Moving Beyond Anti-War Politics
by Phyllis Bennis and Robert Jensen / April 28th, 2007

As Congress sends its bill requiring partial troop withdrawals from Iraq
to the White House for a certain veto, it has never been clearer that
mobilizing against this war is necessary, but not enough.

Congressional Democrats may be willing to stop there, but demanding the
withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq is only the first of our obligations
to help create the conditions for real justice and peace in the Middle
East and around the world. It’s crucial that we also advocate for an
entirely new foreign policy based on opposition to the long U.S. drive
toward empire.

That first step is, of course, crucial. When 78 percent of the Iraqi
people oppose the presence of U.S. troops and 61 percent support attacks
on those troops, it’s clear that our presence in the country is causing
— not preventing — much of the violence. Pulling out U.S. troops
(including the 100,000-plus mercenaries who back the U.S. military)
won’t eliminate all Iraqi-on-Iraqi violence, but it will remove the
reason many Iraqis are fighting. That would take away the protective
umbrella that the widely supported anti-occupation violence currently
gives the real terrorists — those engaged in killing civilians for
political or sectarian reasons. Once U.S. forces are gone and the reason
for the legitimate resistance to foreign occupation is eliminated, the
ugly terrorist violence will be exposed for what it is — and it will be
possible for Iraqis themselves to isolate the terrorists and eliminate
them as a fighting force.

But what comes after a U.S. withdrawal? We clearly owe the Iraqi people
massive reparations for the devastation our illegal invasion has
brought. Only in the United States is that illegality questioned; in the
rest of the world it’s understood. Equally obvious around the world is
that the decision to launch an aggressive war was rooted in the desire
to expand U.S. military power in the strategically crucial oil-rich
region, and that as a result the war fails every test of moral
legitimacy.

As we organize against the occupation, we also must work to end U.S.
support for Israeli occupation and try to prevent an aggressive war
against Iran. But all of this is part of a larger obligation of U.S.
citizens: We must challenge U.S. empire. The U.S. troop withdrawal and
reparations should be accompanied by a declaration of a major change of
course in U.S. foreign policy, especially in Iraq and the Middle East.
We need a new foreign policy based on justice, relying on international
law and the United Nations, rather than the assertion of
might-makes-right.

This takes us beyond a critique of the mendacity of the Bush
administration, to recognize that similar dreams of conquest and
domination have animated every administration, albeit in different
forms. From the darling of the anti-communist liberal elite (John F.
Kennedy) and the champion of so-called “assertive multilateralism” (Bill
Clinton), to the crude Republican realist
(Richard Nixon) and the patron saint of the conservative right (Ronald
Reagan), U.S. empire in the post-World War II era has been a distinctly
bipartisan effort.

In his 1980 State of the Union address, President Jimmy Carter called
for domination of the Middle East: “An attempt by any outside force to
gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault
on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an
assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military
force.” In other words: We run the region and control the flow of its
oil.

George W. Bush took earlier administrations’ power plays to new heights
of reckless militarism and unilateralism, seizing the moment after 9/11
to declare to all nations: “Either you are with us, or you are with the
terrorists. From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor
or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile
regime.” In other words: We demand global capitulation.

The only way to transcend this ugly history is through an honest
national dialogue and a promise of a sea change in U.S. policy.

Look around the world at the results of U.S. strategies. Rhetoric about
democracy and free trade has masked the enforcement of political and
economic subordination to the United States and U.S.-based multinational
corporations. The people of Latin America, much of Africa and the Middle
East, and many parts of Asia can offer compelling testimony to the
impact of those policies, enforced now through more than 700 U.S.
military bases spread across the globe in over 130 countries.

Such empires are typically brought down from outside, with great
violence. But we have another option, as citizens of that empire who
understand how this pathology of power damages our country as well as
the world. Imagine what would be possible if we — ordinary citizens of
this latest empire — could build a movement that gave politicians no
choice but to do the right thing.

Imagine what would be possible in the world if an anti-empire movement
were strong enough to make it clear that ending military violence
requires a just distribution of the resources of this world.

Imagine what is possible if we work to make inevitable one day what
seems improbable today — the justice that makes possible real peace.

Phyllis Bennis is a Fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies and
author of Challenging Empire: How People, Governments and the UN Defy
U.S. Power. She can be reached at: pbennis@ips-dc.org. Robert Jensen is
a professor of journalism at the University of Texas at Austin and
author of Citizens of Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity. He can
be reached at: rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu. Read other articles by Phyllis
Bennis and.