How to End the Iraq War

By Tom Hayden, AlterNet. Posted November 23, 2004.

It is in the nature of truly mass movements that people choose the paths that seem to promise effective results, even victories. So it should surprise no one that much of the energy of the peace and justice movement flowed into presidential campaigns for Howard Dean, Dennis Kucinich and ultimately John Kerry (the UnBush).

As a result millions of people become engaged politically on grassroots levels, many for the first time. The peace and justice message was heard more widely than before.

Under pressure, the Democratic platform opposed the Central American trade agreement (CAFTA) and promised a full review of U.S. trade policy. The movement was unable to push Kerry and the Democrats into an anti-Iraq position, although Kerry at least voiced a constant attack on Bush's policy as mistaken. The pressure of anti-war voices and the Kerry campaign led Bush to delay the request for a supplemental $75 billion appropriation, the assault on Falluja, and the U.S.-sponsored Iraqi elections until after Nov. 2.

Once the election was over, the Bush administration turned Falluja into a slaughterhouse – even as the Democrats remained silent and thousands of activists seemed frozen in mourning or internal discussions of what went wrong.

There is a lesson here for progressives. Since the anti-war sentiment was a factor of public opinion during the presidential race that made Bush defer tough decisions, the movement needs to create an even greater force of opposition that will become indigestible, a kind of gallstone in the stomach of power.

If this seems unlikely, one must remember that the war-makers are feverishly trying to manipulate the perceptions of restive Americans. They fear the multitudes. That is why reporters were embedded at the beginning. That is why the toppling of Saddam Hussein's statue on April 9, 2003 was "stage-managed" by the U.S. Army, according to the L.A. Times.

Even the most recent battle of Fallujah was about "the American military intend[ing] to fight its own information war," as the New York Times observed. According to another Times article, the Fallujah hospital was shut down on the first day of the operation because our Army considered it a "source of rumors about heavy casualties." A senior military official called the hospital "a center of propaganda" as scores of patients were being treated.

The importance of public opinion was stated quite frankly by Robert Kaplan, a leading neo-conservative, in the Atlantic Monthly last year. The most important battleground of America's new "combination warfare," he wrote, is the media:

Indeed the best information strategy is to avoid attention-getting confrontations in the first place and to keep the public's attention as divided as possible. We can dominate the world only quietly, so to speak. The moment the public focuses on a single crisis like the one in Iraq… it becomes a rallying point around which lonely and alienated people in a global mass society can define themselves through an uplifting group identity, be it European, Muslim, anti-war intellectual, or whatever.

Therefore, public opinion – if strategically focused – can end this war. To understand this requires a different analysis than the usual one that assumes that there will be an "exit strategy" after Iraq is "stabilized." The war will end either when the U.S. military "wins" or it will not end at all.

The Iraqi elections are designed to inflate the currently non-existent legitimacy of the Allawi regime by co-opting Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish parties, which are led mostly by long-time exiles. In this scenario, the new regime would technically end the occupation and "request" the U.S. to stay until the country is "stabilized," which means permanently, i.e. fulfilling the long-term agenda of the neo-conservatives, now entrenched more deeply than ever at the pinnacles of power.

While it is theoretically possible (and in my view, desirable) that the January election might bring to power a Shiite-led coalition that would ask the U.S. to withdraw troops, that is hardly the intent. The U.S. still plans to permanently remake a new Iraq, plans that include American military bases, a privatized market economy, ready access to oil, a prime target for Western and, especially Christian, proselytizing in the region. According to the Wall Street Journal, the U.S. is already flooding Iraq with satellite dishes and televisions while privatizing its 200 state-owned companies: "Bremer discussed the need to privatize government with such fervor that his voice cut through the din of the cargo hold."

Instead of assuming that the Bush administration has an "exit strategy", the movement needs to force our government to exit. The strategy must be to deny the U.S. occupation funding, political standing, sufficient troops, and alliances necessary to their strategy for dominance.

A Plan of Action

The first step is to build pressure at congressional district levels to oppose any further funding or additional troops for war. If members of Congress balk at cutting off all assistance and want to propose "conditions" for further aid, it is a small step toward threatening funding. If only 75 members of Congress go on record against any further funding, that's a step in the right direction – towards the exit.

Tom Hayden was a leader of the student, civil rights, peace and environmental movements of the 1960s. He served 18 years in the California legislature, where he chaired labor, higher education and natural resources committees. He is the author of ten books, including "Street Wars" (New Press, 2004). He is a professor at Occidental College, Los Angeles, and was a visiting fellow at Harvard's Institute of Politics last fall.

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