Vol. 71/No. 24      June 18, 2007

The previous week the Democrats dropped an earlier proposal to set deadlines for redeploying U.S. troops in Iraq, and passed a $100 billion war appropriations bill that President George Bush signed.

These developments highlight the convergence of Democrats with the White House over Iraq and the broader “war on terrorism.”

Meanwhile, U.S. defense secretary Robert Gates and Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno, who heads daily operations of U.S. forces in Iraq, backed the White House call to establish a Korea-type force for a protracted stay in Iraq.

These events are demoralizing many in the U.S. peace movement, especially liberals and middle-class radicals who had illusions they could nudge the Democratic Party in an “antiwar” direction.

Cindy Sheehan, for example, a prominent speaker at many antiwar actions since her son was killed in Iraq, announced her departure from the peace movement in a May 31 letter.

During the June 3 debate of Democratic presidential candidates in New Hampshire, Sen. John Edwards said he would do “absolutely everything” to find terrorists and stop them. In the same breath he called the “global war on terror” a “bumper sticker/political slogan” used to justify the administration’s course.

Hillary Clinton disagreed. “I am a senator from New York. I have lived with the aftermath of 9/11,” she said. “And I believe we are safer than we were. We are not yet safe enough, and I have proposed over the last year a number of policies that I think we should be following.”

Clinton’s supporters in the peace movement have attacked people like Sheehan for staging sit-ins at Clinton’s office to protest her pro-war stance. Sheehan’s resignation letter, which was carried in newspapers across the country, alluded to that. “I was the darling of the so-called left as long as I limited my protests to George W. Bush and the Republican Party,” Sheehan wrote. “However, when I started to hold the Democratic Party to the same standards that I held the Republican Party, support for my cause started to erode and the left started labeling me with the same slurs that the right used… . I am going to take whatever I have left and go home.”

Sheehan’s stance is echoed by other liberal forces.

An editorial in the June 18 issue of the Nation magazine, headlined “The Honeymoon Is Over,” said, “As Congress left town for its Memorial Day recess, the euphoria cast by the 2006 election victories was gone… . The slim Democratic majority in both Houses is not a progressive majority.”

Petty-bourgeois radicals are similarly affected. The ANSWER coalition, for example, posted recently on its website their analysis of the state of the peace movement. “It is clear that the anti-war movement is not sufficiently strong at the moment to bring this criminal and despised war to an end,” it says. It lamented that “the size and intensity of the demonstrations, protests and acts of resistance does not at all measure up to the vast magnitude of feelings against the Iraq war.” ANSWER’s leadership includes central leaders of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, a split off from Workers World, a Stalinist party.

Meanwhile, during a visit to the U.S. Pacific Command in Hawaii, in preparation for a security conference in Singapore, Gates said a long-term U.S. military presence in Iraq, like that in Korea, would assure allies and adversaries in the Middle East that Washington is “going to be there for a long time.”

Gates also said that one of the main reasons for U.S. participation in the Singapore meeting is that “while we are fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and a global war on terror, we have—have no intention of neglecting Asia.”

In Iraq itself, a new crisis is looming at the country’s northern border with Turkey. Ankara has been amassing troops there, threatening to invade Iraqi Kurdistan on the allegation that fighters of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a group fighting for sovereignty of the Kurdish areas of Turkey, are being given safe haven in northern Iraq. Both Baghdad and Iraqi Kurdish groups have protested. A June 4 opinion column in the New York Post noted, “The Kurdish area is the most stable and pro-American part of Iraq; neither Washington nor Baghdad can afford to have it become a new item on the ‘problem’ list.”

As this issue goes to press, the Turkish government denied reports that its troops entered northern Iraq today. But Reuters reported that Jabar Yawir, deputy minister for Peshmerga Affairs in Iraqi Kurdistan, which manages the Kurdish Peshmerga army, said 10 Turkish helicopters, with some 150 special forces, landed in a village in Mazouri, and left two hours later without a confrontation. The village, which is about 2 miles inside the Iraqi border, is a PKK-controlled area, he said.

In the southern part of the country, about 600 pipeline workers walked out June 4, shutting down refined oil and gas deliveries to Baghdad, Kerbala, and Nassiriya. The General Union of Oil Employees in Basra is demanding better pay, improved job conditions, land for homes, a reduction in national oil prices, and inclusion in drafting a new oil law. The law will decide the form of foreign investments in oil and how revenues will be distributed among Iraqi provinces—which are controlled by competing Shiite, Sunni, and Kurdish capitalists.  
 
 
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