Oil and Blood NY Times By BOB HERBERT Published: July 28, 2005 It is now generally understood that the U.S.-led war in Iraq has become a debacle. Nevertheless, Iraqis are supposed to have their constitution ratified and a permanent government elected by the end of the year. It's a logical escape hatch for George W. Bush. He could declare victory, as a senator once suggested to Lyndon Johnson in the early years of Vietnam, and bring the troops home as quickly as possible. His mantra would be: There's a government in place. We won. We're out of there.
But don't count on it. The Bush administration has no plans to bring the troops home from this misguided war, which has taken a fearful toll in lives and injuries while at the same time weakening the military, damaging the international reputation of the United States, serving as a world-class recruiting tool for terrorist groups and blowing a hole the size of Baghdad in Washington's budget. A wiser leader would begin to cut some of these losses. But the whole point of this war, it seems, was to establish a long-term military presence in Iraq to ensure American domination of the Middle East and its precious oil reserves, which have been described, the author Daniel Yergin tells us, as "the greatest single prize in all history." You can run through all the wildly varying rationales for this war: the weapons of mass destruction (that were never found), the need to remove the unmitigated evil of Saddam (whom we had once cozied up to), the connection to Al Qaeda (which was bogus), and, one of President Bush's favorites, the need to fight the terrorists "over there" so we won't have to fight them here at home. All the rationales have to genuflect before "The Prize," the title of Mr. Yergin's Pulitzer-Prize-winning book. It's the oil, stupid. What has so often gotten lost in all the talk about terror and weapons of mass destruction is the fact that for so many of the most influential members of the Bush administration, the obsessive desire to invade Iraq preceded the Sept. 11 attacks. It preceded the Bush administration. The neoconservatives were beating the war drums on Iraq as far back as the late 1990's. Iraq was supposed to be a first step. Iran was also in the neoconservatives' sights. The neocons envisaged U.S. control of the region (and its oil), to be followed inevitably by the realization of their ultimate dream, a global American empire. Of course it sounds like madness, which is why we should have been paying closer attention from the beginning. The madness took a Dr. Strangelovian turn in the summer of 2002, before the war with Iraq was launched. As The Washington Post first reported, an influential Pentagon advisory board was given a briefing prepared by a Rand Corporation analyst who said the U.S. should consider seizing the oil fields and financial assets of Saudi Arabia if it did not stop its support of terrorism. Mercifully the briefing went nowhere. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said it did not represent the "dominant opinion" within the administration. The point here is that the invasion of Iraq was part of a much larger, long-term policy that had to do with the U.S. imposing its will, militarily when necessary, throughout the Middle East and beyond. The war has gone badly, and the viciousness of the Iraq insurgency has put the torch to the idea of further pre-emptive adventures by the Bush administration. But dreams of empire die hard. American G.I.'s are dug into Iraq, and the bases have been built for a long stay. The war may be going badly, but the primary consideration is that there is still a tremendous amount of oil at stake, the second-largest reserves on the planet. And neocon fantasies aside, the global competition for the planet's finite oil reserves intensifies by the hour. Lyndon Johnson ignored the unsolicited advice of Senator George Aiken of Vermont - to declare victory in Vietnam in 1966. The war continued for nearly a decade. Many high-level government figures believe that U.S. troops will be in Iraq for a minimum of 5 more years, and perhaps 10. That should be understood by the people who think that the formation of a permanent Iraqi government will lead to the withdrawal of American troops. There is no real withdrawal plan. The fighting and the dying will continue indefinitely. *** Tiny Labor By Barbara Ehrenreich The Progressive - From the August 2005 Issue http://progressive.org/?q=mag_tinylabor In the fifty years of the AFL-CIO's existence, Big Labor has shrunk to a third of its former size, but it's been clinging to its outsized clothes and outmoded habits. While membership dwindles, the AFL-CIO has continued to act like a big shot - doling out tens of millions to the Democratic Party and occupying a palatial spread located within kiss-blowing distance of the White House. Nor has it budged from the style of "business unionism" developed by Samuel Gompers in the early twentieth century, in which unions act much like big insurance companies, offering their "consumers" the prospect of better wages and job security. It's Tiny Labor today, and - split or not - the challenge is to make it also lean, mean, and scrappy as a starving terrier. Herewith a few suggestions, culled from discussions with labor lawyer Tom Geoghegan and dozens of other labor activists around the country: Organize, don't subsidize.The amount spent on organizing is one of the key issues separating Change to Win from the rest of the AFL-CIO. Stern and the other dissidents want to boost the federation's organizing to $72 million; Sweeney would increase it to $30 million out of a total budget of $125 million. Where does the rest of that money go now? Well, a lot goes to subsidize the Democratic Party, with a view to electing more labor-friendly candidates. But the best way to pump up the Democratic vote is, in fact, to organize. According to the AFL-CIO's own statistics, nonunion white male voters went 69 percent for Bush in 2000, while white male union members went 59 percent for Gore. Put another way, union organizing adds more Democratic votes, at least among white males, than any number of television commercials. The best way to get union-friendly elected officials is to build the unions. Open up membership to every pro-union American. If I want to support the women's movement, all I have to do is send in my dues to NOW. But to join a union, most people have to go through the trial-by-fire of a union organizing drive in their workplace. This isn't so in Germany, for example, where individuals can join a union whether their workplace is organized or not. Here, the Steelworkers have started opening up their union to unorganized individuals, but for most Americans the unions remain a distant, inaccessible fortress. Individual members wouldn't be just dues- payers and supporters; they could be the seeds of organizing drives in their workplaces. Advance the class, not just the membership. More than once, union organizers have told me that goals like universal health insurance are irrelevant because the union can win health insurance for its members, or at least those who survive the organizing drive. Maybe 1940s-style Big Labor could reasonably hope to improve life for the working class entirely by organizing, but today's Tiny Labor has to take on class-wide issues now - or risk being the "special interest group" the right always claims it is. The unions should be spearheading the drive for universal health care, subsidized housing, and child care, adequate unemployment insurance, and all the other public benefits that would make low-wage workers' lives more sustainable. At the local level, this might mean sending organizers into low-income neighborhoods to help people deal with TANF (the replacement for welfare) or the public housing authorities - just as, for example, the Swedish unions do. Fight for workers' democratic rights, and not just the right to organize. In complete disregard for international human rights standards, American employers have deprived workers of the right to organize, chiefly by intimidating and firing union activists. The AFL-CIO has responded with its "Voice at Work" program, which emphasizes community support for the right to organize. But that's not the only right missing in the workplace, where workers have no freedom of speech or assembly, no privacy rights, and no right to any kind of due process before being fired. Without these other rights, organizing is almost impossible. Besides, it seems a little self-interested for the unions to focus on the one right (to organize) that brings them dues. We need a new civil rights movement for all workers, and the unions should be leading it. Start seeing labor as a movement, not just an institution. In the business-union model developed by Gompers, workers are treated as consumers of union-won benefits. Maybe this made sense for Big Labor, which had more to offer in exchange for the risks of an organizing drive, but Tiny Labor has to start treating each worker as a potential activist and leader in a grassroots movement against corporate power. This means it has to be evangelical enough to inspire people who've been down all their lives to stop cowering and stand up. How? Well, sometimes labor seems to forget its own secret weapon - the uplifting force the corporate guys don't know about and can't even imagine - and that is solidarity. Tell people that the point isn't just to gain a few bucks, important as that is, but to unite with other workers in the struggle for a better world, here and abroad, for themselves and their grandchildren. A surprising number of people will leap at the opportunity to be part of a world-changing, history-making venture, whatever the risks are. Lose those buildings. Big Labor might have been able to afford them, but it's unseemly for Tiny Labor to be sitting on hundreds of millions of dollars worth of elegant real estate in D.C., and I mean the Teamsters' building as well as the AFL-CIO headquarters. Sell off the buildings right now, at the height of the real estate bubble, and fan out into storefronts and church basements around the country. And what's this with holding this summer's AFL-CIO convention in a hotel that charges at least $186 a night? Ever heard of Motel 6? [Barbara Ehrenreich is a columnist for The Progressive. She is the author of "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America" and "Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War."] _______________________________________________________ portside (the left side in nautical parlance) is a news, discussion and debate service of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism. It aims to provide varied material of interest to people on the left. 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