Christian base - voted for Democrats.
I, too, was pleasantly surprised. In the aftermath of the 2004 presidential elections, I predicted that the Republicans would rule for the next quarter-century because of the formidable grassroots machinery that they had forged, a “juggernaut” with a fundamentalist base in the so-called “red states”. Fortunately, I was wrong.
Two roads
Of course, many voted Democrat because they could no longer take the daily scandals engulfing the Republicans in Congress. But poll after poll showed that the two key reasons animating voters were the Iraq war and the strong feeling that Bush was leading the country down the wrong path. In terms of the national direction, the choice in the minds of voters on November 7 was presciently articulated by Jonathan Schell in his 2003 book The Unconquerable World:
For Americans, the choice is at once between two Americas, and between two futures for the international order. In an imperial America, power would be concentrated in the hands of the president, and checks and balances would be at an end; civil liberties would be weakened or lost; military spending would crowd out social spending; the gap between rich and poor would be likely to increase; electoral politics, to the extent that they still mattered, would be increasingly dominated by money, above all corporate money, whose influence would trump the people’s interest; the social, economic, and ecological agenda of the country and the world would be increasingly rejected.
In contrast to this path of an “Imperial America” was that of a “Republican America” dedicated to the creation of a cooperative world, [where] the immense concentration of power in the executive would be broken up; power would be divided again among the three branches, which would resume their responsibility of checking and balancing one another as the constitution provides; civil liberties would remain intact or be strengthened; money would be driven out of politics, and the will of the people would be heard again; politics, and with it the power of the people, would revive; the social, economic, and ecological agendas of the country and the world would become the chief concern of government.
On November 7, the US electorate clearly rejected the imperial path.
But one cannot say with confidence that voters were very clear about what alternative path they were choosing. It is the role of leadership to illuminate signposts, and the big question at the moment is whether the exultant Democrats can provide that leadership.
Iraq: Bad options all
Iraq is the test case. As many have pointed out, the Democrats have no unified strategy on Iraq. The situation in Iraq has deteriorated to the point where only bad choices are available.
The current Bush strategy is to shore up the Shi’ite-dominated government militarily, and that isn’t working. Bringing in more troops temporarily to stabilize the situation, then leaving - a plan originally endorsed by 2004 Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry - won’t work, since the civil war has progressed to the point where even a million troops would not make a difference. Partitioning Iraq into three entities - the Sunni center, the Shi’ite south, and the Kurdish north - will simply be a prelude to even greater conflict tying down more US troops. Withdrawing to the bases or to the desert to avoid casualties will simply raise the question: Why keep troops there at all?
Getting Iran, Turkey and Syria to come in to create a diplomatic solution - one that the bipartisan Iraq Study Group headed by James Baker and Lee Hamilton may propose - is not going to work because no foreign-imposed settlement can counteract the deadly domestic dynamics of a sectarian conflict that has passed the point of no return.
Bush, of course, remains the boss when it comes to Iraq policy. It is not likely that this stubborn man has ceased to believe in victory, which he restated as his goal at the same press conference where he announced Donald Rumsfeld’s resignation as secretary of defense. The more Machiavellian Republican strategists such as Karl Rove will probably want to enmesh the Democrats in a protracted bipartisan exit strategy that will cost more Iraqi and American lives so that by the time the 2008 presidential elections come around, the mess in Iraq will be bipartisan as well.
As of now, the Democrats have the moral weight of the country behind them. They have an opportunity not only to eliminate a foreign-policy millstone but to open the road to a new relationship between the United States and the world if they take the least bad route out of Iraq - that espoused by Congressman John Murtha, who, perhaps among the key Democrats, knows the military realities on the ground: immediate withdrawal. With all their inchoate feelings about wasted American lives, “our responsibility to Iraqis”, or being seen as “cutting and running”, many of those who voted for the Democrats may have some difficulty accepting the reality that immediate withdrawal is the least bad of all the options. But that is the function of leaders: to articulate the bitter truth when the times demand it.
It is not likely that most Democratic politicians will embrace immediate withdrawal of their own accord. Without more sustained pressure, the likely course they will take is to come with a plan that will compromise with Bush, which means another unworkable patchwork of a plan.
A military strike?
One source of pressure could be the military. It is well known that the top brass are in a state of extreme disaffection with the civilian leadership because they feel that Iraq is destroying US military credibility. When Major-General William Caldwell, the senior US military spokesman in Iraq, pronounced on October 19 that the results of the Pentagon’s strategy of focusing troops in Baghdad to assist the Iraqi military in containing the runaway violence was “disheartening”, he drove the nail in the coffin of the Republicans’ electoral chances. Most likely, the civilian leadership did not clear his statement.
The US military in Iraq may not have yet experienced significant cases of mutiny, but the deterioration of morale is evident in the growing incidents of civilian killings, rape, and prisoner abuse for which an increasing number of marines and soldiers are undergoing trial or have been sent to prison. Unlike during the Vietnam War, US servicemen now are not conscripted. But the high command knows that even professional militaries have their limits and that at some point the rank and file will balk at being sent to a pointless war. Nobody wants to die for a mistake. Nobody wants to be in the last body bag sent from Baghdad. This is what Murtha, a decorated Vietnam veteran who has been hawkish on most other military issues, has been telling his Democratic Party colleagues.
Nevertheless, a de facto military mutiny like the one that swept the US army in the last years of the Vietnam War is not likely. As Democrats and Republicans bicker over a plan for an “honorable exit”, the brass FULL COMMENTARY
CSP:
“On November 7, the US electorate clearly rejected the imperial path.”
Unfortunately, I’m not so sure the American public rejected the imperial path. I see Nov. 7th primarily as a vote against incompetence, the incompetence of “failed” pre-war intelligence (i.e. lies), the incompetence of complete congressional corruption, the incompetence of Katrina and, most importantly, the incompetence of the Iraqi War. I don’t believe it was a vote against American hegemony.
Bello may be seriously misjudging the U.S. public.
18 November 2006, 9:14 amLegume Sam:
From Bello again:
“Electoral choice has created the momentum that can be translated into street action that can, in turn, translate into strong pressure on the Democrats not to agree to a protracted exit strategy.”
Or, electoral choice has stalled whatever momentum there was, and, now that the Democrats are in power in Congress and the “problem is solved,” liberal members of the public will go back to dealing with their debt-plagued lives.
Remember that outpouring of liberal sentiment that accompanied the election of Bill Clinton in 1992? The one that resulted in the 1994 triumph of the Republicans and the Contract with America? No, wait, those were the conservatives who triumphed…
Strong pressure on the Democrats? And if they don’t cave in, we’ll threaten to vote Republican?
18 November 2006, 12:22 pmG.:
I agree with both of your sentiments. The voting public, generally speaking, is too busy being serfs to take democracy seriously, which means we’ll have to encourage them to use alternative channels.
18 November 2006, 2:47 pmTellurian:
The DEMs are not part of the solution, they are part of the problem. The election was not a victory for the population, it was a defeat. The DEMs won even tho they moved tothe right Although less than 80 million out of a population of 300 million voted,and it was the richer, whiter and older stratum, they clearly wanted a change from the Bushites.
They won’t get it. The DEMs are already substituting gestures for policy, and the Bushites are continuing their right wing strategy. Continued war abroad and a Security police state at home.
It is necessary to mobelize the US population against the US power system, including the entire GOP-DEM coalition. This is an historical undertaking, and requires a revolution in our ideological worldviews. In the meantime the truth consneus will continue its drift to the right, no matter whether DEMs or GOPs are elected.
MODERATOR’s NOTE: Okay, I’ve been rubbing up next to this kind of phrase-mongering for more than ten years now. WHO is doing this mobilizing? Be specific. HOW does this “mobilizing” happen? Be specific. Since you have such a radar-lock on this historical period and what is to be done, recommend something concrete… uh, that might work. Otherwise, don’t come by here and waste our bandwidth sermonizing about how much smarter you are than everyone who voted (which means you think you are smarter than the people-of-color, the women, the whtie working class, and the young — and old — who behaved so foolishly. No one has been harder on Democrats (the institution)
18 November 2006, 4:37 pmthan me (this is Stan, one of the two moderators). But I keep waiting to hear exactly what it is you would have people do to build or advance any resistance… aside from doing whatever you say, which obviously is not happening now. Some concrete first steps, directed at people who are willing to take them, is infinitely more useful than these pronouncements. Three polemical sentences is not an analysis.
Randy Morris:
Stan, do you plan to finish the “Guerilla Handbook” series started over at FTW? I definitely appreciated the angle you put in that about “revolution” in the U.S., and ways we can support real political uprisings elsewhere while preparing for this country’s meltdown.
I realize that FTW has pretty much imploded at this point, but it would be a shame if that work was tied up and unavailable due to licensing.
Later,
Randy
MODERATOR’S NOTE: The Insurgent’s Handbook will be serialized on a new website, du to open in December sometime. Watch for http://www.insurgentamerican.com
18 November 2006, 9:28 pmAndrew:
THe Democrats won what they did in part because the conservative voters, a tleast a critical mass, stopped caring some time ago. George Bush has done little to court them; the old argumentwhere they gonna go has been answered: Home.Time is ripe for a third party effort there.
18 November 2006, 9:53 pmOn the other hand, while it is definitely a one up for the Demos, given their history, don’t expect much. Pressure always helps though and some of their leadership is likely to be more respon=sive to pressure, say from feminists, than the Reps were. But George sits in the WH with his veto pen.
THings will be more ripe than ever for a third party on the Left in two years.
Much as I’d like to see a woman President on general principles, can anyone witha brain on the Left take Hilary seriously?
Legume Sam:
Okay, moderator, I accept your challenge.
When it comes to predicting revolutions, I tend to rely upon an old maxim, voiced once, I think, by Lenin: for there to be a revolution, the new society must be ready to come into being, and the old society must be on its last legs.
The old society, in this case, is the society created by global capitalism. The history of capitalism is the history of what Kees van der Pijl called “capitalist discipline” (see van der Pijl’s article “Transnational Classes and Capitalist Discipline,” pp. 1-16 of Stages of Capitalist Development, eds. Westra et al.). We can see, in capitalist history, four quantum leaps in capitalist discipline, corresponding to the four stages of capitalist history (dates are just approximations, more or less corresponding to American history):
1) agricultural capitalism, pre-1859
2) industrial capitalism, 1865-1939
3) consumer capitalism, 1945-1974
4) neoliberalism, 1980- now
Each of these stages begins and ends on a historical event — the first commercial American oil well, the end of the Civil War, World War II, Nixon’s resignation, Carter’s re-opening of the Cold War. With each successive stage, the processes of commodification and commodity production extend their tentacles into the natural world, to the point where (in the last stage) the genetic code has itself been commodified (eg Basmati rice).
At some point in the future, then, the world will have had enough of capitalist discipline. One should then see the threefold crisis of the current era:
1) ecological, involving the stripping of ecosystems for commodity culture
2) economic, involving the crash of the US dollar
3) political, involving the spread of the US foreign policy debacle across the world
come to a head. So that’s how I see the old society. There will be no fifth extension of capitalist discipline across the world, beyond neoliberalism. Nor will a regression to the populist Keynesianism of the initial stage of consumer society be physically possible, for there simply isn’t a resource base available to support the world’s people according to the standard set by the American Way of Life. That is to say, neoliberalism is the end of it, the last stage of capitalism and the last imposition of capitalist discipline.
What must be beyond neoliberalism, I reason, is revolution, beyond which there must be another form of discipline, noncapitalist discipline, to keep global civilization from collapsing (for all the reasons Jared Diamond suggests in Collapse). This is what I call “ecological discipline.” It corresponds to what Joel Kovel, following Enrique Leff, calls “ecological production.” It is the only possible basis of postcapitalist revolution.
I see no hope for the reintroduction of “socialist” ideas within the scope of industrial capitalism. The idea voiced in the Manifesto that the bourgeoisie were their own gravediggers by creating the industrial proletariat is dead; see the conclusion of Craig Calhoun’s The Question of Class Struggle for a more precise explanation of why this is so.
So, if we are still interested in revolution, neither Democrats nor Republicans will be of use. Both parties are reflections of the fractions of capital which they represent; and piggybacking upon capital at this point means piggybacking upon capitalist discipline, which we don’t need anymore of.
The medium-term future will present us with two choices: ecocollapse, or ecological sustainability. Mere coping with capitalism’s ecological destructiveness will not be enough; this is why mainstream capitalist environmentalism (eg preservation, recycling, alternative energy, alternative transportation) offers a losing battle against the well-funded tendencies to ecodisaster. Ecological sustainability must be built into the production systems themselves; thus the radicality of philosophical approaches such as permaculture and agroecology.
Potentially, a position could be staked out within the Green Party in the United States that could promote the radical ecological campaign I would promote. Sure, the Green Party is just a small third party right now, with no hold on the masses. I don’t see any other way through, though, not in the US context. Other countries can do different things, depending upon economic circumstances. But the US is the welfare bum of nations, because of dollar hegemony, and so the American public is likely to find its future within the political economy of the status quo until it blows up in their faces. A politics based on the short term of corporate life is thus likely to persist in the US. We can’t use it, though; we need a politics that reflects likely futures, not a desperate clinging to the circumstances of the present.
To tell the truth, I don’t do a lot of building the Green Party, not with the situation in my community. I thus feel obliged to educate in non-partisan ways. But I do think the Green Party is a worthwhile project in the places where it can work. Other places may be able to use a fourth-party opportunity, a political site where concerns about the real future world to come can be acted upon. The success of Ross Perot’s 1992 campaign proves it isn’t entirely a worthless proposition to start a party outside the existing system. The US is a very unrevolutionary place right now, however, and one major reason why this is so is because practically all of its political thinkers are afraid to venture outside of the two-party box.
19 November 2006, 12:09 amStan:
Okay, now we are getting somewhere. While we might enjoy having coffee to split a few hairs over stage-ism in historical analysis, I share your basic beliefs about where we are heading with all this… though I see partirachy as an unacknowledged and determinative force through all these “stages.” I would argue that id you were to characterize my own political orientation right now, there are worse ways than to call me an ecosocialist (in the sense of Mies & Shiva). My ire above was directed at the language that sounded like it came straight from the latest issue of one of those newspapers of the toy-internationals.
Laying out what the situation is (as close as we can figure), before we determine what to do, always seems a good way to begin.
Where we still have some distance between us is on the question of concrete analysis of where we are here and now, and what do do about it. Taking this a step at a time:
So, if we are still interested in revolution, neither Democrats nor Republicans will be of use.
This is too categorical, and it relies on an unspoken assumption that the main way forward is through what I call public-politics and their attendant elections. The irony of our differences (our, rhetorical, not you and me) is that I seem to be placing less emphaisis on electoral politics as a decisive solution than those who advance the position of categorical abstentionism or third-parties. Of course, Democrats and Republicans can be of use, on a contingent basis. Why wouldn’t we? Two points, again: (1) There is a difference between the party-as-institution and the party base, and (2) at this point in time, these institutions are the only ones that can be pressured to do things we need… like stop the war. Do you think that the Green Party will stop the war? Someone will have to pass the legislation cutting the funds, or sign the order for redeployment. Concrete question: Who will these people be? Or do we let the war continue so that we can tell people we are against it?
Both parties are reflections of the fractions of capital which they represent; and piggybacking upon capital at this point means piggybacking upon capitalist discipline, which we don’t need anymore of.
Both parties are still widely seen as the only institutional vehicles people have for their political expression. In some cases, for self-defense. Saying WE don’t need it anymore is a bit of white privilege, imho. Tell that to Black community in Pascagoula MS. Again, I don’t mean ten years from now. I mean right now. Both party INSTITUTIONS reflect the interests of capital — though that tells us absolutely nothing concrete… because the far more complex situation of the parties differs from place to place. Anyone who does real local politics knows that these folks are not abstactions, but people with names, addresses, family, hobbies, personal ambitions, etc etc etc. As a former military guy, I have learned that the broad inteelignec eavailable from an area study is good reading, but the tactical informaiton I need is that whichis nearest in time and place to my objective… details, details, details. Your piggybacking remark is a non sequitur.
The medium-term future will present us with two choices: ecocollapse, or ecological sustainability.
I’m with you here.
Mere coping with capitalism’s ecological destructiveness will not be enough; this is why mainstream capitalist environmentalism (eg preservation, recycling, alternative energy, alternative transportation) offers a losing battle against the well-funded tendencies to ecodisaster. Ecological sustainability must be built into the production systems themselves; thus the radicality of philosophical approaches such as permaculture and agroecology.
Here, too. But my question is, what do we do right now? How do we get there from here? That is a tough question to answer if we are not yet in a position to know what the here and now is. Interdisciplinarians like Mike Davis, Vandana Shiva, Alf Hornborg, et al, are trying to suss this out, as are thousands fo local activists who are engaged in politics at the neighborhood, municipal, and county level in the US. No doubt, there will have to be policy solutions, but is policy going to be determined as it is now after a revolution? How will a revolution happen? Who will make it happen? How will they be changed from how they act and think now into revolutionaries? Jumping over these questions will leave us paralyzed and demoralized.
Potentially, a position could be staked out within the Green Party in the United States that could promote the radical ecological campaign I would promote.
Why haven’t these promotions worked so far? This is an extremely important question. Maybe THE important question. I would post this as a separate thread, if I weren’t so anxious that we would attract the toy-internationalists back to rant away like toy-Lenins. The old Marxian adage that “social being determines consciousness,” while a bit mechanical, still holds true; and the hegemony of capitalist-patriarchal ideas still strikes me as pretty stable in the US. This is always the place where we get tripped up, we materialist dialecticians. We know that there is this recursive relation between the lived experience of our lives (practice) and the reflective and reinforcing ideologies of the systems that shape that experience. Since we haven’t figured out what the alternative practice is that will re-shape consciousness (changing conditions have torn the old trade union methods out from under us), we somehow drop back into an idealist default… we figure that we have to persuade enough people to believe like us, and that when they see the urgent logic (I am not the least flippant saying this) of our message, “they” will… what? Join a third party? We haven’t done our homework. We haven’t taken the time to study and understand what people’s conditions are — materially, intellectually, affectively — and so we issue these general calls to join something that the mass of people are not in the least motivated to join, because we are appealing only to those who have already reached the same conclusions we have.
But we still haven’t articulated the practice, except to say build a new party to vote for. If we (the political cadres) invested half the energy we do in trying to do something like get ballot access into working patiently in one neighborhood to create more day-to-day independence from the system (without all the hand-wringing indoctrination), we would have made a lot more headway. One community garden is worth ten mini-parties, inho.
This is actually the central subject for a new web site I am trying to put together next month, called Insurgent American.
Sure, the Green Party is just a small third party right now, with no hold on the masses. I don’t see any other way through, though, not in the US context.
I know you don’t. And a lot of other people don’t either. But that doesn’t mean there is no other way. It means we haven’t tried other things yet to see whaqt works, or we haven’t seen what others are doing that is working. People like you, who know prermaculture, fo example, have the gold in your heads right now to share with others, that can begin as oases, then build out into new practices, from which the new consciousness, and affectively understood politics, will emerge.
Other countries can do different things, depending upon economic circumstances. But the US is the welfare bum of nations, because of dollar hegemony, and so the American public is likely to find its future within the political economy of the status quo until it blows up in their faces. A politics based on the short term of corporate life is thus likely to persist in the US. We can’t use it, though; we need a politics that reflects likely futures, not a desperate clinging to the circumstances of the present.
That’s not what it is; and if we see it that way, we will miss critical opportunities. I’ll use the swamp analogy to explain myself. Don’t get me wrong. I love swamps. But the average infantryman learns to fear and despise them… at least, until he becomes an experienced infantryman (women are still excluded from the infantry). A swamp is a pretty bad place to set up a bivouac. It’s not a particularly good place to stay for any extnded period of time, because the subject here requires clean water, a bath now and again, a place where one’s skin can dry out, etc. But it can be a great place to move from point A to point B if the goal is to be undetected or to approach and strike a target from a completely unexpected direction. In other words, there are lots of different ways to describe a swamp, and no single characterization says everything that can be said about the swamp. But the goal of anyone who is about to pass through the swamp determines the contingent meaning of the swamp, which is not part of the more permanent descriptions of the swamp.
As to a politics that reflects likely futures, here is where I am departing radically from the left-of-the-past. Grand strategy cannot be developed that reflects sweeping generalizations about the future, even if those generalizations are largley true. The reason is strategy always consists of campaigns, and campaigns always consist of tactics. In past taxonomies, these were heirarchical — strategy paramount, campaigns subordinate to strategy, and tactics subordinate to campaign. The problem with that is that efficacy of action increases when it is matched to the concretely understood details of a situation. Because the concrete reality wihtin the larger and more tendential generalizations is nearly always too complex to predict. In the old heirarchical strategy-to-tactics taxonomy, as the scale of an effort increases, so does the difficulty of control required to maintain the top-down relation between strategy and tactic, bureaucratizing the process, investing greater energy and attention to control measures and less and less energy into udnerstanding dynamic and local situations, which creates two simultaneous problems: (1) resources are directed away from those who best understand in detail the complexities of their own struggles, and (2) the primary decision-makers are forced to make decisions that necessarily are mismatched to local efforts (loss of tactical agility).
Our politics, imho, needs to STOP trying to reflect likely futures, and START reflecting the actual present. The study of emergence is very important here, as is the understanding of self-organization. We are not going to forget what we are about without some central committee there to constantly remind of of the strategic goals.
To tell the truth, I don’t do a lot of building the Green Party, not with the situation in my community. I thus feel obliged to educate in non-partisan ways. But I do think the Green Party is a worthwhile project in the places where it can work. Other places may be able to use a fourth-party opportunity, a political site where concerns about the real future world to come can be acted upon. The success of Ross Perot’s 1992 campaign proves it isn’t entirely a worthless proposition to start a party outside the existing system. The US is a very unrevolutionary place right now, however, and one major reason why this is so is because practically all of its political thinkers are afraid to venture outside of the two-party box.
It’s only a box if we box ourselves into electoral politics as our primary objective, instead of terrain that we cross tactically when contingent circusmtances necessitate that, which Green Party organizing at the national level does. The Green Party doesn’t have that kind of power, and it hasn’t done the grunt work at the local level yet to contest on that scale without an immense and wasteful effort. I’m not against the Green Party. I just don’t see how it breaks out of being local (a strength) to challenge two entrenched political institutions on the scale of the D-R Parties when our side is so weak right now in terms of popular support. And I don’t see how to build support without development of new practices. Hezzbollah is a far more interesting model for political organization to me than the Green Party.
I really want to say more, but I have a very insistent 3-year-old here. (-:
19 November 2006, 8:56 amFire Witch:
Stan,
I for one would very much like to hear more about the model of Hizbullah for political organization, especially in light of their recent successes against the Israeli invasion.
Is such resistance formed only in the face of repeated invasions?
19 November 2006, 1:21 pmStan:
I don’t see Hezbollah as our perfect model somehow. The history and cultural distance is too great. And their victory over the Israeli invasion was laudable, but the real question is how did they establish themselves with the population to the extent that they did.
Part of that answer is that they already shared a lot cuturally. Hezbollah is not some outside force in Lebanon. They live there. And religion is just one aspect of shared culture. The kinship networks, folkways, and relatively short geographic distances create a natural Polanyian embeddedness. Those are the reasons I believe wide-scale, ideologically driven efforts by the left have so far, to one degree or another, failed except anecdotally. There is no embeddedness, and the central organizing principles in larger scale models always tend toward idealism — unity of thought, which is naturally abstracting…. and bureaucratism. This is the reason I suspect that the first step here in the US is to intentionally create embeddedness through re-localization efforts. Otherwise we aren’t even at bat, so to speak, in the ways that Hezbollah started out.
Hezbollah began in response to a specific situaiton that required organization to deliver services and to provide resistance to the Israeli occupation in 1982. As an old-head organizer (Saladin Muhammad, of Black Workers for Justice) once told me; don’t organize around projects, organize around needs. Because Hezbollah was organic, because it emerged in response to a real and acute need, it had the elements of self-organization that give groups natural stability, instead of stability imposed through constant effort and control… that is, the basis of the networks that compose Hezbollah are families and communities facing similar crises, who already share many common values, morally and epistemologically.
From wiki (which has a very anit-Hezbollah acocutn imo): Hezbollah also organizes extensive social development programs, running hospitals, news services, and educational facilities. Its Reconstruction Campaign (’Jihad al-Bina’) is responsible for numerous economic and infrastructure development projects in Lebanon. In March of 2006 an IRIN news report of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs noted: “Hezbollah not only has armed and political wings - it also boasts an extensive social development programme. Hezbollah currently operates at least four hospitals, 12 clinics, 12 schools and two agricultural centres that provide farmers with technical assistance and training. It also has an environmental department and an extensive social assistance programme. Medical care is also cheaper than in most of the country’s private hospitals and free for Hezbollah members”. Also Hezbollah’s social service agencies provide health care and schooling for poor farmers.
According to CNN: “Hezbollah did everything that a government should do, from collecting the garbage to running hospitals and repairing schools.” In July 2006, during the war with Israel, when there was no running water in Beirut, Hezbollah was arranging supplies around the city. “People here [in South Beirut] see Hezbollah as a political movement and a social service provider as much as it is a militia, in this traditionally poor and dispossessed Shiite community.”
One of the things Audrey and I heard and saw in the Gulf Coast was people who had been abandoned by the government deciding, “we can do this better than they did.” This kind of talk is anathema to some old-tyme leftists, because they are fighting to make the state do its part. But there is more at stake than just the transfer of energy from poor to rich under capitalism that we have to look at here. This is why I am soooo grateful for De’s gift of Ivan Illich to me.. because he, as well as Hornborg have made such a devastating case against the capitalist child that socialism adopted under pressure from hostile encirclement, and out of the plain unwisdom of a patriarchal Man vs Nature embrace of that child: industrialism and its concomitant scale. The state cannot perform these functions as effectively as local networks can (note, I did not say the “private sector”), because with increasing scale, a greater fraction of all effort is transfered to management, until a “watershed” is hit, whereupon the management imposes what De calls “dog-waggery” on the process. The needs of management come to outweigh the mission, which is then subordinated to management. The tail wags the dog.
Dunbar’s number gives us a hint about why this is inevtiably so.
I doubt Hezbollah was thinking of Dunbar’s number or Illich, but the conditions that gave rise to them gave rise to an organization with a high degree of embeddedness and organicity, ergo, stability and acceptance inthe community. Smart leadership was part of it, but part of what made them smart was the fact that they were tactically agile, and they developed a very sophsiticated and selectively decentralized political and military infrastructure. Their visible practice was always matching itself to the immediate and concrete conditions of their base, and the actions (not the ideology and general character) of their enemy.
19 November 2006, 6:43 pmAudrey:
The democrats are in the beginning phases of formally adopting some of these tactics – moving in to directly provide services where they are needed, rather than focusing solely on legislation.
From a press release this week: “Determining that the Democratic Party must embrace civic engagement in order to further restore credibility and respect among citizens, Mark Brewer, Chair of the Michigan Democratic Party and Vice-Chair of the Democratic National Committee, announced today that Michigan will become the first state in the nation to adopt the principles of the Blue Tiger Democrats organization and make it a permanent part of their state organizational structure.
… The Michigan Democratic Party is committed to making civic engagement an integral part of our state organization. By giving Democrats things to do between elections and providing meaningful services we Democrats can show citizens that parties want to engage them more than just on election day.
… In 2006, MDP ran a Blue Tiger pilot project, designed to help low-income families to become more energy efficient and show them ways to lower the cost of their utility bills. The program reached over 28,000 people helped to save many working families over $1,000 each.â€
If I understand this right, they are working to change their image from “a group of politicians†to a group of people in the community providing services. I don’t know if that’s something you can add to a political party after it’s already established, like a garnish, and expect to change its identity. But it’s worth noting that it’s happening now.
19 November 2006, 10:20 pmMarilyn Farhat:
As I predicted before, the Democrats will be pushing to reinstate the draft and the bill is being reintroduced right now. THAT is their sick option.
Tell you what, someone comes near my son to force him to go to war, they will have to go through me first.
20 November 2006, 2:41 pmstacia:
I don’t think any of us know what ‘the revolution’ will look like until it’s actually happening. We might have a picture in our heads of what it will look like, a romantic blend of history, Hollywood, and our own desperate desire for a better way to live, a new system that will encourage the best in people, rather than relentlessly pitting them against each other for the worst. Our vision of the revolution usually includes some of the following elements:
1. the ‘good’ people, underdogs, rising up to overwhelm the ‘bad,’ who have oppressed them. The longer they have lived under oppression, the sweeter and more inevitable their eventual triumph.
2. the heroic leader, out front and alone, leading, inspiring, envisioning, articulating, followed by the grateful populace.
3. the cinematic moment of climax, the decisive collision between the forces of good and the forces of evil. If good wins, it ushers in the period known as ‘happily ever after.’
The above scenario is not difficult to imagine. It exists in Hollywood because it genuinely has happened so many times in history, and these events live in the popular imagination and keep hope alive. In fact, they’re so powerful in the public imagination that some recent ‘revolutions’ have been staged or at least manipulated to capture that same legitimacy in the eyes of the world.
But this is a different moment.
I think whatever revolution we’re heading toward, will have to be completely outside of the above, patriarchal, dualistic, good vs. bad, us vs. them, mindset. Even if the good guys win, define them as radical as you want, the fact that they have won means someone lost, and we are still within our winners/losers, competitive, capitalist, patriarchal thinking.
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
A revolution of politics or economy will not happen without a revolution of consciousness. It can’t be about beating or defeating anybody.
If it’s a real revolution this time, it will have to be a revolution without enemies.
21 November 2006, 9:53 amMarilyn Farhat:
Hezbollah is a movement peculiar to Lebanon and the Lebanese struggle. It was started by a group of young men called “ashabab” literally “young men” who ranged in age from the late teens to 29 years old.
Contrary to what many think, although the Lebanese resistance against the Israeli occupation started in 1982, Hezbollah, as a movement, did not come about until 1985 when the different individuals and small groups who were carrying out missions across Lebanon against the Israelis got together and formed the new militia.
Because of its ties to the community and because its recruits and martyrs came from the same society, the movement felt obligated to compensate families and communities for the hardships they faced during the Israeli occupation and as a result of the neglect of the government. The Lebanese government is notorious for its corruption and lack of action when it comes to important matters.
Even those who opposed Hezbollah ideologically due to its religious core and its ties to Iran, did feel they owed the movement a debt because of their heroic actions against the occupation and their struggle to free the civilians held in the Khiam and similar prisons inside Lebanon and in Israel, many under torture.
Their ideology is based on a moral responsibility towards Muslim Lebanese. Their interests did not extend beyond Lebanon. Their core impetus for action is their belief in their duty to assist those who cannot help themselves for, in Islam, Muslims are encouraged when they witness injustice, to intervene to stop it and, if they cannot stop it, they are encouraged to speak out against it and, if they cannot speak our against them, they are to abhor it in their hearts and minds.
Hezbollah is all about action, not politics. This, however, is changing with time.
The US will never have a movement along the lines of Hezbollah because the struggles of the American poor are purely economical, not religious nor a matter of physical survival. There is much politics in American activism. The US is also a very large country with many conflicting interests and numerous ethnic and religious groups with ties and interests to other places in the world. Also, the bulk of the support for the poor and oppressed in the US comes from private organizations and churches, as well as the government. Lebanon does not have that luxury and, in fact, Hezbollah is an anomaly historically. They are the exception.
Hezballah do not function like a political party. They function like the military with a strict moral ideology and their allegiance is to their own people, not to the party, not to another country, not to a guru. Their success has been due to the intelligence of their core members who were able to pick the best and brightest for certain missions and duties. Not every willing martyr is automatically accepted into the group. They also have a pretty sophisticated network of intelligence gathering. There is nothing mind-boggling about it. They do it well because it is their country and their people’s lives at stake and they are very disciplined. They have truck that they load with building material and they go around the poor neighborhoods to repair what is needed free of charge. You can read the following articles:
http://almashriq.hiof.no/ddc/projects/pspa/hamzeh2.html
and
http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=1&categ_id=25&article_id=76203
There is a misinformation campaign against the group since the 90s. Many erroneously believe they carried our the Marine Barracks bombing. They did not exist as a group at that time.
Sorry to say, but Americans are far too individualistic to ever achieve anything like Hezbollah on a grassroots level. The US military is the closest, special forces even closes, but even there the stakes are not great for these men. They have nothing to lose if they fail except maybe their lives. Hezbollah, on the other hand have to answer to their families and their nations for their successes and failures.
I have had personal encounters with them and the Lebanese and Syrian and I can assure you, there is no comparison in the level of dedication and their willingness to help between them and the others. They are very well-trained in identifying problems and, most importantly, they are right there next to you when you need them, and that is from personal experience.
I strongly recommend again the book by Hala Jaber: HEZBOLLAH: BORN WITH A VENGEANCE. It is about the emergence of the movement.
I would really advise the readers of this blog to read about the movement from the people who live in the area. Hala is a Shi’ite Muslim who was the only person allowed to interview some of the members and go inside the group. I would encourage you to forfeit all the things you have read in the Western media about Hezbollah. It is very simplistic and misleading. It is better to read abou the movement from the people who understand it and speak the languange than those who have political and personal reasons for writing about it.
21 November 2006, 9:33 pmFire Witch:
“This is the reason I suspect that the first step here in the US is to intentionally create embeddedness through re-localization efforts. Otherwise we aren’t even at bat, so to speak, in the ways that Hezbollah started out.”
Stan, this statement of yours resonates particularly with me, as it reflects what Indigenous people in the bioregion (Colorado) in which I reside have been trying to say all along. Amongst white activists, I often hear it called “community” in a way that strikes my ear as abstract, unless it also includes community self-defense, especially internal defense. In my short time as an activist, I have already seen how buzz words like “community” fall far short of their intended meaning when they are spoken by people who have no intentions of confronting the abusers within their own circles, however high the moral high ground upon which they allegedly stand. It seems obvious that here is the first step to take towards a wider liberation - that is, accepting the responsibility for the frightening task of confronting oppression in our most intimate relationships, then expanding this resistance wider and wider until it encompasses the whole of society.
“…don’t organize around projects, organize around needs. Because Hezbollah was organic, because it emerged in response to a real and acute need, it had the elements of self-organization that give groups natural stability, instead of stability imposed through constant effort and control… that is, the basis of the networks that compose Hezbollah are families and communities facing similar crises, who already share many common values, morally and epistemologically.”
And Hizbullah’s ” visible practice was always matching itself to the immediate and concrete conditions of their base, and the actions (not the ideology and general character) of their enemy.”
Yes. That makes perfect sense…”communities facing similar crises.”
In other words, those on the front lines of oppression served by those on the front lines of oppression.
21 November 2006, 10:53 pm