It takes more than voting to end the war

A mid-term election usually doesn’t arouse much passion. This one is different, however.

The reason for the great interest in it is not because there are firm differences in the stated programs of the Republican and Democratic parties regarding the elephant in the room: the quagmire that U.S. imperialism has gotten itself into in Iraq, and what to do about it.

The reason this election seems a cliff-hanger is that there has been a big shift in public opinion from the years right after 9/11 when a majority of voters accepted the war in Iraq—after they had been lied to by the Bush administration—to a majority now wanting to bring the troops home. The political establishment is predicting this will mean a gain for the Democrats.

If the party that does not control the current U.S. government—i.e., the Democrats—had a clear position for getting out of Iraq and Afghanistan, this election might reasonably be seen as a referendum on the war. But that’s not the position of the Democratic Party. On the contrary. The leading Democrats, the ones closest to the powerful economic interests who run this country and fund both parties, don’t call for withdrawing the troops. In fact, they have actually baited the Republicans for not sending more troops to Iraq.

So where does that leave the voters? Up the creek without a paddle. But only if you regard the elections as the determining factor in shaping the course of politics in the United States.

This election will come and go. It is likely to weaken the Republican grip on the administration of the capitalist state and free up many juicy plums for the Democratic Party to pluck. But it will not decide the fate of the U.S. military occupation in the Middle East. Nor the fate of the Iraqi people, who have so clearly shown they would rather die than surrender to a neocolonial regime imposed by Washington and London. Nor that of the U.S. troops, the majority young men and women but also many middle-aged people in the reserves who have been torn from their families, all of whom are beginning to break with military discipline and express their opposition to the occupation and their desire to come home.

What will decide the fate of the hundreds of millions whose lives are intertwined with the ambitions and greed of U.S. imperialist interests who are hell-bent on subduing the Middle East, with its tremendous petroleum resources that can define who controls the world’s economy?

The many millions who hope their wishes to end the war can be fulfilled by pulling down a lever on election day will undoubtedly be disappointed, no matter which capitalist party wins, but they do have the power to change history. They are the masses, the workers and the nationally oppressed. It was these social forces that, in synch with the struggles of the Vietnamese people, finally forced Richard Nixon—a Republican!—to bring the troops home.

In many ways, this is a much more difficult struggle. Control over the Middle East is more vital to U.S. imperialism’s domination over the world—which explains why there is no serious opposition to the war from either capitalist party. Nevertheless, the U.S. is losing the war in Iraq, and the strategists for imperialism on all sides must put on their thinking caps and try to devise some way to rescue their position.

This is no time for the anti-war movement to let its guard down. With the strength of U.S. monopoly capitalism eroding on a world scale—from Iraq to Venezuela to Korea—progressives must be alert to the danger that a deal can be struck in Washington that would entail new military adventures and new assaults on our hard-won social gains.

With the robber barons on the defensive, the movement should go into high gear. This is the time to strengthen the alliances among all sectors of society who struggle day in and day out to survive as the wealth we create is burned up in the furnace of war. (Remember, the recent Senate vote to approve the huge Pentagon budget was 100 to 0.)

The workers and the nationally oppressed are the ones forced to sacrifice the most—in lives, health and income—in every imperialist war. When they become the bedrock of the anti-war movement, the days of the militarists will be numbered.

An approach to uniting and strengthening all the anti-war forces is being put forward by the Troops Out Now Coalition, which stands out in the U.S. movement for its organic connection to the struggles of the most oppressed workers and peoples in this society. It is calling for a summit meeting of activists in Harlem on Nov. 18 and a united anti-war demonstration on the fourth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq on March 17, 2007. (www.troopsoutnow.org)

Workers World supports the TONC call and urges everyone who wants to end imperialist war to work on these events as an important step in fortifying the movement by building bridges to those already in the struggle against racism, against sex and gender oppression, for immigrant rights, for a living wage, and for the rights of all the oppressed.