5-28-08, 1:00 pm

General Petraeus painted a rosy picture when he went back to Congress in early April requesting more cash and presenting a plan to extend the occupation. Petraeus recommended a “pause” in the withdrawal of “surge” troops mandated for this year, despite claims of “success.” In a cynical gesture, George W. Bush chose to put off changes in Iraq war policy until the next administration.

Congressional Democrats laid into the general questioning why earlier he and the administration had argued the occupation needed to be expanded due to ongoing violence, and now insist the “surge” must be extended because of its successes. Many members of Congress focused critical comments at the Bush administration for lacking a viable strategy to end the war and the Iraqi government for refusing to take steps toward national reconciliation and unity.

Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) averred that the administration’s thinking is an irrational recipe for endless war and occupation. “An open-ended pause starting in July (referring to the administration’s refusal to withdraw surge troops) would be just the next page in a war plan with no exit strategy,” he said. Levin wondered why the Iraqis would ever adopt different political or security efforts if they knew they could always rely on the US for both cash and military forces.

Sen. Barack Obama agreed and insisted that the best way to escape the Bush administration’s catch-22 is to create a timeline for bringing the troops home. Referring to the failure to produce political reconciliation among competing Iraqi sects Obama said, “I also think that the surge has reduced violence and provided breathing room, but that breathing room has not been taken the way we would all like it to be taken.”

He added, “I think that increased pressure in a measured way ... includes a timetable for withdrawal. Nobody’s asking for a precipitous withdrawal, but I do think that it has to be a measured but increased pressure; and a diplomatic surge that includes Iran.” Talking to Iran about security in Iraq and humanitarian assistance there is crucial, as many analysts believe that Iran has as much if not more influence in Iraq’s ruling coalition as the Bush administration.

Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) put the point more sharply. “The Iraqi government has failed to make their country safer or more stable,” she said, “[T]hey have failed to hold provisional elections, reform their oil laws or disarm the militias. This is a failure in leadership.”

For his part, Republican nominee Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), who supports the administration’s refusal to change course in Iraq and even has said that he would support a 100-year occupation of Iraq – even a 1,000 years, he told one group – appeared to be confused about the political dynamics in Iraq. After repeatedly mistaking the various religious sects during a campaign trip to the Middle East in March, McCain said that Al Qaeda was “not some obscure sect of the Shi’ites overall.”

Of course, Al Qaeda is a Sunni group and by the best estimates of the Pentagon itself is responsible for only a tiny sliver of the hundreds of weekly violent attacks. In fact, groups that have been funded or supported politically by the US government are more responsible for sectarian conflict.

McCain’s goal in making such blatantly wrong statements may be to confuse voters into accepting his plan to continue the war. The Republican nominee along with Bush administration talking heads and right-wing media pundits have also argued that leaving Iraq would set the stage for a civil war and even genocide. The presence of US forces, they insist, are needed to avert that. When pressed, however, they also freely admit they are mainly interested in pursuing strategic military goals against Iran and other Middle Eastern countries labeled as members of the “axis of evil” as well controlling dwindling oil reserves.

Center for American Progress national security analyst Lawrence Korb rejected the idea that any one group in Iraq is powerful enough to fulfill McCain’s worst case scenario fantasies. Said Korb, “There’s no group strong enough to do it.”

Brian Katulis, also of the Center for American Progress and a co-author with Korb of a report titled, “How does this End?”, pointed out the illogic of the Bush-McCain endless war argument. “The cruel irony is that many of the things that those who want to stay the course ... say they want to guard against, whether its sectarian cleansing ... happened while we were there with the largest presence we’ve had,” he said. “This fact raises some serious questions about what a continued presence will do in absence of any political measures to get the competing Iraqi factions to settle their differences over power sharing,” he added.

Indeed, the Center for American Progress report concluded that the 2006 elections, which were widely regarded as a popular mandate to end the war, put the most pressure on Iraqi groups to move closer to taking on violent factions, improving their own security efforts, and taking steps toward reunification and reconciliation. Bush administration and now McCain assurances that the occupation will continue, however, have had a harmful impact on those efforts, convincing some factions that postponing political reconciliation during a US occupation will improve their own standing relative to others.

A regional diplomatic surge combined with a massive international humanitarian effort are the best ways to prevent worst case scenarios from occurring when US troops come home, argued Katulis and Korb.

Judith LeBlanc, organizing director for United for Peace and Justice, agreed that these steps are needed, but she saw a diplomatic surge, a massive international humanitarian effort in Iraq, and US troop withdrawal and closing US military installations as not just ways to fend off disaster scenarios but as the only alternative to continued war. “Unless the peace movement is pro-actively advocating a way out of Iraq,” she said, “it is very hard for those who are running for office to go much further than to vaguely say we want the troops out, or we’ll bring the troops out in 2009.”

She further argued that success in bringing the war to an end depends on how well the antiwar movement is able to make a clear case for ending the war in the public arena and winning the debate with solid alternatives to neoconservative pro-war ideas: We have to advocate, in a very pro-active way, what the steps are toward ending the war: The first step is to set deadlines for troop withdrawal. The next step is to begin the withdrawal and begin to open up a diplomatic surge, one where those who are running to be a part of the new Congress and the next president of the United States say to the world, “We made a big mistake and we need your help so that the Iraqi people and the Iraqi government can regain control of their country.”

Huge shifts in public opinion against the war and the overwhelming popular enthusiasm for ending the Bush administration are the direct result of the work of the peace movement. “We have come a long way,” LeBlanc asserted, “in exposing the Bush lies about launching this war, the corruption in the Bush administration, and all the corporate profiteering that has gone on in the five years of the war.”

There is little chance that the war in Iraq, the lies that started it, its ongoing failures, the humanitarian crisis it provoked, and the massive cost in lives and treasure for both the US and Iraq would have created an urgent demand for political change if there had been no peace movement to mobilize public opinion against the war.

Even with about seven in 10 Americans wanting the war to come to an end and almost as many supporting the idea of establishing a timetable for withdrawal, ending the war isn’t automatic however. LeBlanc stated, “Now the big challenge is how you take this new level of awareness about the Bush administration and the neoconservative agenda and turn it into a very organized presence in the electoral struggle.”

There is some disillusionment in some sections of the peace movement with the Democratic Congress. Many people feel that “the Congress elected in 2006 had a mandate to end the war, and some feel frustrated that the war has not been brought to an end under this Democratically-controlled Congress,” LeBlanc added. Still, there is a strong current in the peace movement that sees its role as having a positive affect, LeBlanc said. “Historically a majority of the American people have not participated in elections, but what we have seen in 2008 is that there are many people who, through their own personal involvement, now believe that the government’s polices can be changed, and that in particular the war can be brought to an end.”

LeBlanc also put forward the idea of the link between the cost of war and the growing domestic crises, a notion gaining increasing currency among Americans, who now overwhelmingly, according to recent polls, tie the war to the recession. “Because the war is a key element in the present economic crisis,” she said, “the majority of the people understand that billions for war, when healthcare and jobs are being cut, just does not make any sense.”

Rev. Osagyefo Sekou, a New York-based Christian minister who works with United for Peace and Justice, speaking to Political Affairs in a recent interview, agreed with LeBlanc’s assertion and said, “To paraphrase Dr. King in another way, the bombs in Iraq blew up the levees in New Orleans.”

He added that a more fundamental philosophical and moral transformation has to happen in America to make peace permanent and to fundamentally alter US foreign policy. “I believe that nothing less than an epistemic break that has the depth of the founding of Christianity and the breadth of the Reformation can change the course that we’re on,” Sekou said.

To get on the path to accomplishing this, Sekou exhorted the progressive faith community to challenge more directly the moral hegemony of the religious right, which has dominated public discourse in the country for decades. “It has hindered us in thinking in ways that are different and unique,” Sekou said. “As a result, we do not have a viable political discourse around, race, religion, around politics in America.”

From the battles in Congress to the organizing of the broadly conceived peace movement, to delivering a landslide in November along with working to transform the philosophical and moral landscape, the current moment is full of promise and challenge.

The November 4 election, in no small way, will be a decisive factor in whether this moment takes us in a forward direction or keeps us mired in this war and a government that refuses to come to the aid of the majority of Americans. As LeBlanc concluded, “Many people already understand the danger of a McCain administration.

People understand the danger of pursuing a military solution to the situation in Iraq, and people understand the danger of a military solution to all of the huge political and economic problems that exist in the world.”

The presidential election will be a choice between one candidate who ties diminished economic vitality and ruined national prestige to a war based on lies, and another who has so closely identified himself with the lobbyist culture of Washington and the dismal policies of the Bush administration that he is promising little more than a third Bush term.

Our task: help agitate, educate, and mobilize people everywhere we can to make the right choice on November 4th.

--Joel Wendland is managing editor of Political Affairs.net