MUST READ (we can beat smirk) Dem candidates must read also

[impeach the gop]

(snip)
No Time to Be Smug

It's all pretty consistent with the warnings given by those who opposed the war, a group that included many within the US establishment, probably including even Bush pere. Still, this is no time for smug "I told you so" satisfaction on the American antiwar left. Being right and a $1.50 will get you a ride on my city's Elevated Rail Line and there's quite a bit to cause us concern as we look to the obviously crucial 2004 election.

All too predictably, perhaps, the mainstream critique of Bush's Iraq policy is stuck in much the same moral backwater that characterized permissible mainstream criticism of the Vietnam War. The main problem, by this critique, is that the occupation doesn't appear to be "working" all that well for US: it's costing too much for US in terms of our money and lives, and it's costing US too much in terms of global good will, and so on. All of those concerns are real and to be encouraged, of course, but one wonders if the mainstream critics might like to say a bit more about the fact that Bush's invasion transgressed the highest edict listed in the books of post-Nuremberg international law.

And a bit more, perhaps about the Iraqi people. It was a bit of a shock to anyone who has followed the heroic research conducted and disseminated by Iraqi Body Count (IBC, available online at www.iraqbodycount.net/) to read the following comment from the antiwar Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean, presented without comment on the front page of the liberal New York Times (November 4, 2003): "There are now almost 400 people dead who wouldn't be dead if that resolution hadn't passed and we hadn't gone to war." Repeat that phrase to yourself and then go to the IBC web site, which shows quite definitively that more than 7800 Iraqis died during the American attack, better understood as an invasion and occupation than a "war."

As currently constructed, the current mainstream critique seems on occasion to be an argument for sending in more troops to "do the job right." Also disturbing it its implicit and sometimes explicit notion that America's pre-invasion policy of "containment" was "working" just fine - a brutal judgment consigning to history's dustbin the 1 million Iraqis murdered by the US-imposed sanctions campaign.

There is more to be anxious about in the next year. There's the massive power of money and the spin that money buys, much of which will be dedicated to portraying Iraq as a success regardless of the facts. There's the likelihood of White House saber-rattling over new threats both imagined (Syria, Iran, North Korea) and real (including possible new terror attacks deeply encouraged by US policy), something we should expect on the basis both of the administration's political experience (9/11 was Bush's political heaven for more than a year) and of the administration's published doctrine, which targets Iraq as only one episode in a broader "grand imperial strategy" of total global dominance.

There's the sheer chutzpah of the Bush Team, a daring cowboy willingness to defy all the normal obstacles of democratic opinion and once-standard norms of political conduct at home and abroad. There's the possibility that Bush will benefit from a purely fortuitous upturn in the capitalist business cycle (or the spun illusion or exaggeration of such an upturn) and of course there's the scandalous weakness and division of the Democrats, fed by their complicity in the attack on Iraq and their refusal to make strong connections between the struggle against plutocracy and racism at home and the struggle against empire abroad. There's the overly reactive capacity and mindset of the antiwar forces and there's division within the US peace movement.

How to Think About Elections

http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2003-11/25street.cfm