Why We Need an Anti-War Movement

[From March 11th, 2009]

Why do we need an anti-war movement?

If all you listen to are the speeches of the liberal establishment, of President Obama or of organizations like MoveOn.org, there is none. The war in Iraq is over. The war in Afghanistan is a just and humanitarian crusade. And Palestine is not an issue. It is safe to become complacent, to relax, to let the right men take care of things and go about business as if nothing was happening.

Iraq

Yet in Iraq last month 258 Iraqi's were reported killed, twice as many were seriously wounded, and every Iraqi in the country faces the humiliation and terror of the occupation and the militia's it spawned.

This, we are supposed to ignore, because we are told that there will be but a small force of 50,000 troops left after 16 months, and supposedly all of them will be gone by 2011. Yet all of these promises are, as is frequently stressed, "dependent upon conditions on the ground."

Yet what are these conditions on the ground? A Baghdad brought "peace" by concrete walls which divide the city into partitioned neighborhoods which have long since been ethnically cleansed? A deal cut with Sunni warlords to provide money and weaponry in exchange for their temporary service as proxy warlords? A ceasefire with the Shia militia of Muqtada Al-Sadr as he bides his time and also faces pressure against fighting from Iran? There is no real political solution, and the probability that Iraq will again descend into chaos is great, and as soon as this chaos turns into the slightest threat to perceived US interests the US army will try move right back in.

And it will do so with full legality, because under the current Status of Forces Agreement (which is what is supposed to set the cap of 2011), the United States is allowed to intervene "In the event of any external or internal threat or aggression against Iraq." Iraq is made a US protectorate.

And the Pentagon is already preparing for such interventions, with many officers drawing up plans for a military presence beyond 2011 and one very senior military commander who is reportedly making plans for a 15-20 year presence

The military is planning and organizing to continue this war, if we are to definitively end this war then we must plan and organize and take action to stop it ourselves.

Afghanistan

Afghanistan is Obama's "good war". The usual democratic establishment opinion being that Iraq was a bad war, launched for the wrong reasons and executed terribly, but the intervention into Afghanistan is some noble and humanitarian crusade launched to defend human rights, women’s rights and democracy, against the barbarism of so called Muslim extremists.

Let’s take a break and go back a bit into history. How did the Soviet Union justify their invasion of Afghanistan in 1979? The government of Afghanistan had "requested" their intervention. They were defending "democracy", human rights, women’s rights and secular institutions in the face of the terrifying specter of "radical Islam". Yet they, and all 115,000 troops they sent in, succeeded only in bringing violence because they were there for the same reason all Empires occupy a country, to exert control, safeguard their interests and subjugate the population. The United States at that time certainly had no trouble pointing this out, and emphasizing both at home and abroad how a Soviet Military presence would give the Russians a base from which to exert influence throughout the Middle-East and the threat this posed to US interests in the region. So why should the vital role military bases in Afghanistan can play have diminished one bit since then? Especially since the collapse of the Soviet Union opened up the vast Oil and Natural Gas resources of Central Asia to exploitation.

Six months prior to the Soviet Union’s invasion, the United States had already begun to aid the Mujahadeen resistance in the specific hope of provoking the USSR into invading Afghanistan. A 1979 State Department report said

“The United States’ larger interest…would be served by the demise of the Taraki-Amin regime, despite whatever setbacks this might mean for future social and economic reforms in Afghanistan."

In order to hurt the Russians as much as possible, the US gave aid to the most extreme factions of the Mujahadeen. Particularly a disproportionate amount went to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who’s followers first gained attention by throwing acid in the faces of women who refused to wear the veil. The strategy according to Carter’s National Security Advisor was not just to damage the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, but “to export a composite ideology of nationalism and Islam to the Muslim-majority Central Asian states and Soviet Republics with a view to destroying the Soviet order."

The military continued with these ends in mind throughout the Reagan Presidency, in which one of the running jokes was that they would fight the Soviet Union “to the last Afghani life”. The annual supply of arms reached 60,000 tons in 1987, and it should have come as no surprise that under these circumstances when the Soviet Union withdrew, the factions of Afghanistan began to fight it out, with the Taliban eventually emerging on top an outcome which the US didn’t have much trouble with, as a US diplomatic official under Clinton put it.

“The Taliban will probably develop like the Saudis. There will be Aramco, pipelines, an emir, no parliament and lots of Sharia law. We can live with that,"

While US policy turned against the Taliban as it became clear that Afghanistan was harboring opponents, the fundamentals remained the same and this pattern of policy, of holding US geopolitical interests far above human rights or national self determination, is one that has more or less been followed since 9/11.

In the lead up to the war the Taliban was actually ready to negotiate and meet many of the US’ demands, including handing over Bin Laden if proof was presented (Something which it is clear now after more then 7 years would have been a lot better at actually catching him then an invasion), however Bush rejected this and refused to negotiate, aiming for an occupation.

In the opening round of the war the strategy was to use U.S. air power, combined with the ethnically-based militias known as the Northern Alliance. On the one hand, the indiscriminate warfare of bombing with heavy civilian death’s (Which also happened to keep a great deal of non-governmental aid in food and medical supplies from reaching Afghani’s), and on the other the use of Warlord armies who were so brutal and corrupt that the Afghan population had preferred at least the relative stability of the Taliban to their rule.

Since then we have installed the government of Hamid Karzai, first proclaimed President then elected with widespread reports of intimidation and fraud at the polling places. A government which according to the reporter Christian Parenti is so corrupt that “To pay taxes in Kabul one must first bribe the tax collector! No bribe and your taxes (which will be stolen) won’t be registered as paid.”

So if the United States has not caught Bin Laden, and it has not built a viable Afghani State, and if it has not brought secular liberal values but instead the rule of warlords who are often as bad and even worse then the Taliban, what has it brought?

The answer is that it has brought occupation, an occupation that is not just a necessity but is in fact the central goal. The Afghanistan operation allowed the U.S. to plant forces not just in Afghanistan but in the Central Asian states of Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, the gains of which have been partly reversed, but which have been more and more offsetted by every greater investment in bases in Afghanistan.

As of January 2009, the U.S. has begun work on $1.6 billion of new, permanent military installations at Kandahar, hundreds of millions are being spent across the country to establish a permanent military infrastructure to turn Afghanistan into a launch pad to ensure the United States has a firm position in Central Asia, one of the world’s most vital energy producing regions. As a country which borders Iran, Pakistan and China, which is located at one of the most strategic points in the world, Afghanistan is more valuable as a base for projecting US hegemony then any amount of buried oil or minerals.

Obama is currently implementing a plan for more troops on the ground, and more money to be spent on aid. However the increase of troops will at most establish the Karzai’s government control over areas dominated by weak warlords that have fallen under Taliban influence, not to in anyway challenge the warlords who are in many cases worse then the Taliban. The aid will mostly be spent to buy off warlords and keep them loyal to Washington, not to provide genuine aid to the people of Afghanistan

----------

We should, and we must fight against these wars not just because of their individual injustice, but because these wars are the most glaring examples of the systematic injustices that pervade all of our lives. It is the injustice of a world and a nation which is not accountable to it's people, the corruption of a system in which wars are launched. We do not need an anti-war movement just to end this war and that war, only to start all over again in 5 or 10 years, we need an anti-war movement that is committed to ending war, to ending the conditions that give rise to war and the men that make them. We must take back a society in which the media acts as an outlet for the Pentagon. Take back a country in which the poor have their services cut to pay for the decadence and failures of the rich. Take back a world in which billions starve among world-wide abundance.

Because that is ultimately what fighting against the war is about, it's about taking back our lives and our communities and our world from those who have hijacked them and saying that this hatred and destruction and madness will not be waged in our name!

George Orwell once said that "During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act." And that's what we will be doing for most of tonight, stating the facts and demystifying the illusions, and if any of us sound revolutionary it will be because we are getting that much closer to the truth. But it is not enough to know the truth, or even to tell the truth, the essential thing is to apply that knowledge to reshaping the world, and to commit to the slow patient work of building the organizations that will have the power to reshape the world. That is the most important thing we will do tonight, provide the opportunity to get involved in building the organizations that can fight for a better world and make it a reality.