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The
Democrats and Iran
Red Light,
Green Light
Counterpunch
March 14, 2007
By SUNSARA TAYLOR
"Officials said Speaker Nancy Pelosi and
other members of the leadership had decided to strip from a major military
spending bill a requirement for Bush to gain approval from Congress before
moving against Iran...The measure provides nearly $100 billion to pay for
fighting in two wars, and includes more money than the president requested
for operations in Afghanistan and what Democrats called training and
equipment shortages."
-- AP, March 13, 2007
"For all the criticism on the left,
Democratic strategists say they are counting on most of the antiwar
lawmakers to realize that this current spending bill is the best they can
get."
-- New York Times, March 14
You
could close your eyes and pretend it isn't happening.
Pretend that the new Democratic Congress --
after four years of torture, mass murder and war crimes against the people of
Iraq -- didn't just promise the War-Criminal-In-Chief that they would do nothing
to stop a new and even more dangerous war against Iran.
Pretend that these same Democrats -- who have
sold you out so many times and at the cost of so many lives -- didn't just
promise to give the president more money than he even asked for to fight
his current wars!
Pretend that somehow history -- and the people
of the Middle East -- will forgive you for meeting this news with passivity,
silence or at best "protest as usual."
Or you could open your eyes and confront the
nightmares engulfing millions of people in the Middle East and endangering
people around the world that only people living in this country can bring to a
halt.
You can get on a bus, hop on a train, purchase
an airline ticket, or pile into a van and get your butt to Washington DC on
March 17t to march across the bridge and encircle the Pentagon, on March 17th
before the eyes of the world!
Forty years ago, a generation who refused to
accept an unjust and murderous war on Vietnam descended on the Pentagon. They
looked out at the villages being razed, the children burning alive by napalm,
and the blood that would be on their hands if they didn't bring this to a halt
and they declared it was time to go "from protest to resistance."
Now, at a time when the Bush regime, with the
silence and complicity of the Democrats, are escalating their assault on Iraq
and aggressively preparing a new war against Iran, it is wrong not to be at the
Pentagon.
It is wrong to hide behind the lie and excuse
that "protest doesn't make a difference." It is wrong to despair because
"they're not listening to us." And it is wrong to dismiss the real danger of a
new war against Iran simply because Bush is having so much trouble in Iraq.
The problem has never been that "protest
doesn't work." The problem is that there haven't been nearly enough protests and
they haven't been nearly demanding enough.
The campuses across the country have not yet
been shut down in massive student strikes demanding an immediate end to the war.
The Oscars weren't filled with movie stars and directors giving heart to
millions around the world by demanding impeachment right now. The
anti-war vets -- while way ahead of most of the movement and of where the
Vietnam vets were at this far into the war then -- haven't yet staged their
equivalent of the Winter Soldiers testimonials about the war crimes they
witnessed or Dewey Canyon protest where the Vietnam Vets threw back their
medals. We haven't yet seen this war's Daniel Ellsberg -- someone willing to
risk 150 years in prison or more to disclose and disrupt the administration's
ability to lie their way into more war. Hundreds of thousands haven't yet, in
the words of Cindy Sheehan, "turn[ed] off your TV and carri[ied] a sign or a
banner and descend[ed] on the White House as oppressed peasants descending on
the castle of the lord of the realm with pitchforks and torches?"
These are things I know we are more than
capable of! The problem is not that millions don't hate the Bush program, the
problem is that that anger has not been transformed into active, ongoing,
determined resistance --not to merely express our unhappiness -- but to bring
all this to a halt. That has to begin to change on March 17.
In a time of legalized torture, of expanding
war, of war crimes and of crimes against humanity -- all of us are accountable!
Lets just be honest: none of us can claim in
good conscience we've done all that we can and none of us should sleep soundly
at night until we do.
Protest and resistance and refusal to go along
are needed MOST when those in power "aren't listening."
Too many people are in denail about the
growing likelihood of a us attack on Iran as detailed by Seymour Hersh and
others. As Larry Everest, has recently written, "The U.S.'s quagmire in Iraq has
weakened the U.S. influence, fueled the spread of Islamist trends, and bolstered
Iran's regional influence. All this has made the situation in the Middle East
even more unacceptable to the U.S. imperialists, and the Bush regime has
resolved on a course to become even more aggressive in reversing all this --
with the escalation of the war in Iraq and now the serious threats against Iran.
And meanwhile the Democrats have proved incapable and unwilling to stop Bush's
troop 'surge' to Iraq and have mounted no significant opposition at all -- and
in some cases significant support -- to the real threats to launch a U.S. attack
against Iran."
Right now, it is more clear now than ever that
there "will be no savior from the Democratic Party."
It is more clear than ever that the war on
Iraq is not going to stop until we act in ways that make it stop. It is more
clear than ever that a war in Iran will not be prevented unless we act in ways
that prevent it. And it is more clear than ever that Bush won't stop unless we
drive him out.
It is time to march on the Pentagon. It is
time for us to go from protest to society-wide resistance.
--
Sunsara Taylor writes for
Revolution Newspaper and
sits on the Advisory Board of
The World Can't Wait
Drive Out the Bush Regime. She can be reached at:
sunsarasworld@yahoo.com
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