Drums of War, Calls for Peace: How Should the Left Respond to a U.S. War Against Iraq?
Willis, Ellen
I OPPOSE THE Bush administration's drive to war on Iraq, though not without continuing internal argument. Should Saddam Hussein fail to comply with the Security Council's resolution, I would...
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...copies each issue during preceding 12 months: none...
...9. Full names and complete mailing addresses of publisher, editor, and managing editor...
...copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 4,516...
...What, in the long run, should the United States do about Iraq...
...copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 10,238...
...Even politically thoughtful pacifists contribute to this tendency insofar as they define peace as their goal and nonviolence as their bottom line...
...Aggressive wars are an emergency that must be addressed, but violence is an endemic human problem that no amount of antiwar moralizing will solve...
...e. free distribution outside the mail (carriers or other means): average no...
...While we as well as others have often honored that principle in the breach, openly flouting it invites others to do so and encourages wholesale contempt for international law...
...Though many New Left activists opposed the Vietnam War on the basis of their radical democratic principles, the absorption of the left by the antiwar movement ended up destroying it as a force for real social change...
...copies each issue during preceding 12 months: none...
...6. Annual subscription price: $24 individual...
...Otherwise, national defense has been entirely subordinated to corporate desires for low taxes, cost-cutting, and deregulation as usual: airport security remains a joke...
...copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 3,943...
...copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 407...
...Known bondholders, mortgagees, and other security holders owning or holding 1 percent or more of total amount of bonds, mortgages, or other securities: None...
...oppose theocracy and authoritarian nationalism...
...it could be argued that, after all, someone needs to play "bad cop" in this kind of situation...
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...Genuine peace can only be the byproduct of success in reducing the crushing weight of human misery—I'm speaking not only of poverty but of political, cultural, and religious oppression— that stokes human rage...
...copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 8,200...
...Signature and title of editor, publisher, business manager, or owner: Maxine Phillips, Managing Editor...
...If we have information that a country is preparing to launch an imminent attack on us, and we attack first, that is a preemptive strike—arguably an act of self-defense...
...In reality, the post—cold war power vacuum has been filled by transnational capital, which will not passively allow its own goals—global stability and the spread of neoliberalism—to be undermined by American dreams of a new imperium: it's safe to conclude that the reason Bush felt forced to go to the UN, finally, was not the sheer eloquence of Colin Powell's arguments...
...That project requires politics and implies a recognition that not all wars are alike...
...How, for instance, do we oppose Saddam Hussein while supporting the pernicious and, from an antiterrorist perspective, more dangerous regime in Saudi Arabia...
...So, of course, do the far more numerous vulgar pacifists who are simply "against violence" as one would be "against sin...
...In its delusions of unchecked American power it's a fantasy of lunatics...
...intervention, including sending troops, if necessary...
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...It discards the principle that the only legitimate war is one that defends against aggression...
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...copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 9,031...
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...In the long run, the aims of U. S. foreign policy should be to support democratic and secular movements...
...And so do self-proclaimed anti-imperialists whose politics boils down to general moral outrage against American power as such, regardless of where exercised and for what reason: Vietnam equals Bosnia equals Afghanistan equals Iraq...
...and whether or not they get to pursue it in this case, their overall objectives will not change...
...Publication name: Dissent...
...4. Issue frequency: quarterly...
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...The administration hawks don't want disarmament, they want conquest...
...8. Complete mailing address of headquarters or general business office of publisher: same as above...
...copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 10,238...
...5. No...
...copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 84...
...actual no...
...the Indian Point nuclear power plant still presents an inviting target thirty miles from New York City...
...Attacking a specific weapons cache or factory, as the Israelis did with their bombing of the Iraqi nuclear reactor (doing the DISSENT / Winter 2003 n 15 SYMPOSIUM world a favor, in my view), might also be justified on defensive grounds...
...Iraq has been a chronic problem, but the current crisis is a manufactured one...
...Issue date for circulation data below: Summer 2002...
...nothing has been done to protect our ports from smuggled bombs...
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...Ironically, if the UN's efforts are successful, it may well be because Bush's belligerence convinced Saddam that he had no choice but to comply...
...But the Bush doctrine goes much further, claiming our right to make war on any nation we, in our sole judgment, perceive to be a threat to us or a hostile competitor for military power...
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...copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 7,218...
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...subsidize the economic reconstruction of poor countries devastated by war, famine, ecological destruction, and AIDS...
...Editor: Mitchell Cohen/Michael Walzer, Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas, Inc., 310 Riverside Drive, New York, NY 10025...
...And I am moved by Kanan Makiya's conviction that only the U.S...
...Although the Iraq campaign is billed as the linchpin of the war on terrorism, it is actually a substitute for a serious effort against the far more immediate threat of radical Islamism in general and al-Qaeda in particular...
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...and abandon our leading role in forcing neoliberalism down every country's throat...
...And I fear that if much of the democratic left, which at this point barely exists as an organized force, defines itself as part of an antiwar movement, the new radicalism we need will never emerge...
...In analyzing my objections to the current actually-existing peace movement, I've come to see the basic problem as the very concept of a movement organized around opposition to war—as distinct from a movement organized around a set of political principles that may, at a given moment, require antiwar activism, but at another may just as urgently require armed intervention...
...copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 142...
...At home, the administration's main antiterrorist program is seizing every possible opening to dismantle civil liberties...
...copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 226...
...2002 STATEMENT OF OWNERSHIP AND CIRCULATION (Required by 39 U. S. C. 3685) I. Publication title: Dissent...
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...What can the United States do that makes any sense in the context of a foreign policy that's altogether unprincipled...
...copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 9,257...
...copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 3,491...
...copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 218...
...2. Publication No.: 158-080...
...The Bush doctrine is also a recipe for permanent war that threatens incalculable devastation abroad while wrecking democracy at home...
...What we're seeing is the first sally in an open-ended power struggle: the battle will be joined, and deals will be made, between Bush's ultranationalism and the amoral realpolitik of the corporate globalizers...
...ELLEN WILLIS's most recent essay on international politics post-9/11 is "The Mass Psychology of Terrorism," in the forthcoming anthology Implicating Empire (Basic...
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...In this scenario, democratic values have no place...
...The 16 n DISSENT / Winter 2003 administration's lack of urgency on this front is a scandal...
...and so depressingly on...
...7. Complete mailing address of known office of publication: Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas, Inc., 310 Riverside Drive, New York, NY 10025...
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...Managing Editor: Maxine Phillips, 310 Riverside Drive, New York, NY 10025...
...The problem, though, is that the United States is not acting a part...
...of issues published annually: four...
...Owner: Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas, Inc., 310 Riverside Drive, New York, NY 10025...
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...But antiwar movements inevitably elide the distinction between a particuSYMPOSIUM lar war and war in general and become, in essence, apolitical moral crusades...
...copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 781...
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...DISSENT / Winter 2003 n 17...
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...In Afghanistan, the United States mismanaged the war by letting the Northern Alliance fight our battle, with two unsavory results: al-Qaeda leaders and fighters escaped en masse, and thuggish fundamentalist warlords took over much of the country...
...To say that the Bush policy is one of preemptive war is misleading...
...2) paid incounty subscriptions stated on Form 3541 (include advertisers' proof copies/exchange copies): average no...
...military can install democracy in Iraq, even as I believe he is investing his hopes in the wrong cast of characters...
...copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 97.56 percent...
...We have mismanaged the peace by refusing to provide security outside Kabul or spend real money on reconstruction...
...The purpose, function, and nonprofit status of this organization and the exempt status for federal tax purposes has not changed during the preceding twelve months...
...In the event of a popular democratic revolt against Saddam, I would support various forms of U.S...
...copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 572...
...Publisher: Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas, 310 Riverside Drive, New York, NY 10025...
...The Bush-CheneyRumsfeld-Wolfowitz gang has seized on September 11 as an excuse and a cover for an agenda that long predated it: taking advantage of the power vacuum supposedly created by the fall of the Soviet Union to wage a forceful campaign for world domination...
...According to a New Republic article, we are even depriving Hamid Karzai of his Special Forces bodyguards, turning the job over to private mercenaries—a move that like so many Republican policies seems designed to deprive satirists of material...
...3. Filing date: October 1, 2002...
...actual no...
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...Should Saddam Hussein fail to comply with the Security Council's resolution, I would have to rethink my position...
...It's unclear at this writing whether Saddam's agreement to admit inspectors is a transient glitch or a major roadblock in the path to war (in which case the administration may turn its attention to new targets...
...34 inst...
...What can the left do to move America in this direction...
...copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 3,102...
...ASSUMING NOTHING happens to change the above assessment and we do go to war in Iraq, I will participate in antiwar activity, but not as part of an "antiwar movement...
...copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 8,200...
...Date: October 1, 2002...
...While opposing Bush's war, I don't want to lose sight of that question...
...This Statement of Ownership will be printed in the Winter 2003 issue of this publication...
...But at this moment I find it impossible to disentangle the call for war from the larger vision of international relations it is meant to test...
...c. total paid and/or requested circulation (sum of 156(1), (2), (3), (4): average no...
...copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 982...
Vol. 50 • January 2003 • No. 1
