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CONNECTING THE STRUGGLES FOR PEACE AND JUSTICE
(Statement by Lawrence Hamm, Chairman, People's Organization For Progress, at the March and Prayer Vigil for Peace held in Newark, New Jersey on Saturday, April 19, 2003)
The invasion of Iraq is over and the U.S. military occupation of that country has begun. A tremendous movement for peace developed in opposition to the U.S. war with Iraq. Now that the invasion is over we must not allow the movement for peace to dissipate. The struggle is by no means over.
Our efforts to stop the invasion must now be directed towards ending the U.S. military occupation of Iraq. We must continue to demand the cessation of hostilities and immediate return home of U.S. troops.
The U.S. invasion of Iraq was wrong and our occupation of that country is wrong. While president Bush makes speeches about bringing democracy to the Iraqi people, the truth is that the regime of Saddam Hussein is being replaced by a U.S. regime made up of American military and former military personnel.
The occupation does not put the Iraqi people in control of their nation, rather it places that country under direct U.S. control. In the future, when the United States decides it is in its own best interest to give up direct control, it will then relinquish it to a puppet Iraqi government subservient to U.S. interests.
In addition, the occupation will now allow the U.S. to dominate Iraq's economy and gain control of its oil industry which has the second largest oil reserves in the world. The prime beneficiaries of this arrangement will not be the Iraqi people. It will be U.S. corporations.
The occupation of Iraq is not only wrong for these reasons but for another that is closer to home. The military, political, and economic domination of Iraq comes with a price tag. Conservative estimates put the cost at twenty-billion dollars per year. Others have said it could cost as much as a trillion dollars over a ten year period.
In any case, billions of American taxpayer dollars that will be directed away from domestic programs which deal with our needs here at home will be used to pay for the unjust military occupation of a foreign country. Those who stand to benefit the most from this are neither the majority of Americans or Iraqis but Haliburton and the other war profiteering companies close to the Bush and Cheney administration.
We must also continue to build and strengthen the peace movement because the Bush administration appears to be planning future pre-emptive military invasions like the one in Iraq. The U.S. has recently made threatening statements to Syria about "chemical weapons" like those it lodged against Iraq.
Bush supporters in Congress have introduced bills to provide funding for dissident groups in Iran. Such funding to groups like these in other countries is often seen as a precursor to U.S. military action. We must oppose any attempts by the Bush administration to launch pre-emptive strikes against these and other nations.
The peace movement must become a movement not only to end the U.S. occupation of Iraq and to oppose future unjust imperialist wars abroad, but to fight injustice here at home. It will become stronger if it is linked to the struggles for jobs, housing, health care, education, and the protection of civil rights and civil liberties.
The peace movment will become more powerful if it connects to the struggles for affirmative action, reparations for African-Americans, police brutality, racial profiling, and the fight against racism, inequality and other forms of discrimination. The struggle for peace and these struggles for justice face a common foe: U.S. racism and imperialism.
The Bush administration stands in the way of peace abroad and justice at home. Bush supports sending African-American, Latino, Native American, and Asian youth to fight and die for oil in Iraq and yet he opposes affirmative action policies and programs which will enable them to get higher education and better jobs.
If these young people can be sent to war for this government, be put in harms way, risk getting injured or killed, then the least the government can do is to support affirmative action and help them get whatever benefits it can provide.
The U.S. government has given restitution to other racial and ethnic groups it has wronged, but African-Americans are told there is no money to pay them for the centuries of labor stolen from their ancestors during the era of slavery in the United States. Bush administration national security advisor Condoleezza Rice publicly stated that African-Americans didn't need reparations.
Secretary of State Colin Powell, a Bush appointee, walked out of the United Nations World Conference On Racism where the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade was declared a crime against humanity. And yet the Bush administration can get billions from Congress for unnecessary and unjust wars. If there are billions for war then there is money for reparations for the descendants of Africans enslaved in America.
The peace movement must grow. It must connect to other domestic and international movements for justice. It must mobilize greater numbers of people in the streets at the local as well as national levels, but it must also make its opposition felt at the ballot box.
There is a peace and justice constituency and it should make its power felt during elections this year and next. We must begin to engage in massive voter education and registration now, and voter mobilization during upcoming elections over the next two years.
We should vote for those elected officials that stood for peace and vote against those that supported war. We should even consider running our own peace and justice candidates.
Through massive protest and massive voting we must repudiate the Bush administration's warmongering foreign policy and racist domestic policies. We would do the nation and the world a great service if we could send the Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld gang packing in 2004.
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"If there is No Struggle, There is No Progress," Frederick Douglass