Education, agitation, mobilization

The Nation has an excellent editorial in their just released February 5 issue. The following passages from it resonated particularly well with me (emphasis mine):

For the Republic

World opinion is against it. The American people are against it. The Democratic Party is against it. The Congress of the United States is against it. The Iraq Study Group is against it. The Iraqi people are against it. The Iraqi government is against it. Many Republican lawmakers are against it. The top brass are against it. But George W. Bush is going to do it: send 21,500 more troops into Iraq. Can a single man force a nation to fight a war it does not want to fight, expand a war it does not want to expand--possibly to other countries? If he can, is that nation any longer a democracy in any meaningful sense? Is its government any longer a constitutional republic? If not, how can democratic rule and the republican form of government be restored?

[A]lmost everyone declares by now that there is no military solution in Iraq, only a political one. But the hard truth is that there is probably no political solution, either. Certainly, it is beyond the power of the United States to achieve one. Only Iraqis have the capacity to solve their political problems, yet there is no sign that they are headed in this direction. On the contrary, they are sliding deeper into a sort of half-smothered, underground civil war of extraordinary brutality. The professed mission of the American troops is to stop this internal war. But how can that be done with an M-16? "Whom do you shoot at--the Sunni or the Shia?" Senator John Warner has appropriately asked. Perhaps both? In that case, which Iraqis are American troops fighting for ?

[T]he problem with American policy was never that it chose this or that bad strategy in Iraq but that it planted itself in Iraq at all. Once that was done, all strategies were bad, condemning the United States to stumble from error to error--doing more of the fighting, doing less; attacking Shiites, attacking Sunnis; helping Shiites, helping Sunnis; writing a Constitution, letting "the Iraqis" write a Constitution; disbanding the Baath Party, inviting back the Baathists; letting Kurds opt out of Iraq, dragging them into Iraq. Now, four years into the game, American policy has gone from mistaken to unintelligible--its actions not so much misguided as irrelevant to the ghastly conflict now under way.

[T]he deepest theme of the whole three-decade story, now presented in almost outlandish caricature by the President's tug of war with the nation and the world over Iraq, is the issue of power and how it shall be constituted in the United States, and the deepest question the crisis presents is whether this country will continue to be a constitutional republic or bow down to the new system of one-man rule asserted by President Bush. It's an issue that must concern every citizen, and the antiwar movement is in fact reviving it.

Should Congress...impeach President Bush while letting him fight his war? Decency and respect for human life forbid such a conclusion. What is quite permissible, however, is to recall that investigations that could lead to impeachment may, as one ingredient of Congress's activity, strengthen rather than weaken the efforts to end the war. Investigations, resolutions, legislation, not to mention citizen action, can all find their place as part of the common effort.

So, can a president be forced to not fight a war he wants to fight, to not expand a war he wants to expand--possibly to other countries?

Absolutely; as the editorial talks about, it's been done before. Despite the overall failures of main-street media to live up to their core purpose, for the past four years folks have been educating, agitating, and mobilizing other folks against Bush's war on Iraq--and all that work is now starting to pay off. We've put people into Congress who should be supportive of those investigations that could strengthen efforts to end the war. More people are talking among themselves about ending the war. More people are calling and writing their elected representatives and editors of newspapers demanding an end to the fighting. More college campuses and cities are passing anti-war resolutions. A nonbinding resolution has been introduced in the Senate saying the U.S. commitment in Iraq "can only be sustained" with popular support among the American public and in Congress. And more people are marching in the streets in protest of this unnecessary war. In two days, I'll be joining other protesters marching in the streets of Austin against the war, as will thousands of other folks in numerous cities across the country, including the January 27 March on Washington. Our goal? Show Bush that his war on Iraq is not supported by the American public.

I recommend your taking a trip over to The Nation to read the full editorial, it's well worth it. I also hope you'll join in the peace rallies this weekend. Bush's bullets and bombs can be stopped--just as quickly as a sufficient number of of us tell him so.

Education, agitation and mobilization has always produced change. And it'll do so again this time.