[Marxism] Seven Theses on the Current Period, the War and the Anti-war Movement

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx>]

Seven theses on the current period, the war and the anti-war movement
by Gilbert Achcar
September 09, 2004
<http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=11&ItemID=6192>

. . . 6. The major post-Cold War policy directions of the US-led
world imperialist order have ushered in a long historic period of
unbridled military interventionism. The anti-war movement is the only
force capable of overturning this state of affairs.

Since the collapse of the USSR, the evolution of the global
relationship of military forces has virtually eliminated all
impediments to imperialist interventionism. In the case of the
nuclear deterrent, only a suicidal state would brandish atomic
weapons against the US -- another matter being the case of a
clandestine terrorist network not confined to any territory that
could be targeted for reprisals.  The main point is that no military
force on earth can stop the steamroller of US hyperpower once it has
decided to invade any given territory.

The only major power able to stop the imperial war machine is public
opinion and its frontline detachments in the anti-war movement.
Logically, the people of the United States play the decisive role in
this regard. The "Vietnam syndrome" -- in other words, the impact of
the spectacular anti-war movement that massively contributed to
ending the US occupation of Vietnam -- militarily paralyzed the
empire for more than 15 years, from the sudden withdrawal from
Vietnam in 1973 until the invasion of Panama in 1989.

Since the military action against the Panamanian dictatorship,
Washington has been attacking enemies that are easy to demonize given
their hideous dictatorial character: Noriega, Milosevic, Saddam
Hussein, and so on. Moreover state and media propaganda blow things
out of proportion whenever the need arises, i.e. if reality does not
quite conform to the demonized image, especially in comparison with
the West's allies. This was the case for Milosevic (compared to
Tudjman, his Croatian rival), as it continues to be the case for the
Iranian regime (compared to the far more obscurantist and medieval
fundamentalism of the Saudi monarchy). Similar efforts are underway
in relation to Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez.

Still, in 1990 Bush senior ran into some difficulty when he tried to
obtain a green light from Congress for his military operation in the
Gulf, in spite of the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait. Similarly, the
Clinton administration had problems getting support for intervention
in the Balkans; and let us not forget its calamitous withdrawal from
Somalia. This reflects strong and persistent reluctance within US
public opinion and the impact of this uncertainty in the electoral
arena. Unfortunately, this sentiment did not prevent the anti-war
movement from promptly collapsing after its revival in 1990 in
response to the Gulf crisis.

The September 11th 2001 attacks gave the Bush administration an
illusion of mass, unconditional support within Western public opinion
for its expansionist designs dressed up as the "war against
terrorism." The illusion was short-lived. On February 15th 2003, 17
months after the terrorist attacks, the US and the world saw the
broadest anti-war mobilization since Vietnam -- the broadest
international mobilization ever in fact, around any cause. An
expression of the massive opposition within global public opinion to
the planned invasion of Iraq, this mobilization was nonetheless only
a minority phenomenon in the USA itself. The international movement
had, as usual, contributed powerfully to the strengthening of the US
movement, but the effects of September 11th -- nurtured by a campaign
of disinformation orchestrated by the Bush administration -- were
still too strong.

7. Setbacks for the US-led occupation in Iraq have created the
conditions for a major shift in US public opinion and for a powerful
and inexorable rise of sentiment in favor of bringing the troops home.

The problem this time around is that the frontline anti-war forces
have seen a decline in activity since the invasion, although it
should have continued to grow. This untimely retreat in the anti-war
mobilization was caused by a number of factors. For one thing, the
movement was quickly demoralized due to an outlook overly focused on
the short term, although it was highly improbable that the movement
would manage to prevent the invasion given the tremendous stakes
involved for Washington. For another, there is widespread belief in
the US in the possibility of settling the question through the ballot
box, whereas only mass pressure would force a withdrawal of US
troops, given the bipartisan consensus around the importance of
keeping a hold on Iraq. Finally, there is an illusion that the
various armed actions against the occupation troops will be enough to
end the occupation.

These views are at odds with the Vietnamese experience, too far
removed from the awareness of new generations for the lessons to have
remained in collective memory. There has not been the kind of
continuity in the anti-war movement that could ensure such lessons
are passed from one generation to the next. The movement that put an
end to the US occupation of Vietnam was built over time, as a
long-term movement, and not as a mobilization immediately preceding
the outbreak of war and then demobilized once the invasion began. The
movement had far fewer electoral illusions in the USA given that it
had been built under the Johnson Democratic administration and then
peaked under the Nixon Republican administration. It was clear to the
movement that, in spite of their impressive resistance, incomparably
broader and more effective than Iraq's, the Vietnamese were
tragically isolated militarily and could not inflict a Dien Bien Phu
on US troops -- that is to say, a defeat comparable to the one that
had ended the French occupation of their country in 1954.

This is even more evident in the case of Iraq. Leaving aside the
heterogeneous character of the origin and form of violent actions --
where terrorist attacks of a sometimes communalist character against
the civilian population are combined with legitimate actions against
the occupation forces and their local subordinates -- the nature of
the terrain itself makes it impossible to inflict a military defeat
on the US hyperpower. This is why the occupiers are far more fearful
of mass mobilizations of the Iraqi population, such as those that
forced the decision to hold elections by universal suffrage by
January 2005 at the latest.

Only a big upsurge of the anti-war movement, relayed by anti-war
public opinion in the USA and around the world and combined with
pressure from the Iraqi people, can force Washington to release its
grip on a country whose economic and strategic importance is far
greater than Vietnam's, and which has already cost so many billions
of dollars to invade and occupy.

Iraq is only a potential "new Vietnam" from a political angle, not a
military one. It is certainly the biggest quagmire for the US since
1973 -- a quagmire whose repercussions are amplified by memories of
Vietnam (proof of the persistence of the "syndrome") and by the
development of global media and communications since that time.

We have an historic opportunity to resume the momentum of February
15th 2003 and rebuild a long-term anti-war movement. This movement
could transform the US-led Iraq adventure into a new Vietnam, in the
political sense: a new long-term paralysis of the imperial war
machine. Combined with the rise of the global mobilization against
neoliberalism, this would open up the way for the profound social and
political changes urgently needed in this world of spiraling
injustice.

August 29, 2004

Gilbert Achcar's latest books in English are The Clash of Barbarisms:
Sept. 11 and the Making of the New World Disorder and Eastern
Cauldron: Islam, Afghanistan, Palestine and Iraq  in a Marxist
Mirror, both from Monthly Review Press, New York. This text, written
for the general assembly of the French anti-war organisation "Agir
contre la guerre" (Act against the war), was translated by Raghu
Krishnan for the Canadian magazine New Socialist.
--
Yoshie

* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/>
* Greens for Nader: <http://greensfornader.net/>
* Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/>
* Calendars of Events in Columbus:
<http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>,
<http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/>
* Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/>
* Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/>
* Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio>
* Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>

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