A brief statement:

 

Dear Syracuse/Maxwell friends,

 

As some of you know, I now reside to the north (and west) of you, in a country that doesn't have a large military, and tends (out of half-deceptive self image making) to prefer deploying peacekeepers rather than invasion forces.  That distance doesn't relieve me--or the rest of the world, for that matter--of some responsibility for trying to help reign in a destructive rogue state, brandishing and using weapons of mass destruction, that threatens the peace and stability of the entire planet.  As Nelson Mandela noted some time back, that state is not Iraq or North Korea (deplorable as the ruling powers in these countries may be) but the United States.  Here in Canada, as elsewhere throughout the world (including the US), people have been taking on that responsibility--in remarkable, indeed unprecedented numbers.  You know of this worldwide anti-war movement I'm sure, but I start by reminding you of this because I believe we always need to start with some sense of our own potential power and our ability to continue the struggle, and the hope that this rightly should allow us.

 

Hope--as Cornell West puts it--is not the same as optimism.  There's plenty to be pessimistic about, and I don't laud the global anti-war movement in order to downplay its limits and failures.  Iraqis, Palestinians, Kurds, West Papuans, Gujaratis, Colombians, and many others have been and continue to be slaughtered in unspeakable acts of state violence, with the full backing, direct participation, or indirect sanction of the US government, and all of our efforts have not stopped the unelected "leadership" of the US from continuing and even intensifying these acts of aggression, including of course the terrible destruction unfolding before our eyes today.  Nor, of course, can we deny that these acts of aggression--the legitimizing rhetoric of a "war on terrorism" notwithstanding--have not made any of us more secure or free from the threat of terrorism, but less so.

 

Nonetheless, we should not forget that the global anti-war movement has unquestionably slowed down the Bush/Blair rush to slaughter, and might perhaps even serve to force a small amount of restraint on the "Allied" warriors because of the possibility of broad, global backlash.  Nor should we forget that the considerable resistance to unilateral US aggression put up by governments such as France and Turkey is not a result of the wisdom or humanitarianism of these leaders but rather a response to the immense unpopularity of US aggression with the majority of ordinary people, who have voiced their opposition to such aggression repeatedly, and in numerous ways.

 

Those of you long-suffering enough to have endured my seminar on the geo-politics of imperialism, will realize that I find nothing at all surprising or even unpredictable about the activities that the US government is undertaking in Iraq--even if it might seem a bit thankless for Rumsfeld, Cheney, and company to so ruthlessly turn their backs on a former ally like Saddam, who they have in the past so assiduously helped to attack Iran, gas the Kurds at Halabja, and basically repress other Iraqis.  But then, as Philip Agee put it in 1991 (reflecting on both Panama and Iraq), "the US government doesn't just create its enemies, it invests in them."  The US will now try to depose its former ally (as it did with Noriega) and re-install a repressive regime that maintains "geo-political stability" (read: a US-approved oil pricing system).  As Thomas Friedman so candidly put it at the end of the first Gulf Slaughter, the "best of all worlds" would be "an iron-fisted Iraqi junta without Saddam Hussein"--given that Saddam (like Noriega) has shown too much of a propensity to disobey orders.

 

How the Iraqi people are to benefit from all this can be no doubt be "explained" to us by such great mystical minds as Perle and Rice.  But we know our own, more appropriate answers--that this is not about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, nor about changing the Iraqi regime to liberate Iraqis, Kurds, or others.  We have managed to build that understanding into a broader global movement than I recall existing at anytime in recent history.  Recognizing this, I hope we can remember that we struggle not only over this act of aggression, but over all those that will threaten us in the future, as the imperial ambition of the world's greatest rogue state--and all the junior state terrorists that trail along behind--grinds out its non-negotiable projects of domination.

 

Two recent victims of violence, to whom I feel somehow close, remind me that we cannot afford to let our dejection over current events prevent us from recognizing our potential power and our need to continue the struggle. Shaden Abu-Hijleh was a peace activist in Nablus, and the mother of one of my friends, a geographer at An-Najah University. The city of Nablus has been under curfew for approaching a year now.  The sick have been denied access to medical attention, houses and businesses demolished, children prevented from attending school.  It is nothing less than an assault on the basic fabric of Palestinian society--legitimized publicly by anti-terrorist rhethoric but animated by an ongoing project of settler colonial occupation, supported by the US and by fundamentalist religious zealots, though denounced by the Israeli left and by progressive rabbis in the US (in ways routinely and scandalously branded "anti-Semitic" by US Zionists and conservatives).  Shaden Abu-Hijleh worked to try to end this campaign of ethnic cleansing by getting children back into school and trying to keep them in school.  Last September, a jeep full of Israeli troops pulled up in front of her house in Nablus, and according to dozens of eye witnesses, proceeded to fire, without provocation, into the compound.  A minimum of 14 rounds were fired, one taking the life of Shaden, others injuring her son and husband.  The family is now trying to bring a legal case against the Israeli military in Israeli courts.  They cannot rest or give up--since it is their own lives and humanity that are at stake--so neither should we.

 

Rachel Corrie was a peace activist and undergraduate student at Evergreen College in Olympia, Washington.  She had gone to Gaza with an organization called the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), a group full of idealistic and committed young people like a friend of mine who is working with them now in the West Bank and who had only a few years ago risked his life to act as an election observer in East Timor.  Rachel Corrie was placing herself in harm’s way to stop the illegal and immoral Israeli destruction of Palestinian homes, a central project of the illegal and internationally-condemned Israeli occupation (and one opposed by progressive organizations in Israel).  Last Saturday, she was run over and killed by an Israeli driving a bulldozer, who was attempting to demolish a Palestinian home in Gaza.  The Israeli military claims that the driver did not see Rachel, though photographs of the incident show her standing in full view of the driver in a bright orange blazer--invisible only to someone either blind or unwilling to acknowledge the existence of an opponent of the occupation.  Rachel Corrie's friends and supporters in the ISM and at Evergreen have been calling attention to her case, and like that of Shaden Abu-Hijleh, it should remind us of the immense sacrifices and ongoing struggles that people around the world are undertaking.  They don't cease, nor should we.

 

We can be and should be a part of these ongoing struggles, in whatever large or small ways we can.  For me, that is reason enough for hope, and I trust it will be for all of you as well.

 

In solidarity,

 

Jim