The Bush Doctrine set out plans that went far beyond Afghanistan and Iraq. Lance Selfa’s article examines the original claims of the Bush Doctrine, and the contradictions and pressures, not least of which is the unexpected fierce resistance in Iraq, that are constraining and reshaping the doctrine.
While the Bush administration feels confident after the election, liberals and leftists who chased after Kerry have mistakenly concluded that the country is turning to the right, when in truth, the social polarization that characterized the pre-election period is only intensifying, creating the conditions for struggle against the Bush Agenda. Nevertheless, a clear sense of direction will be crucial if we are not only to rekindle a strong antiwar movement, but also connect the issues of the war with the attack on working-class living standards at home. Allegiance to the Democratic Party, which seems set to lurch further rightward, has had a dampening effect on the antiwar movement. The antiwar movement can revive on a solid footing only if it organizes completely independently from a party that criticizes Bush on the basis that he needs to send more troops to Iraq. This is the topic of Sharon Smith’s article.
A clarity of thinking is also needed on the question of the Iraqi resistance, and so we have included four articles on it by Paul D’Amato, Sami Ramadani, and Michael Schwartz. Islamophobia in the U.S. has created a situation in which even those who oppose the occupation are hesitant to call for immediate withdrawal or support Iraq’s right to self-determination. The ISR attempts to lay out a case for Iraq’s right to self-determination and for immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops, and, as a corollary, the Iraqi people’s legitimate right to resist occupation.
AFTER LOSING the 2004 presidential election by running a candidate whose positions on the war and economy were barely distinguishable from Bush’s, the Democrats have concluded that they must move even further to the right to regain the “moral high ground” and win support among conservative voters. Their first order of business, apparently, is to jettison one of the last remaining points of difference between the two major parties, women’s right to choose.
The party sent a clear message by naming anti-choice—and anti-gay—Nevada Senator Harry Reid as the Democratic minority leader in the Senate.
Then Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton chose a celebration of the thirty-second anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion to signal a full retreat. “We can all recognize that abortion in many ways represents a sad, even tragic, choice to many, many women,” Clinton said. Then she gave a nod to the “moral values” hypocrites, arguing that organized religion is the “primary” reason teenagers abstain from sex. She embraced the “opportunity for people of good faith to find common ground in this debate.”
John Kerry himself appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press to say he favors legislation forcing teens to seek parental notification before having an abortion. The Democrats want to be a “big tent,” he said, adding, “Abstinence is worth talking about; adoption is worth talking about.”
The latest Democratic salvo against abortion came from Howard Dean, recently named chairman of the Democratic National Committee. In a speech to the party faithful in early February, Dean, a physician, said: “I don’t think we need to be the pro-abortion party. Nobody’s pro-abortion.”
Abortion is not a frivolous choice for the one-third of U.S. women under age forty-five who have exercised their legal right to have one. Abortion is a necessary health care option because women continue to bear the primary responsibility for raising children, whether they work outside the home or not. Without the availability of legal and accessible abortion, millions of working-class women would be compelled to seek dangerous back-alley illegal abortions. Tens of thousands of women died from unsafe, illegal abortions in the decades before women won the right to choose in the United States. Before abortion was made legal in New York City in 1970, Black women made up 50 percent of all women who died after an illegal abortion, while Puerto Rican women were 44 percent.
It is impossible to speak of equality for women without the basic right to control their own bodies.
Decades of attacks on abortion have left 86 percent of U.S. counties with no abortion provider today. The multitude of existing restrictions on abortion—including twenty-four-hour waiting periods and parental consent or notification requirements—already disproportionately affect poor and young women.
The Democratic Party is surrendering on abortion rights, yet mainstream feminists have been strangely silent. Organizations such as the National Organization for Women (NOW) and the Feminist Majority Foundation have continued to support Democrats, despite the party’s retreat on abortion rights since Bill Clinton’s presidency. But now retreat has turned to surrender, spelling disaster for the right to choose.
NARAL Pro-Choice America is already emulating Hillary Clinton’s capitulation. Kate Michelman, NARAL’s president emeritus argued, “Senator Clinton deserves praise for reaching out to anti-choice Americans.” NARAL has already abandoned its opposition to the latest Republican attack, the “Unborn Child Pain Awareness Act,” requiring doctors to offer anesthesia for the fetus in abortions after the twentieth week of pregnancy.
NARAL stated that it will instead await the next Supreme Court nomination to put up a fight. Imagine a war in which the generals opted not to fight any more battles, but to instead wait for their opponent’s final offensive to fight back—in the meanwhile losing ground, forces, and the ideological justifications for the war. That is NARAL’s approach.
Those who argued for a third-party alternative to the Democrats in 2004 were met with hostility from mainstream feminists—who argued that the Democrats would defend women’s right to choose against attacks by the Republicans and the Christian Right. This latest capitulation to the Right by leading Democrats should put this argument to rest.
The potential exists to mobilize an effective defense of abortion rights, without apology or restrictions. That potential, however, lies outside the confines of the Democratic Party. Unless defenders of abortion rights begin to mobilize independently of the Democrats, women are in serious jeopardy of losing the legal right to control their own bodies.
IRAQ
Demonstration Elections
THE BUSH administration and the press are all aglow over the recent Iraqi elections. The very act of voting was presented as the Iraqi people “defying” the resistance to cast a vote in an election made possible by the benevolent U.S. military presence in Iraq. This is the spin. What is the reality?
It was an election in which the names of candidates were not announced, where most Iraqis could not name more than a few of the 7,700 people running, and where the major parties were forced to drop the demand for American withdrawal timetables from their election platforms. This was not so much an exercise in democracy as another orchestrated American public relations maneuver along the lines of the toppling of the Saddam statue, Saddam’s capture, and Bush landing on an aircraft carrier.
Moreover, the election numbers don’t really add up. According to Institute for Policy Studies analyst Phyllis Bennis, if eligible voters in Iraq are counted rather than registered voters (eighteen instead of fourteen million), the claimed 58 percent turnout drops to a 48 percent turnout.
Out of this, only a fraction were Sunni voters—the majority of them boycotted the election. Certainly not surprising, since one of the ways in which the U.S. set out to create the “right” conditions for the elections was the destruction of Fallujah, a majority Sunni city of about 300,000.
The January elections did not signify a relinquishing of control over Iraq by the United States, whose “domination of Iraq remains unchanged with this election,” writes Bennis. To begin with, the election did not even decide the issue that concerns Iraqi voters the most—getting the U.S. to leave. Secondly, the U.S. retains its monopoly of military power, and therefore of political power, in Iraq. As Tom Englehardt of the Web site Tomdispatch.com reminds us, “All Iraqi ministries have American advisers in them,” and the U.S. maintains
14 massive, “permanent” military bases, also known as “enduring camps”; its CIA contingent is probably the largest in the world; its officials are openly talking about American troops remaining in Iraq at or near present levels at least through 2007.…
All in all, the Bush administration holds power of a sort—through a kind of brute force that has yet to bring Iraq to heel—and shows no sign of having the slightest desire to give up on its Iraqi holdings (no matter the inside-the-Beltway mutterings about “withdrawal”). This is the true face of American “democracy” and “freedom” in Iraq.
Moreover, the U.S. crafted the elections in order to ensure that no single party or coalition gained the two-thirds of seats necessary to control the new national assembly. The Shiite-backed United Iraq Alliance (UIA) received about 48 percent of the vote, the combined Kurdish parties 25 percent, and the Iraqi list of interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, a former CIA operative and Washington’s favorite choice, got 13.7 percent of the vote. This outcome ensures, to the benefit of the U.S., that no single group will be able to dominate. Bennis writes:
The U.S.-imposed Transitional Administrative Law, imposed by the U.S. occupation, remains the law of the land even with the new election. Amending that law requires super-majorities of the assembly as well as a unanimous agreement by the presidency council, almost impossible given the range of constituencies that must be satisfied. Chiefs of key control commissions, including Iraq’s Inspector General, the Commission on Public Integrity, the Communication and Media Commission and others, were appointed by Bremer with five-year terms, can only be dismissed “for cause.” The Council of Judges, as well as individual judges and prosecutors, were selected, vetted and trained by the U.S. occupation, and are dominated by long-time U.S.-backed exiles.
The U.S. may have felt compelled by events to accept some of the trappings of democracy in Iraq—they have rebuffed earlier demands by Sistani’s forces to hold elections—but they cannot accept the substance. A fully democratic election would produce a government hostile to the U.S. presence in Iraq. As early as last spring a poll sponsored by the Coalition Provisional Authority found that 92 percent of Iraqis considered the U.S. as “occupiers” rather than “liberators,” and 85 percent wanted the U.S. troops to leave.
In spite of this overwhelming opposition to the occupation, the outcome of the election has, conveniently for the U.S., produced two possible candidates for the Iraqi presidency—Dawa Party leader Ibrahim Jafari, a long-time London exile who has publicly stated his support for the occupation, and Ahmad Chalabi, former U.S. darling who fell out of favor, but who is probably as acceptable to the U.S. as Allawi. Journalist Juan Cole’s February 20 blog entry notes that the Lebanese paper Al Hayat reported that the announcement of who will be the new prime minister in Iraq has been postponed “in part because of the difficulty in getting a ‘green light’ from Washington.” Cole adds: “This frankness agrees with the comment made by one embassy official that Iraq cannot select a prime minister who is unacceptable to Washington.”
Znet contributor and author Edward S. Herman argues correctly that these were “demonstration elections”—designed to legitimize the occupation through “the calculated use of voter turnout as a measure of approval of the election and occupation itself.”
The U.S. would like to win over a layer of Shiite collaborators, as part of a “divide and rule” strategy designed to pit Sunni and Shiite against each other and thereby prevent the coalescing of a united Iraqi national resistance. At the very least, attacks on Shiite mosques can be used to justify the need for the U.S. to remain in order to prevent “civil war.” The U.S. may have achieved some kind of short breathing space, but when it becomes clear to the millions of Shiites that the U.S. is not leaving and that these elections change little in their lives, the resistance will continue to spread beyond the Sunni population.
The best answer to these sham demonstration elections was given by Hassan Juma’a Awad, general secretary of Iraq’s Southern Oil Company Union and president of the Basra Oil Workers Union, writing in the February 18 edition of the British Guardian:
The occupation has deliberately fomented a sectarian division of Sunni and Shia. We never knew this sort of division before. Our families intermarried, we lived and worked together. And today we are resisting this brutal occupation together, from Falluja to Najaf to Sadr City. The resistance to the occupation forces is a God-given right of Iraqis, and we, as a union, see ourselves as a necessary part of this resistance—although we will fight using our industrial power, our collective strength as a union, and as a part of civil society which needs to grow in order to defeat both still-powerful Saddamist elites and the foreign occupation of our country.
Bush and Blair should remember that those who voted in last month’s elections in Iraq are as hostile to the occupation as those who boycotted them. Those who claim to represent the Iraqi working class while calling for the occupation to stay a bit longer, due to “fears of civil war,” are in fact speaking only for themselves and the minority of Iraqis whose interests are dependent on the occupation.
We as a union call for the withdrawal of foreign occupation forces and their military bases. We don’t want a timetable—this is a stalling tactic. We will solve our own problems. We are Iraqis, we know our country and we can take care of ourselves. We have the means, the skills and resources to rebuild and create our own democratic society.
