Whats a specific policy or issue that the anti-war movement could rally around?
For me the easiest issue is debt. The Iraqis should not have to inherit Saddam’s debt. This is a very simple issue. Now this is something Bush has said and James Baker has said. And that’s why we feel we don’t have the right to say it. The truth is that when Bush and Baker say it, they’re lying. What they’ve actually done to Iraq instead is reduce the debt just enough to make sure that Iraqis can repay it. It was at a completely unsustainable level and was never going to be repaid previously so it was restructured so that they could demand that it be repaid. Then it was attached to an IMF structural adjustment program that makes debt forgiveness contingent on adherence to incredibly damaging and dangerous new economic (free market) policies. We said nothing about this in the anti-war movement when we should have been demanding total debt erasure. We had a window when Bush was using our language, but instead we responded as if we didn’t have any responsibility to do so because he was us
