US Out Of Iraq Now: An Interview with Anthony Arnove

TH: How do you envision generating the political momentum to accomplish immediate withdrawal?

AA: We know from history--recently from the history of the Vietnam War--that public opinion and political protests can change the nature of the debate around a war and change the calculus of power. Right now I think if we want to change the calculus of power the first thing we need to do is to see that we have to pressure the Democrats just as much as we have to pressure the Republicans. It's not as if the Democrats are on our side in this fight--they're not.

So it's a mistake for us to put our energy and resources into persuading the Democrats to somehow be some animal that they're not or hoping that the Democrats are somehow going to become a standard-bearer for our movement--they are not. They will respond only to the thing that the Republicans respond to: a mass groundswell of opposition. Protest. Disaffection that threatens their power to the point where they see we're losing in Iraq, we're losing at home, and each day that we stay in Iraq, things get worse for us. In order to maintain some control over the system, in order to maintain some credibility for future U.S. imperial projects, we need to pull out. And that's going to involve a greater degree of mobilization, protest and disruption of business as usual. I think it's also going to involve gaining some clarity about who the targets of our protests are and on the nature of the Democratic Party that, unfortunately, the antiwar movement has lacked.

TH: It's hard to have clarity, especially when the media are not supportive. You write in the "Resistance in Iraq" chapter, "The propaganda for this war has been internalized by the establishment media and no one blinks." Despite the many successes of the Peace Movement--we have the numbers, we were right about the president lying to the American people--we weren't paid attention to then and aren't being paid attention to now. How do we suddenly get attention?

AA: Well, look. There are a lot of positive things you can say about the antiwar movement. I think it's also useful to step back and ask what we can do better. Given the scale of the crisis of what's happening in Iraq and given the urgency of the issues we're talking about, I think it's good for us to be sober and self-critical and to realize our weaknesses and realize where we can do things better.

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