The war so far
David McReynolds, a long-time leader of both the War Resisters League and the Socialist Party, had this analysis of the war as of early Tuesday morning:
I watched some of CNN tonight, but mainly the BBC report, and then shifted to “world news” (from different parts of the world, available on cable here in NYC on channel 103).CNN is not trustworthy and even BBC was spending too much time talking to American talking heads who were making very little sense.
My quick take, as someone who is not a fan of Saddam. First, by now everyone except Rumsfeld knows that the invasion has gone very badly. The small city near the border that was “occupied” on day one, is still giving trouble. The troops are afraid to go into Basra.
But more interesting is that the civilian population has not risen up to greet the invaders. Quite the contrary. (There are, of course, a wide mix of responses - I suspect that if any of us saw columns of Iraqi tanks rolling down Broadway we would hesitate to jeer, and might even wave hello in hopes the machine guns would point the other way).
The mass surrenders have not occured. US rumors about Saddam being killed don’t seem to be true - more for our benefit than anything else. From news (not CNN) I gather that things are getting very edgy in the Arab countries, and the diplomatic opposition is likely to rise with each passing day, as it becomes clearer than the invasion is not going according to plan. And as the bombing continues to take a growing civilian toll.
Most interesting - and the American talking heads didn’t seem to notice it - is that up to now, just after midnight on Monday, here in New York, the UN diplomats from Iraq haven’t defected, nor have I heard any reports of Iraqi defections elsewhere. That is one of the first things you would expect - if the regime has no support at all and everyone is serving under compulsion, the diplomats abroad would leap to freedom and be defecting all over the place.
I had forgotten that during the Iran/Iraq war (ghastly act by Iraq), once the Iranians pushed into Iraq, the troops put up a fierce opposition (as well as using poison gas). Those of us with long memories, due to advanced age and impending senility, may remember that when the Soviets went into Finland in 1940 they nearly lost - it was a disaster as invasions go. But when the Nazis went into Mother Russia they got one hell of a surprise, and the “six weeks to Moscow” became the real basis of the death of the Nazi regime (twenty million Soviet dead).
It is hard for us - I include myself - to realize that just as Stalin was actually popular (and still is) with wide sectors of Soviet society, there is no reason to doubt that, when it comes to choosing between Western Christian invaders (who have spent the last ten years trying to starve Iraq into submission), and Saddam, a very large number of Iraqis are going to choose Saddam.
With every day that passes the pressure within the Arab world for an end of the war will increase. And the temptation in the US to use greater air power, killing many more civilians, will increase. Already one report tonight said that rifle fire from tribesmen was so heavy the US helicopters pulled back and the bombers went in from a safer (and much less accurate) altitude.
Our job is to continue to “support our troops by getting them out of there” and pressing every button we have (letters, demos, CD, etc., visible calls for peace) to undercut the growing effort by Rumsfeld and Cheney to make this the “great patriotic invasion”. Even if the only supporters it seems to have thus far are Blair and the handful of pro-war demonstrators who turned out in New York City yesterday (the NY Times said that their 1,000 was “1% of those turning out for peace on Saturday - even that wasn’t quite accurate as I think we had far more than 100,000 on Saturday). When before in a war - at the beginning - did the peace groups pull over a hundred thousand and the “official government side” with full media support, pull less than 1,000? (Or in San Francisco, when did we have over a thousand people arrested the day after the US got into war?).
Peace,
David McReynolds