Today, Senator Hillary Clinton will give the annual Fares Lecture. While she speaks, U.S. forces will continue their assault on the Iraqi city of Fallujah, in the most significant battle since the fall of Baghdad in April 2003. Far from representing a solution or a step forward in the conflict in Iraq, the attack on Fallujah will only intensify the anger of ordinary Iraqis and deepen the already existing quagmire in Iraq.
Socialist Alternative will be protesting and leafleting outside of Senator Clinton's speech because she voted for and continues to support the war in Iraq, which has so far cost the lives of over 1,100 U.S. soldiers - many of them young people like us who signed up for college money or job skills.
This is not to mention the countless Iraqi dead, which, according to a recent estimate in a British medical journal, number an appalling 100,000 since the U.S. invasion. Consider also the $150 billion of tax dollars that have already been wasted on this war, while millions of Americans go without healthcare, while our schools continue to crumble, and while rumors of a potential draft continue to circulate.
It is incumbent upon us to stand up to our elected officials and tell them that we oppose the war and want our troops home now. We cannot wait for Senator Clinton or others to decide that it is time to end the war. It was an independent, mass movement of ordinary people who brought an end to the war in Vietnam and forced Richard Nixon out of the White House after only two years of his term. We should do the same to Bush and his war in Iraq.
We cannot wait or sit idly by while our government destroys Fallujah's hospitals, claiming they are aiding the insurgency for daring to report civilian casualties. The last U.S. assault on Fallujah, which took place in April, was called off because of the negative press that the U.S. was getting after hundreds of civilians were killed. Following this, a face-to-face poll commissioned by the Coalition Provisional Authority found that 92 percent of Iraqis considered the U.S. to be "occupiers" - and only two percent considered them "liberators."
Who can blame the Iraqis for thinking this way? The memory of the atrocities and humiliation of Abu-Ghraib are not likely to fade. The U.S. has demolished Iraq's infrastructure, and as of late September had spent only $1.2 billion of the $18.4 billion allotted for reconstruction. Murder, rape and kidnapping have skyrocketed since March 2003, forcing Iraqi children to stay home from school and women to stay off the streets at night. On Monday, Iraq's prime minister Ayad Allawi declared a 60-day state of emergency - in other words, martial law - throughout most of Iraq.
According to journalist Seymour Hersh, the only thing that keeps Allawi's puppet government in power "is American bombing - continuous, overnight, day-long bombing." The Iraq war is a disaster. As Hersh put it in his Oct. 29 speech at Tufts, "We've never been in a worse position, not even in the Vietnam War."
One former intelligence officer told The New York Times that the U.S. government is "digging the hole deeper and deeper and deeper ... The best we can hope for is a semi-failed state hobbling along with terrorists and a succession of weak governments." Yet the Bush administration is expected to ask Congress for another $60 billion in the near future to continue this senseless war.
Despite all this, Senator Clinton still supports the continuation of the war in Iraq. Rather than use her authority to call for an end to the war in Iraq and build anti-war demonstrations to accomplish that task, Senator Clinton has repeatedly used her authority to justify the war. During election season, she stated that even knowing that Bush was lying about the weapons of mass destruction, she still would have voted to give him authority to go to war. This is absolutely unacceptable.
In 2000, I voted for Hillary Clinton for Senate in New York. It was the first time I ever voted, and I voted for her because I saw her as the lesser evil to Rick Lazio and because I thought she had some progressive values. Since then, I have come to see that it is absolutely futile to rely on the Democrats to stand up for our interests against the attacks of the right wing.
Politicians have never been the ones who have brought about progressive changes in society. Rather, mass movements of people have brought about every single progressive change, from the right to vote, to the right to have an abortion, to the civil rights movement, to the end of the war in Vietnam. It is only because of pressure from independent movements from below that politicians have ever responded to our needs. It is urgent right now that we rebuild the anti-war movement and struggle for an end the occupation of Iraq. I urge anyone who agrees with me to ask Senator Clinton to bring the troops home now, and to come to the Get Active Against the War! meeting tomorrow night at 6 p.m. in Campus Center, room 219.
