7-23-07, 10:06 am
Listen to an audio version of this interview here.
Editor's Note: Prasad Venugopal is science editor of Political Affairs and a member of the steering committee of United for Peace and Justice.
PA: People are obviously tired and angry about the war, but there also might be a feeling that people are tired of struggling against the war. Could you could say something out the continuing relevance of the peace movement and organizations like United for Peace and Justice?
PV: I guess I’d have to take a different view of the second half of your question – that people are tired of fighting against the war. I didn’t get that sense from the recent Assembly that United for Peace and Justice recently had in Chicago. This National Assembly actually was the third for United for Peace and Justice and was held from June 22-24.
We had a very good representation from military families and veterans’ groups, who were really among the most vocal opponents of the war, and seemed to be quite energized, because from the military perspective, or from the perspective of the military and military families, more and more soldiers are either refusing to go back or are complaining about the extended tours of duty, the successive deployments, and more are signing on to the Appeal for Redress, and even more, through their families, are putting pressure on Congress to find ways to bring the troops home.
So I would say actually that people are not so tired of fighting the war. If they are tired, they are tired of fighting the Bush administration, which they find is not listening to them and is just arrogantly charting its own course.
In terms of the continuing relevance of the peace movement, one only has to look at the history of the support for this war in the United States. When the Iraq War started in 2003, there was majority support for the war – almost 2/3 or more of the people supported it – on the basis of mistaken assumptions and all the lies that were put forward, such as the connection between 9/11 and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and the weapons of mass destruction argument, all of which were either already known to be false or have turned out to be false.
But once it came to be known, through things like the Downing Street Memos, that the Bush Administration had pre-planned the war and had decided to go to war long before it became a public issue or the UN was involved, then people’s support for the war started crumbling.
It also started crumbling because the Bush Administration portrayed, very early on, a couple of months after the war started, that the “mission had been accomplished.” When it became very clear, in the year following, that the mission was not accomplished, that there was tremendous violence, that there was chaos, and that Al-Qaeda – not Al-Qaeda central, but a new group calling itself Al-Qaeda in Iraq – had been able to establish itself in Iraq as a result of all the violence and chaos and the sectarian battles. People now saw that the war was actually going really badly.
There is a huge difference between having a 2/3 majority supporting the war in 2003 and having almost a 3/4 majority against the war now. The question is how does one move from situation to the other, and in this the peace movement has to play a central role in continuing to push all the arguments just made: that the war was based on lies, that it is an illegal war, and that the Bush administration’s policies are making us less safe.
Therefore, the continuing relevance of the peace movement is that it has kept this issue on the front burner. I think the peace movement played a very significant role in making the war in Iraq a top issue in the 2006 elections, and I think the peace movement is going to play a crucial role in keeping Iraq the top issue in the 2008 election.
I also think that while we may not have been completely successful in transforming the American public's anti-war sentiment into anti-war actions either in Congress or in the White House, we are stilling working hard at doing this. It is a tough battle, but without the peace movement I do not think that Congress or the White House would have been forced to make the changes they have had to make over the last few months.
PA: Their is a majority in Congress that favors ending the war, but Republicans have been able to block it. Can you talk about the impact this might have on the Republicans in the 2008 elections?
PV: Actually, I think that it goes both ways – both the Republicans and Democrats. I agree with you that there has been a majority wanting to end the war in both the Senate and the House, and that this is a direct consequence of the fact that power was transferred from a Republican majority to a Democratic majority in the 2006 elections. I don’t see this happening if the Republicans were still in the majority.
Antiwar sentiment is actually pretty stable, and it’s the majority sentiment in both the Senate and the House. The problem, though, is that 1) the majorities are not strong enough to override the filibusters in the Senate, and they are not strong enough to be veto-proof in either the Senate or the House. This is the problem the Democrats are facing. As far as the issue itself is concerned, it is complex.
People want the war to end, but there is also an underlying sense of fear, which the Bush administration has been playing on: if the war were ended by a withdrawal of troops, then that would make Iraq much less safe, and that it would descend into chaos and violence, and become a haven for terrorists, and so on. People are worried about this, and I am not sure that the Democrats really have presented a plan that has unified the peace movement, or even brought people along who are not in the peace movement, but are in that anti-war majority, to say, yes, this is a great plan. We need to do this, and if we do this, not only will our troops be back home, but Iraq will be a safer place than it is now.
Part of the problem, of course, is that I don’t think that any plan can guarantee the stability of Iraq, and frankly the presence of US troops in Iraq is continuing to guarantee instability and more chaos. I think that once Congress begins to realize that – and more and more Republicans and Democrats, especially in the Senate, are beginning to realize that this is case, then the calls for troop withdrawal will become stronger.
The bottom line is that when the 2008 elections come around, the Republicans definitely are the most vulnerable because they have been supporting Bush, and Bush’s popularity ratings are at an all time low. Republicans who have not questioned Bush’s policies, especially on the war, are at the greatest danger of losing their seats.
On the other hand, Democrats who have been waffling on it or who have plans that really don’t seem to provide any sense of stability in Iraq, or even provide any sense that the troops can come home soon – all these compromises that some Democrats are making – are things that are going to make them vulnerable as well. For example, some Democrats want to leave a number of troops behind, either in Iraq or around Iraq, and so on. I’m not sure that this is what people want. Some people might buy into such arguments, but I don’t think any of them are strong enough for people to accept: it’s alright if we withdraw, say, 50,000 troops from Iraq and leave 100,000 there, or withdraw 100,000 and leave 50,000 there. I think they really want a withdrawal of all troops, but I don’t think the Democrats have come up with a plan that actually says – all the Democrats, I mean – this is what we are going to do, and here is the part of our plan that will provide for a more stable Iraq.
PA: The Bush administration has successfully convinced people that 1) terrorism is linked to Iraq and we will be vulnerable to it if we aren’t in Iraq, and 2) that well, yes, we did create a mess in Iraq, but now we owe it to them to stay there until the situation is secure.
PV: As far as the second issue is concerned, the notion of staying there, that’s it’s our problem – we broke it, so we now have to fix it and so on …. It is more a case of what I call the liberal version of imperialism, the notion that we own Iraq, that we own the situation, and therefore it is ours to fix. It never was ours to fix. It was never ours to invade, and therefore it is not ours to fix. And the only people who can really fix it are the Iraqis themselves. And do they need external help to do it? Yes, but not in an interventionist way, the way that the United States is doing. The best example of this imperialist attitude comes from the statements that were made at the beginning of the war, that we would be treated by the Iraqi people as liberators, and it is very clear that that is not what has happened. People were not coming out with flowers, they were coming out with guns.
As to the question of whether Iraq will be stable, I think this is a very tricky problem. It is a very complex issue. Certainly Iraq’s neighbors have a lot to say about the stability of Iraq, one way or the other. The root problem here is that the United States, as a result of its intervention in Iraq – starting well before the current war – has succeeded, over the last 10-15 years, in successfully sowing the seeds of the kind of sectarian strife that we are seeing. And having done so, the notion that we can now solve this sectarian strife and these competing ethnic, religious, and other divisions within the space of a few years, to me sounds more like fantasy. We have created a very serious problem, and I don’t think we can easily resolve that problem.
Now, does that mean automatically that if United States troops withdraw from Iraq, it will become a haven for terrorists like Al-Qaeda in Iraq or al-Qaeda Central, and so on? Again, this is more fear-mongering. Even underlying the chaos, there is still a good sense of Iraqi national identity, fractured though it may be. The question is, is it strong enough to be able to reassert itself? The presence of US troops is hampering that effort. If US troops were not present, because they are a divisive force, and if there was some help provided to the Iraqis, they could probably rebuild themselves to the point where a sense of Iraqi national identity was reasserted. An Iraqi national identity being reasserted, would be the strongest protection that they could have against Iraq becoming a safe haven for terrorists, which is something I am quite certain the Iraqis themselves don’t want, given that they have seen all the violence over the last 4 years as a result of it.
The fear-mongering that the Bush administration engages in is just as an untenable notion as “we can fix it.” I think that in some ways, actually, we know we cannot fix it, that the Iraqis have to do it themselves, but there are stronger indicators that if we withdraw the troops, the Iraqis themselves will be able to fix it in such a way that Iraq does not become a safe haven for terrorists.
PA: Another approach to clouding the issue the Bush administration has taken is to talk about the issue of progress. Bush says, “Well, progress is the key – if we make some progress than we can stay a little longer, and there is even talk about another surge to help make “progress” happen. Could you comment on that?
PV: The whole progress question has been purely a political game, especially on the United States side, the Bush administration side. Effectively this question of progress is a question of a group of people who write the questions, provide the answers to those questions, and then grade themselves on them. In fact, I think that is really what is going on, at least from the Bush administration side.
These benchmarks that have been established are benchmarks that were established by the Bush administration itself. They then, as they did recently, put out a report card on those benchmarks. However, they grade the progress on the benchmarks themselves. So I think, unfortunately, it has been purely a political game. Most of the important benchmarks from the Iraqi perspective I think have not been met at all. The Iraqis don’t have electricity for more than a few hours a day. They don’t have running water regularly. They don’t have jobs – there is a very high unemployment rate. They can’t even get cooking oil. They can’t get gasoline except at very exorbitant prices. And so far, of course, I haven’t mentioned the biggest problem facing them: constant daily violence that is destroying their sense of life, family and society. There are all the sectarian killings. Children are unable to go to school or university, and people are not able to go to their jobs even if they have them, let alone the high unemployment. In every important parameter of Iraqi society that the Iraqis want to see progress in, there has been massive failure.
If people are wondering if the United States is helping, or if there is some progress the United States is helping to achieve, by all those benchmarks, I think it is actually the opposite of progress. Because the United States is primarily focused on one thing, and that is the violence. They see it as a military problem and not so much as a political or social problem. Since they see it as a military problem, we get all these bizarre policies, such as we are going to support the Shiites since they are the majority and the Sunnis were in power with Saddam Hussein – so we’re going to support the Shiites. Thus they have become the dominant power in Iraqi politics, but then we have Shiite groups like Moqtada al-Sadr’s and others who are allied to Iran. So, in order to make sure that Iran doesn’t become stronger and the pro-Iran Iraqi Shiite groups don’t become stronger, we are going to help in, or we are going to turn a blind eye to, the arming of the Sunnis. We either help to arm them or we turn a blind eye when Saudi Arabia and other countries do. Therefore, we’ll support the Sunnis to keep the Shiites in check. Thirdly, on the one hand we are going to let the Kurds have a free rein in Northern Iraq, but we are also going to turn a blind eye when Turkey says that Iraqi Kurds having a free rein is a major threat to its stability, and therefore is preparing to invade Iraq. There have already been cross-border skirmishes and bombardments and so on. This in order to prevent the Iraqi Kurds from forming what Turkey believes is an Iraqi Kurdistan.
So, the United States and the Bush administration is seeing it as a military problem and is trying to solve it as a military problem alone, rather than as the political and social problem it is. Even when we consider the elections that have taken place in Iraq, all the way through the Bush administration has always been seeing it as a question of who is in power and who is not in power, how to we keep everybody in check, rather than trying to see how we can build a stable, unified Iraq where people will have control over their own lives. Now, once and a while you will see some policies where they might say that we need to build some kind of unified Iraq, but their actions suggest otherwise.
PA: You said that we don’t own Iraq and we can’t fix the problem, but what do we owe them? What are some steps we could take to bring the crisis to a resolution?”
PV: Well, in answer to your first question, we owe them a lot. We have destroyed their country, and I think that at the very least we need to help rebuild their economy, not in the interventionist ways we have been doing, such as trying to give all the contracts to American contractors and so on. We should try to help rebuild the economy through war reparations, through getting the United Nations and other donors to provide the money to help the Iraqis to rebuild their country themselves, to get them jobs. Just as one example, the oil industry needs to be rebuilt. It is antiquated and has been crippled as a result of the sanctions that the United Nations imposed on Iraq as a result of US demands. They need a massive infusion of capital and a massive infusion of labor and technology. Well, the Iraqis have been able to provide the labor and technology for all these years themselves, and even though millions of Iraqis have become refugees in neighboring countries, and so on, I think many of them would come back if the felt that there was some semblance of security – I mean job possibilities and the ability to earn a secure livelihood. If they felt there was that sense of security, then they would come back, and I think that is the sort of thing the oil industry especially needs.
The other things is that the Americans need to extract themselves from the equation. Whether that is done through the United Nations, the Arab League, or other bodies, we really need more partners in this process. We can’t have the Bush administration unilaterally determining what is happening in Iraq, which is the case now. What we really need are more partners in the process? And especially we do need to talk to Iran and Syria, because they are neighboring countries and have a lot at stake in what happens in Iraq, and therefore we really need to talk to them. We need to talk to Turkey and Saudi Arabia as well, and try to establish some sense of what is going to happen in terms of policies for rebuilding Iraq. I think probably the best place to start is through the United Nations, even though (and people in the peace movement make this point), even though the UN is dominated by US interests. Still it would be different than having the US unilaterally determine what happens in Iraq.
I know that we say persistently that we should set a date for withdrawal, but I think that there really is no basis for setting a date, as a demand. Rather, I think a demand that says, “Bring the troops home now!” is a better demand than a demand that sets a date. The reason for this is that I think it is very difficult to establish a basis for setting a date. There is no political basis – we come back to the benchmarks we’ve been talking about. How do you know if you have reached the benchmarks if the people who are providing – and evaluating – the benchmarks are also the ones creating them? So if we demand that a date be set for withdrawal of troops, my question would be: on what basis can one set a date? I think a clearer demand is to bring the troops home now, because that indicates two things: 1) Everybody knows that if you start withdrawing troops, it is going to take many months and is not going to happen overnight, and 2) it recognizes that none of these benchmarks really make much sense, and we therefore need a new way of dealing with things, so that demanding the withdrawal of US troops now would actually precipitate a new course, rather than something like setting a date.
