Yesterday, I was back on the street corner again with our local weekly
peace presence, after having been out of town the previous Thursday. Yesterday,
too, we shifted our timing as we always do when the clocks change: in winter
we vigil from 4:30 through 5:30 p.m., and in summer we do it from 5 through
6. So yesterday’s vigil was the first one under the summer time rules.
Many of the drivers who come through our busy intersection outside
the Federal Office Building there on a regular basis– those who came between
5:30 and 6– hadn’t seen us for six months.
It’s been an interesting experience, standing there throughout the years,
seeing the seasons turn.
We got a fabulous response! People were honk-honk-honking for peace
constantly and repetitively throughout our whole hour there. (One of
the nice things about this action is that at this intersection, traffic from
only one of the four approach roads is allowed to pass through it at any
one time. So all the drivers coming in from the other three directions have
to sit at the lights there and wait their turn. As they do so, they
can hear the honks coming from other drivers, and this often spurs them to
join in. It becomes a particular form of a public “conversation”–
and most importantly, people who are there who are against the war can reconfirm
that they are indeed not alone in their feelings.)
I would say that throughout 2006 so far, the amount of anti-war honking
has increased in an almost linear way, week by week.
On several occasions throughout the past couple of years, my friend and
co-vigiller Heather has said to me, “Helena, I can’t believe we’re still
here. Don’t tell me we’ll still be here this time next year!” And
I’ve always said to her, “Heather, expect to be here for the very long haul.”
Heather wasn’t there yesterday. But as I peered into every car
that passed trying to establish eye contact and see who all these people
were who were honking for us, I suddenly thought, “Hey, maybe we won’t
have to be here this time next year. Maybe the Bushies really can
be persuaded to pull all the troops out of Iraq before April 2007.” And
since then, this feeling has started to take a stronger hold of me.
I’ll note later on that even if this proves to be the case, there are
many other aspects of the administration’s militarism that we still need
to be very concerned about. Not least among them, the prospect that
they might seek to “cover” a chaotic military collapse in Iraq, politically,
by launching an opportunistic military attack against Iran…. As
in, the way the Reagan folks– who of course included both Cheysfeld and
Rumney– “covered” their withdrawal from Lebanon by invading Grenada, back
in 1983.)
But first, I want to pull together all the pieces of evidence I currently
have that indicate that the end-point of the US project in Iraq might be
closer at hand than I had previously thought.
1. US opinion has been swinging consistently against
the war this year. And this is not simply the evidence from
my expreiences on the street corner. If you look at the AP/Ipsos opinion-poll
figures here
, you’ll see that the the public’s judgments on the Bushites’ handling
of the Iraq issue run as follows:
|
Disapprove (%)
|
Approve (%)
|
|
| Early Jan ’06 |
58
|
39
|
| Early Feb ’06 |
60
|
38
|
| Early Mar ’06 |
58
|
39
|
| Early Apr ’06 |
63
|
35
|
Compare those figures with, for example, the early-January
of 2005 figures of 54 percent disapprove/ 44 percent approve.2. Throughout 2004 and 2005, the US public was continuously being
promised that there were political ‘watershed events’ ahead in Iraq that would
make the US invasion and occupation of the country all look (relatively) worthwhile.
Those events included the “handover of sovereignty” (!) in 2004; the
holding of the January ’05 election; the August ’05 “completion” of the Iraqi
constitution; the Iraq-wide referendum on the same; and then the holding
of the “definitive” election for a “permanent” Iraqi government in December
2006. Those pronmises, and indeed the staging of all of those events
more or less as promised, kept a non-trivial chunk of US opinion on board
the administration’s project in Iraq. (Regardless of the effect of these
events on opinion in Iraq, which for the Bushites’ purposes is almost an
irrelevant consideration.)American people sincerely wanted to believe that something good could
come out of the whole venture in Iraq– and the Bushies were promising them
that these good things were “just ahead”.But since December15, 2005 they’ve run out of politically stage-managed rabbits
to pull out of their magician’s hat. Indeed, they haven’t even been
able to “win” the formation of an Iraqi government as a result of the December
election. (Of course, as I’ve argued elsewhere recently, they could
have gotten an Iraqi government formed if they’d been prepared to go
with the Iraqi people’s duly decided choice. But they haven’t been ready
to do that, because “the people’s choice”, Ibrahim Jaafari, is not their
chosen puppet. And furthermore, he has also committed himself to seeking
a firm timetable for a — presumably complete– US troop withdrawal, which
they don’t like.)The US-caused (or at the very least, US-aggravated) “impasse” in the formation
of an Iraqi government accountable to the elected parliament there has caused
great hardships for the Iraqi people. But it has also caused great
political problems for the Bush administration, who now have literally
no more political rabbits to pull out of their Iraqi hat.3. Based on my close following of both the events in Iraq and the Bush
administration’s record there over the past three years, I conclude the following:
(a) they still really don’t have a clue about what’s going on there– apart
from whatever it is that their legions of bought-and-paid-for lackeys choose
to tell them, and (b) at the political level they have no plan, workable
or otherwise, for how to get of the mess they’re in. Let’s hope, at
the very least, that the military has some workable plans for peaceable force
extraction?4. There are mid-term elections coming up here in November. To
try to stabilize the politically disastrous record of its Iraq project as
much as possible before then, the Bushies will need to have some non-trivial
“victory event” sometime before the end of September. Ideally, from
their point of view, this should include the very visible return home of
a significant chunk of the soldiery currently deployed there– maybe 50,000
of them at a minimum. “Welcome home” parades in major US cities, etc,
etc. (But maybe they should not use the “Mission Accomplished”
banner and the flight-suit thing again.)Even that might not do it– in terms of allowing the Republicans to win their
goal of keeping control over both Houses of Congress in November. (Let’s
hope not!) But of course, if they do pull a large chunk of the soldiery
out of Iraq before a reliably pro-US administration has been installed,
then the likelihood that such an administration could ever be installed there
will plummet to near-zero, and the likelihood of a really serious debacle
befalling the depleted forces that remain will also rise. (It’s
a strange fact of the current US deployment in Iraq that the vast majority
of those troops have now been pulled back into performing purely “force
protection” tasks– i.e., guarding their own enclaves and supply-lines.)
…Anyway, based on the above confluence of what has been happening politically
inside Iraq with what has been happening politically inside the US– that
is why I now think it’s possible to conclude that the end of the US troop
presence in Iraq may well be nigh. Okay, that there is now,
say, a 60% chance that all US troops will be out of Iraq by this time next
year.
Let’s check back in at that point and see how this prediction holds up, okay?
But if it does happen… if all our efforts out there on the street corners
of the real communities of the world, here in the more global arena of the
blogosphere, and everybody’s antiwar efforts from all around the world,
should show some real fruit… what then? Do we declare victory and
go home?
No, of course not. Firstly, as I mentioned above, we will need to redouble
our efforts to make sure that any withdrawal from Iraq (whether partial or
total) is not accompanied at the same time by any aggressive US military
adventure elsewhere.
Secondly, we really need to open up a serious discussion inside the US (and
outside it) on how we want to see the US’s relationship with the rest
of the world developing as the US project inside Iraq winds down… Do
we US citizens really still think of ourselves as constituting an “indispensable
nation”, as Madeleine Albright used to say, or as one that has any kind of
“manifest destiny” to regulate the affairs of the rest of the world (as the
Bushies– and also many Democratic pols– have long aspired to do)?
And thirdly, we need to start having a much deeper kind of discussion on
what kind of a world it really is that we all– US citizens and that 96%
of humanity that makes up “the rest of the world”– seek to build over the
decades ahead. Surely, it should be one that moves away decisively
from any toleration of warmaking or investment in the instruments of war;
that is truly committed to lifting up the conditions in which the world’s
poorest and most marginalized communities live, and giving those people full
voice in the regulation of the world’s affairs; and that seeks to erase both
the gross economic equalities that exist and the use of any economic or other
unfair advantage for purposes of coercion and social control?
So yes, we should keep all these longer-term goals in mind as we proceed.
But meantime, I have to tell you, yesterday for the first time, mixed
in with the smell of the sweet spring blossoms over the road, I could also
for the first time in this long struggle against the Bushite project in Iraq
catch the faint scent of victory ahead.