Re: [lbo-talk] Milan Rai on UN occupation of Iraq

[Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxx>]

Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
> At 4:07 PM -0800 3/26/04, Devine, James wrote:
> >people do often reply to polls by saying what they feel they "ought to" say.
>
> They often do even under "normal" circumstances in the United States
> (e.g., Americans overstate their church attendance).
>
> Doug and Joel ought to remember that Iraq is *under foreign military
> occupation conducting counterinsurgency warfare* with censorship,
> checkpoints, house raids, arbitrary arrest and detention, no due
> process, etc. -- i.e. Iraqis do not have freedom of speech.
>

I can't quite see the point of this argument. The (active) anti-war
movement is irrevocably committed to "U.S. out of Iraq Now!"  The debate
is really over on that. No one is going to go out and organize in favor
of some such slogan as "The U.S. should think about leaving as soon as
it has established a stable order that the U.N. is willing to oversee
and that is approved by at least 63% of the Iraqi people in a
scientifically organized poll."

And regardless of exact percentage of Iraqis that (verbally) support
this or that, it is clear that well over 10% of the Iraqi population is
committed to expelling the U.S. That guarantees that upwards of 100,000
troops are permanently committed to taking continual casualties so long
as the U.S. remains there. That in turn means

(a) that the u.s. lacks the military resources for further aggression
elsewhere -- e.g., there can be no _direct_ u.s. intervention in
Venezuela, and

(b) that the anti-war movement will be able to retain at least its
present level of strength, with new people in it becoming steadily more
committed to protracted struggle. It should even grow a bit after the
present hiatus from politics ends sometime early in 2005.

Nearly everyone in the local group is committed to ABB, but they are
also quite free from the sectarian crap that seems to infest most (not
all) ABBs on the maillists. Hence it makes sense to a very large core to
work hard to build for the future. And no one has let out a peep about
popularity polls in Iraq. They want the troops home.

What I said in October 2001 seems to be still holding: the political
future is much brighter than it was before 9/11.

Carrol