One thing many
people have gradually come to realize is that we have not seen such an
effort yet, only pretenses of it. Certainly, some who now disapprove of
what the Congress just passed still think they were right to support
what it was doing two months ago, and it's less important to return to
that debate than to get our act together from here on out. But we are
more likely to make wise decisions in the future if we learn the right
lessons from our mistakes. So, a quick review may be in order.
Two
months ago, peace activists were pushing hard for the House to allow a
vote on an amendment by Barbara Lee to end the war (or at least move
significantly in that direction). Numerous activist groups sided with
Speaker Pelosi and the Democratic leadership and opposed the Lee
amendment in favor of a supplemental spending bill to end the war. The
push back from principled peace activists against the supplemental was
muted by concerns that if the Lee amendment passed, then the
supplemental would be a good thing.
On March 22nd, the
Democrats decided not to allow a vote on the Lee Amendment. So the
debate became clearly one for funding the occupation or not funding the
occupation, but there was only one day to lobby before the vote, and
numerous groups were pushing the idea that the bill was the best we
could get and actually took serious steps to end the occupation of
Iraq.
This flew in the face of the simple fact that no bill at
all would have been better than this one, not to mention that the bill
promoted the theft of Iraq's oil, failed to use the power of the purse
to end the war, and allowed Bush to "waive" other measures he might not
like. The Democratic leaders themselves didn't pretend this was a bill
to end the war, so much as a bill to move the war to Afghanistan. But
the media lapped up the astroturf-roots talk about peace and standing
strong against Bush. Here's a video of Rep. Lynn Woolsey opposing the
bill in a debate with Bob Borosage who promotes it as the best antiwar
bill possible.
But even Woolsey, and Congresswomen Waters and
Lee, played along with the game. They planned to vote No, but promised
Pelosi they would not ask any other members to follow them. Only
Congressman Dennis Kucinich pledged to vote No and urged his colleagues
to join him. Peace activists demanded that standard from other members
and an unfortunate split developed between those taking such a strong
position for peace and those activist groups following Pelosi's lead a
split that may be healing as the Democrats' position has worsened ever
so slightly over the past two months.
But this history lesson
could begin much earlier. Pelosi's plan for her first 100 hours as
speaker didn't even mention Iraq. She pledged that defunding the
occupation and impeaching the warmakers were both "off the table."
Democratic Party-led activist groups take her "off the table" pledge
seriously on impeachment, but pretend the one on the funding of the
"war" never happened. This is an advantage because it means more people
lobby her to end the war. But it's a disadvantage if we're
insufficiently skeptical about what she's doing.
Pelosi used
every dirty trick imaginable to badger Congress Members into voting for
this spending bill, including threatening to take away chairmanships
and to back primary challengers and deny election support. On March
23rd, the House passed the supplemental. The corporate media and the
groups following Pelosi called this a vote against a war, not a vote to
continue funding an occupation. This made the position of peace
activists almost incomprehensible, because we opposed the Republicans
who voted no in opposition to the little bells and whistles and
nonbinding deadlines, we opposed the two Republicans who voted yes to
fund the occupation, we opposed the bulk of the Democrats who voted yes
to fund the occupation, and we praised the eight Democrats and two
Republicans who voted No for the right reasons. The media was
completely incapable of telling this story, but Congress Members and
the leaders of activist groups heard it quite clearly from constituents.
By
March 27th, the Democratic leadership had announced its willingness to
compromise with Bush and weaken further the weak bill that had just
been voted on. But activists' eyes were moving to the Senate and
devising a new way to get distracted. We focused on urging Senators to
pass Jim Webb's amendment to discourage an attack on Iran We failed to
focus strongly on opposition to the money that could fund an attack on
Iran, money that is now in Bush's pocket. On March 29th, the Senate
passed the supplemental and did not even vote on an Iran amendment.
Again, the media called this a vote against the "war."
On April
25th and 26th the House and Senate passed a compromise version
supplemental, which had been watered down further from what both the
House and Senate had originally passed.
And on May 1st Bush vetoed the bill.
Now,
here's where things get really weird. Even though the bill funded the
occupation, required stealing the oil, permitted an attack on Iran, and
contained nothing useful with any teeth in it, the story line had been
spread so effectively that this was a good bill, that even the peace
groups that had opposed its passage supported protesting its veto. And
of course the veto was objectionable. Bush opposed the tiny impositions
in the bill on his dictatorial power. But once you've protested the
vetoing of a bill to fund an occupation of someone else's country, you
pretty well have got yourself stuck promoting a new bill to do the
same. And you can either back a bill with the same or greater
likelihood of being vetoed, or you can back one less likely to meet
that fate. And there can be no question which route the Democratic
leadership will take. So, the question becomes whether you are yet
ready to break with them, even if as it turns out they break with
themselves and oppose their own bill after they support it.
But
there was an important act left in this drama before we reached that
deus ex machina. On May 7th the progressive Democrats in the House cut
a deal with the leadership. They would be permitted to vote on a good
bill to end the occupation (which the leadership would not whip for and
which would fail), and in exchange they would turn around an hour later
and vote to fund the occupation with an even weaker bill than last
time.
The new supplemental did not contain even a hint of a
deadline to end the war, and for most of the month of May almost no one
noticed or remarked on this state of affairs. Media coverage by May 8th
had completely dropped any mention of the absence of a deadline in the
bill. The focus was all on "benchmarks" and how many months of the
occupation would be funded at a time. It was as if the presence of even
a nonbinding deadline in the vetoed bill had been completely eradicated
from history and memory, even though that deadline had been Bush's
primary professed reason for vetoing the bill. The story now was of the
Democrats getting tough and standing up to Bush with "benchmarks" even
though this meant sending him exactly what he wanted, a bill with no
deadline, and even though he supported all of the "benchmarks."
So,
what did peace groups and other activist groups do? They promoted Yes
votes on Jim McGovern's bill to end the occupation (or at least move
significantly in that direction), and almost completely ignored the
vote coming an hour later on funding additional months of "war". So, on
May 10th, a huge number of Democrats (169) voted for McGovern, and then
all but 10 of them turned around and voted to fund the war. And then we
thanked them. They had played us like a fiddle.
The Senate was
far less slick. It didn't hold its votes an hour apart, but separated
them by two weeks. On May 16th, the Senate voted down an amendment by
Russ Feingold to end the occupation (or at least move significantly in
that direction). The vote for the money was still to come, and who had
voted right on Feingold would be forgotten by then.
Meanwhile,
something quite unusual and dramatic happened. By May 23rd, Congress
Members Pelosi and David Obey had turned against their own bill. They
were going to make sure it came up for a vote and passed, but they were
going to vote against it. Once this happened, Pelosi-following activist
groups, too, turned against the bill. And the absence of a deadline in
the bill reemerged in the media with a vengeance. Now everyone suddenly
noticed that the bill no longer had any sort of, even nonbinding,
deadline in it. This was a bill for endless war. The "benchmarks" were
forgotten. The short-term funding talk was forgotten. And people were
even beginning to see through the game.
While Pelosi was
"opposing" the bill, she was also beginning to take heat from all sides
for having brought the bill up for a vote and assured its passage. She
voted No, but she did not whip, cajole, threaten, or bribe her
colleagues to join her against the occupation as she had done to get
them to join her for it. During the debate on the floor prior to the
vote, Pelosi, Obey, and others made clear that they wanted the bill to
pass and considered it necessary "for the troops." Obey remarked on the
floor:
"I hate this agreement. I'm going to vote against the major portion of this agreement even though I negotiated it."
Then
he went on to defend his record of "funding the troops" and blamed
Bush's veto for preventing money from getting to the troops. There was
no chance Obey would let this bill be voted down.
No one
mentioned that not a single troop gets a single dollar because the
occupation continues, or that the Congressional Research Service said
in April that the occupation was already funded through July, or that
polls of troops in Iraq last year found that a strong majority wanted
to end the occupation last year, or that most of the money goes to
occupation-profiteers.
Republicans attacked Obey for voting
against his own bill. Nobody criticized him for introducing it in the
first place. But activists and the media were waking up to the game.
And Bush's statement after signing the bill containing his own
"benchmarks" the next day was along the lines of "I was born and raised
in this here briar patch."
From the left to the center,
everyone got this one right as soon as it was too late. Pelosi had
joined the Republicans to put a Republican bill on the floor, had
allowed right-wing Democrats to assure its passage, and then had
pretended to rejoin the Democrats in voting against it. Reactions
ranged from planning for the next vote, to a demand for protests and
phone calls, to a plan to recruit primary challengers against the most
pro-war Democrats, to a demand that all peace-loving souls reject the
entire Democratic Party and either back the Green Party or (if you
don't care about poor people or think that right now keeping people
alive has got to take precedence) support the Ron Paul Republicans.
There's
only one Democrat in Congress with a completely clean record through
this process: Dennis Kucinich. He argued against invading Iraq prior to
the 2003 vote that authorized it. He published his case against it and
helped persuade many of his colleagues to vote No. Kucinich challenged
the legality of the war in court in an effort to prevent it. He
proposed a detailed plan to end the occupation of Iraq over three years
ago. His current plan is found in his bill HR 1234.
Kucinich
is the only Democrat who has voted against every new funding bill for
the occupation and always urged his colleagues to vote against the
occupation as well. He was one of only seven who voted against the Rule
to bring the latest Supplemental to a vote.
Kucinich is the
only member who has repeatedly raised the topic of oil theft in the
Democratic Caucus' meetings. And after Obey screamed as him for it and
defamed him in the media, Kucinich obtained 60 minutes on the floor of
the House to speak to the topic. (A result that seems sadly unlikely to
convince Obey to stop screaming at people.)
Now, in March when
Pelosi was threatening to not support or to challenge incumbent
Democrats in the next election if they wouldn't back her occupation
spending bill, nobody called her a traitor or drummed her out of the
Democratic Party. But on Friday I had to take a leave from my part-time
consulting to Kucinich's presidential campaign, because the Cleveland
Plain Dealer, which has hated Kucinich for decades, began complaining
that in my other job I was promoting challengers to pro-occupation
Democrats. I told the reporter, Sabrina Eaton, and she refused to
print, that I believed contested primaries were healthy for any party,
and that participation in them was a pro-Democratic Party position at a
moment when a lot of people were fed up and quitting the party in
protest.
But Eaton operates under the common delusion that
participation and challenges in primaries must be stifled so as not to
nominate candidates too far from the middle to win general elections.
That is to say, this is her rule for Democrats, not necessarily
Republicans. And she compounds this with the false position, which is
almost a matter of definition, that peace cannot be a centrist
position.
But I favor peace candidates in primaries in every
party, including Democratic, Republican, Green, and any other. And I
favor a strong Green challenge to the Democrats for the same reason I
favor strong primary challengers to Democrats, to influence the
Congress now. To the amazement and frustration of some Green partisans
I have not learned from the past two months or the past few decades
that the entire Democratic Party is an evil plot that must be purely
opposed. While Kucinich may be the best Democrat, others are relatively
great, good, and mediocre. I'm not trying to identify role models. I'm
trying to end a war and reestablish the rule of law.
And to the
amazement of many Democratic real politikers I do not accept that
promoting Greens is a dangerous temptation that will only give us more
Republicans. I've seen virtually nothing over the past five months of
Democratic rule that was superior to what we had under the Republicans.
A few embarrassing hearings, but no enforcement of subpoenas, no
impeachment. A partial correction to the minimum wage, but no end to
the steady march of corporate trade deals. A hell of a lot of rhetoric,
but no end to the occupation of Iraq, in fact no end in sight, and no
resistance to attacking Iran. Ron Paul has done more for peace than
Pelosi. And if we don't make clear to pro-occupation,
pro-Cheney-immunity Democrats that we will vote Green or Republican or
stay home, then we should never bother leaving our homes.
I do
hope that some people have learned not to be loyal to the leadership of
any party when it requires setting aside their own views or those of
the people they represent. I was never loyal to Pelosi and Reid, but I
have learned more in recent weeks about the depths they will sink to.
Politics for politicians is all about friendships and loyalties. For
activists it is not, and if Kucinich supports a pro-war candidate for
president I will not support him in that. But I will urge everyone now
to do the one thing most likely to influence Congress toward peace:
fund Kucinich's presidential campaign.
The optimistic view of
this story is, I think, as follows. We have finally had a vote for
money in which a Yes vote was understood to be a Yes vote, and a No
vote was understood to be a No vote, and 140 Congress Members and 14
Senators voted No, rejecting the absurd Orwellian dictum on "funding
the troops." More and more activists and other Americans understand
that story. More and more people are willing to demand of Congress what
we know is possible rather than what they tell us is possible. And we
know that Congress can, if it chooses, bring up a bill right after
Memorial Day break to ban any future spending on the occupation of Iraq
beyond September, require the withdrawal of all troops, mercenaries,
and contractors by that date, turn Iraq's territory, oil, bases, and
our world's largest "embassy" over to the Iraqi people, and make it a
felony for Bush to violate these terms.
We have a duty to
learn not to compromise until we need to, to ask up front for what we
really want, to treat every member of Congress as if they work for us
rather than the reverse, to stop calling an occupation a war, and to
insist that the only harm done to US troops is done by those who fail
to bring them home.
Writings 
Over the past two months of repeated Congressional votes to fund the occupation of Iraq, culminating in President Bush's signing the bill last Friday, what if anything have we learned? Have we learned anything about individuals or political parties or activist organizations to trust or despise, or have we learned better what to demand of them regardless of such emotions? Have we learned anything about policies to support, battles to lose, pyrrhic victories, or how to talk about ending the occupation?
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