Antiwar (vintage) – Page 7 – Just World News with Helena Cobban

Peace train, part 2

Thursday, I wrote here about the guy who came and asked if I could tell him where to get a pro-peace yard sign like the one we have, and how I gave him one there and then.
Before he left, he asked how much he could pay me. I told him they cost $5, but really not to bother. Before he left we introduced ourselves to each other: “By the way, I’m Helena”… “And I’m Phil. Nice to meet you.”
Yesterday, I found $5 in our mail box. It was wrapped in a piece of paper saying, “Helena– Thanks for what you’re doing for our country– Phil.”
What a great end to the story.
Today, I came up to NYC by, yes, real metal train. And yes, I did get my bg BR piece almost completely written. 9,600 words. (And yes, that is the short version.)
…Terrible day (again) in Iraq, today. Oh my G-d.
Tomorrow I’m going to a “summit meeting” of pro-peace US and Iraqi women convened by the Global Peace Initiative of Women. Faiza will be speaking there… Maybe they’ll have wifi in the hotel and I can blog it in near real time?

For an effective US antiwar movement

I have the following proposal, to help us create a much more effective national antiwar movement here in the US. This proposal grew out of the analysis I made here earlier, of the problems in the two big existing antiwar coalitions, both of which have a noticeable leftwing slant:

Maybe we should stop having any faith at all that either of those two existing organizations is capable of coordinating an effective antiwar movement at this time.
Maybe we should ask Tony Benn, the President of the British Stop the War Coalition, and his six very able Vice-Presidents, for permission to form a fraternal branch of their organization here.
Stop the War Coalition-US would adopt the same organizing approach that has proven so effective for the parent group in Britain. In particular:

Going this route would have huge advantages. For one thing, we could fold into such a movement the many sterling folks in the US who are not on the political left, who share the growing desire to bring the troops home… Like that great bunch of people who founded Antiwar.com. They are mainly rightwing libertarians. But their commitment to working and organizing against the war has been so strong that they have always welcomed the contributions of lefty peaceniks to their work. Good for them! That is truly another example we should follow.
When you’re doing coalitional work, it is almost always, imho, important to focus strongly on the goal of the coalition. Now is surely such a time!
The strategy described in the principal statement that came out of the worldwide conference hosted by the Stop the War Coalition on Saturday looks appropriately focused, and looks as if it could attract the broadest possible array of US antiwar activists to such a movement. It was this:

I suggest a new STWC-US should start by simply adopting that strategy as its own… Maybe the British STWC could send a couple of their people across the Atlantic to come and help us get set up here?

Chaos in the US antiwar “movement”

I just posted about the organizational effectiveness and leadership being shown by the British Stop the War Coalition. So how about the situation here in the US?
First off, we need to understand that organizng any kind of a nationwide effort in this country is a challenge of a completely different order than in Britain. The country is huge and encompasses a dizzying array of political differences– particularly on the chronically disorganized “left”. A coalition that might work well in, say, San Francisco, could be impossible even to imagine in Atlanta, or Houston. “Democrats” in the south are often very different indeed from “Democrats” in the north. As I’ve remarked here before, there isn’t even, really, any effective nationwide political-party system in this country. The political parties we have here play a very different function in the nation’s life here than parties do in any other country…
I confess that I haven’t kept in close touch with the people doing nationwide organizing here against the war. I participated as a foot soldier in a couple of non-local demonstrations in the lead-up to March 2003. But mainly I’ve restricted my actual antiwar activism to local, city-wide initiatives while doing a lot of thinking, research, and writng about global and some national issues on the war-and-peace agenda. (A person can’t do everything.)
In order to undertand what’s been happening at the level of nationwide organizing here in the US I have relied, in general, on my links with a couple of nationwide Quaker organizations– the excellent Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL) and the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC)– to guide me.
At the national level here there are two big antiwar coalitions, which have had a frequently stormy relationship with each other. And now is, sadly enough, one of those times.
These coalitions are United for Peace and Justice, and International ANSWER.
ANSWER is, at many levels, far better organized than UPJ. For example, though I’m sure that both organizations were represented at last Saturday’s conference in London, only ANSWER has anything about it up on its website today– and what they have there looks very compelling and well organized. UPJ still, four days later, has nothing.
This is by no means unusual. UPJ is a massive and unwieldy coalition of hundreds or perhaps thousands of groups. After 9/11, these groups weren’t even able to come together and agree how to form a single coalitional body for another 13 months. ANSWER held its first post-9/11 national anti-militarism demonstration on 9/29, 2001.
ANSWER is run by a small, tightly-knit group of organizers affiliated with something called the World Workers Party, which is either Maoist or Trotskyist, I’m not sure which. As indicated on this page on their website ANSWER hides the identities of its decisionmakers behind a listing of twelve organizational affiliates, with no names attached. Of those organizations I’ve only ever heard of Pastors for Peace, which I think does some very worthwhile things, including challenging the US economic embargo on Cuba.
But ANSWER remains a very shadowy organization. Its lack of accountability to the public is strongly indicated by the fact that the names of none of its leaders or officials are given on its website. And several people have accused ANSWER of using bullying, disruptive tactics to get its way. (E.g. here.) UFPJ, to its credit, has a strong commitment to using only nonviolent means, and requires that all affiliated organizations share that commitment.
By contrast with ANSWER, UPJ has a massively long list of affiliated organizations. Some of these are national organizations– including both AFSC and FCNL. Some are local, including my own home-town’s Charlottesville Center for Peace and Justice.
I guess that coordinating this huge coalition has been a real nightmare for whatever good souls have been attempting to do the job. Along the way– in response, no doubt, to the demands of some of the constituent groups– UPJ notably enlarged its focus from working purely on anti-war work, to include work for “justice” as well. It started out as “United for Peace”, and became “United for Peace and Justice”. This was, imho, a monumental mistake. Why try to build a big coalition addressing a broad range of issues when a big coalition that focuses on one issue would surely be more effective on that issue? (And then, once that “battle” is won, folks could consider moving on to a different coalition for the next big issue, as they feel appropriate…)
By broadening its agenda, UPJ seemed to be indicating that, after all, the war wasn’t such a huge issue in American life…
One other result of the UPJ folks’ no doubt well-intentioned desire to broaden their focus– and thereby also, by clear implication, to make the coalition one of considerable longevity into a far distant future– has been the establishment of a complex decisionmaking structure that looks like a bureaucratic nightmare… As portrayed very vividly on this page on their site. If you skim your way through that document to learn about how UPJ’s Steering Committee is formed, what its responsibilities are, etc., you can well understand why that body is sclerotically incapable of generating rapid responses to anything that’s happening in the real world.
Bottom line there: the UPJ Steering Committee consists of representatives of 40 constituent organizations, who serve in their representational rather than personal capacities. So in order to get any decisions at all made, each of those 40 has to go back to her or his own home organization and get a decision from them, first, before they can vote for or against a proposal in the Steering Committee…
To make matters even more complex, UPJ and ANSWER have, as I noted above, been contesting against each other, off and on, since the very beginning. Including now. On Monday, UFPJ reportedly issued this statement, in which it said:

has decided not to coordinate work with ANSWER again on a national level.

I said “reportedly” there, because that report comes from the leftist, Massachusetts-based website Znet. (You can also find it posted on After Downing Street, here.) But I notably could not find it anywhere on UPJ’s own website– either on the front page or in their “press room” page there, which today leads off with “news” dating from March 2004.
My God. What an organizational disaster all round. Inside UPJ; between UPJ and ANSWER; and in the antiwar movement in this country more broadly…
And this at a time, remember, when the strength of the antiwar argument is, virtually all by itself, winning enough converts around the country to have already substantially turned the tide of public opinion against the war.
Hey guys, we’re on our way to winning! Could you stop your bickering and your bureaucratic infighting just long enough to agree to work together– with each other, and with all the millions of other Americans who are against the war but who don’t necessarily share your full leftist agendas– just for long enough to give this antiwar movement the final shove of momentum that it needs??
And meanwhile, people– Iraqis, Americans, and others– are dying in Iraq because the war is dragging on so long…
I have a suggestion. Maybe we should all stop having any faith at all that either of those two existing organizations is capable of coordinating an effective antiwar movement at this time.
Maybe we should ask Tony Benn, the President of the British Stop the War Coalition, and his six very able Vice-Presidents, for permission to form a fraternal branch of their organization here.
Stop the War Coalition-US would adopt the same organizing approach that has proven so effective for the parent group in Britain:

Global organizing against the war

On Saturday, December 10, the British Stop the War Coalition hosted a very significant gathering of some 1,400 anti-war organizers from around the world, including from Iraq, the US, and many other countries. (Thanks to Dominic for nudging me to post about this. It’s actually much more important than the Iraqi elections.)
If you scroll down on that page, you can see the text of the principal statement issued by the conference. I shall paste the operative parts of it in at the end of this post. Crucially, the conference called on all opponents of the war around the world to start, now, organizing

international demonstrations on March 18-19 2006, the third anniversary of the war and invasion, calling for the immediate withdrawal of troops and an end to the occupation.

You can read a fuller account of the conference here.
I really salute our friends and colleagues in the British antiwar movement for the focus and organizing savvy that has enabled them to take the lead in coordinating global opposition to the war at this time. And I’ve been reflecting a little on why they have been so much more effective than the anti-war coaltion(s) in the US, which are currently in a situation of some chaos.
Two crucial reasons for the relative effectiveness of the British coalition are:

In this latter regard, as you can see from this page on their website, the Stop the War Coalition (STWC) is run by a committee consisting of some 50 named, British-based individuals, some of them very distinguished, along with representatives of around eight organizations. This is a classic British organizing method. It makes for transparency, accountability, and a relatively high degree (and speed) of responsiveness to events.
As for the situation here in the US, I think I need a whole new post to address that in…
Anyway, here are the operative parts of the statement adopted by the December 10th conference:

Addendum, Dec. 15, 10 a.m.:
Here’s a link to David Swanson’s account of some of his time in London for the meeting

At 2,000 U.S. dead

Today, the MSM reported the death
of the 2,000th US soldier in Iraq.

Given that the 1,000th such death occurred on September 7, 2004, nearly 18
months into war, it is clear that the pace at which these deaths are being
inflicted is increasing.

Over at Today in Iraq, new poster Whisker has a somber
roll-call
of the names of all the US dead. Check it out.

After reading that, I spent a few minutes at
this site
, and clicked on a couple of the tributes there.

I mourn all the victims of this war… Iraqi, US, other nationals… Each
one who died– woman, car-bomb victim, aid worker, child, insurgent, journalist,
man, diplomat, professional soldier– was an individual with his or her own
dreams, hopes, and fears; and with family members who loved them, and who have been left behind to
mourn. I think that’s the first thing to remember. A long
time after remembering that, we can get into issues of politics, responsibility,
and culpability. The vast majority of those who died were noncombatants

God comfort the bereaved, the great numbers of maimed and wounded, and all the prisoners in this war.

Bring the troops home.

Gen. Odom battles the war, the Dems, the MSM

This, from Gen. William Odom, who capped a distinguished career in the US Army by serving as Director of the National Security Agency from 1985 through 1988.
Just the title of this text is great, and explosive, since it bursts through much of the namy-pamby political “positioning” that so many antiwar folks (self included) have engaged in during discussions of the US presence in Iraq up until now.
Here is Odom’s title:
What’s wrong with cutting and running?
I got this text today via Today in Iraq, who got it from Antiwar.com, who got it from the Neiman Foundation’s “Nieman Watchdog“…
One very interesting question is why, if this text was already available at the Watchdog on August 3, it hasn’t received more attention in the US national discourse before now? This is a very germane questiont. The Nieman Foundation, located at Harvard University, is a very well-funded media-studies center that is connected with many very well-funded media outlets and media “personalities”. The context for Odom’s text seems to be that it was part of (perhaps a transcript of?) an interaction with journalists at the Foundation, perhaps in some kind of seminar with working journos, or whatever.
Odom started out there saying,

If I were a journalist, I would list all the arguments that you hear against pulling U.S. troops out of Iraq, the horrible things that people say would happen, and then ask: Aren’t they happening already?

He then lists nine of the key argument against pulling out, and one by one he refutes them. JWN leaders may be very interested to read these refutations– and to use them in discussions with fence-sitters… They are generally very well constructed and well worded.
But at the end of that sustained piece of argumentation on the substance of the troop-presence argument, Odom then gets into some very serious criticism of the Dem Party leaders and the US media establishment:

Look at John Kerry’s utterly absurd position during the presidential campaign.

Well, here was Gen. Odom, telling some of the leading lights of US (mainstream) journalism how to do their jobs! And also, by very strong implication, chiding them– and the Dem Party leaders– for not having done their jobs up in the past. Is it any surprise that his remarks somehow didn’t get amplified into the echo-chamber of what passes for US mainstream discourse for more than two months after he made them?
What can we all do to amplify them some more at this point?

Body part porn and war, part 2

This is a continued reflection on the latter portion of what I posted here yesterday.
First, I’ll just paste in here a lightly edited version of the bit that was buried down at the bottom of y’day’s post:
…going to the link that Mark from Ireland gave to the sex-porn-plus-violence website was very interesting. Warning to anyone who wants to go there: definitely not for the faint of heart.
That link is to a page there titled: Pictures From Iraq And Afghanistan – Gory; Moderators: chris, LordDefile, awwwwcrap22, Jonny2K, Jannemans14. It was a directory of other files you could go to. I clicked first on this one.
It started out with 19 photos of sort of “after-incident” reports. No captions or explanation of any of ’em. They each had dates which seemed to be in June and July of 2004. Some of the images were extremely disturbing: the head inside and outside the bowl; many burned bodies and body parts, etc.
As I said, no captions. But between each image and the next were what looked like links to other, explicitly described sex-porno (as opposed to pure-physical-violence porno) pages, also on the NTFU website. The juxtaposition is shocking/ sobering/ intriguing?? It tells us something profound about the inherently violent nature of sex-porno, I think…
But here’s one really interesting thing about that page w/ the 19 ghastly photos and the links to sex-porno photos: Below all that there was a discussion board, with most contribs dated late October 2004. The discussions were almost purely political and very intelligent, most of them not rhapsodizing about the violence or the war. Indeed, many of the people there seemed to be expressing a fairly strong anti-war stance. Like this one, from page moderator “Jonny2K”:

Yep. Sure was a good idea to send thousands of peacetime part-timers over to get involved with this shit. I’m thrilled that I’ll have to be (tax)paying for veterans’ psychiatric benefits for the rest of my life so that our current Cowboy-in-Chief can outdo his Daddy.

That one generated a lengthy subsequent discussion.
Then there was this exchange between JonnyK and his fellow moderator LordDefile:

Jonny2K wrote:

LordDefile commented:

Jonny2K responded:

Elsewhere on the page discussion contributor Sestos wrote:

up till now we have kept most of our pictures inhouse. Saddly those photos are more common then rare.

The following is my little subsequent reflection, today:
Note that Sestos there says “sadly”, and talks about cleaning up the dead bodies as “the worst detail you can have”. That man is not glorifying violence. I have a feeling some of the people who take those ghastly photos may be doing so as a way to “frame” the terrible experience they were having there, or to help them distance themselves from it.
Okay, perhaps that doesn’t explain why they choose to hand the photos around and share them later… But anyway, I am sure there would be hundreds of really interesting psychological studies people could do of what is happening to those men and women– some of them very young– who suddenly find that the “job” they signed up for includes not only killing other men and women, sometimes at very close range, but also cleaning up the debris afterwards… “so that the outside of the FOB does not have limbs and eyes all around it.”
No wonder Jonny2K had commented, “I’m thrilled that I’ll have to be (tax)paying for veterans’ psychiatric benefits for the rest of my life so that our current Cowboy-in-Chief can outdo his Daddy.” (Clear irony alert there, global readers: There is NO way that sentence could be read without understanding that Jonny’s use of the term “thrilled” there was completely ironic.)
I’ll just add in here one of my ongoing pet critiques of US warfighting, which is that society and the military in general engage in long and v. expensive training, marked by numerous parades, rituals, and other rites of passage, that are designed to turn an ordinary civilian person into a highly trained killer. But then when they exit the military, what kind of ‘de-programing the violence’ training do we give these people, and what kinds of deep, community-wide rituals that could mark their reintegration back into normal civilian life?
Almost none at all. That’s why I think my work on the re-civilianizing rituals in Mozambique, and what I’ve learned about such rituals elsewhere, including Uganda, seems so important.
… Anyway, there’s lots more that’s interesting in that NTFU website there. Maybe some JWN readers with stronger stomachs or more time could check out more of it. All comments on this phenomenon are very welcome, whether you’ve been to the site or not.
As for me, I’m still trying to catch up with the idea of having extremely serious conversations about the ethics of war on a porn website…

Achcar and Bacevich on exiting Iraq

Gilbert Achcar’s excellent answer to Juan Cole’s “not-an-exit” plan is here.
Kudos to Juan for posting the whole of Gilbert’s critique on his own site.
Gilbert makes many of the same points I would have made if I’d had more time to write yesterday. (I have a nasty big deadline I’m supposed to be meeting today. Right now. Yikes.)
Gilbert was quite right to give prominent mention to Andrew Bacevich’s important oped in the WaPo over the weekend.
For a slightly earlier “exchange” about Iraq between Juan and me (and Nir Rosen and Shibley Telhami), check out that long forum we had in The Nation at the end of July.

Peace demo # 82 or so

It was good to be back home this week and go to our regular Thursday afternoon peace demonstration in the center of town. (The Charlottesville Center for Peace and Justice had resumed the weekly peace presence in early December 2003. Hence the numbering system above.)
These past few months, we’ve been trying to urge our supporters to make a special effort to come out to the vigil on the first Thursday each month, even if they find it hard to make the other Thursdays. The weather has not been cooperating. Each of the months since we’ve had this policy, the afternoons of the first Thursday has been very rainy. Yesterday was no exception.
Nevertheless, six or seven of us did turn up. I’d taken my rain gear, and the rain was nowhere near as bad as I have sometimes experienced it there… But oh, yesterday as always in recent months, the demonstration was definitely worth doing! The honks of support that we got were extremely numerous– at some stages fully half of the passing drivers were participating.
Yes, we had a couple of people yelling bad things at us. I can understand if people were upset over what had happened in London. I was myself. But the general reception we got was great.
Two especially nice things happened. One woman driver rolled down her window and handed us a bag of truly delicious, home-baked cinnamon buns. (Note to self: remember next time that it’s well-nigh impossible to hold the sign, wave to passing motorists, and hold a cinnamon bun all at one time.) Then at a different point, one of our Charlottesville City Police officers came by on her bike, looking very snappy and efficient in her bike-police uniform. “Thanks for being there,” she told us cheerily as she passed.
Of course, one could interpret this as “Thanks for being there, on that sidewalk,” as opposed to in the median strip, which the police tell us– probably rightly– can cause a traffic hazard. But still, I realize that we really are lucky to live in a city where peaceful political protest is recognized and even welcomed as part of the normal order of things, and moreover is protected by the law.
Anyway, this is just to let our non-American readers know that the antiwar movement is alive and well in some spots of heartland America.
Also, it’s slowly but surely growing in influence nationwide. About time, eh?

Exit-from-Iraq movement gathering steam

Catching up with my reading after the NZ trip I see from the website of the Friends Committee on National Legislation that The first bipartisan resolution calling on the president to begin planning for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq was introduced in Congress on Thursday, June 16.
FCNL is a Quaker organization based in Washington DC that lobbies Congress on issues of concern to Quakers. Such as, right now, the need to push for a speedy and total withdrawal of US forces from Iraq.
The site notes that the bill introduced June 15 was sponsored by Republican Representatives Walter Jones (NC) and Ron Paul (TX) and Democrats Dennis Kucinich (OH), Martin Meehan (MA), and Lynn Woolsey (CA). It calls on the president “to announce before the end of this year a timetable for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq.”
It has the engaging subtitle of “Homeward Bound”.
You can read the text of the legislation here.
Elsewhere on the FCNL site, you can see a handily interactive map showing the location and some details about the 14 possibly “enduring” military bases inside Iraq for which President Bush sought funding in May 2005.
Relevant to what I wrote yesterday about the highly contested north-Iraq cities of Mosul and Kirkuk, note that two of those bases are in Mosul and one in Kirkuk.
Talking of big, lucrative construction contracts, there’s this, from Reuters yesterday:

signed the work order with Kellogg Brown and Root, a unit of Halliburton, in May.

was not made public when it was signed because the Army did not consider that such an announcement was necessary, she said.

So what do we imagine the profit-margin on a $4.97 billion contract is? It must be more than one billion.
How much of that profit will go into Dick Cheney’s blind trust and the bank accounts of his friends and former colleagues from Halliburton? And why did it take the US Army two months to decided that maybe the fact of this contract should be made available to the US public, after all?
… Well, anyway, it strikes me that all of those are just signs of the increasing desperation of an administration that is coming to recognise these two key facts:

Pull the troops out of Iraq in decent order while you still can, guys! Follow my 9-point plan for how to do it!