Electing Barack Obama is not going to “solve” the many urgent problems Americans face in their (our) long-misguided policy in Iraq. I’ve been lucky in the past few weeks to discuss priorities for the antiwar movement along with peace activists and engaged analysts in different cities around the US, including the gathering organized by the Ecumenical Peace Institute in Berkeley, California, on Saturday.
Here are the main points I take away from those discussions. I’m putting them together in a list here so readers can chime in and make the list more effective:
- 1. We should constantly focus on the tight connection between the US’s war in Iraq and the country’s budgetary crisis. The war is currently costing about $8 billion per month. Harvard economists Linda Bilmes and Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz estimate (1, 2, 3, and 4) that the final cost of the war to the US budget will be around $3 trillion.
We should keep front and center the budgetary cost that this war, the war in Afghanistan, and the US’s tens of other coercive military engagements and commitments around the world put on the US taxpayer on a continuing basis.
2. We should state explicitly that the goal is to end the US wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere— and to down-size the US military (and its budget) to a size that is consonant with the task of, strictly, national defense rather than, as at present, worldwide imperial-style control and coercion.
Actual defense, that is, in the way that the Swiss or the Costa Ricans do it, rather than nudge-nudge wink-wink “defense” based on global domination in the way the US has done it since the end of the Cold War.
3. This will necessarily involve building new relations of cooperation and mutual respect with other big and medium-size powers around the world. We should welcome this transformation! Today, the US constitutes less than five percent of global humankind, and the entire “west” only around 12 percent. It is quite absurd to think that the US, or even the whole group of “western” nations, can impose its will on the rest of the world over the long– or even medium– term.
The vast majority of the peoples of the “rest” of the world strongly want to have a new, much better relationship with the American people. But they want it to be based on mutual respect, not on the “west” continuing to try to maintain its current degree of control over “the rest.”
4. We are incredibly lucky to have, in the United Nations, an organization that (a) strives to represent and help organize the interests of all the world’s nations; (b) embodies the important ideals of human equality and need to avoid war and violence, pursing only nonviolent means to resolve conflicts; and (c) actually has, in its own institutions, many extremely valuable mechanisms for serving the welfare of all humankind.
Yes, the UN is imperfect. But its imperfections have been aggravated considerably by the actions that US governments have taken over the past 30 years. And sadly, far too many members of the US political elite today still harbor a primitive and generally ill-informed knee-jerk opposition to the UN. US peace activists therefore need to work hard at publicizing the good the UN has done, countering the disinformation that’s been launched against it, and urging far greater support from all segments of the US public for the UN’s work.
And yes, we can and should do this while also pressing for some much-needed reform in the UN– not least, a reform of the governance system that currently gives Washington and four other nuclear-armed countries explicit veto power in the UN Security Council.
5. Regarding Iraq– and come to that Afghanistan and other locations of US military activity– our primary strategy as US-based peace activists should be to urge the US to hand off the power of political decisionmaking regarding these countries to the UN. For example, it is not up to Americans, whether our government or our people, to decide whether Iraq’s people need a referendum, or a new election, or a new Constitution, before they can win their full and unfettered independence from our military’s tight continuing grip. We have no legitimacy or standing to insist on things there being done “our way.”
The UN, by contrast, does have legitimacy, as the world organization, to be the body that convenes the negotiations that will be necessary if the people of Iraq (or Afghanistan) are to regain the true national sovereignty and national independence that our government’s actions have withheld from them for too long.
In both countries, this will involve the UN convening and chairing negotiations over the following matters:
- a. The establishment of a durable and fair internal political order that is free from the outside influence of the US and any other outside parties;
b. The establishment of a durable regional order, involving at the very least the governments of all countries that directly abut Iraq (or, Afghanistan) as well as leading representatives of the country itself and any other such parties as the UN negotiating chief deems necessary for the success of the negotiation; and
c. The modalities and mechanisms for the complete withdrawal and return home of the US military occupation force, and the institution of other, politically legitimate mechanisms for assuring public order in Iraq and Afghanistan. (These may be some combination of local forces, responsible to the newly constituted or newly validated internal political order, and UN peacekeepers responsible to the UN Security Council.)
6. US peace activists should work hard to remain well informed about the political developments within both Iraq and Afghanistan and to build good, respectful relations with representatives of all streams of opinion in both countries, especially their nationalist (anti-occupation) movements.
In Iraq, the current parliament, which was elected under US auspices in December 2005, has since then adopted many nationalist positions and has done a lot to block the Bush administration’s attempts to impose a long-term military presence on their country. We should strengthen our links with Iraq’s parliamentarians and all other Iraqis working for a US withdrawal from Iraq that is speedy, total, and orderly.
In Afghanistan, the parliament does not seem to play such a clear role. But there, too, there are many leading politicians within the US-established political order who have shifted towards challenging the US’s current high degree of control over the country’s politics. Many US peace activists are understandably appalled by the anti-woman and otherwise repressive policies of the Taleban. But there are many anti-US forces who are not Taleban-style authoritarians, so we should remain wary of attempts to lump all anti-US forces there together as simply “Taleban.” Anyway, Afghanistan is the country of the Afghans, not our country; and all previous attempts by “western” (including Soviet) outsiders to dominate and transform the country have failed miserably. The UN, which represents all the countries that (unlike the US) abut Afghanistan and are very intimately affected by developments there, is truly in a better position to lead the diplomacy needed to help stabilize its people’s lives, which for nearly 30 years now have been battered and torn apart by war.
7. As an important part of the transformation (or “righting”) of our country’s relations with the rest of the world, we should start campaigning to convert our bloated defense industries into vibrant centers for research and production of goods needed for a pro-green upgrading of our country’s civilian infrastructure.
The economic recession has already started to hurt many Americans; and we can expect it will continue for many years, and most likely get worse and stay worse for quite some time. The dangerous arguments of those in the military-industrial complex who say that our military spending provides jobs, and therefore should not be cut, need to be countered directly, at every level. Instead of using taxpayer money to sustain this bloated and quite counter-productive military machine, let’s use it to build bridges, schools, homes, a functioning health-care network, and windmills!
The rest of the world truly does not need– or, in most cases, want– the American military to control and police it. And nor should we be happy about playing that role.
I believe that the time to discuss these ideas, and really push to get them out there in the US national discussion, is now. We need to get these ideas and these demands onto the agenda not just of whoever is elected president in November, but also of every incoming member of Congress, and every Senator.
Our country is truly at a turning point: one that goes much deeper than “just” a few changes of personnel at the top. We are at a turning point in our relations with the rest of the world. President Obama– if indeed it is he who is elected– may get some strong initial support from other peoples around the world. But they will be watching his actions and not just his words or his demeanor.
As President, Obama might reframe the terms of our country’s relations with the rest of humankind. (And I suppose John McCain could, too; though that seems less likely.) However, we should be quite clear that Obama has come up within the existing US political system and been formed almost completely within the country’s leading institutions. He has taken money from plenty of lobbyists and has shown himself very receptive to their urgings on a number of issues, including Israel and– most recently– the Paulson bailout. So we should have no illusions that simply electing him will be enough to bring about the change the world’s peoples so sorely need. He will need a lot more “nudging” and persuasion to do so from all sectors of US society.
The above list of position points on our country’s policies towards Iraq, other military engagements, and the need to end the current, massively militarized nature of our country’s engagement with the rest of the world is just one part of the effort I am making in these weeks to “Re-imagine America”– both at home and abroad. We really are at a turning point: I can’t stress that point enough. The current crisis of US-led casino capitalism, coming on top of the demonstrated failure of the Bush administration’s attempts to impose its will by force on the peoples of distant Afghanistan and Iraq, gives us an unprecedented opportunity to change the terms of our internal debates over policy priorities at a very deep level.
I started to do this in my book Re-engage! America and the World After Bush, which still, by the way, provides a handy compilation of the basic facts and figures on which my current arguments are based. (So please go ahead and buy ten copies to give to all of your friends…)
In Ch.6 of the book I charted the already fairly rapid decrease in the US’s “relative” power in world affairs that has occurred over the past 8-10 years. But the book came out in May. And since then, the US’s political standing inside both Iraq and Afghanistan has deteriorated notably. In Iraq, the US has proven incapable of imposing its “conditions” on the Baghdad government regarding the security agreement, or the oil law: two goals that Washington had previously defined as crucial.
In Afghanistan, the political and military situations have both deteriorated a lot. Obama’s view that “more US troops” is all that’s needed to solve the problem there is quite misguided. It isn’t, basically, a military problem at all, but a profound political problem regarding the legitimacy of the US and NATO’s very presence in the country.
The most recent “straw” added onto the sagging camel’s back of US power in the world has been the financial crisis.
But– as indicated above– all these matters are connected in numerous ways. We need a new, holistic, outside-the-box, and definitely outside-the-Beltway way to think about them and deal with them. That’s what I’m trying to work on here. Please contribute your own (constructive) ideas about an agenda that is both possible and visionary to the brainstorming here…