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Articles : IraqDemocratic Spin Won't End the War in Iraq
Editor’s note: In early 2005, I attended a two-day conference organized by the labor union SEIU. The event gathered some of the nation’s leading young left-leaning activists, in particular those working in the media, with the goal of synergizing our efforts around core issues. Over the course of the weekend, the idea was to come up with five “top issues” we could all agree to focus on in the coming year. Wal-Mart was a big issue, as was the looming battle of the White House’s plan to privatize social security. To my dismay, Iraq was not one of them. I expressed my shock, pointing out that we were a nation at war and that as progressives it was not just a moral duty but a good tactical decision to oppose it. I noted the war was only going to worsen and American public opinion would turn on it and that we needed to get out in front of it. In addition, many soldiers and their families were turning away from Bush because of the war and that this represented a new opportunity for the left to connect with members of the armed services. While several participants thanked me for my comments in private, I was mostly met with blank stares. Between sessions, I found myself talking with a representative from MoveOn. I asked him why Iraq didn’t seem to be on the top of MoveOn’s list of issues at the time. His response sent a chill up my spine: “Iraq is not a winner.” In contrast, he pointed out, Bush’s social security privatization program was unpopular and provided the left with a tangible opportunity for a much-needed political score. We need wins, he said, repeating a mantra I would hear throughout the weekend from several other participants. Cut to Spring 2007. Most Americans want the U.S. out of Iraq, Bush’s approval ratings are at an all-time low and the Democratics have control of Congress. But the war is still raging with no end in sight. In March, we ran two articles by the Center for Media Democracy’s John Stauber Iraq: Why Won’t MoveOn Move Forward? and More on MoveOn and the Dems which attacked MoveOn for what he argued was their capitulation to the Democratic leadership’s compromises on Iraq. The articles caused a major rift in the antiwar movement, with the MoveOn “pragmatists” on one side and the “naive” peaceniks on the other. MoveOn’s Eli Pariser responded with a spirited defense of his organization’s strategy, which we also ran here. But today Stauber’s words seem eeirly prescient as Congress passed the Iraq supplemental bill without a requirement that the White House set a date for withdrawal of U.S. troops. We’re publishing Stauber’s latest critique of MoveOn and the Democratic Party in hopes not of stirring up another inter-lefty squabble, or to beat up on MoveOn, which has done trailblazing work in the last seven years, but to move the debate on how to end the war forward. Because with today’s news it’s clear what we’re doing now isn’t working. UPDATE: MoveOn repsonds to today’s vote here. MoveOn executive director Eli Pariser said, “Republicans, joined by some Democrats, once again endorsed President Bush’s policy of failure in Iraq and obstructed the will of the American people.” [A.L.]
After several months of empty posturing against the war in Iraq, politicians in Washington have made what Democratic congressman James P. Moran called a “concession to reality” by agreeing to give President Bush virtually everything he wanted in funding and unrestricted license to continue waging the increasingly detested war that has made Bush the most unpopular president since Richard Nixon.
This is the outcome that we warned against two months ago when we wrote Why Won’t MoveOn Move Forward? In it, we criticized MoveOn for backpedaling on its previously claimed objective of ending the war in Iraq immediately. Anti-war sentiment was the main factor behind last year’s elections that brought Democrats to power in both houses of Congress. Once in power, however, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi pushed through a “compromise” bill, supported by MoveOn, that offered $124 billion in supplemental funding for the war. To make it sound like they were voting for peace, the Democrats threw in a few non-binding benchmarks asking Bush to certify progress in Iraq, coupled with language that talked about withdrawing troops next year.
Understanding how legislative processes work, we expected then that even those few nods to anti-war sentiment would be eliminated in due course. Bush had already said he would veto the Pelosi bill and pledged to hold out for funding without restrictions of any kind. Moreover, there was little doubt that the Democratic leadership would eventually cave to his demands. Notwithstanding their stage-managed photo ops and rhetorical flourishes for peace, prominent Democrats signaled early that they would give Bush the funding he wanted. Barack Obama even went so far as to state publicly that once Bush vetoed the original bill, Congress would approve the money because “nobody wants to play chicken with our troops on the ground.” (Two weeks later, MoveOn announced that it had polled its members, and Obama was their “top choice to lead the country out of Iraq.”) In effect, the confrontation between Bush and the Democrats was a high-stakes game of poker in which the Democrats went out of their way to make it clear that they would fold once Bush called their bluff.
Not everyone saw this coming, of course. Back in March, Salon.com called MoveOn’s Eli Pariser “shrewdly pragmatic” for backing Pelosi’s original supplemental war funding bill. It quoted Pariser predicting that after Bush was “forced to veto” Pelosi’s bill, “That forces the Republicans to choose between an increasingly isolated president and the majority of the Congress and the majority of the American people.”
Similar “shrewd pragmatism” came from blogger and Democratic campaign consultant Matt Stoller at MyDD.com, praising MoveOn’s “dedication to practical results” and calling the Pelosi bill “a major step forward … Moveon was true to its members in helping this happen.” Stoller criticized us by name for our naiveté in thinking otherwise:
John Stauber, who is an ardent critic of Moveon, comes from a different generation of liberal activism. [...]
Stauber isn’t used to a non-Southern Democratic Party. It’s nothing he’s ever known, and it’s frankly nothing that any of us have ever known. None of us know how to wield power in this new political world, where the public is liberal, the military industrial state is cannibalizing itself, and the political system is (slowly) reorienting itself around this shocking new paradigm. Stauber is also not used to the idea that activist liberals actually like the Democratic Party. He believes that Moveon members would not support Democratic leaders if presented with a different set of choices, without acknowledging that Moveon members have traditionally supported Democratic leaders when the questions are tactical in nature.
A “tactic,” as the dictionary explains, is “an expedient for achieving a goal.” If the goal is to end the war in Iraq, the Pelosi bill was never a tactic that had any chance of succeeding. Its provisions had no teeth and it was clear that too many Democrats never intended to see the fight through. As this week’s betrayal by the Democratic leadership demonstrates, ending the war is simply not their goal. Their goal is to continue the war for the time being, while giving themselves just enough distance from it that they can run as the anti-war party in next year’s presidential and congressional elections. Stoller seems to have belatedly arrived at this realization himself. Responding to this week’s news, he writes:
We’re in Iraq because the political system, the public, and all of us became unable to distinguish between truth and falsehood. We’re still in Iraq, and will be there until the public is genuinely convinced to leave. Right now, we’re not there. I know what the polls say, but I also am watching Clinton, Edwards, Obama, Giuliani, Romney, etc running for President, and not one of them is calling for a full withdrawal. Not one. Clinton, the leading nominee in a supposedly antiwar party, is a hawk and doesn’t even think that voting to authorize the war was a mistake.
Amazingly, the conclusion that Stoller draws from these facts is the following non sequitur:
So do not tell me that Pelosi, Reid, and Moveon are doing a bad job. They are not. They are persuading a country and a politics that is used to lazy bullshit that kills a lot of people to think twice about it, and resist.
Here’s the point that Stoller seems to have missed: There is a difference between what the public wants and what politicians do. Just because the high and mighty politicians don’t get it yet, don’t assume that the average American doesn’t. It is not “the public” that needs to be persuaded. The politicians, their marketing campaigns, and the bloggers who join them may be “unable to distinguish between truth and falsehood,” but the public at large fully understands that we need to get out of Iraq. The question is simply how to translate that public awareness into effective pressure that will force the politicians to change course. As we wrote in March, “When politicians and advocacy groups like MoveOn play anti-war games of political theater while effectively collaborating with the war’s continuation, they merely add one more deception to the layers of lies in which this war has been wrapped.”
Since 2003 we’ve co-authored two books on Iraq, and we have been reporting on the war for over five years now, since we began to dissect the Bush administration’s propaganda push almost immediately after 9/11. We’ve been reporting on MoveOn for almost as long. And by the way, we are not “ardent critics” of MoveOn, as Stoller claimed. We are trying to constructively criticize an organization whose leaders mean well, even though they have been selling a flawed strategy. MoveOn has emerged as a powerful political player with a massive email list of more than three million names and the ability to raise millions of dollars for Democrats while waging innovative PR campaigns around the environmental, political and social issues they promote.
The bottom line, however, is that MoveOn until now has always been a big “D” Democratic Party organization. It began as an online campaign to oppose the impeachment of President Clinton, and its tactical alliances with Democratic politicians have made it part of the party’s current power base, which melds together millionaire funders such as George Soros and the Democracy Alliance, liberal unions like SEIU, and the ballyhooed Netroots bloggers like Matt Stoller, Jerome Armstrong and Markos Moulitsas Zúniga of the Daily Kos. At a personal level, we presume the members of this coalition genuinely want the war to end, but their true and primary priority is winning Democratic Party control of both houses of Congress and the White House. Now that the war in Iraq hangs like a rotting albatross around the neck of the Bush administration, it has become the Democrats’ best weapon to successfully campaign against Republicans. From a “shrewdly pragmatic” point of view, therefore, they have no reason to want the war to end soon.
Some Democrats (not the top politicians, of course) are saying this openly. Here, for example, is how one blogger at the Daily Kos sees things:
I know, that means more American casualties, more Iraqi casualties, more treasure and lives wasted.
But I think you’ve got to keep in mind the big picture here. ... [B]y the end of September, people will be beginning to pay real attention to the next election…
I think this does give the Democratic party a tremendous opportunity to crush the Republicans for perhaps a couple of decades to come. Iraq, and the Republican support of it, may well do for the Republicans what Vietnam did for Democrats — make the public suspicious for decades about the party’s bona fides on foreign policy.
In this analysis, “more treasure and lives wasted” are the “little picture,” while winning elections is “the big picture.” Democrats like Russ Feingold who oppose the Iraq supplemental do not share this strategy, and it is never explicitly stated even by the Democratic politicians who are signing on this week to fund the war, but it is implicit in their actions.
If you visit the MoveOn website today as we write, the top item on the page is a request for people to sign a petition against price gouging by oil companies. They’re focused on the “big picture” of using the current spike in gasoline prices as an opportunity to build their email list, while the little picture of ending the war has fallen from the top of the page. Yesterday MoveOn began a campaign calling on Democrats to vote no on the Iraq supplemental. MoveOn is also talking for the first time about supporting primary challengers to Democrats who “ran on ending the war but vote for more chaos and more troops in Iraq.” This belated spark of independence, however, is too little and too late to stop a deal that has already been struck, in which politicians that MoveOn has been supporting have just surrendered ground from a position of strength to a president and party that is weakened, on an issue of utmost importance to their country.
MoveOn is expert at marketing, PR and advertising. Their emails to members convey a friendly, informal style and a sense that “they” are just like “us.” But there are important differences between the organization and many of the people who sign their petitions and give them money. MoveOn has not been primarily a movement against the war. It has been a movement of Democrats to get the party back into power.
We do not doubt that MoveOn’s leadership sincerely believes they are pursuing the most practical and effective course to improve America’s political problems by vanquishing the Republicans and getting Democrats elected. However, when given a choice between building a powerful grassroots movement to end the war, versus exploiting the war for the benefit of getting Democrats elected, MoveOn has repeatedly chosen the latter while probably believing there is no difference.
There is an organized anti-war movement in America that is not an adjunct of the Democratic Party. Up until now, it has been weak and divided and unable to organize itself into an effective national movement in its own right. In its place, therefore, MoveOn and its Netroots allies have become identified as the leadership of the anti-war movement. It is vitally important, however, that a genuinely independent anti-war movement organize itself with the ability to speak on its own behalf.
In the 1950s and the 1960s, the civil rights movement was most definitely not an adjunct of the Democratic or Republican Parties. Far from it, it was a grassroots movement that eventually forced both parties to respond to its agenda. Likewise, the movement against the Vietnam War was not aligned with either the Democratic or Republican parties, both of which claimed to have plans for peace while actually pursuing policies that expanded the war.
That’s the sort of movement we need again, if we wish to see peace in our lifetime.
This commentary is a joint statement by Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber, the co-authors of books including Weapons of Mass Deception and The Best War Ever: Lies, Damned Lies and the Mess in Iraq.
Posted by anthony
Anthony Lappé is GNN's Executive Editor. He's written for The New York Times, Details, New York, Paper, The Fader and Vice, among many others. He has worked as a producer for MTV and Fuse. He is the co-author of GNN's True Lies and the producer of their Iraq doc,...
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The above article is perfect example of why we need to support Ron Paul, the only fully anti-war candidate.
What more do you need?
Seriously, it had better not be Hillary vs. Giuliani or I’m moving to Canada.
We Gave Them Our Hearts, They Gave Him A Blank Check
David Sirota
It is a dark day in our nation’s history. That sounds melodramatic – but it is true. Today America watched a Democratic Party kick them square in the teeth – all in order to continue the most unpopular war in a generation at the request of the most unpopular president in a generation at a time polls show a larger percentage of the public thinks America is going in the wrong direction than ever recorded in polling history.
The numbers are not pretty. First, 216 House Democrats cast the key vote to send a blank check Iraq War funding bill over to the Senate. As I reported at the beginning of the day and as the Associated Press now confirms, the vote on the rule was the vote that made it happen. As the AP said: “In a highly unusual maneuver, House Democratic leaders crafted a procedure that allowed their rank and file to oppose money for the war, then step aside so Republicans could advance it.” Nauseating.
Read the rest of the article here.
The two party system has failed us. Completly.
The two party system has failed us. Completely.
You ain’t seen nothing yet.
Sometimes no Peace
Funding the Iraq Occupation without Timelines or Deadlines is a Travesty
*Reid & Pelosi: traitors and turncoats to our troops, the voters, the Constitution*
by Rob Kezelis
In the face of a petulant, pig-headed, pertinacious President, for weeks both Reid and Pelosi claimed the moral high ground. They promised to insist on timelines for the withdrawal of our troops, currently stuck like fish in a barrel.
Let’s review what is happening in today’s IraqNam. General David Howell Petraeus was appointed to take over command after four years of lies and misreporting, after four years of worsening conditions and growing turmoil and death. His prior success in a small region was his biggest selling point. Anyone who could actually make friends and earn the trust of several factions, despite the brain-damaged policies of Bremer, Rice, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Bush, Feith, Wolfowitz, had to have something going for him. Congress approved his promotion by an overwhelming majority.
Three years ago, President Bush called for the first surge (a rose by any other name still has thorns). Six months later, he increased troops again, (many thorns), and a year ago, there was a fourth, perhaps fifth surge. Each surge had a minor, temporary impact. For example, people forget that we re-invaded Baghdad no less than three times, AFTER we invaded the very first time. Each time resulted in a slight lowering of the kidnapping, death and torture rates, while there was a noticeable increase in violence and death outside of the capital.
In December, as violence levels rose across the country of 24,000,000 disenchanted, suffering, unhappy, occupied people, Bush proposed his latest surge as a Final Solution. Despite generals and experts claiming that 20,000 troops would have little or no impact, Bush and his spin team painted his many critics as being unpatriotic, intent on losing and more intent on playing political games than doing the right thing. As usual, his oration was filled with half-truths, half-assed cliches, and half-brained arguments.
Were it not for the blogs, the liberals, the moderates – the true patriots, the Democratic majority would have caved in back then. Instead, the hue and cry from the grassroots caused the Democratic leaders to take a step back and reconsider their standard, spineless, yellow-belly response to a power-hungry, fascist White House. Even though Bush got his surge, the Democrats seemed willing to stand up for the first time in six years.
We learned that the 20,000 quickly grew to 29,000. Then we learned that 50,000 additional support troops were needed to supply, arm and support the new targets. This week we learned that another 50,000 might be necessary and that the military plans to stay in Iraq for at least 10 years.
So much for a Final Solution, unless you happen to be one of the 386 dead US soldiers, including 15 over the weekend, 2 on Monday and 9 more wasted lives today.
So what happened to those brave, smart, politically savvy Democratic leaders like Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid? Where was the long missing spine that 70% of the US population wants to see in action? How will these two bravely stand up to an abusive, misguided and arrogant administration that lies as a matter of practice, and deceives out of habit? And what sort of timelines, deadlines and demands for withdrawal would the pass, in the face of a second presidential veto?
“For heaven’s sake, look where we’ve come. It’s a lot more than the president ever expected he’d have to agree to,” chirped the brave Harry Reid, explaining why he and Pelosi caved in like a poorly regulated and uninspected Virginia coal mine.
You are right, Harry. He did not expect you to cave in so quickly, removing the best chance our soldiers had.
Just last week, that center of integrity, Nancy Pelosi promised that timelines were an integral part of the funding package. Yesterday, she cravenly explained that she might not support the entire bill, sans timelines, yet the reality is that she stood up to the president about as strongly as a mature, white dandelion bud to a tornado.
But, they argue, WE HAVE STRONG BENCHMARKS, SIXTEEN OF THEM! Yeah, except by the bill’s own language, the president can waive each one of them on a whim. Some benchmark.
There is just one way to describe the actions of Pelosi and Reid. Turncoat comes to mind. Traitor to our troops also springs forth. Negligent, lacking, and dilatory in upholding their oath to the constitution might work, too. Your choice.
The problem with Harry and Nancy meeting George on his terms is that 70% of America has been figuratively stabbed in the back. Instead of removing the funding, saving our troops by getting them home, and leaving a quagmire of our own making, the Democrat Party leadership has just signed on as co-owners of Bush’s war. From this day forward, every US death is as much on their hands as the president’s. From now on, every drop of blood spilled by our boys and girls is a stain on the Democratic leadership as much as on this administration.
Shame seems to be a missing emotion inside the Bloatway. Must be something in the water. It is time for a voters’ revolution. Unless and until the will of the people is expressed by our elected officials, it is our duty to work on replacing the miscreants, the turncoats, the persons responsible for getting our soldiers killed and maimed.
great article.
Great article.
Thanks. Fixed.
I liked this article by Stauber a lot more than the first two. It’s been a while since I read the first two, but i remember after reading the articles and reading move on’s retort, beleiving that moveon had some wiggle room in shucking off the arguments that stauber made. This article I beleive addresses more of a tangible issue with moveon than the others and is better written and composed better imho. Good article.
what 2 party system? there is only one party, the corporate party, and it has a right and left wing. This is why I don’t vote, that and I am pretty sure my vote got discounted in the last 2 presidential election because i am African-American.