In the run-up to the demonstrations against the NATO summit in Chicago this month, Ashley Smith interviewed the State Department official-turned-antiwar activist.

Ashley Smith: You had been a career military officer and State Department official. What compelled you to resign and join the antiwar movement?

Ann Wright: I was in the military for 29 years –13 years on active duty and 16 years in the reserves, and then another 16 years while I was in the State Department as a U.S. diplomat. So I was a part of the system under seven different presidents, from Lyndon Johnson all the way to George Bush Jr.

I didn’t believe in, or agree with, all the policies of all these administrations. I disagreed with many of them, but I never resigned. I always found other things I could work on that I felt were not harming people. It was only at the end of my government career that I finally resigned over something, because there were plenty of things I could have resigned over earlier, but I didn’t. I held my nose about them, like most government employees do.

The tipping point for me was the decision of the Bush administration to invade and occupy Iraq. They used the excuse of weapons of mass destruction. I didn’t believe them. We all knew that there had been two no-fly zones over the country over a period of 10 years. There had been quarantine, a blockade around the country, and there had been endless inspections for weapons of mass destruction.

On top of that, the UN inspectors, most of whom were U.S. intelligence agents, didn’t find anything, or the few weapons they found they destroyed. But, in general, the consensus of the international community was that there were no weapons of mass destruction left in the country.

So I just didn’t believe what the Bush administration was saying. When Colin Powell gave that lengthy address to the General Assembly in February 2003, I remember sitting in our embassy in Ulan Bator, Mongolia. I watched it on live TV with all of our staff around, because we all realized that this was a momentous event, and we knew that our lives would again be changing if the U.S. decided to invade and occupy Iraq.

With the buildup of rhetoric that was coming out of Washington in the fall of 2002, I was very, very uneasy, and I had trouble sleeping. I ended up having to be medically evacuated to Singapore because they thought I was suffering symptoms that are often the precursor of a stroke. I was having all sorts of light-headedness, shortness of breath, and I had arrived at the age where you need to watch out for this sort of stuff.

After an intense week of every type of medical exam possible, the doctor said, “Are you under any particular stress?” And I said, “Well, yes, I’m under stress. My nation is about to blast the hell out of another country.”

I continued waking up in the middle of the night, not being able to go back to sleep, and then staying up and just reading and writing out my concerns about what was going on. Every night I was reading materials, underlining passages and writing comments in the margins like, “This is the stupidest thing they could ever think up!” I was piling up pages and pages of writing detailing all my disagreements with Bush’s policy.

When I finally resigned, I ended up writing what I’ve been told was the longest resignation letter in the history of the State Department. It’s about three pages long and it not only talks about the war in Iraq, but other concerns about Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, the Bush administration’s lack of effort to engage North Korea, and its unnecessary curtailing of civil liberties under the Patriot Act.

When I resigned, I got over 400 e-mails from friends and colleagues in the State Department and other agencies saying, “You’re doing the right thing. We wish we could resign, but we’ve got kids in college, mortgages, you know, the whole financial thing.” But there are plenty of people in the government I think that have retired early and with severe cases of ulcers from having had to go through all of the horrors of the Bush administration.

AS: After you resigned, you became an antiwar leader while Bush was in office, but you did not stop when Obama was elected. What’s your assessment of Obama and his policies?

AW:  Everyone was hoping for a real change from what George Bush had dished out during his eight-year reign. But let’s remember that even during the campaign, candidate Obama did tell us that he felt the Afghanistan war was a good war, and he intended to escalate it. On that bad promise he’s delivered, but on many other good ones he has not.

He’s not closed Guantánamo. We still have the military commissions trying a few prisoners in Guantánamo. Virtually nobody has been released during the Obama administration, or even put on trial — these people are in imprisoned with no hope of resolution of their cases.

On the issue of curtailing of civil liberties, it’s worse under the Obama administration. Whistleblowers are getting the worst of the raw deals — six people have now been charged with espionage for revealing classified information that shows government malfeasance and criminal acts.

I’ve been very disappointed and displeased with Obama’s tenure. Like many other people, I have been challenging those policies, and writing and speaking and having endless vigils out in front of the White House. I, like many others, have gone to protest the president at various events, disrupting them over a variety of issues and getting arrested, just as we did under the Bush administration.

How to deal with the Obama administration has been a big debate in the movement. At our recent Veterans for Peace convention, we had a long and good discussion about whether we should call for the impeachment of President Obama as we had called for the impeachment of President Bush. While we were hesitant to come out against the first Black president, after we laid out all the evidence we decided that we had no choice but to call for Obama’s impeachment.

AS: What do you think of Obama’s policies in his Afghanistan?

AW: I think his escalation of the war in Afghanistan is perhaps his worst decision. He’s caused a huge number of civilian casualties, wasted a tremendous amount of money on sweetheart deals for private contractors, and enabled enormous amounts of corruption among Afghan businessmen as well as in the Afghan government itself.

Many of these Afghan corporate and governmental elites are part of the warlord class. We’re training and equipping their militias in the police and army. They will be there to fight not for the country of Afghanistan, but for the warlords to whom they belong.

Obama has decided to extend his patronage of the corrupt Afghan elite with this new 10-year strategic pact. He’s supposedly closing the door in Afghanistan as he supposedly had closed the door in Iraq. This is all, in fact, a public relations ploy. Behind the supposedly closed door, the U.S. is spending billions of dollars in Iraq and there will be billions for the next 10 years in Afghanistan.

AS: What’s your analysis of Obama’s new focus on Asia to contain Chinese power?

AW: Obama sees China as a rising rival, a huge economic powerhouse as well as a regional military power with the largest land army in the world and with an increasingly advanced air force and the navy. As you said, he wants to contain it.

He and the Congress are whipping up anti-Chinese rhetoric here in the U.S. Just recently the administration denounced the Chinese for building their first aircraft carrier. This is pure hypocrisy. The U.S. already has 14 of them. And for the first time, the Chinese have one, and they talk about it as that’s the greatest threat to all of the world.

That’s not to absolve the Chinese government of its problems and its own bad policies. But the U.S. should not be adding them to the “axis of evil.” This pivot to Asia will only push China into a corner and may lead them to do something that will give the excuse for the U.S. to make even more hostile policies.

And the U.S. pivot seems almost designed to provoke China. Obama has increased the military to military relationships with the Philippines. We still have a huge number of soldiers stationed in Okinawa in Japan.

He’s opened a new base for 2,500 Marines in Australia and an airfield that will be dedicated toward big Global Hawk drones that can stay indefinitely in the air for surveillance in Asia. And in South Korea, we still have over 30,000 troops and he’s pushing for a new naval base in a pristine place called Jeju Island. Obama wants that to be the homeport for Asia’s part of America’s worldwide missile defense system.

This last decision is very significant since it will increase tensions with not only the Chinese but also Russians. The missile shield in Europe as well as the new one proposed for Asia is one of the reasons that Putin did not attend the G8 meeting. He wanted to send a signal that he is going to be putting more and more pressure on the U.S. to stop this missile defense system. Otherwise, he’s going to put one in, too, which will not be good for world security.

AS: Why is the U.S. putting an increasing emphasis on drones as a central part of its new strategy?

AW: Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or drones are an easy, clean way for the U.S. to wage war. You don’t have to have your own military on the ground. These drones are capable of flying long distances, they can be refueled in the air, and they can do the dirty work of the U.S. without any American’s life being risked.

They are automating warfare. Some of these drones are as large as the 727 and can carry payloads that are enormous. They can put big bunker buster bombs under these things and fly them over and just drop wherever they want.

But this new automated military will not, in fact, protect American lives. Just like traditional military actions or missile strikes, drone warfare will inevitably precipitate blowback. We’ve already seen attacks on U.S. embassies and consulates specifically in response to drone attacks. So, the administration’s claim that these are the safest things that we could be using isn’t true.

We’ve already had examples of blowback from Obama’s drone war. Remember the young Pakistani-American guy who had planned to detonate a carload of explosive in Times Square. Luckily a hot-dog vendor thwarted his plot, but afterward when he was asked why he planned the attack, he explained, “Well, it’s the drones. The U.S. is using them to kill families in Pakistan.”

We also have the incident of the Jordanian doctor who was recruited to be an asset of the CIA. The CIA wanted him to infiltrate al-Qaeda and bring back information. But, this agent became horrified by the U.S. drone war. So he went to a CIA base in Afghanistan and blew himself up and killed all eight CIA agents.

Afterward it came out that he left a letter for his wife saying, “I am so horrified about what the U.S. is doing with these drones in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and I refuse to work with them anymore.”

The drone war is even complicating U.S. policy in Afghanistan. Pakistan closed the main supply route for over three months in protest against CIA drone strikes. The U.S. has been forced to bring in equipment into Afghanistan through the northern road network from Latvia, which is extraordinarily expensive. Despite Obama’s hopes, war, including drone war, will never be bloodless and clean.

AS:  A lot of people think that Obama is bringing an end to the wars Bush’s started. What is the real picture of U.S. militarism today?

AW: First of all, we have to be very watchful of what the Obama is doing in Iraq and Afghanistan. The truth is he has not really ended the U.S. domination over either of those countries. The U.S. has hoards of American private contractors in each of those countries, and many of them are private security firms who have every bit as much firepower as the U.S. military.

Beyond that, the U.S. has increased its bases throughout the Middle East. We don’t even know the total number of bases, outposts, runways and landing strips in Yemen, Oman, Qatar, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. We do know that there are CIA and U.S. military bases in Yemen. There’s a huge base in Qatar. There are, I think, seven bases now in Oman.

In Africa, the U.S. has established a military base in Somalia. They are using various alibis to justify increased military presence throughout the continent. The U.S. is sending the military into Ethiopia all the time. We have U.S. military forces in Kenya. And then we have U.S. Special Forces in Uganda to supposedly to go after Kony. Well, you can be sure that once they’re in, they’ll never leave.

Over in Mali and West Africa, the U.S. always has what they call mobile training teams, groups of Special Forces that will come in and do specialized training for militaries. That’s their way to establish relationships between senior leaders of the military, to try to get some sort of compatibility with the military in case the U.S. decides it needs to go in there. So the U.S. has a large number of small groups of military all over Africa.

In Asia, the U.S. pivot against China is ratcheting up tensions throughout the region. We have Special Forces in the Philippines, down in the island of Mindanao that are using drones and have assassinated 11 people already. And there are members of the Philippine government and legislature, their parliament, who are outraged about what’s going on.

Walden Bello, one of the wonderful international activists and member of the Philippine parliament, has already written to his government saying, “What’s going on? These are things you’re doing without any consultation — allowing U.S. military and armies, military operations that are killing Filipino people.”

And then, of course, we have many U.S. military forces in Korea, Japan and Okinawa. We’ve had a large naval base down in Singapore for a long time. We do have military to military relationships now with Vietnam, with Laos, Cambodia. So, the U.S. has its tentacles everywhere and, depending on who gets out of line, the U.S. may put great military as well as economic pressure on that country. And the U.S. will use the global “war on terror” to declare its right to go anywhere, anytime, do anything.

AS: So what do you think the key tasks for the antiwar movement today?

AW: Well, to be vigilant, to be vocal, to be on the streets, to keep after the issues of Iraq and Afghanistan. Don’t let them fade out of view. And one can use a variety of levers on it, because we’ve got to have some hook to make the public aware. In Iraq, we have to call attention to the issue of private contractors and the numbers that are there — who they are and what they’re doing — and also where U.S. oil companies are and what sort of contracts they’ve got there.

And in Afghanistan, we will be seeing war sponsored by the U.S. well after 2014. We have to debunk the idea that U.S. forces will be leaving behind an independent country. I think that the next 10-year period we will see U.S. forces there in large numbers fighting Taliban, conducting night raids and drone strikes, and violating the sovereignty of Pakistan. We should also watch out for U.S. using its power to control pipeline routes in the region as well as exploit the natural resources of Afghanistan.

Pakistan will likely be the most volatile of all of the areas. What the U.S. is doing there just has the potential to be a greater catastrophe than even Afghanistan. The U.S. is killing untold numbers of people with drones and essentially thumbing its nose at the Pakistani government, which has pleaded with us to stop because of the reaction that they are getting from their own people.

I mean it could explode in just so many horrific ways. People are furious with the U.S. The U.S. embassy in Pakistan has already been burned twice over the past decades.

We really have to follow what the U.S. is up to in Asia and the Pacific. We have to be watchful of the rhetoric of the administration and do everything we can to tamp it down, to call the hand of the government.

We also need to keep agitating against the occupation of Palestine. We need all sorts of international citizen activism to highlight the illegal settlements in the West Bank, the apartheid wall, and the treatment of Palestinians within Israel and the blockade of Gaza. I think that campus activists have played a key role doing all sorts of things like building walls to bring home what the apartheid structure of Israel is like.

We have to keep up the international effort to break Israel’s blockade of Gaza. Very soon, we’ll be announcing a new project called Gaza’s Ark. Rather than trying to get boats to break the blockade from outside, we are going to work with Palestinians to break the blockade from the inside. We’re going to help sponsor a Gaza boat building and sailing school. This will provide some much needed jobs for the people of Gaza.

This is an important shift. We all have felt badly about spending so much money on flotillas from the outside that gets a lot of publicity for the issue but they don’t really help the people inside Gaza that much. With this new approach, we can get work for people and help stimulate the economy to a small degree.

Once the boats get built, we’ll solicit people all over the world to order products from Gaza. We’ll put these products on the boat and have them set sail from Gaza to deliver them to the world. Everyone will know that the probability of ever getting this stuff is pretty low, but they can be a part of helping break the blockade and also help the people of Gaza earn money for the beautiful work that they do. It’s an important new step for the continuing struggle to liberate Palestinians from Israeli occupation.

Finally, we need to keep the pressure on the American government and the Israeli government to stop any drive to war against Iran. We really need to pester the hell out of the Obama administration on this rhetoric that they’ve been saying about Iran developing weapons of mass destruction.

I mean we’ve heard all of this before. These same allegations against Iraq lead me to resign my post. Instead we should be encouraging them to talk with Iran. We should be in dialogue, not in military confrontation.

*  This article first appeared at Socialist Worker.

“Everything that the American troops have done in Iraq–all the fighting and all the dying, the bleeding and the building, and the training and the partnering–all of it has led to this moment of success,” Obama said. “[W]e’re leaving behind a sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq, with a representative government that was elected by its people.”

Such claims are a lie. None of this rhetoric can disguise the terrible waste of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq–as many as 1 million Iraqis dead, millions more driven from their homes, along with 4,500 U.S. soldiers killed, 32,000 wounded and nearly $1 trillion gone.

Obama’s claims about America’s “extraordinary achievement” in Iraq are Orwellian. In reality, the U.S. war and occupation further wrecked an already devastated country, left it in a shambles rather than rebuild it and stoked sectarianism between Iraq’s three main groups–Kurds, Shia Muslims and Sunni Muslims.

The U.S. already precipitated one civil war between Sunnis and Shias in 2006. And now, sectarian conflicts are threatening to explode again.

Shortly after the U.S. withdrawal, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, a Shia, attempted to arrest Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi, a Sunni. Hashimi fled to the Kurdish region for sanctuary. Sunni Salafists, who view Shias as infidels, have launched a wave of attacks that killed scores of Shia during their religious holiday of Arbaeen.

Post-occupation Iraq may be poised to descend into three-cornered warfare.

In the 1970s, Iraqis–though living under the brutal rule of Saddam Hussein’s regime–had achieved economic development and living standards on a par with Greece.

Over the last three decades, the U.S. has wrecked the country.

The U.S. launched the 1991 Gulf War to prevent Iraq from becoming a regional power that could threaten American control over the Middle East and its strategic oil reserves. The first Gulf War killed 300,000 Iraqis and destroyed the country’s infrastructure. Afterward, sanctions crippled Iraq’s economy, prevented reconstruction of the country, and led to the deaths of as many as 1.5 million more people.

In 2003, the Bush administration justified its invasion of the country with fabricated claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. In reality, Bush hoped the invasion would begin a series of regime changes in the region, including in Iran and Syria. With allied regimes in place in these countries, the U.S. would be able to dominate the region, control access to oil and thereby assert power over its international rivals, especially China.

The invasion quickly succeeded in toppling Saddam Hussein. But in short order, the Iraqi resistance to occupation destroyed Bush’s imperial fantasies.

Nevertheless, the U.S. occupation inflicted a terrible price on Iraqis. The Lancet medical journal estimated that between the invasion in March 2003 and June 2006, there were 650,000 civilian deaths directly and indirectly attributable to the war. Opinion Research Business, a British polling agency, used the Lancet‘s methodology to estimate over a million civilian deaths between March 2003 and August 2007.

Far from rebuilding Iraq as promised, Iraq remains in worse shape today, eight years after the invasion, than it was Saddam Hussein.

Outside of the Kurdish north, most Iraqis still go without regular electricity and don’t have reliable supplies of potable water. The Iraqi economy is in disastrous shape, with sky-high levels of unemployment and poverty. Journalist Juan Cole reports that the number of Iraqis living in slums jumped from 17 percent before the occupation to 50 percent today.

Instead of leaving behind a stable democracy responsive to its people, the U.S. established a corrupt state similar to that in Lebanon. Kurdish, Sunni and Shia ruling classes compete, via their political parties, in a three-way battle for the spoils of the national government. According to Transparency International, Iraq’s new government is the eighth-most corrupt in the world.

Perhaps the single-worst aspect of the entire legacy of occupation is the sectarianism and ethnic chauvinism that the U.S. consciously stoked and then used as the basis of the country’s new political system.

Iraq had a history of ethnic and religious oppression–though nominally secular, Saddam Hussein’s Baathist regime was predominantly Sunni. It repressed Kurdish aspirations for self-determination, and crushed Kurdish and Shia uprisings at the end of the first Gulf War.

Iraq, however, did not have a history of mass sectarianism and ethnic cleansing. But the U.S. occupation magnified and militarized these divisions, eventually triggering a full-blown civil war between Sunnis and Shias in Baghdad during 2006.

Iraq’s three major groups–Shia, Sunni and Kurds–reacted differently to the 2003 invasion.

The Sunni ruling class saw the U.S. war as an attack on its historic control over the country–confirmed by the occupation authorities’ “de-Baathification” program that hit Sunnis the hardest–and it went into resistance right away. The Kurdish ruling class, on the other hand, saw the invasion as a chance to consolidate its autonomous zone in the North, established after the first Gulf War.

The Shia ruling class and its religious parties Dawa and the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI) tried to use the invasion to gain control of the new government. Since the Shia were a majority of Iraq’s population, Dawa and the ISCI pressed hard for elections to consolidate their dominance–which encouraged Sunnis to view them with hostility. Only the Shia nationalist Moktada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army organized protests against the occupation.

When the U.S. targeted Sadr and his followers with repression, it raised the possibility of an Arab opposition uniting Sunnis and Shia against the occupation. In response, the U.S. turned to the oldest trick in the imperialist book–divide and conquer.

When the U.S. appointed up an Interim Governing Council, it used the Lebanese model, assigning each community representatives in proportion to their percentage of the population. But the pressure continued for elections. When they came, the U.S. had designed them in a fashion that cemented the religious and ethnic divisions in Iraqi society. As author Nir Rosen wrote:

Iraq’s election law itself seemed designed to promote civil war. Although the diverse country is divide into 18 province, it had only one electoral district…Ethnic and religious blocs preferred one district because they were nationally known, and they would be able to avoid challengers who had genuine grassroots local support.

Faced with impending defeat, the Sunni elite called for a boycott of the elections, which culminated in the victory for a succession of Shia-dominated governments. Sunni Salafist forces organized in various formations, including Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia. The Salafists staged a series of bombings and attacks on Shia civilians. Even the Sadrists turned against the Sunnis then.

A civil war between Shia and Sunni exploded in 2006, with Baghdad as the chief battleground.

Instead of using its occupation forces to stop the conflict, the U.S. fueled it. Washington’s Ambassador to Iraq, John Negroponte, had made his mark during the Reagan administration, backing death squads in Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua against left-wing movements and governments.

Negroponte implemented the so-called “Salvador Option” of backing Shia death squads against the Sunni resistance. He encouraged the Shia ISCI party to incorporate its militia, the Badr Brigades, into the Interior Ministry’s security forces. He then encouraged them to target not only the Salafists, but also the Sunni resistance itself.

The Shia-dominated Badr Bridgades and sections of Sadr’s Mahdi Army launched a massive counter-attack against Sunnis in Baghdad. Entire neighborhoods were ethnically cleansed.

In the end, according to the UN Refugee Agency, the fighting drove 4.7 million from their homes. Over 2 million mostly Sunnis fled the country, half of them to Syria, and another 2 million were internally displaced.

“There is no national identity any longer,” Ghassan al-Attiyah, an Iraqi political scientist and commentator, told journalist Patrick Cockburn. “Iraqis are either Sunni, Shia or Kurd.”

Negroponte and the U.S. had another twist in store. In 2007, the U.S. made overtures to sections of the Sunni elite–as part of the so-called “surge” of troops into Iraq–with the aim of exploiting divisions between the broader Sunni resistance and the Salafist groups. Over the protests of the Maliki government, the U.S. hired 100,000 Sunni resistance fighters and paid them $300 a month to form the Awakening Councils to fight a proxy war against the Salafists.

U.S. policies enflamed the sectarian conflict not only in Iraq, but across the Middle East.

The U.S. had planned to move on from Iraq to take down the Shia-dominated regime in Iran and Iran’s allies in power in Syria. But bogged down by the Iraqi resistance and the civil war, the U.S. hand in the Middle East was growing weaker. Iran gradually became as influential in Iraq as the U.S. itself.

The U.S. responded by raising the specter of a “Shia Crescent,” headquartered in Iran and extending through a Shia-dominated Iraq to Syria and the forces of Hezbollah in Lebanon. As Nir Rosen wrote, “The Bush administration contributed to regional sectarianism, seeking to bolster the so-called ‘moderate Sunni regimes’ (dictatorships like Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, viewed as moderate because they collaborated with Israel and the United States) against Iran or Hezbollah.”

U.S. allies like Saudi Arabia were only too happy to respond to the call for a network of Sunni states aligned with the U.S. against Iran and its influence in Iraq. The Saudis, along with the U.S. and Turkey, poured money into Iraqiya, an Iraqi party led by the secular Shia Ayad Allawi, but which had won 80 percent of the Sunni vote in recent elections. Iran, on the other hand, backed the Shia formations, from ISCI to Dawa and the Sadrists.

The battle over control of the Iraqi state came to a head in the 2010 parliamentary elections. Because of disagreements among them, the Shia parties didn’t put up candidates as part of a united slate, and Iraqiya was able to win the largest block of seats in parliament. Nevertheless, Maliki was able to unite the Shia parties to form a government.

The Sadrists agreed to participate–but on the condition that Maliki refuse to renegotiate the Status of Forces Agreement that the Bush administration had struck with the Iraqi government in 2008. Under the agreement, the U.S. was required to withdraw completely from Iraq by the end of 2011.

Despite pressure from the Obama administration to allow some number of U.S. military troops to remain in Iraq, with immunity from prosecution, Maliki refused to go along, and the U.S. was forced to pull its last soldiers out of Iraq in the middle of the night on December 18.

With the U.S. left with only a force of mercenaries in Iraq working for the State Department out of the giant Baghdad embassy, the situation in Iraq has reached a new stage–and the sectarian conflict threatens to explode once again into civil war.

Each of the sections of Iraqi ruling class is angling for full or partial control over the state, leadership of Iraq’s 900,000 military troops and police, and access to the country’s huge oil revenues.

The Kurdish ruling class, represented by Masoud Barzani of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, aims to consolidate its autonomous province and seize control of the contested city of Kirkuk, with its large oil reserves. Sunni politicians, represented in parliament by Allawi’s Irakiya party, want to establish a Sunni autonomous zone. Meanwhile, Shia leaders in Nuri al-Maliki’s coalition government aim to consolidate their rule over the country as a whole.

These schisms have detonated a political crisis.

Less than 24 hours after U.S. forces withdrew, Maliki, responding to an assassination attempt, ordered the arrest of Hashimi, the Sunni vice president of the coalition government, on terrorism charges mainly relating to the 2006-07 period. Hashimi fled to the autonomous Kurdish territory, where he remains. Maliki’s forces were able to arrest the vice president’s bodyguards, who were coerced into confessing to terrorist activities on national television.

Thousands of Sunnis have protested in various cities against the threatened arrest of Hashimi. The Iraqiya Party is now boycotting parliament and cabinet meetings to protest what it describes as Maliki’s attempt to consolidate dictatorial power, particularly over the security forces. Iraqiya is calling for Maliki to step down or face a no confidence vote.

At the same time, Sunni Salafist guerillas have launched a wave of attacks on Shia civilians and religious pilgrims. The Salafists have killed 145 Shias on a pilgrimage during the Arbaeen holidays. In one horrific attack on January 5, Salafists killed 78 pilgrims in Nasiriyah.

It is hard to predict whether the political crisis will descend into a full-blown civil war, but there are certainly dynamics driving in that direction.

For their part, the Salafists are intent on causing this. Leaders among the Sunni, Shia and Kurdish ruling classes also have an interest in playing the sectarian card to divert the anger of a desperate working class and urban poor onto other religious and ethnic groups.

The flashpoints are clear. Maliki’s attempt to consolidate a Shia state is a provocation to both Sunnis and Kurds. As Nir Rosen writes, “Government buildings are decorated with Shiite flags, banners and posters, and these can be seen even on Iraqi Army and Police vehicles and checkpoints. Not only is there no separation of church and state, there is no separation of state and sect.”

The Sunni elite’s demand for a Sunni autonomous zone could lead to another round of ethnic cleansing. Any such zone would contain a significant Shia minority who would be second-class citizens. No doubt the Salafists would take the opportunity to target the Shia, and this would provoke counter-attacks on Sunni minorities in predominantly Shia areas.

The Sunni Awakening Councils could also turn against the Shia government. The U.S., which had been bankrolling the Awakening Councils, has pressured Maliki into continue the payments and incorporating the councils into the Iraqi military. But Maliki has only hired one-sixth of these fighters. The well-armed Awakening Councils could be the basis of Sunni military attacks on Maliki’s ramshackle army.

Meanwhile, the long-simmering conflict between Arab and Kurdish rulers in Iraq could explode over control of the northern city of Kirkuk. Kirkuk sits on key oil reserves that would be a bonanza for whoever rules over it. A long-running, low-intensity conflict between Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and Arabs could reignite at any time.

On the other hand, there are interests and dynamics that could prevent the slide toward civil war.

The Shia, Sunni and Kurdish ruling classes have a stake in maintaining access to the national state and its oil profits. If the conflict goes too far, this would undermine their ability to continue to enrich themselves through state office. As journalist Patrick Cockburn wrote:

Disaster may come, but perhaps not yet. Iraqi politics can be misleading because, with the country so violent at the best of times, furious political confrontations do not necessarily lead to all-out conflict. Each side has a lot to lose from the final disintegration of the state.

Sunni rulers also recognize that they lost the last battle with Shia forces, and that they would likely lose any fight with either the Kurds, who have their own military forces in the Peshmerga, or the Shia, who control Iraqi military as well as a network of their own militias.

Among the Iraqi masses, there is also a deep weariness after three decades of war, sanctions, occupation and civil war. There is mass discontent with the entire government and distrust of national political parties that are widely perceived as corrupt, and only out to stuff their own pockets with government cash.

But no national political force has emerged to galvanize a united resistance among workers and urban poor against the government and the sectarian and chauvinist parties that dominate it. At various points, Iraqi oil workers seemed to point a way forward, but they have yet to create a national union movement nor a political party of their own that can break out of the stranglehold of communalist politics.

The U.S. and regional powers like Iran and Saudi Arabia will also be a factor in whether or not Iraq erupts in another civil war.

Each side in Iraq is weak in important ways, and so it looks to international sponsors for money and support. The Kurds look to the U.S. The Sunnis look to Saudi Arabia. And the Shia look to Iran and Syria. Thus, the growing schisms between the U.S. and the Sunni regimes it is allied with on the one hand, and Iran and its Shia allies on the other, will rebound into Iraq.

The U.S. remains the key player in all this. It has suffered a major defeat by having been forced to withdraw its military forces from Iraq. As a result, Iran has emerged as the principal victor of the Iraq war, with increased influence in the region. It now has a government dominated by Shia parties in control of Iraq to add to its historic relationship with the regime in Syria and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

The U.S. also faces a threat from below in the form of the Arab Revolutions, which have toppled two U.S. allies in Tunisia and Egypt and shaken other regimes in Washington’s network of Sunni monarchies and dictatorships.

But the U.S. is determined to shore up its declining influence in the region. It wants to maintain its power in Iraq itself. It still retains a large military base in the country, otherwise known as the U.S. Embassy. This facility is the size of 80 football fields and employs 16,000 staff, 5,000 of whom are military contractors. The U.S. hopes to be the broker between the various forces inside Iraq, using its alliance with the Sunnis and Kurds to prevent the full consolidation of a Shia state aligned with Iran.

Meanwhile, the U.S. is escalating its conflict with Iran, using the cover of Iran supposedly developing–does this sound familiar?–nuclear weapons of mass destruction. Washington’s allies Israel and Saudi Arabia are also important actors in a conflict that revolves around the same imperial interests at stake in the invasion of Iraq–control of Middle East oil and geopolitical dominance.

Thus, the sectarian conflict that the U.S. stoked in Iraq is being reproduced on a regional level–with the U.S., Israel and a network of Sunni regimes confronting Iran’s Shia government and its allies. The catastrophe that took place with the civil war in Iraq–and that threatens to break out again–could play out regionally, with horrifying consequences.

The hope amid this horror is working class solidarity across the ethnic and religious divisions. This is not a fantasy, but has been demonstrated at the high points of the Arab revolutions, such as the efforts to unite Muslims in defense of the oppressed Christian Copt minority in Egypt.

In reality, only the ruling class benefits from such communalist divisions. Sectarianism cannot provide jobs, electricity, food nor housing for working people and the poor. The working class in Iraq and throughout the Middle East will have to combat sectarianism, religious oppression and national oppression on the road to uniting the Arab working class in a struggle for a new Middle East.

Only such a struggle can stop the horrors that imperialism has unleashed in the form of ethnic cleansing, civil war, and regional war.

Abdul Malik Mujahid is a leader of Muslim Peace Coalition, a recently formed organization to challenge Islamophobia. Joe Lombardo is co-chair of the United National Antiwar Committee (UNAC), the chief sponsor of the April 9 and 10 antiwar protests. They talked about building an alliance between Muslims, labor and the antiwar movement for UNAC protests and the struggles ahead.

Ashley Smith: How has the “war on terror” impacted the Muslim, Arab and South Asian populations in the U.S.?

Abdul Malik Mujahid: Governments struggle to convince people to go to war because human beings don’t really want to kill each other. To get people to kill, you must demonize the enemy and the people associated with that enemy.

So while the U.S. has been in Iraq for 20 years, more recently Afghanistan and now Libya, they have targeted the Muslim community here at home. Anybody who looks like a Muslim has become a suspect. As a result, people targeting Muslims have discriminated against Arab Christians, Hindus and Sikhs, and Indians.

The magnitude of the attack on Muslims in America has not been adequately recognized. People know that there’s demonization and Islamophobia, but they don’t quite know how strong it is.

There have been more than 700,000 Muslims interviewed since 9/11, and tens of thousands have been detained and deported. The detention regime we are under has stopped and detained close to 100 or 200 people every day for between 3 hours to 12 hours, sometimes even longer. Every day of the week, every years since September 11, there many people have been detained for several hours. Mosques are routinely checked for nuclear bombs across the country.

All of this has had a huge impact on America’s Muslim population. It has devastated Muslim charities. Despite President Obama’s speech in Cairo and his recognition that charity is a Muslim pillar of faith, he has not taken a single step to help reestablish the charity structure, which has been destroyed in the post-9/11 world. So now when we have the most need for charity establishments within the country we have the least.

Islamophobia also has an impact on people’s wages. For example, one study found that wages of Muslim men have gone down by 10 percent. Unfortunately, the study did not include Muslim women. If they had, the decline would actually be worse than 10 percent.

But the worst thing is that Islamophobia has spread from right-wing talk shows to the mainstream. In the last election cycle, politicians spoke against Islam and Muslims. They are now turning Islamophobia into public policy. They have made it almost impossible to establish mosques. The practice of Islam is being criminalized, with proposed laws in 13 states making simple religious practices like praying and washing after prayer a criminal offense. If a proposed law in Tennessee passes, Muslims can be detained, tried and punished for 15 years.

Such public policy is only amplifying the attacks on Muslims. There have been attacks on the mosques. In one case, an imam was burned alive in a house where he was trying to remove anti-Muslim graffiti from the walls, and there was an explosion.

Joe Lombardo: A number of us in the antiwar movement and those of us in UNAC understood that the justification for this so-called “war on terror” was Islamophobia. We saw that this led directly to attacks on Muslims in this country. So to be an effective antiwar movement we needed to oppose Islamophobia.

Here in Albany, N.Y., I started working with the Muslim Defense Committee. Then we helped form Project Salaam, which helped document these so-called preemptive prosecutions. We all remember preemptive war, which got us into Iraq. The U.S. justified that war by saying that while Iraq was not attacking the U.S., it someday might attack the U.S.

Pre-emptive prosecution is similar. They now prosecute Muslims not for anything they have done, but for the presumption that someday, they might do something. So agents and provocateurs were sent into mosques, trying to get marginalized people to do something, either by tricking them or bribing them or inventing plots, and hundreds were arrested and put in jail. Project Salaam documented all of this.

As Malik said, Islamophobia has become institutionalized. It’s becoming part of law with these bills to outlaw Sharia law. We just saw the congressional hearing led by Rep. Peter King, and before that, we saw the attack on Park51 and other Muslim building projects around the country. We have even seen terrorist attacks against some of these projects. For example, hate mongers blew up construction equipment at a mosque being built in Murfreesboro, Tenn.

Those of us who have looked at the history a little bit understand how scapegoating an entire religion can lead to untold horrors. We watched what happened with the Nazis in Germany, and so we’re very fearful of Islamophobia being used in the same way here. So it became very clear that the antiwar movement had to take a very strong position against this bigotry, and UNAC basically has.

AS: Can you tell us about collaboration between UNAC the Muslim Peace Coalition?

AMM: There is a greater realization on the part of the Muslim community that Islamophobia is one form of hate, probably the most prominent in our society today.

But there are older hates in marginalized communities. There is racism toward African Americans. There is the criminalization of our youth in the inner cities. There’s hate toward immigrants, especially Latinos. In fact Muslims are perceived as immigrants, even though one-third of Muslims are African American, who have been here for centuries. More than 50 percent of Muslims are born and raised in America, but the image is that they are an immigrant community.

Labor unions are also being targeted, and women are suffering in other ways. Social services are being cut. Teachers are being laid off, and teaching is a women-led profession. So with 40 percent of households being woman-led, such cuts are devastating for women and children.

In this situation, we felt that there is a common cause for Muslims not only in resisting Islamophobia, but also in uniting with other allies who are suffering discrimination and economic attacks.

We need to understand two key points. First, Islamophobia, war and terrorism are all connected phenomena. So we need to fight against war and Islamophobia, as well as terrorism. Second, hate and poverty are not only problems the Muslim community faces. Other communities face similar problems. We can and must unite with as broad forces as we can to mount a resistance.

This realization resulted in the formation of the Muslim Peace Coalition. Many Muslims have been part of a lot of coalitions, mostly civil rights or human rights. We felt we needed to create the Muslim Peace Coalition that resisted the war abroad and the war at home. We are facing the war at home because all the money is being sucked up by the war abroad.

Understanding the urgency of this situation, 40 different Muslim intellectuals held a conference call, and we realized that something must be done. We started inviting different activists in different cities. Now the Muslim Peace Coalition has chapters in 14 different states.

JL: UNAC’s collaboration with the Muslim Peace Coalition brought us in close contact with the Muslim community and leaders of the Muslim community like Malik. The Muslim community is a very substantial community in this country, and a vital ally with the antiwar movement on the issue of peace. So I think our collaboration will really expand and build the antiwar movement.

Everything that they do with the war abroad and the war at home is geared toward dividing us. In Iraq, it’s Shiite divided from Sunni or Arab from Kurd, but they always divide and conquer. And they do the same thing here. The kind of racism that we see directed toward the Latino community, Blacks or Muslims is geared to divide us and have us fearful of one another. Some forces in our society want to exploit the fact that there are some cultural and language differences and so forth.

By us coming together, it bridges that gap. It’s like in Tahrir Square, when the Coptic Christians prayed, Muslims stood around them to help protect them. All these divisions in society that are used to keep us apart can be broken down, and we’re starting to see a little of that here with this alliance between the Muslims and the fight against Islamophobia and against war.

AS: One of the key initiative that both of you have pursued has been outreach to labor movement to build for April 9 and 10. How did this come about, and what kinds of initiatives have you pursued?

AMM: At the invitation of Kathy Kelley, I participated in the UNAC conference in Albany, N.Y., that drew about 700 or 800 leading activists in the peace movement. I noticed a few of the groups that were not quite represented–mostly Muslims, labor, Latinos, African Americans and young people.

I took it upon myself to organize a conference call with Muslim peace activists around the world. It drew about 40 intellectuals. We felt that we should take responsibility of creating and enhancing the participation of the Muslim community in the antiwar movement.

But at the same time, it remained in my mind that labor among all these groups would be one of the most important groups to reach out to. They have professional capacities, offices, human resources and financial resources. I thought we should reach out to them.

I started a conversation in Chicago and started looking into labor unions that I have contacts with. One of the main unions that I have contacts with is 1199SEIU, the health care workers union based in New York. I had interviewed George Gresham, the president of 1199, on my radio show, and I invited him for our January 8 peace activist daylong training in New York. This meeting was focused on Muslim constituencies by design. But we also reached out to allies in the antiwar movement and the labor movement.

George came extended his support, and to our delight, he condemned the war in Afghanistan and, in the tradition of Dr. King, connected the antiwar movement with the war at home. He invited Joe and I to address his executive committee. They gave us an extraordinary welcome. They unanimously voted to support and endorse the UNAC demonstration in New York on April 9. They could see the common cause, and they agreed to join the struggle.

JL: I’m a lifelong member of a trade union. I’m a New York state worker and a member of the labor council, and I’ve always understood the importance of labor in any social movement.

It’s not just because of resources, but labor has an extraordinary power. If labor ever worked all together and was organized to collaborate as one, we could stop the running of the country if we decided to do that. So there’s extraordinary power in labor, and it’s always very important to bring labor into any social movement.

We see the effects of the war on the economy here. And we see all these states, one after the other, not only imposing budget cuts but also trying to do away with collective bargaining rights, which were rights we really fought for. Many lives were lost in that fight.

In Wisconsin and Ohio, they’re trying to push us back 100 years and do away with collective bargaining. It’s really a blow not only for labor, but also for every working person in the country, because it will affect all of us. We’ll all lose from it. We’ll all lose benefits, wages and everything we’ve gained over many, many years of organizing and struggle.

So there seemed to be a very natural connection between the antiwar movement and the labor movement. 1199SEIU has endorsed the rally. There are other significant labor unions that have endorsed in New York City. Teamsters Local 808, which organizes commuter train workers, has endorsed. Transport Workers Union Local 100, which organizes bus and train workers, has endorsed, and we’ve received other significant labor endorsements.

George Gresham recently spoke at a meeting in Boston. He said they made some mistakes on October 2 at the One Nation Rally that they want to correct now. Specifically, he said that the union movement has to work closer with the Islamic community and the antiwar movement. Perhaps some of our work has helped facilitate that, and I’m hopeful that the demonstration will bring us closer, and that we can work together.

I think what happened in Wisconsin shows the importance of collaboration. Labor mobilized when the governor attacked them. They copied some of the methods they saw in Tahrir Square in Egypt. Just like in Tahrir, workers stayed in the Capitol building. But they didn’t do it alone. The entire antiwar and progressive community came out. Students came out with them and for them.

I think it’s clear that an alliance between all of us is the way that we’re going to go forward. So hopefully, we’re starting to build those bridges between the antiwar movement, the Muslim community and the labor movement. If we can foster such collaboration, it will make the antiwar movement stronger, it will make the labor movement stronger, and it will make the fight against Islamophobia stronger.

AS: What are you doing to reach out and mobilize Muslims for the demonstrations?

AMM: Joe and I came up with the idea of a speaking tour through mosques in and around New York. We want to mobilize the Muslim community for the April 9 demonstration. Joe and I got in his car for six days and went around meeting key leaders of the community. We addressed many congregations, ranging anywhere from 60 people to over 1,000 people. We were able to talk to all the key leaders in New York, New Jersey and some in Connecticut.

One thing I learned from this tour is that people have been waiting for something like this, and that people are ahead of us in understanding that we are in a common struggle. They were thankful to meet with us. Now we have 100 imams who have issued a call for Muslims in and around New York to mobilize for April 9.

It has been an extraordinary learning process and humbling experience. People think on their own, they have reached the same conclusions, and they were waiting for someone to connect the dots for them. I am hopeful that labor, churches, synagogues and temples will also go around on such a peace tour during the few days left before April 9 to do similar outreach and organizing.

JL: I think it was an extremely important tour, and I learned a tremendous amount about the Muslim community. I’ve been in more mosques than I’ve ever been in my life, and I think it’s clear that most Muslims are against the wars.

But Muslims are very much on the defensive because of how this “war on terror” and its Islamophobia targets them. I think it was very important for them to see that there are non-Muslims who stand with them and support them in the antiwar movement. I felt incredibly welcome wherever I went, and they were happy that I was there.

I also learned a lot about mobilizing people just by being with Malik and watching the kinds of things that he did with his community, and also the tremendous respect he has within the Muslim community. So I think this is an incredible asset for the antiwar movement and for UNAC, and I think it will result in a large Muslim turnout for the April 9 demonstration.

AMM: I think America is going through what is essentially a struggle for its future. Some people want to make the people, especially the white majority, scared of a demographic future in which diversity is going to become as American as apple pie. They want people to become scared of that diversity. That’s what behind slogans like “Take back our country.” More people are buying guns and making death threats against President Obama and things like that.

I happen to believe that diversity is going to be a major strength for America in a world which is daily becoming a more globalized and interdependent world. There is no country on the earth that has more people from all over the world than the United States.

Two things can help America in this situation. Number one, instead of bombing people, we should relate to people like a good customer of a mom and pop store. Second, we must respect people for who they are. All the diverse people in America could actually become true ambassadors in the future economy and the future world order in which there are other nations, which are rising up.

Instead of fear-mongering, we need to consider diversity as a strength for America and a better world.

In particular, Clinton’s role in working with Haiti, both before and after the catastrophic earthquake last January, was singled out.

To the U.S. media, Clinton is a compassionate statesmen, with only the best interests of the Haitian people at heart. Particularly since this year’s quake, he has been viewed as a decisive leader who can “get things done,” in contrast to the country’s ineffective government. Because of his role as co-chair of the Interim Haiti Reconstruction Commission (IHRC), Esquire magazine called Clinton “CEO of a leaderless nation,” the Miami Herald repeatedly refers to him as the “czar of the recovery effort.”

Ordinary Haitians have a different view. They remember Clinton as the man who, while president, demanded Haiti follow the “Plan of Death”–the neoliberal prescriptions of the IMF and World Bank that “structurally adjusted” the Haitian economy in the interests of U.S. business, at the expense of the country’s peasants and poor.

Today, Haitians know Clinton as a man who wields immense power over the country’s future. Esquire‘s description of him as the “CEO of a leaderless nation.” can only be called a political Freudian slip–a CEO, after all, is concerned with profitable investments for shareholders, not meeting people’s needs.

It isn’t even true that Clinton can “get things done.” According to the Washington Post, only 2 percent of the more than $5 billion in aid promised by the U.S. and other countries at a UN donor conference for the first 18 months of reconstruction has materialized. Clinton’s IHRC has dispensed just over $500 million so far–a drop in the bucket compared to the need.

Clinton has promised to “burn up the phone lines” to get world governments to fulfill their pledges. But if and when he manages to get funds for the IHRC, no one should be under any illusion that the reconstruction aid will be used in the interests of Haitian peasants and poor.

The IHRC is a colonial body that will implement the same old neoliberal measures. The U.S. spearheaded setting up the IHRC at an international conference in June. In its original design, the 26-member executive body had a majority of foreigners representing various countries and international financial institutions. Faced with protests from Haitians, the executive was reorganized so that there is now 13 Haitians and 13 foreigners. Clinton and Haitian Prime Minister Max Bellerive were selected as co-chairs.

But lest anyone mistakenly think Bellerive and the other 13 Haitians have any control over the commission, the World Bank was chosen as the trustee of the funds. On top of that, Haitian President René Préval was compelled to extend his decree of emergency powers to prevent any Haitians from overruling the IHRC’s power in Haiti.

“Haiti’s true government,” wrote Berthony Depont, editor of the weekly left-wing paper Haiti Liberté, “has just been installed on June 17 with 26 members, all handsomely paid, at the Karibe Convention Center. There are 13 junior Haitians, all too happy to be nominated, but who have no credibility with the Haitian people. Then there are the real members of the Interim Haitian Reconstruction Commission: the foreigners.”

Clinton, whatever his penchant for professing to feel Haitians’ pain, will makes sure that the IHRC serves the interests of the U.S. and other powerful governments, in alliance with its allies in Haiti, the wealthy.

As the U.S. Agency for International Development proclaims unapologetically on its Web site: “U.S. foreign assistance has always had the twofold purpose of furthering America’s foreign policy interests in expanding democracy and free market, while improving the lives of the citizens of the developing world.”

In fact, the whole history of Haiti proves that “free-market economics” benefits U.S. multinationals and the Haitian elite, while impoverishing the masses–and that “expanding democracy” is restricted by who the U.S. government thinks should hold power.

Of course, not even Bill Clinton will claim that Haiti–the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere–has thrived in the neoliberal era. He’s even admitted that U.S. demands during the 1990s that Haiti end trade restrictions against U.S. agricultural products had a devastating effect on the economy. “We made this devil’s bargain on rice,” Clinton said in March. “And it wasn’t the right thing to do. We should have continued to work to help them be self-sufficient in agriculture.”

In a recent Esquire article, he waxed lyrical about what he hoped to accomplish in Haiti. “Haitians…need the organizational structure and the support to get things done,” he told the magazine. “That’s what I’m trying to do: move things along. I want them to consider all their big alternatives. I want them to consider becoming a wireless country, consider becoming an energy-independent country. I want them to close their landfills, recycle everything and use the rest for energy. Wouldn’t it be great if they became the first wireless nation in the world? They could, I’m telling you, they really could.”

Clearly concerned that such projects could be easily dismissed as fantasies about a society where more than 10 percent of the population lives in refugee camps, he retreated later in the interview. “I don’t want to be naïve,” he told Esquire. “It’s going to be a stretch. It’ll be hard, but I’m excited about it. Enough so that after a couple of heart incidents and being sixty-three years old, I am prepared to spend three years on it. They want the right things for their country.”

However, when you look behind Clinton’s fantasizing and his dilettantish commitment of three whole years to Haiti’s future, the IHRC plan is, in fact, the same old plan–with some public relations bells and whistles–that Clinton and his friend Paul Collier, an Oxford professor and former World Bank official, came up with in 2009.

Collier’s blueprint for Haiti is standard neoliberalism–with emphases on pushing sweatshop industries, reorienting Haiti’s desperate peasants toward producing export crops, developing the country’s beaches and historical sites for tourism, and investing in infrastructure to service all these projects, none of which will benefit workers and the poor.

Clinton’s neoliberal plans for Haiti will work out nicely for the vulture capitalists who have descended on Haiti to exploit the earthquake catastrophe. “Haiti has become the new El Dorado in terms of people seeking opportunities to make a quick buck,” Jean-Robert Lafortune, president of the Haitian American Grassroots Coalition, told The Miami Herald.

In March, the International Peace Operations Association held a conference for private security firms like Triple Canopy to contract their services to Haiti’s corporate elite. As Patrick Elie, former minister of defense in Haiti, told the Inter Press Service: “[T]hese guys are like vultures coming to grab the loot over this disaster…[M]oney that might have been injected into the Haitian economy is just going to be grabbed by these companies, and I’m sure they’re not the only mercenary companies.”

Meanwhile, textile manufacturers are lining up to take advantage of IHRC’s commitment to sweatshop labor–and palm off the exploitation of impoverished workers as humanitarianism.

As Time magazine reported, “Gap is planning to roll out its own made-in-Haiti line. The company, which owns Old Navy and is already responsible for 4,000 Haitian textile jobs, may even set up special Haiti sections in some stores. ‘Customers generally don’t care about country of origins,’ says Art Peck, a senior Gap executive. ‘We think they will with Haiti.’”

In the agricultural sector, USAID and Monsanto are collaborating on the misnamed project WINNER–a “benevolent” program that will, in fact, further erode Haiti’s food sovereignty.

Monsanto–in what one of their executives calls a “fabulous Easter gift”–donated 475 tons of hybrid seeds at a cost to itself of $4 million. The seeds are supposed to be distributed to Haitian peasant farmers, but the country’s social movements have long opposed the use of Monsanto’s genetically modified products. Farmers are vowing to burn the Monsanto seeds, which are coated with pesticides and likely not adapted to Haitian diverse soil conditions.

In protest against WINNER, thousands of peasants marched in Hinche on July 4 and burned Monsanto seeds. “With friends like Monsanto and its governmental allies, who needs enemies,” said Benoit Griouard of Union Paysanne. “This so-called donation is an attack on Haitian farmers and the future of their local seeds.” Another leader, Chavannes Jean-Baptiste from the Mouvman Peyizan Papay declared Monsanto’s seeds “a gift of death. It’s an attack on peasant agriculture, on the farmers, on biodiversity, on native seeds, on what remains of our environment in Haiti.”

In perhaps the most bizarre example of disaster capitalism, the Vietnamese Army’s telecommunications company Viettel bought Haiti’s last state-owned company, Teleco, for $59 million.

Before he sold it, Préval fired hundreds of workers and invested precious funds that could have been used for the benefit of Haitians in projects that would make Teleco fit for privatization.

Meanwhile, forces that claim to be a voice for the Haitian people against business and governments are getting a piece of the pie in the aftermath of the quake.

With the exception of a few, like Partners in Health, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have used the Haitian tragedy to accumulate vast sums of money that they haven’t spent to aid the Haitian masses. And when they have, their efforts have been haphazard, uncoordinated and unaccountable to the Haitian people or government.

The Philanthropy News Digest reported in May that “roughly $14.9 billion, or $37,000 per displaced family, has been donated for Haiti earthquake relief efforts to date, much of it raised by the American Red Cross, CARE, Catholic Relief Services, the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund and the Clinton Foundation Haiti Fund.

“The Red Cross, for example, has raised $444 million and spent about 25% of that amount; CARE has raised $34.4 million and spent about 16 percent of that; CRS has raised $165 million and spent 8 percent; and the Clinton Bush Fund and the Clinton Foundation have raised $52 million combined, of which 13% has been spent.”

Not only have many NGOs and charities spent only a fraction of what they raised off Haiti, but they also display what the Disaster Accountability Project calls a “shocking lack of transparency.” According to the project’s study of 197 organization that received donations for Haiti, only six provided factual situation reports, while 128 others, had no reports but only emotional appeals and anecdotes.

The Red Cross has come under particular fire. Outraged after a fact-finding trip to Haiti, Florida Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz attacked the Red Cross, saying, “We were actually pretty struck by the fact that we didn’t see the Red Cross anywhere at all.”

After hearing the Red Cross’ claim that it was holding onto the bulk of donations around Haiti for long-term projects, Wasserman Schultz later softened her criticisms. But the truth is that NGOs like the Red Cross shouldn’t be rationing funds in such an emergency; Haitians need money for reconstruction right now.

The stinginess of the NGOs has angered Haitians. Ruth Derilus, who worked for an NGO with a multimillion-dollar budget after the 2008 floods in Gonaïves, told the Nation magazine she would never work for one again because “of all the money they send here, only 10 percent actually makes it to the ground. The rest is spent on foreign experts, hotels, car rentals and hotel conferences.”

Instead of helping to solve the crisis, the NGOs are making money off Haiti and restricting aid. Meanwhile, the U.S. and other powerful governments use the NGOs to effectively bypass the Haitian state, further weakening its role in the country. Thus, the IHRC will only spend 6.6 percent of its budget through the Haitian state–the rest will go to private corporations and NGOs.

This is why many Haitians, as well as others in the Caribbean who have had similar experiences, have denounced the NGOs for undermining Haitian democracy.

After a meeting of the Caribbean Community, Roosevelt Skerrit, the prime minister of Dominica, stated, “With respect to the NGOs operating out of Haiti, we called on the UN secretary general to do all that he can to bring some level of order to the situation, because while we speak about maintaining democracy in Haiti, we can’t at the same time be affording NGOs to undermine the democratic institutions in Haiti…We call on the international institutions and government to cease and desist from putting resources into the NGOs.

From celebrity political figures like Bill Clinton, to the U.S. and other powerful governments, to corporations and NGOs, the forces and institutions that could make a difference in the lives of poor Haitians are putting other interests first. Haitians endured the disaster of the earthquake. Now they are facing the man-made disaster of neoliberalism.

There was an immediate outpouring of solidarity after the quake struck Haiti on January 12–people from the U.S. to Palestine and beyond gave to NGOs and charities, even when they couldn’t afford much themselves.

At the end of March, the United Nations held an international conference for donors to fund the rebuilding of Haiti, where dozens of countries promised almost $10 billion over the next few years and more than $5 billion for the first 18 months of emergency reconstruction.

But the record of the world powers is a stark contrast to the generosity of their citizens. The U.S., France, Canada and the UN–not to mention a range of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) with connections in high places–have done next to nothing to provide alternative shelter to refugees. They have failed to remove the rubble, let alone begin reconstruction, and they reneged on their pledges to deliver aid.

Instead, Haiti’s earthquake is being used as an excuse to ratchet up a neoliberal economic plan for the country and to bolster the now 6-year-old UN occupation to repress any resistance.

Meanwhile, the situation in Haiti remains dire. The earthquake killed some 300,000 people, including an estimated one-quarter of government workers. It destroyed countless houses, leaving 1.5 million people homeless, and it collapsed the National Palace and wrecked a majority of other government buildings. Overall, the Inter-American Development Bank estimates that the quake caused between $8 billion and $13 billion in damage.

Six months later, those 1.5 million people are still homeless, struggling to survive in 1,300 refugee camps. Astonishingly, 232,000 of these homeless are still without tents or tarps, according to reports. Only one-quarter of the camps are managed by the either the Haitian government or aid organizations.

According to the Montreal Gazette‘s grim account, Port-au-Prince:

still looks like a war zone… The camps erected by hundreds of thousand of Haitians in the hours after their lives were shattered are becoming permanent slums.

Late afternoon torrential rains soak belongings and leave lake-size puddles in which mosquitoes breed, then spread malaria. Deep, raspy coughs can be heard everywhere. Scabies and other infections transform children’s soft skin into irritating red bumpy rashes. Bellies are swelling and hair turning orange from malnutrition. Vomiting and diarrhea are as common as flies.

While injuries from the quake have healed into scars, there are countless accidents from the chaotic living conditions–toddlers falling into vats of boiling rice or beans, people breaking limbs on chunks of concrete and wire, entire families poisoned by carbon monoxide as they cook in their tents. Around the city, the stench of rotting bodies has been replaced by the stench of rotting piles of garbage.

Neither governments, international institutions nor NGOs have made a dent in constructing alternatives to these camps. Indeed, the one major alternative camp that has been established exposes how the Haitian elite is exploiting the crisis for profit.

The Haitian government, in cooperation with the U.S. military, began construction in Corail Cesselesse, nearly 15 miles from Port-au-Prince with the aim of building a new city of 300,000. It appointed Gerard Emile “Aby” Brun, the president of Nabatec Development, to oversee the transfer of some 7,000 people from a squatter camp on the Petionville Golf Course to the new location.

According to the Associated Press’ Jonathan Katz, Brun “is also a lead negotiator with South Korean garment firms to build factories that Haitian officials say will likely go into Corail Cesselesse. The camp he set up is a potential source of workers for those factories, which can take advantage of generous U.S. import laws for Haitian-assembled textiles.”

However, the camp is located on a flood plain with no vegetation to provide shelter from the scorching sun or the torrential storms of hurricane season. An Oxfam worker told the New York Times that the plan for Corail Cesselesse “does not represent clear strategic thinking on the part of the government. It’s like Sudan. There’s not a tree in sight. And people feel marooned. They are having issues finding income-generating activities, and soon, they are going to have trouble feeding themselves.”

Meanwhile, in Port-au-Prince and its surrounding towns, despite the promises, ruined houses, hospitals and buildings remain as they were the day after the earthquake.

So far, only 5 percent of the estimated 26 million cubic yards of rubble from the earthquake has been removed. The New York Times reports that “experts say it would take a thousand trucks three to five years to clear away the wreckage, though fewer than 300 trucks are hauling now.” Donor countries, NGOs and the Haitian government have only managed to build 5,500 hurricane-proof shelters.

Leading figures in the relief effort–like Bill Clinton, co-chair of the Interim Haiti Reconstruction Commission (IHRC)–claim that the failed promises of reconstruction are the result of the enormity of the disaster and the international economic crisis that depleted resources available for Haiti.

But these are excuses. If Haiti were a priority, the great powers would find the money. Since it isn’t, they have only promised the paltry sum of $10 billion. Compare that to the amount the U.S. spends on its real priorities–for example, the Pentagon, which is $663 billion for 2010. And the scale of the disaster, rather than being an excuse for inaction, should be the reason for a massive mobilization of resources for reconstruction.

Rather than step up the relief effort, donor countries–with the help of the Western media–are scapegoating the Haitian government to deflect attention for how little they’ve done.

For example, they blame Haitian President René Préval for failing to overcome problems with land tenure and to secure plots for new housing. But most of the big landowners are allies of the U.S. Thus, the U.S. government is in a better position than the powerless Préval administration to compel landowners to donate for new construction.

This isn’t to leave Préval off the hook. He has been a pathetic figure, disappearing in the wake of the earthquake and, despite grumblings about violations of sovereignty, providing Haitian cover for imperial betrayal.

For example, on the July 12 six-month anniversary of the quake, while the capital city sat in ruins–and its people in vast new tent slums–Préval gave out medals to honor representatives from countries and NGOs that have done so little to rebuild Port-au-Prince.

But to blame Préval as the primary reason for the dysfunctional condition of the Haitian state is absurd. The U.S., France and Canada as well as the UN are directly responsible for undermining the capacity of the Haitian state to coordinate reconstruction, let alone future development of the country.

The betrayal of Haiti began centuries ago. After Haiti’s successful slave revolution won independence from France in 1804, European powers undermined every attempt by the country to chart an independent course of development in the interests of its people. Famously, France demanded that Haiti pay–in today’s dollars–$21 billion in reparations for the French slavemasters’ loss of their property–that is, their slaves.

Since the 1980s, the U.S. has imposed neoliberal policies–what Haitians have called the “Plan of Death”–that compromised the state’s ability to run the economy. For example, the U.S. compelled former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and his then-ally Préval to privatize state-owned companies and cut tariffs on rice imports. These policies increased unemployment among urban workers and undercut Haitian rice production to the extent that the country today is dependent on subsidized American rice. As a result, per capita income has fallen by one-fifth–from $600 in 1980 to $480 today.

Meanwhile, the U.S. and its international allies collaborated in neutering every attempt to use the Haitian state to improve the conditions of impoverished peasants and the urban poor. For example, Aristide was forced out of his elected position as president twice by coups in 1991 and 2004–to prevent social reform in the interests of Haitian peasants, workers and the poor.

Since the second coup, the Haitian state has not been in control of the country in any way. The U.S., other imperial powers, and international financial institutions are running Haiti’s economy, and the UN, through its misnamed United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH), has occupied the country since 2004, ruling it in traditional neocolonial fashion.

Now these powers need a scapegoat because, after all the fanfare that accompanied the donor conferences, they have failed to deliver.

Only Brazil, Norway, Estonia, and Australia have submitted all their promised donations to the IHRC. The Washington Post reported that donors have only supplied 2 percent of the $5.3 billion promised for the critical first 18 months of emergency reconstruction. According to the UN Human Development Program, the IHRC itself has only dispensed $506 million–only 9 percent of the funds budgeted for 2010 through mid-2011.

The U.S. has played a central role in obstructing aid to Haiti. The Senate held up the U.S. contribution of $2.8 billion, with Republican Sen. Richard Lugar playing a key role in blocking this aid package. Lugar insists that until Préval can ensure free and fair elections–translation, ones that pro-U.S. candidates are sure to win–and reduce barriers to private investment, the U.S. should not release its full contribution to the IHRC.

As a result of such maneuvers, the IHRC has only $90 million in its coffers. No one should be holding their breath until more arrives. The world’s main governments have a dismal track record on fulfilling humanitarian promises for Haiti. A previous UN donor conference for Haiti in April 2009 got pledges of $400 million, but only 15 percent of the funds ever materialized.

What money has been spent by the IHRC shows that the world’s most powerful government care more about padding the pockets of their own corporations. Beverly Bell of the Institute for Policy Studies found that huge sums of money have:

gone right back to donor nations, as with the $0.40 on every U.S. government aid dollar that paid for the U.S. military presence in Haiti for, at least, the first two months after the quake. Untold dollars go to U.S. firms, like the agribusiness corporations, whose surplus rice is being purchased by USAID to deliver as aid…

There are the fees paid to a small army of consultants working for foreign governments and international agencies… Then there is graft, corruption and poor planning, all of which further redirects aid dollars away from desperate earthquake survivors.

The UN has also failed Haiti through the crisis. UN officials live apart from the Haitian masses in relative luxury. In a revealing public relations disaster, the UN spent $10 million to rent two cruise ships, the Ola Esmeralda and the Sea Voyager–dubbed the “Love Boat” by UN staff–to house officials from the World Food Program and MINUSTAH.

Edmond Mulet, the former Guatemalan diplomat who heads the UN mission, told reporters that the ships are a reward for the UN staff’s hard work. “It is the least we could do for them,” he said. “They are working 14, 16 hours a day. The place was pulverized. Living conditions are really appalling.”

Richard Morse, the Haitian American musician and owner of Port-au-Prince’s Hotel Oloffson, captured the message that the UN is sending in a statement to reporters:

If the UN is living on a cruise ship, it is a perfect metaphor for how they are viewed in the country. If they think that quake refugees should be living on cruise ships, then they should get cruise ships for the Haitian people, that’s all I’m saying. Unless, of course, I’m misinterpreting this, and they really are better than the Haitians.

MINUSTAH, meanwhile, has been occupying the country since 2004, with forces drawn from Brazil and several other countries, including Israel. Between them, Mulet, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and Brazilian Gen. Luiz Guilherme Paul Cruz have increased the UN occupation force to 8,940 soldiers and 4,391 police officers.

The UN occupation costs more than $51 million per month. UN troops don’t speak Haitian Creole. In concert with the U.S.-trained Haitian police, they patrol poor neighborhoods, seizing political prisoners and repressing dissent.

Just as they did in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake, foreign governments and the media have played up the threat of violent crime in the refugee camps to justify the increased troop presence. Instances of rape and sexual violence against women are undoubtedly a real problem. But neither the UN nor the Haitian police are capable of solving them.

In fact, a variety of human rights investigations have documented human rights violations by both the Haitian police and MINUSTAH forces. As recently as 2007, MINUSTAH expelled 114 Sri Lankan soldiers after allegations of rape and child abuse. In the current crisis, Haitian women have complained that UN soldiers and police have demanded sex in exchange for food and aid.

To really address the causes of violence and rape in the camps, the international powers would have to address the horrific living conditions in the camps–the very thing they have avoided. Spending $51 million a month on soldiers and cops will only increase violence–the violence of repressive forces used against desperate poor people, especially when they protest their deteriorating conditions.

In June, protests swept Haiti in opposition to the MINUSTAH occupation and the Préval administration. Graffiti spray-painted on the ruins of Port-au-Prince denounces the UN, the U.S., NGOs and Préval.

Many of the protests and much of the graffiti calls for the return of Aristide. They also object to Préval’s handpicked electoral commission, which is expected to ban the most popular political party in the country, Aristide’s Fanmi Lavalas, and thereby rig the election scheduled for November 28.

MINUSTAH officials have made it clear that their main worry is the growing resistance, and their soldiers have attacked demonstrations. For example, on May 23, UN soldiers went on a rampage in the massive refugee camp opposite National Palace, firing tear gas and rubber bullets for hours. On the same day, MINUSTAH soldiers stormed the University of Haiti, firing more tear gas and rubber bullets into a student protest.

The hope for Haiti lies in this renewed resistance to colonial occupation. Only resistance can compel international forces to deliver on promised aid–and make sure that aid serves the interests of the Haitian peasants, workers and urban poor. As Jacqueline Cherilus, a 22-year-old medical student at Université Lumière, told a reporter:

Americans and everyone who’ve sent tents: We’re tired of that stuff, those same tents and tarps. We need construction. You see how strong the rains are becoming? Tents can’t resist that rain. How long can we live in tents and tarps. You can’t live for two or three years under a tarp. We need houses. We’re going to have hurricanes soon and flooding.

The aid is poorly organized and poorly divided. There are lots of people who don’t receive anything. To have real aid, we need social change.

Outside of Haiti, activists must stand in solidarity with the emerging protest movement against the occupation and for development in the interests of Haitian peasants, workers and urban poor.

We must make several demands. First of all, we should support Haiti’s right to self-determination. Haitians and their government should be in control of the reconstruction of Port-au-Prince and the rest of the country, not the imperial powers, their corporations, the UN and the NGOs.

We should call for the promised aid to be immediately released to the Haitian state so that it can improve its capacity to deliver housing, health care and education. We must also call for an end to the UN occupation of Haiti and for an end to its ban on the return of Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Moreover, Aristide’s party, Fanmi Lavalas, the most popular political force in the country, must be allowed to participate in upcoming elections.

On top of the pittance of aid, they have promised, the U.S., France, and Canada should pay reparations for the damage they have done to Haiti. France can begin with repaying $21 billion it extorted from the country when it won independence.

Only when Haitians are allowed to determine their own destinies in economics and politics will Haiti be able to develop in the interests of its people.

Ashley Smith: SB 1070 HAS clearly reignited the immigrant rights movement. What is SB 1070 and what forces organized to get it passed in Arizona?

Joel Olson: SB 1070 IS an all-star anti-immigrant bill. It’s a combination of nativist legislation that state senator Russell Pearce and some of his allies like state senator John Kavanaugh have been trying to pass for at least three years now.

Approximately 12 percent of Arizona’s workers are undocumented according to official statistics. A large percentage of our economy, which is based in construction, tourism and agriculture, is heavily dependent on undocumented labor.

This sits well with the business wing of the Republican Party that is happy to exploit the workers. But it does not sit well with other sections of the party–the small business owners who don’t rely on undocumented labor; many of the elderly, white conservatives who live in retirement communities; and a section of the white working class. So there has been a rift among conservatives over the question of undocumented labor that has been heating up since 2005.

Up until recently we had a Democrat, Janet Napolitano, as governor. She blocked the most extreme legislation from passing. Every time the legislature pushed these bills they either got killed in committee or Napolitano vetoed them.

But ironically, when Obama got elected, Arizona elected a much more conservative state legislature. Obama appointed Napolitano to the Department of Homeland Security, and the staunch conservative Jane Brewer, who was secretary of state, then became governor.

As a result, there was nothing blocking the nativists from passing their legislation. Pearce’s strategy was to put all their anti-immigrant ideas in one big grab bag bill–SB 1070. He threatened that if the legislature didn’t pass it he would put it up as a referendum. The legislature voted for it and Brewer signed it.

AS: Have the protests against SB 1070 both nationally and within the state impacted public opinion in Arizona about the bill?

JO: Initially there was majority support for the bill. A lot of people have cited a somewhat sketchy poll, which relied on some questionable methods that showed 70 percent of Arizona backed the bill.

After the outcry against the bill nationally, the call for a boycott, and protests here in Arizona, support for the bill has dropped. The latest poll that I read revealed that there was just over 50 percent support for the bill. But there is a big gap between an older generation that is overwhelmingly white and a younger generation that is multiracial with a large percent of youth of color. Among those 34 or younger, support drops to 45 percent or less.

The youth of color have grown up with immigrants both documented and undocumented. They don’t particularly recognize any legal distinction between them. Compare that to the Baby Boomers. When they were coming up in the 1960s and 1970s, the U.S. had the lowest percentage of immigrants–5 percent–since before the civil war. Now immigrants are about 12 or 13 percent of the population. That is now close to the early twentieth century when it was 15 percent.

The older, white generation folks who were not used to seeing immigrants in their daily lives for most of their adulthood are now seeing signs in Spanish. The younger generation, however, has grown up with immigrants. So SB 1070 has much less support among young folks. But remember it’s the older folks that tend to vote.

AS: How did the Repeal Coalition come into being and what has it demanded?

JO: We emerged in January 2008 when some of us saw these bills working their way through the legislature, several of which eventually got bundled in SB 1070. We saw this coming and we thought the debate over immigration in Arizona and the U.S. was stifled between two very narrow positions. On the one side we have the nativist view, which is “kick them all out” and is represented by SB 1070. On the other hand, we have the business wing that says, “let a few of them work, deny them rights, and kick the rest out.” So you are stuck between nativism and bracero [guest-worker] programs.

We thought that what was missing from that was the voice of undocumented workers, their loved ones and supporters. Our goal was to insert a third pole into the debate. We believe that all human beings in a global economy have the right to live, love and work wherever they please.

We knew that the nativists had control of the state legislature. So we knew that lobbying wouldn’t work and we weren’t particularly interested in lobbying anyway.

We believe instead that power comes from the grassroots. Therefore we need to focus on the local level rather than the state legislature. Our strategy was to build at the grassroots and then put pressure on the cities to declare themselves sanctuary cities and declare themselves opposed to all anti-immigrant legislation as a way to put a wedge between city and state governments.

So we developed a grassroots municipal strategy as opposed to an interest group, lobbying strategy. Events, I think, have proven our strategy to be a wise one.

AS: What kind of forces came together in the coalition?

JO: We had imagined it becoming a coalition. But that in fact didn’t happen. We went to a lot of organizations to get them to sign on to our repeal resolution that calls for the repeal of all anti-immigrant laws and declares each city that endorses it a sanctuary city. We went to plenty of groups and no one was interested except for undocumented folks in the working-class neighborhoods as well as Latinos, Black folks and indigenous people who feared racial profiling. So we became more of an organization who found members among those groups.

We started knocking on doors and holding meetings called “juntas” in people’s homes. We use many of the same tactics that union organizers use. We built ourselves up in Flagstaff and Phoenix.

Then, when SB 1070 became news, people said, “Holy shit what do we do about this?” We were right there and broader forces gave us the time of day for the first time.

AS: How did you get the Flagstaff City Council to sue the state over SB 1070?

JO: We have been working in the neighborhoods building a base of support by holding meetings and organizing rallies. Other forces like Northern Arizona Interfaith Council (NAIC), which does grassroots work as well as engaging with politicians, lobbied politicians against SB 1070, especially City Councilwoman Coral Evans.

Evan’s constituency is based in the neighborhood called Sunnyside, where we have been doing most of our organizing. Ms. Evans, to her credit, recognized how devastating this law would be to her community.

Our pressure from below and NAIC lobbying as well as Evans’s own political savvy and moral conscience led her to believe that Flagstaff needed to do something about SB 1070. She put the issue on the City Council agenda about three weeks ago. We packed that meeting and insisted that the City Council take some action. They realized that they needed to do something, especially since that there was an election coming up and their constituency was mobilized with expectation that they would act to defend their rights.

The following week, Evans came in with a proposal to file an injunction. We pulled out all the stops to pack that meeting. We outnumbered the Tea Party people six to one. We had 200 people in the chambers, we had 100 people in an overflow room watching the deliberations on a live television feed, and we had 200 people out protesting in the streets. We also had undocumented folks, who were afraid to go into the city hall, sending us messages to read to the City Council.

The meeting started at 5:30 p.m. and didn’t get out until 10:00 p.m. Everyone wanted to speak. Evans had a five-to-two majority by the time of the meeting, but under the pressure of the massive community turnout, it turned into a unanimous vote.

AS: Has the precedent of Flagstaff led other cities in Arizona to pass similar injunctions?

JO: The same afternoon that Flagstaff voted, Tucson voted five-to-one to file an injunction. The Mayor of Phoenix tried and failed.

Towns like Nogales have passed resolutions condemning SB 1070 but they have not voted to sue. They don’t have the resources. There are other forces working on councils elsewhere. I think you can see a groundswell at the municipal level, but Tucson and Flagstaff are the two cities promising to sue and they have the best chance of overturning SB 1070.

The municipalities in reality are in a lose-lose situation. If they don’t enforce the law, they can get sued. If they do enforce the law, they’re going to get sued for racial profiling. They are going to get sued no matter what they do.

From a strict self-interested perspective, these city governments were compelled to do something.

AS: It seems like the nativist Republicans show no sign of stopping. For example, Brewer just signed a law banning ethnic studies from the public education. Why are they pushing this so hard?

JO: HB 2281 is a law that Brewer signed at the end of April that bans the teaching of ethnic studies in the public schools, but not in the universities. It targeted the Tucson Unified School District, which taught some Chicano history courses.

While it might seem incredible that they could pass this law in the middle of a national outcry against SB 1070, you have to look at this from the perspective of Republican primary politics. Brewer was appointed for governor after Napolitano left. She is running for governor in 2010 and is being challenged by the hard right wing. McCain is also up for re-election this November and is being challenged by an extreme nativist, petty bourgeois SOB.

All the so-called “respectable” Republicans are running as far to the right as they can in order to win their primaries. Of course, they have to tilt back to the center when they run in the general election. But frankly, the Democratic Party is very weak and not very smart here, and so the Republicans push far to the right and do not need to come back to the center much, even in the general election. So HB 2281 is part of the politics of Republican primaries.

AS: How does the ban on ethnic studies fit into the broader attack on immigrants in Arizona?

JO: This law is part of a concentrated attack on undocumented folks. The stated goal of SB 1070 is “attrition through enforcement.” In other words, they want to get rid of undocumented people through strong law enforcement. All of these laws point toward that goal.

HB 2281, the anti-ethnic studies law, shows that this is not just an attack on illegal immigrants, but also an attack on Latinos more broadly.

AS: What does the organizing look like for the national day of action for May 29 that the Alto Arizona Coalition has called?

JO: Most of the organizing for that is taking place in Phoenix. It’s being organized by a coalition of established immigration reform groups. Repeal Coalition has been recently been invited to join, but we have not played a major role in the organizing in the May 29 rally.

Some of the other groups, Puente and Somos, are the main forces behind the demonstration. They are predicting a bigger turnout than the May 2006 rallies which drew between 70,000 and 100,000 in Phoenix. That remains to be seen, but I do think it’s going to be big.

I think these protests are important. We have our own scheduled this Saturday in Flagstaff. People are very angry and want to protest.

The question is what next after the protests? This law is going to go into effect July 28 unless the courts stop it. There are five or six lawsuits that have been filed. In addition to the Flagstaff and Tucson suits, we also have ones from the ACLU and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund and some others.

If the courts grant an injunction between now and the time the law goes into effect at the end of July, I’m not sure what will happen. But if the injunction strategy fails, then the only option is massive disobedience of this law.

Our strategy in Repeal is to push cities, universities, public schools, private schools, churches, and even homes to declare themselves sanctuaries, saying that they will not obey these laws and that every human being regardless of their papers is welcome in our town, our church, our school, our campus, and our homes. After the protests, we have to start organizing this civil disobedience.

AS: How does the battle in Arizona fit into the national fight for immigrant rights

JO: Arizona is the test case; many more states want to try to pass laws like SB 1070 or at least rally their conservative base with such proposals. Repeal has always recognized this. Arizona has been the center of the debate and if we can change the terms of the debate here we can change it nationwide.

That’s why all sorts of organizations have put out a call for people to come to Arizona this summer. Puente is organizing a Freedom Summer. Repeal Coalition can always use people if they want to come down and learn how to do grassroots organizing. We are not a 501C3 nonprofit. We run on an extreme shoestring budget. We don’t have money and don’t have places to put large numbers of people up. If people come down, we need them to be self-sufficient.

There is a hell of a lot of work to be done here and we could use the help. If people are interested in coming and doing some good work, they should contact us and there will be opportunities.

AS: What are the Democrats doing to stop this legislation in Arizona and nationwide?

JO: In Arizona, with a few notable exceptions, the Democratic Party is far worse than the Democratic Party nationwide. It’s extremely weak and has no leadership.

It did the right thing in opposing SB 1070; no Democrat voted for it in the legislature. But you cannot expect leadership from them any time soon. The Democrats here and nationwide think that demographic change will lead them to be victorious in 10 or 15 years.

On the one hand, they are willing to lose for the next 15 years. On the other hand, they believe demographics are destiny. But if you are not fighting for the right politics, I don’t care what generation is coming, if you don’t fight for their hearts and minds, you can’t count on them.

On a national scale, the Democrats are not much better. I think the Schumer Bill is a craven attempt to appease the Latino base that is furious that the Democrats have not done anything about immigrant rights. It’s also an attempt to appease Republicans by adding everything from biometric security cards to border enforcement.

The Democrats are under the delusion that they can win over some of the Republican base, but they never will. They probably know that their proposal is dead in the water but they hope they can dangle it to sop up some of the anger of their Latino base. I don’t expect any leadership whatsoever from the Democrats on this.

Three months ago, people told me that repeal was an unrealistic demand. They are not saying that any more. I would also say that immigration reform is equally unrealistic given the political dynamics of the country right now. Repeal is just as viable an option. To me, frankly, in an economy in which goods and services move across borders, it’s only just that workers are able to move across borders as well.

The demand that we should be making is that all people should have the right to live, love and work wherever they please.

Professor Gates’s arguments aren’t original and they effectively absolve the U.S. and Europe of primary responsibility for slavery and other imperial crimes.

He claims that, in assigning guilt for the enslavement of some 12 million Africans, “There are many thorny issues to resolve before we can arrive at a judicious (if symbolic) gesture to match such a sustained, heinous crime. Perhaps the most vexing is how to parcel out blame to those directly involved in the capture and sale of human beings for immense economic gain.”

Why does Professor Gates find the seemingly obvious culpability of the U.S. and European colonial powers so vexing? He argues that since African kingdoms actively participated in the slave trade providing captives to the European slave traders, they share equal responsibility for the crime of slavery. Therefore, for Gates, it’s difficult to determine who should pay reparations, if anyone.

Gates looks to President Obama, given his African and American heritage, “to bridge the great reparations divide. He is uniquely placed to publicly attribute responsibility and culpability where they truly belong, to white people and black people on both sides of the Atlantic, complicit alike on of the greatest evils in the history of civilization.”

While Gates never quite says so in his article, he for all intents and purposes opposes reparations because of this supposed shared guilt.

Gates has put himself in strange company. The ex-leftist and now right wing fanatic, David Horowitz, made essentially the same case against reparations in his notorious 2001 article “Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Blacks is a Bad Idea for Blacks–and Racist Too.”

Horowitz’s first reason for opposing reparations is “There is no single group clearly responsible for the crime of slavery.” He argues, “Black African and Arabs were responsible for enslaving the ancestors of African Americans. There were 3,000 black slave owners in the ante-bellum United States. Are reparations to be paid by their descendants too?”

It’s shocking to say the least that Gates, a black liberal and recent victim of racist police harassment in Cambridge, Mass., should find common ground with a bottom-feeder like Horowitz who campaigns against Black Studies programs. The fact that Gates is a bedfellow with Horowitz, while it should trigger our suspicion and outrage, doesn’t refute his argument.

First of all, Gates’s main point that some African rulers were involved in the slave trade, which he presents as some new revelation, is common knowledge to anyone who has read even some of the voluminous literature on slavery.

As historian Eric Foner wrote in a letter in the New York Times:

Henry Louis Gates Jr. notes that African rulers and merchants were deeply complicit in the Atlantic slave trade. Despite Mr. Gates’s contention that “there is very little discussion” of this fact, it hardly qualifies as news; today, virtually every history of slavery and every American history textbook includes this information.

Gates is using known facts to make an absurd claim that European powers and African kingdoms have some kind of equivalent responsibility for slavery. In reality, Europe and the U.S. are primarily to blame for the horrors of slave catching, the Middle Passage and new world slavery.

Their demand for slave labor transformed the patriarchal slave system in Africa into a new and different system to supply chattel slaves for plantations. Of course, African rulers in various kingdoms participated in the process for their own purposes. So did a few thousand black slaveholders in the U.S.

To equate the main perpetrators of the system of modern slavery–the European and white American merchants and slaveholders–with its African bit players is simply illogical. It would be like equally apportioning blame between the U.S. and its puppet regime in South Vietnam for the killing of 4 million Vietnamese during the Vietnam War.

That’s ridiculous. The U.S., not its puppet, was responsible for that slaughter. In the same manner, Europe and America, not their African collaborators, hold primary responsibility for the horrendous crime of slavery.

Moreover, the vast majority of Africans and Black Americans in no way collaborated with the slave trade and exploitation of slave labor. Only a tiny number of African rulers and black slaveholders did. The vast majority of Africans and Black Americans were slavery’s victims.

Therefore, the U.S. and European states as well as the numerous corporations that participated in the slave trade should pay reparations to its Black American and African victims.

Gate’s argument, while fairly easily refuted, plays a pernicious role in domestic and international politics. Inside the U.S., Gates provides cover for the Obama administration’s failure to redress racial inequality in America. Black unemployment is at record levels, public education has become as segregated as it was in the 1950s, and as every study documents, Blacks face systematic discrimination in everything from housing to hiring and police harassment.

In this context, Gates decides to write a column arguing that Obama is in a special position to assert the equal culpability of whites and blacks for slavery and therefore against reparations to African Americans. Whether consciously or not, Gates strengthens the forces on the right who argue that we are in a post-racial, even post-racist, society where we don’t need special legislation and programs like reparations for African Americans and other racially oppressed groups.

Gates has joined a chorus of liberals who displace blame for conditions in Africa away from imperialism and onto African rulers. As Margaret Kimberly writes:

[S]everal years ago, Gates proudly showed the world how little he knew in the PBS documentary series “Wonders of Africa.” In the slave trade segment, Gates’s only moment of anger was directed at an Ashanti Prince. If Gates wants to wax righteously indignant, he should interrogate a member of the Brown family of Brown University. The Brown fortune was made through slavery, as were many others. Gates ought to give a Brown descendant the third degree on camera.

But Gates knows enough not to bite the hand that feeds him. Ensconced at Harvard, he’s not about to attack let alone demand reparations from the Ivy League institutions built on the backs of the slave trade. Instead, Gates wants to shift blame from its rightful place onto petty collaborators.

Bush and the right wing utterly failed to accomplish this when they bungled the debate over reparations by boycotting the Durban Conference on Racism. Gates hopes that Obama will better present the argument of equal culpability for slavery on both sides of the Atlantic to enable the U.S. to escape the demand for reparations.

Back in the real world, as Walter Rodney rightly argued in his classic book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, first the European slave trade and then colonization pushed Africa’s economic development backwards. That legacy of imperialism is largely responsible for the situation in many African countries today. No academic trickery or poetic rhetoric can obscure this fact.

But Gates’s argument for U.S. imperialism extends far beyond the case of African reparations. He’s trying to shift blame from American and European imperialism onto its victims right at the moment when demands are rising for reparations on many fronts.

African nations have called for reparations for slavery most dramatically in 2001 at the anti-racism conference in Durban, South Africa. Haiti President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, before he was overthrown by a U.S.-backed coup in 2004, agitated for $21 billion in reparations from France, which forced the country it lost to a slave revolution in 1804 to pay for its loss of property–its ex-slaves.

The antiwar movement, the Iraq Veterans Against the War in particular, has raised the call for reparations for Iraq and Afghanistan for the destruction of those two societies. And the international movement against climate change, which recently held a summit in Cochabamba, Bolivia, just issued a demand for the industrialized world to pay climate reparations to the developing world.

In this situation, Gates is providing academic alibis for the U.S. and Europe to evade responsibility for their imperial crimes.

We know the U.S. and European governments and corporations–firms like FleetBoston Financial Corporation, Aetna Group Insurance and CSX railroad–who have the blood of slaves on their hands and profits from the slave trade in their coffers. They should be made to pay.

There is ample precedent for supporting these demands. The U.S. has made indemnity payments to Japanese Americans who were jailed in internment camps during the Second World War, to American Indians for the theft of their lands and mineral rights, and to Filipino veterans that fought with the U.S. Army during Second World War.

There’s also precedent for specific compensation for Black victims of racism. For example, in 1997, President Bill Clinton paid $10 million to Black victims and their families to compensate for syphilis experiments conducted on in 1930s by the Public Health Service.

The recipients of reparations shouldn’t be the black elite, but working-class Blacks whose slave forbears were the systems victims and who today suffer under the legacy of slavery in the form of racism and poverty. As Earl Ofari Hutchinson argues

Oprah Winfrey, Bill Cosby, Michael Jordan and other mega-rich blacks will not receive a penny in reparations. Any tax money to redress black suffering should into a fund for HIV/AIDS education and prevention and underfinanced inner-city public schools; should expand job skills and training, drug and alcohol counseling and rehabilitation, and computer access and literacy training programs; and should improve public services for the estimated one in four blacks still trapped in poverty.

Internationally, Africa, Haiti, Iraq, and Afghanistan–to name just a few–all deserve reparations from the U.S. and Europe. The struggle for reparations is a part and parcel of a larger fight to redistribute money from the bloated Pentagon budget and super-rich to the majority of society here and around the world.

If we can win reparations for slavery and imperialism, we can raise everyone’s aspirations to take the money back from those who have stolen it from us through exploitation and oppression. Contrary to the sophistic arguments of Professor Gates, the demand for reparations is therefore a key element in the fight for a whole new society that puts people’s needs before profit and empire.

On January 12, a 7.0-magnitude earthquake devastated Haiti, killing as many as 300,000 people and leaving more than 1.5 million people homeless. Then, on February 27, another quake hit southwestern Chile, killing hundreds and leaving more than 2 million people homeless.

One Haitian family, the Desarmes, tragically endured both diasters. After the earthquake struck Haiti, Pierre Desarmes, a Haitian musician based in Chile, where he performs with his band, the Reggaeton Boys, brought his father, mother, two brothers and their families to live close to him in Santiago. They were there when the second quake hit Chile.

“In Haiti, they got me out from under the ruins of a house, and I felt lucky to have survived,” Pierre’s father, Joseph, told the BBC. “To come to Chile and go through the same situation, you can’t imagine how I felt–how powerless I felt. It was the worst thing that could have happened to me.”

Their story invites comparison of the two earthquakes–and indeed, the mainstream media made much of the natural and social differences that separated the two countries’ experiences.

While the magnitude of the earthquake in Haiti measured 7.0 on the Richter scale, it hit eight miles below the earth’s surface, and its epicenter was close to the country’s main population center, the capital of Port-au-Prince. It therefore caused far more severe ground shaking and brought down many more buildings. Disaster experts estimate it will cost $14 billion to rebuild Port-au-Prince alone.

In Chile, by contrast, the earthquake was 500 times more powerful at 8.8 on the Richter scale, but its epicenter was 22 miles below the surface and much further away from major population centers. As a result, the degree of ground-shaking and consequent destruction of housing and infrastructure was less extensive.

On the other hand, because the epicenter was in the Pacific Ocean, it caused 50-foot tsunamis that leveled villages up and down the southern coast of Chile.

Moreover, despite early claims that the Chile’s building codes protected the country from devastation on the same scale of Haiti, it has become increasingly clear that the quake caused massive damage to the country’s second largest city, Concepción, as well as roads and bridges elsewhere. About 500,000 homes were left uninhabitable by the quake and tsunamis. It will cost an estimated $30 billion dollars to rebuild the country’s housing and infrastructure.

Nevertheless, the level of death and devastation in Chile wasn’t as severe as in Haiti–and this has nothing to do with plate tectonics, fault lines or epicenters. The real reason for the difference is social and historical.

Haiti, as the press has repeatedly reported, is the poorest country in the Western hemisphere, with over 80 percent of the population living under the poverty line.

The U.S. government is largely responsible for this situation. It has backed predatory dictators, undermined attempts at social reform, and imposed neoliberal economic plans that destroyed peasant agriculture and drove people into Port-au-Prince, where U.S.-sponsored sweatshops could not absorb them.

As a result, they were left indigent in giant poorly constructed slums. The US also incapacitated Haitian state, which controls little of what happens in the country. Therefore the Haitian government does not even have building codes even in its capital, Port au Prince, which sits on a fault line. Because of this history of American imperialism, Haiti was already a social disaster ever more vulnerable to natural ones.

By contrast, Chile is one of the wealthier countries in Latin America. Its per capita GDP is $14,700 compared to Haiti’s $1,300.

But such statistics can obscure the massive social inequality in the country–again, the product, in large part, of U.S. imperialism. The U.S. backed the military dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet, which overthrew the reform socialist government of Salvador Allende in 1973, murdered thousands of activists and unionists, and imposed free-market economic policies at gunpoint.

Pinochet undermined many social reforms and vastly expanded social inequality. But he couldn’t erase all of Allende’s accomplishments–for example, the country’s famous building codes. As author Naomi Klein wrote in the Nation:

Chile’s modern seismic building code, drafted to resist earthquakes, was adopted in 1972. That year is enormously significant because it was one year before Pinochet seized power in a bloody U.S.-backed coup. That means that if one person deserves credit for the law, it is not Friedman or Pinochet, but Salvador Allende, Chile’s democratically elected socialist President.

Pinochet was never able to privatize the country’s copper industry, which produces a third of the world’s supply. As a result, the Chilean state is flush with resources that it could use to reconstruct the country.

While the mainstream media made much of the differences between the two disasters, the similarities are striking. In both cases, the behavior of the countries’ rulers and governments–not to mention the role of the U.S. government–has exposed the priorities of a system that puts corporate profits and law and order over human need.

In both countries, neoliberalism exacerbated the impact of the natural disasters. U.S. neoliberal policies weakened the state and destroyed the economy in Haiti, making it peculiarly vulnerable to disasters and incapable of responding to them.

In Chile, Pinochet’s neoliberalism created vast pools of poverty, deprived of basic social services before the earthquake. As Naomi Klein notes, Pinochet’s free market policies “caused rapid deindustrialization, a ten-fold increase in unemployment and an explosion of distinctly unstable shantytowns.”

Successive center-left coalition governments that have ruled Chile from 1990 until 2010 have done little to redress this inequality, and have in fact continued the neoliberal policies of the dictatorship. The impoverished were thus the most devastated by the quake, and also those quickly demonized as “looters” for breaking into stores to survive.

Moreover, as many homeless Chileans can attest, the construction industry observed the country’s widely heralded building regulations more in the breach than the observance. As the Chilean revolutionary group, Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucinaria (MIR), reports:

The old highways and bridges made by the state resisted the quake. The new highways in the capital, no. The highways that were privatized under the coalition government, which were propagandized as public-private investment, did not stand up to any seismic movement and are destroyed.

In spite of millions in government subsidies, in spite of contracts, in spite of the daily fees from users, all the bridges, pedestrian passages have all come down, killing people and wounding many more.

The quake also exposed how the housing industry evaded the building codes. “Residents of a collapsed 15-story apartment building in Concepcion, opened just months ago, were outraged that it had been so badly damaged and were convinced that contractors had not complied with building codes that require buildings to be able to withstand tremblors,” the New York Times reported. “Already, there was talk among residents of taking builders to court once the emergency was over.”

As the MIR concludes, “In real estate capitalism, the business is not in building, but in accumulating capital, which means lowering the quality of construction, lowering the quality of the materials, falsifying reports and bribing the tax collectors.”

In both disasters, the government was, in fact, slow to respond to the crisis. In Haiti, the country’s government is powerless–the real governmental power is the United Nations occupation, backed up by the U.S. As has been amply documented, most recently in a new report by Refugees International titled “Haiti: From the Ground Up,” the UN and the U.S. failed to respond to meet people’s needs in a timely or coordinated fashion.

In Chile, the outgoing center-left government of Michelle Bachelet failed to respond as well. With almost criminal neglect, the Chilean Navy, which is tasked with alerting the country to the threat of tsunamis after earthquakes, failed to warn coastal villages of the impending waves.

“Nobody showed up around here to warn us,” a resident, Alejandra Jara, told the BBC. “We fled on our own because we know that when there’s a big earthquake, you have to leave everything and take off.” Untold numbers of people didn’t flee and are either dead or missing.

Moreover, just as in Haiti, the Bachelet government failed to quickly get food, water and shelter to the 2 million homeless people. “The government has been very slow to respond,” Victor Perez told the New York Times, as he stood by a tent that he and his girlfriend were living in, outside their ruined Santiago apartment building. “We have no water or lights, and most of the stores nearby are out of food.”

The Christian Science Monitor reported that deprivation was much worse in the Maule and Bio Bio regions–the areas closest to the epicenter. “Really what people need is water, non-perishable food, warm clothes and medicine,” Daniel Agredano told the paper. “Help is arriving, but only a bit at a time. It should have come more quickly. That’s why people go so desperate and started looting the supermarkets.”

In both countries, the international media’s initial sympathy for victims of the disaster has shifted to the demonization of desperate people as “looters” for taking food and water from supermarkets.

This has served as justification for massive military deployments. In Haiti, the U.S. government deployed 20,000 troops under the cover of providing relief; they actually policed desperate people and surrounded the country to prevent any refugee seeking sanctuary in the U.S.

In Chile, Bachelet buckled under pressure from the right wing and business interests, which were terrified at what they called “looting” of supermarkets in Concepcion, and sent 14,000 troops to protect corporate property and impose an 18 hour-a-day curfew. After deploying the troops, she warned, “We understand your urgent suffering, but we also know that these are criminal acts that will not be tolerated.”

In both countries, quake victims had to rely on themselves to survive. Deprived of government aid, Haitians and Chileans both formed local committees to organize themselves, distribute food and water, and assist one another in organizing shelter for the homeless.

As the Center for Constitutional Rights’ Bill Quigley and other eyewitnesses in Haiti have documented, without aid, Haitian victims of the earthquake have had to turn to one another to help with food, water and shelter. In Chile, local committees have sprung up among quake victims, especially in remote coastal villages, to provide similar services.

The story of international assistance is also remarkably similar. Just as in Haiti, the response of capitalist governments around the world to Chile’s earthquake has been laughable.

The “international community” offered a pittance to Haiti. The U.S., for example, only put up $100 million, a sum that pales in comparison to Obama’s $650 billion military budget or the $3 trillion it will have spent to occupy Iraq and kill 1 million Iraqis.

Similarly, after Bachelet finally called for international assistance for Chile, countries around the world again offered only tiny sums. For example, the European Commission has already approved $4 million in emergency aid for Chile, Japan has pledged $3 million, and China $1 million. This is not humanitarian aid, but public relations stunts–designed not to help victims, but to secure international alliances and win domestic political support.

In the aftermath of the quakes will come what Naomi Klein has called the “shock doctrine.”

In Haiti, the U.S. is taking advantage of the disaster to implement former World Bank researcher Paul Collier’s plan to exploit the country’s “comparative advantage”–its impoverished workers–in mango plantations, the tourist industry and sweatshops.

In Chile, incoming center-right President Sebastian Pinera–a billionaire businessman and supporter of Pinochet’s brand of free-market economics–has railed against the “looters” and pressured Bachelet to deploy the military.

While he promises to continue the center-left economic policies of previous governments, Pinera will be under pressure from his Pinochetista supporters on the right for a turn to further free-market economics. He will also use the precedent of Bachelet’s deployment of the military to justify further policing of the growing ranks of the poor.

As for the U.S., it is using both disasters to attempt to recover ground it lost throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. It faces regional challengers from several left governments that have come to power in Latin America–most significantly, Hugo Chávez in Venezuela.

Chávez has spearheaded the formation of the regional economic organization ALBA and the new regional political formation established at Rio Summit in Mexico that includes all the countries from the region, but for the first time ever excludes the U.S. and Canada. On top of that, many of these countries are forging political and economic bonds with other regional powers like Iran, as well as the U.S.’s main international competitor–China.

The U.S. has used the cover of humanitarian intervention in Haiti to assert its role as the boss of the region, taking control of the country in a de facto colonial seizure of state power–as when it took over the airport, diverting aid flights from other countries and taking emergency power from the quisling government of René Préval.

Barack Obama has sent Hilary Clinton on a tour to build relationships with the region’s right-wing governments, including a stop in Chile, where she met with Pinera and Bachelet. In an expression of “generosity,” she delivered a grand total of 25 satellite phones to aid in the coordination of disaster relief.

The U.S. wants to cultivate relationships with right-wing government to split the various regional blocks and international compacts with China and Iran that threaten its historic dominance of the region.

The disasters in Chile and Haiti should be a cautionary tale. We will confront more natural disasters of this sort, which the economic system and its governments will fail to respond to in a manner that puts people first.

We aren’t facing more earthquakes; there is no demonstrable increase in natural tectonic activity.

Instead, we are vulnerable to killer earthquakes for social reasons–vast cities have been built in areas to take advantage of natural features conducive for economic development, like the intersection of rivers, which tend to lie atop fault lines.

Such killer quakes will be a particular threat in the Third World, where neoliberal agricultural policies have driven millions of peasants from the countryside into vast urban slums, ruled by neoliberal states that provide no social services and enforce no building regulations. As Seismologist Roger Bilham told Democracy Now!:

I forecast that it is possible now to have something that has never happened in earth’s history: an earthquake killing perhaps a million people. And how can you make such a ridiculous prediction? The answer is that never before have had such large populations at risk from earthquakes, cities of 12 million.

There are many cities like this, and several of them, like Istanbul and Tehran, have a history of damaging earthquakes, and we may well see the effects of corruption and building practices revealed only after these earthquakes have struck.

On top of that is climate change, a new phenomenon caused by capitalist development, that will force whole areas to flee rising water levels and that confronts the whole world with more and more devastating killer storms.

The disasters in Haiti and Chile will fade from the headlines. But as the U.S. knows from the tens of thousands of refugees from Hurricane Katrina, that doesn’t mean the crisis is over. Thus, Haiti is dropping out of the U.S. news, but Ophelia Dahl from Partners in Health warns:

More than seven weeks after the earthquake, there remains an urgent humanitarian crisis. The situation is very bad and getting worse. We witnessed hundreds of thousands of people living in makeshift temporary shelters; spontaneous settlements made of scraps of cardboard and plastic bags. What little people have is soaked, because they’re sleeping in the rain, and the makeshift shelters are already breaking down and dissolving.

The conditions for the homeless and displaced people are absolutely inhumane and getting worse every single day.

No doubt the same fate will befall the impoverished victims of the disaster in Chile. Thus, while on the surface, the story seemed to be a tale of two different earthquakes, the reality in both cases is remarkably similar. Capitalism–in advanced countries, or industrializing ones, or the poorest nations–puts profit and stability over people, even amid disaster.

When his administration finally responded, it deployed the National Guard and armed Blackwater personnel to impose order, rather than putting the priority on providing food, shelter and safe water. Kanye West’s words during an NBC Concert for Hurricane Relief–”George Bush doesn’t care about Black people”–were proved right.

On the surface, the response of the Obama administration to the horrific earthquake that struck Haiti last week couldn’t seem more different. “I have directed my administration to respond with a swift, coordinated, and aggressive effort to save lives,” Obama declared. “The people of Haiti will have the full support of the United States in the urgent effort to rescue those trapped beneath the rubble, and to deliver the humanitarian relief–the food, water and medicine–that Haitians will need in the coming days.”

His words were a stark contrast to the ravings of the racist right. Rush Limbaugh claimed that Obama’s speech was an attempt to win support among “both light-skinned and dark-skinned black community in this country,” and that “we’ve already donated to Haiti. It’s called the U.S. income tax.” Writing in the New York Times, conservative columnist David Brooks dismissed the idea that aid could help Haiti in this crisis–because Haiti’s culture is “more progress-resistant than others.”

Compared to such statements, Obama’s sympathetic response and promises of aid may seem decent and just. But in the week since the earthquake, it has become clear that the U.S. isn’t pursuing a humanitarian policy.

Though it is an opponent of the Obama administration, the conservative Heritage Foundation accurately described the aims that are driving U.S. policy in Haiti:

The U.S. response to the tragic earthquake in Haiti earthquake offers opportunities to re-shape Haiti’s long-dysfunctional government and economy as well as to improve the public image of the United States in the region.

While on the ground in Haiti, the U.S. military can also interrupt the nightly flights of cocaine to Haiti and the Dominican Republic from the Venezuelan coast and counter the ongoing efforts of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez to destabilize the island of Hispaniola. This U.S. military presence, which should also include a large contingent of U.S. Coast Guard assets, can also prevent any large-scale movement by Haitians to take to the sea in rickety watercraft to try to enter the U.S. illegally.

Meanwhile, the U.S. must be prepared to insist that the Haiti government work closely with the U.S. to insure that corruption does not infect the humanitarian assistance flowing to Haiti. Long-term reforms for Haitian democracy and its economy are also badly overdue.

However impolitic–the piece was quickly removed from the Heritage web site–this actually describes the policy that Barack Obama is carrying out.

If the Obama administration were pursuing a humanitarian policy in Haiti, it wouldn’t have appointed George Bush to join former President Bill Clinton in overseeing fundraising for disaster relief.

Not only did Bush spectacularly fail the victims of Hurricane Katrina, but his administration orchestrated a political destabilization campaign against Haiti’s democratically elected government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Bush imposed sanctions on the country that undermined Aristide’s presidency and impoverished the masses. The U.S. then backed a right-wing coup that toppled the government in 2004.

Appointing Bush to oversee aid to Haiti is like putting Nero in charge of the fire department.

Then there’s the mismatch between Obama’s words about “full support” and the pittance his administration plans to spend to address the crisis–just $100 million. As Bill Quigley, legal director for the Center for Constitutional Rights, wrote, “A Kentucky couple won $128 million in a Powerball lottery on December 24, 2009. The richest nation in the history for the world is giving Powerball money to a neighbor with tens of thousands of deaths already?”

Moreover, a week into the disaster, while U.S. officials, privileged Americans and rich Haitians received quick relief, the promised aid hasn’t reached the mass of Haitian people.

Amid a crisis where the first 48 hours are decisive in saving people’s lives, the United Nations–and the U.S. in particular–failed to come anywhere near addressing the needs of the 3 million people impacted by the earthquake.

Every minute that aid gets delayed means more people dying from starvation, dehydration, injury and disease–and yet by Monday, the UN only planned to distribute food and water to 95,000 people.

An estimated 1.5 million people are homeless and sleeping in the streets, as many as 200,000 have died, and with each tick of the clock, the toll grows higher. Why could the U.S. not rush aid to Haiti. Why were American helicopters and transport planes so late in starting aid drops.

The U.S. and UN claimed that damage to Haiti’s airport, port and roads impeded delivery of doctors, nurses, food, water and rescue teams. But the U.S. always seems to find ways around such obstacles when it comes to invading countries like Iraq and Afghanistan. Clearly the means exist to deliver aid quickly to a country an hour away from Florida.

So did the U.S. relief operation fail to live up to its mission? The truth is that disaster relief for the poor is not the mission in Haiti, just as it wasn’t the priority in New Orleans or any other disaster.

Instead of rushing aid to Haiti’s poor, the Obama administration has prepared a military occupation, claiming that armed forces are necessary to control what they expected to be angry Black people.

The corporate media coverage shifted from its initial sympathy with victims of the disaster to churning out scare stories about looting. “[M]arauding looters emptied wrecked shops and tens of thousands of survivors waited desperately for food and medical care,” Reuters claimed. “Hundreds of scavengers and looters swarmed over wrecked stores in downtown Port-au-Prince, seizing goods and fighting among themselves.”

In other words, the media took a few isolated conflicts and blew them up into an implication that Haiti’s poor are a violent threat–and the real obstacle to relief efforts.

These scare stories in turn became a justification for not delivering aid. Writer Nelson Valdes reported:

The United Nations and the U.S. authorities on the ground are telling those who directly want to deliver help not to do so because they might be attacked by “hungry mobs.” Two cargo planes from Doctors Without Borders have been forced to land in the Dominican Republic because the shipments have to be accompanied within Port-au-Prince by U.S. military escorts, according to the U.S. command.

When asked why the U.S. hadn’t used its C130 transport planes to drop supplies in Port-au-Prince, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said, “It seems to me that air drops will simply lead to riots.”

Of course, precisely the opposite is case. People will riot because they lack food and water.

The real situation is quite different. As author Richard Seymour wrote:

The striking fact, patiently reported by observers on the ground, is that Haiti is not gripped by anarchy, “mob rule,” mass slaughter or anything of the kind. There was probably no more violent crime this weekend, and probably less than in some American cities. Instead, while aid is obstructed, Haitians have cooperated to undertake rescue efforts and administer aid without the assistance of relief workers.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez rightly describes Obama’s military intervention as “occupying Haiti undercover.” The U.S. has taken control of Haiti’s main airport and seaport, and is in the process of deploying 10,000 U.S. troops to bolster the 9,000 UN troops already occupying the island. Half of the soldiers will police Port-au-Prince and half will be deployed on military vessels surrounding the island.

In a puff piece meant to support this occupation, Time magazine perhaps unintentionally revealed the colonial nature of the operation. “Haiti,” they write, “for all intents and purposes, became the 51st state at 4:53 p.m. Tuesday in the wake of its deadly earthquake. If not a state, then at least a ward of the state.”

The U.S. is using its position of power to impose its control over the country and impede relief efforts, turning away planes from Doctors Without Borders, the Mexican government and the Caribbean Community and Common Market. Jarry Emmanuel, the air logistics officer for the World Food Program, complained, “There are 200 flights going in and out every day, which is an incredible amount for a country like Haiti. But most of those flights are for the United States military. Their priorities are to secure the country.”

In a stunning video report from Port-au-Prince, an Al Jazeera reporter said:

Most Haitians here have seen little humanitarian aid so far. What they have seen is guns, and lots of them. Armored personnel carriers cruise the streets. UN soldiers aren’t here to help pull people out of the rubble. They’re here, they say, to enforce the law.

This is what much of the UN presence actually looks like on the streets of Port-au-Prince: men in uniform, racing around in vehicles carrying guns. At the entrance to the city’s airport where most of the aid is coming in, there is anger and frustration. Much-needed supplies of water and food are inside, and Haitians are locked out.

“These weapons they bring,” [an unidentified Haitian says], “they are instruments of death. We don’t want them; we don’t need them. We are a traumatized people. What we want from the international community is technical help. Action, not words.”

As anger among Haitians simmers over the lack of real relief, it is only a matter of time before heavily armed U.S. and UN forces open fire and kill innocent Haitians.

Already, on Wednesday evening, CBS News reported, “Controlled chaos turned to confrontation near the airport in Port-au-Prince today, when UN peacekeepers were ordered to clear the street filled with Haitian men seeking jobs. The force was made up of Jordanian, Pakistani and Indian forces that were unable to speak Creole, English or French. They did their talking with nightsticks and rubber bullets. At least one rubber bullet was seen fired into the crowd. No one was seriously injured.”

U.S. ships are in the process of surrounding the island. Some will provide floating hospitals. But they are also there to prevent an exodus of refugees out of Haiti.

Under some pressure, Obama granted Temporary Protected Status to Haitian refugees currently in the U.S.–but only for 18 months. At the same time, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has announced that any Haitians who attempt to enter the U.S. will be returned to Haiti.

The Obama administration is already coordinating plans for the restructuring of Haitian society–in the interest of international capital. It is implementing what author Naomi Klein calls the “Shock Doctrine”–when capitalist powers use economic or natural disasters to impose neoliberal programs, such as opening up national markets to multinational corporations, privatization of state-owned companies and cuts to the minimum wage.

The UN’s special envoy to Haiti, Bill Clinton, had been hard at work implementing such proposals before the crisis. He cut deals with cruise ship companies to dock on Haiti’s northern coast, and pushed the re-development of the Haitian sweatshop industry.

Now Obama, Clinton and Bush will further impose neoliberal “reforms.” Already, the International Monetary Fund has extended $100 million in loans to Haiti during the crisis, and all that of money comes with strings attached. As the Nation‘s Richard Kim wrote:

The new loan was made through the IMF’s extended credit facility, to which Haiti already has $165 million in debt. Debt relief activists tell me that these loans came with conditions, including raising prices for electricity, refusing pay increases to all public employees except those making minimum wage, and keeping inflation low. They say that the new loans would impose these same conditions. In other words, in the face of this latest tragedy, the IMF is still using crisis and debt as leverage to compel neoliberal reforms.

While the U.S. sends soldiers to police Haiti instead of providing humanitarian aid, Haitians in the U.S., Haiti solidarity activists and unions are mobilizing to meet the needs of the Haitian poor–and help empower them to take control over their society. In one powerful example, the National Nurses Organizing Committee is in the process of mobilizing 7,000 nurses from the U.S. to volunteer in Haiti to provide medical care.

As activists continue to donate money to organizations like the Haiti Relief Fund and Partners in Health that aim to empower Haitian grassroots institutions, we must make several demands on the Obama administration.

First, we must demand that Obama immediately stop the military occupation of Haiti, and instead flood the country with doctors, nurses, food, water and construction machinery. Soldiers with guns will only make the situation worse.

Second, the U.S. must also end its enforcement of Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s exile and the ban on his party, Fanmi Lavalas, from participating in elections. Haitians, not the U.S., should have the right to determine their government.

Third, we must demand that the U.S., other countries and international financial institutions cancel Haiti’s debt, so that the aid money headed to Haiti will go to food and reconstruction, not debt repayment.

And we must agitate for Obama to indefinitely extend Temporary Protected Status to Haitians in the U.S.–and open the borders to any Haitians who do flee the country.

Only through agitating for these demands can we stop the U.S. from imposing its Shock Doctrine for Haiti at gunpoint.

The earthquake toppled poorly constructed houses, hotels, hospitals and even the capital city’s main political buildings, including the presidential palace. The collapse of so many structures sent a giant cloud into the sky, which hovered over the city, raining dust down onto the wasteland below.

According to some estimates, more than 100,000 people may have died, in a metropolis of 2 million people. Those that survived are living in the streets, afraid to return inside any building that remains standing.

Around the world, Haitians struggled to contact their family and friends in the devastated country. But most could not reach their loved ones since phone lines were down throughout the country.

One person who did reach relatives, Garry Pierre-Pierre, editor and publisher of the Brooklyn-based Haitian Times, stated, “People are in shock. They’re afraid to go out in the streets for obvious reasons, and most of them can’t get inside their homes. A lot of people are sitting or sleeping in front of the rubble that used to be their homes.”

President René Préval issued an emergency appeal for humanitarian aid. He described the scene in Port-au-Prince as “unimaginable. Parliament has collapsed. The tax office has collapsed. Schools have collapsed. Hospitals have collapsed. There are a lot of schools that have a lot of dead people in them. All the hospitals are packed with people. It’s a catastrophe.”

The weak Préval government was unable to respond to the crisis, and the United Nations — which occupies Haiti with close to 9,000 troops — was completely unprepared to manage the situation. Many UN leaders and troops died in buildings that collapsed, including their own headquarters.

International Red Cross spokesman Paul Conneally said that 3 million out of Haiti’s 9 million people would need international emergency aid in the coming weeks just to survive. The UN, U.S., European Union, Canada and countless non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have promised humanitarian aid.

While most people reacted to the crisis by trying to find a way to help or donate money, Christian Right fanatic Pat Robertson stooped to new depths of racism. He explained that Haitians were cursed because they made a pact with the devil to liberate themselves from their French slave masters in the Haitian revolution two centuries ago.

The corporate media at least reported that shifting tectonic plates along a fault line underneath Port-au-Prince caused the earthquake — and that Haiti’s poverty and the incapacity of the Préval government made the disaster so much worse. But they didn’t delve below the surface.

“The media coverage of the earthquake is marked by an almost complete divorce of the disaster from the social and political history of Haiti,” Canadian Haiti solidarity activist Yves Engler said in an interview. “They repeatedly state that the government was completely unprepared to deal with the crisis. This is true. But they left out why.”

Why were 60 percent of the buildings in Port-au-Prince shoddily constructed and unsafe in normal circumstances, according to the city’s mayor? Why are there no building regulations in a city that sits on a fault line? Why has Port-au-Prince swelled from a small town of 50,000 in the 1950s to a population of two million desperately poor people today? Why was the state completely overwhelmed by the disaster?

To understand these facts, we have to look at a second fault line — US imperial policy toward Haiti. The US government, the UN, and other powers have aided the Haitian elite in subjecting the country to neoliberal economic plans that have impoverished the masses, deforested the land, wrecked the infrastructure and incapacitated the government.

The fault line of U.S. imperialism interacted with the geological one to turn the natural disaster into a social catastrophe.

During the Cold War, the U.S. supported the dictatorships of Papa Doc Duvalier and then Baby Doc Duvalier — which ruled the country from 1957 to 1986 — as an anti-communist counterweight to Castro’s Cuba nearby.

Under guidance from Washington, Baby Doc Duvalier opened the Haitian economy up to US capital in the 1970s and 1980s. Floods of US agricultural imports destroyed peasant agriculture. As a result, hundreds of thousands of people flocked to the teeming slums of Port-au-Prince to labor for pitifully low wages in sweatshops located in US export processing zones.

In the 1980s, masses of Haitians rose up to drive the Duvaliers from power — later, they elected reformer Jean-Bertrand Aristide to be president on a platform of land reform, aid to peasants, reforestation, investment in infrastructure for the people, and increased wages and union rights for sweatshop workers.

The U.S. in turn backed a coup that drove Aristide from power in 1991. Eventually, the elected president was restored to power in 1994 when Bill Clinton sent US troops to the island — but on the condition that he implement the US neoliberal plan — which Haitians called the “plan of death.”

Aristide resisted parts of the US program for Haiti, but implemented other provisions, undermining his hoped-for reforms. Eventually, though, the US grew impatient with Aristide’s failure to obey completely, especially when he demanded $21 billion in reparations during his final year in office. The U.S. imposed an economic embargo that strangled the country, driving peasants and workers even deeper into poverty.

In 2004, Washington collaborated with Haiti’s ruling elite to back death squads that toppled the government, kidnapped and deported Aristide. The United Nations sent troops to occupy the country, and the puppet government of Gérard Latortue was installed to continue Washington’s neoliberal plans.

Latortue’s brief regime was utterly corrupt — he and his cronies pocketed large portions of the $4 billion poured into the country by the U.S. and other powers when they ended their embargo. The regime dismantled the mild reforms Aristide had managed to implement. Thus, the pattern of impoverishment and degradation of the country’s infrastructure accelerated.

In the 2006 elections, the Haitian masses voted in longtime Aristide ally René Préval as president. But Préval has been a weak figure who collaborated with U.S. plans for the country and failed to address the growing social crisis.

In fact, the U.S., UN and other imperial powers effectively bypassed the Préval government and instead poured money into NGOs. “Haiti now has the highest per capita presence of NGOs in the world,” says Yves Engler. The Préval government has become a political fig leaf, behind which the real decisions are made by the imperial powers, and implemented through their chosen international NGOs.

The real state power isn’t the Préval government, but the US-backed United Nations occupation. Under Brazilian leadership, UN forces have protected the rich and collaborated with — or turned a blind eye to — right-wing death squads who terrorize supporters of Aristide and his Lavalas Party.

The occupiers have done nothing to address the poverty, wrecked infrastructure and massive deforestation that have exacerbated the effects of a series of natural disasters — severe hurricanes in 2004 and 2008, and now the Port-au-Prince earthquake.

Instead, they merely police a social catastrophe, and in so doing, have committed the normal crimes characteristic of all police forces. As Dan Beeton wrote in NACLA Report on the Americas, “The UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH), which began its mission in June 2004, has been marred by scandals of killings, rape and other violence by its troops almost since it began.”

First the Bush administration and now the Obama administration have used the coup and social and natural crises to expand the US’s neoliberal economic plans.

Under Obama, the U.S. has granted Haiti $1.2 billion in debt relief, but it hasn’t canceled all of Haiti’s debt — the country still pays huge sums to the Inter-American Development Bank. The debt relief is classic window dressing for Obama’s real Haiti policy, which is the same old Haiti policy.

In close collaboration with the new UN Special Envoy to Haiti, former President Bill Clinton, Obama has pushed for an economic program familiar to much of the rest of the Caribbean — tourism, textile sweatshops and weakening of state control of the economy through privatization and deregulation.

In particular, Clinton has orchestrated a plan for turning the north of Haiti into a tourist playground, as far away as possible from the teeming slums of Port-au-Prince. Clinton lured Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines into investing $55 million to build a pier along the coastline of Labadee, which it has leased until 2050.

From there, Haiti’s tourist industry hopes to lead expeditions to the mountaintop fortress Citadelle and the Palace of Sans Souci, both built by Henri Christophe, one of the leaders of Haiti’s slave revolution. According to the Miami Herald:

The $40 million plan involved transforming the now quaint town of Milot, home to the Citadelle and Palace of Sans Souci ruin, into a vibrant tourist village, with arts and crafts markets, restaurants and stoned streets. Guests would be ferried past a congested Cap-Haïtien to a bay, then transported by bus past peasant plantations. Once in Milot, they would either hike or horseback to the Citadelle . . . named a world heritage site in 1982 . . .

Eco-tourism, archaeological exploration and voyeuristic visits to Vodou rituals are all being touted by Haiti’s struggling boutique tourism industry, as Royal Caribbean plans to bring the world largest cruise ship here, sparking the need for excursions.

So while Pat Robertson denounces Haiti’s great slave revolution as a pact with the devil, Clinton is helping to reduce it to a tourist trap.

At the same time, Clinton’s plans for Haiti include an expansion of the sweatshop industry to take advantage of cheap labor available from the urban masses. The U.S. granted duty-free treatment for Haitian apparel exports to make it easy for sweatshops to return to Haiti.

Clinton celebrated the possibilities of sweatshop development during a whirlwind tour of a textile plant owned and operated by the infamous Cintas Corp. He announced that George Soros had offered $50 million for a new industrial park of sweatshops that could create 25,000 jobs in the garment industry. Clinton explained at a press conference that Haiti’s government could create “more jobs by lowering the cost of doing business, including the cost of rent.”

As TransAfrica founder Randall Robinson told Democracy Now! “That isn’t the kind of investment that Haiti needs. It needs capital investment. It needs investment so that it can be self-sufficient. It needs investment so that it can feed itself.”

One of the reasons why Clinton could be so unabashed in celebrating sweatshops is that the US-backed coup repressed any and all resistance. It got rid of Aristide and his troublesome habit of raising the minimum wage. It banished him from the country, terrorized his remaining allies and barred his political party, Fanmi Lavalas, the most popular in the country, from running for office. The coup regime also attacked union organizers within the sweatshops themselves.

As a result, Clinton could state to business leaders: “Your political risk in Haiti is lower than it has ever been in my lifetime.”

Thus, as previous US presidencies have done before, the Obama administration has worked to aid Haiti’s elite, sponsor international corporations taking advantage of cheap labor, weaken the ability of the Haitian state to regulate the society, and repress any political resistance to that agenda.

These policies led directly to the incapacitated Haitian state, dilapidated infrastructure, poorly constructed buildings and desperate poverty that combined with the hurricanes and now the earthquake to turn natural disasters into social catastrophes.

While everyone should support the current outpouring of aid to help Haiti, no one should do so with political blinders on. As Engler said:

Aid in Haiti has always been used to further imperial interests. This is obvious when you look at how the U.S. and Canada treated the Aristide government in contrast to the coup regime. The U.S. and Canada starved Aristide of almost all aid. But then after the coup, they opened a floodgate of money to back some of the most reactionary forces in Haitian society.

We should therefore agitate against any attempt by the U.S. and other powers to use this crisis to further impose their program on a prostrate country.

We should also be wary of the role of international NGOs. While many NGOs are trying to address the crisis, the U.S. and other governments are funneling aid to them in order to undermine Haitians’ democratic right to self-determination. The international NGOs are unaccountable to either the Haitian state or Haitian population. So the aid funneled through them further weakens what little hold Haitians have on their own society.

The Obama administration should also immediately lift the ban against Aristide’s return to Haiti, as well as the political ban on his party, Fanmi Lavalas, from participating in the electoral process. After all, a known drug criminal and coup leader, Guy Philippe, and his Front for National Reconstruction (FRN) party has been allowed to participate in the electoral process. Aristide and his party, by contrast, are still the most popular political force in the country and should have the right to participate in an open and fair vote.

The U.S. should also stop deportations of Haitians who have fled their crisis-torn country and grant Temporary Protected Status to Haitian refugees. That would allow any Haitians who have fled the political and social crisis since the coup, the hurricanes and now the earthquake to remain legally in the U.S.

On top of that, we must demand that the U.S. stop imposing its neoliberal plans. The U.S. has plundered Haitian society for decades. Instead of Haiti owing any debt to the U.S., other countries or international financial institutions, the reverse is the case. The U.S., France, Canada and the UN owe the people of Haiti reparations to redress the imperial plunder of the country.

With these funds and political space, Haitians would be finally able to begin shaping their own political and economic future–the dream of the great slave revolution 200 years ago.

What You Can Do

The American solidarity organization Haiti Action is committed to raising money for Haiti’s grassroots movement — including labor unions, women’s groups, educators and human rights activists, support committees for prisoners, and agricultural cooperatives — to distribute to those in need.

You can make a donation to the Haiti Emergency Relief Fund online.

Coates is a member of Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP), co-chair of Single Payer New York and a steward in the Public Employees Federation in New York.

Ashley Smith: We’ve heard lots of hype from the Democrats about the House and Senate bills. What’s in these two bills, and what will they mean for workers?

Andy Coates: The crux of each bill is compulsory private health insurance. The government will use its power to compel every individual to purchase private health insurance, or enroll in Medicaid. The bills don’t make private health insurance affordable; they propose to subsidize private insurance premiums for those who live on modest means.

For example, the House bill will subsidize the premiums of those whose income is 400 percent of the federal poverty level and below. Taxpayers would pay for this. But it would still mean that people who earn 200 percent to 400 percent of the federal poverty level would have to pay 8 to 12 percent of their income for private insurance premiums, or pay a fine and stay uninsured.

That would be the so-called “choice.” For the uninsured, paying for expensive insurance would amount to an enormous wage cut. And then they’ll get skimpy coverage, with high co-pays, high deductibles and all those other onerous and unworkable measures that come with very expensive private insurance.

AS: One of the justifications that Obama and the Democrats used for these bills is that they will control the cost of health care. Are they telling the truth?

AC: Total health care spending will not be brought under control by either of these bills. It will not bend the cost curve. As health care costs continue to increase dramatically, the crisis of unaffordable health care will continue, for ourselves and our families, with increased out-of-pocket costs, new mandatory premium payments and ongoing medical bankruptcies, will remain acute.

AS: What about the so-called public option? What impact will it have on the health care system?

AC: The proposals for the public option as they stand are meaningless from the point of view of reform, and ridiculous as a way to influence the insurance market. There are so many compromises, it might be renamed the incredible shrinking public option. And also, as a TV talking point, it has often eclipsed a focus on what’s really in the bill.

But I think that there’s more fundamental point. The public option was never a proposal for workable reform. It’s actually a neoliberal concept. Marie Gottschalk, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, has written an article in the new Socialist Register 2010 entitled “U.S. Health Reform and the Stockholm Syndrome.”

She argues that when it comes to health reform, American reformers are like hostages who identify with, and even defend, their captors. I heard her speak in New York, where she said it seemed that if a window opened to permit real health reform, many “reformers” wouldn’t even try to climb out.

AS: What do you mean that the public option is in fact a neoliberal proposal?

AC: The public option idea is basically that the insurance market will will magically meet our needs, as long as there is consumer choice and fair competition. This is the ideology popularized by Ronald Reagan. If only a government agency could be added alongside these giant, highly profitable insurers with their oligopoly control, then the marketplace would magically reform itself. Does that make any sense?

The insurance market rewards insurers that avoid paying for the care of sick. The public option would have to play by the same rules and compete on the same market. So in the best-case scenario, the public option would tend to enroll the sickest patients, and, in turn, would have higher, not lower, expenses. The Congressional Budget Office recently made this very point in a report on the House bill.

So a successful public insurer next to the private companies might instead put us on the fast track to permanent two-tiered health care, a deplorable trend already well underway.

But most likely of all, if enacted, the public option would turn out nationally just as it has in Maine–a failure, not a reform. In Maine, a state-funded public insurance called DirigoChoice has been around since 2003. Since then, it has enrolled fewer than 10 percent of the uninsured, it has not done a thing to control costs, and this year, it faces a fiscal crisis that threatens its future existence

AS: What impact will these bills have on the health care crisis?

AC: Immediately on the passage of the bill, very little would change. There is some insurance regulation, but we should note that this is regulation the industry itself proposed.

For instance, the insurance companies will have to stop rescissions–arbitrary cancellation of policies that come usually with the “coincidence” of the patient getting sick. But they can still cancel policies if the policyholder commits “fraud”–or if you simply can’t pay your premiums. And over the decade, the insurers stand to gain tens of millions of new customers and hundreds of billions in taxpayer subsidies.

So I think that passage of the bill is virtually irrelevant to the everyday crisis. The main features in the House bill are not scheduled to start until 2013, and those in the Senate bill won’t start until 2014. Then it still won’t lessen disparities, or guarantee access to everyone, or improve the quality of care, or reduce costs. In fact, the main things in the bill have already failed at the state level, including the public option, including mandatory insurance.

AS: For most people, health insurance will still be tied to their jobs, right?

AC: Yes. When you lose your job, you will still lose your health insurance. Even worse, illness can lead to job loss and loss of insurance. Not just for the patient. If someone in your family gets very sick, the illness can cause you to miss work, too–going to appointments, to chemotherapy, waiting after surgery, coming home from the hospital, going to the pharmacy, going back to the hospital.

In such situations, people often lose their jobs in the United States. That’s the purpose of the Family Medical Leave Act. But even so, in our insane system, people lose their health insurance because they have no paycheck. These cruelties will remain a fact of life. Can we swallow such a bitter pill with a bit of tonic that more of the people who lose their jobs will now be eligible for Medicaid? I don’t think so.

AS: Would it be better if no bill passes than one of the proposals in Congress today?

AC: Single payer New York, the coalition that I am a co-chair of, had a steering committee discussion a few months back. It was our opinion at that time that it would be better to keep arguing for singe payer, and not take a position on a bill that hadn’t come out. More recently, Single Payer New York put out an unequivocal statement that recommends a “no” vote. We have also applauded Rep. Eric Massa of western New York for his principled vote against the House bill.

Personally, I think we should embrace any dialogue that advances the grassroots, kitchen-table debate about health care in this country.

The costs and hassles of health care are breaking working-class families. Prescriptions are not affordable, appointments can’t be had, our insurance is tied to our job or our spouse, millions of people are impacted by bankruptcy and Medicaid is a disaster. Too often, a personal crisis, health care amounts to an accumulating social crisis. The Democratic bills now in the Congress are no solution.

AS: The single-payer movement had attracted Democratic support in the House for a bill known as HR 676 that would have established a single-payer system. Leaders among these Democrats promised that there would at least be votes on single payer. Why didn’t they deliver?

AC: Forgive me for the long story here, but what happened this year was really remarkable and very positive. How many people are on full-time paid staff for single payer in the whole country? Less than a dozen or so, if that? Yet, there was a year of sustained mobilization, starting before Obama’s election, that grew and grew, from local, volunteer organizing.

The AFL-CIO convention passed a resolution this fall that endorsed single payer and the broader concept of social insurance, building on support for HR 676 within the unions. And then the Democratic Party leadership had to maneuver and spin all year long, trying to keep single payer off the table. These are a testament to the strength and energy of the grassroots inside and outside the AFL-CIO.

Back at the end of July, New York Congressman Anthony Weiner and six other HR 676 co-sponsors, brought into the Energy and Commerce Committee an amendment to substitute the text of HR 676 for the House bill. The leadership needed to get the main bill out of committee that day, the day before the summer recess. One day earlier, about a thousand people visited Congress and rallied outside the Capitol for single payer.

So while Nancy Pelosi and Henry Waxman, the committee chair, didn’t want to have a debate on single payer in the committee, neither could they simply push it aside. So Pelosi offered Weiner a deal. If he withdrew the amendment in committee, she would let him put it on the floor of the House for a debate and vote.

Weiner took the deal, but it was the single-payer grassroots who really called Nancy Pelosi’s bluff. We recognized that a floor vote–a losing vote–would be a historic precedent, not just that single payer would get to the floor of the House for the first time, but that the grassroots movement would be the force to put it there. Plus we hoped to see members of the House of Representatives stand for single payer and be counted. We wanted to know who our true friends were, with an eye on the 2010 elections.

So a campaign of lobbying, picketing and protesting commenced, from dozens of local organizations and a handful of national organizations. It brought to Congress hundreds of thousands of phone calls and faxes and e-mails, maybe millions–far more than anyone would have predicted. Protests grew vigorous. In fact, over 150 people were arrested in nonviolent civil disobedience actions at insurance companies and at congressional offices, including Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco office.

Weiner, an ambitious guy, jumped in with a bit of pizzazz. He got on television, and at one point turned the tables on the interviewer by asking what it was that insurance companies added to health care. Single payer helped his stature. But the week that the House bill came up, Weiner published a piece on the Huffington Post that was all about the public option, with no mention of single payer.

Earlier, we had expressed our dismay because he wanted to change some of the HR 676 language to leave out the undocumented immigrants–changing “residents” to “citizens” in the amendment. On the other hand, to his credit, he worked to get his single-payer amendment to the floor up to the very end. And Pelosi never would have negotiated with Weiner without the grassroots heat, charming though Weiner might be.

In fact, the day before the vote, there was a full-page ad by the AFL-CIO and eight unions, including the California Nurses Association, in Roll Call calling for a “yes” vote on the Weiner Amendment. By this point, the Democratic Party leadership must have been surprised and frustrated that they had to keep finding new ways to keep single payer off the table. We heard rumors that even the White House had helped squelch the amendment vote.

In a curlicue twist, late on the Thursday before the Saturday House vote, Congressmen Dennis Kucinich and John Conyers together issued a letter saying that the Weiner amendment would be “tantamount to driving the movement over a cliff.” A losing vote for single payer on the House floor would hurt the cause, they said.

Their opinion stood in direct contradiction to the single-payer advocates who saw the efforts demanding the amendment as historic and imperative. Nancy Pelosi must have been overjoyed, for the letter gave her a new excuse to knock single payer off the table.

Pelosi also made an argument that in retrospect seems like pure chutzpah. She said that if a single-payer amendment came to the floor, she might also have to allow an amendment to restrict abortion rights to the floor. So we were to be mollified by the thought that if the single-payer amendment was withdrawn, at least women’s rights would be protected.

But we know how that turned out. We asked for health reform, and they gave us an abortion ban. Is that the true state of the Democratic Party today? To get the Democrats own “Blue Dog” right wing to vote for “health reform,” largely conceived and written by the insurance companies, they had to trade away women’s rights? Good grief.

Meanwhile, Kucinich had another amendment that would make it slightly easier for single payer to be enacted state by state. The Kucinich amendment came through the Education and Labor committee, where Kucinich got it passed with help from Republicans, but it wasn’t included in the bill. This amendment, too, was the focus of grassroots action–and is still.

He has since been fighting to get the state-by-state amendment back into the final legislation, with some success, getting the Progressive Caucus to endorse the idea. After Kucinich voted against bill, he issued a clear and powerful statement explaining his vote by saying the private insurance companies are the problem, not the solution.

AS: What’s the lesson of this experience?

AC: We just found out that Bernie Sanders will put a substitute single-payer amendment before the Senate, with at least two other senators promising to vote for it. But when the dust settled in the House, only two representatives, Dennis Kucinich and Eric Massa, voted against the bill because it wasn’t single payer. Two. The rest went with the Democratic Party leadership and voted for the bill–abortion ban and all. Evidently, this is what it means to be a progressive Democrat in Congress today.

It also tells us that we need to build a bigger grassroots movement. We are learning that the Democratic Representatives–and I daresay the Republicans, too–will respond to a grassroots mass movement, but we have to build that movement. No one will do it for us. As we do so, we must maintain our independence from elected officials. We have to continue to pressure them, sure–but our eyes should be on the grassroots, not the Democratic Party. I think that’s the most important lesson.

We might also remember that single payer will be won when it becomes a mainstream demand. So the goal of the movement should be to make our proposal the litmus test for the entire nation–left, right and center. The whole country simply must have a health system built upon the principle of solidarity. What other kind of society would we want to live in?

AS: What’s the way forward for the single-payer movement?

AC: What we need above all else is confidence. Our demand is popular, workable and just. We learned this year that there really is a social movement for single payer coming into being. We should be telling our advocates this: if you keep doing what you have been doing, we will win single payer. All year long, we have had the attention of the Congress and the White House. Much as they wanted to, they could not shake us.

It’s really up to us. We can build this movement. The health care crisis will persist in spite of the Democrats’ 10-year plan. With unemployment still rising and possibilities for a frank political crisis emerging, we might soon find a situation in which something has simply got to give. We need to learn to articulate broader benefits of single-payer reform as an economic rescue and as personal liberation for working people.

Our grassroots single-payer movement will also grow by learning to fight on related issues. For example, in Braddock, Pa., the western Pennsylvania single-payer activists have gotten involved in defending a community hospital from closing. The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center–itself an insurance company by the way, and a massive corporation with a millionaire CEO–bought up the health care infrastructure in the area, including Braddock Hospital.

If we had single payer, we wouldn’t have this corporate medicine, building a new hospital in the wealthy suburb and closing the hospital in the old city. If we had single payer, health care priorities would be planned to meet the needs of the community, not the corporate bottom line.

The single-payer movement needs to join local struggles like this one and articulate how single payer would help solve these problems. That’s how we will be able to forge out of a nascent movement a force that can overwhelm the opposition to single payer in Washington, D.C.

Coates is a member of Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP), co-chair of Single Payer New York and a steward in the Public Employees Federation in New York.

Ashley Smith: The right wing has mounted a major offensive against Democrats proposals for health care reform, with all sorts of absurd allegations and distortions. What’s your assessment of the right-wing attacks?

Dr. Andy Coates: At one town hall I attended, a guy had a sign that said, incredibly, “Tsars are not for the USA, Tsars are for the USSR.” Nearby, there was quiet bragging that somebody had a gun in his car. So there is nuttiness, but also potential danger as the right wing mobilizes.

At that meeting, I thought that people for single-payer outnumbered the right wing. Those in favor of some kind of reform far outnumber those against, but the “get the government out of health care” group fought for the mike and fought for attention.

Earlier, I was heckled while speaking in favor of single-payer on a panel in Syracuse convened by a Congressman. The interesting thing to me–besides hearing people holler “socialism!” at the top of their lungs–was that the hecklers listened carefully to every word people said. And I noted their applause when I said that mandating the purchase of health insurance wouldn’t solve anything. At that meeting, a clear majority was for single-payer, but that’s not how the press reported it.

So I think that many people, swayed by Republican arguments, will actually think this through for themselves. For example, someone who’s 59 years old, avoiding the doctor, trying to make it a few more years to Medicare, worried that Medicare won’t be there–and rightly so, for the Republicans keep repeating that it’s “bankrupt,” and the President keeps saying that Medicare and Medicaid is breaking the country.

I believe we can win these people over to single-payer. We shouldn’t let the TV coverage of these meetings distort our view. Poll after poll, and our own experience, attests that the majority of people are on the side of real reform–of Medicare-for-all single-payer health care.

AS: Many people find the debate in Washington completely confusing and exasperating. What do you think is going on?

AC: It is confusing. Just think about it–the Republican Party recently came out foursquare in defense of Medicare, after decades of calling for its abolition. Of course, the Republicans want to protect Medicare Part D, a giveaway to the pharmaceutical industry, and they love Medicare Advantage, a privatization of Medicare that has proven lucrative for private insurance companies.

Meanwhile, we have the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers Association of America, led by former Republican congressman Billy Tauzin. Tauzin was quoted in the Los Angeles Times saying that the White House promised not to negotiate with the pharmaceutical industry–promised to preserve Medicare Part D, and also not to allow the import of drugs from Canada or other countries where they would be cheaper than American prices. In exchange, PhRMA is going to spend $150 million advertising in favor of so-called “reform.”

So PhRMA and the White House and the Republicans all appear to be in alignment, defending Medicare Part D from reform. Perhaps Obama was accurate when he said recently that there was 80 percent agreement on the proposals. Yet we hear “government takeover!” as if someone were actually proposing such a thing.

AS: It seems like both the Republicans and the so-called “blue dogs” in the Democratic Party oppose the idea of government involvement in health care. What’s your view of their argument?

AC: We should set the record straight. The government is deeply involved in medical care. Taxpayers fund at least half of all health care spending in the U.S. The number of people covered by Medicare, Medicaid and military health plans is over 87 million. The idea of getting the government out of health care could be called a utopian fantasy.

Medicare has been an enormously successful program for 44 years. The Veterans Administration is a socialized system where the federal government owns the hospitals and clinics, pays the staff directly, and bargains with the pharmaceutical industry for low drug prices. The Veterans Administration delivers the best quality health care in the country–numerous studies attest to it.

AS: Why has the Obama administration made such a mess of its campaign for health care reform?

AC: No one disputes any longer that our system is in grave trouble. We’re spending twice as much as any other nation on health care, and yet we have a mediocre, dysfunctional system.

The Obama administration’s message has been, again and again: “If you like your insurance, you’ll get to keep it.” They needed to find an argument that would help them earn the support of the health insurance industry. So Democratic Party pollsters “discovered” that people love their health insurance. In the name of reform, ironically, they broadcast the idea that people fear change.

This is at odds with everyday experience and the 2008 election returns, on top of many polls that show popular support for single-payer. I think there is great enthusiasm and great expectation in favor of change–dramatic, fundamental change. And people find the hassles of health insurance ridiculous.

AS: What is the nature of the reform that the Democrats are proposing?

AC: The heart of the reform is a mandate that individuals purchase health insurance–to criminalize the uninsured.

In exchange for accepting some new regulation, the insurance industry will get the government to coerce people into buying their product. Because working people don’t make enough money to buy the product, tax money will be used to subsidize the private insurance premiums. The Los Angeles Times called this “a bonanza” for the health insurance industry.

AS: This is exactly what Massachusetts did. What has been the impact there?

AC: Yes, Massachusetts mandated that everyone buy health insurance. And this hasn’t made premiums affordable. To reduce premiums, policies have things like very high deductibles and large co-pays. In the case of a single person making just over $30,000 a year, if you add up the premiums and deductible, she or he will have to shell out over $5,000 before any insurance kicks in. This simply isn’t affordable.

Massachusetts subsidizes insurance premiums for everyone who makes less than 300 percent of the federal poverty line. This guarantees a constant flow of money into private health insurance companies, while it exacerbates the state’s budget deficit.

And to address the deficit, Massachusetts has cut safety net health care! They have taken hundreds of millions of dollars out of programs that would have helped poor and low-income patients–the very people most need the care and whom the reform should have most helped.

In addition, Massachusetts has a feature like what’s in the proposed federal reform–a brokerage house called the Commonwealth Health Insurance Connector. It’s supposed to help people get private health insurance. But it’s yet another layer of bureaucracy!

The Insurance Connector alone employs more people than the province of Ontario has working for its Medicare program. Medicare in Canada costs 1.3 percent of health spending. The Insurance Connector adds 4.5 percent in administrative cost to each policy it brokers. And the province of Ontario has twice as many people as the state of Massachusetts.

The Massachusetts model doesn’t work. It doesn’t lower costs, and it doesn’t cover everyone. It forces people to buy defective, unaffordable insurance. And when you lose your job in Massachusetts, you still lose your health insurance.

AS: Beyond the idea of mandates, the Democrats have also floated the so-called public option. What do you make this idea?

AC: Let’s look back to the early 1960s. When Medicare was gaining momentum and needed to be enacted by Congress, its opponents put forward a proposal intended to be friendly to the health insurance industry. The idea was that seniors should be able to purchase health insurance from private companies, but also have the choice of a public insurance option.

Medicare passed instead, thank goodness. It seems fair to ask whether today we should support a proposal that was objectionable over 45 years ago.

The idea of the public option was again put forward in 2007, in a briefing paper by Professor Jacob Hacker. He envisioned a very large public program, enrolling all of the uninsured and anyone else who voluntarily wanted to purchase health insurance from a public insurer. The public insurance company, in turn, would have the market share, the clout and the low overhead to compete against private health insurance companies.

Many good-hearted people have latched onto this proposal today because they think that the private health insurance industry is simply too powerful to conquer. These people aren’t against single-payer. They simply lack confidence that we can achieve a Medicare-for-all single-payer system in one step. They’re looking for an incremental route.

In PNHP, some of us like to say, “You can’t jump a chasm in two leaps.” In the insurance marketplace, the winning company keeps the healthy and wealthy customers and avoids or jettisons the sick and the poor.

Would a public option really be able to compete? Wouldn’t it simply end up with the sick patients, whose care is costly, and flounder? Wouldn’t it more likely lead to greater disparities, an official two-tiered system? Is there anyone who really believes that the heavily monopolized U.S. insurance market would even reform–let alone abolish–itself simply because people were given the choice of a public plan?

Even so, what seems surprising so far is that we haven’t seen much of a specific proposal for what this public option would look like. We hear the words “public option,” but the details about how it would be launched and funded, who would be enrolled, and how it would, in fact, impact the market remain murky. If you’re looking for an incremental route, some specific steps might be useful.

Because the Democratic leaders didn’t put forward a specific proposal, the public option really seems like little more than a bargaining chip. It’s a feint, not a punch.

The New York Times editorial the day after his September speech advised the president not to surrender the public option–yet. The advice was to try and trade away the public option for Republican votes. Meanwhile the public option, as a posture, has lured progressives and liberals to support a reform that is a huge giveaway of taxpayer money to insurance companies.

So the Democratic Party leadership now finds itself in a bit of a pickle. A significant part of the liberal community finds the public option utterly compelling. They see in the idea a morally defensible alternative to the insurance industry, whose profits are essentially blood money.

Will the Democratic leaders, even so, abandon the public option? We’ll see. In Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi noted that when Nancy Pelosi was asked if progressives might bring down health care reform over the public option, she laughed out loud and said that there’s no way that progressives would vote against the President, no matter what.

AS: Even if we got the public option, would it deliver the health care reform that we need?

AC: In the best-case scenario, the public option will not cover everyone, improve quality, redress disparities or guarantee the choice of physicians. PNHP founders David Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhandler estimate that the maximum cost savings it would offer would be only 9 percent of what single-payer would offer. It would also add yet another insurance entity to the 1,300 different insurers we have now. And it won’t end the fundamental problem with health care–the profit motive. That’s what lies behind the health care crisis in America.

Let’s be honest–competitive insurance companies successfully shun sick and poor patients, and enroll healthy and wealthy patients instead. Any entity, including a public option, that enters that marketplace, even with the best intentions, has got to compete for the healthy and wealthy patients to survive.

How can a public option get the insurance market to reform itself? It would also require a colossal amount of regulation–active government coercion of the private industry.

Let’s talk about the political feasibility of getting the government to reform the insurance market in a way that all the companies would share the risks, the burden of the sick and poor, with account books open to the public, so everyone can know what resources are going to the care of patients, and see the fairness of the insurance market reform.

That proposal, in my estimation, would actually require much more political organization–a mightier political force–than we need to win single-payer and go ahead and expand and improve Medicare to include everyone. It makes more sense to simply ask the insurance industry, which has failed our country so terribly, to step aside.

AS: How would single-payer solve the health care crisis in the U.S., and how do you respond to those who say it’s unrealistic to challenge the health insurance industry?

AC: I think about the dimensions of health reform as a pentad, with five interrelated points. We need to reign in unaffordable costs, improve the quality of care, lessen disparities, guarantee access and protect the provider-patient relationship. Any proposal for comprehensive reform has got to get at all of these: costs, quality, disparities, access and choice.

When you see it that way, a single-payer program is the most basic foundation that would have the power to deliver comprehensive reform.

It would liberate tremendous resources, hundreds of billions of dollars annually, that are presently squandered in a vast administrative bureaucracy that exists to extract money from the system. This bureaucracy drives health care into a dysfunctional frenzy. Single-payer would not only eliminate that administrative waste but a myriad of perverse monetary incentives.

Under a single-payer system, everyone would have health care–not insurance, but health care. We would be able to build new hospitals and clinics to meet needs in medically underserved communities. This would not only guarantee access, but improve quality and lessen disparities. And this would be also an economic stimulus of gigantic proportions, a very important thing given the current economic crisis.

With everyone in and nobody out, single-payer would guarantee every patient the right to go to any doctor, nurse practitioner or any health care provider they chose. It would be based upon protecting, not eroding, the privacy of the provider and the patient.

As liberating as single-payer can be, without a true people’s movement, we can’t take on the entrenched power of the insurance industry. The insurance companies control hundreds of billions of dollars of health spending through a byzantine, bureaucratic apparatus that exists to extract resources, including profits, from the care of sick people. It has an enormous lobbying apparatus and contributes rivers of money to both Republicans and Democrats. It’s a very, very serious foe.

AS: How can the debate be shifted to put single-payer at the center?

AC: By sticking to the facts. The right likes to say that single-payer can’t happen because we need to have a uniquely American system.

But if we’re going to have an evidence-based debate about the best way to provide a uniquely American system of health care, it would be between the Medicare model, which is socialized health insurance, and the Veterans Administration, a socialized health system in which the federal government owns every hospital and clinic, pays the doctors and nurses directly, bargains with the pharmaceutical industry with bulk purchasing as its leverage, and monitors the quality of care, with excellent results.

The practicality of the single-payer proposal can’t be refuted. The idea is gaining momentum. If we mobilize, it will become unstoppable. If we’re creative and if we don’t back down, we will win this reform.

Remember, Medicare was implemented 45 years ago within one year. The government enrolled and guaranteed benefits for every single person over 65 in an era before personal computers, with typewriters and carbon paper. In the 1990s, the Taiwan government studied health reform and concluded that single-payer, modeled on our Medicare system, was the best way to go. They pushed it through within a few tumultuous months. And the health finance system in Taiwan has been successful and popular ever since.

AS: What should the strategy of single-payer advocates be in the health care debate this fall?

AC: Build the grassroots movement! Look at recent history. Our emerging movement has overcome all sorts of opposition.

Before he was elected, Obama organized living room discussions on health care. PNHP heard from across the country that hundreds of these meetings were actually in favor of single-payer. The Obama campaign’s report, over 100 pages, managed little more than a mention of single-payer. It was dismissive.

When the White House had a meeting on health care that didn’t invite any single-payer advocates, activist doctors threatened a picket line unless Oliver Fein, the president of PNHP, was invited. Within a day, the White House changed course and invited Oliver Fein and John Conyers, who had also been excluded.

Then, the White House held health forums throughout the country, in Michigan and Vermont, Iowa, North Carolina and California. Single-payer people came out in the hundreds to the meetings.

Max Baucus, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, declared single-payer off the table early in 2009. So when the Senate Finance Committee heard testimony, at two sessions, activists, including doctors and nurses, stood up to demand that single-payer be put on the table.

That civil disobedience galvanized our movement. Dr. Margaret Flowers was then invited to testify before the Senate Health, Energy, Labor and Pensions Committee. When the House committees took testimony, single-payer was on the table.

Meanwhile, members of Congress have now heard and heard and heard again from single-payer activists. This spring, Nancy Pelosi was quoted as saying, “It’s single-payer, single-payer, single-payer, everywhere we go.”

Because of this nascent mass movement, it looks like single-payer will now get to the floor of the House of Representatives this fall for the first time. New York Rep. Anthony Weiner managed to get Nancy Pelosi to allow a floor vote on HR 676, the single-payer bill.

In the Energy and Commerce Committee, Weiner and six other representatives proposed an amendment that would substitute the text of HR 3200 with the text of HR 676, the single-payer bill. The committee chair, Henry Waxman, interrupted Weiner to say that if he would withdraw the amendment from committee, the speaker would allow a floor debate and vote.

This shows that single-payer really is on the table. This should give our movement confidence.

AS: What do you think of the Rep. Dennis Kucinich’s proposed amendment that would allow states to pursue single-payer plans on their own? What should single-payer activists say about his state-by-state strategy?

AC: Dennis Kucinich has proposed an amendment to HR 3200, the main House health care reform bill, which would allow states to implement state-based single-payer programs. Because it came through committee–in fact, it passed the House health committee with Republican votes–it won’t have a floor vote. Three committee chairs and the House Speaker will decide whether the Kucinich amendment will be included in the final version of HR 3200.

The Kucinich amendment is an expression of the great energy to establish state-based single-payer health insurance programs in California, Vermont, Pennsylvania, New York and elsewhere. Many activists who argue for such a state-by-state strategy point to the precedent in Canada. There, Saskatchewan was the first province to enact a single-payer health care system, which then spread province by province in Canada.

Yet with 50 different states, it’s hard to imagine a similar process unfolding in the U.S. when we consider the wide disparities across states–say, Louisiana compared with Minnesota.

It’s also difficult to imagine how state-based single-payer reform would work practically. Say that we won state-based single-payer in New York state–how would it affect people from northern New Jersey, southern Connecticut and elsewhere, who use the excellent hospitals in Manhattan? If a small state like Vermont passed single-payer, how would the system defend itself against the onslaught of attacks that would inevitably come from the powerful insurance and pharmaceutical industries? The Kucinich amendment, in a way, highlights these challenges.

Even so, I’m completely in favor of fighting for state-based single-payer reform. It is a legitimate demand and great way to educate. However, we must not lose sight of our goal–national health insurance.

AS: Given that we are going to have some version of the Obama proposal likely passed what will that mean for the single-payer movement?

AC: Back in February, in his first appearance before Congress, the president said that health care reform cannot and will not wait another year. But even if a bill gets passed, the main elements–like the insurance mandate, any kind of public option if it survives and the insurance exchange–won’t begin until 2013. Meanwhile, we face a system where the experience of seeking care is often a hassle and humiliating, and is sometimes deadly.

This fall, health care activists should explain that we have workable reform within our grasp–single-payer health insurance. We should use the deliberations that go on in Washington and the points that come out of them to explain why and how single-payer would be better.

In reality, whatever happens in Washington will not change our lives much for the better. But the election of the president and the call for sweeping reform have raised the nation’s expectations sky-high that there will be meaningful change. Under those conditions, I’m enormously optimistic that we can build the kind of grassroots movement that we need to win single-payer national health insurance.

Ashley Smith: What is the G20, and what are they meeting about in Pittsburgh on September 24-25?

Paul LeBlanc: The G20 consists of the top economic and political leaders of the global economy. They want to ensure that the global economy functions in a positive and smooth way in the interests of those who dominate the global and key national economies. Often that is in direct conflict with the needs and interests of the majority of the world’s people.

The G20 will be gathering together in Pittsburgh, but they haven’t revealed what topics they will be discussing. To be honest, the G20 is not noted for its transparency.

I think it’s obvious that they will be addressing the economic crisis. I guess they would be talking about the environment, which is a key issue for the world’s people, but also for the global economy. It’s conceivable that they will be talking about issues of wars and peace.

But they have not shared with us or consulted with us, the majority of the world’s people, about exactly what they will be discussing. That’s one reason why we have to raise our voices and advocate for the kind of world we would like to see.

AS: Initially, the G20 was planned to meet in New York City. Why did they move it to Pittsburgh?

PL: The Obama administration hasn’t given a clear answer. They’ve said Pittsburgh is a wonderful and beautiful city, and it’s doing all kinds of innovative things. Many have speculated that political deals have been made. Remember that Pennsylvania went for Obama, and Pittsburgh in particular, and so Obama may have decided to let Pittsburgh host the G20 summit to reward his political allies and keep the state aligned with the Democratic Party.

There are other issues, though. Pittsburgh is smaller and less complex than New York. The progressive movement here is vibrant, but there are fewer of us here than in New York. So they hope to minimize and contain whatever protests develop against the G20.

AS: How have activists in Pittsburgh responded once you found out the G20 was happening in Pittsburgh?

PL: The response of the activist community has been amazing.

We have at least three tent cities being planned. There’s an environmental encampment organized by a number of environmental groups, there’s a women’s encampment organized by Code Pink and Women’s League for International for Peace and Freedom, and then there’s another poor people’s encampment organized by Bail Out the People and Monumental Baptist Church.

There are at least three educational activities, which raise questions about and criticisms of the G20. The one that I’m most intimately involved with is the People’s Summit. There will also be an International Peace Justice and Empowerment Summit that is being organized by progressive activists in the African American community here. The People’s Summit and the International Summit are working together to coordinate their efforts. There’s another activity initiated by the United Electrical Workers Union in conjunction with the Institute for Policy Studies.

AS: What about plans for demonstrations and actions?

PL: There are several peaceful, legal demonstrations planned. The Bail Out the People movement has called for a demonstration for jobs and justice on Sunday, September 20. The Steelworkers and Pennsylvania state Sen. Jim Ferlo have planned one for Wednesday, September 23. The Thomas Merton Center has called for a big peaceful legal rally for Friday, September 25 in cooperation with dozens and dozens of other organizations from around the country.

The Pittsburgh G20 Resistance Project has called for actions of an undefined character on Thursday, September 24. This group has not announced that its actions will be restricted to peaceful or legal methods. I don’t know what the character of those activities will be.

Those are just some of the activities that are taking place.

AS: We’ve seen reports in the media about a huge police presence being deployed in Pittsburgh, and heard that the city and federal hovernment may not provide permits for demonstrations. Where does the fight for civil liberties and the right to protest stand now in Pittsburgh?

PL: First of all, there has been a considerable amount of fear-mongering and violence-baiting in much of the media initially, and it’s still going on. The media and authorities lump all of the different protests together and smear them, implying that activists are going to do horrible things and generate immense violence.

They’ve generated a significant amount of fear in the population. The authorities are using this situation to justify a series of policies that are potentially extremely repressive. They have put out a call out to police departments in the surrounding area to supply up to 4,000 additional police.

This is not simply a local police matter; it’s a national security matter. The Secret Service and other federal governmental agencies are directly involved in coordinating and training the police in all sorts of tactics to deal with this supposedly grave threat that they’ve projected. So there’s potential for significant police violence as has happened in other places against protesters.

At the same time, the local government indicated initially that it would provide permits. But then later, it stated that they would not be providing permits. Now there are all sorts of stories in the media saying either that permits have been provided or not been provided.

The situation is a bit confusing. But the movement has rallied together to push for democratic rights for all to engage in peaceful, legal protests, and to secure the various permits we need for the encampments, marches and rallies. There’s also a wonderful team of lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union, National Lawyers Guild and Center for Constitutional Rights, which have been representing activist groups in negotiations with the representatives of the city and the federal government.

There has been an indication that at least some of the permits will go through. But the city has stated that everything is subject to approval by the federal government, which may reserve the right to rescind any permits.

So all of this is still up in the air. But it does appear to me that the government will be giving some ground to the constitutional rights of protesters to organize peaceful, legal actions.

AS: Many activists experienced this kind of restriction, and in some cases police violence, under the Bush administration, and expected different from the Obama administration. What do you make of what the Obama administration is doing in Pittsburgh?

PL: During the campaign, Obama repeatedly said that the way positive social, political, and economic change was brought about in the history of this country has been through protest movements–through the struggles of the labor, civil rights movement, and women’s movements. He said that all this change was brought about through organizing and protesting in the streets and workplaces.

One would have thought therefore that his response and the response of his administration would have been to welcome people speaking out about the kind of world they’d like to see, and having protests raising questions about the G20.

His administration has done the opposite. It appears that there’s not that much difference between the policies of Bush and those of Obama toward these kinds of protests.

It seems to me that it would be in Obama’s best interests to adhere to what he was talking about in his campaign. If he really believes in those things, then he should be true to what he was saying in the campaign. So far, there is no clear evidence that he is being true to that.

AS: What do you and others have planned for the People’s Summit?

PL: The People’s Summit is going to take place September 19 through September 22. It is being sponsored by a broad array of forces. Recently, unions such as National Organization of Legal Services Workers (UAW Local 2310), the United Steel Workers and the Pittsburgh Federation of Teachers have decided to join in.

We’ve got a number of local community leaders from Pittsburgh speaking, such as Carl Redwood, Tim Stevens, Molly Rush and John Canning. We also have some leading labor leaders like Leo Gerard from the Steelworkers, as well as John Tarka from the Pittsburgh Federation of Teachers.

We have invited major international speakers. Walden Bello from the Philippines and one of the key leaders of the global justice movement will be speaking. A representative from Jubilee Zambia/Jubilee USA named Privilege Haangandu will also be addressing the summit.

From the U.S., we have some leading activist voices. Jeremy Scahill, the crusading journalist who writes for The Nation and other publications, will be speaking. Anthony Arnove, who works closely with Howard Zinn and wrote an excellent book, Iraq: The Logic of Withdrawal, will be at the summit. Howard Zinn himself, who for medical reasons will not be able to be here, has made a video presentation especially for the conference.

There will be cultural activities that include an African dance group; Son of Nun, a nationally known hip hop artist; and a presentation of Howard Zinn’s one-act play Marx in Soho by the wonderful actor Brian Jones.

Throughout the whole conference, we’ve organized an inter-weaving of the global and local to show common problems that we are facing. It’s a very intense and rich array of speakers, educational activities and discussion about what kind of world we would like to see.

There isn’t full agreement among the Peoples’ Summit sponsors on whether the G20 can be part of the solution to the world’s problems. Some feel that it is an organic part of what is going wrong.

But we are unified in a commitment to have that discussion, and also around a basic set of principles: decisions being made about all of our lives should be made by all of us. There should be liberty and justice for all. All of us in the U.S. and throughout the world are entitled to freedom expression, freedom of beliefs, freedom from fear and freedom from want.

That’s the kind of world we want to see. The Peoples’ Summit as a whole isn’t involved in any demonstrations, although some of its sponsors–such as the Thomas Merton Center, to which I belong–are very involved in preparing for peaceful, legal protests.

AS: All the hype about police repression and the battle over permits may give people the feeling they should stay away. What do you say to activists who are wondering whether or not to come to the demonstration?

PL: No one should have any doubts or questions: there will be a peaceful legal demonstration on Friday, September 25.

The Thomas Merton Center is spearheading a broad coalition that is absolutely committed to making that happen. It is organizing a network of peace marshals to ensure the peaceful nature of the demonstration.

I am confident that the government will not try to violate our constitutional right to march. It may want to tailor where we march. But our legal team will fight very hard to win our right to march to the City County building, where we will have a rally and then go on to the Federal Building, which is very close to the Convention Center where the G20 will be meeting.

The marchers want to go there to express their beliefs and ideas on what kind of world we want to see, to question whether the G20 should make decisions that affect our lives, and to demand that such decisions be made with the democratic participation of the people.

If it turns out that the city does not allow the march to go the Federal Building, that will be challenged through legal channels, but there will be no confrontation with police. Such a confrontation would only happen if our democratic rights were entirely violated. In that case, I think significant numbers of people would follow the example of Martin Luther King Jr. and commit non-violent civil disobedience.

King once put it this way, “We must have the right to protest for what is right.” People will be prepared to do that if their constitutional rights are being violated.

I don’t anticipate that this will happen. The indications from the city are that it will be allowing a peaceful legal protest on September 25. So any activists who can should come to Pittsburgh and join our march.

AS: How do you see the People’s Summit and the protests against the G20 fitting in with the growing frustration with the limits of the Obama administration and the recognition that we have to fight for the change we want?

PL: Our organizing is crucially important. Only through educating, organizing and mobilizing pressure for peace and social justice, independently of all politicians and governments, will we win the better world we need.

We have to develop popular pressure that will compel governments to respond in a positive way to the needs of the majority of the world’s people. If the Obama administration is going to live up to its campaign promises, it must feel this kind of popular pressure.

As Obama said during the campaign, this is only way that genuine change is brought about–by mobilizing such pressure. The time to do so is now.

But even if the Obama administration, other governments and the G20 respond positively on certain kind of issues, it will be necessary to maintain popular pressure, because there are powerful counter-pressures from multinational corporations and the wealthy to make the world go their way at the expense of the rest of us. We must build popular pressure to push it our way.

But there’s another issue as well, a more fundamental issue, and that is we believe a different kind of world is possible, one in which the people democratically make decisions, control the institutions that affect their lives and control the economic resources on which on all of us depend.

We need a better world, a different world, in which that democratic principle permeates everything. Until we are able to achieve that world, we need to build popular pressure to win reforms that support democracy, human rights, and social and economic justice.

As we build movements for these short-term victories, we have to debate and discuss how can we bring about a world which is based not on the profit for the few, but on meeting the needs of humanity. We are at pivotal time in building this struggle, both for reforms and a whole new world.

The refugees from Swat — in the north of Pakistan, near the Afghanistan border — are victims of a Pakistani Army offensive, backed by the U.S., against forces of the Taliban, which operate in both countries. Under pressure from the U.S., the Pakistani military broke a ceasefire arrangement with the Taliban and is carrying out a scorched-earth assault — with the excuse that this is the only way to flush out Taliban fighters. But the civilian population is paying a terrible price.

The nightmarish scene in Swat and other areas in the north marks the latest stage of Pakistan’s crisis, brought to a boil by the U.S. escalation of its war in Afghanistan, which is spilling across the border. But it also a sign of the deepening contradictions of Pakistani politics following the downfall of the U.S.-backed strongman, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, last year amid growing unrest.

Musharraf was replaced by Asif Ali Zardari, the husband of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and leader of the Pakistan Peoples Party. But Zardari, who has a long record of corruption, has quickly lost credibility. He only reinstated Pakistan’s Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry — whose ouster by Musharraf spurred a mass movement spearheaded by lawyers — after huge protests in March forced his hand. Now, with the attacks in Swat, the Pakistani military is regaining the initiative.

Saadia Toor, an assistant professor of Anthropology and Social Work at Staten Island College and part of the group Action for a Progressive Pakistan, talked to Ashley Smith about the situation in Pakistan today.

Ashley Smith: For last few weeks, the media have been filled with reports of the “imminent threat of the Taliban,” and then coverage of Pakistani military assault on the Taliban in Swat. Why has the Pakistani military abandoned the former peace and launched this attack?

Saadia Toor: Finally, we’re beginning to see a lot of good analysis coming out of the left media. Earlier, the U.S. government’s rhetoric was being picked up uncritically. We’ve seen scaremongering in the media over the imminent takeover of Pakistani nukes by the Taliban.

The U.S. has created this bizarre new moniker “Af/Pak” as a way to cover over their expansion of the war from Afghanistan into Pakistan. Building consent for this expansion has been what all the State Department, Pentagon and media propaganda has been about in the last few weeks.

To address your question about why the Pakistani Army abandoned the peace, we have to step back and understand the relationship between the Army and the Taliban. The Pakistani military has not been interested in dealing with the Taliban because the Taliban don’t appear as a threat to them. The military’s primary and existential obsession is with India, and that’s where the majority of the Pakistani Army is deployed. The Pakistani Army knows that the Taliban is, in part, its own creation, and it can deal with them.

Moreover, the military knows very well that the Taliban are not in any sense an existential or military threat to the country. The army therefore allowed the Taliban to enter Swat. They accepted that Swat and some of the other border provinces are incompletely integrated into the country, and allowed the Taliban to exert its control.

The army has been under massive pressure from the U.S. to deal with the “Taliban problem,” and the fact that the Taliban broke the peace deal allowed the army to prove to its American masters that it’s a reliable ally. So now the military has driven back the Taliban quite easily from Buner and pummeled them in Swat.

The Pakistani Army isn’t concerned about what their attack on the Taliban would do to the civilian population in Swat, so what we have now is a humanitarian nightmare, with over a million internally displaced civilians.

Why did the Obama administration push Pakistan to abandon the peace deal?

Saadia Toor: The U.S. doesn’t respect any Pakistani rules or laws. It has its own imperial ambitions and priorities in the region. So it pressured Pakistan to essentially rip up the peace deal, and go on this brutal offensive.

The peace deal with the Taliban that was struck by the ruling party in the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) was pragmatic. The Taliban had been upping its threat in NWFP. It had killed ruling politicians and threatened their families. The civilian ANP government in the province also got no support from the army, and so was backed into a corner and had to accept the peace deal.

But the U.S. told the Pakistani government to ignore that deal after the Taliban attack on Buner.

Still, that’s only the superficial cause for the U.S. to back the assault on the Taliban. Tom Hayden has a fabulous piece in The Nation entitled “Understanding the long war” that goes a long way to explaining what U.S. ambitions are.

To understand those, you have to step back and examine the whole “war on terror.” It’s in reality a renewal of the “Great Game” of rivalries in the region over who’s going to control the oil and natural gas resources. Beyond that geopolitical battle, the military industrial complex has a material interest in perpetual warfare.

The U.S. wants to wind down its occupation in Iraq, which it sees as a distraction, and push ahead with a much larger scenario — what the U.S. State Department calls the arc of instability, from North Africa to the Middle East to South and Central Asia. The U.S. is gearing up for, in the shocking words of one official, 50 years of warfare in this area.

The question of resources is central. This is the new Great Game — between the U.S., Russia, China, India, Pakistan and Iran, to name a few — that we have been observing since the beginning of the war in 2001. The U.S. had planned a pipeline to go from Central Asia through the Pakistani province of Balochistan. It saw Afghanistan as strategically important in these designs.

Balochistan, in particular, is under the radar right now, but it’s going to be a key region in the imperial competition. The Chinese have already been active in Balochistan; they helped build one of the ports. To counter this Chinese presence, the CIA has overrun Balochistan. With the help of the Pakistani military, it’s also also been training forces for black ops in Iran.

You said that the Pakistani Army is primarily focused not on the Taliban, but India. How has the recent tilt by the U.S. toward India affected this?

Saadia Toor: The U.S. has cultivated India, which has been happy with this new relationship, and shifted toward a much greater alignment with the U.S. India has made a huge break with its traditional non-alignment posture of the past.

We saw that come together dramatically right after 9/11, when India, the U.S. and Israel formed a block of so-called democracies against terror. We saw the reactivation of this alignment after the terror attacks in Mumbai. Sadly and tragically, the attack in Mumbai gave India the boost it needed to convince the U.S. to pay attention to India’s strategic needs in relationship to Pakistan.

So in the State Department’s Af/Pak policy document, you see that India isn’t considered one of the regional players that needs to sit together and be told what to do. India has bought itself out of this trap. It’s not going to be asked to do anything.

For example, the U.S. isn’t going to pressure India to do anything about Kashmir. Because extremist groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed, as well as the Pakistani military, are so Kashmiri-focused, the logical thing would be to force India and Pakistan to sit down with the Kashmiris to work out a solution that respects the Kashmiri people’s wishes.

Of course, if that were to happen, the Pakistani military wouldn’t change, nor would Lashkar-e-Taiba or Jaish-e-Mohammed disband. But it would result in stability along the border with India.

Since India has managed to extricate itself from these regional talks, it has avoided getting pressured toward a solution in Kashmir. But this, in turn, guarantees an ongoing conflict between Pakistan and India over Kashmir, at the expense of the region, and especially the people of Kashmir.

Couldn’t U.S. plans backfire and cause of further destabilization not only of Afghanistan, but now Pakistan as well?

Saadia Toor: We can’t underestimate the hubris of an imperialist state like the U.S. Despite eight years of war, occupation and counter-insurgency, and seeing that they aren’t working and are, in fact, backfiring, U.S. thinking doesn’t seem to be shifting at all.

In Pakistan, the U.S. policy could really destabilize the country. A military coup is a real possibility. The military is always happy to step in and overrule civilian democracy. The reason that it hasn’t done so is because it suffered such a severe public relations crisis in the last few years of the Musharraf regime. It did not feel it could come back.

But given the way things are going — especially all the finger-wagging by Secretary of State Hilary Clinton against the civilian government for being fragile and incapable of handling things–it seems like the U.S. might support a return to military dictatorship.

The U.S. has always been happier dealing with the Army, whether it has been in power or not. And the Pakistani Army’s most important backer is the U.S. state. The U.S. has fed the army, nurtured it and allowed it to become the monster it is. Certainly, the Pakistani military has had no support from below — that all comes from above, and from the U.S. in particular.

The army suffered this huge PR crisis under Musharraf because it was seen as doing the U.S.’s dirty work — which, to be honest, it has been doing for 50 years. So it retreated. Gen Ashfaq Kayani has been very happy to work behind the curtain of the civilian government, because the military ultimately knows that it’s always in control. It will do whatever it has to, and let the blame fall at the feet of the civilian government.

But if events turn in such a direction and the army is successful in winning back moral authority, it could take power. Part of the hysterics about “the Taliban are coming; the Taliban are coming” was drummed out for the U.S., and part was for the domestic consumption of the Pakistani elite.

The liberal elite supported the Pakistani Army in attacking the Taliban. This is just after having pushed Musharraf out of power.

There’s a constant vacillation among the liberal elite between democratic rule and the Pakistan Army. So knowing that the Pakistani military helped create and backed the Taliban in the first place, the liberal elite supported the attack. This is dangerous, since it is re-legitimizing one of the most reactionary forces in Pakistan — the military.

Recent opinion polls in Pakistan show the majority of Pakistanis are concerned about the economic mess, and not terrorism. What do you make of this?

Saadia Toor: What you see in these polls is the split between the haves and have-nots.

The aim of the army has been to win back the liberal elite. Of course, the military would love the support of the masses. But the liberal elite is what matters to them. And on the ground, conditions are so dire for the masses of the people that nothing the Pakistani military is doing is going to shore up mass support for it.

For example, people in Swat say that before this current operation, the Pakistani military targeted the Taliban. In the U.S. and Pakistani media, military leaders played out a drama for our consumption — they pretended to attack the Taliban, when, in fact, they weren’t.

The Pakistani state has always provided safe haven to the Taliban, as well as Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed, even when Musharraf declared them illegal. That was only done to please the U.S. It was obvious these groups were never repressed. When the military raided the offices, no one was there. When it arrested people, it wasn’t the leadership. This was all a drama staged for American consumption.

In Swat, the Pakistani military was doing nothing but terrorizing civilians. On top of that, those who lived close to the border with Afghanistan have had to deal with the U.S. drone strikes. So the masses of people feel completely helpless and angry at all sides.

The Pakistani military will never be able to win over those people who actually experienced what is happening on the ground. And certainly those people are not Taliban supporters either, since they have experienced the terror of the Taliban.

But the elite sitting in the cities are really terrified of the Taliban. Now, if one could assume the Taliban could become a major force in those cities, there would be something to be afraid of. But that’s not going to happen. My worry is that this whole fear of the Taliban will function to make that the Pakistani elite willing to accept anything else — from the former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, with all of his connections to the fundamentalists, to the military itself.

How has U.S. pressure for Pakistan to attack the Taliban affected the lawyers movement that developed in opposition to Musharraf after he got rid of Pakistan’s chief justice? Now the movement has had to confront the new president, Asif Ali Zardari, the corrupt husband of assassinated political leader Benazir Bhutto who succeeded Musharraf. Does the lawyers’ movement offer hope for progressive social change in Pakistan?

Saadia Toor: To begin with, some of leadership of the lawyers movement did come from the upper class, but the main section came from the middle class–the petty bourgeoisie–and extended on down from there.

So when the confrontation between the lawyers movement and Zardari came to a head, the liberal elite was against the Long March to demand that Zardari restore the chief justice. The elite’s biggest fear is the Taliban — that is, this religious takeover of Pakistan.

Never mind that they have been fine with the general religiosity that has flooded Pakistan since General Zia-ul-Hak’s dictatorship. They felt that it had no effect on their lives; they could go to their clubs and say, “So what if the rest of Pakistan is becoming more and more religious.”

The liberal elite was thus complicit with this spread of Islamism. It failed to step up and make secularism mainstream the way it used to be. In the 1970s, the political discourse was so different than it is now. This liberal elite therefore supports Zardari uncritically because it sees him as the only secular force.

Musharraf made his whole political career by saying that if it weren’t for him, the fundamentalists would take over. He sold this very effectively to the U.S., but also to the upper-class liberals. They very much saw him as their man until that was untenable.

This same kind of thinking is now behind the uncritical support for Zardari, because the elite wrongly believe that if it weren’t for him, the whole country would be taken over by the Taliban. The upper-class liberals were therefore critical of the Long March because they thought it was attacking Zardari, and any action or criticism would therefore open the floodgates for the fundamentalists or the army.

How has the left in Pakistan responded to the military operation against the Taliban?

Saadia Toor: The left is very fragmented and small in Pakistan. That, of course, has its own history because of its complete decimation under the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Zia-ul-Haq. Among some elements of the left, there is tremendous confusion about the situation.

For example, I can speak about the Communist Party of Balochistan and its positions. It has been anti-Taliban and pro-secular, and trying to speak from the position of the Swati people. But the discussion for a long time on its e-mail list was that it should support the army going in and attacking the Taliban.

This is a disastrous position. It does not take a very sophisticated analysis to see that the army stands to gain from this whole operation. The action is designed to build up support for the army and show that it is an effective force that needs more money.

Of course, there are always small groups and individuals which have taken a principled stand.

There have also been a few altercations between the principled left and the liberal elite on this issue. The elite’s position has been pro-army. The principled leftists have argued against army action because the army is deeply involved in creating this mess, isn’t interested in addressing the main issue of the Taliban, and the whole action is window-dressing. So there were actual altercations at public meetings between these two positions.

What should the principled left position be?

Saadia Toor: The principled position is always to be anti-army — not just on an abstract level, but drawing on the actual history of the relation of the army to groups like the Taliban and the Pakistani people. If you’ve been paying any attention to these things, it boggles the mind that someone would call on and expect the army to protect the people. It shows the ideological confusion.

It’s not so long ago that we were marching against the army for its cozy relationship with the US, the “war on terror,” and the disappearances under Musharraf. I don’t understand the basis on which the left would be calling on the Pakistani Army to solve the current problem.

I think a principled position would denounce the army for its disinterest in dealing with these groups, for actually cultivating these groups in Afghanistan and Pakistan, for its continuing extraction of money from the U.S., and for its ongoing mobilization against India.

Now with India’s investment in Afghanistan growing, the Pakistani Army investment in the Taliban is even higher. The Pakistani Army supported the Taliban against the Northern Alliance, which they perceived to be supported by India.

With India giving aid to Afghanistan, establishing an embassy there, and supporting infrastructural projects, the Pakistani Army will have a greater stake in supporting forces like the Taliban as a counterweight. The Pakistani Army is locked in this conflict with India, which is increasingly a sub-imperial power in the region.

What should the left say about the Taliban?

Saadia Toor: It’s sad and shocking to hear people talk about the Taliban as an expression of class anger. At one level, that analysis is really troubling because it presumes the Taliban has a vast amount of popular support. But if you talk with refugees coming from Swat, it’s clear that the Taliban doesn’t. We must oppose the Army, but clearly not because we support the Taliban. A principled left position is to oppose both.

A left position must talk about the disenfranchised and the federal issues in Pakistan, as well as expose the Pakistani military and the entire ruling elite’s complete disinterest in its people. The Pakistani state has never honored the rights of its federated units. [In the war of 1971], the ruling West Pakistani establishment was happy to let go of East Pakistan [now Bangladesh], rather than give in to its demands for a more balanced relationship between the center and the provinces. And East Pakistan was not a small federated unit; it was the majority of the population at the time.

The West Pakistani establishment constructed an image of East Pakistan as a hotbed of Hindus and communists, and during the army action in 1971, the army brutalized the population of East Pakistan, for which the Pakistani state has never apologized. That’s the real face of the army and its relation to the Pakistani people.

A left position should focus also on the developing class anger and struggles among the peasants, as well as among the proletariat across whole of the country, including in Punjab. These struggles must be reported and not ignored. The fact that they are ignored has a huge impact on the balance of power in the political sphere.

If you don’t acknowledge that these struggles exist and that they matter, then it can seem as if the Islamists are the only opposition to injustice and imperialism. That’s simply not the case, as the massive lawyers movement, as well as these many local class struggles, prove.

What should the U.S. antiwar movement say about Obama’s new surge in Afghanistan and his expansion of the war into Pakistan?

Saadia Toor: In liberal circles, Iraq is looked upon as the bad war, of course. That was Obama’s main argument. He was never an antiwar candidate. He was against the war in Iraq to some extent as a distraction.

But now, after his election victory, we’ve seen the split in the antiwar movement between people who opposed the entire “war on terror” and those who just opposed the Iraq war. So there is no effective antiwar movement to counter Obama’s escalation of the war into Afghanistan and Pakistan.

In this context, the American military is having a field day. It’s obvious for anyone to see that Obama has carried over the personnel, the ideologies and the policies of the Bush Administration.

The Obama administration is certainly trying to repackage essential continuity with the Bush administration’s policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan. But there isn’t a whole lot of finessing that needs to be done to sell this to the American public, since there is a whole lot of agreement that the Afghan war is the moral war, and that Pakistan is thought of as an untrustworthy and reluctant ally that is crawling with militants.

In this context, the antiwar movement must educate people about the true situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan. It must demand that the drone attacks stop, and that the U.S. get out of Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The rhetoric of the Obama administration is disingenuous; the concern is not about getting bin Laden if it ever was. They have had eight years to do this and haven’t succeeded. Their real ambitions have little to do with bin Laden, and are actually much larger.

As Pepe Escobar, Tom Hayden and Gareth Porter have argued, the U.S. is planning a 50-year engagement, a new Great Game for control of the region — and that is not something that the U.S. antiwar movement should endorse. The antiwar movement should not let Obama continue this imperial policy of aggression into Afghanistan, Pakistan and potentially lots of other states.

Two new studies released by the World Health Organization (WHO) and Oxfam reveal the devastating toll on Iraq’s surviving population in the wake of the U.S. war and occupation.

The U.S. has besieged Iraq, a country of some 27 million people, for the last 20 years. The 1991 Gulf War killed hundreds of thousands. Sanctions imposed on Saddam Hussein’s regime led to the deaths of over 1 million people. The 2003 invasion and occupation caused another 1 million deaths, drove in excess of 4 million from their homes and caused a civil war that tore apart the society. In sum, the U.S. has killed or displaced nearly a quarter of Iraq’s population.

According to the WHO’s Iraqi Mental Health Study, a survey of 4,332 Iraqis over the age of 18, about 17 percent of Iraqis admitted to suffering from some kind of mental disorder, the most common being depression, phobias, post-traumatic stress disorder and anxiety.

The Associated Press described this horrific number as a “surprisingly low rate of mental disorders.” But as Dr. Saleh Al Hassnawi, who was involved in the study, stated, “In Iraq, there is considerable stigma attached to having a mental illness.” So while already high, the real numbers are no doubt greater.

Of course, given the horrors of the last 30 years of U.S. attacks on Iraq, Iraqis have developed nearly super-human coping mechanisms to survive. As Dr. Abdul al-Monaf al-Jadiry remarked, “Gradually, people seem to have become accustomed to enduring hard experiences.”

Of those who reported suffering mental illnesses, 70 percent considered committing suicide. If extrapolated to the entire population, over 3 million Iraqis have considered suicide as a result of their disorders.

Given the combination of social stigma and the destruction of the Iraqi health care system, only 2 percent of those suffering mental problems sought out treatment. Most hid their conditions, self-medicated with various drugs, or asked for Valium and sleeping pills from pharmacists.

The study released from Oxfam is even more devastating. A survey of 1,700 women from five of Iraq’s 18 provinces, it portrays the impact of the occupation on women since 2003. “Now that the overall security situation, although still very fragile, begins to stabilize,” Oxfam stated, “countless mothers, wives, widows and daughters of Iraq remain caught in the grip of a silent emergency.”

The scale of the crisis in Iraqi women’s lives is mind-boggling. Oxfam reported that 55 percent of the women they surveyed reported they had been the victims of violence since 2003. Researchers also found that 55 percent of women had been displaced or forced to abandon their homes.

Despite the media celebrations of growing security in Iraq, 40 percent of those surveyed stated that their security situation was worse in 2008 over 2007. Close to 60 percent of women said that security and safety remained their most pressing concern.

As result of displacement and violence, over a third of the respondents had now become the effective head of their households. There are an estimated 740,000 widows in Iraq, and the actual number could be far higher.

The U.S. attempt to dismantle the central government’s traditional role as the hub of the economy and principal provider of social services has devastated these women. Seventy-six percent of widows said they did not receive their husband’s pensions from the government. While 76 percent said that they relied government food rations, 45 percent reported receiving it intermittently. Thirty-three percent had received no humanitarian assistance since 2003, and a majority stated that their income was lower in 2008 than in 2007 and 2006.

Oxfam reported, “Beyond security, the overwhelming concern women voiced was extreme difficulty accessing basic services such as clean water, electricity and adequate shelter . . . Availability of essentials such as water, sanitation, and health care is far below national averages.”

A quarter of women stated that they did not have access to drinking water on a daily basis and nearly half declared that the water they get is not even potable. Nearly two-thirds reported that they had less than six hours of electricity each day.

Access to education for women and their children is, unsurprisingly, no better. Oxfam reported that, “a staggering 40 percent of mothers surveyed said that their children not attending school. This is not only because of economic hardship, discrimination against girls and insecurity; it is also a result of the destruction and deterioration of education facilities.”

While the media trumpets this horror as success, those who opposed the war and occupation must not fall under their siren song. The U.S. government has committed one of the great crimes against humanity in Iraq and owes its people an enormous debt. The antiwar movement must continue to demand the complete and immediate withdrawal of all occupying troops and we must compel the U.S. government to pay reparations to the people of Iraq so that they can rebuild their society.

Obama extended his promised time frame for withdrawing “combat troops” to 19 months. But even more telling is the aspect of Obama’s policy that remained vague during the campaign–plans for a “residual force” of up to 50,000 soldiers to remain in Iraq through at least 2011.

This isn’t a plan to end the occupation of Iraq, but to continue it in another form.

“You cannot leave combat troops in a foreign country to conduct combat operations and call it the end of the war,” said Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio. “You can’t be in and out at the same time. We must bring a conclusion to this sorry chapter in American history.”

Obama’s policy on Iraq has been shaped by a new consensus that has developed among the U.S. political establishment over the past year and a half. It holds that the surge of U.S. troops ordered by George W. Bush in 2007 stabilized the country, the war is now winding down, and the U.S. occupation will soon come to an end.

This is all an illusion — and a new book by Thomas Ricks, the Washington Post journalist and author of Fiasco, about the disaster of the U.S. invasion and the early years of the occupation, shows why, even if Ricks himself doesn’t draw all those conclusions.

Rick’s book, The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008, is the most thoroughgoing analysis of the surge. It affirms much of the establishment consensus, but concludes that the surge failed to achieve its main goal of political reconciliation in Iraq. Instead, Ricks argues, it created conditions that will likely lead to more civil war and regional instability, which can only be contained by an unending occupation.

Ricks isn’t an antiwar author. He is the conduit for the opinions of dissident generals and establishment figures that didn’t oppose the invasion of Iraq or the Bush administration’s war aims, but instead advocated different strategies and tactics for victory in Iraq.

Ricks’ first book Fiasco argued that the U.S. deployed too few troops to occupy Iraq and created an incompetent occupation bureaucracy that failed to rebuild the country. This was the source of the resistance to the U.S. occupiers — which was swelled by the indiscriminate and brutal repression of the population.

Indeed, by 2006, the U.S. faced a massive, though splintered, Sunni and Shia resistance; a raging civil war; and the economic breakdown of the country.

In The Gamble, Ricks recounts how Gen. David Petraeus, retired Gen. Jack Keane, Gen. Raymond Odierno and a coterie of establishment critics like Stephen Biddle, Eliot Cohen and Robert Kaplan collaborated in developing a new strategy to solve this crisis.

This group argued for the U.S. to abandon its strategy of holing up on massive bases like Camp Victory and of trying to offload security to an unreliable Iraqi military. Instead, they agitated for the U.S. to adopt a counter-insurgency strategy.

According to Petraeus and Co., the U.S. needed to increase overall troop numbers, move its forces out of the large bases and deploy them in smaller ones throughout the cities of Iraq. There, they would be assigned to protect the people, separate combatants in the civil war and win over Iraqis to inform on the sectarian forces, especially al-Qaeda in Iraq.

The counter-insurgency advocates developed the idea of a “surge” of 30,000 troops to provide security in Baghdad and contain the spread of the civil war to the rest of the country.

In Ricks’ account, they had to overcome resistance not only within the Bush administration and the military establishment, including Joints Chief of Staff Chair Gen. Peter Pace and Centcom chief Adm. William Fallon, but also among the Democratic Party and the Iraq Study Group, which advocated a drawdown of troops, regional diplomacy and greater responsibility for managing the crisis handed off to the Iraqi government.

The Republicans’ defeat in the 2006 elections gave the dissidents the leverage they needed. They were able to win the Bush administration, which was jettisoning many of the original architects and managers of the war, including Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Bush appointed the dissidents Petraeus and Odierno as first and second in command of Iraq and gave them the green light to implement the surge. The Democrats who won control of Congress barely resisted the surge strategy, casting a symbolic, nonbinding vote against it, but turning about-face and voting to fund it.

Ricks claims the new strategy was a success. The U.S. forces were able retake much of Baghdad. According to Ricks, they protected residents from the sectarian militias, brought down the level of violence, and thereby stabilized the country’s capital.

Ricks is by no means a Pollyanna about the new situation in Iraq. He admits that violence in Iraq merely returned to the already intolerable level of 2005, which still makes the country one of the most dangerous places on earth.

But he does note that U.S., in effect, had abandoned its fantastical aims of transforming Iraq and the whole Middle East region. As he writes:

“This new sobriety was the intellectual context for the reduction in the goals of the war . . . Instead, the quietly restated U.S. goal was to achieve a modicum of stability, to keep Iraq together and to prevent the war from metastasizing into a regional bloodbath. That meant finding what one official called “a tolerable level of violence” and learning to live with it.”

While Ricks admits that other factors were involved, he contends that Petraeus, the new counter-insurgency strategy and the U.S. military were the primary factors for success, as measured by these more modest goals.

But Ricks’ case doesn’t hold up to closer inspection. In reality, Iraqi political developments, not the U.S. surge, caused the drop in violence.

The only reason that the U.S. surge could have any effect in Iraq at all was because the Iraqi resistance had no political leadership capable of uniting mass Arab opposition to the occupation and wining over Kurds with the promise of defending their right to national self-determination. If the resistance had developed such political leadership, Petraeus’ vaunted strategy of counter-insurgency would have failed, as it did in Algeria, Vietnam and many other colonized countries.

Even so, the real reasons for the relative stabilization of Iraq have nothing to do with the surge.

What were they? First, the civil war between Shia and Sunnis had played itself out before the U.S. deployed its new troops. U.S. forces merely stabilized a Baghdad that had been effectively carved up into ethnically partitioned neighborhoods — the U.S. went so far as to erect concrete barriers to separate Sunnis and Shia.

Second, faced with defeat in the civil war, the Sunni tribal leadership in Anbar Province and Baghdad called off its resistance to the occupation and cut a deal with the U.S., agreeing to turn their guns on al-Qaeda in Iraq, in return for money, training and weapons funneled through the so-called Awakening Councils.

Third, the main Shia resistance leader, Moktada al-Sadr, concluded his forces had no chance of victory in a direct confrontation with the Shia government and the U.S. occupation forces. Instead, he has opted to bide his time and wait for a decrease in U.S. forces.

Finally, contrary to U.S. allegations that Iran fueled the conflict in Iraq, the Shia-led Iranian government used its relationship with Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, as well as with Sadr, to stabilize Iraq. While Iran is happy to cause trouble for the U.S. in Iraq, it doesn’t want to see a conflict emerge that would threaten its goal of establishing a Shia-dominated regime as an ally.

Though Ricks wrongly lionizes the surge, he concludes that it failed to achieve its principal aim–political reconciliation between Shia, Sunnis and Kurds.

Ricks blames the various Iraqi factions for their failure to reach an accommodation. While there is no doubt that antagonism existed between Iraq’s three main communities — Shia, Sunnis and Kurds — the truth remains that there had been no civil war before the U.S. occupation. The U.S. divide-and-rule strategy in Iraq exacerbated the divisions, precipitated the civil war and has left the different sides armed to the teeth.

The U.S. built up a new Shia-dominated state, with Maliki as prime minister, backed by a reconstructed military and security apparatus that is predominantly Shia and hostile to the Sunni population. At the same time, the U.S. funded and armed the Sunni tribal leaders who oppose the Shia government. And, over the years, Washington fostered the development of an expansionist Kurdish autonomous area.

While Ricks wrongly blames the Iraqis for these conflicts, he is right when he predicts that the current stability is likely to be transitory. As he writes:

The surge, while making short-term gains, also may have carried long-term costs that will only become fully apparent when Obama is president.

The surge may have brought transitory success…but it has done so by stoking the three forces that have traditionally threatened the stability of Middle Eastern states: tribalism, warlordism, and sectarianism,” argued Steven Simon, a Council of Foreign Relations expert on the Middle East. If continued, he predicted, the U.S. support for tribes, local militias and other centrifugal forces will undermine central authority and lead to a divided dysfunctional state “that suffers from the same instability and violence as Yemen and Pakistan.

The only way that the U.S. can even remotely claim such a scenario as a success is to lower what it expects of the “new Iraq,” and hope for a central government not all that different from Saddam Hussein’s authoritarian regime. Ricks argues that this outcome is unlikely “to be something that American recognize as victory.” As he continues:

Instead, additional years of sacrifice promise to be made for markedly limited objectives. A senior intelligence officer in Iraq described the long term-goal American goal as “a stable Iraq that is united, at peace with its neighbors, and is able to police its internal affairs, so it isn’t a sanctuary for al Qaeda. Preferably a friend to U.S., but it doesn’t have to be.” He paused and pointedly noted that his list doesn’t include democracy or the observation of human rights.

And this, according to Ricks, is the best possible outcome. More likely, he says, would be a future of military coups; intensified civil war, not only between Shia and Sunni, but also between Arabs and Kurds over the oil-rich city of Kirkuk; and the spillover over of these conflicts into the rest of the region.

Thus, he argues that instead of the war and occupation winding down, the U.S. planners aim to manage these crises with a tens of thousands of troops for as long as 20 years. He quotes one aide to Petraeus admitting, “I don’t think it does end. We are going to be in this centrally located Arab state for a long time. There will be some U.S. presence, and some relationship with the Iraqis for decades.”

However reluctantly, Ricks sees the U.S. occupation as necessary to manage this unending crisis. He concludes his book:

No matter how the U.S. war in Iraq ends, it appears that today we may only be halfway through it . . . In other words, the events for which the Iraq war will be remembered probably have not yet happened.

The antiwar movement should heed this conclusion and not be lulled into passivity by the current consensus that the war is over.

We should reaffirm our anti-imperialist analysis that the U.S. war was never about fighting terrorism, liberating the Iraqi people from Saddam Hussein or bringing about political reconciliation.

The U.S. went to war in Iraq to assert its domination over an oil-rich country and region; remake the Middle East on its terms; conduct regime changes against other powers like Iran and Syria; and block any international competitor, especially China and Russia, from developing independent relationships with the the countries of the region.

We must continue to demand that the U.S. immediately withdraw all occupying forces — not just “combat troops, but Obama’s misnamed “residual” ones — and pay reparations to the Iraqi people so they can repair their own society, however they see fit.

Police carried out preemptive raids and detentions designed to deny people their constitutional rights to freedom of speech and assembly. And in one incident, police also targeted guests and participants in the Veterans for Peace/Iraq Veterans Against the War conventions held at the Ramada Mall of America outside the Twin Cities.

Near the conclusion of the conference, police tailed a carload of convention participants returning to the Ramada. “Police followed us for about 15 or so miles all the way to the Ramada and then detained us in our car for close to half an hour,” explained VFP associate member Ashley Smith. “They jumped out of their vehicle, surrounded our car, and demanded our ID’s for no justifiable reason.”

The police eventually released the carload without charges, Smith stated. “The police seemed to be itching for a confrontation, perhaps because the delegation from Alaska, home to Republican Vice Presidential Candidate Sarah Palin, was staying in the very same hotel.”

After this incident, the Ramada night manager targeted another convention participant who had been a guest at the hotel throughout the weekend. Kevin James, a black hip hop activist and performer widely known as Son of Nun, had been watching the police harassment of activists outside the hotel. When he re-entered the Ramada lobby, the manager singled him out, demanding what room he was in and asking for his ID. The manager got hotel security and at least eight police officers to detain James for close to half an hour.

James stated that the police searched him and looked on the verge of arresting him when he refused to present his ID. It was evident to James and others who witnessed the hotel’s treatment of him that this harassment could only be an example of racial profiling since many white guests who were also present were not asked for ID. After other activists came to his defense and began organizing both a publicity campaign and legal defense, the officers let James go free.

“I’ve stayed at plenty of hotels in my life,” he noted, “and I’ve never been racially profiled by the staff in any of them. This incident is especially disgusting since I was a guest of two groups who’d patronized the hotel in the days before, VFP and IVAW, who are fighting to end the racist war and occupation of Iraq. The fact that I was subject to the culture of police repression around the RNC seems to be par for the course here in the Twin Cities.”

VFP and IVAW convention organizers expressed grave concern over these events. “One of the things that’s particularly upsetting is that these actions are intimidating people who want to participate in changing our society for the better,” said Michael McPhearson, VFP’s executive director. “Isn’t that the right that I and other veterans served to protect? Now our government is suppressing that vital democratic right.”

IVAW executive director Kelly Dougherty also expressed dismay at the harassment by police. “The way that Kevin and other close allies of IVAW were harassed and singled out after the convention was disturbing and very IVAW,” said Dougherty.

“The suspicion and mistrust that Kevin experienced is a symptom climate of fear that is being stoked by our government and causing us to turn against one another instead of working together for change.”

I have been asked to lay out the political rationale for a mass action strategy for the antiwar movement. To do so we must begin with the horror the United States has brought to the Middle East. The United States has nearly destroyed Iraq. Its invasion and occupation of a country of 27 million people has led to the deaths of well over 1 million Iraqis, the expulsion of 5 million refugees and internally displaced civilians, and the near complete wreckage of the economy. Nearly 70 percent of the population is unemployed. The invasion and occupation outranks the worst horrors of European imperialism as one of the great war crimes and examples of state terror. The U.S. assault on Sadr City and Basra shows that with each passing day they commit atrocity upon atrocity.

But as Max Elbaum argued on his panel last night, far from fulfilling Bush’s neoconservative fantasies of U.S. domination over the Middle East, the invasion has, in the words of General William Odom, led to the “greatest strategic disaster” in U.S. imperial history. Why? Because the Iraqi people resisted the occupation and put a stop to the other regime changes from Syria to Iran the United States had planned.

The U.S. occupation is a failure. It is one of three failed wars Bush has conducted — Iraq, Afghanistan, and his proxy war carried through by Israel against Lebanon. The cost of these disastrous wars has led Bush into enormous deficit spending that has exacerbated the economic crisis the United States and world have entered.

Like some cursed mortal from ancient Greece, Bush suffers from a reverse Midas touch as everything he touches turns to lead. His popularity has plummeted from nearly 90 percent in the aftermath of 9/11 to now 28 percent. The only politicians who are less popular are in Congress; their approval rating hovers at about 22 percent. The majority of Americans have turned against the war and the Bush agenda.

Yet neither Bush nor the Democrats have a plan for an immediate withdrawal from Iraq. Last night Stephen Zunes and Max Elbaum laid out the reasons. The war was not about weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, liberation, or democracy. These were all smokescreens for the real ambitions of U.S. Empire in the Middle East. In truth, the Iraq war was part of a long-term and bipartisan plan to lock in U.S. dominance over a unipolar world order. Their goal in the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq was to secure control over the key areas of the world energy system in the Middle East and new energy sources in Central Asia.

By dominating these regions the United States aimed to lock in their advantage against rising energy-dependent competitors, especially China. This imperial ambition explains their tenacity in the face of the utter failure of their invasions and their overwhelming lack of popular support.

Complicity of Democrats and Corporate Media

Too often this imperialism is passed off as a product of Bush and the Neocons. In reality, the Democrats voted for these wars and continue to vote for the funding even going so far in the most recent proposed bill to give Bush billions more than he requested. They also opposed immediate withdrawal in favor of redeployment that would leave thousands of “anti-terrorist” troops in Iraq, effectively extending the occupation in the guise of ending it. And neither Hilary Clinton nor Barack Obama could guarantee that they would even be able to implement this plan by the end of their first term.

Even worse, the Democrats have often positioned themselves to the right of Bush in the campaign against their next target in their battle for Mideast imperial dominance — Iran. Hilary Clinton just last week promised to “obliterate Iran” if it attacked Israel. She targeted not just the government but also the entire nation, a threat that can only be called a genocidal. While not sharing Clinton’s Bushite bluster, Obama has stated, “launching some missile strikes into Iran is not the optimal position for us to be in” given the ongoing war in Iraq. “On the other hand, having a radical Muslim theocracy in possession of nuclear weapons is worse.” Obama has also promised that military strikes on Pakistan should not be ruled out if “violent Islamic extremists” were to “take over.” And both have called for an increase of U.S. troops in occupied Afghanistan, the occupation they view as good and right.

Far from dissenting with this bipartisan imperial project of the so-called War on Terror, the corporate media has loyally parroted it. The corporate media has in fact been exposed as, for all intents and purposes, state-controlled in a manner reminiscent of Stalin’s Izvestia. As the New York Times reported, the Pentagon handpicked the military experts that the major media outlets used for “informed” opinion in support of the war on Iraq. One of the experts went so far as to say that he felt like a Pentagon puppet carrying their line right onto the pages and screens of the corporate media.

Antiwar Public Opinion

Despite this imperial unanimity of both corporate parties and their media, the U.S. public has overwhelmingly turned against the war and is increasingly moving to the left on most issues. Over 67 percent want to end the war. Sixty percent of troops wanted to be out of Iraq by 2007. Twenty-three percent of Americans want an immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops. And as the Pew Research Center documents, workers have moved dramatically to the left, the most left-wing they have been since the last upsurge in the early 1970s. These facts conclusively dash the myth of a “right-wing America” that many even on the Left believe.

The media, however, squelches these opinions as well as the developing forces of the antiwar movement. For example, the corporate media conducted a virtual blackout of Iraq Veterans Against the War’s (IVAW) amazing Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan. In reality the corporate media, we must recognize, is owned by the same corporate power that led the war charge into Iraq.

Far from expressing this overwhelming antiwar sentiment, the presidential candidates either oppose it or attempt to co-opt it. John “McCentury” McCain threatens to keep U.S. forces in Iraq for 100 years if that’s what it takes to “win.”

Now Obama and Clinton, in order to get elected, have had to posture as antiwar. But, in truth, both oppose immediate withdrawal. Both are for retaining “anti-terrorist” forces of thousands after “withdrawal.” Both are hawks on Iran. Both are unflinching advocates of Israel’s occupation of Palestine. Both are for increased intervention in Afghanistan. They are in fact presenting themselves to the real power brokers, the American ruling class, as competent managers of the empire. While they may have this or that tactical difference with Bush, they share his commitment to U.S. dominion in the world system. They boast that they can do this more effectively.

We already have tested the Democrats and found them wanting. The American public swept them into power in Congress in 2006 with the expectation that they would end the war or cut the funding. Instead they have continued to fund the war and offered only verbal opposition to Bush.

Antiwar Strategy

As a result, an enormous gap has opened up between, on the one hand, the people and, on the other, the corporate politicians and the corporate media. The question we confront in this situation is what strategy the antiwar movement should pursue to win our demand for immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq.

The mass action strategy remains the only viable means to win. It will take the mass mobilization of workers, soldiers, and students in solidarity with the resistance of occupied people. Stephen Zunes was right last night when he invoked the mass struggles that it took to end the Vietnam War — rebellion of the troops; campus strikes; mass demonstrations; and large-scale civil disobedience. Given the stakes for U.S. imperialism in the Middle East, it will take an even more militant mass movement to drive the United States out of the region.

Now the mass action strategy is very different from the dominant liberal strategy in the antiwar movement and the common sense of the vast majority of people opposed to the war. Co-chair of United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ), Judith LeBlanc describes this strategy as “creating a peace block in Congress.” The argument is essentially that yes, we should build the movement, yes, we should call demonstrations — but all with an aim of electing Democrats who are thought to be the vehicles, the means, of ending the war.

Inevitably then, the Democrats, who have been pro-war, begin to shape the demands and protests of the antiwar movement. Demands and issues and speakers that might offend the so-called “peace block” get dropped. Protests that might step on the toes of the Democrats don’t get called. During the elections the movement gets funneled into the election in the vain hope that the Democrats will do what they say they will not do — bring an immediate end to the war.

The main antiwar coalition, UFPJ, has thus demobilized the movement. UFPJ opposed united mass demonstrations on the fifth anniversary of the war, saying they would never work with the other antiwar coalition, ANSWER. Nearly every email I get from UFPJ is about phoning congress, voter registration and education, or lobbying.

The combination of the pull of the election on mass antiwar sentiment and UFPJ’s liberal strategy of orienting on Democrats has precipitated a crisis in the antiwar movement. At a national level, it is really the weakest it has been since the beginning of the Iraq war. It is in near collapse. Even at a local level there are real weaknesses in antiwar organizations on campuses, in cities, and at workplaces. Thus there is an enormous gap between consciousness and the organized movement.

We have to be honest and sober about that. The last thing we need is drunken driving in the struggle. But we also cannot be bearers of doom and gloom or give up on building a mass movement. We have to nurture the small, local coalitions in workplaces, among soldiers, and on campuses. These are the first shoots of a future mass movement.

We can organize excellent local antiwar actions and educational events. We have the powerful examples of Winter Soldier and the very successful regional conferences of the Campus Antiwar Network (CAN) as well as conferences like the one we are holding this weekend. We have to build on these new foundations in every way possible at the local level. At the same time we have to develop a strategy that can forge a stronger national movement.

Avoidable Traps

In developing a new strategy there are some traps we should avoid that will prevent the development of a new mass movement. Some have wrongly argued that movement tactics like mass demonstrations are a thing of the past and no longer work. They argue we need savvy media strategies instead. Now I am in favor of using the media as best we can, but as the New York Times article demonstrated, the corporate media is the voice box of the Pentagon and the White House. It is occupied territory. The very corporate backers of the war and the two mainstream parties own the media and will be on the whole unfriendly to the movement we must build. This should come as no surprise; they have been hostile to every progressive social movement in history, at home or abroad.

Others argue that instead of mass actions we need small direct actions. Now I’m in favor of direct action and civil disobedience as a tactic in certain circumstances. After all, mass and illegal factory occupations helped build the trade unions in the 1930s. Similar tactics of mass civil disobedience like the Montgomery bus boycott and the wave of sit-ins built the civil rights movement. But direct actions that are small, secret and not oriented on winning over a sympathetic mass audience can and will backfire. Moral witness can make us feel good but fail to galvanize mass struggle.

Mass Action Alternative

These are not strategies but tactics. Our alternative strategy to UFPJ’s must be independent mass action. Our movement must be independent because the electoral cycle must not set our agenda. That does not mean excluding forces and people who are going to vote for the Democrats. Yet we must be clear that our movement’s goal is not electing Democrats but the immediate withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Iraq. The Democrats and the election cycle cannot shape our demands or actions. We must fight for our demands no matter who’s in office, and we must fight for our demands right through the election cycle.

Our organizing must aim for mass collective action. Why? Because that is the lesson of history. Change always comes from below through the mass mobilization of the exploited and oppressed. As Howard Zinn has said, “the really critical thing isn’t who is sitting in the White House, but who is sitting in.” Mass organizing is what built the unions, won civil rights, ended the war in Vietnam, and won abortion rights. Mass independent, collective struggle won everything we cherish today. As the great black abolitionist Frederick Douglass said, “Without struggle, there is no progress.”

That strategy in turn shapes our tactics. Our strategy of mass collective action must include a wide variety of tactics. We must be incredibly flexible in tactics, always with a mind of leading the activist minority to win over the sympathetic majority. So we should organize mass, legal demonstrations in some circumstance. In others, mass direct actions like those that shut down the World Trade Organization meetings in Seattle in 1999 are vital.

But I want to defend the tactic of demonstrations in particular since many have grown disillusioned with their utility. Demonstrations help to build the base of the movement. In the process of organizing for demonstrations, coalitions grow in size and sense of purpose. The preparation offers an opportunity for coalitions to educate new layers of activists in the politics of the struggle. On the demonstrations themselves, activists new and old feel the power of their forces. And after effective mobilizations, activists can reach out to include wider layers of new activists, thereby building larger local organization. In and of themselves, demonstrations are not adequate. But they are a decisive component for building organization for even more militant struggle.

Lessons of the Vietnam Era

To really understand the kind of mass struggle we must aim to build, we should draw on the lessons of the movement against the war in Vietnam. It was not the president or Congress that ended that war. Instead it was the dynamic interaction of three militant mass struggles. The mass civilian antiwar movement staged mass marches, mass civil disobedience, and a wave of campus strikes that shut down the universities and colleges of the United States.

On top of that, the U.S. troops revolted against the war. As David Cortright’s Soldiers in Revolt describes, civilian activists in collaboration with vets and GIs set up coffeehouses where soldiers could organize their antiwar movement and build Vietnam Veterans Against the War. In Vietnam itself, the U.S. troops refused to fight, organizing “search and avoid” missions and even threatening their officers with fragmentation grenades to prevent officers from sending them into combat. This GI rebellion essentially paralyzed the American military in Vietnam.

Finally and most importantly, the Vietnamese people themselves forged the National Liberation Front that fought for their own emancipation. They proved especially after the Tet Offensive in 1968 that the United States and its puppet government had no support in the Vietnam and that the people were committed to driving the U.S. out of Southeast Asia. This three-dimensional, militant movement won the liberation of Vietnam.

These three interrelated movements should also give us ideas for devising the strategy of our movement. To be clear, the movement of the 1960s is not a blueprint for today and we cannot simply reproduce it. We must find our own way. But we can draw from its lessons.

In reality, we will need an even strong mass movement this time. Why? Because the geostrategic stakes for the United States in Iraq are far higher than they were in Vietnam. Former Federal Reserve Board Chair Alan Greenspan finally admitted the “unfortunate truth”: It really is all about the region’s oil. Whoever controls that oil controls the world economy. And the U.S. has no intention of leaving Iraq or the Middle East as a whole. They want to lock in a unipolar world order against rising global powers like China as well as eliminate regional challengers like Iran and Venezuela. We thus have an even bigger fight on our hands than activists in the 1960s.

The Movement Today

We are, however, far from the kind of mass movement we will need to win Iraq’s liberation. As I have said, the national movement is in sorry shape. While there are inspiring flashes of local struggle and organization, it too must be built or re-built. This is challenged by the election year, but not in a fashion that much of the Left thinks. The pull of the election is obvious. Yet at the same time, the election is raising hope — expectations for change and a host of reforms from ending the war to addressing social inequality, racism, and sexism. I do not have hope in Obama to really address these realities, but I have hope in the people who have hopes in Obama.

We have to be patient and determined through the election year and seize opportunities at the local level. It is simply not true that we cannot do anything during the elections. For example, just last week in Boston over 600 students came to hear Noam Chomsky lecture against U.S. imperialism. There are countless other example of hopeful small actions and educational events that embody the future of the movement.

Our key task is thus to rebuild the base of the movement. We have to initiate local organizations through educational events, actions, and all sorts of events from movie screenings to local Winter Soldier hearings. While I support the upcoming National Assembly in Cleveland, I do not think we are in a position to launch a new national formation. Cleveland will be a chance for activists to share ideas and initiate collaboration, but our key emphasis has to be on building the infrastructure of the movement.

We need to organize and build antiwar organization among students, workers, soldiers, and military families. We need to build existing and new chapters of the CAN, U.S. Labor Against the War, IVAW, and Military Families Speak Out. We must build the base for a future mass movement that will likely emerge in the aftermath of the presidential elections. As in the struggle against the Vietnam War, those organizations will be necessary to mobilize the social power to compel our rulers to get out of Iraq.

Demands for the Movement

A key part of rebuilding the movement is figuring out the demands around which we must organize the coming struggle. I agree with Max Elbaum, who argued last night that demands are a tactical question. We must figure out which demands are necessary for the movement and will galvanize popular opposition and action. In doing so, we should avoid the trap of single-issue dogmatism on the one hand and on the other ANSWER’s endless laundry list of demands. Neither is a guide to building the movement.

Our central organizing demand must be the immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq. But we should have important subsidiary demands that are necessary for preparing the movement to confront U.S. war plans. Thus, we must demand “no war on Iran,” since they are clearly preparing for a future confrontation with Tehran.

We also must put forth a position against anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia as that clearly is the legitimating ideology of the war and is responsible for horrific oppression of Arabs and Muslims. If we hope to build bridges of solidarity with the peoples of the Middle East and if we hope to bring Arabs and Muslims into the U.S. movement, this is a necessary demand.

Finally, we must put forward class demands such as “money for jobs and education, not for war and occupation.” This can broaden the movement among sympathetic workers who see the United States wasting $3 trillion on war and occupation while New Orleans gets washed out to sea, their homes are foreclosed, and their jobs are lost amidst the recession.

I also think it is important for the left wing of the movement to argue for including opposition to occupation of Afghanistan even though we may lose it. We should be clear that the entire War on Terror is united in the minds of our rulers from Afghanistan to Iraq and we ought to oppose it across the board — especially since the Democrats are campaigning for a surge in Afghanistan. Moreover, we should argue for speakers on Palestine to show how the Israeli occupation is a crucial component of U.S. dominion over the Middle East.

Flashes of the Future

While we have many challenges today, we can see the first shoots of the new movement developing in smaller or larger scale around us today. The Winter Soldier hearings captivated the entire antiwar movement and projected a new and hopeful GI and vet resistance. The ILWU (International Longshore and Warehouse Union) strike on May 1 represents a huge development where workers in an historic union are striking against the war to shut down all the ports of the West Coast, one of the busiest areas of trade in the world. We will need such class power to liberate Iraq from U.S. occupation. Also, new student activists in conferences and actions this spring displayed exciting new stirrings of youth resistance. These are early signs of forces stirring that have the social power to shut down the U.S. war machine through mass militant protest.

Through the election year we must be patient but also persistent and aggressive to cultivate each new shoot of resistance. Whoever wins this election — and I think the Democrats are likely to sweep every level of government — will have raised both people’s expectation for an end to the Bush regime and expectation for real change. However, they will preside over an economic crisis, two failing occupations, and deepening social inequalities inside the United States.

Today we must seize every opportunity to educate, organize, and act locally to establish vehicles to mobilize the growing sentiment for change; we must do so with the determination to provide an alternative means for winning change when the Democrats either fail to deliver or deliver inadequate solutions to the various crises we will confront. We do not know the timing of when people will become frustrated with the Democrats’ refusal to deliver what we want, when they will look for our alternative. No one has a crystal ball, but we must organize the bases of a future antiwar movement prepared to galvanize sentiment and lead a mass and militant resistance to the U.S. occupation of Iraq.

Bush celebrated the siege of Basra as “a defining moment in the history of a free Iraq” that would bring “America closer to a key strategic victory in the war against the extremists and radicals.” Just as with previous proclamations like “Mission Accomplished,” this new “defining moment” turned out to be precisely the opposite of what the U.S. and its puppet Iraqi government intended. Sadr withstood the attack, and it took Iran, the U.S. archenemy in the Middle East, to save the Iraqi government by brokering a cease-fire.

At the very moment General Petraeus, Ambassador Crocker, and Republican presidential candidate John “one hundred years of war” McCain were hailing the success of the surge before Congress, the assault heightened political and military conflicts between and among Iraq’s three main communities—Shia, Sunnis, and Kurds.

The U.S. precipitates intra-Shia civil war

Contrary to U.S. propaganda that the Maliki government organized the assault on its own, the U.S. played a key role in its design and execution. “No significant Iraqi military action,” argues analyst Gareth Porter, “can be planned without a range of military support functions being undertaken by the U.S. command…. Furthermore, the embedded role of the U.S. Military Transition Teams makes it impossible that any Iraqi military operation could be planned without their full involvement.”

The U.S. and the Maliki government opted to attack Sadr in Basra to secure their control over Basra’s oil fields and the port and to eliminate the Sadrists as competitors in the October provincial elections—with an eye toward the neoliberal reconstruction of the oil industry and wider economy.

The Sadrists’ parliamentary faction had supported the Maliki government and had ministers in his government. But the Sadrists, who are Iraqi nationalists with deep roots among the Shia poor, split from the Shia United Iraqi Alliance (UIA) controlled by Maliki’s Dawa Party and Abdel-Azziz al-Hakim’s Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI), whose base is the Shia elite.

Dawa and ISCI opted to support U.S. plans for an extended occupation, the new oil law (not yet passed) that would open up Iraq’s oil industry to foreign and private investment, and the soft partition of Iraq with a weak central government. In response, the Sadrists withdrew from the government and denounced the Dawa/ISCI government as collaborators who were failing to address the demands of the Iraqi masses for independence, a strong central government and improved living conditions. Dawa and ISCI were therefore itching for a fight with Sadr.

ISCI and Dawa had a further interest in proving to the U.S. that they were willing and capable of liquidating the Sadrists. Ibrahim Sumydai, a former Iraqi intelligence officer and analyst, argues, “The Shiite parties saw the growing cooperation between the Sunnis and the Americans and started to fear maybe the Americans will turn and give power back to the Sunnis. The other Shiite parties wanted to prove that they are still America’s closest allies in Iraq, so they attacked the Madhi Army.”

The U.S. and Maliki foolishly underestimated the Sadrists’ strength, unity, and popular support and thought they were in a position to eliminate his forces. They wrongly thought that Sadr’s declaration of a cease-fire in August 2007 and its renewal in February 2008 were signs of weakness. Moreover, they mistakenly believe that they had split Sadr from his “criminal and extremist militias,” including those in Basra.

In fact, Sadr used the cease-fire to consolidate, unify, and strengthen the Madhi Army with the help of Iranian weapons and training. As one of his commanders told the Canadian Press, “We are better organized, have better weapons, command centers, and easy access to logistical and financial support.” Moreover, Maliki and the U.S. underestimated the widespread support Sadr gained by breaking with the UIA and agitating against the occupation and poverty.

After the British were driven from Basra, a three-cornered fight developed among the ISCI with its Badr Brigades, Fadhila with its militia the Oil Protection Force, and Sadr’s Madhi Army for control of the city and its crucial oil fields. While ISCI and Fadhila won political control of the city and Shia south in the 2005 provincial elections, the Madhi Army controls the city itself through its forces and social services.

Over 20 percent of Iraq’s oil is pumped out of Basra’s wells and 90 percent of its oil exports are sent out of Basra’s port. It is therefore a major strategic prize for the U.S. and the Iraqi government. Right before the attack, Vice President Cheney visited Iraq to push for the new oil law. Moreover, as the siege of Basra occurred, Chevron, Exxon, and British Petroleum were negotiating with the Iraqi Oil Ministry for contracts on the Rumaila oil field near Basra.

The U.S. decision to hold provincial elections in October was the final precipitant of the battle of Basra. They pursued these elections to appease demands for political inclusion from the Sunni Awakening Councils—the militias of former resistance fighters recruited by the U.S. to fight al-Qaeda—whose forces boycotted the last provincial election and therefore are not represented in their own strongholds. However, the U.S. along with ISCI and Dawa feared that Sadrists, who also boycotted the 2005 provincial elections, would sweep the Shia south as well as Baghdad.

The victors of the provincial elections will decide on the proposal from ISCI and Dawa and their Kurdish collaborators for the soft-partitioning of Iraq into ethnic and sectarian super-provinces—Kurdish in the North, Sunni in Anbar, and Shia in the South—with a weak central government. However, the Sadrists as well as the Sunnis favor a strong central government, oppose the oil law, and demand a timetable for U.S. withdrawal. So, if the Sadrists were allowed to sweep the October elections, they would likely win control of the Shia areas, challenging the U.S. occupation and its neoliberal economic plans.

The U.S., ISCI, and Dawa were therefore determined to eliminate Sadr and his Mahdi forces as their principle political opposition before the October elections. As an Iraqi member of parliament stated, “Maliki’s goal is to wipe out the Sadrists before elections because he knows his bloc will lose to them.”

The siege of Basra

Driven by their own illusions and interests, the U.S. and Maliki launched Operation Knights’ Assault with 30,000 soldiers and policemen, most of them ISCI’s Badr Brigade militias in uniform. Maliki declared, “we entered this battle with determination and we will continue to the end. No retreat. No talks. No negotiations.”

The operation turned into a catastrophe for Maliki and the United States. The Mahdi Army fought their forces to a standstill. Over 1,500 government forces refused to fight and turned over their weapons and vehicles to Sadr’s militias. Sadr’s forces struck back with protests in cities throughout the Shia south and even launched attacks on U.S. soldiers and the Green Zone, causing the highest number of U.S. casualties since the start of the surge.

Sadr appeared on Al Jazeera to rally Arab nationalists and all Muslims to expel the U.S. occupiers from Iraq. He declared that “the occupation is trying to divide Sunnis and Shias…. I love the Sunnis. I am Shia, but we are all Iraqis. Iraq is still under occupation and the United States’ popularity is reducing every day, every minute. I call through Al Jazeera, for the departure of the occupying troops from Iraq as soon as possible.”

“The Iraqi people,” he continued, “are suffering just as if they were still under Saddam. The small Satan left and the great Satan came. God willing, the occupation forces will be driven out as happened in Vietnam.”

The Iranian connection

Desperate for a solution, ISCI and Dawa representatives sought out the Iranian government to negotiate a cease-fire and escape from humiliating defeat. “Adding to Bush’s utter humiliation,” the Nation’s Robert Dreyfuss writes, “the Iranian negotiated truce was mediated by the commander of the so-called Quds Force of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, Brigadier General Qassem Suleimani…. The Quds Force, you will recall, was only last year designated as a ‘terrorist’ entity by the U.S. government. So President Bush’s ‘defining moment’ is this: the head of an Iranian ‘terrorist’ force has brokered a deal between the two leading Shiite parties in Iraq, Sadr’s movement and ISCI.”

Therefore, Sadr and Iran emerged from the battle of Basra as clear victors. Sensing his advantage, Sadr called for a million-strong demonstration demanding an end to the occupation. Neither the U.S. nor the Maliki government could tolerate the Sadrist threat in the run up to the fall elections. They immediately laid siege to Mahdi strongholds in Sadr City, the teeming Shia slum of 2 million. U.S. air and ground support was substantial. Militias likely associated with ISCI killed Sadr’s second in command in the holy city of Najaf. Faced with a reign of terror and streams of refugees fleeing Sadr City, Sadr called off his demonstration.

The U.S. and Maliki won over Sunni and Kurdish representatives to join them in introducing a bill that would require that all political parties disarm their militias or be excluded from the October elections. Of course, the law, if passed, would no doubt be implemented in a completely discriminatory fashion against Sadr’s Mahdi Army and not against ISCI with its Badr Brigades disguised in the police and army, nor the Kurdish parties with their fighters in the Peshmerga. There’s no telling what ISCI and Dawa will do with the various Sunni parties and their connections to the Awakening Councils.

Failure of the surge

The assault on Basra has ended the false calm of the surge and sparked both increasing resistance to the occupation as well as ethnic and sectarian conflict between and among Iraq’s three great communities.

As Vali Nasr, author of The Shi’a Revival, told Time magazine, “The ceasefire and the surge allowed everyone to regroup and rearm. There is still the Shia–Sunni conflict. There is still the Sadr-Badr conflict. The surge and the ceasefire merely kept them apart, but there has never been a real political settlement. No, the big battle for Iraq hasn’t been fought yet. The future of Iraq has not been determined.”

The U.S. and the Maliki government have opened up a period of intra-Shia war against the Sadrists. They will attempt to co-opt Sadr’s moderate wing and crush his militias. But, as the Arab Times reports, “Sadr says he will not enter any political process that would allow U.S. forces to remain in Iraq. Sadr also denounces U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates as a terrorist and says he will never work with Iraq’s occupiers.” Moreover, despite his overriding strategy of avoiding self-defeating military conflicts with the U.S., Sadr has threatened to call off his cease-fire with the occupation forces and government. As Juan Cole argues, “if the Sadrists are really excluded from civil politics, and they are the majority in the South, then you will have just pushed a majority of Iraqis out of the political process and potentially into civil violence.”

Bush’s decision to subcontract the fight against al-Qaeda to the Sunni tribal leaders has created the conditions for an even more explosive conflict between them and the Shia. The U.S. pays $16 million a month for the services of the Sunni Awakening Councils of 90,000 former resistance fighters. The councils’ tribal leaders are salafists, hard-line fundamentalists who despise not only the U.S., but also the Shia government, which refused to integrate their forces into the Iraq Army; indeed, they consider the Shia to be infidels.

The Guardian newspaper reported in March that there were several strikes among Awakening Council members over inadequate pay and frustration over doing life-threatening dirty work for the U.S. against al-Qaeda. If the U.S. calls off the elections because of the chaos their siege of Basra caused, the tribal leaders could easily renew their guerrilla resistance to the occupation, and their attacks on the Shia.

The ISCI/Dawa plan for soft partition has exacerbated conflicts among Arab Shia and Sunnis and the Kurdish parties. The Sadrists and Sunni forces are both for a strong central government, while disagreeing about its sectarian balance. By contrast, the Kurdish parties want control over the oil rich areas of Kirkuk and Mosul as part of an autonomous Kurdish region. To do so they would have to ethnically cleanse the Arab population as well as the Turkmen minority, something that would provoke Turkey to intervene against Kurdish nationalists and in defense of the Turkmen. With the approach of the provincial elections, all of these sectarian and ethnic conflicts will grow more intense.

To impose their rule over the catastrophe they have wrought, the U.S. has frozen any withdrawals until July to maintain its force at about 140,000. It has also ordered the British troops near Basra to remain in the country. The U.S. and Britain are clearly preparing for further and even more violent assaults on the people of Iraq.

Threatening Iran

Desperate for a new justification for the failing occupation, the Bush administration, General Petraeus, and Ambassador Crocker have turned to blaming Iran for all their problems in Iraq. Both Crocker and Petraeus trumpeted the Awakening Councils’ success against al-Qaeda in Iraq, but they argued that the real threat is Iran, which they claim is fighting a proxy war through so-called special groups inside the Mahdi Army.

This is a complete distortion of reality. The Iraqi opposition to the occupation is home grown, particularly Sadr and Mahdi Army, who have long been critical of Iran and the parties it has controlled—the U.S. allies ISCI and Dawa. Moreover, while Iran has cultivated allies among all the Shia factions, it has played a restraining role. Gareth Porter reports, “Maliki and Supreme Council chief Abdul Aziz al-Hakim publicly dissociated themselves from the U.S. ‘proxy war’ line, insisting that Iran was restraining Sadr rather than egging him on.”

Nevertheless, the Bush administration has increased its threats against Iran. No doubt with U.S. approval, Israel in early April staged one of the largest military exercises in its history with the expressed purpose of preparing a response to attacks from Iran in the event of a U.S. war on Iran.

After the hearings in Washington, the U.S. sent Petraeus, Crocker, and Rice to all the Sunni states in the region to rally them against Iran. As the Washington Post reports, “Maliki’s willingness to go after fellow Shiites attracted support from other political groups in Iraq, including Sunnis and Kurds that have long been suspicious of his sectarian leanings. It also gave Washington a talking point to use with the Sunni Arab governments in the region that have shunned him. ‘It’s an opportunity to make him look better inside Iraq and to make a better argument to the Arabs,’ an official said.”

However much Cheney fantasizes from his bunker about another war, the U.S. is in no position to attack Iran. The U.S. military high command clearly opposes it for fear of breaking its already crisis-ridden military. Admiral William Fallon already resigned over Bush’s decision to deploy the Navy to the Persian Gulf.

Instead of a prelude to war, the Bush administration’s threatening posture and rhetoric aims to bully Iran while conducting behind the scenes negotiations about its nuclear program and its policy in Iraq. George Bush announced his intent “to solve these issues diplomatically. You can’t solve these problems unilaterally. You’re going to need a multilateral forum.” But Bush’s threatening posture could easily tip the volatile situation into military confrontation between the U.S. or Israel and Iran.

The Democrats offer no real solution to the Bush administration’s disastrous policy in Iraq or toward Iran. Despite their antiwar rhetoric, they merely want to rehabilitate U.S. imperialism in the Middle East through better diplomacy, phased withdrawal, and increased military intervention in Afghanistan. More often than not the Democrats join the Bush administration in bashing the Iranian boogeyman. When the rubber hits the road, the Democrats won’t even oppose Bush’s war plans; yet again they have promised to pass the $108 billion emergency war-funding bill that Bush has submitted to Congress.

Resistance, civil war, and chaos

Sadr’s uprising against the U.S. and Iraqi government siege of Basra has certainly undermined the surge. But overall, neither Sadr nor the Iraqi resistance as a whole has produced a nationalist formation able to unite Sunni, Shia, and Kurds against the occupation.

Sunni salafists lead the bulk of the Sunni resistance as well as the Awakening Councils. Many collaborated with anti-Shia bigots in al-Qaeda in Iraq. They envision reclaiming sectarian dominance in a new central government, thereby positioning themselves in opposition to the Shia majority and discounting legitimate Kurdish demands to self-determination.

Sadr has emerged as the paramount Arab Shia Iraqi nationalist. But as left-wing Iraqi exile Sami Ramadani argues,

Sadr’s previous tactics have been strongly criticized for being an obstacle to greater anti-occupation unity. These tactics included on-off participation in the government and the Sadrists’ presence in parliament (within the sect-based coalition list that won most of the seats in the January 2006 occupation-controlled elections). Though his supporter have withdrawn from the government and the sectarian coalition, their tactics have partly contributed to the sectarian climate which they constantly criticize and regard as the main obstacle to unity.

The Kurdish parties have collaborated with the U.S. invasion and occupation to secure their dreams of autonomy within a federated Iraq, a demand that puts them at odds with the Iraqi Arab majority.

Except for the heroic struggle of the Iraq oil workers in Basra and elsewhere for union rights and against the occupation, there is little non-sectarian and multiethnic organization capable of galvanizing a truly nationalist movement that encompasses all the demands of the Shia, Sunnis, and Kurds.

Nevertheless, with each passing day, the U.S. occupation makes the situation in Iraq worse—killing its people, increasing sectarian and ethnic conflicts, undermining the economy, and destroying the infrastructure of its society through the unceasing violence provoked by the occupation. In such conditions, Iraqis will struggle to unite their masses and liberate their country.

Our task in the U.S. is to demand immediate withdrawal to free Iraq from colonial occupation and compel the U.S. to pay reparations to the Iraqi people so they can rebuild their society however they see fit.

The U.S. and the Iraqi government–chiefly, Maliki’s Dawa Party and his backers in the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI)–hoped to assert central government control over Basra’s oil fields and port, and block the Sadrists from winning in October’s provincial elections. Success would have ensured their ability to establish a federal structure in Iraq and implement a new oil law allowing U.S. multinationals to invest and develop Iraq’s oil industry.

The Sadrists foiled these plans by holding their ground in Basra. The government offensive sparked demonstrations across Shia Iraq, with Mahdi forces launching mortar attacks on U.S. positions inside the Green Zone in Baghdad. After a week of fighting, Iran stepped in to broker a ceasefire.

Thus, Iran and Sadr emerged as the victors. Sensing his advantage, Sadr has called for a million-strong demonstration against the occupation on April 9, the anniversary of Saddam Hussein’s fall in 2003.

Meanwhile, the U.S. and the Iraqi government are promising to crack down on “illegal militias” and have continued their attack on Sadr strongholds in Sadr City and elsewhere.

How did the Sadrist movement arise, and what are the sources of its conflict with other Shia forces, such as the clergy-dominated Dawa party and ISCI? A new book by journalist and author Patrick Cockburn–called Muqtada: Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shia Revival, and the Struggle for Iraq–provides answers.

The Shia Islamist currents represented by Sadr on the one hand and the ruling Shia parites on the other were a minority until the last few decades. Iraqi politics was dominated by various secular forces–nationalism, Baath pan-Arabism and Communism.

As Cockburn writes, “Few paid much attention to the radical potential of Shi’ism before the Iranian revolution of 1978-79; the rise of Hezbollah in Lebanon following the Israeli invasion of 1982; and the Shia uprising in Iraq in 1991, followed by their gradual takeover of power after the U.S. invasion of 2003.”

The Sadrs, one of the great families of the Shia clerical establishment, played a key role in forging Shia Islamism in Iraq in the run-up to the secular nationalist revolution in 1958. Moktada’s father-in-law, Mohammed Baqir al-Sadr, along with a layer of radical young clerics, founded the Dawa Party in 1957.

Mixing nationalist aims along with a religious commitment to defend Islam and its institutions from the secular threat, the Dawa Party aimed to build an alternative to the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP), which recruited heavily among impoverished Shia workers.

Dawa was the source of all the major currents of Islamism in Iraq today, from the ISCI to the Sadrists. Baqir was forced out of the party in 1960, but he continued his political activism in opposition to the Baath Party, which eventually seized power in a coup in 1968. With U.S. backing, the Baathists mounted a relentless campaign of persecution against all its political opponents, from the ICP to Kurdish parties to Dawa and Baqir’s Shia followers.

Baqir and Dawa’s conflict with the Baathists came to a head in 1979 after the Iranian Revolution, when the Shia clergy led by Ayatollah Khomeini seized power. Baqir became an open advocate of Islamic revolution in Iraq.

Faced with a Shia revolution in neighboring Iran and within Iraq itself, Saddam Hussein seized control of the Baath Party and the Iraqi government. The new regime banned the Dawa party, making membership in it punishable by death; it arrested and executed Baqir; and it launched a disastrous eight-year war against Iran.

During the war, another great clerical family, the Hakims, called a meeting of Shia Islamists in Iran in 1982 to form the Supreme Council of Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI, recently changed to ISCI). The Iranian state backed SCIRI and built up its Badr Brigades as a force it hoped to install in Baghdad after defeating Saddam. The Badr Brigades even fought on Iran’s side in the war against Iraq. As a result, Dawa, which had Iraqi nationalist leanings, distanced itself from SCIRI.

Cockburn argues that SCIRI “swiftly acquired a dubious reputation in Iraq for doing the Iranians’ dirty work. ‘They tortured Iraqi prisoners during the war,’ says one professor at Najaf University. ‘The Sunni and the Shia twice as badly because they used to ask them: Why did you join Saddam’s army if you are a Shia?’ In the coming years, SCIRI never quite shook the reputation, in the minds of many Iraqis, of being stooges of Iran who tortured their fellow countrymen.”

Inside Iraq, the clerical establishment advocated a return to quietism, rejection of the Sadrists and Khomeini, and accommodation to Saddam’s dictatorship. This strategy didn’t resonate with the Shia masses, however. In the wake of Saddam’s defeat in his next disastrous war, the 1991 Gulf War, Shia troops revolted in southern Iraq, setting off a regional rebellion to accompany a Kurdish uprising in the North.

The U.S. government under George Bush Sr. feared the development of another Islamic revolution and therefore refused to aid the Shia. Iran, SCIRI and the Badr brigades also balked at aiding the rebellion, out of fear of a hopeless confrontation with the U.S. Left with a free hand, Saddam’s forces massacred 150,000 Shia. The regime also attacked the Kurds in the North, driving millions into Turkey and Iran. But after an international outcry, the U.S. imposed a no-fly zone and cultivated the Kurdish parties as their key ally in Iraq.

Despite the genocidal U.S.-UN sanctions imposed on Iraq, Saddam was able consolidate his police state around Sunnis from his tribe, and carried on the oppression of both Shia and Kurds. He attempted to co-opt Baqir al-Sadr’s cousin and Moktada’s father, Mohammed Sadiq al-Sadr, to provide the regime with a base among Shia.

Sadiq used the space to develop his own distinctive brand of Islamism and never expressed support for the regime. In contrast to Baqir’s orientation on political struggle, Sadiq pioneered a new Islamism focused on waging a cultural revolution and advocacy for economic grievances of the Shia poor, suffering under the sanctions.

Sadiq built a mass base in the city that would eventually be named after him, Sadr City in Baghdad. In his Friday sermons, he denounced U.S. imperialism, Israel, the devil, the sins of the West and economic injustice. He also advocated Sunni and Shia unity, thereby posing an Islamist alternative to the more moderate clergy and the exiled parties.

SCIRI and the other exiles abroad denounced Sadiq as an agent of Saddam and looked down on his appeal to the Shia poor. Their base was among the elite–the petty bourgeoisie and other expatriate ruling classes. Moreover, Sadiq infuriated Iran by proclaiming himself supreme leader of the Shia in Iraq. The Iranian clergy closed down his offices in Iran and expelled his representatives.

Increasingly, however, Sadiq came into conflict with Saddam, who feared, rightly, that the Sadrist movement would be a threat to the regime. Saddam moved to suppress the movement, murdering Sadiq and two of his four sons in February 1999.

The Shia masses rose up in the al-Sadr Intifada, and the regime again carried out mass collective punishment against them. Once again, Iran, SCIRI and the Badr brigades refused to lift a finger to support the uprising. Outraged at this betrayal, the Sadrists chanted in their meetings, “Long live al-Sadr! The al-Hakim family are traitors.”

In the run-up to the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, SCIRI, Dawa and prominent secular Shia collaborated with the U.S. in the hopes of establishing themselves in the new Iraqi government.

Sadiq’s son, Moktada al-Sadr, pursued a different course. He survived the assassination of his father and two brothers, went underground and maintained a skeletal structure of his father’s movement. He held SCIRI, the Dawa Party and the clergy in contempt for collaborating with U.S. imperialism or Iran, or standing passively by.

Once the U.S. invaded, Moktada emerged from the underground, quickly established control of Sadr City and reached out to the Shia south. He rebuilt the Sadrist mass movement among the Shia poor that advocated Shia-Sunni unity in opposition to the occupation.

Almost immediately, the schisms between the Shia factions emerged. SCIRI, Dawa and other Shia formations participated in the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council (IGC). In contrast, Moktada denounced the IGC as a tool of the occupation and set up the Madhi Army to provide security amid the post-occupation chaos and to resist the occupation.

The U.S. immediately targeted Moktada. They accused him of murdering the cleric Abdul Majid al-Khoei, repeatedly battled the Mahdi fighters and finally shut down the Sadrists’ newspaper. In response, while the Sunni resistance rose up in Falluja, Sadr’s followers rose up in Sadr City, across the South and finally in the holy city of Najaf.

For a brief moment, a united Arab resistance against the occupation seemed about to emerge. But the U.S. struck a deal with the leading Shia cleric, Grand Ayatollah al-Sistani, which enabled Moktada to survive, but also broke the possibility of a joint resistance.

Sistani compelled all the Shia parties to campaign for the series of elections that eventually established the Iraqi government, something that alienated the Sunnis who increasingly feared a Shia majority. The Sunnis also contributed to the breakdown of Arab nationalism by refusing to purge al-Qaeda forces who were carrying out increasing attacks on Shia.

Sadr shifted from military opposition to the U.S. toward politics and used the Mahdi Army to impose his puritanical religious edicts and self-defense against al-Qaeda and U.S. attacks.

The Shia parties divided the government among themselves, taking over its various institutions as bases to compete with one another, and against the Sunnis and Kurds. ISCI controlled the Security Ministry, filling its forces with the Badr Brigades. The Sadrists gained control of the Health Ministry and sent the Madhi Army into the police.

Unlike other Shia parties, however, Moktada maintained his opposition to the U.S. occupation, denouncing the Americans for failing to meet the needs of the Shia poor. As a result, as the U.S. failed to reconstruct the society or provide basic security, Moktada’s popularity soared among the Shia poor–while ISCI and Dawa lost support because they were tainted by open collaboration with the occupiers.

When a full-scale civil war broke out between Sunnis and Shia after the bombing of al-Askari Mosque in February 2006, the Madhi Army defied Moktada’s public call for Shia-Sunni unity and joined in an ethnic-cleansing campaign of atrocities against Sunnis. Sadr’s forces won the Battle of Baghdad, asserting control over half the city and 80 percent of Shia neighborhoods.

Faced with a failing occupation, the Bush administration opted for the so-called “surge.” This involved making peace with the Sunni tribes, arming them to attack al-Qaeda and setting their sites on Sadr’s Madhi Army in Baghdad and the Shia south.

The U.S. pressured Maliki to confront the Madhi Army. Maliki had been the compromise candidate for prime minister supported by the Sadrists, but now wholly dependent on the U.S., he broke with Sadr and formed an alliance with ISCI that took was based on orders from the U.S.

To avoid an unwinnable confrontation with the U.S., Moktada declared a ceasefire. He went underground and implemented a plan to regain control over the loose structure of the Mahdi Army through religious indoctrination and military training.

The U.S., ISCI and Dawa, in alliance with the Kurdish parties, went ahead with their plans for the soft partition of Iraq into a federated state, with Kurdish, Sunni and Shia super-provinces. The U.S. also pushed for a new oil law to open Iraq’s industry to foreign investment.

The Sadrists agitated for a strong central state, opposition to the occupation and defense of the national oil industry. They still appealed for Sunni-Shia unity for a new Iraq–notably leaving the Kurds out of their vision. But given the Mahdi Army’s pivotal role in the ethnic cleansing of Baghdad, the Sadrists are unlikely to forge a genuine nationalist resistance.

Meanwhile, Iran has cultivated relations with all the Shia parties–not only their favored sons in ISCI, but also the Sadrists–in the hopes of positive relations with whoever wins the intra-Shia battle.

The U.S. and Iraqi governments’ decision to attack Sadr has destabilized the country and forced into the open the conflicts among the Shia, and between them and the Sunnis and Kurds. This foolish gambit disrupted the temporary peace that coincided with the U.S. surge–and tipped Iraq toward further chaos.