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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ilaine who wrote (66879)	1/19/2003 2:14:13 AM
From: Nadine Carroll	Respond to of 281500

Todd Gitlin deserves quoting: Marc Cooper, that rare journalist of the left who calls know-nothings by their proper name, put it bluntly and well in the Los Angeles Times on September 29 ("A Smart Peace Movement Is MIA"), writing that "If the left is not for war against Hussein and is also opposed to economic sanctions, what is it for? If the left is for containment instead of invasion, then isn't it the U. S. armed forces that must do the containing? ... If, at the end of the day, Hussein does foil weapons inspections, what is to be done then?" To the unswerving Ramsey Clarks of the world, such questions are trivial or worse. So how did they end up at the front of the antiwar parade? In part, it's because they're always ready, and because they always have the same answer to every question: US Out of Everywhere. In part, it's because they're organized. They stay "on message" -- a horrible political phrase to describe the discipline of fanatics. In part it's because other antiwar groups, chiefly pacifists, are grateful simply to have company in resisting the stampede. Where is the party of sense? Now that the Democrats having caved in -- most are too calculating by half -- who will mobilize the millions of Americans who think the Bush doctrine is dangerous, but are sure to flee left-wing pieties? Will the silent majority of American antiwarriors stand up? Those who care about global peace and security, and reject preventive or preemptive war as the means to achieve it, should be organizing teach-ins -- real teach-ins. They should be holding debates, not rallies of the faithful, mouthing nonsensical slogans. Right now, the hard left is in charge by default, and the antiwar movement is lame on arrival as a result. If sensible antiwar forces make a valiant effort to speak outward to the American public, not upward to the gods of the hollow left, then and only then will we stand a chance of usefully weighing in against the rush to war. motherjones.com

To: Ilaine who wrote (66879)	1/19/2003 2:26:17 AM
From: bela_ghoulashi	Respond to of 281500

A curiously good commentary, an odd mixture of hard-headed reality and exasperated sour grapes. >>What a smart movement could do is put out the markers, create the organizational networks, and establish the foundation on which a more substantial antiwar movement might later be built. << Sounds like they wistfully hope to really get it together a year or so after the fighting's already over.