Muhammad Idrees Ahmad

Even after 4 years of brutal occupation, the US antiwar movement is still debating whether it should give moral support to those resisting the empire. From Barbara Ehrenreich to Phyllis Bennis, the self-proclaimed dissidents have reproduced Bush’s rhetoric to demonize the Iraqi resistance. Phyllis Bennis was earlier taken to task by Gabriele Zamparini, but far from expressing regrets, Bennis responded to Alexander Cockburn’s suggestion osupporting the Iraqi resistance as the only means of ending the war with a long screed. Here is Bennis’s retort followed by Cockburn’s response:

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.

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.

The latest addition to the debate is the following powerful contribution from an Iraqi-American, Dahlia Wasfi:

I speak to you today on behalf of relatives on my mother’s side-Ashkenazi Jews who fled their homeland of Austria during Hitler’s Anschluss. It is for them that we say “Never again.” I speak to you today on behalf of relatives on my father’s side who are not living, but dying, under the occupation of this administration’s deadly foray in Iraq. From the lack of security to the lack of basic supplies to the lack of electricity to the lack of potable water to the lack of jobs to the lack of reconstruction to the lack of education to the lack of healthcare to the lack of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, they are much worse off now than before we invaded. “Never again” should apply to them, too.

There has been debate recently within the American peace movement on the issue of support for the Iraqi resistance. The argument has been made by some that we don’t support the resistance in Iraq because it’s different than it has been for other countries we’ve invaded. That “what is understood to be ‘the Iraqi resistance’ is a disaggregated and diverse set of largely unconnected factions…There is no unified leadership that can speak for ‘the resistance’…There is no unified program, either of what the fight is against or what it is for…(Bennis, 2007)”

Well – judge not lest we be judged, for this is an offensive display of the arrogance of empire.

We sit here 8000 miles away with our luxuries of electricity and water, while Iraqis suffer in the desert heat with no relief, and we tell them they are disorganized. This is fiddling while Iraq burns. People are dying; the question is moot.

We are not fighting Al Qaeda in Iraq; we are slaughtering people’s children. We went in to liberate Iraqis from a ruthless dictator we imposed upon them who allegedly killed 300,000 during his 30 year reign of terror. We’ve accomplished more than triple that in a fraction of the time.

If ever there were legitimate resistance to illegal occupation, it is in Iraq.

If ever there were a people struggling for democracy and independence, there are Iraqis.

If ever there were a people who have known suffering at the hands of bloodthirsty American imperialism, there are Iraqis.

Through the last 400 years, the European immigrants who landed on these shores have raped and pillaged millions in the name of empire. They followed the call to “Go West, young man,” slaughtering 95% of the indigenous population along the way. In the late 1800’s, sights were set on the Caribbean, and through the last 2 centuries, we have had a hand in creating colonies in Africa, Latin America, and Southeast and Western Asia. After all, what is the Middle East, but the Arab World and America’s colonial outpost Israel, according to their geographic position relative to Western powers?

But now there is a wedge in this imperial path, driving the American neo-conservative empire to a screeching halt. The Iraqi people – who are, in fact, the Iraqi resistance – are succeeding where we could not. What’s not to love?
We cannot start examining history from September 11^th, 2001. Since WWI, Arabs have been lied to, manipulated, and used by the U.S., Great Britain, and other colonial powers. Next year will mark the 60^th year of Al Nakba in Palestine-the Catastrophe. Iraqis have now seen that illegal occupation extended to include the Fertile Crescent, their land between two rivers, their Mesopotamia. Iraqis see the close to 6 million Palestinian refugees, illegally denied their right of return. Iraqis see the U.S. Army building walls to make impoverished ghettos, like the Nazis did, and like the Israelis are doing with their apartheid wall. Iraqis see the open-air prison that is Gaza, strangled and starving as we speak because of our political agenda. The crime of these prisoners? They were born Palestinian. Iraqis are living under occupation tactics such as daily house raids, uprooting of trees, looting of property, psy-ops death squads and the use of depleted uranium – all of which they know too well by watching our joint actions with Israel in Palestine.

And do you know what Iraqis are saying? I don’t speak Arabic, but I can translate for you. They’re saying, “Get out!” They’re saying, “NO way – you’re staying for 60 years.” They’re saying, “Get your oil the old-fashioned way – pay for it!” And why are they saying this? Because they have a dignity and self-respect rooted in 7000 years of civilization.
Iraq is the center of Arab nationalism. Actually, this is what my father says, and I would argue that my father is the center of Arab nationalism. Modern-day Iraqis are the descendents of ancients who devised the first system of writing, the 24-hour day, the bases of mathematics, law, science and medicine. Once corrupt American corporations, the U.S. military, and its death squads, prisons, and bombings are out of the picture, true reconstruction by Iraqis can and will begin.

Perhaps we don’t embrace the Iraqi resistance because its fighters are killing American soldiers. What other choice have we given them? From Vietnam to Lebanon to Somalia to Iraq, we have taught our victims around the world that the only way to effect a change in American foreign policy is to spill American blood.

Thousands died in Chile during the CIA led coup on Sept. 11^th, 1973. But we only remember 3000 Americans who died on the 28^th anniversary of that massacre. Grenadans in 1983 and Panamanians in 1989 were buried in mass graves by the thousands after the U.S. assaults, but the stories of these victims go untold. Between 1,000 and 10,000 Somalis were killed when our humanitarian mission in 1993 turned into military aggression. (We will never know the exact number of our innocent victims, again because of mass graves.) But we left Somalia because 19 Americans fell victim to their system and were dragged through the streets of Mogadishu. Time and again, it doesn’t matter how many “others” die. The outrage comes when the victims are American.

Martin Luther King Jr. said “silence is betrayal.” In these times, remaining silent on our responsibility to the world and its future is criminal. And in light of our complicity in the supreme crimes against humanity in Iraq and Afghanistan, and ongoing violations of the U.N. Charter and international law, how dare any American criticize the actions of legitimate resistance to illegal occupation? How dare we condemn anyone else as “violent” or “disorganized?” Our so-called “enemies” in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, our other colonies around the world – and our inner cities here at home-are struggling against the oppressive hand of empire, demanding respect for their humanity. They are labeled “insurgents” or “terrorists” for resisting rape and pillage by the white establishment, but they are our brothers and sisters in the struggle for justice.

Last Sunday, my family’s luck ran out, and one of my cousins in Iraq was killed in the violence we have brought upon Iraqis and their children. He leaves behind a wife; a 2 year old son who keeps asking “Where’s Daddy?”; a heart-broken mother and brother; and an entire family devastated by grief for whom life will never be the same. If there are political differences, then whatever they may be, there’s nothing complicated about fighting for Iraqi women and children, who are the majority of the suffering population. And if we respect their humanity, can we not respect their grief as they lose their brothers, fathers, husbands and sons, the same way we mourn with and share the pain of American military families?

I close with the words of a man of peace, El Hajj Malik Al Shabazz, Malcolm X, vilified and ultimately assassinated because he spoke freely. Though condemned as violent, he lived for peace, and for love and brotherhood. I very humbly offer his wisdom.

We declare our right on this earth to be … a human being, to be respected as a human being, to be given the rights of a human being in this society, on this earth, in this day, which we intend to bring into existence by any means necessary.

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Time is on the side of the oppressed today, it’s against the oppressor. Truth is on the side of the oppressed today, it’s against the oppressor. You don’t need anything else...

It’s been an honor to share this time with you.

Dr. Dahlia Wasfi is a speaker and activist. Born in the United States to an American Jewish mother and an Iraqi Muslim father, she lived in Iraq as a child, returning to the U.S. at age 5. She graduated from Swarthmore College with a B.A. in Biology in 1993 and earned her medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1997. Dr. Wasfi has made two trips to Iraq since the 2003 “Shock and Awe” invasion to visit her extended family. She returned from a three month stay in Basrah in March 2006. On April 27, 2006, she testified at a Congressional Forum to provide her eyewitness account of life in Iraq. Based on her experiences, Dr. Wasfi is speaking out in support of immediate, unconditional withdrawal of American forces from Iraq and the need to end the occupation “from the Nile to the Euphrates.” Her website is www.liberatethis.com.