Walden Bello
The following are excerpts from a speech given at an international conference of anti-war and anti-globalisation campaigners held in Beirut in September. Bello is executive director of the Bangkok-based research organisation Focus on the Global South and a professor of sociology and public administration at the University of the Philippines. The full speech is available at <http://www.focusweb.org>.
Over the last few months, there have been two defining events in Iraq. One was the expose of systematic sexual abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison facility outside Baghdad. The second was the uprising in Fallujah in April.
The Abu Ghraib scandal, which has angered most of the world and shamed most Americans, stripped the last shred of legitimacy from the US presence in Iraq.
The uprising in Fallujah, which saw Iraqi men, women, and children fighters defeat the elite of Washington's colonial legions, the US marines, was the turning point of the Iraqi war of national liberation. Fallujah was followed by uprisings in other cities like Najaf and Ramadi. It showed that the Iraqi resistance is not one carried out by remnants of the Saddam Hussein regime but one that is widespread, popular, and on the ascendant.
The question is no longer whether Washington will eventually be defeated by the Iraqi resistance. It will be defeated. The question is how long it will hang on to an impossible situation.
Washington hangs on despite the daily attacks on its troops by the resistance. Given this situation, the victory of the Iraqi people's resistance will definitely be hastened by one thing: The emergence of a strong global anti-war movement such as that which took to the streets daily and in the thousands before and after the Tet Offensive in 1968.
So far that has not materialised, though opposition to the US presence in Iraq is the dominant global sentiment, and disillusionment with their government's policies in Iraq has now spread to a majority of the US public.
Indeed, at the very time that it is most needed by the people of Iraq, the international peace movement has had trouble getting into gear. The demonstrations on March 20, 2004, were significantly smaller than on February 15, 2003, when tens of millions marched throughout the world against the projected invasion of Iraq. The kind of international mass pressure that makes an impact on policymakers — the daily staging of demonstration after demonstration in the hundreds of thousands in city after city — is simply not in evidence, at least not yet.
Perhaps a major part of the reason is that a significant part of the international peace movement hesitates to legitimise the Iraqi resistance. Who are they? Can we really support them? These questions have increasingly been flung at the advocates of an unconditional military and political withdrawal from Iraq.
Let us face it: The use of suicide as a political weapon continues to bother many activists who were repelled by statements such as that of the Palestinian leaders who proudly asserted that suicide bombers were the oppressed people's equivalent of the F-16.
Let us face it: The fact that a large part of the resistance in both Iraq and Palestine is Islamic rather than secular in inspiration continues to bother many Western peace activists.
Yet there has never been any pretty movement for national liberation or independence. Many progressives were also repelled by some of the methods of the Mau Mau movement in Kenya, the FLN in Algeria, the NLF in Vietnam.
What progressives forget is that national liberation movements are not asking them mainly for ideological or political support. What they really want from the outside, from progressive like us, is international pressure for the withdrawal of an illegitimate occupying power so that internal forces can have the space to forge a truly national government based on their unique processes.
Until they give up their implicit conditioning of their actions on the guarantee that a national liberation movement tailored to their values and discourse will be the one to come to power, many peace activists will continue to be trapped within a paradigm of imposing their terms on other people.
Let me be clear. We cannot promote conditional solutions — even one that says US and Coalition troop withdrawal only if there is a UN security presence that takes the place of the Americans. The only principled stand is: Unconditional withdrawal of US and Coalition military and political forces now. Period!
But if the future in Iraq itself continues to hang in the balance, the Iraqi resistance has already helped to transform the global equation.
The US is weaker today than it was before May 1, 2003, when Bush declared victory in Iraq. The Atlantic alliance that won the Cold War no longer functions, largely because of the division over Iraq. Spain and the Philippines have been forced to withdraw their troops from Iraq, and Thailand has now quietly followed suit, contributing further to US isolation.
In Latin America, we now have massive popular anti-neoliberal and anti-US movements in Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela and Bolivia that are either in government or are making it difficult for governments to maintain their neoliberal, free market policies. Hugo Chavez has frontally challenged imperialism in its own backyard, and he remains in power owing to the organised support of the Venezuelan people. More power to him and the Venezuelan people!
Owing to its hubris, the US is suffering from that fatal disease of all empires — imperial overstretch.
Our role, to echo that great Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara, is to worsen this crisis of overextension, not only by creating or expanding movements of international solidarity against the US in Iraq, the US-Israel axis in Palestine, and the creeping US intervention in Colombia.
It is also by giving birth or reinvigorating struggles against the US imperial presence in our own countries and regions. For instance, the struggle against the US bases in North-East Asia and the renewed US military presence via the so-called war on terror in South-East Asia is one that we from East Asia must rededicate ourselves to.
But let me end by returning to our urgent task, which is to defeat the US in Iraq and Israel in Palestine. We are all here not to celebrate our strength but, most important, to address our weaknesses over the next few days.
Let me just say that one of the challenges that we will be addressing is how we get beyond spontaneous actions, beyond coordination that remains at the level of coordinating international days of protest. The enemy is extremely well coordinated at a global level and we have no choice but to match that level of coordination and cooperation. But we must match it with a professionalism that respects our democratic practices — indeed, we must confront it in ways that turn our democratic practice into an advantage.
The other challenge that I would like to highlight is that of closing the political and cultural gap between the global movements for justice and peace and their counterparts in the Arab and Islamic worlds. This is a gap that imperialism has exploited to the hilt, with its effort to paint most of our Arab and Muslim comrades as terrorists or supporters of terrorism.
We cannot allow this situation to continue, which is the reason we are holding this meeting in Beirut.
From Green Left Weekly, October 27, 2004.
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