opinion

Also in this section:

Bernal, Cronies Day
Sirias, Trapped in a changing Cuba
Gutman, Inflexible beliefs
Stimson, Finding the easy
Greenpeace, G8 countries shirk climate change duties
Wheeler, The protests during Bush's Latin America trip
Alvares de Azevedo e Almeida, Bush in Brazil
Denis, The joy of living in the Caribbean

N. Jackson, The wheel of karma catches up with Scooter Libby

E. Jackson, Obama, Walter Reed and the antiwar movemen

Obama, Walter Reed and the antiwar movement

by Eric Jackson

Will Rogers surely wasn't the first Democrat to deny that he was a member of an organized political party. A "first past the post" system of electing legislators from single-member districts naturally lends itself to a two-party system --- although in some large countries like Canada to a series of regional two-party paradigms --- and when you reduce the political divide to two parties you get these big tents that include diverse ideologies and interests in one party. This phenomenon has been notorious in the Democratic Party since the times of Jefferson and Jackson. It's a growing problem for the Republican coalition that Nixon and Reagan put together as well.

The problems of today's American political parties are set within the contexts of certain legal, economic and technological realities. North America's suburbia is designed by urban planners and architects in such a way that families physically are isolated from their neighbors and the politics of door to door campaigning is often very difficult. The hardcore crime in many urban areas makes it hard for any campaign not based into those neighborhoods to "reach in" for support. Television is the way to reach most voters, but its owners have used their political clout to make it hellishly expensive. The electronic tools of the grass roots campaign are the telephone bank and more recently the Internet. You have a grossly inequal distribution of wealth in society, superficial mass communications media that are more concerned with celebrity than with substance, courts and politicians who represent the rich and pressures from below resulting from a long train of campaign finance scandals all combining to create a legal framework in which early fundraising has become the winnow of presidential primary campaigns.

Although my personal favorite is someone else, it appears that on the Democratic side the presidential primary race is shaping up to be Clinton versus
Obama versus Edwards. Because both Clinton and Edwards voted for the war in Iraq the antiwar activists, a powerful minority within the party, have been gravitating toward Obama.

It seems that Edwards has made his adjustments on the war issue with an eye toward a bruising primary battle, while Clinton admits no errors in an apparent calculation that any concession to the antiwar movement in the primaries hurts her in the general election. But of course, that could also be a formula that ends up leaving her out of the November 2008 race.

The antiwar calculations are made in light of the 1972 experience and the results of breakaways like the 2000 Nader campaign. If you win the primary and get slaughtered in the general election, or walk away in a huff to make a third party ideological statement, that large majority you have mustered against an unpopular war is likely to be defeated by a vicious minority that will take reprisals.

Antiwar Democrats who have lots of money --- most of them concentrated in California and New York --- appear to be going with Obama. The "can a black man be elected president?" question is, to my mind, one of the lesser concerns. Obama's electability question arises more from the fact that his one US Senate race ended in blowout because his GOP opponent imploded in a tawdry scandal, and thus we don't even know if he can carry a major state like Illinois under more normal political circumstances. Obama's experience question arises not only from his scant years in Washington, but more from the fact that his jobs in politics have been legislative rather than executive. I'm not the only one who feels more comfortable voting for a presidential candidate who's been a governor, the mayor of a large city, a cabinet secretary or  high ranking military officer than for someone with only legislative experience. The presidency is, after all, an administrative job.

(Tangentially, I don't believe that experiences managing big businesses or major universities necessarily give rise to the sorts of public administration skills needed to be a good president. Academia and the corporate world are very different.)

So anyway, this antiwar voter is left with many questions about the Democratic presidential hopefuls and the party's congressional caucuses and the circumstances of the moment focus my attention on Obama.

On Capitol Hill the Democrats are a big tent circus as was expected --- but actually, a bit more ably led by Nancy Pelosi on the House side than I would have predicted. The Senate, simultaneously the world's greatest deliberative body and this despicable and out of touch millionaires' club, despite the recent partisan shift remains the obstacle that the framers of the US Constitution intended.

Despite the cacaphony, from under the big top we hear the sounds of people ready to govern, and especially so from Obama, especially about the war in Iraq.

Might you expect that the son of a Kenyan father, who spent some of his formative years in the Third World, would understand that even with the best of intentions a government in Washington is inherently incapable of managing the affairs of people in far-away Iraq and shouldn't be so foolish as to try? That's the underlying assumption of Obama's and most Democrats' insistence that we set a date to be out of Iraq and gradually do so.

After the devastating economic hit that the Iraq War has been to the United States, might you expect a "peace dividend?" Obama knows better and isn't playing demagogue to the antiwar primary voters on this issue. The United States is a big country with people and interests to defend and just because we don't like the ways in which its military has been used is no good cause for the antiwar movement to conclude that we don't need armed forces. And the truth of the matter is that like a spoiled child playing with a toy that matters very little to him, George W. Bush has broken the US Armed Forces. There will be no economic "peace dividend" because it won't be cheap to repair the damage that has been done, and meanwhile in Afghanistan the Taliban is growing ever stronger and more forces need to be sent there if it is not to become an Al Qaeda base again. Obama is acting with the utmost maturity and responsibility in leveling with the American people about these realities.

And isn't the ongoing scandal at Walter Reed Army Hospital the emblem of Bush's irresponsibility and the challenges that leaves for the United States?

Even before Bush the younger was inflicted upon us, the US military had been downsizing as the result of America's industrial and economic decline. The post-World War II US economic leadership of the world was frittered away in Vietnam, and then over the ensuing decades corporate interests propped up their profit margins at the expense of the national interest by exporting American industrial production abroad. The United States went from being a creditor nation to being a debtor nation. The Cold War was won in large part by an arms race that broke the Soviet economy but also did tremendous harm its stronger American counterpart. In all the triumphalist hooplah a lot of people expected an economic bonus of some sort, but the downsizing of US military forces was not so much the result of a less dangerous world as of an American economy no longer able to support such an expense.

It wasn't just our military that declined. The American standard of living stagnated or declined for most people, even if the prosperity of the very richest distorted the overall statistics. The kids of union-scale factory workers inherited the prospect of burger flipping or Wal-Mart clerking. Private pensions began to go the way of the dodo. People lost their health care benefits, k-12 education declined, the cost of a university education soared, jobs became unavailable in the inner cities and record percentages of the American people were incarcerated.

So along comes George W. Bush with his delusions of imperial grandeur, thinking to wage a generations-long war on ever-shifting axes of "evil" and foolishly thinking that he could do so cheaply. Part of his cheap policy has been stinginess with respect to those he has sent off to fight. Another part of his cheap policy has been the scapegoating of others for the disastrous results of his own decisions, whether to torture US captives, to invade Iraq with insufficient forces to do the job or to skimp on medical care for wounded veterans.

Heads roll, but never those of the intellectual authors of the many scandals swirling in the dust around Bush's failure in Iraq. So they're going to blame the Secretary of the Army and the commander of Walter Reed when the truth is that just when the workload of that facility went way up there was a right-wing doctrinaire "privatization" that cut way back on the number of doctors and other resources available for the patients?

Well, Fox News and the Reverend Sun Myung Moon's Washington Times may spin it as a lower level mistake that has been corrected, and certain mainstream media and Democratic politicians who ought to know better may go along, but the truth isn't about to just go away. Congressional hearings will be held, wronged soldiers and veterans ignored by the corporate media will be heard over the Internet and in other spaces that the high and mighty don't control and questions that polite reporters who care to keep their jobs don't ask will be asked. The full enormity of the damage that has been done to America by the Iraq adventure will come out.

It turns out that Obama is the one who brought an admission of the problem's dimensions into 2008 presidential politics. Whether or not that's a good campaign move, and whether or not the voters decide that Obama's the best person for the job, all Americans owe the man a debt of gratitude for restoring a modicum of realism to the national debate.

So what about the antiwar movement? There's a good crop of Democratic candidates this year, several of whom --- including all of those with a good shot at the nomination --- should be very attractive to antiwar voters in a general election facing anyone whom the Republicans might offer. I don't think that at this time there's a compelling reason for the antiwar movement to move as a unit into any candidate's camp.

But there is an urgent necessity to shape the issues around which 2008 politics revolve. These can be stated in positive or negative terms, but I have a hunch that the latter may be more effective.

No torture. No secret prisons. No "rendition" of prisoners to evade US legal jurisdiction. No denial of habeas corpus. No mercenaries. No repression of antiwar dissidents. No vilification of or reprisals against America's professional soldiers, diplomats, cops and prosecutors who express common sense objections to the Bush administration's dogmatic follies. No short-changing of America's veterans.

Above all in the 2008 election year, no more war in Iraq. And more generally, no new era of Western Crusades against the Muslim world and no more attempts to solve America's energy and economic problems through warfare.

That stark set of negative messages is neither Obama's nor the Democratic Party's. It is, however, a lot of what the antiwar movement is saying and if the movement plays its cards right any presidential candidate or political party that explicitly or implicitly takes positions to the contrary should be thoroughly thrashed next year.

Bernal, Cronyies Day
Sirias, Trapped in a changing Cuba
Gutman, Inflexible beliefs
Stimson, Finding the easy
Greenpeace, G8 countries shirk climate change duties
Wheeler, The protests during Bush's Latin America trip
Alvares de Azevedo e Almeida, Bush in Brazil
Denis, The joy of living in the Caribbean

N. Jackson, The wheel of karma catches up with Scooter Libby

E. Jackson, Obama, Walter Reed and the antiwar movement