[NYTr] Cockburn vs Bennis: Support Their Troops?

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

[Here's the second half of Cockburn's weekly column.  It too
irresistably brings lyrics from Phil Ochs to mind.  Back in the day "we
supported the Viet Cong [sic]" says Bennis, "and the Sandinistas too!
But that was then, this is now." (And we won't support the Iraqi
resistance because they are _________ (fill in the blanks).  Well, as
Phil said, "... and I know that you were younger once, but you sure are
older now, and when I've got something to say,sir, I'm gonna say it
now."  -NY Transfer]

Counterpunch - Aug 25, 2007
http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn08252007.html

"Support Their Troops?"

by Alexander Cockburn and Phyllis Bennis

I wrote a column (http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn07142007.html
) half way through July, called "Support Their Troops". It was about
the decline of the antiwar movement here. Many people were incredulous
at the suggestion that the American left express more empathy for the
Iraqi resistance. What follows is a critical reaction to my piece by
Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies, and then my
response:

                              *

Bennis:

Alexander Cockburn makes three points in his "Support Their Troops?"
column. One is right, one is wrong, one is preposterous. First he says
the U.S. peace movement doesn't embrace the Iraqi resistance. Right.
Second, the U.S. peace movement is "pretty much dead." Wrong. Third,
publicly sympathizing with the Iraqi resistance will somehow build
"necessary critical mass to have a real movement."

Cockburn waxes nostalgically about the days of earlier anti-war
movements, particularly Viet Nam and Central America. I was part of the
sector of the Viet Nam anti-war movement whose favorite chant was "One
side's right, one side's wrong. We're on the side of the Viet Cong!" In
the 1980s we didn't only oppose U.S. intervention, we also supported
the FMLN and the Sandinistas. And throughout the anti-apartheid years,
we supported the African National Congress.

But that was then. This is now. I have spent the last 17 years opposing
U.S. sanctions, war, invasion and occupation of Iraq. But I never
supported Saddam Hussein, who was "resisting" the U.S. during the
sanctions years, and I don't support what is called "the Iraqi
resistance" today.

What's the difference? We supported the NLF in Viet Nam, the FMLN, the
ANC out of principle, because we supported the social program they were
fighting for. We may not have agreed with every position or every
tactic, but we shared not only what they were fighting against ­
U.S.-backed dictatorships or U.S.-paid contras or the devastation of
apartheid ­ but what they were fighting for as well. Independence and
socialism in Viet Nam, self-determination and social justice in Central
America, a non-racial South Africa.

Unfortunately that's not the case with Iraq. Certainly the Iraqi people
have the right to resist an illegal occupation, including military
resistance. And certainly there are Iraqi people, organizations,
movements that many of us do support. (The work of U.S. Labor Against
the War in supporting the Iraqi oil workers unions is one of our best
examples.) But what is broadly named "the Iraqi resistance" is a set of
largely unconnected armed factions (including some who attack Iraqi
civilians as much as they do occupation troops). There is no unified
leadership that can speak for "the resistance," there is no NLF or ANC
or FMLN that can claim real leadership and is accountable to the Iraqi
population as a whole. We know virtually nothing of what most of the
factions stand for beyond opposition to the U.S. occupation ­ and for
myself, of the little that we do know, I don't like so much.

Real internationalism means making good on our own obligations to end
the U.S. war and occupation, and recognizing the Iraqis' international
law-sanctioned right to resist. Internationalism does not require us to
embrace any particular resistance forces regardless of what they stand
for. We build the strongest movement by keeping our focus on the U.S.
occupation, maintaining our demand to bring all the U.S. and
"coalition" troops and mercenaries home, dismantle the U.S. bases, and
give up control of Iraq's oil industry.

Cockburn is wrong when he claims the peace movement is dead. How does
he think that 70% anti-war opinion he notes was created? There are now
300 cities across the U.S. where "dead" movements have forced city
councils and mayors to pass resolutions demanding that troops and
National Guard be brought home, that money funding the war and
occupation be brought home and reallocated to education and
infrastructure and health care. UFPJ is coordinating regional
mobilizations on October 27 and across the country counter-recruitment
work is escalating.

Our movement is very much alive. It is nowhere near as strong as we
must be to force an end to the U.S. occupation. But we are alive,
searching for a clearer strategy to transform anti-war public opinion
into real political power, to bring that 70% with us to support an
entirely new U.S. foreign policy based on justice, not power.

Phyllis Bennis, Director
New Internationalism Project
Institute for Policy Studies

                                 *

Here's my answer to Bennis:

Right now I don't think the peace movement is advancing the end of the
war in Iraq by a single day. In fact goodly chunks of it are
effectively protracting it, by marching in lockstep with the Democratic
Party whose overseers strive on an hourly basis to tamp down unseemly
criticism of what the Party's congressional representatives could be
doing. What they have substantively done since the Democrats took over
the Congress is to have given the green light to the "surge", to
continued funding for the war, to the next Pentagon budget.

Take the "netroots". The organizers of the recent Yearly Kos event
wouldn't even schedule a strategy session on ending the war in Iraq.
They denied John Stauber's request that they put on the official
schedule a strategy session organized by Stauber's Center for Media and
Democracy, featuring speakers frrom Iraqi Veterans Against the War. Set
that wimp-out by MoveOn next to this paragraph from a New York Times
news story from DesMoines, Iowa, published August 12. "Four years after
the last presidential race featured early signs of war protest,
particularly in the candidacy of Howard Dean, a new phase of the debate
seems to be unfolding, with antiwar groups giving the Democrats
latitude to take positions short of a full and immediate withdrawal.
Neither MoveOn.org nor its affiliated group, Americans Against
Escalation in Iraq, have sought to press Democrats here in Iowa to
suggest anything short of ending the war immediately."

Phyllis Bennis talks vaguely of "searching for a clear strategy", but
this vagueness is no more surprising than the self-restraint of MoveOn
and Americans Against Escalation in Iowa. Bennis resides at the
Institute for Policy Studies, whose principals are well aware that
any-IPS related support for a strategy deemed discomfitting to the
Democratic Party's efforts to capture White House in 2008 would result
in having IPS's major funders yank them back into the kennel in short
order.

I don't doubt Bennis' calendar is admirably full of speaking events,
but from out here in the progressive north west there's nothing much
going on between San Francisco and the Canadian border. Yes, there have
been useful actions in Olympia and Tacoma, but it's all awfully quiet.
The mass mobilizations of 2003 seem light years away. In 2005 UFPJ
raised over $1 million and in 2006 it raised $575,000. Those budget
numbers were provided at a UFPJ conference. The difference came from
failure in small donations and internet donations.

Of course there's no fizzle. People here aren't being driven crazy by
the war the way we were by the slaughters and bombings of Vietnamese in
the war then. The horrors pressed down on one every day. Of course
people were ultras, which is where the long-march radicals should
always start out The alternative is to come out of the womb squealing
about "the excesses of the left" and spend the rest of your life like
Todd Gitlin writing op eds to that effect.

It was even the same somewhat in the Central American interventions of
the 19080s. You could read about contras disemboweling a rural
organizer from the FSLN and tremble that it might be the same person
you just met on a solidarity tour, either up here or down there. People
thought I was being frivolous by evoking North American lesbians
traveling to meet their Nica partners, but bed is a pretty good place
in which to cement revolutionary solidarity.

Iraq's mostly a blur to the peace movement. Actual Iraqis are a blur to
the peace movement. Sure, towns here pass resolutions telling the
president or the US Congress to do this or that. Arcata, California, 60
miles north of me, got a lot of press for doing that, at least until
they threw David Meserve off the city council. It was cute, but it
didn't add up to anything. Now, if a delegation from Arcata said it was
sending a sister city delegation to Falujah, that would mean something.
Sister cities programs can add up to something serious, which is why
mainstream Jewish organizations go crazy every time Madison, Wisconsin
or Olympia, Washington, try to set up official ties with Rafah, in Gaza.

Both Bennis and Katha Pollitt are outraged by Lawrence McGuire's
remarks about the Iraqi resistance, but I thought, and think, what he
wrote was on the money. Isn't it the ultimate in cynicism to use the
Iraqi resistance's successes as a stick with which to beat George Bush
and the Republicans, but not the Democrats, while simultaneously saying
that you'd rather not think about the Resistance, because it seems Not
Very Nice. If you are too scared to look, you'll never find out
anything. In mid-July important Sunni-led insurgent organizations
gathered in Damascus to prepare a negotiating position in advance of US
withdrawal. Leaders of three of the groups met with Seumas Milne of the
UK Guardian and denounced al-Qaida, sectarian killings and suicide
bombings against civilians. You can either try to inform yourself of
what exactly the elements in the Iraqi resistance are actually doing,
or you can take the route Pollitt did in her hysterical outburst, where
she stigmatized the resistance as composed of "theocrats, ethnic
nationalists, die-hard Baathists, jihadis, kidnappers, beheaders and
thugs". How come she forgot to add "raghead"? I guess it wasn't PC.

Alexander Cockburn
Petrolia, California.