We in the anti-war movement declared from the inception of this horrific war on Iraq, “No Blood for Oil.” The Bush Administration and media blowhards ridiculed our slogan. But the mad doctor of the free market, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, just spilled the beans in his new memoir. He wrote, “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows; the Iraq war is largely about oil.”
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!”