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.

Democrats like presidential frontrunner Hilary Clinton have conceded and even celebrated the success of the surge.

In order to present the surge as a success, the media have focused almost exclusively on the decline in Iraqi and U.S. casualties over the past few months. The fact that these numbers are comparable to 2005 figures—a period when no one was touting any great successes in Iraq—is perhaps the best indicator of how shallow the feel-good talk is. The fact remains that in Iraq 1.2 million people have died, 5 million have been driven from their homes, the central state is practically non-functioning, and the economy is in complete shambles.

2007: The Deadliest Year

Bush’s surge sent in 30,000 troops over the last year to bring the U.S. troop presence up to about 160,000, concentrated in Baghdad and Anbar province. The administration planned to defeat al-Qaeda, contain the civil war between the militias, and give space for political reconciliation between the Kurdish, Arab Sunni, and Arab Shia elites.

The surge initially caused a massive spike in violence, and in spite of the recent declines—which are likely to be only temporary—the overall picture is one of increased casualties. Lauren Frayer, a freelance journalist based in Jerusalem, reports that 2007 has been “the deadliest year for U.S. troops despite the recent downturn, according to an Associated Press count. At least 852 American military personnel have died in Iraq so far this year—the highest annual toll since the war began in March 2003.”

A Pew Research Center poll of American reporters who have worked in Iraq found that “nearly 90 percent of U.S. journalists say much of Baghdad is still too dangerous to visit.”

Iraqis see conditions getting worse, not better. An ABC/BBC poll found that in 2005, two-thirds of Iraqis said life was getting better, but by August 2007, that figure had declined to one-third of the population. Instead of supporting the surge and occupation, 47 percent want immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces, and an overwhelming majority wants withdrawal within a year. Nearly two-thirds of Iraqis support attacks on U.S. soldiers.

Real Causes of Recent Drop in Violence

Only in the last few months have attacks on U.S. troops, the Iraqi Army, and civilians dropped. But, as Juan Cole concludes, “the ‘good news’ of a lull in violence is relative at best. In fact, Iraq’s overall death rate makes it among the worst civil conflicts in the world.”

Bush’s troop surge, moreover, is not even the cause of this recent decline. Rather, the drop seems to be the result of a shift in U.S. tactics combined with unforeseen changes on the ground in Iraq. The American forces have increasingly used air strikes instead of ground troops, thereby minimizing U.S. casualties. Pepe Escobar reports that the U.S. launched “four times more air strikes on Iraqis in 2007—the year of Bush’s ‘surge’—than in the whole of 2006.”

Similarly, instead of exposing U.S. troops to battle in Anbar, Bush opted to buy off tribal leaders of the resistance and arm their militias to fight al-Qaeda. Hala Jaber reports in the Sunday Times, “U.S.-backed Sunni militias have spread eastward from Anbar across Baghdad. They already number 77,000, known collectively as ‘concerned local citizens.’ This is more than the Shiite Mahdi Army and nearly half the number in the Iraqi army.”

The U.S. troops also did not have to weigh into battle against Sadr’s forces. Instead of risking open warfare with a buttressed U.S. troop presence, Sadr declared a cease-fire.

The recent decline in Iraqi civilian deaths followed a frenzy of sectarian killing earlier in 2007 that ethnically cleansed Baghdad and its neighborhoods. As a result, it has gone from a city that was 65 percent Sunni to 75 percent Shia. Charles Crain writes in Time magazine, “many neighborhoods have completed their brutal sectarian segregation, leaving fewer easy targets for intimidation and murder.” Juan Cole notes that:

“the relative reduction in violence is artificial and probably cannot endure. Blast walls enclose once posh Baghdad districts like Adhamiya, but although they keep out death squads they also keep out the customers that shopkeepers depend on. When a Baghdad pet market was bombed recently, it was revealed that the U.S. military had banned vehicles in its vicinity for some time, but allowed cars to drive there again just a few days before the bombing. Vehicle bans are effective, but not practical in the medium or long term. When they end, what will prevent the bombs from returning?”

Refugees Returning to Peace and Security?

Perhaps the biggest scam of the surge propaganda is the claim that refugees are returning to Iraq because of the improved peace and security. The Iraqi government now claims 46,300 refugees returned in October at the rate of 1,600 a day.

However, as Damien Cave writes in the New York Times, “Under intense pressure to show results after months of political stalemate, the government has continued to publicize figures that exaggerate the movement back to Iraq and Iraqis’ confidence that the current lull in violence can be sustained.”

The tiny minority of the 5 million driven from their homes is not returning willingly. Instead, the countries that have received most of the Iraqis—Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan—have all in various ways made it so difficult to enter or stay in their countries that most of the refugees are being forced back into Iraq as a result of persecution and poverty.

The New York Times reports that a UN survey of Iraqi refugees in Syria found “46 percent were leaving because they could not afford to stay; 25 percent said they fell victim to a stricter Syrian visa policy; and only 14 percent said they were returning because they had heard about improved security.”

Political Failure of the Surge

The surge’s political goal of reconciliation between the Sunni, Shia, and Kurdish elites has also failed. The U.S. hoped to force them to agree on a central government, repeal the ban on Baath Party members’ participation in politics, hold regional elections, and pass the infamous oil law to open Iraq’s key industry to U.S. corporations.

All of these initiatives have stalled. The various Iraqi elites are completely at odds with one another on most of these issues and have mutually incompatible plans for a future Iraq. The Kurds want a separate nation. The Shia want to either control the central state on their terms or establish a majority Shia region. The Sunnis want a return to a central government so they are not cut out of oil revenues that are concentrated in the Kurdish and Shia regions.

The only point that the Arab elites agree on is opposition to the U.S. occupation and its aims. As Pepe Escobar writes, “As far as the key Sunni and Shiite factions are concerned they all agree on the basics. Iraq won’t be occupied. Iraq won’t have permanent U.S. military bases. Iraq won’t give up its oil wealth. And Iraq won’t be a toothless pro-Israel puppet regime.” The Kurds, by contrast, are still willing allies of the U.S. occupation.

Time Bomb of Resistance and Civil War

U.S. policies enacted during the surge have set in motion dynamics that will spur greater resistance. U.S. troops now back Sunni tribal leaders and militias that recently had been fighting the U.S. in Anbar province; these newly armed and trained forces see themselves as temporary allies with the U.S. against al-Qaeda, but there is nothing that says they won’t resume at a future date active armed opposition to the occupation. The U.S. also supports the Shia parties that oppose the occupation. And the Sadrists are merely biding their time until the U.S. withdraws the 30,000 surge troops to assert their more effectively organized forces.

As one army officer stated, “the tactic of paying your enemy not to fight is not a new one, but it has limitations. If the plan is to leave Iraq, it’s a good solution. If the plan is to stay in perpetuity, and that seems to be the case with the Bush administration, history says it’s dangerous. Eventually, the underlying hatred for the foreign presence overwhelms greed.”

The surge has also set the stage for an even more destructive civil war. Because the U.S. has increasingly allied itself with Sunni forces and used them to pressure Shia parties to pass pro-Sunni legislation, such as ending the ban on ex-Baathists serving in government, they have further deepened the schisms between the Arab sects that could produce greater sectarian violence. Even worse, the U.S. has armed the Sunni resistance in Anbar to the teeth, making it more capable of taking on the Shia militias and Shia-dominated government that they despise. Moreover, if the surrounding countries expel greater numbers of Iraqis, the returning refugees will only further spark sectarian tensions. Most cannot return to their homes because families of other sects now occupy them. The sectarian forces will likely use their demands as a rallying point for a renewed civil war.

The civil war is also spreading to the previously stable Kurdish region. The Kurdish parties are trying to retake control of Kirkuk, one of the key centers of oil production, in order to establish the economic foundations of their autonomous region. This has brought them into conflict with not only the Iraqi Arabs but also U.S. ally Turkey which fears that the strengthened Kurdish region will inspire their own Kurdish population’s nationalist aspirations.

Surge triumphalism is merely the latest justification for the American occupation of Iraq. With bipartisan agreement, the U.S. has proceeded with the construction of five mega-bases, one hundred smaller ones, and its massive Baghdad embassy. From these redoubts they plan to rule Iraq as a neocolony and use it as a permanent base from which to police the region.

This gap shouldn’t be so surprising. George Bush, leading Democrats and the media all predict catastrophe after an immediate withdrawal. “If we were to leave before the job is done, chaos would ensue, innocent people would lose their life, extremists would be emboldened,” Bush declared. “The countries of the Middle East would be endangered, and that would cause America to be endangered, as well.”

Neocons Robert Kagan and William Kristol challenged advocates of withdrawal, asking, “How would they respond to the eruption of full-blown civil war in Iraq and the massive ethnic cleansing it would produce? How would they respond to the intervention of Iraq’s neighbors, including Iran, Syria and Turkey?

“And most important, what would they propose to do if, as a result of our withdrawal and the collapse of Iraq, al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups managed to establish safe haven from which to launch attacks against the United States and it allies.”

In fact, with each one of the original justifications for the Iraq war now in tatters, predictions of a disaster to come if the U.S. leaves have become the principle justification for continuing the occupation.

Far from dissenting, Democratic Party leaders say much the same about Iraq. At a recent debate, Hillary Clinton, Barak Obama and John Edwards all refused to promise that U.S. troops would be out of Iraq by the end of their first term–all, apparently, because of the ominous dangers of withdrawal.

Some of their justifications for continued occupation are just plain bizarre.

Remember, for example, that there was no al-Qaeda in Iraq until after the U.S. occupation began. Iraq didn’t have a sectarian civil war between its people until the U.S. pitted Kurds, Shia and Sunni against one another to maintain its grip on the country.

And the U.S. has done much, much more to destabilize the region. It went to war in Afghanistan and Iraq. It endorsed Israel’s war against Hezbollah in Lebanon. It backs Israel’s continued occupation of Palestine. And it is rallying the region’s Sunni states for a possible war on Iran.

Just as they lied to get support for the war in the first place, the leaders of the U.S. political and military establishment are lying to rally support for a continued occupation.

What are the facts about the situation in Iraq?

To listen to U.S. officials tell it, you would think that al-Qaeda is the main element of the Iraqi resistance to the U.S. occupation–and if the U.S. were to withdraw, al-Qaeda would establish a Sunni caliphate in Iraq and threaten the region and beyond. “Leaving Iraq now,” Bush warns, would “allow the terrorists to establish a safe haven in Iraq to replace the one they lost in Afghanistan…People aren’t just going to be content with driving America out of Iraq. Al-Qaeda wants to hurt us here.”

This couldn’t be more wrong. Al-Qaeda is a minority of the resistance. Some U.S. generals estimate it only has some 500 fighters. Most Sunni and all Shia resistance organizations have repeatedly denounced al-Qaeda.

As antiwar writers Raed Jarrar and Joshua Holland put it, “Al-Qaeda is universally detested by large majorities of Iraqis of all ethnic and sectarian backgrounds because of its fundamentalist interpretation of religious law and efforts to set up a separate Sunnis state. Its only support–and it obviously does enjoy some support–is based solely on its opposition to the deeply unpopular U.S.-led occupation of Iraq.”

A BBC poll of Iraqis confirms this picture. Almost half said they approved of al-Qaeda’s attacks on coalition troops, but only one in 100 support its fundamentalist and separatist agenda.

Qasim Al-Jumali, a former member of Falluja’s city council, argues that in an independent Iraq, support for al-Qaeda would evaporate. “If the U.S. was to pull out from Iraq and Iraqis have a national government instead of the puppet one now, Iraqis with their government and tribal leaders would quickly eliminate al-Qaeda from all Iraq,” he said.

The claim that al-Qaeda will use Iraq as a base to harm Americans is even more far-fetched. “Many people worry that once a large number of suicide terrorists have acted, it is impossible to wind it down,” Robert Pape, the author of a book on suicide bombers, said in an interview with the American Conservative. “The history of the last 20 years, however, shows the opposite. Once occupying forces withdraw from the homeland territory of the terrorists, they often stop–and often on a dime.”

The best way to stop terrorism is remove the causes of it–most of all, the U.S. government’s occupations, bases and imperial adventures throughout the Middle East.

The claim that Iraq will descend into an all-out civil war is equally wrong. It relies on a racist myth that Iraqis have always been divided by ancient hatreds, and only a U.S. presence can contain and repress them.

While it would be wrong to say that there is no history of Sunnis oppressing Shia or Kurds in Iraq, there is a strong history of Iraqi nationalism and working-class solidarity that overcame these divisions.

In fact, the U.S. exploited the conflicts to maintain its rule. As Robert Dreyfuss writes in the Nation magazine:

The Catch-22 of the American occupation is this: Iraqi nationalism is the only political force capable of uniting Sunni and Shiite Arabs and thus putting an end to the sectarian civil war, but for the past four years, the United State has systematically worked to suppress nationalism.

Instead, beginning with Paul Bremer’s Coalition Provisional Authority in 2003, the United States deliberately apportioned political posts using an ethnic- and sectarian-based formula. Since then, U.S. occupation authorities favored separatists…[who want] a separate Shiite enclave in the south, and the Kurdistan Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, which are angling for an independent state in Iraq’s north.

The best chance for dampening the conflict that the U.S. has stoked would be for Iraq to be free of U.S. manipulations. Without the occupation, Shia and Sunnis would be able to come to an accord. Without the occupation, it is unlikely that the Kurds would push for the ethnic cleansing of Arabs from Kirkuk, or necessarily push for a separate Kurdish nation that would antagonize Turkey, Syria and Iran, which all have restive Kurdish minorities.

Even as it has successfully manipulated sectarian tensions, U.S. actions–from Congress’ recent resolution in favor of partitioning Iraq, to the oil law to deregulate and privatize Iraq’s oil industry, to the Hunt oil contract with the Kurdish regional government–are triggering a groundswell of Arab nationalist opposition to the occupation. This, not the continued U.S. presence, holds the hope of overcoming sectarian conflict in Iraq.

Finally, the claims about a U.S. withdrawal causing a wider war in the region reek of hypocrisy. The U.S. government’s stated aim in launching the Iraq invasion was to begin the process of rearranging the entire Middle East on new terms.

The U.S. and its ally Israel are the chief aggressors in the region. All the other states, including members of the Arab League, fear instability. The quickest way to ensure that the war does not spread is for the U.S. to get out of Iraq and the rest of the Middle East.

The same applies to U.S. complaints about “foreign powers” interfering in Iraq’s internal affairs. The U.S., after all, has more than 150,000 occupying troops in Iraq, along with at least as many mercenaries and private contractors. It is the “foreign power” interfering in Iraqi affairs.

A few Democrats and some liberal opponents of the war agree that the U.S. should get out of Iraq right away, but say that peacekeeping forces from the UN or other countries in the region need to be mobilized in the interests of stability.

For example, Democratic presidential contender Bill Richardson supports such a plan–but for pro-war reasons. He thinks that if the U.S. withdraws from Iraq, it can more successfully wage war against both al-Qaeda and Iran and strengthen American domination of the region.

It is important to remember that the UN isn’t a neutral force–that’s why the Iraqi resistance targeted it from early in the occupation. Why? Because the UN was used by the U.S. to administer sanctions that killed over a million people during the 1990s. The U.S. won UN approval for its 2003 invasion and continues to use it to advance its project in Iraq.

Other voices have called for peacekeeping forces from surrounding Muslim countries. United for Peace and Justice leader Leslie Cagan went so far as to advise “the world’s greatest superpower to encourage and cajole neighboring nations, including other countries of the Middle East, to a conference table to figure out how a multilateral solution could be worked out.”

In support of former Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern’s plan for a regional occupation, Johann Hari argues, “The U.S. then needs to convene a regional conference, at which it pledges to pay full-whack for an international stabilization force to police Iraq, manned exclusively by Muslim countries such as Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt and Jordan.”

The obvious problem is that all these countries are U.S. allies, and would only agree to a peacekeeping arrangement on U.S. terms. They are also dominated by Sunni Muslims, and their occupying forces would enflame Shia resentment, and thus encourage sectarian tensions.

Underneath all of these arguments lies an old imperialist idea: that colonized people are the “white man’s burden,” who need a stern overseer–and certainly aren’t capable of self-government.

This is why arguments in favor of a continued intervention of any sort, even when made by sincere opponents of the war, are wrong. The real issue is the right of Iraqis to determine their own future.

In a Project on International Policy that Iraqis what they thought would happen if the U.S. withdrew, “two-thirds said they thought the ‘day-to-day security of ordinary citizens’ would improve, a similar number predicted that ‘violent attacks’ would decrease, 61 percent said that ‘interethnic violence’ would drop, and 56 percent predicted that the number of ‘foreign fighters’ in Iraq would dwindle,” Jarrar and Holland reported.

“Iraqis by more than a two-to-one margin believe that a U.S. commitment to withdrawal will strengthen the Iraqi government and make a conciliation among ethnic and sectarian groups more likely.”

Only Iraqis–not the U.S., UN or any other power–can overcome the catastrophe that the U.S. has caused in Iraq. The damage will not be overdone overnight, but only Iraqis have the right to shape their society and overcome their divisions. The only role for the U.S. government is to pay unconditional reparations for the nightmare it has caused.

The US has now scattered the sands of Middle East with blood, blood of over one million Iraqis, blood of 3,800 American soldiers, and countless tears of heart-stricken parents, siblings and children from Baghdad to Syracuse. All this blood shed for empire, for oil, for the corporate powers that dominate our government, society and world.

The Bush Administration has turned Iraq into a living hell. They laid waste to the country, drove nearly 5 million Iraqis from their homes, divided Iraq’s people against one another to rule the country, and thereby triggered a civil war. And General Patraeus has the gall to declare the surge and the occupation a success.

This is not success but catastrophe and every day the US occupation continues it gets worse. But our rulers are not done; they are preparing new lies to justify a war on Iran. We are hearing the same litany of accusations; Iran’s government oppresses its people; it has weapons of mass destruction; it is a threat to peace and security; it is interfering with the internal affairs of Iraq; it is a terrorist regime.

The stench of hypocrisy in DC is overwhelming. The US not Iran is the main threat to peace and security in the Middle East. For god’s sake, the US is the country interfering with Iraq’s internal affairs through a military occupation. The US has a giant stockpile of nuclear weapons and is the only country ever to use them. The US has initiated war on Afghanistan, Iraq, and backed Israel’s war on Lebanon and occupation of Palestine. It has engaged in state terror throughout the region for imperial control of oil.

As Martin Luther King Jr. said during the Vietnam War, the US government “is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” Our task is not to change regimes in any other country. That is up for the people there to do. Instead our task is to build a mass movement to stop our own regime’s imperial wars and its attacks on us here at home.

And it is in our interests to do so. At the very same time the US government has pursued a war abroad, it has pursued one at home. It has shredded our civil liberties, scapegoated Arabs and Muslims, arrested and deported immigrant workers, and wasted billions that could have aided the black people of New Orleans after Katrina.

Imagine what we could do with the half a trillion dollars spent on the Iraq war. We could reconstruct our decaying cities in upstate New York, we could guarantee quality education, national healthcare, jobs, and we could save people from losing their houses to foreclosure.

But our so-called opposition party, the Democrats have failed to challenge the Bush administration’s war at home or abroad. Save for a handful, the Democrats voted for the war; they refuse to cut funding; they refuse to demand an immediate withdrawal of all US forces; they refuse even to impeach the war criminals in the Whitehouse

All of the main presidential candidates stated this week that they could not guarantee withdrawal of all troops by the end of their terms in 2013! And a large number of Democrats are actually backing Bush’s drive to war on Iran. Just this week, Democratic frontrunner Hilary Clinton voted to classify Iran’s military as a terrorist force, essentially giving Bush a blank check for war. Even worse, in an act of colonial hubris, they voted to escalate Bush’s divide and rule strategy by endorsing the partition of Iraq.

Nonetheless, a great awakening is taking place. Now a majority opposes the war in Iraq and want progressive social change at home. The question we face is how to transform that sentiment into an organized force to end the war.

First and foremost we have to stick to our demands—immediate withdrawal of all occupation forces from Iraq; no war on Iran; care of veterans when they come home; reparations for the Iraqi people; and money for our social needs.

Second we have to rely on ourselves. We should take inspiration from the 50,000 black people that marched to free the Jena 6 in Louisiana. That demonstration led directly to the release of Mychal Bell from jail. Such protest—from the union fights of the 1930s to the movements of the 1960s—is the only way we have ever won our demands. Only by our independent grassroots struggle can force the masters of war in Washington to listen and obey.

So we have to organize, agitate, and fight. We must organize chapters of the Campus Anti-War Network to build a mass student movement to end the war. We must organize chapters of US Labor Against the War in every workplace! We must organize more GI Coffeehouses like Watertown’s Different Drummer Cafe around military bases. And most importantly we must organize chapters of Iraq Veterans Against the War across the country to build a new GI resistance inside the military itself.

We are just at the beginning of the fight to stop the US war machine, but only our independent mass struggle will force our government out of Iraq and begin the battle for a new society that puts people before empire and profit. As the great black abolitionist Frederick Douglas declared, “Without struggle there is no progress!”

Just last week, our liar in chief, George Bush himself invoked Vietnam in an attempt to justify the occupation of Iraq. In an absurd revision of history, he claimed, “Whatever your position in that debate, one unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America’s withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like ‘boat people,’ ‘re-education camps,’ and ‘killing fields.’”

Bush’s lies know no end. The US intervention was the cause of the problems of Vietnam. It would never have provided a solution. Nowhere is that more clear than in Iraq today. Bush has created his own boat people, the 4 million Iraqi refugees. He has created his own re-education camps from Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib to the secret detention centers all around the world. He has created his own killing fields in Iraq, where over 1 million have lost their lives since the invasion. King, not Bush, was right; the US government is the greatest purveyor of violence in our world today.

The US pursues its so-called War on Terror today for oil, profit and empire in the Middle East. The entire US establishment endorses these aims. Save for a handful, the Democrats voted for the war; they refuse to cut funding; they refuse to demand an immediate withdrawal of all US forces and corporations; they refuse even to impeach the war criminals in the Whitehouse.

Our rulers have used the so-called war on terror as a cover to assert US dominion over the Middle East from Iraq to Afghanistan, Lebanon, Palestine and Iran. By controlling Middle-eastern oil, the US aims to dominate the world. They treat each war and occupation as part of their overall strategy. We in the anti-war movement must therefore oppose not just one of them, but all of them together. It is all one imperial war.

But we, the majority here in the US have not benefited from the horrors the US has wrought in the Middle East. As King said in his speech, the “bombs dropped abroad explode at home.” At the very same time the US government has pursued a war abroad, it has pursued one at home. It has shredded our civil liberties, scapegoated Arabs and Muslims, and wasted billions that could have aided the black people of New Orleans after Katrina. While the US has blown up bridges in Iraq, it has not even repaired them in Minneapolis.

A great awakening is taking place among the masses of Americans. Now a majority opposes the war in Iraq and want progressive social change at home. The question we face is how to transform that sentiment into a fighting force. We have to re-build an anti-war organization in our cities, on our campuses, in our workplaces, and inside the military itself. We have to turn sentiment into organization and social power to shut down the war machine.

But we cannot stop just with ending this war but must challenge the capitalist system that breeds war. As King said “for years I labored with the idea of reforming the existing institutions of society, a little change here, a little change there. Now I feel quite differently. I think you’ve got to have a reconstruction of the entire society, a revolution of values.”

We need an anti-war movement and a new American left that can fight for a new society based on international solidarity, human need, and the elevation of the downtrodden here and abroad as the masters of our own destinies. Another world is possible; another world is necessary, let’s begin to fight for it!

Since the new phase of its war on Iraq began with the March 2003 invasion, the U.S. has caused the death of at least 655,000 Iraqis — though that is only a part of the death toll from two Gulf Wars, and the decade and a half of strict economic sanctions between them.

Despite all the promises, the U.S. has wrecked rather than reconstructed Iraqi society, and from the beginning of its occupation, it stoked a civil war between Sunni and Shia Muslims that has now taken hold and is wreaking horrific damage.

In the 1970s, Iraq had the living standards of Greece. Today, it ranks below Burundi, as one of the poorest countries in the world.

How did the U.S. set Iraq on fire? A new book, The Occupation, by Ali Allawi, who held the posts of trade, defense and finance ministers in successive governments following the U.S. “handover” of power in Iraq, is the most detailed and thorough account yet of this imperial war crime.

The backdrop to the U.S. occupation of Iraq lies in the previous colonial era, when Iraq was ruled by Ottoman Empire in present-day Turkey, and then the British following the first World War.

Allawis’ book describes how these imperial overlords manipulated divisions between Iraq’s three main peoples — Sunnis, Shias and Kurds, using a Sunni ruling class to dominate the country’s Shia majority and Kurdish minority.

In 1958, a secular nationalist movement led by Gen. Abdel Kareem Qasim overthrew the British-installed monarchy, and formed a historic compromise with the Shia and Kurdish elite to form modern Iraq. But it preserved, however muted, the domination of Sunni over Shia and Kurd.

By this point, the U.S. had replaced Britain as the preeminent imperialist power in the region. It aimed above all else to maintain control over the Middle East’s oil and natural gas reserves in order to dominate the world system.

With the overthrow of the Shah of Iran in 1979, the U.S. turned to Saddam Hussein’s Baathist regime as a pivotal ally in the region. It supported Iraq in its 1980s war against Iran that killed over a million Iraqis and Iranians, and left Iraq’s economy in shambles.

In a foolish solution, Hussein invaded Kuwait to the south, to seize oil wells and money, and project Iraq’s military power into the rest of the Middle East. The U.S. now saw the regime it had once supported as a threat — one that, along with Iran, challenged its dominance of the Middle East.

The first Bush administration launched the 1991 Gulf War, driving Iraq out of Kuwait. The Gulf War, destroyed much of Iraq’s infrastructure and killed an estimated 300,000 people, but the Hussein regime didn’t fall. The U.S. feared that Iran might take advantage of a power vacuum, so it stood by as Hussein and the Baathists massacred hundreds of thousands of Shia and Kurds who rose up after the war.

The U.S. implemented a policy of dual containment of Iran and Iraq, enforced by new military bases that the U.S. established in Saudi Arabia. Bush and Clinton backed UN sanctions that strangled Iraq’s bombed-out economy, further destroyed the living standards of ordinary Iraqis and led to the death of over 1 million people.

The dual containment policy began to fail as both Iran and Iraq evaded sanctions. They made economic deals and alliances outside U.S. control with — among others — the European Union, Russia and China.

Under pressure from neoconservatives and Iraqi exiles like Ahmed Chalabi, Bill Clinton signed the Iraq Liberation Act in 1999, which shifted U.S. policy from containment to “regime change” — setting the U.S. on a road toward invasion.

Taking advantage of the September 11 attacks, neoconservatives in the Bush administration, like Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, argued that the U.S. should set out to overthrow Hussein, impose a free-market system that would be a model for the rest of the Middle East, and set the stage for the U.S. to achieve further regime changes in Iran and Syria.

With the help of expatriate Iraqis, the administration concocted intelligence–now completely discredited — to claim that the Hussein regime possessed weapons of mass destruction and had links with al-Qaeda, and therefore posed an imminent threat to the U.S. The bulk of the U.S. establishment — Republicans and Democrats alike — endorsed regime change and supported the invasion.

The U.S. easily won the war against a demolished Iraqi army. But it had no plan for the occupation and creation of a new Iraqi government.

“The entire process of managing the affairs of a country of over 25 million people that had been enmeshed in wars, sanctions and dictatorship was reduced to an office that had been established less than eight weeks before the invasion of the country,” writes Allawi.

Bush appointed Jay Garner to head up Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Affairs (ORHA) to reorganize Iraqi society. According to Britain’s special envoy, John Sawers, it was “an unbelievable mess.” He said the ORHA had “no leadership, no strategy, no coordination, no structure and [was] inaccessible to ordinary Iraqis.”

Thanks to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s plans for a “streamlined” military, the U.S. didn’t have enough troops on the ground to guarantee even the semblance of security. Across the country, the Baathist state fell apart, and desperate people looted everything, from state institutions to the National Museum and the school system — spawning lawless chaos and further wrecking weakened social institutions.

Recognizing the brewing crisis, the Bush administration fired Garner and brought in their new pro-consul, Paul Bremer — who with UN approval established the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) as the occupation government of Iraq.

Bremer ruled autocratically from his headquarters in Saddam’s former Republican Palace in Baghdad, inside what would become know as the Green Zone. His CPA issued unrealistic promises of reconstruction, imposed foolish orders and soon alienated almost every section of Iraqi society.

Bremer’s Order No. 1 was a program of de-Baathification to purge party members from the state and other institutions. The order, however, led not just to the removal of Baathist leaders, but also tens of thousands of teachers, doctors and other professionals who had joined the party of 2 million members merely to advance their careers.

Bremer then abolished the Iraqi Army with Order No. 2. Not only did this decree exacerbate the growing lawlessness in Iraq by gutting any effective security services, but it led fired Sunni officers and soldiers to join the developing resistance — bringing with them both military training and caches of armaments.

The order also thrust hundreds of thousands of Shia into unemployment, without much hope of a job in a desperately poor country.

Bremer also decreed free-market reforms to privatize state-owned businesses and open up Iraq to international investors. “The kind of raw and unfettered Darwinian capitalism that the more radical of the CPA advisers were trying to promote was totally unsuitable for Iraq in its current bankrupt state,” Allawi writes.

Nevertheless, Bremer promised that such reforms would lead to economic reconstruction and expansion. The CPA did serve up billions of dollars in no-bid contracts to well-connected U.S. corporations like Halliburton, Bechtel, KBR, Blackwater and the ironically named Custer-Battles.

But CPA contracts didn’t deliver promised reconstruction. On the contrary, unemployment skyrocketed to 70 percent, oil production plummeted, and electricity output dropped below pre-war levels. Social chaos flowed from the economy’s collapse.

Far from being greeted as liberators, the U.S. occupiers were soon confronted with a genuine, if fractured, resistance. Only the Kurds supported the occupation without reservation.
The Sunni resistance developed in mosques where clerics denounced the real injustices of the occupation and supported armed action. Increasingly, resistance leaders drew on Sunni fundamentalism — from the rest of the Middle East, rather than within Iraq, where it had not had a base — with its anti-Iranian and anti-Shia theology.

The resistance mounted a campaign of attacks designed to isolate the U.S. from its allies, attacking the UN, offices of countries like Jordan that collaborated with the occupation, and Iraqi civilians who worked for the CPA. Soon, the insurgents began to target U.S. forces with their infamous improvised explosive devices.

The Sunni-led resistance, however, fell into a sectarian trap. It alienated the Shia, who comprised the bulk of civilians targeted for collaborating with the occupation. Even worse was the infusion — though in relatively small numbers — of foreign extremists with a Salafist ideology, like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who were intent on attacking not only collaborators, but all Shia.

The Shia establishment — including religious parties like the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) and Dawa, as well as Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani — didn’t like the U.S. occupation, but did hope to use it for the purpose of winning Shia majority rule.

In contrast, the militant Shia cleric Moktada al-Sadr agitated against the occupation among the Shia poor, whose lives had been further devastated by the war. He combined Iraqi nationalism, including calls for solidarity across sectarian divisions, with Shia fundamentalism.

The U.S. turned to repression to put down the growing Sunni — and eventually, Shia — resistance. Its forces swept through entire neighborhoods, breaking into houses, arresting all young men and throwing tens of thousands into overcrowded prisons like Abu Ghraib, where they were abused and tortured for information.

This reign of terror only further inflamed the fractured resistance. In the spring of 2004, Bremer nearly united all tendencies of the resistance into a genuine national liberation struggle when he simultaneously provoked uprisings in predominantly Shia Najaf and predominantly Sunni Falluja.
In March, Bremer had one of Sadr’s deputies arrested, and shut down publication of his newspaper. Sadr’s forces rose up across the South and occupied Najaf. Bremer railed that he wanted Sadr “killed or captured,” and laid siege to the holy city.

Meanwhile, in April, the U.S. ordered an assault on the resistance in Falluja as punishment for the murder and hanging of four Blackwater private security contractors. The U.S. assault and the Sunnis’ determined stand turned Falluja into a rallying point for the resistance.

Sadr announced his solidarity with the uprising in Falluja, and Falluja rebels voiced their support for Najaf. Allawi quotes U.S. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez saying that he saw a danger of “a linkage that may be occurring at the very lowest levels between the Sunni and Shia. We have to work very hard to ensure that it remains at a tactical level.”

Fearing a united resistance, the U.S. called off both sieges. For a moment, it seemed a nationalist resistance movement was cohering. But Sunni Salafist attacks against Shia continued to break up the possible unity. Meanwhile, the Shia demand for majority rule confirmed fears among Sunnis that they were being left out of a new national compact.

As a result, when the U.S. leveled Falluja in November 2004, driving 150,000 people out of the city, even Sadr failed to express solidarity with the victims.

Like all imperial occupations, the U.S. turned to a strategy of divide and rule. It used the process of setting up the new Iraqi state to pit Sunni against Shia against Kurd — with the goal of maintaining its grip.

In 2003, the U.S. set up the Iraqi Governing Council as a symbolic, consultative body to the CPA. Following the model that the French imposed on Lebanon a half century earlier, the U.S. apportioned seats on the council through representation of religious and national groups. This imposed a sectarian dynamic on Iraqi politics from the very beginning.

Despite promising early elections, the U.S. worried that Shia fundamentalist parties, with their fraternal relations with Iran, would be able to win a majority in any election. So over the protests of Sistani and the Shia parties, the U.S. appointed an interim government.

The U.S. named ex-Baathist Ayad Allawi, the secular Shia head of the Iraqi National Alliance, as prime minister of the interim government. He reversed de-Baathification and brought back many bureaucrats from the old regime. He and the U.S. hoped to build a “Baathist Lite” security state and woo back the Sunni politicians and masses who had been alienated by de-Baathification.

But Allawi’s support for ruthless U.S. repression of the rebellions in Najaf and Fulluja backfired. Allawi’s iron fist drove Sunnis more into the arms of the resistance, and united Shia fundamentalist efforts to seize control of the government for their own purposes.

The subsequent election in January 2005, the October 2005 referendum on the constitution, and the December 2005 election only deepened the sectarian divide. After Sunnis overwhelming boycotted the first vote, the U.S. coaxed them into participating in the referendum and the second election as a counterweight to rising Shia power.

“There was no doubt about the hardening of sectarian and ethnic opinion,” Ali Allawi writes. “Shias voted for the UIA; Sunnis voted for the Tawaffuq bloc or Saleh al-Mutlaq’s group; and the Kurds voted for the Kurdistan Alliance.”

The U.S. had thus transformed religious and national divisions into communal divisions–and set the stage for a civil war.

The Iraqi governments that replaced the CPA had no real power. They met in the Green Zone, under the watchful eye of U.S. forces and completely cut off from the real Iraq. The U.S. occupation called the shots on key issues, only using the new regime as political cover–and, increasingly, as a scapegoat for its failures.

Both the interim government and the subsequent governments of Prime Ministers Ibrahim Jafari and Nuri al-Maliki staffed their administration with cronies of their own. Iyad Allawi’s interim regime oversaw, in the words of the head of the integrity commission, “the largest robbery in the world”–as officials stole billions of dollars in reconstruction funding.

The Jafari and Maliki governments inherited a weak state, rife with corruption and without any real power over the country. They continued the American practice of grand promises of improvements with no delivery, and hired their own hangers-on to replace the Allawi’s ex-Baathists.

Worst of all, they rebuilt security and police forces with sectarian Shia militias. With tacit approval from top government officials, the SCIRI’s Badr Brigades and Sadr’s Mahdi Army unleashed a campaign of revenge and terror against the Sunni resistance, and eventually the Sunni population itself.

Ali Allawi describes how Sunni organizations “began to collect grisly evidence of the hundreds, later known to be thousands, of people who were summarily killed or abducted and had disappeared.” In self-defense, the Sunni masses turned more and more to their own militias for protection from government forces.

In 2006, the Sunni Salafist bombing of the Golden Dome, one of the holiest places in Shia Islam, became the tipping point that pushed the country toward a civil war. In revenge, Shia militias, including the Mahdi Army, massacred an estimated 1,300 Sunnis in the following days.

From then on, the civil war has continued unabated, with attacks and counter-attacks tearing entire communities apart. As many as 2 million Iraqis have been internally displaced by the conflict, and another 2 million people have fled to surrounding countries in the Middle East.

Today, Iraq lies in ruins. Allawi’s book is the most detailed account of how it happened. He retains vain hopes that it could have gone differently — that the U.S. could have done a better job of occupation with more troops, better planning, a more thorough transformation of the Baathist state and a more rigorous imposition of free market reforms.

But none of these could have overcome the fact that occupation does not bring liberation, but instead inevitably provokes resistance. The urgent task in the U.S. and in the Middle East is to build an anti-imperialist opposition capable of overcoming national and religious divisions–and defeating a wounded but still very dangerous U.S. imperialism.

However, as Brzezinski notes in his new book, Second Chance, “barely fifteen years after the wall came down, the once proud and globally admired America was widely viewed around the world with intense hostility, its legitimacy and credibility in tatters, its military bogged down…, its formerly devoted allies distancing themselves, and world-wide public opinion polls documenting widespread hostility toward the United States.”

While Brzezinski excoriates the Bush Administration for what he calls its “catastrophic leadership,” he does not put the current imperial crisis merely at the feet of the toxic Texan. Instead, he argues that the last three Presidents have failed to craft a new grand strategy for the US and each in turn contributed to the current crisis.

As the former National Security Advisor to the Carter Administration, Brzezinski is no leftist. He is perhaps the most insightful imperialist thinker produced by Cold War liberalism and the most important one to confront America’s imperial crisis and propose a strategy to rehabilitate it.

Brzezinski reviews the records of the last three presidents attempt to shape the emerging new world system. To lead the world he argues a new grand strategy would have to take shape around are three priorities: (1) shaping the power relationships toward a more cooperative global system; (2) containing civil wars, preventing terrorism and halting the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction; and (3) ameliorating rising global inequality and spreading ecological crisis.

According to Brzezinski, the first Bush Administration did not develop a new grand strategy to address these priorities, relying on a vague slogan that the US was committed to a “New World Order.”

Amidst the dramatic transformations brought about the collapse of the Russian Empire, Bush I scrambled to keep up and essentially relied on conventional great power diplomacy to maintain the status quo among great and lesser powers, not lead their transformation.

Brzezinski singles out Bush’s failure to capitalize on its military victory in the Gulf War as his presidency’s “original sin.” He did not turn military success into a political victory to address the regions problems especially the conflict between Israel and Palestine. Instead Bush maintained the regional status quo.

Even worse he established military bases in Saudi Arabia and maintained sanctions against Iraq. All of these failures would provoke Arab anger and provide fertile grounds for the appeals of Al Qaeda against the US.

Brzezinski is no less scathing toward the Clinton Administration for failing to come up with a grand strategy. Clinton instead hoped that economic globalization would of its own accord erode conflicts between nations in the world system.

Brzezinksi argues that this naïve economic determinism led the Clinton administration to inadequately attend to statecraft among great and regional powers. Moreover, Clinton’s trumpeting of globalization left the US vulnerable to criticism and resistance from victims of multinationals, IMF/World Bank structural adjustment programs, and the Asian economic crisis.

Globalization’s inequalities both eroded US legitimacy and sparked what Brzezinski calls a populist movement dramatically expressed through the Seattle protest in 1999 that shut down the World Trade Organization meeting.

Brzezinski attacks the Clinton Administration for encouraging America’s elites to indulge in “social hedonism.” He argues that the ruling class’ unwilling to pay taxes or subordinate itself to international treaties and rules provoked denunciations of the US as a callous hyper-power. Its behavior risked fraying the strategic alliance with other global leaders, especially Europe.

George Bush’s foreign policy turned a problematic position into a catastrophe. Neoconservative advisers shaped his administration’s strategy in the wake of 9/11. In place of fostering alliances engaged in deterrence Bush announced his doctrine of preemptive war carried through by the US, whether other powers came along or not, telling other regimes “you’re either with us or against.”

Brzezinski argues that the neocons have foolishly narrowed US policy to the Middle East ignoring other strategic interests. Moreover, they demonized Moslems and Arabs and turned the US into an open partisan of Israel compromising any semblance of neutrality in negotiations over the Palestinian crisis.

As a result of Bush’s policies and wars, Brzezinski concludes that the regime has done “calamitous damage to America’s global standing,” caused a “geopolitical disaster” of broken alliances, destabilized Central Asia and the Middle East, increased the stimulus for terrorist counter-attacks, and encouraged rather than deterred the spread of weapons of mass destruction as all those under threat from the US race to build a bomb out of self-protection.

Most troubling for Brzezinski is how Bush has encouraged Russia, China and “rogue states” like Iran to begin forming a potential rival alliance that could threaten the primacy of American leadership of Europe in shaping the world system.

In a startling passage, he summarizes the consequences of Bush’s “suicidal statecraft”: “Europe is now increasingly alienated. Russia and China are both more assertive and more in step. Asia is turning away and organizing itself while Japan is quietly considering how to make itself more secure. Latin American democracy is becoming populist and anti-American. The Middle East is fragmenting and on the brink of explosion. The world of Islam is inflamed by rising religious passion and anti-imperialist nationalisms. Throughout the world, public opinion polls show that U.S. policy is widely feared and even despised.”

Brzezinski concludes that the US must conduct a regime change, replacing the Bush administration and its neocon policy advisers with foreign policy realists and chart a new grand strategy capable of repairing the damage done by the last three Presidents. The 2008 election is America’s second chance and, given the dire predicament of its current imperial crisis, he says there will not be a third.

Brzezinski proposes that the US take up Human Rights as the guiding principle of a new grand strategy. By focusing on human rights, the US can undue its lost legitimacy, win over its alienated allies, and rehabilitate itself in the eyes of those suffering in poverty and aspiring to fulfill the nationalist aspirations.

To carry this through, the US must rebuild its alliance with Europe and incorporate China, Japan, and Russia into formations like NATO and a rehabilitated WTO, thereby preventing the development of imperial rivals.

The US must conceive of its project as promoting national interests that are also in the interests of the global community. It must impose self-restraint on the social hedonism of the ruling class in order to spend money and build international formation that implement global policies to further the world’s common interests.

The price of failing to implement this strategy is two fold. First, the US will spur Russia and China among others to form a rival axis of power that could tip the world toward larger imperial wars. Second, it will antagonize the emerging populist rebellion against global inequality.

This widening inequality is producing “revolutionaries-in-waiting … the equivalent of the militant proletariat of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries … [The] political awakening is now global in geographic scope, comprehensive in social scale …, strikingly youthful in demographic profile and thus receptive to rapid political mobilization, and transnational in sources of inspiration because of the cumulative impact of literacy and mass communications. As a result, modern populist passions can be aroused even against a distant target, despite the absence of a unifying doctrine such as Marxism … Only by identifying itself with the idea of universal human dignity — with its basic requirement of respect for culturally diverse political, social, and religious emanations — can America overcome the risk that the global political awakening will turn against it.”

Brzezinski’s book is a liberal manifesto for rehabilitating imperialism. But it relies on a fundamental, faulty assumption that the world’s nations, both great powers and war torn nations, can be led by the US as a global commonweal.

While it is true that Bush’s incompetent and reckless strategy exacerbated conflicts between rival powers, it did not create them. As Lenin argued in Imperialism, capitalism compels great powers to compete with one another generating all sorts of conflicts and inevitably military conflagrations. Only this competitive dynamic can in the final instance explain the increasing antagonisms between China, Russia and the US in particular that have developed in the wake of the Cold War.

Moreover, while Brzezinski’s program of social reform to address global inequality and climate change might produce at best more aid, a revitalized peace core, and implementation of the Kyoto Protocols, it will not address the systemic causes of the world’s growing problems.

The period of our rulers providing guns and butter is long gone. The competitive pressures of the capitalist race to the bottom preclude fundamental social reforms because of the vicious competition built into the system and dramatically increased since the 1970s.

Brzezinski’s grand strategy of human rights may position the US better to win its way in the system than the previous three failed ones, but it will not overcome the imperialist and exploitative pressure built into capitalism.

The alternative to these lies in precisely what he most fears, what he calls rising populism or at other moments the tyranny of the majority. Only such a mass movement from below can win social reforms.

And for that new rebellion against social inequality to win and replace capitalist imperialism and class exploitation with genuine democratic control of society by the majority, it will need both Marxism and revolutionary parties. That which Brzezinski wants to preempt is the only solution — worker’s revolution.