Stopping Bush's war

ON MARCH 20 , at least 50,000 people demonstrated in San Francisco against the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Many thousands more participated in demonstrations around the world, marking the first anniversary of President George W. Bush's ill-fated attempt to exert unilateral U.S. policy in the Middle East.

Unfortunately, while much of his most active base was out in the streets, presumptive Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry was skiing in Idaho – and if he made any statement on the anniversary of the war, we can't find any news of it.

That's not a good sign of the way the campaign is shaping up.

Kerry has a lot going for him as a candidate. Unlike Bush, he's a genuine war hero who came out against the war in Vietnam. (Bush supported it while staying at home and doing something short of his full duty with the Texas Air National Guard.) The economy is getting worse, not better, and Bush is doing nothing to improve the situation. Despite his military swagger and his claims to being a "wartime president," Bush is eminently vulnerable.

But Kerry needs a broad coalition to win – and that coalition has to include the active, organized support of the large numbers of voters, particularly young voters, who were energized by the antiwar campaign of Howard Dean. And as even the New York Times pointed out March 21, Kerry needs to quickly define himself by pointing out what Bush has done that he would do differently.

The war in Iraq would be a good place for him to start.

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As we noted last week, the numbers alone are alarming. More than 570 U.S. soldiers have been killed and another 3,190 injured. At least 8,581 Iraqis, many of them children, are dead. Unfortunately, this has turned out to be, as we warned a year ago, another Vietnam-style quagmire (see "The New Vietnam," 4/2/03).

Bush spoke this week about the "liberation" of Iraq, but a year after the invasion, life for many, if not most, people in that country remains dangerous and bleak. The only ones doing well are the private American corporations that are winning huge contracts to rebuild the infrastructure and run the oil industry.

And it's clear there's so much mistrust of the United States – in Iraq and throughout the region – that any new Iraqi government that bears the stamp of being created and imposed by the Bush administration will lack credibility and be unable to create a stable democracy with a real popular mandate.

It's also clear that the international community is increasingly unhappy with the U.S.-led occupation and that Bush's so-called coalition is starting to crumble. The new prime minister of Spain led the way when he announced he would pull Spanish troops out of Iraq unless the United Nations takes over the occupation, and it's likely other countries will soon follow suit.

The antiwar marchers who filled the streets of San Francisco don't all agree on the exact strategy for getting the United States out of Iraq. But many, perhaps most, serious progressive thinkers argue it would be wrong for the United States simply to pull out now and leave the chaos and anarchy the invasion created. The Bush administration made this mess, and the United States has a responsibility to help clean it up.

The best way to do that is to turn the military occupation (as well as the civilian reconstruction) over to the United Nations as soon as possible, to take U.S. troops out of the picture as quickly as the job can be handed over to other countries, and to quit handing over the wealth of Iraq (and billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars) to Halliburton, Bechtel, and other U.S. corporations.

The recent terrorist attack in Spain suggests Dean was entirely right when he said the United States isn't any safer today (with Saddam Hussein gone) than it was a year ago. In fact, even mainstream news outlets like the Los Angeles Times argue Bush has ignored homeland security in his rush to pour huge sums of money into the misguided Iraq adventure.

These are all issues Kerry needs to address, strongly, right away, to set the tone for a presidential campaign that can turn the second George Bush, like the first, into a one-term president.