E-Mail This Article to a Friend What will it take? (continued)

David Cobb, 2004 Green Party candidate for President

The only thing stopping the troops from being brought home is the political will necessary to force the Congress to act appropriately.

The make-up of Congress, of course, can only be addressed in two- and six-year election cycles. I advocate and urge the American people to vote for what they want, because it is the only way to get it. If a Green Party peace candidate gets 10 to 15 percent of the vote, that will be a profound message that people are willing to, and will only, vote for peace candidates. That’s the way that you build a movement.

I’ve been traveling around the country, and there is a large anti-war sentiment out there, even in the so-called red states. When we look at the polling data, we see that the majority of Americans are without question opposed to the war.

The anti-war sentiment against the war in Iraq is as high as anti-war sentiment was against the war in Vietnam — the numbers are actually remarkably higher than at that stage of the illegal war in Vietnam. The voice is actually stronger, the actions are more powerful, but frankly the corporate media is not reporting on it. I don’t think that anybody can say that the corporate media during the Vietnam era was a dove, peacenik crowd. Yet they were actually just reporting on events as they happened, both in Vietnam and anti-war efforts. We are not seeing the same response from the corporate media. The corporate class has figured out how to use electoral politics, media institutions, the military, and even academic institutions to undermine the growing movements. How many people know that over 250 protesters gathered at the Halliburton shareholders meeting, with multiple arrests? It didn’t get any media play. During the Vietnam era, the actions of a dozen people resulting in arrest at that early stage was national news.

We have to be willing to engage in a broad diversity of tactics, and understand that the movement is not just about withdrawing troops from Iraq, but about creating a positive alternative of a peaceful foreign policy. We must be moving toward alternative energy sources, and toward a more socially just society here at home. It must be a broad-based movement, and the tactics to engage in include voting, protesting, writing letters to the editor of your local newspaper, and calling in to radio talk show hosts. We need to use every opportunity to have our voices heard. Little things like putting peace buttons on our clothing or on our automobiles, so that people can see that they’re not alone.

My platform was very explicit and very clear. I would have issued a public apology to the people of Iraq. That apology would have acknowledged that our troops were deployed based on lies, and that the United States government had actually armed and supported Saddam Hussein during his regime. The second thing would be to say that the we intend to withdraw and get our troops out.

But also we would acknowledge that US bombs literally destroyed the infrastructure and civil society of that country, and that we want to make sure that we are appropriately accountable, to the extent that we can be, for that destruction. The $82 billion that has been earmarked, mostly going to Halliburton and to the military, should instead be made available to the people of Iraq to rebuild their own country.

And fourthly, we ask the United Nations to convene a regional peace summit, that the United States would participate in but not lead. Bring in people from all aspects of civil society to help the process of genuine reconciliation, to allow the people of Iraq to go through their internal process of creating a genuinely democratic system. And by democratic, I mean that they choose what to do.

Mehrzad Boroujerdi, director, Middle Eastern Studies program, Maxwell School, Syracuse University

I don’t really see withdrawal happening any time soon. The US has really dug a big hole for itself in Iraq, and it’s one of those scenarios where you’re damned if you stay, damned if you leave. To bring any type of an order to the place, I think you’re looking at a minimum of a decade. Sooner than that would be way too idealistic.

All the indications are that the Iraqis are moving toward some sort of a civil war, or a period of major unrest. I’m referring, for example, to the make-up of the government, the parliamentary elections, and the way we have decided to handle the power brokers of the Sunni, Shiite, and Kurdish communities. Instead of creating any sense of coherence, that this is a united place, we have been dragged into playing the politics of notables. These sectarian identifications are not a good omen for the future of Iraq. For example, the Kurds seem to be articulating rather maximalist types of demands at this point, which the Sunnis will definitely disagree with, but I am afraid that even the Shiites down the road are going to raise objections to.

There are two different dynamics at work. One is the US attempt to control the insurgency and bring it under control — although I must say that I personally don’t use the word insurgency any more. I think it is now much too widespread to call it an insurgency; this is a resistance, and becoming more so every day.

The other dynamic is this enlarging gulf between the various communities in Iraq. At the end of the day we are going to end up with a situation where peoples or communities or elites are going to be branded as traitors for having cooperated with the US. Or, you are going to get back to a situation where instead of any type of civil society, you have the scenario that we have witnessed, under the best of circumstances, in a place like Lebanon, where power is divided along these sectarian fault lines. The president is from this community, the prime minister is from there, and it becomes an uneasy peace even under the best of circumstances.

A vacuum would be created if the US were to leave, and that does need to be filled in some way. Let us not forget the examples of some other places, like Rwanda, where the absence of an intervening force can cause calamity. But on the other hand, the continuing US presence, and how we seem to get everything wrong, by insulting the sensitivities of people, and roughing them up and so forth, is obviously rubbing a lot of people the wrong way — those who the US should not have alienated in the first place if it was hoping to get things under control.

The cost of this thing hasn’t quite sunk in with the American people. I’m seeing some numbers indicating a bill of $5 billion a month. The increasing human cost, and monetary cost, not to mention the political cost in terms of prestige and political capital that the US lost, I think sooner or later is going to make people become aware that this is a quagmire that you cannot easily get out of. So the sooner we can face the reality, rather than just acting as cheerleaders for the administration, the better off we will be.

A combination of willful ignorance on our part, plus a misreading of the realities on the ground, have joined hands to produce the dilemma that we are facing right now.

I think the press and academia have a responsibility to tell this administration that, look, your explanations have not been borne out by the facts. I mean, we heard so much about these foreign fighters, and then according to the government’s own numbers, of the people that they arrested following the attack on Fallujah, only six percent were foreign fighters. These are really troubling indicators of how the facts on the ground are going.

We are dealing with an immensely ideological administration that likes to portray things in simple black-and-white terms, but there is nothing black and white about it. It is so nuanced in so many ways, it’s so complicated by the factors of history, ethnicity, nationalism — you name it. I think they are coming to terms, that not only was it wishful thinking to talk about revamping and redrawing the maps of the Middle East, we are getting burned in one single instance, in Iraq.