Naomi Klein on Iraq and the anti-war movement

I just came across a great interview with Naomi Klein on Alternet. She talks alot about what she thinks is wrong with the anti-war movement, and where it can go from here, what specific issues it can latch onto:

The great error made during the electoral campaign was that the anti-war movement allowed itself to turn into an anti-Bush movement. So as the logic of anyone-but-Bush set in — and there wasn't a candidate speaking on these issues — the war itself disappeared. What I mean by that is that the reality of war itself disappeared. The truth is that we were talking about Iraq in the past tense — not about what was happening on the ground during the campaign. And indeed, I believe that continues to be true to a scandalous degree, especially what we've just seen in recent months in Iraq. I'm worried that we haven't learned from that mistake yet.

We also need to more clearly focus on policy demands. I have been arguing for a long time that the anti-war movement should turn itself into a pro-democracy movement, i.e., support the demands for democracy in Iraq.

As an aside, I want to make a clear distinction between democracy in Iraq and the elections being held right now because they're not the same. The elections are, in fact, being used as a weapon in Iraq at the moment.

One of our great failures was in January of 2004, when there were a hundred thousand people in the streets in Baghdad demanding direct elections and rejecting the idea of an interim government. We didn't mirror those protests, unlike the time when we had protests around the world opposing the war.

This is just an example to make the point that it's not a question of us deciding what the demands are from here. There are clear demands that are coming out of Iraq. And if we care to listen, we can mirror them and bring them home to where the decisions are being made in Washington, in London, and so on. We haven't done much of that.

What we've really done a lot of is proving ourselves right to have even opposed the war in the first place. And I even sometimes get the sense — in some anti-war circles — that we who oppose the war don't have any responsibility to talk about how to improve the situation in Iraq beyond just advocating pulling out the troops.

She also talks about the issue of Iraq's dept, and how the US is playing that to its advantage:

I agree that there's a profound responsibility not to abandon Iraq. But the presence of troops is not the solution, which is why we need to talk about reparations. What we need to talk about is the fact that so little of the reconstruction money has actually made it to the ground. That money is still owed. The reason why this money was approved was because Americans accepted that as part of the invasion they did owe something to Iraq in terms of the reconstruction. But that money hasn't gone to Iraq's reconstruction, and is an ongoing debt. There are programs that could be developed that could bring real hope to Iraq — that can be a real bulwark against civil war.

One of the ways in which the Kerry campaign was morally bankrupt was that it refused to speak about this issue. Bush and Cheney talked about what was owed to Iraq and talked about the responsibility of not to cut and run.

I have heard people on the left in the U.S. say that we don't owe Iraq anything, that they have oil revenue, that our only responsibility is to just pull out. That is wrong. Our responsibility goes far beyond that. Anybody who says that has really not taken a hard look at the level of devastation of that country.

I also just heard recently from some people who said that they don't want another U.S. taxpayer dollar going to Iraq. Barely any U.S. taxpayer dollars have gone to Iraq. In fact, Iraqi money has gone to U.S. companies because it's the Iraqi oil money that's bankrolled their reconstruction contracts.

What's a specific policy or issue that the anti-war movement could rally around?

For me the easiest issue is debt. The Iraqis should not have to inherit Saddam's debt. This is a very simple issue. Now this is something Bush has said and James Baker has said. And that's why we feel we don't have the right to say it. The truth is that when Bush and Baker say it, they're lying. What they've actually done to Iraq instead is reduce the debt just enough to make sure that Iraqis can repay it. It was at a completely unsustainable level and was never going to be repaid previously so it was restructured — so that they could demand that it be repaid. Then it was attached to an IMF structural adjustment program that makes debt forgiveness contingent on adherence to incredibly damaging and dangerous new economic (free market) policies.

We said nothing about this in the anti-war movement when we should have been demanding total debt erasure. We had a window when Bush was using our language, but instead we responded as if we didn't have any responsibility to do so because he was using that language.

Of course, there are some exceptions. There's this great group called Jubilee Iraq that has been working on these issues. I think that these campaigns — which are working on issues that are real practical solidarity — need to be funded better and get more support.

There's another campaign that's evolving around plans to eliminate the food ration program in Iraq — which is just another brilliant idea. Right now, the whole country receives a food basket, and 60 percent of Iraqis depend on them for basic nutrition. But this program is seen as a relic of state socialism by the neocons in charge. So in the middle of this brutal economic recession in Iraq where 70 percent of the country is unemployed, they're proposing eliminating the main source of nutrition for the country and giving people cash instead so they participate in a market economy.

We need to develop an agenda based on the demands coming from Iraq for reparations, for total debt erasure, for complete control over the oil revenues, for a cancellation of the contracts signed under the occupation, and so on. This is what real sovereignty would look like, real self-determination — we know this.

See the full interview here.