Berkeley's Wheeler Hall Protest Marks Escalation in Campus Intifada

There's been a good bit of commentary on the student fee protests at the University of California. For example, regarding this week's action at Berkeley, CSPT, Michelle Malkin, NRO, and Tiger Hawk all discuss the spoiled brats of the elite university system. And Dan Riehl provides some quotes from activists on the ground, "Some Priceless Prose From Berkeley" (via). But as I've argued, and what's becoming more clear as the pace of activism picks up, the current unrest is being driven in large part by the hardline revolutionary contingents on the streets and in the halls of academe. I covered this previously. See, "‘Mobilizing Conference’ for Public Schools Revives ’60s-Era Campus Radicalism."

This photo, from the San Francisco Chronicle, captures the visual imagery of the protest's roots in the struggles of international revolutionary solidarity:

The Wheeler Hall protest has now been shut down (see, "Wheeler Hall Occupation Ends Peacefully"). But a wide array of "progressive" neo-communist groups are at the base of this latest wave of mobilizations, and they're vowing an escalation in the struggle.

Recall that International ANSWER organized the November 17th protest against the CSU Board of Tustees. The UC Solidarity group is an alliance of radical academics and student protesters seeking to rekindle campus unrest of the 1960s. The communist Amy Goodman's Democracy Now! is endorsing the protests, "Why Are We Destroying Public Education? University of California Students and Staff Prepare for System-Wide Strike to Protest Cuts," and "As UC Regents Approve Major Tuition Hike, Students, Faculty Decry Erosion of Public Education in CA and Nationwide." And from the hardline communist Fight Back! journal, "Student Struggles Continue Across California." The International Committee of the Fourth International has a report, "University Protests Continue in California," and that group's splinter faction, International Socialist Organization, as well, "Struggle Heats up in California."

The Wall Street Journal reported on the unconditional demands of the occupiers, which turned off moderate students focused on fee increases rather that worldwide revolution:

UC Berkeley officials condemned the action at their campus. "We certainly understand the students' frustrations and concerns, but it's disappointing they expressed their frustrations in this way," said Janet Gilmore, a UC Berkeley spokeswoman.

In the crowd, sentiment seemed mostly in favor of the building occupation. Protesters locked arms to block entrances to the building in an effort to impede police.

But some students said the tactics were counterproductive, and that the demands, in some cases, were unreasonable. For example, some protesters demanded the UC regents eliminate the fees. "I agree the tuition hike was not good for me, but I know the state is in a crisis," said Jeffrey Joh, a 19-year-old sophomore. "Their message here is unclear."

Recall that the student insurgency group, Occupy California, is mobilizing revolutionary cadres for widespread campus mobilizations. See, "California is Occupied," which features the image above from inside Wheeler Hall, and this picture below from UC Santa Cruz:

The Student Activism blog has pledged to take direct action to the next level, "Two Days After the Regents’ Vote, UC Fee Protests Go On." Check also the Indy Media blog for direct action updates.

My sense is that the only thing missing so far is the arson, kidnappings, and bombings that have marked earlier decades student revolutionary agitation. And unfortunately, my bet is that it's only a matter of time -- we'll be seeing some Bill Ayers wannabes popping up in short order.

RELATED: International ANSWER has released a press statement in solidarity with jailed pro-communist attorney and terror-enabler Lynne Stewart, "Free Lynne Stewart."

Long Beach ANSWER Cell Mobilizes for March 21st Protest

A former student of mine dropped off one of these International ANSWER flyers announcing a March 21 protest rally in Los Angeles, "Bring the Troops Home NOW!"

I'm really intrigued with the latest direction of the antiwar movement.

It can't really be all about "bringing the troops home now." The Obama administration's now committed to winding down the war in Iraq (and many Republicans are on board), and Afghanistan was considered a just war everywhere except the most extreme bastions of hardline anti-Americanism (and the American footprint there has hardly been "hegemonic" for that matter). No, the fact is that ANSWER's committed to the violent overthrow of the world capitalist, imperialist classes and the establishment of a new-age utopian state of multi-culti statism and post-hierarchical ontology. Even more interesting is how far the administration's obliging this agenda. What's to protest?

What's really interesting to me is that not only are these flyers routinely plastered all over my campus, but little green pocket-size leaflets are posted outside the offices of the history faculty in the hallway in my department. My college frankly hosts an ANSWER cell that is the local community contact-point for the international socialist movement. At least two of my colleagues are faculty sponsors of the group (one of whom I've debated). They have a bulletin board on my floor with photographs of previous bus-trips to downtown pro-terror rallies. These are the uncollegial folks who nihilist Dave Noon defended as regular-old professors, people who couldn't possibly ostractize conservative faculy members on the grounds of alleged neo-fascist androcentric patriarchy. Nope, it's a figment of the conservative imagination.

It's an upside-down world out there folks (and there's more along these lines at "The Ayers-Dohrn Paradox").

Must America Improve its International Standing?

One of the most common criticism of the Bush administration is that it has damaged America's international reputation.

From renouncing international treaties to the war in Iraq, activists and analysts alike routinely excoriate President Bush's ideology, style, and policies. Can American foreign policy recover?

This is the topic of a symposium over at the January/February issue of Foreign Policy, "What American Must Do?" Here's the introduction:

America’s relationship with the world is in disrepair. Anger, resentment, and fear have replaced the respect the United States once enjoyed. So, we asked a group of the world’s leading thinkers to answer one question: What single policy or gesture can the next president of the United States make to improve America’s standing in the world?

The selection of responses, by a number of prominent public intellectuals and scholars, is not as balanced as it might be. Jorge Domínguez, who is vice provost for international affairs at Harvard University, captures the typical left-wing academic renunciations of the "Bush regime":

The United States was the leading architect of the international laws and organizations sculpted in the wake of World War II. It built this multilateral framework because it was useful and because it was right. Yet, during the last decade, the U.S. government has undermined important multilateral agreements concerning climate change, the international criminal court, and nuclear nonproliferation. It has shredded the Geneva Conventions. It has embraced dictators who should have been rightly treated as international pariahs....

Torture? Waterboarding? It is difficult to accept such dishonorable practices being used by the same country that rightly denounced the horrific abuses that its adversaries employed against U.S. soldiers during wars in Korea and Vietnam. The United States should not torture the prisoners it holds, just as it would not want its citizens to be tortured anywhere in the world.

The next U.S. president must rebuild respect for international rules and organizations, many of which the United States once helped mightily to create.

No surprises there - pretty standard stuff.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a Nobel Prize winner, takes it a little further, declaring that the U.S. needs to apologize for its actions:

After the September 11 attacks, an amazing outpouring of sympathy, concern, and love for the United States sprang forth from all over the world. It was proof that there is no instinctive or deep-seated hostility to the United States, no automatic anti-Americanism. There is, of course, frequent resentment of particular policies. The Reagan White House, for example, pursued constructive engagement with the apartheid government of South Africa. Many of us in South Africa opposed this course of action vehemently, but it did not make us anti-American.

Today, the negative feelings about the United States have been provoked by the arrogance of unilateralism. The administration of George W. Bush has routinely thumbed its nose at the rest of the world and told it to go jump in the lake. It did so over the Kyoto Protocol, the International Criminal Court, and the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. But nowhere did it do so more spectacularly than in the invasion of Iraq, heaping contempt upon the United Nations and upending international law. That arrogant action has turned out to be a catastrophic disaster on all scores....

More than anything else, the United States is looked upon fondly for its remarkable generosity.... If the world’s superpower has the grace and modesty to say it is sorry, people would rub their eyes in disbelief, pinch themselves, and then smile because a new day had dawned.

Apologize? This is a strangely blinkered demand, and it's too bad, because Archbishop Tutu boasts an esteemed reputation in the fight for justice in Africa.

Indeed, given his humanitarian record, one might think he'd at least credit and praise the Bush administration for its successful African HIV project, now widely recognized as the globe's most important AIDS initiative, which has been vital in combatting the disease on the African continent and around the world. "So far, roughly 1.4 million AIDS patients have received lifesaving medicine paid for with American dollars, up from 50,000 before the initiative," according to Sheryl Gay Stolberg in a recent New York Times report.

Tutu apparently can't see past the Bush Doctrine and our increasingly successful intervention in Iraq. Bush Derangement Syndrome knows no international boundaries.

The symposium boasts an antidote to this anti-Bush sentiment in Fouad Ajami's essay, "Steady as She Goes" :

There is a familiar liberal lament that the United States had the sympathy of the world after September 11, but uselessly squandered it in the years that followed. The man who most vehemently espoused this line of thinking in France, former French President Jacques Chirac, is gone and consigned to oblivion. The French leader who replaced him, Nicolas Sarkozy, stood before a joint session of the U.S. Congress in November and offered a poetic tribute to the land his predecessor mocked. He recalled the young American soldiers buried long ago on French soil: “Fathers took their sons to the beaches where the young men of America so heroically died . . . The children of my generation understood that those young Americans, 20 years old, were true heroes to whom they owed the fact that they were free people and not slaves. France will never forget the sacrifice of your children.” The anti-Americanism that France gave voice to for a generation has given way to a new order. This young leader now wants to fashion France in America’s image.

The man or woman who picks up George W. Bush’s standard in 2009 will inherit an enviable legacy. Europe is at peace with U.S. leadership. India and China export the best of their younger generations to U.S. shores. Violent extremists are on the retreat. Millions have been lifted out of dire poverty. This age belongs to the Pax Americana, an era in which anti-Americanism has always been false and contrived, the pretense of intellectuals and pundits who shelter under American power while bemoaning the sins of the country that provides their protection. When and if a post-American world arrives, it will not be pretty or merciful. If we be Rome, darkness will follow the American imperium.

Ajami argues that no great changes are required for the direction of American foriegn policy under the next administration. Indeed, the U.S. has an interest in the continued and vigorous promotion of America's historic freedom agenda, an international program boosted with ideological and military muscle under Bush 43. The U.S. will be less safe if our next leader abandons that project.

International ANSWER: 'No New War on Iraq!' (VIDEO)

I looked for something on the Bay Area ANSWER goons last night, but didn't see anything.

They need to up their media game, or something.

At Ruptly, "USA: 'No new war on Iraq' chant San Fran protesters."

And here's Press TV on both D.C. and Los Angeles:



PREVIOUSLY: "'No New War on Iraq!' Stalinist International ANSWER Protests War in the Middle East."

Liberal Internationalism and Regime Change Myanmar

In my earlier entry, "Regime Change Myanmar?," I noted:

The humanitarian crisis in Myanmar is the most recent example of state failure among the developing world's authoritarian regimes.

Yesterday's Los Angeles Times noted, for example, that the Myanmar government's initial refusal to accept international relief reflected the junta's indecision and fear.

Whatever the cause, it's simply unacceptable for the world community to stand by idly while hundreds of thousands perish, and the nation descends into a nightmare of disease and hunger.

I suggested too that I was seeing little support for outside intervention on either side of the political spectrum, although liberal internationalists have long argued for regime change in precisely situations like these.

Well it turns out that the hippest liberal internationalist du jour has done a little writing on this, and Ross Douthat offers his response:

Matt has an interesting post on the questions that Burma raises for liberal internationalism of the sort he advances in Heads in the Sand:

Realistically, you're not going to see a forceful U.N. intervention in Burma because no country capable of mounting such an operation (basically the U.S. and maybe Britain and France) would want to mount one, while Russia and China (and probably even post-colonial democracies like India) would be opposed to anyone mounting one, and democratic countries would be secretly glad that Russia and China would block a move like this because they could blame inaction on Russia and China ... for a domestic audience even though they wouldn't want to step in themselves.

That said, if you could sort of bracket the logistics/will/capabilities issues, with any proposed humanitarian military intervention I've come to think that we need to think seriously about two issues - legitimacy and sustainability. We really might be greeted by the Burmese as liberators ... The trouble is what happens the day after you're greeted as a liberator. An occupying foreign power is naturally going to come to be viewed with suspicion by the occupied. This is in many ways an intrinsic problem, but it can be ameliorated a lot by legitimacy -- especially the kind of legitimacy you get from the U.N. where precisely because the UNSC decision-making process is cumbersome you can be ensured that a UNSC authorization reflects a broad international consensus ...

The other thing is sustainability. The international system needs to have some kind of recognized rules of the road. "The United States topples foreign regimes when we decide their government is bad" isn't a reasonable proposal for us to ask people in Beijing, Moscow, New Delhi, Teheran, Brasilia, or anywhere else to live by. By "any large country topples any foreign regime when it decides their government is bad" is a terrible rule that would lead to a lot of destructive conflict of various sorts. At the end of the day, great power conflict -- even if it "only" takes the form of cold war-style standoffs -- will do immense humanitarian damage to the world and avoiding it should be a very high priority. Does that mean we should do nothing? No, it doesn't, it means American officials (and, indeed, civil society figures) should keep pushing the international community to move to a world where something like the Responsibility to Protect has some force in the real world. But it has to be done in a reasonable consensual way that tries to stitch together America and its traditional allies with new emerging powers in various regions ...

I think this argument captures what I take to be the central difficulty with Matt's thesis: Namely, the extent to which it's offering a long-term agenda as a response to a question - how, when where and why the U.S. and our allies should intervene abroad - that tends to manifest itself as a series of discrete and very immediate challenges. It's all very well to say that the United States should be trying to build a world order in which great powers like Russia and China are willing to sign on whatever sort of Burmese intervention might theoretically be sanctioned under the "Responsibility to Protect" umbrella, but even if you're optimistic that such a world order is attainable - which Matt is, and I'm not - it's still far enough off that we can expect many more Burma-style (or Darfur-style, or Kosovo-style, or Rwanda-style) quandaries in the meantime. And answering the "what is to be done?" question that invariably accompanies these crises by saying that "American officials ...should keep pushing the international community to move to a world where something like the Responsibility to Protect has some force in the real world" amounts to answering it by saying "in the short term, nothing."

Now, that may be the right answer, but it's an answer that's more likely to appeal to realists and non-interventionists of the left and right than to the liberal internationalists to whom Matt's addressing himself. Basically, it amounts to telling people who are ideologically invested in the idea of interventions to halt wars, genocides, famines and so forth that they need to accept today's famine, and tomorrow's genocide, and the day after that's bloody civil war ... and someday, if the U.S. plays its cards right and invests heavily enough in a multilateral framework for international relations, the other great powers will come around to "rules of the road" under which it's plausible to imagine the UN conducting humanitarian interventions inside the borders of its more misgoverned member states. And while the Iraq invasion has made this Yglesian, "choose the UN, and patience" approach to world affairs much more appealing to the liberal-internationalist set than it was in, say, 1999 or 2002, as time goes by and more Burmese-style crises pass without an international response, I expect that most liberal hawks will default back toward the more aggressive and UN-skeptical approach to the world's troubles that at present is defended primarily by neoconservatives.

This is a long way of saying what I was trying to get at, clumsily, in my conversation with Matt about his book - namely, that he's trying carve out a "liberal internationalist" middle ground between the sort of liberal hawkery that helped give us the Iraq War and the non-interventionist (or pacifist) left, but that in practice (at least when the U.S. isn't just coming off a disastrous overseas intervention) this middle ground tends to get very narrow very fast: From JFK down to Bill Clinton and the liberals who agitated for the invasion of Iraq, it's hard to find all that many prominent liberal internationalists (at least within the Democratic Party) who resisted the temptation, when it presented itself, to choose interventionist ends even when the multilateral means that liberal internationalism is theoretically committed to weren't available.

I indulged the full quote so readers can digest it themselves - but also because I simply can't stand Yglesias' radical foreign policy project, and I want to give full play to Douthat's takedown.

Douthat mentions his "conversation" with Yglesias (available here), where he frankly puts Yglesias in a bind by suggesting that the international system doesn't just float by itself after one establishes some "legitimate" set on multilateral institutions and rules. The maintenance of international order is a collective action problem, and to overcome the system's inherent free-riding behavior (that will likely kill the regime), a "privileged group" or hegemon is required to bear the greatest burden in supporting the institutional order.

That hegemon is the United States, and since Yglesias detests not only U.S. power and prepondrance, but the use of any and all military force as well, there's no way he's going support a U.S.-led invasion of Myanmar to topple the military junta and open up that country to the world's humanitarianism that's practically pleading to help Burma's afflicted.

I've read Yglesias' Head in the Sand, and I'm planning to post a review on it sometime soon.

The book is inconsistent and utopian, and fails because it refuses to see any useful role for the deployment of American hard power.

Douthat is indulgent toward his colleague, who I imagine he has to see at the office quite frequently, and thus prefers some semblance of collegiality.

But let's be honest: Heads in the Sand is a long treatise in the foreign policy of Bush Derangement Syndrome. Yglesias comes out and says at least once explicitly, and by implication on a number of other occasions, that there's nothing - not one thing - redeeming about the Bush administration's foreign policy: Not breaking free from the outdated Cold War arms control framework, not resisting Kyoto-style hypocrisy on international climate change, not on Afghanistan (a war that had bipartisan support, but is pilloried by Yglesias as simply a "superficially important" warmup for toppling Saddam), and not the war in Iraq (where the surge is now looking to be the most important U.S. military turnaround in history).

And that's a serious problem, for even Yglesias' liberal international mentors see elements of utility in American leadership in security affairs, even in cases like Iraq, where (dubious) questions of international legitimacy constrained the American exercise of power.

I'll have more on these themes later.

But regarding regime change Myanmar, see Anne Applebaum, "A Drastic Remedy: The Case for Intervention in Burma."

Photo Credit: "Video footage has emerged showing the bodies of children who died in the cyclone, laid out in a row in a makeshift riverside morgue," BBC News

'Mobilizing Conference' for Public Schools Revives '60s-Era Campus Radicalism

At last weekend's ANSWER's "teach-in" on Afghanistan, one of the speakers was Tamara Khoury of Students Fight Back, a college protest group out of Cal State Fullerton. Ms. Koury denounced the "war economy" that was siphoning funds from public education: "I can't get into my classes, my tuition this year was doubled, and yet hundreds of billions go wage criminal war against innocent people each year. This must end."

It turns out that Students Fight Back is a campus front group for the ANSWER Coalition, and the group's support from terrorist-backing organizations is just the beginning. With the the slow pace of economic recovery in California, radical activists around the state are taking advantage of the current "crisis of capitalism" to decry budget cuts and organize "collective action" for the "struggle" of the working class. Check the website for the Mobilizing Conference to Save Public Education. And notice the classic raised fist of international solidarity at the announcement:

Actually, a number of campus "direct action" campaigns have been taking place over the last few weeks. Just this week, activists at CSU Fullerton mounted a protest called "Furlough Fest" to resist the three-day cutbacks that idled the campus. Students "occupied" the college green, and activists set up tents and camped out overnight to decry cancellation of classes." ANSWER's Students Fight Back was a key organizing cell for an earlier action on September 29th. That event came on the heels of the September 24th mobilization at UC Santa Cruz, which was billed as a part of "a day of action at all UCs across the state." Dubbed the "Occupation of the Graduate Student Commons at UC Santa Cruz," the mobilization was an element of the larger campaign of grassroots resistance. According to organizers, "a single day of action, announced in advance, is not enough. Escalation is absolutely necessary."

The UC Santa Cruz action was quite a serious business. Students occupied campus buildings for five hours, and the university has released a formal policy on police reactions to the demonstrations. One student announced that protesters were sending a message about "an actual shift in power relations." He said, "We have the capacity, if we act in concert, to stop the university from functioning." Photographs from the occupation show protesters marching with militant signs, for example: "Demilitarize and De-Privatize Our University," and "Dismantle UC Regents - Demand Student Collective Self-Determination."

Marc Bousquet, a hardline professor at Santa Clara University, published an interview with a student cadre at the Chronicle of Higher Education, "Will Occupation Become a Movement?" The interview followed a second round of direct action at UC Santa Cruz. Bousquet asked what were the next steps for Occupy California!:

We should all look forward to, and prepare ourselves for, a far longer struggle, a struggle for which these actions, regardless of what one thinks of them, do not serve as inspirations but rather as concrete expressions of what is felt by countless others across the system and world.

The is clearly the language of international solidarity and revolutionary struggle.

In the fact, Socialist Worker, the Marxist-Leninist organ of the International Socialist Organization, published a big background report on the student mobilizing conference, of which the occuption movement is clearly aligned, "Organizing the Fight for Public Education":

There are different political ideas among of these groups of people, running from moderate liberals to socialists and anarchists, and all points along the spectrum.

And there is no agreement on tactics. Some students and teachers believe that lobbying elected officials is essential, while others have taken direct action to occupy buildings or liberate libraries closed due to budget cuts.

The socialists are particularly invested in the potential of the events to bring about a revolutionary crisis in the state educational system. Last week, Professor Julian DelGaudio, who is the faculty organizer for Long Beach City College's local ANSWER cell, distributed a letter to the editor from the Berkeley Daily Planet, written by Eugene Ruyle, an emeritus professor at Long Beach State: "Don’t Let the University Interfere with Your Education":

As a congressional candidate of the socialist Peace and Freedom Party (District 10, 2008), I would remind everyone that, ultimately, the solution to California's budgetary problems lies in the socialist transformation of the global economy, based on the principles of peace, democracy, equality, and ecology, and led by the workers of the world organized as the ruling class. I do not suggest that students and workers simply wait for The Revolution, however. Instead, I urge them to challenge the existing system ...

Again, clear talk of revolutionary transformation. And while Ruyle's manifesto was actually quite bourgeois in its program (salary rollbacks and budget reform are among the planks), it's unlikely that the restless youth will sit around for too long waiting for the legislative and electoral initiatives needed to actualize the left's transformational agenda.

Indeed, students just this week organized a walkout and militant takeover over the library at Fresno State University. According to Indy Media, the occupation was one of the "largest mobilizations since the 60s":

The rally before the march was well attended, fluctuating from 100-300 students and faculty. People spoke and expressed their shared rage. This was followed by a march of well over 600 students chanting things like "no cuts! no fees! education should be free!" and "hey! hey! ho! ho! Welty's gotta go!"

It's unclear what impact all of this protest activity will have over the long term. California holds a gubernatorial election next year, and the budget crisis will be the central issue facing the electorate, combined perhaps with a popular movement for constituational change through the initiative process (simple majority to pass the state budget, for example). But like the antiwar student protesters of the 1960s, radical street activists are clearly impatient, militant, and just can't wait. Some of the sponsoring organizations have clear ties to international organizations hostile to the United States, and for a genuine revival of the campust uprisings during the Vietnam era we'd need to see direct action leading to revolutionary agitation and political violence against established authority.

Unlike during the '60s, student protesters today don't have the draft as the central rallying institution of injustice and oppression to resist. Students today will not be sent to fight and die in the jungles of Indochina in an "imperial" war of aggression against the "indigenous" Vietnamese population. Without that, the current movement will lack urgency and historical inevitability.

What's not unlikely, however, is the emergence of a new cadre of communist extremists who form a revolutionary vanguard with plans to topple the capitalist regime. Certainly the ANSWER Coaltion continues its work to speed up the contradictions of capitalism and the triumph of the working class. Should the language of "criminal wars" overseas and "catastrophic" corruption and "privatization" of the university elicit a true violent response, California could well be in for a reprise of the campus violence that rocked the nation during the peace movement years ago.

In 1968, student extremists occupied the campus at Columbia University for five days. College dean Henry Coleman was held hostage for 24 hours. Mark Rudd, the leader of the campus cell of Students for a Democratic Society, described the resistance as leading the way toward a Marxist revolution. Tom Hayden, a SDS national leader, claimed that the Columbia occupation "opened a new tactical stage in the resistance movement." When police cracked down on protesters, many innocent bystanders got caught up in the violence. Militant organizers used the widening confrontation to expand the coalition seeking to overthrow the system. Protests spread to other universities thereafter. Harvard University was gripped with its own student takeover in 1969. The same violent police response in Cambridge turned the radical minority there into martyrs when police stormed University Hall to put down the unrest. Movement organizers sought to exploit the official response to gain sympathy for communism. Campus turmoil continued, and in October 1969 the Weatherman faction of the SDS organized the Days of Rage protests in Chicago to bring down the system once and for all. Thereafter, throughout the early-1970s, domestic terrorist groups and revolutionary totalitarians continued to make war upon the U.S. government.

And so, forty years later, student activists are pushing to reignite the potential violence of the earlier protest generation. One might well hope that California enjoys an economic recovery in the short term, and that the "crisis of capitalism" is delayed long enough to avoid inevitable bloodshed and mayhem that comes from the kind of militant activism that we're seeing today.

Congressman Claims Same-Sex Marriage is Push for Socialism: You Think?

From The Hill, "Congressman: Same Sex Marriage Part of Push for Socialism." (Via Memeorandum.)

Well yeah! It's about time someone in power said it!

Here's this from zombietime, "Protest Against Prop. 8 Gay Marriage Ruling: San Francisco, May 26, 2009":

And remember the big International ANSWER protests last November:

Join ANSWER in the Struggle to Overturn Prop. 8!
LGBT Equality Now! Keep the Struggle in the Streets!

-Click Here to Volunteer to Overturn Prop. 8

The California Supreme Court upheld the bigoted Prop 8, denying same-sex couples the same rights granted to heterosexual couples. The decision is an outrage, plain and simple. No tiny, elite body of wealthy men and women should be able to decide the rights of millions of LGBT people, who suffer systematic discrimination. Let's be clear, with Prop. 8, the "people" have not spoken. The rich, right-wing religious institutions and other homophobes have tried to push an entire community back into the closet. Now, the California Supreme Court has joined them. As the politicians and courts capitulate to reaction and sell out the LGBT community, what’s needed is an independent, unified civil rights movement.

Despite these temporary setbacks, we can fight back and win! The wave of same-sex marriage victories the country shows that the clock will not be turned back on this struggle. We will soon be victorious in California and everywhere. But we can't do it alone. We need to stand together with all working people--gay and straight; women and men; Black, Latino, Asian, Arab, Native, white and everyone--because the struggle must grow as big and united as possible.

Prop 8 will only be overturned through mass opposition in the streets. The demonstrations today are a step in that direction, but we can’t stop here or wait for another referendum. We must stay in the streets if we are going to win. An injury to the LGBT community is an injury to all!

-Click Here to Volunteer to Overturn Prop. 8

The ANSWER Coalition has played a key role in the fight to overturn Prop. 8. ANSWER organized the largest pro-LGBT protest in L.A. history on Nov. 8, 2008, just days after the bigoted ballot measure passed. It's time to march once again. No matter what the outcome is, we'll march for equality until discrimination and bigotry are defeated in California and throughout the U.S. Help us raise the level struggle for equality in the streets of Southern California. Let’s build a united people’s movement against war, racism, homophobia and sexism. An injury to one is an injury to all!

For more info call 213-251-1025 or email ...

Notice that this is the "struggle" for gay marriage, in the language of the workers of the world.

But get this: The lefties are up in arms!

At Raw Story, "Iowa Congressman: Same-sex Marriage 'A Purely Socialist Concept'." And at Think Progress, "King: Same-Sex Marriage Is ‘A Purely Socialist Concept’."

And what did Representative King actually say? Well ...

... if there’s a push for a socialist society, a society where the foundations of individual rights and liberties are undermined and everybody is thrown together, living collectively off of one pot of resources earned by everyone. That is, this is one of the goals they have to go to is same-sex marriage because it has to plow through marriage in order to get to their goal. They want public affirmation. They want access to public funds and resources. Eventually all those resources will be pooled because that’s the direction we’re going. And not only is it a radical social idea, it is a purely socialist concept in the final analysis.

Sounds about right to me, and given the overwhelming evidence that socialists and neo-Stalinists are the biggest proponents of gay marriage today, it looks like the outraged netroots hordes "got some 'splaining to do."

Oh, and don't miss teh stupid!! at Daily Kos.

Campaign for America's Future, Top Democrat Activist Group, Launches Class-Warfare Website

In a stunning embrace of political terminology normally associated with political polarization and vile anti-Americanism, top Democrat Party activists, led by long time progressive leader Robert Borosage, have launched an initiative to push economic warfare against conservatives and Republicans. Aaron Klein reports, at WND, "Democrat Operatives Launch Class-Warfare Website":

A George Soros-funded radical think tank with close ties to the Democratic Party has launched a new website urging politicians and activists to wage class warfare while hailing what it calls a new era in politics – the use of class warfare to win elections.

WageClassWar.org was launched last week by the Campaign for America’s Future, or CAF.

CAF’s co-director, Robert Borosage, explained the need for such a website.

“America’s growing diversity and its increasingly socially liberal attitudes played a big role in this election. But looking back, we are likely to see this as the first of the class warfare elections of our new Gilded Age of extreme inequality,” he wrote in a statement.

“More and more of our elections going forward will feature class warfare – only this time with the middle class fighting back. And candidates are going to have to be clear about which side they are on,” he wrote.

Continued Borosage: “In 2012, candidates who supported the economic interests of the many over the few won their elections. Populism was the voice, but economic opportunity was the message. The pundits may wring their hands, but in the future it won’t be values voters, angry white men or soccer moms that win elections. It will be class war.”

The website does not feature a mission statement and is unclear about exactly how the group will go about attempting to wage class warfare.

The site explains how Obama’s 2012 campaign utilized class warfare and set the stage for the deployment of such tactics in future elections.

Continue reading Klein's report here.

But readers can go right to the website, which features Borosage's introductory exhortation for the progressive class-warfare agenda, "Waging Class War":

Needless to say, Obama is neither by temperament nor predilection a populist class warrior. But faced with potential defeat, he turned to what works. The depths of the Obama presidency came in the summer of 2011 after the debt ceiling debacle, in which the president was roughed up by Tea Party zealots, and emerged looking weak and ineffective.

Obama came back by deciding to stop seeking back-room compromises with people intent on destroying him and to start making his case. In the fall, he put out the American Jobs Act and stumped across the country demanding that Republicans vote on it. His standing in the polls began to rise. Then Occupy Wall Street exploded, driving America’s extreme inequality and rigged system into the debate. In December, the president embraced the frame: He traveled to Osawatomie, Kansas, revisiting a campaign stop Teddy Roosevelt had made in the first Gilded Age. He indicted the “you’re on your own” economics of Republicans while arguing that “this is a make-or-break moment for the middle class, and for all those who are fighting to get into the middle class.”

In the run-up to the election, the president’s campaign employed two basic strategies. First, the president consolidated his own coalition. He defended contraception and pay equity while his campaign attacked the Republican “war on women.” He reached out to Hispanics by ending the threat of deportation for the Dream kids. He not only ended “don’t ask, don’t tell,” but also moved to embrace gay marriage. Widely described as socially liberal measures, these were also profoundly bread-and-butter concerns. Could women choose when to have children? Could Hispanic children be free to pursue the American dream? Could gay people gain the economic benefits of marriage?

At the same time, the president’s campaign made a risky but remarkably successful decision. Their opinion research showed that painting Romney as a flip-flopper had little traction, but the attacks on vulture capitalism hit home. They decided to spend big money early in such key states as Ohio on a negative ad barrage defining Romney as the heartless vulture capitalist from Bain. Both campaigns believe that Romney never recovered.

And the conclusion to Borosage's declaration of war:

More and more of our elections going forward will feature class warfare — only this time with the middle class fighting back. And candidates are going to have to be clear about which side they are on. Politicians in both parties are now hearing CEOs telling them that it is time for a deal that cuts Medicare and Social Security benefits in exchange for tax reform that lowers rates and closes loopholes. Before they take that advice, they might just want to look over their shoulders at what will be coming at them.

This is very useful, for it puts the lie to the left's own words that this president was going to heal the country's divisions and govern as a post-partisan leader amid the emergence of transcendent progressive benevolence. There have been so many lies over the last few years, but this is one of the biggest, now actually embraced by top Democrats as a badge of honor and a program to destroy the enemy.

This is also useful as a reminder of just how far left the mainstream of the Democrat Party has moved. Here's the Borosage entry at Discover the Networks:

A former New Left radical and onetime Director of the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), Robert Borosage co-founded (with Roger Hickey) both the Campaign for America’s Future and the Institute for America’s Future. He also founded and currently chairs the Progressive Majority Political Action Committee, the activist arm of a political networking organization whose aim is to help elect as many leftist political leaders as possible. In addition, he is a contributing editor at The Nation magazine and a regular contributor to The American Prospect.

Borosage attended Yale Law School and earned a graduate degree in International Affairs from George Washington University. In 1974 he established the Center for National Security Studies, a civil rights / civil liberties organization that regularly accuses the CIA and the FBI of rampant abuses.

From 1979 to 1988 Borosage was Director of the Institute for Policy Studies. In 1988 he left IPS to work on Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaign, for which he served as a speechwriter and an assistant in framing responses to policy issues.

Borosage also has worked for such political figures as Senators Paul Wellstone, Barbara Boxer, and Carol Moseley-Braun.

In 1989 Borosage founded the Campaign for New Priorities, which called for decreased federal spending on the military and greater allocations for social welfare programs.

In 1996 Borosage and Roger Hickey co-founded the Campaign for America's Future (CAF), and three years later they established a sister organization, the Institute for America's Future (IAF).

Each year, CAF holds a “Take Back America” conference which the organization describes as “a catalyst for building the infrastructure to ensure that the voice of the progressive majority is heard.” Speaking at one such event in Los Angeles in June 2001, Borosage characterized President George W. Bush’s policies as a mélange of “tax cuts for the wealthy,” “arsenic in the water,” and “salmonella in the food”....

In a November 2002 L.A. Weekly article, The Nation editor David Corn quoted what Borosage had said backstage during a recent anti-war rally sponsored by International A.N.S.W.E.R. According to Corn, Borosage stated: "This [rally] is easy to dismiss as the radical fringe, but it holds the potential for a larger movement down the road…. History shows that protests are organized first by militant, radical fringe parties and then get taken over by more centrist voices as the movement grows. They provide a vessel for people who want to protest."

Backstage at an A.N.S.W.E.R. rally? International ANSWER is the residual protest arm of the Stalinist World Workers Party. It's been on the leading edge of the most radical left wing agitation since the early George W. Bush administration. There are all kinds of interlocking ties between groups like this and the mainstream of the Democrat Party, although President Obama and institutional Democrats have long attempted to mainstream their activities and distance themselves from the revolutionary shock troops.

Here's more background, on the founding contingents of the Campaign for America's Future:

Approximately 130 people played a role in co-founding the Campaign for America's Future (CAF) in 1996. Among these individuals were: Mary Frances Berry, Julian Bond, Heather Booth, Robert Borosage (co-founder), John Cavanagh, Richard Cloward, Jeff Cohen, Ken Cook, Peter Dreier, Barbara Ehrenreich, Betty Friedan, Todd Gitlin, Heidi Hartmann, Tom Hayden, Denis Hayes, Roger Hickey (co-founder), Patricia Ireland, Jesse Jackson, Joseph Lowery, Steve Max, Gerald McEntee, Harold Meyerson, Frances Fox Piven, Robert Reich, Mark Ritchie, Arlie Schardt, Susan Shaer, Andrew Stern, John Sweeney, and Richard Trumka. To view the full list of co-founders, click here.

It's also useful to troll around over at the CAF website, where one finds Borosage agitating on the current fiscal cliff negotiations, "The Grand Betrayal":

The battle lines are being drawn. The AFL-CIO, SEIU and AFSCME have announced labor’s opposition to cuts in entitlement programs and to continued tax cuts for the rich. Groups representing the base of the Democratic Party—from African-Americans to Latinos, women and the young—are lining up around a four-point program calling for jobs first; protecting Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security; letting the top-end Bush tax cuts expire; and protecting programs for the vulnerable.

Reaching no deal is preferable to a bad one that cuts entitlements. Going over the so-called fiscal cliff is perilous, but probably preferable to a bargain under the terms currently in play. With no agreement, the Bush tax cuts would expire. In January the Senate would immediately push to revive the lower rates for everyone but the top 2 percent. Republicans could vote for tax cuts, but rates at the top would rise. The automatic spending cuts would not kick in immediately (although the stock market might feel the hit quickly). But the thing to remember about failure to reach a deal before January is that Medicare, Social Security and many programs for the most vulnerable are shielded from the cuts. And the new Congress would likely act rapidly to reverse the cuts to military and domestic spending. The already faltering recovery would surely weaken, threatening the loss of more jobs. But that might force Congress to address the real crisis—jobs and growth—rather than court a ruinous austerity.

Whatever the outcome, the battle is likely to be only the first skirmish of a defining struggle over the future of the Democratic Party and the progressive movement. We’ve just had what might be called the first of a new era of class-warfare elections. The plutocracy ran one of their own, on their agenda and with their money. The American people’s rejection of Mitt Romney, despite the lousy economy, demonstrated the declining appeal of the conservative, trickle-down agenda. The budget debate will draw battle lines within the Democratic Party, between the Wall Street–dominated New Democratic wing and the progressive wing fighting for the change this country desperately needs.

We are headed into a new era of upheaval. Our money-soaked politics may suffocate growing demands for change. But if Democratic legislators join the president in a grand betrayal, they may witness a powerful Tea Party movement from the left, as Republican legislators have from the right.

Well, the battle lines are being drawn alright.

But remember, as Rush Limbaugh warned, the politics of the fiscal cliff aren't really about fiscal policy. They're about destroying the Republican Party. This Wage Class War initiative just comes right out in the open with it, which is good. Let's not pretend that Americans are one country with a few minor differences on the margins. We're indeed in a political war for the survival of the America that we grew up with, one, in my lifetime, marked by decency in overcoming oppression, and in expanding political and economic opportunity to growing numbers. But progressives don't care about any of that. They have been taken over by the most radical elements of the '60s counter-culture and New Left revolutionary cadres. These are Marxist-Leninists in suits. Their man is now in office for a second term after having bludgeoned the so-called political embodiment of corporate power, GOP nominee Mitt Romney --- a man who was wholly unprepared for the onslaught of progressive blood libel and demonization that was thrown down throughout the campaign.

So conservatives can just suck it up and man the ramparts for the battles that are coming. The left's isn't even pretending to hide its program of fundamental transformation of the country, enunciated so well and violently by top Democrat Party hack Robert Borosage and his fellow subversives of the progressive movement.

REPSAC = CASPER: Deranged Stalking Asshat Denies Revolutionary Communists in Madison

I was rolling at CPAC last week with Skye at Midnight Blue. She told me the story of how James Casper, a.k.a. Repsac3, used to stalk her all over the Internet, tracing her online locations from comments at YouTube videos and so forth. That is beyond creepy, no doubt. But I was totally busting up when she said "That guy Casper spells his name backwards to make Repsac." And I'm laughing right now, because for all these years commenters here and about have widely suspected Repsac's moniker to represent perfectly the slithering snake slime that is James Casper. To deal with this freak is to develop cringe-inducing paroxysms simply at the thought of this radical reptile spawning more of his hate sacs of ovoviviparous* evil.

I haven't had a chance to share the story, but it turns out that Repsac3 (also known as RepRacist3 for his white supremacist eliminationism) has been trolling around the blog, and claims to have caught some big lie about the Trotskyite revolutionaries in Madison: "Donald Wets Himself In Fear of 'Cooooomunists!!!'"

As so often happens, Donald Douglas is lying, and hoping his readership is too stupid to notice...

And what was the lie? Well, the lady at the video is from the Trotskyite International Socialist Organization, and she says "I'm a public employee and so are a lot of our members." If Repsac's gonna call me out as a liar that'd be nice if he'd provide a transcript of the video. I said earlier that all of her "members" were up every morning organizing for the dictatorship of the proletariat, because, well, that's what Marxist-Leninists and Trotyskyites do. And that's called inference. Hello. But asshat RepRacist3 doesn't stop there. He goes on to deny that there were any communists in Madison beyond this "pair" of revolutionaries. Okay, well, sure. Progressives are postmodern deniers of truth and reason, but even this display of willful ignorance is quite something. The MacIver Institute made a number of Madison videos with communist activists from around the country. I thought posting one was enough, but since I have occasion, this one's worth it as well:

In some ways this one's even better. Indeed, Robert Stacy McCain wrote it up, "VIDEO: Chicago Commies in Wisconsin":

Bob Avakian’s RCP is the leading Maoist group in the U.S. RCP spinoffs include Refuse & Resist and Not in Our Name, which were important presences in the Bush-era anti-war protests.

One of my pet peeves about mainstream media coverage of those protests was how they blithely ignored the involvement of Marxist organizations, including International A.N.S.W.E.R., a front for the Workers World Party, a bizarre Trotskyite splinter group.

Every time there was a major left-wing protest in D.C., these commie groups would be out in force, and the media never reported it, whereas any time there’s a Tea Party event nowadays, the media squawk ”Koch money! Koch money!” like a fucking parrot.

Word. I think I'll sign up McCain for David Horowitz's NewsReal Blog! And if that ain't enough, perhaps the slithering slime CASPER = REPSAC might check out Trevor Loudon's report, "Communists Converge on Madison":

Every communist and socialist group in the U.S. Midwest is sending cadre to beautiful Madison, Wisconsin, in protest at Governor Walker's Budget Repair Bill.

Well, yeah.

In addition to the International Socialist Organization and the Chicago Maoist contingents, the neo-Stalinist ANSWER cadres were out in force, "Eyewitness report from Wisconsin." And also in solidarity is none other than the Communist Party of the USA, "The fightback fire is being lit down below." And from the International Committee of the Fourth International, another Trotskyite offshoot, "The struggle of Wisconsin workers enters a new stage." There's even an statement from some obscure local cell, the Socialist Party of Wisconsin, "Statement on Walker’s Attack on Workers." There's more, but no need to keep linking. Lots of commies are down with the Wisconsin Dems. Seriously. The woman in the video at top says she found the events in Egypt "inspirational" --- that is, inspirational for a new American revolution. Indeed, even Jesse Jackson made similar statements!

And with that, let's go back to RepRacist3:

Let's be clear. There are communists here in America. And yes, there are some Socialists, like the pair in the propaganda video. There are probably a few Stalinists, even. Their numbers are pretty small -- (The video shows only two socialists. Given the number of folks protesting in Madison, that ought to tell you something right off the bat. If there really were "Socialist Public Employees Call[ing] for Revolution in Wisconsin," you can be sure that Donald and his fellow union-busters would've showed you as many as possible, being as vehement as possible. They came up with two twenty-somethings handing out flyers and newspapers and talking about the rights of workers.) -- and for the most part, they're discussing ideas, not committing (or even contemplating) violent "Stalin-like" acts of any kind.

I'm being indulgent, since it's frankly not going to make much difference to someone who refuses to acknowledge objective reality. I guess there's some epic comedy value in this, at any rate. RepRacist3 made the exact same argument after last year's "One Nation" rally, which saw dozens of individual socialist organizations participating: "Progressives March on Washington for 'One Nation Working Together' — Thousands Rally in Support of Socialist Agenda." And from Looking at the Left, "Democrats, Union Workers, and Communists Rally Together in Washington":

The lines between the Democratic Party, labor unions, socialist and communist organizations, were blurred at the One Nation Working Together rally at the Lincoln Memorial on Saturday. Organized by One Nation Working Together, which is headed by the cream of the Democratic National Committee, the rally was a sort of coming out moment for the radical leftist base of the Democratic Party.

Exactly.

I've been blogging about the Democrat Party's progressive-socialist base for years. I had a series on this back in 2008, six months before Barack Obama was elected, which has been substantiated by events: "No Enemies on the Left? Progressives for Barack Obama." And checking the links you'll see REPSAC = CASPER flailing away in denial that long ago. It's pretty sad. At least a half-dozen books have been written since Obama took office, outlining the hardline socialist contingents that have propelled this regime to power. Gallup did a poll of ideology last year and found a majority of Democrats evincing a positive view socialism. And a Pew survey at the same time found 43 percent of Americans under 30 supporting socialism, which was equal to those with a favorable view of capitalism. These young folks identifying with socialism are among the same youth cohorts that activated the college-level OFA groups that wedged the Democrats into office in 2008.

So, let's be clear: Today's Democrat Party base includes a large segment of communists and socialist-progressives. There were roughly 80 socialists serving as Democrats in the 111th Congress. The State of Wisconsin is one of most progressive states in American history, and thus it's no surprise that militant factions positioned Madison for a showdown against capital. So, again, I'm not going quibble with REPSAC = CASPER, who was widely ridiculed on bloggers' row at CPAC. He's crazy, frankly, and dangerous. And he's distorting what I said about the International Socialist Organization and he's lying about the absence of communists in America. They're all around. And if it weren't for bloggers like myself and others willing to expose these domestic enemies for what they are, the forces of leftist totalitarianism would be making even greater inroads. Conservatives will continue to have their work cut out for them, and I'll keep fighting these demons, despite the repeated attempts of idiots like RepRacist3 et al. to shut down this blog.

* I had the wrong reptilian terminology there. In Repsac's world that me makes me a congenital liar, so this addendeum sets the record straight.

#Murrieta Open-Borders Vigil Astroturfed by ANSWER Stalinists and Che-Loving Anarcho-Communists

Recall that background on ANSWER, from FrontPage Magazine in 2002, "What is the A.N.S.W.E.R.?":

The IAC [International Action Center] has been described as a Stalinist organization and one that supports authoritarian regimes and communist dictatorships. Incidentally, both Serbia and Iraq have retained [former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey] Clark as their U.S. counsel. The IAC is affiliated with the Workers’ World Party, which is affiliated with ANSWER. All of these organizations are advocates of Arafat.

More at Discover the Networks.

Democrats and open-borders leftists are in solidarity with hardline communists totalitarians whose goal is the obliteration of borders and the destruction of the United States.

And no surprise, but the ANSWER Stalinists were out in Murrieta today, astroturfing the "pro-children" amnesty vigil this afternoon:

NOW: We're in Murrieta standing with the undocumented against unjust laws, inhumane treatment & racist mobilizations! pic.twitter.com/Rxeki6Dap3

— ANSWER Los Angeles (@AnswerLA) July 9, 2014

Pro immigrant on supporter march and chant outside Murrieta City Hall. pic.twitter.com/qwum0oufm0

— RICHARD LUI (@rzlui) July 10, 2014

Pro-Amnesty Socialists Flood #Murrieta City Hall http://t.co/7iPiDEnVsI

— What? Wake Up! (@whatwakeup) July 10, 2014

Socialists out supporting refugees. #Murietta vigil starting. pic.twitter.com/yGKX7Qes7w

— ACSA Collective (@acsacollective) July 10, 2014

In Murrieta ready 4 the vigil for the #UnaccompaniedMinors to begin. #not1more @ICUCPICO @PICOnetwork @adamkruggel pic.twitter.com/DK84YgLSrK

— Oswaldo Farias (@waldochanges) July 10, 2014

Pro children protestors debating provocateurs after #Murrieta vigil. pic.twitter.com/tpKaMg0WUP

— ACSA Collective (@acsacollective) July 10, 2014

Already about 150 pro-immigrant activists gathered here at #Murrieta City Hall for vigil. Crowd growing very quickly, remains peaceful.

— Tatiana Sanchez (@TatianaYSanchez) July 10, 2014

Crowd has about doubled since vigil started at 6pm at City Hall. #murrieta #immigration pic.twitter.com/fLibIKRcGd

— Tatiana Sanchez (@TatianaYSanchez) July 10, 2014

Angel & Elba are from Guatemala. Their children, 7 & 10, are detained in Texas. #immigration pic.twitter.com/AHiiiapiTD

— Tatiana Sanchez (@TatianaYSanchez) July 10, 2014

Much better photo of crowd. I'm estimating about 200 activists are here in #murrieta. pic.twitter.com/xeA0mXT69O

— Tatiana Sanchez (@TatianaYSanchez) July 10, 2014

Protester holding US flag has arrived with T-shirt shirt reading, "Border Patrol." Police standing by. #Murrieta pic.twitter.com/ZSAJNEXnji

— Tatiana Sanchez (@TatianaYSanchez) July 10, 2014

Protester discussing #immigration issue with large group of activists. Police standing by. #murrieta pic.twitter.com/r59eZLTgFX

— Tatiana Sanchez (@TatianaYSanchez) July 10, 2014

From tonight's vigil for child migrants in #Murrieta pic.twitter.com/ctqp6wbkY6

— julianne hing (@juliannehing) July 10, 2014

More at the San Bernardino Press-Enterprise, "Vigil held for migrant children," and the Desert Sun, "Murrieta pro-immigrant supporters gather for vigil."

Diminishing International Relations: Left Bloggers and Foreign Policy

I'm really intrigued by Anne-Marie Slaughter's entry at the Huffington Post, "Stop Gotcha Politics on Iraq."

Slaughter's apparently taken flak from the left blogosphere for her article, "A Duty to Prevent," which appeared in Foreign Affairs in 2004. In the essay she suggested that the Bush administration did not go far enough in adopting multilateralism in working to prevent nuclear proliferation. Apparently, some commentators, like Tom Hayden, have attacked Slaughter as backing uncritically the Bush administration's Iraq policy of preemption.

For those unfamiliar with her work, Slaughter's one of the top international relations scholars working in the "norms and institutions" research paradigm (liberal internationalism). She's a huge advocate of multilateral coooperation and the legalization of world politics.

What's interesting in her HuffPo entry is how she not only engages but elevates to policy respectability left-wing blog commentators like Matthew Yglesias, who have very little expertise in international relations theory. Check it out:

The point of the article, entitled "A Duty to Prevent," was not to approve the war in Iraq, still less to encourage another such venture, but rather to make the point that to improve the chances of effective multilateral responses to situations like the apparent build-up of weapons of mass destruction in a nation under U.N. sanctions it was critical to update multilateral rules and to develop the capacity for preventive action far short of the use of force.

This debate has already gone several rounds. Atlantic blogger Matt Yglesias picked up the same line from the same article and drew the same inference in an op-ed in the LA Times last fall. I emailed him and explained, speaking for myself (I am not advising any campaign):

I would not rule out unilateral action under any circumstances; a nation that had chosen to try unilaterally to stop the genocide in Rwanda in the face of both global and regional inaction would be hard to condemn. Similarly, it is imaginable that the United States or any other nation could conclude that it had absolutely no choice but to use force to defend its vital interests. But the entire point of our article was to minimize the likelihood of either of these situations ever occurring by embracing doctrines in the humanitarian and the non-proliferation area that would spur non-military collective action early in the game and would ensure global or at least regional authorization of force if it came to that....

Yglesias quoted this paragraph in a subsequent post and added that he found little to disagree with, although he questioned whether it is politically or legally possible to define "vital interests" in a way that does not open the door to unilateral interventions by many countries. That's a fair question and a fair debate, one that I would happily join with Tom Hayden.

Hayden's post and many other commentaries surrounding the fifth anniversary of the invasion are a microcosm of the problem with our Iraq policy as a whole. The debate is still far too much about who was right and who was wrong on the initial invasion and far too little about how, in Obama's formulation, to be as careful getting out of Iraq as we were careless getting in. That does not mean that those of us who were wrong about Iraq -- with whatever nuances, explanations, and justifications we might care to offer -- do not have a great deal to answer for. We do. But it does mean that until we can fix the mess we are in, everyone who cares about what happens both to our troops and to the Iraqi people should force themselves to face up to the hard issues on the ground rather than indulging in the easy game of gotcha.

Now, readers know that I comment regularly on this debate over "who's right or wrong" on Iraq. My post, "The Lessons of Iraq," lays out my position concisely, and see as well the debate over the war at Slate, "How Did I Get It Wrong?"

I think Slaughter's naive to think the debate on Iraq's justification or success will conclude any time soon. The deepest ideological divisions in society today revolve around the appropriate role of U.S. of force in the world, and the controversy's getting a big boost on the 5th anniversary of Iraq.

While Slaughter's obviously a scholar who's steeped in the literature on the international norms of war, peace, and cooperation, most in the antiwar movement enter the debate from a considerably less learned perspective. Theirs is more of the postmodern ideological agenda which seeks peace at any price, vilifying power and warfare as fascist and Hitlerian. There exist tremendous contradictions in this approach, and some on the left are indeed intense advocates of projecting forward military power for humanitarian operations (Samantha Power, for example).

But the politics of the Iraq war seem light years away from the controversies over the use of force in the Balkans in the 1990s. While realists criticized the Clinton administration for supporting intervention in the alleged absence of vital national interests, the current debate over Iraq has been much more divisive, mobilizing an antiwar movement that has struggled to rekindle the power of the 1960s-era of political radicalism.

Yglesias, for all of his credentials as a top lefty blogger, appears not far removed in his criticism of the war from the folks at Code Pink or INTERNATIONAL Answer.

That's my problem with Slaughter. While public intellectuals have throughout history provided powerful moral and ideological criticisms of politics and public purpose, contemporary left-wing debates on the Bush administration are mired in nihilism and anti-Americanism.

By engaging the antiwar blogosphere the way she does, Slaughter elevates the spokesmen for the uncleansed, unhinged fringe to the realm of reasoned foreign policy debate.

So far, I'm not impressed by the quality of analysis of top left-wing antiwar bloggers like Yglesias, as well as Glenn Greenwald and Josh Marshall.

These people are pundits, not poltical scientists. If policymakers want to listen to them and act on their recommedations, that's perfectly fine, but scholarship has a peer evaulation process that promotes the best, most rigorously practiced research and ideas to the top of the intellectual marketplace. Yglesias and his sort are not in that realm.

Not all theory has policy relevance, of course, but much does. By elevating the often intemperate but wholly ideological conspiracies and ideological attacks of the left blogosphere to the level of dispassionate professional policy advocacy, Slaughter demeans the very profession to which she is a committed pathbreaker.

For more along these lines, see my takedown of Josh Marshall's foreign policy, "Uninformed Comment: Josh Marshall on American Military Power."

See more at Memeorandum.