> > Doug and Joel ought to remember that Iraq is *under foreign military > occupation conducting counterinsurgency warfare* with censorship, > checkpoints, house raids, arbitrary arrest and detention, no due > process, etc. -- i.e. Iraqis do not have freedom of speech. >
I'm not sure why I'm being characetrized as having argued that Iraqis have free speech. More accurately, I think that we can't just assume that people are lying or are duped or their own view of things is as "clear" as we think ours is.
I can't quite see the point of this argument. The (active) anti-war movement is irrevocably committed to "U.S. out of Iraq Now!" The debate is really over on that. No one is going to go out and organize in favor of some such slogan as "The U.S. should think about leaving as soon as it has established a stable order that the U.N. is willing to oversee and that is approved by at least 63% of the Iraqi people in a scientifically organized poll."
The march 20th demo near where I live used the slogan "US out/UN in." I just don't think the situation is as simple as "US out Now!" Of course they should get out; they should have never gone.
To my mind, there are some similarities to the situation in Haiti. After the US unleashes terrorist gangs (former death squad types funded by the CIA), sponsored now by the Republican Party, by the way, should we just say "US out Now!" and let the Haitians fend for themselves?
And regardless of exact percentage of Iraqis that (verbally) support this or that, it is clear that well over 10% of the Iraqi population is committed to expelling the U.S. That guarantees that upwards of 100,000 troops are permanently committed to taking continual casualties so long as the U.S. remains there. That in turn means
(a) that the u.s. lacks the military resources for further aggression elsewhere -- e.g., there can be no _direct_ u.s. intervention in Venezuela, and
(b) that the anti-war movement will be able to retain at least its present level of strength, with new people in it becoming steadily more committed to protracted struggle. It should even grow a bit after the present hiatus from politics ends sometime early in 2005.
Nearly everyone in the local group is committed to ABB, but they are also quite free from the sectarian crap that seems to infest most (not all) ABBs on the maillists. Hence it makes sense to a very large core to work hard to build for the future. And no one has let out a peep about popularity polls in Iraq. They want the troops home.
What I said in October 2001 seems to be still holding: the political future is much brighter than it was before 9/11.
Carrol
All very well put.
Joel Wendland http://www.politicalaffairs.net/article/articleview/70/1/14/ (interview with Iraq CP representative I did late last September)
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