Los Angeles--MIM handed out MIM Notes and collected 26 signatures on our petition to support Prof. Jose Maria Sison (1) from demonstrators calling on the Los Angeles City Council to pass a resolution against a unilateral Amerikan war in Iraq. The council passed the resolution 9-4 on 21 February, and Mayor Jim Hahn signed it, making L.A. the largest U.$. city to oppose the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld war plans.(2) In the same meeting, the council voted unanimously to ask the Federal government for more money to prevent terrorism in the city of L.A.
The crowd was extremely friendly to Prof. Sison's cause, and most people who stopped to talk about the petition had firm and progressive opinions on the wrongheadedness of the "War on Terrorism." Asked to sign a petition defending the democratic rights of political refugees, one bystander quipped "that depends on the refugee!" S/he was referring to John Ashcroft's policy of calling refugees whose persecution the united snakes funds (like Palestinians), while turning Iraqi refugees into poster children for the need to bomb Saddam Hussein out of office.
Other demonstrators only needed to hear that Prof. Sison is a revolutionary political activist smeared as a terrorist by the Amerikan government, and they were clamoring for our clipboard. And a couple were already familiar with Prof. Sison and his situation. Everyone who got a copy of MIM Notes was pleased to see us out there and happy to take a newspaper with politics much more radical than the resolution they had turned out to endorse.
In the council meeting, MIM saw the LAPD "protect and serve" an older white-haired woman wearing a t-shirt and buttons with anti-war slogans. She stood up towards the end of the debate to make some comment, and before three words were out of her mouth two pigs grabbed her arms and started dragging her from the council chamber. She later told MIM that she had only been trying to tell the city council of plans to carpet bomb Baghdad. She wanted to stress the importance of opposing this war to prevent Amerikan war crimes against the Iraqi people.(3)
For all this, MIM was surprised to learn the "anti-war" resolution itself is a half-assed piece of liberal twaddle and a good argument against radicals getting involved in Amerikan electoral battles. The resolution calls Saddam Hussein "a despot with aims contrary to peace," expresses "unquestionable pride in and support for the men and women of the Armed Services," supports all "diplomatic efforts" to avert this war including ongoing weapons inspections, and opposes only a ITAL unilateral END Amerikan war.(4)
So even forgetting the war-mongering language in reference to Saddam Hussein and support for the inspections that have been shown to serve a dual function as intelligence-gathering missions for the Amerikan military, this resolution is hollow. Unilateral action has been off the table for months as England and a number of other European countries support a war. Resolution-sponsor Eric Garcetti effectively said that if Colin Powell had made a stronger case before the UN he wouldn't have bothered: "we're not necessarily opposed to any war, but we're opposed to unilateral war, and we don't think the case has been made."(5) Still, a whole network of neighborhood activists has organized phone trees, letter-writing and fax campaigns around getting such resolutions passed in the name of "peace."
MIM urges readers who think our views are correct but too far "out there" to check out the lobbying that went into getting this resolution passed, and to think about the activist-hours invested and the return our side got out of those hours. If your goals include peace, appealing to the broadest Amerikan public opinion does not matter, putting forth the most forthright anti-imperialist line with the greatest energy matters. As we argued in MIM Notes 276, we do not need to appeal to the tens of millions who pull levers for the Democrats and Republicans. If the 200,000 who marched on Washington, D.C. had been waving Little Red Books, Bush would be a lot less anxious to rush into war. From the war mongers' perspective sending the military overseas gets a lot less attractive when half a million Maoists -- a tiny minority in the u.$. population -- could be strolling into DC in the meantime. If you really want to oppose this war, please leave the empty-resolution-passing work to your city council members and throw your own weight behind MIM.
Notes:
1. http://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/agitation/philippines/index.html
2. http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0222-05.htm
3. This happened at the February 18 meeting when the resolution was first introduced.
4. http://www.neighborsforpeaceandjustice.org/npj/id6.html
5. www.inq7.net/brk/2003/feb/22/brkafp_8-1.htm