Mayor Dellums letter to Port Action

I personally having moved elsewhere will not be at this demonstration. I hope everyone who can does go to this event and ups an the ante now that the mayor of Oakland supports this event (as compared to the previous mayor). However i wish to point out that Mr. Dellums by using the term "blunder" implies that this war could have gone another way (maybe if his party, the Democrats were in power.) By using the the term "blunder" as compared to war crime or some such equivalent he lets the people who suported this war (including almost all of the Democrats in Congress and other leadership positions) off the hook.

When a rapist chooses the wrong victim and winds up getting his balls shot off, he's made a serious blunder. But I doubt that Mr. Dellums would oppose the rapist's blunder. He would, like almost everybody, oppose the rapist's crime and be glad for his blunder. But while the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, along with all the actions of the U.S. and its allies and puppets against Iraq since 1990, constitute a crime of world-historic proportions, the question of whether the 2003 invasion was a "blunder" depends on whose support for the invasion you're talking about, and even then it's not always clear.

For example, the Zionist network was one of the strongest backers of the original decision to attack Iraq. But, especially if they can't engineer a U.S. attack on Iran, Israel may wind up in a weaker position than it was before, when Iraq was a buffer against Iran. So, whether the war was a blunder for the Zionists or not will probably not be clear for a while, if ever.

The armaments capitalists have been both promoters of and beneficiaries of the war and continued occupation, so their support for the war certainly was no blunder. (If we ever get them and their kept politicians in front of the firing squads they have so richly earned, that will be another story!)

Of course, the biggest losers are the Iraqi people. Various factions in Iraq have made many blunders, most of which involve the failure to focus their energies on defeating the occupiers and instead playing into the occupiers' divide-and-rule strategy. (Some of those blunders, like sectarian killings, are outright crimes as well.)

The next group of losers, though a distant second, are the working-class and middle-class U.S. taxpayers and soldiers. Many of this group did support the war and their support was both a crime and a blunder. But it may be reaching the point where those soldiers actually start mutinying and revolting like U.S. soldiers did in Vietnam. That would be neither a crime nor a blunder, but a great contribution to human liberation!

I agree with both commentators that the BushCON Cabal committed real War Crimes in launching the Imperial Conquest of Iraq. But in carrying out the illegal Occupation those arrogant & incompetent War Criminals then committed the "Mother of all Blunders" in trying to impose a pliant puppet Regime that would merely put an Iraqi face on a neo-Imperial colony. The progressive movement must continue to ceaselessly strive to convict these War Criminals, and confiscate their entire ill-gotten family fortunes to begin paying for reparations to the Iraqi people.

What Mayor Dellums wrote was a general antiwar statement. That's fine and worthwhile in it's own right especially considering most of his fellow Dems supported the war in Iraq (and still supports the ongoing occupation and war in Afghanistan )
But please let's don't exaggerate . This is not a letter of support for shutting down the loading of military cargo ! Yes, he isn't outright condemming this labor oriented demo like Jerry Brown . And no one was shot by ''non lethal '' weapons this time .
In the future let's be very accurate and don't interpret a few pacifist sounding sentences as somehow support for anti-imperialist class struggle .