The key is solidarity

Solidarity is the secret weapon of the oppressed, the exploited and the disenfranchised. In order to turn back the ruthless drive of the military-industrial-banking complex to extend its empire from Iraq to Zimbabwe to Korea to Haiti, the anti-war movement must develop the broadest solidarity—at home and internationally.

The labor movement here was built not on lobbying or public relations campaigns but on militant solidarity—in the plants and on the picket lines. With solidarity it was able to demand, not beg for, better wages and working conditions.

On March 19, the union of longshore workers in California will be demonstrating solidarity with the anti-war demonstrators marching that day to mark two years since the U.S. started its assault on Iraq. The workers will lay down their tools and demand that the U.S. government bring the troops home. That’s language that the super-rich corporate bosses who control Washington can understand.

Civil rights were won through solidarity at the lunch counters, in the bus stations, in the streets resisting police dogs and fire hoses, and in countless acts of every-day courage and mutual defense that pushed back the racist segregationists, the terrorist KKK and their powerful patrons.

In New York on March 19, demonstrators will gather in Marcus Garvey Park in Harlem before marching to Central Park. The multinational crowd of Black, Latin@, Arab, Asian, Native and white will be declaring their solidarity against the war makers. Gathering in Harlem is especially important as the Bush administration cuts education, housing, healthcare and even veterans’ benefits in order to divert hundreds of billions of dollars into wars of conquest.

The demonstration has been organized by a rainbow coalition, Troops Out Now. The communities who feel the pain of the budget cuts the most and whose youth are under the greatest economic pressure to join the military will lead the march. This is what real democracy looks like. Get used to it.

Some figures in the anti-war movement have failed to recognize the significance of this demonstration or add their solidarity. They say they cannot support the resistance in Iraq. However, that is not one of the demands of the demonstration. Therefore, they must mean that they will not even share a platform with someone who might support the resistance. They qualify any demand for the withdrawal of U.S. troops by insisting that a “multilateral” occupation force be in place first.

This is shortsighted and a violation of the right of self-determination. What gives U.S. imperialism the right to invade and then keep its troops in Iraq even one more day when the overwhelming sentiment of the Iraqi people, expressed constantly through their heroic resistance, is to get them out?

The Iraqi people don’t want MORE countries sending troops to occupy them and control their natural resources. They want to run their own country, free of outside interference. They are demanding national sovereignty, which has come to be recognized as a right in international law only because tens of millions of people have fought and died in anti-colonial wars to achieve it.

To put conditions on the withdrawal of U.S. troops is to support the occupation.

This same political struggle in the anti-war movement came up during the Vietnam War, when some countered the slogan “Bring the troops home now” with “Negotiate now.” To demand that the Vietnamese negotiate with the U.S. was to demand that they make concessions to an imperialist power which had invaded their country, killed millions of people and poisoned their land and water with toxic chemicals.

It came up again during the first Gulf War, when the slogan “Sanctions, not war” was counterpoised to “End the war.” But sanctions are a form of war—and a most horrible form that killed over a million Iraqi civilians, a huge portion of them children.

The anti-war movement will go forward despite these differences, just as it did in the 1960s and 1970s. The returning troops as well as youth worried about a renewed draft will have little patience for demands that prolong the occupation, the tortures and the killing. Communities devastated by school and hospital closings, transportation cuts and higher energy bills will increasingly add their voices to the call to bring the troops home now.

In the process, let’s build a spirit of international solidarity with all those who have been demonized by this imperialist government because they refuse to become subjects in a global empire ruled by Washington and Wall Street.