How to End the Occupation of Iraq:
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How to End the Occupation of Iraq: Outmaneuver the War Proponents By Gareth Porter | April 4, 2005
For an anti-war activist of the Vietnam era, the current search for a political strategy for ending the U.S. occupation of Iraq brings to mind the very similar problems facing the movement to end the Vietnam War in 1968-69. In fact, a review of the strategy that the anti-war movement pursued at that juncture of the Vietnam War helps clarify the choices before the present movement and their likely consequences. It should serve as a warning against ignoring the possibility of embracing the negotiation of a compromise peace agreement with those resisting the U.S. occupation as an anti-war strategy. The political dynamics surrounding the occupation of Iraq are strikingly similar to those surrounding the comparable phase of the Vietnam War. As in Vietnam in early 1968, the U.S. war in Iraq suffered a serious setback last year, and most Americans concluded that the intervention had been a mistake. In fact, public opinion has soured on the current occupation even faster than it did for the occupation of South Vietnam. It was in August 1967, slightly more than two years after the first major U.S. troop commitment to Vietnam, when a majority of U.S. citizens expressed the belief that it had been a mistake to go to war in Vietnam. In the case of Iraq, a majority of Americans concluded that it was not worth fighting a war over Iraq as early as May 2004, a little more than a year after the invasion. Opponents of the U.S. military occupation of Iraq are struggling to find a way to translate widespread disillusionment with war into effective political pressure on the administration to withdraw, just as was the case in Vietnam in the late 1960s. The dominant influence of the ideologically driven right wing in the Republican Party, the Republican control of Congress, a divide within the Democratic party, and the influence of conservative media present formidable obstacles to a campaign to get U.S. troops out of Iraq. A different set of obstacles, including a significant fraction of the population who wanted to escalate the war further and a majority that was viscerally opposed to anti-war demonstrations, stood in the way of effective pressures on Nixon to get out of Vietnam. The strategy adopted by the Vietnam anti-war movement in the late 1960s was to demand unilateral withdrawal and to mount mass demonstrations to demonstrate public opposition to the war. In retrospect that approach can be seen as a strategic error that allowed the Nixon administration to prolong the war for four more years. The error lay in the failure to focus on developing a proposal for the negotiated withdrawal of U.S. troops under a peace settlement at a time when it could have been an effective form of pressure on Nixon. Advancing such a plan for peace negotiations now would avoid a battle over unilateral withdrawal that the anti-war forces are unlikely to win. Continued: http://mparent7777.blog-city.com/read/1178839.htm
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Political tags—such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth—are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire.
- Robert A Heinlein
The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.
- H.L. Mencken
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