Topic: politics
Sometimes you’ve got to be a Johnny One-Note. And so it is with the illegality of the Iraq War – and with demands that the US withdraw immediately.
As I’ve said here and elsewhere for many depressing months, the US invasion of Iraq was illegal and immoral from Day One – indeed, even before that, since the mere threat of launching an aggressive war, when the threat is backed with the physical means to wage war, violates at least the spirit of international law. And when a nation actually launches an aggressive war, that nation becomes an international outlaw subject to appropriate countermeasures. (Don’t hold your breath; it’ll be a cold day in the globally-warmed future when “coalition forces” of some kind seize Washington, arrest the commander-in-chief and neutralize the weapons of mass destruction in his arsenal.)
But with very few exceptions, politicians and pundits and academics persist in framing the war question as a tactical and strategic matter only. Whether it’s George Bush and his absurd escalation, or the Congressional Democrats offering another path to “success” in Iraq, or media types across the spectrum editorializing about how to extricate our forces from a quagmire (big news: antiwar Senator Chuck Hagel, who’s way to the left of Hillary Clinton on this one, has dubbed it a “bog”), the acceptable range of options still is so pinched that the real issue – that an aggressor state must cease its aggression immediately and unconditionally – can’t squeak through to consciousness. Yet there it is, for all the world to see; and there’s no doubt that most of the world does have its eyes wide open.
So again to quote antiwar veteran and author Stan Goff: “Exit” isn’t a strategy, it’s an order. This country, though its military-industrial fingers have been almost perpetually crossed, has pledged to follow the UN Charter, the Nuremberg Principles, etc. And none of these covenants allow us to keep doing what we’re doing.
Bush is now trying to confound the opposition by demanding that advocates of withdrawal come up with a “plan,” as if withdrawal isn’t more of a plan that his witless “staying the course.” And the Democrats - with party leaders like Hillary Clinton and Harry Reid, and with an agenda that makes them a sort of Junior Chamber of Commerce next door to the Republicans’ Fat Cats Club – will respond with gestures in the House and Senate as their poli-biological clock runs down to 2008.
You can already tell which way the wind and the hot air are blowing by the Dems’ silence on Rep. Dennis Kucinich’s newly announced run for president. How many will get on board with the one true antiwar candidate? Kucinich’s highly detailed withdrawal plan features a relatively quick pullout of US forces and contractors, a regional conference aimed at stabilizing Iraq, an infusion of UN-controlled peacekeepers, actual reparations to be paid by the US and UK, and guarantees of Iraqi sovereignty and control of the country’s oil wealth. (The plan, viewable at http://kucinich.us, has some nice touches of the kind you rarely see from Democratic high officeholders – like a clause about keeping the IMF and World Bank from dictating terms during the reconstruction.)
Let’s hope the past won’t dictate the political future here at home. In 2004, the party and its media enablers scrambled for John Kerry while giving Kucinich a kick in the teeth. Thus they, the supposed realists, set back the cause of peace a couple of years. Talk about a mind-boggle as well as a bog.
