And speaking of John Edwards

The Democrats are already grooming a few 2008 candidates, including the execrable Hillary Rodham Clinton who has already stated her intention to beef up the war against Southwest Asia. Let’s not forget that her husband presided over an Iraqi holocaust that George W. Bush is still trying to match. The Republicans are secure for now with their white nationalist popular base. An active and increasingly militant left is a more immediate threat to the Democrats – who have prospered from Repubilican reaction for decades now by capturing social bases that feel they have nowhere else to go. That dilemma is real, but it is also predicated on the notion that to “go there” we need to contain ourselves in electoralism and pluralist policy fights that are engineered by corporations and NGOs.

That’s why Sheehan and others who propose the radical option of simply leaving Iraq are now being surrounded by the friendly faces of “progressives” who will try and redirect this newfound mobilization along acceptable paths.

Enter Tom Hayden with his “proposal” for disengagement in Iraq. The logic is – antiwar Congresspeople cannot advance their agenda without an alternative to the fake “exit strategies” of the right. Of course, this is just another Moveon proposal. Nothing unilateral about it, and no demand for immediate withdrawal. Moreover, it depends on actions taken by Iraqis that the US will ultimately have no control over unless it is coercive. This plan is no less racist in its implications than the Republican myth of democracy-implants. It still calls for outsiders (including possibly the CIA!) to broker the withdrawal and oversee the “reconciliation” of those troublesome brown people. Sorry, Tom. This is bullshit. Just because you ask for guarantees of no permanent US bases and no preferential US contracts does not erase the fact that you have taken self-determination off the board and are attempting to redirect the demand (yet unmet!) for a political decision to leave into a policy debate.

Let me just say something about how to withdraw. This is my plan, and it requires nothing of the Iraqis.

  Continue reading Stan Goff

And catch this thoughtful and thought-provoking comment to Stan's article:

Stan, civil disobedience is good. We should do it more, and en masse. But I feel you are just on the edge of advocating armed insurrection. When you talk about bleeding bringing down the beast, whose blood are you talking about? Because, if it’s our blood or Iraqi blood or Haitian or whosever blood, you know the beast likes that blood; it feeds on that blood. If you mean making the beast itself bleed, how are we going to do that enough to bring it down? If we merely wound it, we will just anger it, as the right-wing response to Cindy Sheehan demonstrates. Serious massive civil disobedience will certainly result in bloodshed (ours, not the beast’s). The only harm to the beast will be increased international opprobrium, and we already know how much the current beast cares about that, which is not a whit. Nevertheless, I and countless other gray-haired grannies would be happy to put ourselves on the front line, suffer beatings, imprisonment, and all the rest, IF we believed that our sacrifice would result in changing not just the mask but the real face, eyes and heart of the United States for the better. Can you make us believe? Because if you can’t, we will just go on quietly living our lives as liberals, trying politely to help others be happy who otherwise might suffer, and indulging in cafe latte when it suits us.