Stop the War?

[Mikey_C]

Take a look at this and this (if you can't make out Galloway's rantings, he repeats them in print here. )

Now, once upon a time I was one of the two million people who marched the street against the invasion of Iraq. OK, the movement wasn't all that it is cracked up to be, and one hand to contend with undesirables such as the SWP, but on the whole there was a sense of unity and a firm feeling that we were on the side of right.

Now, however, it looks like the "Stop the War" campaign has become the "Support One Side of the War" campaign. This has been a gradual process: starting really with support for the dodgy "Iraqi Resistance" and their trade-unionist murdering ways.

Then, in the wake of 7/7 we had appeals from respected people on the Left that we should "understand" the actions of random mass killers and religious fanatics, and that their actions were the logical (if not the justifiable) consequences of government policy.

Next came the "Danish cartoons" fiasco, at which we were supposed to stand alongside bloodthirsty mobs to support the forces of religious reaction against free speech.

Now it seems to have become "right wing" to stand up for the gains of Enlightenment. Gay rights, women's rights, freedom speech: out of the window. Post-colonial guilt and knee-jerk anti-Americanism are all that you need. In the weirdest twist of all, as left-wing anti-semitism raises its ugly head among Hezbollah's armchair supporters, the nazi BNP claims to have renounced it(!)

What is going on in the world? I don't need reminding of the horrors taking place in Lebanon, I'm just wondering where I can find calm, rational people alongside which I can voice my concerns and hope for a peaceful solution.

Or is there no such hope, and do we just have to stand on one side or another? In which case, I'll just have to tune out, turn off and drop out.

[L'Etranger]

I think, you are probably pretty well on course if you detect the confusion at all! That is already a great advantage.
As a true to the bone Moorcockista-Anarchist you are bound to follow both your heart and natural common sense, at the same time you have a considerable sense for tact and will always defend the weak. You and your position are not for sale and you don't just buy everything your party, your chosen politician, vicar, ayatollah, union or coffee house round says is right. (Or left for that matter.)

[PsychicWarVeteran]

Man, I can't put it any better than L'E has done here. He's spot on.

Keep fighting the good fight, Mikey. There are lots of people out there just like you, it's just that they often get drowned out amidst the din of the loudmouthed freaks. That's why it's important to keep on keeping on. Don't tune out. Let your love and rationalism out-yell the hate and psychopathy!

See, I told you I couldn't put it as well as L'E!

[Oren]

In the weirdest twist of all, as left-wing anti-semitism raises its ugly head among Hezbollah's armchair supporters, the nazi BNP claims to have renounced it(!)

Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez, often endorsed by the radical left as their champion, has just met with Mahmoud Ahmandinejad, the leader of Iran, an extreme theocracy. Ahmandinejad has been announcing over and over that the Holocaust is a fabrication. The two leaders had a great time together and pledged their unconditional support to each other. The same Hugo Chavez hinted in his last Christmas speech that the Jews control the world's wealth.

It's amazing to see how these days leaders who are supposed to be at the opposite extremes of the political spectrum, would band together, and would use anti-Semitism as a tool to further their policies and garner support.

[Oren]

An Israeli living in Spain went to a leftist anti-war demonstration in Madrid. He called for the end of hostilities on both sides and for a peaceful solution. His only mistake was that he brought an Israeli flag with him (and not a Lebanese or Palestinian as the others). He soon found out that the demonstration wasn't really against the war, but rather against Israel. He was beaten and scarcely avoided serious injury. His flag was taken from him and torn to pieces.

Where is the sense of unity in the worldwide Left?

[Mikey_C]

Cheers, guys - I'm glad there are good people out there who understand where I'm coming from.

The Chavez thing - I wasn't convinced that his Xmas Eve comments were intended to be anti-Semitic, but he has some of the worst friends: Mugabe, Lukashenko and now Ahmadinejad. There was much praise for him at our union conference this year, but also great sympathy for a trade union speaker from Zimbabwe who feared arrest when she stepped off the plane. Yet another contradiction noone wished to draw attention to.

Oren's post sums up the situation. You can feel the ugly energy coming from these protests. Unfortunately, the "worldwide left" is very weak at the moment, as neoliberalism is more or less universally accepted as the economic orthodoxy. So instead, the likes of Galloway are hitching a ride on someone else's train. You only need to look at the history of the Tudeh Party of Iran to see where that will lead.

[Mikey_C]

Sorry to keep playing the same tune, but I found this article from Canada which sums up my thoughts:

StopWar’s peace is about opposing Israel

Things started at a July 18 demonstration in Montreal, when a small group of young Lebanese showed up with a sign that read “Peace for Lebanon and Israel”. They were shouted at and shoved around and driven off. Their sign was torn up. The event then proceeded, with people carrying placards that bore the flag of the fascist organization Hezbollah and pictures of Hezbollah’s rabidly anti-Semitic leader, Hassan Nasrallah.
Before the month was out, you could fairly mark July 2006 as one of the most squalid months in the history of the “left” in Canada.
On July 22, at a Toronto rally sponsored by the Canadian Peace Alliance, there were Hezbollah flags, strapping young men in Hezbollah T-shirts, Nasrallah’s fat, stupid face in placard-sized photographs, and pictures of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a Holocaust denier and lyncher of homosexuals.
To be clear about the depths of this squalor: Hezbollah glorifies death and war to the point of making pornography out of it, calls Jews the descendants of “apes and pigs”, and happily disseminates such fascist classics as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Nasrallah himself is helpfully unambiguous about his hatred of Jews: “If we searched the entire world for a person more cowardly, despicable, weak, and feeble in psyche, mind, ideology, and religion, we would not find anyone like the Jew. Notice, I do not say ‘the Israeli.’?”
To be clearer: while the Canadian Peace Alliance has been busy with its “Don’t Attack Iran” campaign, Ahmadinejad’s regime, which is explicit about wanting Israel obliterated, has been busy funding and arming Hezbollah and trying to assemble a nuclear arsenal for itself.
Meanwhile, in Vancouver, on the same day that trade unionists and “peace” activists were marching under Hezbollah banners in Toronto, about 300 people gathered at the Vancouver Art Gallery for a rally cosponsored by Vancouver’s StopWar Coalition. The rally’s main speaker was Rafeh Hulays, who has openly declared in a letter to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that Hezbollah’s kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers—the event that set off all the bloodletting in Lebanon—was “legal, moral, and necessary”.
Shortly after his July 22 address to the Vancouver peace rally, Hulays was again writing to Haaretz, admitting that he didn’t believe in peace anyway. “I no longer do,” he wrote. “There are many monsters that need to be dealt with. Israel happens to be the biggest, ugliest, and most dangerous.”
A week later, the StopWar Coalition held another demonstration on the steps of the Vancouver Art Gallery, this one to protest “Canadian complicity in Israeli war crimes”. This time the featured speaker was Hanna Kawas, who openly campaigned against Ottawa’s 2003 decision to ban three notorious Palestinian terrorist groups. The StopWar Coalition joined him in that effort.
Odd thing for an antiwar group to do, you might say, since war is the reason these terrorist groups exist.
But this isn’t about peace at all—peace is just code for opposing Israel. This is about war.
Actually, two wars.
One is the just struggle of the Palestinian people for freedom, for their own state, and for peaceful coexistence with Israel. The other is an Islamist war against modernity, against liberalism, and, as always, against the Jews. In that larger war, the Palestinian cause is a cover, the Palestinian poor are fodder, and there is no shortage of useful idiots to make light work of it all.
Take the famous British demagogue George Galloway, for instance. While Nasrallah’s face was being paraded around downtown Toronto on July 22, Galloway, at a similar rally in London, fairly screamed these words: “I am here to glorify the leader, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah.”
Then there are Galloway’s friends in the Socialist Workers Party, whose Canadian affiliates provide the key staff positions for the Canadian Peace Alliance, the Toronto Coalition to Stop the War, and the War Resisters Support Group. And on it goes.
Still, StopWar is perfectly entitled to argue that pro-war, fascist Jew-killers should be allowed to raise money, propagandize, and otherwise operate freely in Canada. Argue away, you might say to StopWar. Just not in my name.
But that won’t quite do if you’re a member of the B.C. Teachers’ Federation, or the Hospital Employees Union, or the Vancouver Green party, or the New Democratic Party, or the United Church of Canada. If you belong to any one of about 160 organizations that StopWar lists as endorsing members, or if you simply happen to live in Vancouver or Burnaby, then StopWar is speaking in your name.
And don’t you dare try to speak for yourself about these things. You will be told you don’t know what you’re talking about, or that you’ve “bought into” something called the neoconservative agenda, or, worse still, that you’re a Zionist.
So, in July 2006, while Israel was fighting for her very life, and Lebanon and Palestine were being ground to bits, and Iraq was descending deeper into a hell of throat-slitting and suicide bombing, Canada’s “antiwar” left had openly opted for war.
And the words on the placards left no doubt about which side it was on: “We Are All Hezbollah”.

Also, this poem from Steve Cohen:

LIVE DANGEROUS – SHOP AT MARKS AND SPENCERS
I don’t want to be a court jew
A court jew kneeling before the throne of the idiot anti-zionist
The court jew in the palace of the stupid anti-imperialist
Martin Buber where are you now
You who refused to kneel before the ultimate socialism of fools – anti-semitism.
You who abstained from being the house nigger
From being an Uncle Tevye

I don’t want to shout out “not in my name”
(and my name is Y’Israel Zev ben David)
Instead I want to scream out “Jews don’t need to disassociate themselves from collective guilt cos there is no collective guilt”

I wanna be a dangerous Jew, a frightening Jew, a threatening Jew, a communist Jew, a revolutionary Jew
I don’t wanna be an easy protest Jew
And today the easy protest is to demand the blood-stained might of Israel , gets out of Lebanon, gets out of Gaza, turns back on the road to Damascus, ceases its recreation of armeggedon
You don’t have to be a socialist to demand this, you don’t have to be a Trotskyist to demand this
You don’t have to be a Cohen or a Levy or a Gluckstein to demand this
Or a Y’Israel zev ben David to demand this
You just have to be sane
And in the name of sanity demand it!

Being a dangerous Jew, a frightening Jew, a threatening Jew, a communist Jew, a revolutionary Jew means living on a different planet
The planet of Truth
As Trotsky said “Only the truth is revolutionary”
And the truth is that Hizbollah are not the Sandanistas, are not the ANC, are not the IRA, are not Gueverrists, are not anti-colonialists, are not Spanish Republicans, Sparticists or Bolsheviks
Are not a fitting emblem for our tee shirts

The truth is that they are fascists, neo-fascists , proto fascists
They are feudalists, medievalists,obscurantists
Theocratic collectivists
Seeking to re-establish the Caliphate
A thousand years too late
Without the science, the medicine, the mathamatics, the poetry, the philosophy
Just the Protocols of Zion

Concealing these simple truths
Is not part of any honest anti-war movement
It is part of a dishonest anti-war movement
It is part of a pro-war movement
It is the 1930s. And it is the 1940s.
It is the same movement which saw the red flags of the Israeli Communist Party unfurled in solidarity with Haj Amin al-Husseini
The Mufti of Jerusalem
Idiot anti Zionist
Idiot collaborator with Adolf Hitler

I wanna stand between the anti-zionist picket of Marks and Spencers
And the Zionist picket of the anti-zionist picket of Marks and Spencers
Denouncing the massacres
Wearing the mascara
Being camp
The third camp
Asking do you want to buy a picket or two.

Asking do you enjoy kids’ games.
So let’s play Spot The Difference
A Palestinian child in a two foot coffin
An Israeli child in a two foot coffin
Lids closed
Where do you put your Stop The War flags?
Your Hizbullah flags?
Your Zionist flags?
Your red flags?
Let me tell your where to put them.

I hate this poem
Rather I hate writing this poem
Rather I hate the truths behind this poem
Where sticking simply to the easy protest
Would be an easier way to win friends
But not to influence people

Because the enemy of your enemy can also be another of your enemies
And the friend of your friend can be a bastard reactionary
So don’t dance with the boy who danced with the girl who danced with the prince of darkness
It’s just an accident of geography and sperm direction that Jews weren’t born Muslims
And vice versa
It can get worser
So fight for workers unity
Cut out the communalists
The Board of Deputies and the Muslim Association
So fight for workers unity
Cut out the opiates
The synagogues and the mosques
So fight for workers unity
Sling out the middlemen
The Jihadists and the Israeli leadership
So fight for workers unity

Get a new tee shirt
In my name

Great stuff!

[nalpak retrac]

Nice work, Mikey.

[Doc]

Nothing wrong with playing the same tune, Mikey_C! If the drumbeat fits...

[Mikey_C]

Looking around the web, it appears that many people understand where I'm coming from. Here's Ann Pettit, the original "Greenham Common woman";

“I can understand where Israel is coming from,” she says. “I’m not a fan of Hezbollah. It worries me a lot.”

[Morgan Kane]

The anti globalisation movement Attac and the social forum have the same problems.

M Tariq Ramadan and consorts have explained that " as muslims " they are against globalisation and that they have their place in the movements. Result : lecture about islamic ideas for freedom of women and so on and insults for people insisting that fundamentalist have not theirt place in a movement who wants frreedom and equality for everybody .....

A newspaper as " le monde dipliomatique " ( in france the paper of the anti globalisation movement ) has been torn on these subjects and israel and has lost many readers such as me .......

For my ideas on the war, see the relevant topics ...

[voilodian ghagnasdiak]

An article regarding a planned Israeli pre-emptive nuclear strike against Iran's nuclear facilities was on CNN yesterday morning and then promptly yanked later on in the day. If this is not propaganda and holds any truth in it....shit is going to hit the fan bigtime. There will definitely be Iranian retaliation and an Islamic uprising which will lead the world deeper into a mid-east war.

Daily Star:
Israel has drawn up secret plans to destroy Iran's uranium-enrichment facilities with tactical nuclear weapons, Britain's Sunday Times newspaper said. Israel denied the report, while Iran warned of dire consequences in the event of any such attack.

http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article....ticle_id=78327

[Miqque]

In reading Tom Clancy's Fighter Wing, I've read many comments of the commanders from Desert Storm ('91) and the lessons and intelligence gathered from military performance. It seems the common opinion that the elder President Bush also went pell-mell into battle without an exit strategy; and this seems a Bush family trait. At this point by examining the deployment in Baghdad and other towns in Iraq what we seem to have is a mess. It seems to me, with only minimal military knowledge, that the first thing to address would be relief of the current troops. Then, with at least a quarter of them fresh, a pullback to coordinated bases of operation designed to support, in strike teams and with specific mission objectives, deploying out to support hot spots as we turn areas over to Iraqi army and police. THis should take about six months, minimum; but would allow for a focus to shift from anti-US sentiments to simpler anti-authority sentiments (taking authority for one's own actions and a healthy dose of the individual overseeing and participating in directing government actions being at the heart of a practicing democracy). Being mad at police or their own army might well be the shift needed to get Iraq back to the business of functioning autonomously as a country.

As Iraqi forces learn the ropes, we (coalition forces) should continue to condense in smaller, highly-protected bases - sort of like a sprinkling of embassies. When pull-out time comes, we should deploy OUT of Iraq as fast as we got in.

There remains the major question of "security in the region". After occupying the country, it seems proper to establish a solid base, probably south near the Kuwaiti border, where we can place an air team with some of the bigger, beefier nastier weapons. Obviously we must be close enought to stike Iran if they continue being bad about theior nuclear program; and we must never leave countries like Syria, Lebanon, Jordan or any of the others out of consideration. As what we really have is a region of fighting religious sects ill-defined by artificial country borders, the critical issue is propaganda. It is critical to never lie. Only truth will help set the region free, so radio, television, internet and the occasional drop of flyers and notices will all be necessary to improve access to the truth (both as to the military, what a democracy is, and the actual real words of the Qu'ran that have NOT been shaded, misinterpreted and biased by various teachers). We have a situation more akin to East Germany in the Cold War in Iraq now, maybe with more fiorefights in the streets. We need to repeat the information that used to go out via Voice of America and other propagandic methods to influence the common folks.

Once we pretty much get out of Iraq we (the USA) must focus on rebuilding our air power. Much equipment will go off line in 2020, and that ain't so far off. Development cost have basically been spent; what we need to do is invest (probably via tax cuts) in the aerospace companies ready to start producing more airframes and specific conversions to state-of-the art aircraft. No doubt our ships and submarines could do with some replacing; as well as the elderly space shuttle fleet. This is lots and lots of jobs and business domestically, and we do very well in selling commercial airframes around the world. To be blunt, we need lots of new equipment. The standard automobile has better electronics and GPS and so forth than the best of the fighter aircraft. We also need new air-refueling tankers, heavy lifters, and fighters themselves. (After the last order for 442 fighters is filled, there are noo more in the pipeline. We need about 2,000 more to replace old ones and bring all aircraft up to snuff. Mind that a pilot costs about a million bucks to trains, so our ongoing costs are huge.)

We've replaced software and tires and other stuff, but it's time to buy a whole new car. We can only do that if we stop, as soon as possible, the years of draining away our resources in Iraq. It's time for that country to come together and attend to itself.

[Morgan Kane]

Don' t forget Iraq is just a piece of the puzzle ... there is another piece where the strategical and situation is worst than in Iraq called Afghanistan...

Taliban are winning the war, politically and militarily and every body does as if nothing was hapening ...

[David Mosley]

At this point by examining the deployment in Baghdad and other towns in Iraq what we seem to have is a mess.

That's the understatement of the year!

Thanks for the analysis, Miqque. Very useful.

I believe one of the concerns is over the probity of both the Iraqi armed forces and the security/police services. Anecdotal information seems to suggest that most of the people who were in place at grass roots levels under Saddam are now back in their old jobs. behaving pretty much as before, albeit under the auspices of a new regime, which has yet to prove itself.

I saw an interview with the late Frank Herbert the other week, where he said that he didn't entirely believe in the adage 'power corrupts' but rather he thought that 'power attracts the already corrupt'. It remains to be seen I think whether the new 'democratic' regime of Iraq will prove to be beneficial both to the Iraqi people and to the interests of the West as a whole or whether they will pursue policies of 'self-interest'.