Hawkish Right-Wingers Hurting Teachers, and Your Kids

By Stephen Zunes, AlterNet. Posted May 13, 2009.

Even after U.S. forces invaded and occupied Iraq, and the Bush administration admitted that Iraq had not failed to disarm as it and its supporters in AFT executives had claimed, the AFT continued to support the war.

At the 2004 AFT biannual convention, the leadership rebuked anti-war elements of the union by passing a resolution declaring, in part, that "we urge the Bush administration, the Congress and the American people to reject calls for the precipitous withdrawal of U.S. forces."

It did not define what "precipitous" meant, and the resolution listed no criteria for when, or under what conditions, leaders believed U.S. forces should come back home, a choice of words widely interpreted to mean support for an indefinite U.S. military occupation.

This hawkish stance was in sharp contrast to the AFL-CIO as a whole and most of its other member unions, which had gone on record in opposition to the U.S. war in Iraq and in support of the withdrawal of American troops from that country.

There was widespread opposition within the union to the AFT's continued support for the war, however. In addition to rank-and-file opposition to the occupation in terms of its impact on the people of Iraq, including Iraqi trade unionists, there was also concern raised among the membership regarding its economic costs, pointing out how supporting a war that could eventually cost as much as $3 trillion would make it difficult for the U.S. government to increase funding for education.

Meanwhile, the AFT leadership backed its hawkish position on Iraq with action: The majority of AFT's political contributions (funded from the dues of its members) in 2004 and 2006 went primarily to candidates who supported the Iraq war.

Although the union later criticized the Bush administration for misleading the nation about Iraq’s WMDs, it was far more forgiving of Democrats who had done the same.

Despite the fact that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., in a 2002 meeting with McElroy, LaCour and other union leaders, had insisted that Iraq had somehow reconstituted its WMDs and constituted a threat to the United States -- which union officials later acknowledged played a major role in formulating their January 2003 statement -- the AFT endorsed her 2008 presidential bid against Barack Obama, who had opposed the war and challenged the false claims of an Iraqi threat.

To this day, Clinton has refused to apologize for misleading union leaders on Iraq's military capabilities or for her vote authorizing the war. The union poured in hundreds of thousands of dollars in key primary states in an unsuccessful effort to defeat Clinton's anti-war challenger, with AFT president McElroy insisting that -- despite the Clinton-backed invasion having alienated much of the international community from the United States -- it was she, not Obama, who would "improve America's standing in the world."

Backing Bush on Lebanon

The AFT has also been eager to endorse the wars of America's allies. The AFT leadership was able to push through a resolution in the 2006 convention defending another aspect of the Bush administration's militaristic agenda in the Middle East: support for Israel's assault that summer on Lebanon, which killed nearly 800 Lebanese civilians, destroyed billions of dollars worth of that country's infrastructure and caused widespread environmental damage.

As with the decision by the AFT leadership in 2003 to repeat the Bush administration's false claims about Iraq, the 2006 resolution repeated a series of false claims by the Bush administration regarding the Lebanese Hezbollah movement and the Palestinian Hamas movement.

For example, the resolution claimed that Hezbollah "proudly takes credit for the 1983 bombing of the Beirut barracks" that killed 258 U.S. Marines. In reality, though, while some individuals who later became part of that extremist Islamist group may indeed have been involved in that attack, Hezbollah has repeatedly denied having any role.

Requests from AFT to provide evidence to back its claim that Hezbollah "proudly takes credit" for the attack have remained unanswered.

In defending Israel's war on Lebanon and its bloody assault on heavily populated areas of the besieged Gaza Strip, the AFT went on record claiming that Hezbollah and Hamas were "holding the people of Lebanon and the Palestinians in Gaza hostage," as part of an effort to back the Bush administration's insistence that it was these Palestinian and Lebanese militias that were ultimately responsible for the deaths of their countrymen, not the indiscriminate bombardments of civilian areas by U.S.-supplied Israeli forces.

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Stephen Zunes is a professor of politics, chairman of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of San Francisco and serves as a senior policy analyst for Foreign Policy in Focus.

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