[antiwar-van] Fwd: The Real Questions...

[Carole Karkhairan]

>Date: Thu, 09 Jan 2003 18:12:27 -0800
>From: Cathy Woods <cathywoods at shaw.ca>
>Subject: The Real Questions...
>X-Sender: cathywoods at shawmail
>To: cathywoods at shaw.ca
>
>Bush deplores the killing of [certain] innocents
>
>The following is the script of an interchange between Press 
>Secretary Ari Fleischer and journalist Helen Thomas.
>
>Press Briefing by Ari Fleischer 12:35 P.M. EST
>Office of the Press SecretaryJanuary 6, 2003
>
>MR. FLEISCHER: Good afternoon and happy New Year to everybody. 
>...The President will discuss with members of his Cabinet his agenda 
>for the year. The President is going to focus on economic growth, 
>making America a more compassionate country, and providing for the 
>security of our nation abroad and on the homefront.
>
>And with that, I'm more than happy to take your questions. Helen.
>
>Q: At the earlier briefing, Ari, you said that the President 
>deplored the taking of innocent lives. Does that apply to all 
>innocent lives in the world? And I have a follow-up.
>
>MR. FLEISCHER: I refer specifically to a horrible terrorist attack 
>on Tel Aviv that killed scores and wounded hundreds. And the 
>President, as he said in his statement yesterday, deplores in the 
>strongest terms the taking of those lives and the wounding of those 
>people, innocents in Israel.
>
>Q: My follow-up is, why does he want to drop bombs on innocent Iraqis?
>
>MR. FLEISCHER: Helen, the question is how to protect Americans, and 
>our allies and friends --
>
>Q: They're not attacking you.
>
>MR. FLEISCHER: -- from a country --
>
>Q: Have they laid the glove on you or on the United States, the 
>Iraqis, in 11 years?
>
>MR. FLEISCHER: I guess you have forgotten about the Americans who 
>were killed in the first Gulf War as a result of Saddam Hussein's 
>aggression then.
>
>Q: Is this revenge, 11 years of revenge?
>
>MR. FLEISCHER: Helen, I think you know very well that the 
>President's position is that he wants to avert war, and that the 
>President has asked the United Nations to go into Iraq to help with 
>the purpose of averting war.
>
>Q: Would the President attack innocent Iraqi lives?
>
>MR. FLEISCHER: The President wants to make certain that he can 
>defend our country, defend our interests, defend the region, and 
>make certain that American lives are not lost.
>
>Q: And he thinks they are a threat to us?
>
>MR. FLEISCHER: There is no question that the President thinks that 
>Iraq is a threat to the United States.
>
>Q: The Iraqi people?
>
>MR. FLEISCHER: The Iraqi people are represented by their government. 
>If there was regime change, the Iraqi --
>
>Q: So they will be vulnerable?
>
>MR. FLEISCHER: Actually, the President has made it very clear that 
>he has no dispute with the people of Iraq. That's why the American 
>policy remains a policy of regime change. There is no question the 
>people of Iraq --
>
>Q: That's a decision for them to make, isn't it? It's their country.
>
>MR. FLEISCHER: Helen, if you think that the people of Iraq are in a 
>position to dictate who their dictator is, I don't think that has 
>been what history has shown.
>
>Q: I think many countries don't have -- people don't have the 
>decision -- including us.
>
>To view the transcript, 
>see:http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/01/20030106-1.html
>__
>
>Heeding Our Own Warnings
>by Jessica Azulay; ZNet Sustainer Program; November 08, 2002
>http://www.zmag.org/content/print_article.cfm?itemID=2596&sectionID=41
>
>Many astute social commentators have done a great job of pointing 
>out that one of Bush's purposes for planning to attack Iraq is to 
>distract the public from other important domestic issues.
>
>While we on the radical left point out that the public is getting 
>the wool pulled over its eyes, many of us are nevertheless 
>preoccupied with the possibility of war. Huge amounts of energy are 
>being put into anti-war organizing and the coming months will see 
>many large demonstrations on both local and national levels. But as 
>we pour our energies into mobilizing against a war-to-be, we run the 
>danger of ignoring all of those issues that Bush and others want us 
>to forget about.
>
>By saying this, I'm not arguing against protesting war. If the Bush 
>administration is hell-bent on attacking Iraq, and if congress is 
>willing to give him the no-holds-barred go-ahead, then we need to 
>try to stop the aggression before it starts. It's also extremely 
>important, however, that our strategies for anti-war organizing 
>don't set us up to abandon all of the other really important fights.
>
>War is horrible and opposing it in its own right on moral grounds is 
>important and necessary. But for those of us who hope to see radical 
>change to the systems of oppression, we need to look for strategies 
>that have both the potential to stop the impending war and lead us 
>closer to our longer term goals of (might I say it) revolution. We 
>should see preventing the war on Iraq as a short-term goal and find 
>strategies that treat that goal as a means to an end-the end being 
>wholesale transformation into a radical society. This means we 
>cannot afford to abandon the critical struggles that Bush and 
>friends so desperately want us to forget about.
>
>We are in a good position because the same strategies that will be 
>most effective in preventing a military aggression against Iraq are 
>consistent with strategies that will be most effective for achieving 
>our longer-term goals. Continuing to demand and struggle for social 
>change is one of the most important components of effective, 
>sustainable antiwar strategy.
>
>We must be focused on bringing more and more people into antiwar 
>activism and channeling the energy of those involved into activities 
>and organizing that threaten the elite's war efforts and their 
>policies at home. Only by raising the perceived costs of war for 
>those in power will we convince them to change these policies. Since 
>those in power are corporations and power-hungry politicians, we can 
>best raise their costs by challenging not just their authority to 
>declare war on Iraq but also their economic and political authority 
>in general.
>
>This is exactly what happened in the sixties during the anti-Vietnam 
>War organizing. It was not enough that people were protesting war. 
>What really scared elites was the fact that there was a large and 
>growing movement that included not only antiwar activity but also 
>anti-system organizing. The youth were challenging authority, 
>questioning social norms, and generally rebelling against mainstream 
>mentality. This is the type of energetic and broad movement that we 
>need to build today, both because it will be the most effective and 
>swift in bringing down Bush's war plans and because it will help us 
>in all of our struggles.
>
>All of this means that we must add depth to our antiwar protest. We 
>must work to educate our movement about the linkages between war and 
>the problems that everyday people face at home. We must constantly 
>highlight those connections and dedicate ourselves to working on 
>issues that affect people at home as well as protesting U.S. foreign 
>policy. This means holding events in which people from many sectors 
>of the community are asked for input. These events may have an 
>antiwar focus, but they should include other connected issues that 
>people find important. There is also the possibility of planning 
>events in which two or more issues are addressed at the same time. 
>For example a rally which calls for the funding of free community 
>health care instead of war. Many groups are already doing this type 
>of organizing, and we should validate their work and support it.
>
>Antiwar groups should seek to collaborate with and support their 
>local area groups which are focusing on issues such as health care, 
>police brutality and prison issues, labor, housing, education, etc. 
>When there is a choice between coalition building with national 
>groups that do hierarchical organizing on a mass scale and tend to 
>co-opt events that take part in organizing or organizing with local 
>groups to put on local multi-issue events, we should choose to work 
>and build locally. This will not only help us get the word out in 
>our own communities but it will bring us closer to building antiwar 
>and anti-system infrastructure on a sustainable scale.
>
>If we do not ground our anti-war organizing in a more holistic 
>strategy for social change, then we will be left with very little 
>when it is all over. Even if we do succeed in avoiding war with 
>Iraq, we will still have to pick up where we left off with all of 
>our other fights. While Bush and company will have failed at 
>pursuing their wildest imperialist dreams, they will still have 
>succeeded in distracting the public from domestic problems. If, on 
>the other hand, we can combine our anti-war activism with our 
>long-term struggles and use the momentum building in the anti-war 
>movement to propel us forward toward even greater social change, we 
>can thwart their war effort and foil their distraction caper.
>__
>
>The Readily Available Reality of American Policy in an Age of Empire 
>and Inequality by Paul Street; January 09, 2003
>
>Excerpt:
>
>Noam Chomsky makes a useful distinction between the “dictionary” 
>meaning of “democracy” and the operative “doctrinal” meaning used by 
>the architects of American policy and opinion. The former involves 
>“one-person, one vote,” de-concentrated power and equal policymaking 
>influence for all regardless of wealth and other distinctions. The 
>latter meaning “refers,” in Chomsky’s words, “to a system in which 
>decisions are made by sectors of the business community and related 
>elites” and in which “the public are to be only ‘spectators of 
>action,’ not ‘participants.’ They are permitted to ratify the 
>decisions of their betters and to lend their support to one or 
>another of them, but not to interfere with matters—like public 
>policy—that are none of their business.”
>
>Source: http://www.zmag.org/content/print_article.cfm?itemID=2839&sectionID=11
>
>cathywoods at shaw.ca
>www.creativeresistance.ca
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