There is a kind of parallel in the unprecedented swell in outrage against the operation in Gaza and in the lead-up to the Iraq war despite the difference in scale. Turnouts at the demonstrations a little over a month ago were at least 10 times what I remember during the July 2006 bombing, and definitely much larger than turnouts I've seen for much less controversial wars, and others around Europe and North America I know had similar observations. That's where the similarities end though, because the outrage at Israeli actions soon materialized into concrete and specific activism with specific demands (occupation of Universities, the BBC, reenergization of boycott, divestment and sanctions campaigns, and some real successes at punishing those complicit in the occupation.)
In the case of Iraq activism, after a decade-plus of work against the sanctions and then the lead-up to the war bringing about the largest demonstrations coordinated worldwide ever, with tens of millions in the streets, mostly people that had never attended a protest of any kind in their lives, only for the movement to completely die not even six months after the war started. There are many factors that contributed to that, along with an unfortunate reality that the left for the most part didn't take much of an interest in developing its position beyond 'us there=bad', and many didn't expand their post-war analysis any further than that. You might think that position might be enough, and if this were a protest against gentrification or something I might be okay with that, but the US was doing a lot more in Iraq than just being there, and had been doing a lot more since 1991, with longterm and massive implications that can never be reversed. This was left out of the narrative and instead post-war Iraq debates were dominated by discussion of whether the war was good for America or not or were entirely focused on arguing over the numbers of bodycounts. A handful of projects like Jubilee Iraq, Hands off Iraqi Oil, 3iii came about that actually were working on specific issues that were impacting Iraqis and had some concept of cooperation with Iraqis themselves but overall interest just dropped in favour of more generic arguments about the war on terror. Meanwhile the right dominated and manipulated rhetoric of faux concern for the actual population to their ends(or at least they did untill CNN discovered that there are dogs in Iraq) and the monopoly they had on that rhetoric ensured that they were never challenged on that level.
For that reason I was struck when I stumbled upon this four year old talk by Naomi Klein in which she articulated some of the same problems with the US left, a fear of complexity, and a need to take leadership from actual Iraqis, a need to take the position for justice to happen there despite the efforts of the Bush admin, that justice was something that was even desirable, not simply for the troops to come home(and no the two aren't mutually exclusive.)
I don't agree with everything said here but keep in mind that this was early 2005, what I'm interested in is the ideas, particularly about the fear of complexity among some activists. The unfortunate lazy outlook by democrats and some on the left* that a victory would mean seeing the Bush admin fail, when in fact seeing the Bush admin's projects collapse under their own weight were as much the democrat's failure as his, proof that they had just given up at countering their claims and at ever holding them accountable. That isn't enough to sustain a movement, it's enough to build political capital for the opposing party, but not enough for a movement.
There were other reasons for the left's weakness: that this was all relatively soon after September 11th and Americans were still finding the space to fight for their own rights-it was around this time that international solidarity became severely uncool(though there are a lot of other reasons for that that are a whole nother post.) Practically of course I get that it's much easier to boycott someone like Lev Leviev than it is to have an effective boycott campaign against an oil company or a security company or a corporation contracted to build infrastructure(though there have been successes of this type with respect to the Israeli occupation as well,) and I'm well aware that BDS campaigns started well before 2008.
These are all things that have been on my mind since about 2004 and have come back into focus since the 5 year anniversary. Over the past year or so I've been looking forward to the end of this war (with ground troops anyways) if only because I've been sick of hearing the same old arguments from the same people. And of course these are generalizations and don't apply to a lot of people, there have been some people working amazingly hard on various issues and last of all I don't disclude myself from this criticism, but I can't say I haven't been frustrated by conversations I've had over the last almost six years. This isn't meant to be one of those blogs whining that certain issues get more attention than others, but the last couple of months have proved how awesome activism's potential is and it got me looking back at this post that I started writing almost a year ago and wondering what the fuck happened. I don't know what the difference is, maybe it all was a matter of really bad timing, but anyways that's what I'll be pondering as the next anniversary rolls around, if anyone cares.
*ps: I don't mean to conflate the left and democrats but I will when they use each other's talking points for the sake of brevity. Either way I've had just as many issues with "radical" as "liberal" approaches to Iraq over the years.
**Did you know that oil workers are still banned from forming trade unions? The fuck?
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7 comments:
ive been thinking about this too. esp since ive been noticing activists shy away from iraq in general (though momentum seems to be building for the anniversary protest, but thats a whole other issue).
yes, it took something like gaza to ppl get out into the streets. but whats the point, now that so many (though not all) have crawled back into their houses? i don't want to sound cynical, and i do not want to deny the advances that have been made, but to many people the situation in gaza will/has become just as 'acceptable' as the situation in iraq. there are no protests, for example, for the jerusalemites who are getting expelled- just as there are no protests about iraqi oil. those issues somehow just don't trigger an immedeiate reaction in people, whereby which they feel compelled to actually *do* something.
this whole system where we wait for massacres/invasions to get up and do something (i.e RE-act) is flawed- i don't how we got into this habit but its got to stop.
Hey sorry I didn't reply right away I had a long day.
Honestly I'm still a lot more hopeful for Palestine since the activism translated into conrete goals which Iraq was really missing. Like Laila Haddad's list of 12 things you can do, #1 being educate yourself, was incredibly apt imo, so many people just aren't very well informed, it's really shocking to me how little people know about what happened in Iraq the last 3 years even now, even lefties. But comparing this to activism in the 90s that was just so incredibly abstract-ie hey lets make giant shit out of paper mache, it's such a difference.
I guess that was my point, like with Iraq, they had the numbers going for them, and pretty much nothing else, here they have a lot more but that was the culmiation of years of work. I think though besides that, for the people who started paying attention to Palestine that probably have never heard of Gaza before, like seriously I would go on a comics blog and there would be posts about Gaza there, though they were getting their info from some problematic sources they still were interested and concerned. It's got me wondering about what can be done for more generic outreach and education, outside of student-y ghettos-like ifamericansknew is a great resource but what else can be done to expand on that and give people things they can do as individuals.
...incidentally I went and saw a guy from AATW talk last night, which is kind of exactly what I'm talking about.
agreed. its puzzling, really, how iraq is completely off the radar. and its really disturbing too. i was at an art exhibit tonight and it featured the map of iraq; a girl turned to me and asked "i'm not good at geography, but is this a map of iraq?" i mean, we invaded this country, right, the least we could do is know a) where its located b) how it looks like on a map. (maybe if we had a law that said something like that we would never go to war at all) so yea people don't know shit. i don't know if it would be right to say its b/c of under-reporting- thats an understatement, really. though palestine gets coverage, it usually gets the wrong type of coverage. but you know, maybe its just a matter of realizing that the two situations - palestine and iraq- are not mutually exclusive. either way, like i said, its disturbing, and i feel something must be done...
oh and i would comment on what obama had to say about iraq today but i'm too busy choking on the fruitcake that is obama-mania. how people manage to gulp it down i have no idea.
Obama does exactly what I would expect any politician to do, I guess I have different expectations for people that barely follow politics and people that are actually active and spend their time pretending they understand these things.
The lack of media coverage lately is a big part of it, but ultimately I think people-left liberal "radical" whatever-don't care about what's happening in Iraq-to Iraqis-right now because it was NEVER a part of their agenda. Even in 2006/7 the vast majority of people I would talk to about what was happening just didn't care. And the answers to all this are far from simple or easy, I get that, but if you're not even looking for them, fuck you I'm not going to your protest.
Getting the troops home is their agenda and that's it. It doesn't matter if that happens after 10 years and it doesn't matter what happens in between those dates(or what happened before, or what happens after that is a direct result of that.) The strategy is similar with Obama, I mean as in, lets just wait till the Bush admin to run out the last days of their term of power that lasted EXACTLY AS LONG AS IT WAS LEGALLY POSSIBLE. This is a victory? Just waiting to things to run out of steam.
I don't want to just rag on people though without explaining the problem, which is that the left really didn't understand their place, AATW do understand their place, I think maybe Hadash does too, with Iraq I think the EPIC people are about as close as we get and of course there there's a bunch of groups solely focused on the humanitarian aspect, which became a politcal act in and of itself when the Bush admin completely ignored the crisis because it didn't fit with its success narrative. Which is good but it didn't explicitly address causes.
MOST IMPORTANT part of knowing your place and acting like you actually care about Iraqis though, is that you can't be selective about what you care about. That acknowledging their suffering from a suicide bombing or 1991 as just as important as Falluja or Abu Ghraib, and that understanding this doesn't undermine their anti-war positions, actually it strengthens them. As far as I've seen this was what pissed off Iraqis the most by far, across the political spectrum.
There's a fourth part to this besides liberals and lefties (and neocons who I don't think are worth mentioning since they are pretty much irrelevant to politics these days) which is the role of actual Iraqis-both the diaspora and the ones that stayed, which is a huge subject. I'll have to talk to a lot more people before I come to any conclusions there.
*clarifying that "knowing your place" here entails understanding the position of privelege that you are in and approaching the other as an equal and not assuming you know what's best to them/talking to them like they're retarded. preemptively making this clarification for any people who will want to misinterpret that wording.
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