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I just heard about this via e-mail a few minutes ago:

An unusual coalition of antiwar Democrats and angry Republicans in the House today torpedoed a $162.5 billion proposal to continue funding the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan into next year, eliminating, for now, the one part of the controversial bill that had seemed certain to pass.

Instead, House members voted to demand troop withdrawals from Iraq, force the Iraqi government to shoulder more war costs and greatly expand the education benefits for returning veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflict.

The surprise on war-funding left antiwar activists on and off Capitol Hill exultant and Democratic leaders baffled. House leaders had broken the war-funding bill into three separate measures, the first to fund the wars, the second to impose strict military policy measures opposed by President Bush, and the third to fund domestic priorities, including expanded education benefits and flood control work around New Orleans.

But that legislative legerdemain became the plan’s undoing. Democratic leaders knew that many members of their caucus, who have vowed not to approve another penny for the Iraq war, would reject the supplemental appropriation for the conflicts, but they expected Republicans to push it through. [Utterly despicable. —R.G.] Instead, 131 House Republicans voted present on the measure, incensed that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and a few of her lieutenants had drafted the war bill largely in secret.

[…]

The House actions were a dream come true for the antiwar movement.

It is time now for Americans to be heard and for this Congress to move forward with the safe redeployment of our troops, exulted Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Tex.) who called on the House to use the $162.5 billion in war funds for domestic priorities.

For the first time ever, the U.S. House has now taken decisive action to bring this war to a close, declared Alan Charney, program director of the antiwar group USAction.

When the Senate takes up the bill, its version will include war funding, but prescriptions on troop withdrawals and torture will probably fall to a GOP filibuster.

—Jonathan Weisman, Washington Post (2008-05-16): War Funding Bill Stalls in House

I suppose what’s most likely is that the funding will be re-added in conference committee, or a new emergency funding bill will be thrown together while the party whips are lashed extra-hard and the warhawk Republicans kiss and make up with the doughface Democratic leadership. But there is a glimmer of hope today that there wasn’t yesterday, shining through the cracks in the both the War Party coalition (of leadership Democrats and warhawk Republicans), and in the ruling majority. I don’t know whether this is just a stumble, or the beginning of a real fall, for the bloody-handed, doughfaced Democratic leadership. I’m too cautious to expect a fall, but I do hold out a little hope. And when they do fall, you can expect them to fall fast and hard. Stay tuned on this one.

See also:

• GT 2008-05-13: Gosh that’s tough
• GT 2008-03-25: And now they bring up you.
• GT 2008-02-17: In ten words or fewer: brass tacks edition
• GT 2007-12-16: Reformist overtures

Everything old is new again.

Please bear the following facts in mind.

If you and your family are trying to escape the Chinese government’s coercive population control policies — if, for example, you are a man, and your wife has been forced into an abortion by threats or violence from the government, and even if you, yourself, have been threatened with government-forced sterilization; or if you are a woman, and you have been forced into an abortion by the government, but you don’t want to be forced to live apart from your life partner — if, that is, either you or your life partner has been held down, under threat of violence, and had your reproductive organs cut into, against your will, by order of the State, and it’s perfectly likely to happen to you again if you go on living in China — well, then, I’m sorry, but that just isn’t a good enough reason for the United States government to consider you and your family Officially Persecuted by the Chinese government, and thus not enough for them to get out of your way and leave you alone to live your life peacefully within the borders that the U.S. government claims the right to fortify. They are especially unlikely to consider your persecution important enough to merit asylum if the Chinese government, as part of those same population control policies, refuses to write down a legal record of your marriage to the man or woman that you wed years ago and have lived with ever since. In fact a panel of comfortable American judges will sneer down at you, from their politico-moral high ground, that legal marriage reflects a sanctity and long-term commitment that other forms of cohabitation simply do not. Your actual, real-life marriage doesn’t count, because the government that is persecuting you won’t recognize it. Your suffering and the violation of your body, or your spouse’s body, by a violent government, don’t matter to this government, because it won’t count them as real persecution. So instead of leaving you alone, this government will roust you up out of your new home, and march you out at bayonet-point, and ship you out of the country, back to the tormentors in China who you risked everything to escape.

If you are a woman from the Republic of Guinea, and, when you were a child, you were held down and had your clitoris cut out with a knife, without anesthesia, and if, after being forced to suffer this painful and traumatizing mutilation of your body, you make a deliberate decision to get out of the country, perhaps because it hurt you, and perhaps because the effects still hurt you, and perhaps because you didn’t want it and now you just can’t stand to live in the place where it was done to you, and perhaps because you don’t want your daughters to be forced into the same thing — well, I’m sorry, but according to the United States Department of Homeland Security and the United States Department of Justice [sic], that just isn’t a good enough reason to consider you Officially Persecuted in Guinea, and thus not enough reason for them to get out of your way and leave you alone to live your life peacefully within the borders that the U.S. government claims the right to fortify. Because, hey, you’re damaged goods now and you don’t have any clitorises left for them to cut out. Your suffering and the violation of your body, by certain violent members of your community, don’t matter to them, because it won’t count them as real persecution. So instead of leaving you alone, this government will roust you up out of your new home, and march you out at bayonet-point, and ship you out of the country, back to the tormentors in Guinea who you risked everything to escape.

If you and your family are from Iraq, and, because of the crushing poverty and the tremendous danger to your life and limb which you face — due to the United States government’s own war and bombing and occupation in Iraq; or due to threats from the government-backed and freelance ethnic-cleansing death squads, which have flourished under that occupation; or due to the crossfire in the endless battles between the United States government’s occupying forces and Iraqi insurgents — if, because of all that, you are one of the 2.5 million Iraqis who have fled the country in order to try to find a new home (either temporarily or permanently) where you can live your life free of fear and starvation and unspeakable daily violence, and now you find yourself stuck — like 2.4 million of your fellow Iraqis — in some hellhole refugee camp or urban ghetto in neighboring countries like Syria or Jordan, where conditions are awful, where you are surrounded by suffering, where you cannot legally work for pay and have little or nothing to do other than take hand-outs and fill out paperwork for UNHCR, while you watch your life savings drain away in the effort to keep yourself alive for a few more months while you wait, and wait, and wait, and if you don’t happen to be one of the 500 people per year who are eligible for Special Immigration Visas in return for collaborating with the U.S. government’s occupying forces in Iraq, and you don’t happen to be one of the quota of only a few thousand Iraqi refugees that the U.S. government has agreed to accept each year — well, then, I’m sorry, but according the United States government that just isn’t a good enough reason to get out of your way and leave you alone to travel to the United States and live your life peacefully within the borders that the United States government claims the right to fortify. Your suffering, and the danger to your life or the lives of your loved ones, by any one of the countless armies and armed factions rampaging through Iraq, don’t matter enough to them for them to reconsider their immigration quota policy. So this government will keep you penned up in your hellhole ghetto, where you can die for all they care, or, if you somehow get to America, this government will march you out at bayonet-point, and ship you out of the country, back to the ghetto conditions or to the tormentors in Iraq who you risked everything to escape.

This is life, such as it is, under government immigration controls. It is life as it always will be, as long as politicians and bureaucrats have the power to pick and choose whose reasons for wanting to cross an arbitrary line on a map are good enough, and whose are not.

But it is criminal that there is even one single refugee in this world who cannot immediately find asylum and a chance to make a new life and a new home for herself in a new country.

It is inexcusable that, in the name of the ethno-political system of international apartheid, the governments of the world continue to collaborate in violence against women, in forced starvation, and in ethnic cleansing, by forcing peaceful women and men into refugee ghettoes or, worse, by forcing peaceful women and men back into the maws of the very governments or violent factions who intend to devour them.

It is obscene that a bunch of politicians and unaccountable bureaucrats from the United Nations or the U.S. government would be invested with the power to sit in judgment, from their comfortable offices, on the most marginalized, the most exploited, and the most oppressed people in the world, so that they put all their conventional prejudices and political blinders to work in picking and choosing whose suffering should count as real, in the eyes of the governments of the world, or whose suffering, if acknowledged as real by the government, is important enough to let them into a tiny quota that the government will allow to cross an arbitrary line on a map.

The S.S. St. Louis still sails the seas today, a ghost ship with ghost passengers, without rest and without safe harbor. It will haunt the world forever, as long as this system of international apartheid is enforced.

And all for what? To avoid the voluntary co-mingling of people from different countries? To ensure that the people of the world hear only one language, live and work with people of only one nationality, remain segregated, either by penning them up in their government-appointed place or else by making sure you can monitor all their movements according to a government-created system of passbooks and minders? The idea would be laughable if not for all the ghosts—the ghosts of millions upon millions of real, living, irreplaceable and unique individual people, who were turned back, ruined, persecuted, mutilated, tortured, starved, and murdered for the sake of that idea.

There is another way. A way in which the living can finally live, and the dead can finally rest, in peace. But that other can only become a reality when people are free to move from one place to another, and their reasons, their suffering, and their lives cannot be measured and found wanting by entitled strangers with the power to turn them back and force them back to the tormenters that they risked everything to escape. It can, that is to say, only become a reality with the immediate, unconditional, and complete abolition of all government border controls, and with universal amnesty for all currently undocumented immigrants.

There’s no room for compromise or moderation in the politics of immigration when real people’s bodies and real people’s lives are hanging in the balance. As they are all over the world today.

See also:

• The Collateral Repair Project is a grassroots project providing direct aid to Iraqi civilians who live as refugees within Iraq and in surrounding countries.
• Rad Geek @ feministe (2005-02-02): Free Rodi Alvarado and all political prisoners!
• Rad Geek, comments on feministe (2006-05-19): When Immigration Goes Hard-Line
• GT 2008-01-31: Bordercrats Against Joy and Plenty
• GT 2007-12-17: International apartheid in Roswell
• GT 2007-11-12: Sin Fronteras

In a footnote on a generally appalling post, devoted entirely to abusing anyone who might have the temerity to hold the doing-worse-than-nothing Democratic Congressional majority in general — or Nancy Pelosi in particular — to account on matters of principle (a post which makes itself completely impossible to reply to with anything other than more abuse and facile sarcasm, because the post does not, at any point, identify any particular person or action that is being targeted, and so offers no basis for serious discussion), Anthony McCarthy has this to add:

Volunteering in a political campaign, seeing what they go through, I’m sick and tired of hearing people run down our [sic] politicians. They are just about all dedicated to pubic service. Few moderate to liberal Democrats serving in elective office at the national level couldn’t be enjoying a much more comfortable and profitable life pursuing a wealth-making career. With considerably fewer headaches. You think it’s such a bed of roses, try getting yourself elected. Try dodging the bullets and balancing the pressure groups.

It must be so hard on them.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is out there trying to dodge metaphorical bullets. If she doesn’t make it past those metaphorical bullets, then, sometime in early 2009, she’ll be demoted to a mere Representative, or might even have to look for a new well-paying white-collar job. Meanwhile, near Mosul, a woman and a child failed to dodge some actual bullets, when U.S. soldiers opened fire on their car.

They died.

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - A woman, a child and two gunmen were killed by U.S. forces conducting a military operation targeting al Qaeda in northern Iraq, the military said on Sunday.

It said U.S. forces fired on a car carrying suspected militants that refused to stop near the northern city of Mosul on Saturday.

… Iraqi and U.S. troops launched a major offensive in northern Iraq on Saturday against al Qaeda militants in the region.

—Dean Yates and Sami Aboudi, Reuters (2008-05-11): Two civilians killed in U.S. operation in N.Iraq

Those non-metaphorical bullets were paid for by the United States government. The reason that they keep getting paid for is that Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi keeps on voting for the government to keep paying for it, and has used her considerable power and influence, both under parliamentary rules and through back-room party politics, to make sure that her fellow Democrats in Congress also go on voting to keep paying for it. (She is about to do her damnedest, along with her other political cronies, to do this yet again, and is trying to figure out how to ramrod the bill through Congress as quickly as possible.)

This war would be over if Pelosi didn’t choose to spend the past year and a half safeguarding her political career at the cost of perpetuating a murderous and disastrous occupation, which she herself recognizes as a bloody failure. The reason for this disgusting policy, forcing me and millions of other antiwar Americans to pay hundreds of billions of dollars over this past year and a half, for a war now almost universally recognized as a catastrophic mistake and an unrelenting failure, is that doing anything different is widely thought, among Democratic power-brokers like Pelosi, to be political suicide. (That’s the melodramatic metaphor that politicians and their enablers like to use to describe an act that will probably cause you to lose some measure of political power that you’d otherwise have some hope of seizing and holding onto. Thus it is endlessly used to justify, or excuse, politicians who sacrifice the very things that they supposedly wanted the power in order to achieve for the sake of the power itself. Thus, by rhetorically equating a hold on political power with life itself, power is treated as if it were an end-in-itself rather than what it is, a mere means to further ends, which are always more important.)

Let me tell you a story about something that happened less than 40 years ago. On April 9, 1970, the New York Assembly passed a new abortion law, which repealed almost all government restrictions on a woman’s right to choose abortion. The vote was extremely close. In fact, it was so close that the final round of floor voting resulted in a 74-to-74 tie. Without a tie-breaking vote, the repeal bill would be defeated, and the New York state government would go on coercing women in the name of forced pregnancy. But just before the clerk could declare the bill officially defeated, an upstate Assemblyman named George M. Michaels got up and took the microphone. He was a Democrat representing a conservative district, and while he was personally pro-choice, he knew that most of his constituents were anti-abortion, and would be outraged by a vote for the abortion bill. Here is what he did.

So the bill passed. Abortion was completely decriminalized. But Michaels was right: it was the termination of his political career. He was running for re-election that year, and within weeks of the vote his political party formally announced that they were abandoning him. Two months later, Michaels was defeated in the Democratic Party primary. George Michaels’s political career was over. But abortion is still legal in the state of New York.

It’s one of the most admirable and important things an elected politician has ever done in the United States. And it was a deliberate act of political suicide.

Those who would never think of doing something like that, who dismiss the very idea of political suicide out of hand, with a shudder or a sneer, and who make self-pitying pleas about how much it would cost them to take some kind of stand — which is to say, sanctimonious excuses for clinging to power, no matter how much they sacrifice and betray in order to keep it — are worth less than nothing as political allies.

Further reading:

• GT 2008-03-25: And now they bring up you.
• GT 2008-02-17: In ten words or fewer: brass tacks edition
• GT 2007-12-16: Reformist overtures

There will be a time when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today!

—Last words of August Spies (1887-11-11), immigrant, anarchist, and Haymarket martyr

Fellow workers:

Today is May Day, or International Workers’ Day, a holiday created by Chicago workers—most of them anarchists—to honor the memory of the Haymarket martyrs and to celebrate the struggle of workers for freedom, for a better life, and for control over the conditions of their own labor. It was created during the radical phase of the struggle for an eight-hour day: after legislative campaigns by the Knights of Labor and the National Labor Union failed, labor radicals in Chicago — organizers like Albert Parsons, Lucy Parsons, August Spies — declared that workers should take matters into their own hands, in the form of direct action on the shop floor. Workers would no longer try to get an eight-hour day by promising a useful and compliant voter base in return for patronage from politicians. To get an eight-hour shift, workers would make their own: in many shops, workers in the International Working People’s Association would bring their own whistle to work and blow it at the end of an eight hour shift — at which point most or all of the workers on the floor would just get up and just walk off, like the free people they were, whether or not the boss demanded more hours of labor. At the height of the struggle, they organized a General Strike, in defiance of the bosses and in spite of repeated violence from the Law.

Today is also the third annual day of rallies, strikes and marches against the criminalization of immigrant workers. A day which immigrant workers have chosen for actions against the bigotry of nativist bullies, the violence of La Migra, and the political system of international apartheid, as contemptible as it is lethal. A day to proudly proclaim We are not criminals and We are not going anywhere, to demand the only political program that recognizes it — open borders and unconditional amnesty for all undocumented workers.

And it is a joy for me to read that today is also a day of strikes against the bosses’ war in Iraq, which will shut down all the sea ports on the west coast of the United States, as an act of defiance against the State war machine and against the worthless political opportunists who promise to end it while voting, over and over again, to sustain it:

Amid this political atmosphere, dockworkers of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union have decided to stop work for eight hours in all U.S. West Coast ports on May 1, International Workers’ Day, to call for an end to the war.

This decision came after an impassioned debate where the union’s Vietnam veterans turned the tide of opinion in favor of the anti-war resolution. The motion called it an imperial action for oil in which the lives of working-class youth and Iraqi civilians were being wasted and declared May Day a no peace, no work holiday. Angered after supporting Democrats who received a mandate to end the war but who now continue to fund it, longshoremen decided to exercise their political power on the docks.

—Jack Heyman, San Francisco Chronicle (2008-04-09): Longshoremen [sic] to close ports on West Coast to protest war

The Longshore workers have the explicit support of postal workers in New York and San Francisco, and I hope this will be only the beginning of ongoing, widespread industrial action to end a war that political action — even after two election cycles, after hundreds of millions of dollars, after countless hours of lobbying and electioneering, after a change in government, and with the backing of an overwhelming supermajority of the populace — has proven completely incapable of ending.

This is May Day as it is and ought to be. A Day of Resistance against the arrogance and power of bosses, bordercrats, bullies, and the Maters of War, who would harass us, intimidate us, silence us, exploit us, beat us, jail us, deport us, extort us, and do anything else it takes to stop us from coming into our own. A day to celebrate workers’ struggles for dignity, and for freedom, through organizing in their own self-interest, through agitating and exhorting for solidarity, and through free acts of worker-led direct action to achieve their goals, marching under the banners of We are all leaders here and Dump the bosses of your back. A day to remember:

There Is Power In A Union

There is power, there is power,
In a band of working folk,
When we stand
Hand in hand.

—Joe Hill (1913)

Radio Bilingüe has a list of immigration marches and rallies across the country today. I plan to be at the mitin in Las Vegas tonight:

• Las Vegas immigrant rights mitin (rally)
• Tonight, May 1, 2008, 7:00 PM
• Federal Courthouse, 333 Las Vegas Blvd S.

Meanwhile, in the news, some useless idiot is wandering around Washington proclaiming Law Day, accosting hundreds of millions of complete strangers to tell them to put on ceremonies in praise of his own power to do the beating, jailing, deporting, etc. In Istanbul, organized workers marched to Taksim Square in defiance of the Turkish government, which has declared their free assembly illegal, and which has deployed government riot cops to attack them with firehoses and tear gas. In Harare, organized workers are holding rallies today to call attention to the devastating effect of the government’s hyperinflationary money monopoly on workers’ wages—and an apparatchik of the Zimbabwean government—one of the most violently anti-worker governments in the world—is taking the opportunity to wear a concerned expression and assure that Government would at all times endeavour to make sure that workplaces were monitored through inspections to minimize hazards that might injure or kill them. (No word yet on whether the hazards the inspectors will be inspecting for include the Zimbabwe Republic Police or the Central Intelligence Organization.) We must never forget what this band of creeps and fools is doing their best to remind us of — that the State is the most deadly weapon of our enemies, and that it is a weapon that we will never be able to wield for ourselves without chaining ourselves to politics and destroying the very things we meant to fight for.

In this season and in these days, in the midst of Babel during its most raucous festival—when so much of what we see and hear are the endless shouts of professional blowhards who know of no form of social change other than political change, and who know of no site of political change other than the gladiatorial arena of electoral politics, and who seem to know of no form of electoral politics other than polling, horse-trading, and endlessly shouting about a series of nomenklatura-contrived issues, which boil down to little more than a media-facilitated exchange of racist, sexist, ageist, and authoritarian barbs among the nomenklatura-approved serious candidates—it’s important to remember that, in spite of all the noise and spectacle, the most significant events for labor and for human freedom are happening in the streets of cities all over the country and all over the world, where workers are organizing among themselves, demanding their rights, fighting for their lives, and defying or simply bypassing the plutocrats and their so-called laws. In the U.S.A., while the punch-drunk establishmentarian labor movement reels from one failure to another, some of the most dynamic and successful labor struggles in the past few years have been fought by a grassroots union organized along syndicalist lines without NLRB recognition, using creative secondary boycott tactics which would be completely illegal if they had submitted to the regulatory patronage of the Wagner-Taft-Hartley system. There is a lesson here—a lesson for workers, for organizers, for agitators, and anti-statists. One we’d do well to remember when confronted by any of the bosses—whether corporate bosses or political, the labor fakirs and the authoritarian thugs styling themselves the vanguard of the working class, the regulators and the deporters and the patronizing friends of labor all:

Dump the Bosses Off Your Back

Are you cold, forelorn, and hungry?
Are there lots of things you lack?
Is your life made up of misery?
Then dump the bosses off your back!

—John Brill (1916)

Happy May Day, y’all.

Elsewhere Today:

• Scott McLemee, Crooked Timber 2008-04-30: All Out for May Day
• Gulf Stream Blues 2008-05-01: Labour Movements Cry Mayday!

Further reading:

• GT 2007-05-01: May Day 2007
• GT 2006-05-01: May Day 2006: A Day of Resistance
• GT 2005-05-01: May Day, May Day
• GT 2004-05-01: Free the Unions (and all political prisoners)!

CONTACT: Gilda Carbonaro 301-792-8854 Gold Star Families Speak Out
Mike Ferner 240-274-9785 DemocracyRising.US

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE


LAURA AND JENNA BUSH PROMOTE “READ ALL ABOUT IT,” A GOLD STAR MOTHER ASKS THEM TO READ HER LETTER

Mother of Marine killed in Iraq delivers letter to Bushes at book signing event at D.C. Borders


On Friday, April 25, at 7:00pm, at the Borders bookstore at 14th and F Streets, NW, the mother of a Marine Corps Sergeant killed in Iraq will deliver a letter to Mrs. Bush and her daughter, Jenna, who will be at the store promoting their children’s book, “Read All About It.”


THE LETTER:

Gilda Carbonaro
Bethesda, Maryland





Laura and Jenna Bush
c/o Borders Books
14th and F Streets NW
Washington, D.C.


April 25, 2008


Dear Laura and Jenna Bush,

As you promote your new children’s book, “Read All About It,” and advocate for literacy tonight I hope you will take but a few moments to read these heartfelt lines.

I write to you as one of thousands of parents and family members whose loved ones have been killed in Iraq or Afghanistan; whose child, parent or spouse has returned blinded or deaf, armless or legless, or unable to ever move their limbs again; or perhaps have returned apparently unharmed, but with nightmares and a ticking timebomb in their minds.

You may think this a grim postscript to an evening’s chat about a book for children, but when someone you love has been taken from you forever, or returned so terribly damaged you barely know them, it becomes foremost in your thoughts every waking moment. You then begin to understand what is truly grim. And, I must add, there are those among us who still carry such unspeakable pain and anger they’ve become all but exhausted.

But many of us have felt exhaustion be replaced by an energy and a clarity of purpose we have never experienced before. One thing that has become clear to us is an answer to the question, “How could anyone send the youth of its nation to invade Iraq?” We see now how differently someone would answer that question if they suffered the anguish of a family member being killed as the result.

Your children, Mrs. Bush, are safe and I am glad for you. But I wonder, have you ever urged them to enlist in this heroic adventure? Your husband has told us many times how important this cause is. Your children appear well qualified, and as part of the First Family you’ve no doubt taught them the value of demonstrating leadership for the nation.

Why, then, has the price for this war been paid only by people like my son, Marine Corps Sgt. Alesandro Carbonaro, who died May 10, 2006, eight days after being horrifically burned in an IED blast in Al Anbar Province, Iraq?


Can you not see the simple, basic unfairness of asking others to do what you yourself are unwilling to do? Have you drifted so far from an understanding of fundamental justice that you cannot see the contradictions apparent to so many of us?

These are not rhetorical questions. They are as real as the knot in our stomachs and the ache in our hearts. It is time – and past time – that you face these questions without blinking or dodging and give us a satisfactory answer.


Most sincerely,



Gilda Carbonaro
Bethesda, Maryland

Goddess speed, Mrs. C. Never back down!

I trust the anti-colonialist and anti-racist reasons to oppose most US uses of military force against other countries are clear to most “Alas” readers. I haven’t been discussing that connection because it’s too clear to be missed, not because it’s not important.

In contrast, I am worried, perhaps needlessly, that some readers will read this series of posts as me saying that I’m voting based on foreign policy concerns, not concerns about sexism, misogyny and LGBTQ issues.

I don’t believe the distinction exists. I’ll use this post to discuss why the distinction between a hawkish versus a moderate foreign policy should matter to feminists of all sorts.

And make no mistake — Clinton is a hawk, not just posturing as one for the election. Quoting Stephen Zunes:

…When her rival for the Democratic presidential nomination Senator Barack Obama expressed his willingness to meet with Hugo Chavez, Fidel Castro or other foreign leaders with whom the United States has differences, she denounced him for being “irresponsible and frankly naive.”

Senator Clinton appears to have a history of advocating the blunt instrument of military force to deal with complex international problems. For example, she was one of the chief advocates in her husband’s inner circle for the 11-week bombing campaign against Yugoslavia in 1999 to attempt to resolve the Kosovo crisis.

Though she had not indicated any support for the Kosovar Albanians’ nonviolent campaign against Serbian oppression which had been ongoing since she had first moved into the White House six years earlier, she was quite eager for the United States to go to war on behalf of the militant Kosovo Liberation Army which had just recently come to prominence. Gail Sheehy’s book Hillary’s Choice reveals how, when President Bill Clinton and others correctly expressed concerns that bombing Serbia would likely lead to a dramatic worsening of the human rights situation by provoking the Serbs into engaging in full-scale ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, Hillary Clinton successfully pushed her husband to bomb that country anyway.

The most famous difference between Clinton and Obama is Clinton’s support of invading Iraq — an approach to foreign policy fully consistent with her history, and likely to continue in a future Clinton adminstration, judging from who she’s chosen to lead her foreign policy team so far. From a feminist perspective, it cannot be overemphasized that our decision to invade and occupy Iraq has been a nightmare. Here are just a few examples:

First, from an op-ed by Bonnie Erbe:

A new poll of leaders of Iraqi women’s-rights groups finds that women were treated better and their civil rights were more secure under deposed President Saddam Hussein than under the faltering and increasingly sectarian U.S.-installed government.

Roz Kaveny writes:

Most weeks, three or four people are hacked, stoned, burned or shot to death for being lesbian, gay, bi or trans. The highest Shia religious dignitary Sistani has again promulgated a fatwa calling for the execution of all non-repentant LGBT people - people talk of him as a liberal and in this degree he is - he allows people to repent on pain of death when most of his rivals would just kill. Contacted by the UN about this campaign of murder, the Iraqi government has refused to acknowledge that it is even a problem.

This is a direct consequence of the war - the Saddam regime, vile as it was, was secular in this respect, just as the Ba’athists in Syria still are. No-one does well in a totalitarian state, but LGBT folk were left alone, mostly.

Riverbend:

Rape. The latest of American atrocities. Though it’s not really the latest- it’s just the one that’s being publicized the most. The poor girl Abeer was neither the first to be raped by American troops, nor will she be the last.

Houzan Mahmoud, of The Organization for Women’s Freedom in Iraq, writes: (link via Bitch PhD):

More widely, professional women have been deliberately targeted and killed - notably in the city of Mosul - and, recently, anti-women fundamentalists in Baghdad have taken to throwing acid in women’s faces and on to their uncovered legs.

So-called “honour killings” are rife, as is the kidnapping and rape of women. Beheadings have occurred and women have been sold into sexual servitude. […] This is a recipe for future gender enslavement, second-class citizenship and ignorance. Thousands of female university students have now given up their studies to protect themselves against Islamist threats.

Islamist hostility is contagious and echoed daily in high-level political debate. Currently there is a drive over the “right” of men to have four wives, to make divorce a male preserve and for custody of children to be given to men only. Even women on Iraq’s National Assembly - the country’s parliament - have been calling for resolutions to allow for the beating of women by their guardians (males relatives, such as husbands or fathers).

This is all the outcome of the occupation of Iraq.

Melissa at Shakesville writes:

This is madness. In one fell swoop, they have turned back literally decades of women’s rights in Iraq.

When all other rationales for this war were proved devoid of substance, the Right yammered about a humanitarian intervention…and so did the hawkish Left. The last time I checked, women were humans, too, and they ought not to be left with less freedom than they had before we got there.

Iraqi women’s rights activist Yanar Mohammed:

Even apart from this the streets are not women-friendly. Many professional women who drive to and from work get insulted by men travelling around in pick-up trucks holding machine guns and wearing black from head to foot. Going out in the streets is scary. Many females have stopped going to school.[…]

If you travel from the north down through Iraq to the south, it is like being in a time machine. You travel from the 21st century in Sulamaniya, through Kirkuk to Baghdad, where you see a city which is in ruins. There is dust everywhere, and people are wearing very old clothes. Then in the south you are in the Dark Ages. In the areas dominated by the Sunni Islamists, in Fallujah or in Mosul, women’s situation is even worse than in Basra. You have something there which is new to us in Iraq. It comes from Wahhabism, from al Qaeda, from Saudi Arabia.

Riverbend again:

For me, June marked the first month I don’t dare leave the house without a hijab, or headscarf. I don’t wear a hijab usually, but it’s no longer possible to drive around Baghdad without one. It’s just not a good idea. (Take note that when I say ‘drive’ I actually mean ‘sit in the back seat of the car’- I haven’t driven for the longest time.) Going around bare-headed in a car or in the street also puts the family members with you in danger. You risk hearing something you don’t want to hear and then the father or the brother or cousin or uncle can’t just sit by and let it happen. I haven’t driven for the longest time. If you’re a female, you risk being attacked.

I look at my older clothes- the jeans and t-shirts and colorful skirts- and it’s like I’m studying a wardrobe from another country, another lifetime. There was a time, a couple of years ago, when you could more or less wear what you wanted if you weren’t going to a public place. If you were going to a friends or relatives house, you could wear trousers and a shirt, or jeans, something you wouldn’t ordinarily wear. We don’t do that anymore because there’s always that risk of getting stopped in the car and checked by one militia or another.

There are no laws that say we have to wear a hijab (yet), but there are the men in head-to-toe black and the turbans, the extremists and fanatics who were liberated by the occupation, and at some point, you tire of the defiance.

I could go on with quotes like this for another fifty screens, easily. The scope of the disaster is almost impossible to comprehend.

What’s important for this election isn’t how bad Iraq is, however. Iraq has happened, and neither Clinton nor Obama can change that. What’s important is how a Clinton or Obama presidency will change what happens in the future.

If Obama’s approach to foreign policy, and his team of policy advisers, comes into power, that will not mean that progressives occupy the White House, and it will not mean that horrible abuses of American power will cease to happen. Obama is not perfect. Obama is not even progressive. He’s just significantly better than the alternatives.

An Obama White House mean that a group of people who are significantly less warlike, and more critical of the U.S.’s use of military power, will become much more important in Washington and in our national conversation than they have been (and will remain so for years after Obama leaves office). It means that questionable invasions and bombings, which Clinton has supported throughout her career, will probably happen less frequently.

If Clinton becomes President, that will be a big improvement over Bush, in that we’ll switch from having a Republican hawk to having a Democratic hawk. It will be a much saner and more intelligent hawkish administration; but it will still be a hawkish administration, and from a feminist perspective — especially a feminism perspective that recognizes that anti-racism, anti-colonialism and LGBTQ issues aren’t separate from feminism — that’s bad.

Clinton didn’t intend the enormous harms I discussed above, of course. (On the contrary, Clinton has a dedication to women’s rights internationally that goes back many years, and which I admire.) But the unintended consequences of hawkishness aren’t less dire because they’re unintentional. The unintended consequences of Clinton’s future hawkish policies could easily turn into thousands of deaths, thousands of rapes, thousands of women under virtual house arrest, thousands of LGBTQ people in prison or worse. For people on the margins, unintended consequences are deadly.

I am not saying that if you’re a feminist, you must vote against Clinton because she’s a hawk. Feminists can vote a variety of ways for a variety of legitimate reasons, and countless feminists I admire will be voting for Clinton, or already have.

But foreign policy isn’t separate from feminist issues. It makes no sense at all to say that you’re voting based on feminist concerns, not foreign policy concerns. Foreign policy is a feminist issue, and anyone voting as a feminist should take that into account as they weigh the advantages and disadvantages of each candidate.

Previously, I argued that the differences between Obama and Clinton even on desperately important domestic issues, such as LGBTQ rights or health care, are unlikely to make a real difference in policy outcomes. This is because the differences between the candidates — both centrist Democrats — on these policies are small, and the enormous effects of political constraints and legislative give-and-take will matter so much that the small differences between Clinton’s and Obama’s policies will be a wash.

But Presidents have much more control over foreign policy, especially matters of war and peace. This is an area where even small differences can potentially matter a lot. Specifically, a President’s beliefs about the use of military power, versus diplomatic approaches, is essential. There are areas of foreign policy in which the President will be forced to compromise with Congress, for better or worse: trade policy, for example, and immigration law. But there is no area where the President has more freedom to choose than military and diplomatic policy.

Unfortunately, it can be hard to determine what the differences between Clinton and Obama on foreign policy are. Listening to what they say is of limited use, because currently they’re both primarily concerned with persuading swing voters and superdelegates to support them, and everything they say is tailored to that end.¹

What matters more is who each candidate has chosen to be their foreign policy advisers. The press and public don’t pay much attention to these advisers, except when one gaffes² ; furthermore, the candidates are probably planning to be stuck with most of these advisers for years to come. So the foreign policy teams Clinton and Obama pick probably reflect their real policy preferences — or at least, reflect their real preferences more than calculated candidate statements to the public do.

Furthermore, it’s important to realize that the advisers a president “brings with” will stick around for years. Some of them will have the President’s ear while the President is in office, which is important. Many of them will be elevated into positions of greater importance within foreign policy circles, which is an effect that can last long after the President who elevated them leaves office. (Many of President Nixon’s foreign policy people remain important foreign policy people today.)

This is one of the most important effects a President can have. In the months before we invaded Iraq, the greatest advantage that the Bush/Cheney pro-war group had is that the bounds of “serious” foreign policy views were being set almost entirely by people who were in favor of invading Iraq; those who were not in favor of preemptive war were not considered serious, and so had a limited impact on the national debate.

The invasion of Iraq has been a disaster, and that disaster will probably continue for many years to come. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who would otherwise be alive are now dead, because of our invasion. Even more Iraqis have not been killed, but have been hurt in other ways; they’ve been horribly injured, their lives have been constrained, their infrastructure (even more) destroyed, their children’s and grandchildren’s prospects for the future dimmed.³ In addition, thousands of Americans have been killed and tens of thousands grievously wounded or traumatized. After that come the less important, but still substantial costs: Costs in money, costs in missed opportunities, and costs to the US’s international standing and effectiveness.

Over the next thirty years, there will be many times when the tenor of the “expert class” of foreign policy thinkers will again set the bounds of what is “serious” and what is not. As we’ve seen in Iraq, when the “serious” opinion excludes all people who oppose wars of choice, the costs to the world are hideous. The foreign policy experts riding on Clinton’s and Obama’s coattails are therefore important to consider.

And it’s here that we find a real difference between the candidates. Stephen Zunes, writing in Foreign Policy in Focus, reports:

Obama advisors like Joseph Cirincione have emphasized a policy toward Iraq based on containment and engagement and have downplayed the supposed threat from Iran. Clinton advisor Holbrooke, meanwhile, insists that “the Iranians are an enormous threat to the United States,” the country is “the most pressing problem nation,” and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is like Hitler.

…it may be significant that Senator Clinton’s foreign policy advisors, many of whom are veterans of her husband’s administration, were virtually all strong supporters of President George W. Bush’s call for a U.S. invasion of Iraq. By contrast, almost every one of Senator Obama’s foreign policy team was opposed to a U.S. invasion. […]

Hillary Clinton has a few advisors who did oppose the war, like Wesley Clark, but taken together, the kinds of key people she’s surrounded herself with supports the likelihood that her administration, like Bush’s, would be more likely to embrace exaggerated and alarmist reports regarding potential national security threats, to ignore international law and the advice of allies, and to launch offensive wars.

By contrast, as The Nation magazine noted, a Barack Obama administration would be more likely to examine the actual evidence of potential threats before reacting, to work more closely with America’s allies to maintain peace and security, to respect the country’s international legal obligations, and to use military force only as a last resort.

In terms of Iran, for instance, [Obama advisor] Cirincione has downplayed the supposed threat, while Clinton advisor Holbrooke insists that “the Iranians are an enormous threat to the United States,” the country is “the most pressing problem nation,” and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is like Hitler. This is consistent with Clinton’s vote for the Kyl-Lieberman amendment that opened the door to a potential Bush attack on Iran, and with Obama’s opposition to it.

Which experts do you want influencing the boundaries of acceptable foreign policy thought for the next three decades: The ones who supported invading Iraq, or the ones who opposed it?

Matt Yglesias writes:

Obama people are more likely to value international law, strategic restraint, and a narrow focus on al-Qaeda whereas Clinton people are more likely to take a pragmatic/instrumental view of international institutions, worry that nothing will happen without American leadership, and to have more sympathy for the Bushian idea that you need broad confrontation with rogue regimes.

Which expert do you want whispering in the President’s ear for the next four to eight years, when the next important foreign policy decisions come — Susan Rice, who has been arguing for the last six years that humanitarian intervention in Darfur should be among the US’s most pressing foreign policy goals, or Richard Holbrooke, who has been a cheerleader for invading Iraq from the start? (Holbrooke is a leading contender for Secretary of State if Clinton is elected.)

And at the most basic level, which President do you want: The one whose foreign policy team consists almost elusively of people who got the single most important foreign policy question of the last decade wrong, or the one who hires people who didn’t get it wrong?

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Note: The original draft of this post included a section arguing that foreign policy is a feminist issue. The section got to be so long that I decided to make it a separate post, which I will post later today.

* * *

PLEASE DON’T POST COMMENTS ARGUING THAT INVADING IRAQ WAS A GOOD IDEA, or arguing that supporting hawks is a good idea. If you want to do that, use this post instead.

This thread is intended to be an argument for progressives who agree with core progressive ideas, and in particular progressive ideas about war.

* * *

1. Although I hasten to add that what they say is not entirely meaningless. First of all, the political pressures limiting what Clinton and Obama say now, will still operate (although less powerfully) once either of them takes office. And secondly, on the rare occasion that Obama and Clinton’s public statements on foreign policy do diverge, that may indicate a real difference in their approaches to foreign policy.
2. ”Monster.” — S. Powers, 2008.
3. Obligatory Saddam-Was-A-Monster statement: None of this is to say that Saddam Hussain wasn’t a monster. But our invasion has made things much worse.

This thread is the home of arguments about whether or not invading Iraq was a good idea, whether or not the US should attack Iran, whether or not hawkish foreign policies are wrong, etc.

The first seven or so comments were originally in response to this post, but I’ve moved them.

When dealing with the NCAA, you can be certain that there will never be a shortage of hypocrisy. As March Madness gives way to April Sadness, two wonderful examples came flying out of the NCAA cupboard. The NCAA has, over the years, condemned the practice of scalping tickets at their events. Now the folks at the [...]

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Glenn Greenwald, writing a week or two ago:

In the past two weeks, the following events transpired. A Department of Justice memo, authored by John Yoo, was released which authorized torture and presidential lawbreaking. It was revealed that the Bush administration declared the Fourth Amendment of the Bill of Rights to be inapplicable to “domestic military operations” within the U.S. The U.S. Attorney General appears to have fabricated a key event leading to the 9/11 attacks and made patently false statements about surveillance laws and related lawsuits. Barack Obama went bowling in Pennsylvania and had a low score.

Here are the number of times, according to NEXIS, that various topics have been mentioned in the media over the past thirty days:

“Yoo and torture” - 102

“Mukasey and 9/11″ — 73

“Yoo and Fourth Amendment” — 16

“Obama and bowling” — 1,043

“Obama and Wright” — More than 3,000 (too many to be counted)

“Obama and patriotism” - 1,607

“Clinton and Lewinsky” — 1,079

And as Eric Boehlert documents, even Iraq — that little five-year U.S. occupation with no end in sight — has been virtually written out of the media narrative in favor of mindless, stupid, vapid chatter of the type referenced above.