Anti-war encampment to confront Congress

During the week starting March 12, a Congress elected to end the war in Iraq is expected to vote to fully fund the war. Its support for the war is not hidden in some enormous package with hundreds of unconnected measures. It is a vote for a special supplement of $245 billion directly for continuing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Congressional approval will leave millions of people feeling betrayed, frustrated and angry. Bush, whom many consider a war criminal, won’t be the sole owner of the war in Iraq. There will be heavy criticism in Congress of Bush’s tactics and of the war itself. By the Democratic Party leadership deciding to vote to fund the war, the Iraq quagmire also becomes their war—not just Bush’s war.

While this “debate” in U.S. ruling circles over how to proceed with the disastrous occupation of Iraq is carried on in Congress, will it be possible for the millions who oppose the war on Iraq to bring their own demands to the table?

The call for an encampment outside the Capitol starting March 12 opens an opportunity for just such an independent intervention representing millions of workers and oppressed people.

The U.S. Constitution grants Congress the power to provide funds for government activities. Thus Congress can fund or refuse to fund a war. As a New York Times editorial explained on March 4, “There is little dispute that Congress could, if it had the political will, end the war in Iraq tomorrow by using its power over appropriations to cut off funds to the troops.”

For four years Bush’s congressional critics have hidden behind the claim that Bush’s lies in the build up to the war deceived them, and that’s why in December 2002 they voted to give the president full authority to wage war. They claim they gullibly accepted the lie that Iraq was hiding and planning to use weapons of mass destruction.

The leaders of the Democratic Party would like to evade responsibility for their continued complicity with the war by drawing attention to a non-binding resolution that criticized the war that passed the House. The resolution is so insignificant that it was forgotten almost before it was voted on.

Democrats have proposed a whole series of other bills aimed at drawing attention away from their fundamental betrayal: they are funding the war. Every major politician has a plan. Some proposals reauthorize the war with new conditions and a plan for a phased withdrawal. Other plans take troops out of Iraq and redeploy them to Korea, Afghanistan or offshore in the Middle East. There are calls for more protection, more body armor, for more equipment for the U.S. troops.

The vast majority of these same politicians claim they will vote for funding because they care about the troops. Indeed, they will carry out their patriotic duty and vote to give President Bush a special, additional package, even above and beyond the already monstrous Pentagon budget, specifically to continue this hated war.

One congressional piece of legislation, HR 508, calls for ending the funding and bringing the troops home. Only 10 percent or 40 members of the House of Representatives have signed on to it, including a significant number of the Congressional Black Caucus members and some of the most outspoken congressional opponents of the war. But in a congressional atmosphere of heavy pro-imperialist pressure, this bill too includes clauses that undercut what is promised in the title—“Bring the Troops Home and Iraq Sovereignty Restoration Act of 2007.”

As the debate on how to proceed with war in Iraq grows more intense, the problem for the congressional opponents of Bush’s tactics is becoming more difficult.

As a minority opposition, the Democratic Party could criticize Bush’s handling of the war without taking responsibility for ending it. Now the Democrats’ dream of controlling the majority in both houses of Congress has become their nightmare. The Democrats are caught between their complicity with the imperialist bourgeoisie and their promises to their anti-war voter base.

expose complicity?

Can a dramatic intervention from the ranks of the grassroots anti-war movement expose this complicity and move the opposition to the war to a new level?

Earlier protests have attempted to expose the role of both capitalist political parties in imperialist war and of both the executive and legislative arms of the bourgeois state.

On Jan. 19, 1991, just three days after the first U.S. war on Iraq began with a massive bombing campaign, a large anti-war protest of tens of thousands marched from the White House to Congress to denounce the war.

In January 2003, just weeks before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, a massive demonstration of hundreds of thousands gathered in the field in front of the Capitol. Speakers and activists denounced both Bush for preparing the war and the congressional role in authorizing it.

Congress’s criminal support for imperialist wars is even clearer today than at the time of those past anti-war demonstrations targeting the Capitol, because the majority of this Congress was elected on a wave of opposition to the war amid Democratic promises that Congress would act.

While even after Congress has already voted to authorize a war it is quite correct to protest there. This time political activists have called for a determined challenge during the very week that Congress discusses and votes the funds to continue the war.

The House of Representatives is scheduled to vote on the Iraq and Afghanistan war appropriations during the week beginning March 12. The Troops Out Now Coalition (TONC) and many hundreds of activists and grassroots organizations from around the country will descend on Washington, D.C., to camp in front of Congress to mobilize opposition to this vote.

The political dynamic has changed. The encampment ensures that another war vote does not go unchallenged.

Independent, militant action not tied to either political party is the only way that millions of poor and working people will gain an understanding of the system that oppresses and impoverishes them.

This challenge is taking root all across the country as local activists have targeted elected officials on their role in the war. This is not polite lobbying. There have been sit-ins, disruptions and arrests at the offices of both Republicans and Democrats.

Recognizing that it is sometimes more possible to use mass pressure at the local level, activists have encouraged city councils to pass resolutions demanding that Congress refuse to fund the war. In New York City, Councilmember Charles Barron’s resolution before the NYC Council and Councilmember Chuck Turner’s resolution in Boston are examples of the growing challenge, as is a resolution in Detroit. In San Francisco, the Central Labor Council passed a resolution to support the encampment and to demand that Congress refuse to approve the funds to continue the war.

By calling for the week of mass actions at Congress, TONC has actively encouraged a move beyond mass one-day, bi-annual demonstrations. Mass demonstrations play a key role in moving people initially into action. But serious revolutionary activists and determined opponents of the war should grapple with how to move the struggle forward, toward active resistance to the war, both in the streets and within the military.

Some of the actions most remembered in the Vietnam War movement, in the Civil Rights movement, in the Black Liberation struggle, the union movement, the LGBT movement and the women’s movement were the sit-ins, shut-downs, take-overs, seizures, encampments and job actions that by their challenge pushed the movement forward.

Although there have been a number of demonstrations at the Pentagon over the years, people remember the October 1967 event even today because thousands of young people refused to leave the site. They scaled walls, stormed the stairs, lit bonfires and faced down lines of U.S. soldiers and federal marshals.

Different forms of political action are not necessarily competitive. All have a place. The Troops Out Now Coalition and many others planning actions in D.C. during the week of March 12 to 19 have called for full support for the March to the Pentagon. Along with organizing for actions on the week of March 12, TONC is organizing buses in more than 20 cities for the Pentagon March.

It would further strengthen and re-energize the anti-war movement if the organizers of the March on the Pentagon urged all participants who were able to stay in Washington for even a few hours to join the encampment at the Capitol.

What is needed is growing numbers of people in the streets in united, determined and varied forms of independent action confronting the whole capitalist war machine.