Is Ending the War in Iraq a Civil Rights Issue?
For several months, the Board and staff of the Equal Justice Society have been grappling with the issue of the immorality and insanity of the war on Iraq.
You might be asking yourself, "Hey, we thought you folks dealt with race and oh, by the way, what are those pictures of Dr. King, Tony Soprano, Paris Hilton, and George Bush doing here."
Well, I will provide answers to all your concerns by the time you get to the end of this article.
I am off to Paris on Tuesday to join my friends and colleagues David Oppenheimer, Sheila Foster, Tim Simon, Joe Grodin, and Jim Goldston. We are all teaching at Golden Gate University's summer program. Life is good but I could not leave without saying something about our current political moment. At the end of the Lehrer News Hour on PBS, I wait tensely to see the faces of the dead. I weep. I shout at the set. I yell at George Bush. I wonder why we are not able to stop this war since the overwhelming majority of us want that result. When you read that the dead soldiers are teenagers, your sense of grief is particularly intense. When you remember that lies were told to get us into this war, your rage is palpable. When you realize that the vast majority of Americans feel the war is a mistake yet it goes on and on, your sense of powerlessness increases.
Let me hit the rewind button and go back to the question of why EJS feels it should be involved in this issue. The thought for the creation of EJS came in the late 1980s when the right wing was running rough shod over the federal courts. Reactionary rulings were the norm. There were so many nonsensical rulings from the United States Supreme Court. When one studies the reason for this turn of events, one had to credit the brilliant strategists of the Right. EJS was formed as a counterweight to this trend. We were concerned with a range of issues along the ideological divide. Campaign finance reform, the role of government, the tax structure, US foreign policy, the lack of adequate health care, and race were just a few of the issues that we felt deserved our attention. In addition, we felt that the progressive community needed to consciously embrace an expansive vision of a better world that addressed social, political, economic, and artistic concerns.
We spent a long weekend in Santa Cruz several years ago with brilliant scholars and activists such as Kimberle Crenshaw, Alan Jenkins, Gerald Torres, Duncan Kennedy, and John Hansen. We learned about the genesis and agenda of the Radical Right. Many of the lessons learned that weekend inform our work as well as our analysis of the war on Iraq. Some true believers on the far Right do not really believe in democracy. The notion that common men and women can vote and therefore make domestic and foreign policy is anathema to them. Some of them believe in a variation of nobles oblige. Many conservatives do not believe in government except for national defense. Grover Norquist was famously quoted speaking of the federal government in the following manner. "We should starve the beast [the federal government] until it is so weak that we can drag it into the bathtub and drown it." Prophetic words if one conjures up images of Black people floating dead in the brackish waters of post-Katrina New Orleans. Some, not all, on the far Right are outright racist, eugenicists, who believe people of color are inferior to White people. All in all, we were presented with a frightening but cogent vision of some who now run the federal government.
We have watched with horror the erosion of civil liberties, warrantless surveillance, extraordinary rendition, citizens held indefinitely, foreign people held in Guantanamo so the US justice system cannot afford them protections, billions and billions of dollars spent in Iraq ensuring that there will be less money for social programs — all in the name of a war premised on LIES!!!!!!
We have talked of impeachment. We have talked of asking the Congress to conduct a criminal investigation of the current administration. We have cried in anguish at our seeming inability to make a difference.
We feel that many civil rights issues are raised by this war. Are basic democratic values being ignored? By that I mean, if the American people have clearly expressed their desire to end this war, are not our rights to a representative government being ignored? If people of color are the ones being tortured with the tacit and sometimes express approval of the government, is this not a civil rights issue? If Latinos are targeted in high school by military recruiters, is this not a concern of the civil rights community? If the Bush administration is ignoring the rule of law in allowing warrantless surveillance, is this not a civil right/liberties concern? If the cost of the war is bankrupting our government so that social programs that help our clients and constituents cannot be funded, does this not implicate the civil rights community?
Dr. King stated in a speech he gave a year before his assassination, "For those who ask the question, 'Aren't you a civil rights leader?' and thereby mean to exclude me from the movement for peace, I have this further answer. In 1957 when a group of us formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, we chose as our motto, 'to save the soul of America.' We were convinced that we could not limit our vision to certain rights for black people. If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over."
In the coming months, I will be talking with our friends and allies about what we must do. The essence of the civil rights movement has always been righting wrongs, doing the impossible, speaking truth to power. It is time to bring that legacy to ending this war.
Why Tony Soprano and Paris Hilton? If you have followed EJS, you know that the power of popular culture is very important to us. In the last week, I read two very interesting articles in Salon.com. Here is a brilliant piece of analysis by Gary Kamiya:
"…This is one reason why the corrosive moral ambiguity of "The Sopranos" speaks to us. Like Tony Soprano at the start of the series, America is a little stressed these days, a little anxious. On the surface, everything is fine. Under our devoutly Christian leader, we are all highly moral. We have right and God on our side as we fight the evildoers. Except that, well, we've been feeling kind of weird. And, to tell the truth, we have a few skeletons in our closet.
"Somebody whacked some of our crew, and we were scared, so we whacked Iraq. Just like Tony ordered the hit on Adriana. Steps were taken, as Sil would say. Except it turned out there were some unexpected consequences. We basically killed an entire country, and a whole lot of Americans, and people are dying all the time. And what are we doing? Nothing. We're going to the Bada Bing. We're having dinner at Artie's. Same old same old. Everything's fine. It's just fine.
"Except that it's wearing us down, having this strange war that no one thinks about, and this president who keeps preaching about good and evil and how we're the greatest country in the world and why we have to keep fighting this "war on terror" that no one understands. And it's hard to say anything back to him because he's really prickly and self-righteous.
"We're trying to act like nothing's wrong but all this stuff is working on our minds. Nothing they tell us about right and wrong seems to make sense anymore. It's all self-contradictory. They tell us lying is wrong. But after Lewis Libby was convicted of lying to federal investigators, the same people who were screaming the loudest about America's moral decline and the need to embrace transcendent values are now raging that it didn't matter because no crime was ever discovered. What's that about? It's all confusing, and the pressure is building up, and we're starting to get these anxiety attacks. And there's no Dr. Melfi in sight."
A week or so earlier, Cintra Wilson wrote a very interesting article about why the country was so interested in the travails of Paris Hilton. Wilson said:
"Paris has come to embody the angst of our increasing sense of powerlessness -- she's the blonde whom we punish, because we understand her crimes. We don't really understand all the crimes of the administration -- congressional bribes, organized mass deceit via domestic propaganda, policy fixing, violations of privacy and human rights.This made sense to me. We all feel so powerless. We are so sad about the state of the world. We know things are messed up but we don't know what to do about it. Many of us go about our daily work for social justice with the insanity of the current administration as a low murmur, as annoying background noise. We are the people who got the ADA passed. We have won court cases giving our clients rights and money. We have built affordable housing for people. We have gotten better health care for sick folks. We have raised families. We have raised money. We are very accomplished. How do we translate that competence and passion and experience into political muscle?
"Those are too legally complicated. While we were busy ogling Lindsay's drug binges, Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction" and Britney's shaved head, our leaders larded us with misinformation, illegally invaded another country, murdered we-don't-even-have-any-idea-how-many innocent civilians (not to mention independent journalists), stole a nation's oil, tortured enemy prisoners, quietly bankrupted our economy and our international moral standing in service to the short con of military Keynesianism, effectively built Dick Cheney his own private Praetorian Guard, and ushered in the most serious threat to American freedom in our history: the very real threat of despotism."
I do not have the answers but I wanted to talk about this. If you have ideas or reactions, please let me know. Okay, that's it. I am off to Paris. Maybe the French have some ideas.
Be well. Take care.
EJS
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Military recruiters do target poor Latino neighborhoods and schools. This is essentially a poverty and race draft, and is definitely a civil rights issue. There are troubling reports of undocumented Latinos being tacitly promised a path to legal status by recruiters. While there is a way for legal residents who already have the means to naturalize to speed up the process, there is no current path to legal status for undocumented folks based solely on military service.
However, the proposed DREAM Act does provide such a path, along with a path to citizenship for undocumented students who attend college. In truth, it is a piece of legislation that does not have a ton of hope of passing as is, and would likely have none without the military portion. This has led many advocates to have mixed feelings about the legislation, but upon the urging of the constituency most effected (undocumented young folks) and weighing the balance of the good vs. the bad, most immigrant advocates are fully supporting the bill. This is because the situation is so desperate for the growing population of young undocumented immigrants in this country, who have lived in the US for the majority of their lives, YET HAVE NO WAY TO GAIN LEGAL STATUS. This leaves these young people with no hope of ever escaping their de jure second-class status. This DREAM Act would provide an opportunity for many of this group to gain legal status, in a way that may garner sufficient bipartisan support.
However, there are vocal portions of the Latino community that oppose the bill. I feel that this is a mistaken move, and one that results from not listening to the community of folks effected. While I share their reservations about a law that will effectively target one group for military service, I do not place these concerns over what is being said by the undocumented students. In fact, to my knowledge the student organizations that specifically work on undocumented student issues all support the DREAM Act.
What *can* we do as we pursue our lives, most of us so comfortable, so unaffected except in our minds, that knawing of rage and despair that doesn't stop, gets worse with every revelation from Washington.
It seems you’re asking whether, in essence, the right-wing take-over of America‘s social and economic infrastructure, as exemplified by our prosecution of an imperialistic war for oil in Iraq, is a civil rights issue that the Equal Justice Society should be involved in? I would respond - rhetorically; since the right-wing case involves the disenfranchisement (at the least) of everyone who disagrees with their intended end point, how can it be anything else?
The mistake, as I see it though, is to frame the issue in the context of traditional civil rights battles when the enemy was racism and racists (or sexism and sexists) who were, usually, clearly identifiable and who gave clear warning of their beliefs and intentions thus making it easier to target them and their policies. They are, of course, still around and as noxious as ever but they are not the primary spokesmen of those who truly exert power over the actions of our government and those other governments with whom ours is allied.
Now, the policies our government follows to achieve its ends (which I define as establishing unchallenged control over access to the world’s supplies of fossil fuels and the uncontested acquisition of power) are primarily corporate and economic and only secondarily (and likely incidentally) targeted toward the suppression of any identifiable group of people. It may appear that the Iraq war is racist but, considering the only other accessible supply of fossil fuel of similar size extant north of the equator (where an attack would be less “racist”) is in a country we don’t wish to engage, Russia (although we are challenging Russia over control of the fossil fuel resources of the former Asian SSR‘s - the so-called “stans“). Similarly, corporate control of America’s political, economic, and military endeavors (the traditional military-industrial-congressional complex) is driven not by a racist creed, or even a primarily religious ethic but by stark economic concerns (although those controlling the international mega-corporations do tend to be white, male, and ultra-conservative Christians [to see why read Jared Diamond‘s “Guns, Germs, and Steel“] - so how come people keep trotting out the old "International Jewish Conspiracy"? - but I digress). Hence, had “America’s Oil” been found to lie under the sands of a white Australia that was utterly unwilling to peacefully give them up on terms satisfactory to America’s oligarchy instead of hidden under the sands of Arab Iraq, we’d now be supporting ‘our boys in Australia’. This seems evident based on the reciprocity between the U.S. (and its corporations) and Saddam Hussain until the issue of limited supplies of fossil fuels became a source of friction and also by the U.S.’ support of the government of Nigeria at present that would quickly change to another ‘war for Freedom’ should a new government there determine to nationalize Nigeria‘s oil and charge us ‘pump prices‘ for it.
The issues that operate at the next level down from those of the corporatocracy, such as the rise of the religious right, the racist anti-immigrant movement, the reactionary trend in women’s rights, the re-segregation of America, and so many others that occupy those of us trying to make the lives of those less fortunate, or those more oppressed, better are, largely, irrelevant to the corporate giants who care not a whit about the sex, race, or beliefs of those who labor for them or who consume the products they sell. To me, this is what is meant by a multi-tiered society. And, while we residents of Lilliput struggle to make life better for all our fellow Lilliputians, the Gullivers of this Earth just continue on their course unaffected and only occasionally bemused by the antics of the Lilliputians.
Of course, the ultimate issue is exactly that of Equal Justice but it will only be achievable when, somehow, it is applied at the level of the corporate giants who determine the economic priorities in our world (to see how utterly irrelevant our day-to-day concerns are to those who live at that Jovian level read: “House of Bush, House of Saud” by Craig Unger - then you‘ll glimpse why, no matter how important something like Brown v. Board of Education was and how much good it did for those affected, it was utterly irrelevant to people on the boards of the Carlyle Group or Boeing). As they concentrate wealth and power, leaving less and less available for more and more people, the remaining wealth, power, and resources will be fought over by those who will form their alliances based on issues like race, sex, and religion. The issue will be how to overcome those divisive descriptors, unite behind a common purpose, and concentrate on achieving democratic control over the wealth and power currently concentrated in the hands of the corporatocracy.
Sorrowfully, the monolithic structure and strength of the military-industrial-congressional-religious(?) complex makes it seem nearly impervious to anything but global level events. Such an event may just be the advent of peak oil and the effect it will have on the military & corporate structure of the future (see The Pentagon v. Peak Oil By Michael T. Klare -
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174810/michael_klare_the_pentagon_as_global_gas_guzzler). Similarly, the universal effects of global warming’s changes may well create a unified world approach to overcoming the greed and excess inherent in the corporatocracy’s management of the world’s resources if we can manage to approach it before critical shortages result in world-wide chaos. Other than that, however, I see little chance that long-term, lasting, change can be had. Thus it remains critical to continue the struggle as best one can in hopes of keeping the flame alive.