Frida Berrigan | Afghanistan: War Trumps Elections

http://www.truthout.org/082609T?n

Afghanistan: War Trumps Elections

Wednesday 26 August 2009

by: Frida Berrigan  |  Visit article original @ Foreign Policy In Focus

An Afghan election worker rests on a ballot box. (Photo: Getty Images)

    The official results of Afghanistan's presidential elections won't be known for weeks. The ballots cast around the country need to be brought to Kabul - some by donkey and helicopter - and counted. Nevertheless, U.S. officials have rushed to celebrate the process, and NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen heralded the elections as "a testimony to the determination of the Afghan people to build democracy." This, despite more than 75 reported incidents of violence throughout the country, an estimated 26 civilians and security forces dead, reports of more than a handful of districts where no one voted, and complaints about impermanent ink, intimidation, and other irregularities.

    As we continue to watch and wait for the final results, this focus on Afghanistan should provoke a reconsideration of means and ends in what the world is now calling "Obama's War." The military won't defeat al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Nor will elections in an occupied country solve this problem. We have to start looking at different solutions.

    Can't Get There From Here

    In a primetime speech before the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) in Arizona last week, President Barack Obama recommitted himself to the war in Afghanistan, saying that "this is a war of necessity" that is "fundamental to the defense of our people." And repeated what he characterized as a "new strategy" with a "clear mission" and "defined goals," namely to "disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al-Qaeda and its extremist allies."

    This strategy does sounds less grandiose than President George W. Bush's articulation of the U.S. commitment to Afghanistan from 2002. "We know that true peace will only be achieved when we give the Afghan people the means to achieve their own aspirations," Bush said. "Peace - peace will be achieved by helping Afghanistan develop its own stable government. Peace will be achieved by helping Afghanistan train and develop its own national army. And peace will be achieved through an education system for boys and girls which works." After enumerating the ills of the Taliban, Bush concluded: "By helping to build an Afghanistan that is free from this evil and is a better place in which to live, we are working in the best of traditions of George Marshall."

    But whether the goal is an Afghan Marshall Plan that turns Herat into Heidelberg or Obama's more limited but still sweeping goal, the fact of the matter is - as they say in Maine - you can't get there from here.

    In the VFW speech, Obama did acknowledge that "military power alone will not win this war" and he has dispensed with the Bush-moniker 'Global War on Terror." But he continues to rely on slightly upgraded (and very costly) versions of the same set of tools used by the Bush administration - troops on the ground, military training for Afghan security forces, and technology (especially drone strikes in Pakistan) - to "win" in Afghanistan.

    Defining Success

    Defining what success looks like is proving just as difficult in the 44th White House as it was in the 43rd. As Af-Pak Special Representative Richard Holbrooke said, "We'll know it when we see it." That is not an acceptable matrix for success - not when the price-tag is $177.5 billion and counting. Historic elections or no, Obama finds himself just as lost as any other would-be conqueror.

    Disrupting, dismantling, and irrevocably defeating al-Qaeda and the Taliban cannot be done with remote-controlled drones, counter-insurgency forces, NATO troops, and private contractors training the Afghan security forces. It cannot be accomplished through increasing the number of doctors, dentists, and nutritionists in the country, or sending more city planners, engineers, and communication experts - all during an occupation and a war. Democracy, education for girls, development - none of these laudable and critical goals can be achieved through military operations or external efforts protected by military operations. They can be temporarily delivered. Elections can be held, schools can be built, and girls can be protected on the way to school. But this no more than photo-op, fleeting kind of change.

    Rick Reyes, a retired Marine corporal who served as an infantryman in Iraq and Afghanistan, recently wrote in Roll Call magazine: "As a Corporal in the U.S. Marines - who served in both Afghanistan and Iraq and who remains willing to give my life for this country - let me say from experience that our current strategy will not bring security to Afghanistan or to America." U.S. military efforts, he continued, have created "too many civilian casualties, too many children without food and women without husbands, too many innocent Afghans becoming anti-American because of our action."

    Being effective means beginning from a different position. We need to start by saying that the Taliban and al-Qaeda do not represent an existential threat to the United States. They are not large, they are not powerful, and they are not unified in anything except their opposition to the intervention of the United States and NATO. These adversaries need to be isolated, delegitimized, and undermined, not confronted as an equal on the battlefield.

    "Al-Qaeda consists of a few hundred people running around Pakistan, seeking to avoid detection and helping the Taliban when possible. It also has a disjointed network of fellow travelers around the globe who communicate over the internet," writes John Mueller, a professor at Ohio State University and author of Overblown. "No convincing evidence has been offered publicly to show that al-Qaeda Central has put together a single full operation anywhere in the world since 9/11. And, outside of war zones, the violence perpetrated by al-Qaeda affiliates, wannabes and look-alikes combined has resulted in the deaths of some 200 to 300 people per year and may be declining. That is 200 to 300 too many, of course, but is scarcely suggests that 'the safety of the people around the world is at stake,' as Obama dramatically puts it."

  Foreign Policy In Focus columnist Frida Berrigan is a senior program associate at The New America Foundation's Arms and Securitynitiative.

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Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218.  Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net

 

"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs

 

The Scapegoat's Apology

Published on Wednesday, August 26, 2009 by CommonDreams.org

The Scapegoat's Apology

by CommonDreams.org

by Robert C. Koehler

I don't begrudge William Calley his remorse about My Lai, but I'm hesitant to acknowledge his apology for it.

If you steal $10 from your mother, you need to apologize. If, as you carry out orders, you lead a raid on a village that slaughters 500 or more defenseless people, something of a higher magnitude is required before you can have your life back.

"There is not a day that goes by that I do not feel remorse for what happened that day in My Lai," Calley told members of the Kiwanis Club of Columbus, Ga., last week. "I feel remorse for the Vietnamese who were killed, for their families, for the American soldiers involved and their families. I am very sorry."

It's not that I don't believe him . . . or that I hold him unforgivable. As a matter of principle, I refuse to waste time heaping my allotted teaspoonful of disapprobation on a scapegoat. Calley's "responsibility" for My Lai, though personally enormous, is a minute fraction of the symbolic role — the Bad Apple in an American Uniform — he was forced to fill. He was, indeed, just following orders. And the first order of war is to suspend your humanity.

Just ask Lynndie England — another Bad Apple, another Face of Shame — who was also recently in the news. She had been scheduled to discuss her biography as part of a veterans forum at the Library of Congress several weeks ago, but threats and safety concerns forced the organizers to cancel her appearance.

England once almost apologized for Abu Ghraib, or for her miniscule but high-profile role in that scandal. "Yes, I was in five or six pictures and I took some pictures," she told an interviewer for Stern, the German illustrated weekly magazine, "and those pictures were shameful and degrading to the Iraqis and to our government. And I feel sorry and wrong about what I did."

The apology came well into the interview, in response to a pressing question about her sense of remorse. It was still tangled with her anger that the photos were made public at all, and was the lamest part of a fascinating interview. Far more interesting, for instance, were her memories of the casual horrors of Abu Ghraib and the moral relativism that was expected of her:

"Of course it was wrong. I know that now. But when you show the people from the CIA, the FBI and the MI (military intelligence) the pictures and they say, ‘Hey, this is a great job. Keep it up,' you think it must be right. They were all there and they didn't say a word. They didn't wear uniforms, and if they did they had their nametags covered. . . .

"It was kind of weird at first. But once I started to see the big picture, I thought, OK, here come these guys, the OGAs (other government agencies), the MIs or even officers, and they don't even look twice at it. If they approve, then I'm not going to say anything. Who was I to argue?"

Poor Specialist England. She was just trying to be patriotic — "as a child I mainly grew up on military gung-ho movies, so that's where I got the idea" (to join the Reserves) — but she got caught up, like Lt. Calley, in the darkness of war, which passeth all understanding. "Who was I to argue?"

It's always the same darkness, is it not? At his trial, Calley protested: "I was ordered to go in there and destroy the enemy. That was my job on that day. . . . I did not sit down and think in terms of men, women and children. They were all classified the same, and that was the classification that we dealt with, just as enemy soldiers."

In both cases, the odd thing was that the darkness got interrupted and they got caught in freeze-frame, enthusiastically carrying out their orders, or perhaps improvising them. But they'd been doing so surrounded by a context — the chain of command — which suddenly vanished when they got caught.

And here we come to the excruciating difficulty of any scapegoat's apology. Their personal regrets, whether sincere or wound through with self-pity, hardly touch the enormity of the role they've been forced to play. They can apologize, or try to apologize, for carrying out their orders, but they can't apologize for the orders themselves, or the special interests of war that bear ultimate responsibility for their implementation.

But let us stop playing with that slight word, "apology," and dig at least for a word that approaches the magnitude of the matter at hand. What if Calley had told the Kiwanis of Columbus, Ga., that he intended not to apologize but to atone for his role in the My Lai massacre? What would that mean?

At the very least it suggests a commitment to do more than clear one's name or somehow pay off a debt for old crimes. It suggests a lifelong commitment to reach for wisdom, and to convey that wisdom to the present moment. To atone is to cry out — with the outsize voice that history has bequeathed the scapegoat — against the big wrong called war that is still worshipped today, and with one's words cut into present policy. We can't change the past but, by God, we can humanize the future.

© 2009 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

Robert Koehler, an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist, is an editor at Tribune Media Services and nationally syndicated writer. You can respond to this column at bkoehler@tribune.com [1] or visit his Web site at commonwonders.com [2]. 

Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218.  Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net

 

"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs

 

Army judge: 9/11 lawyers can't see CIA 'black sites'

http://www.miamiherald.com/news/breaking-news/story/1201628.html

 

 

 Posted on Tue, Aug. 25, 2009

Army judge: 9/11 lawyers can't see CIA 'black sites'

BY CAROL ROSENBERG
crosenberg@MiamiHerald.com

Romanian military staff stand at the end of a corridor on the Mihail Kogalniceanu airbase, some 155 miles east of Bucharest, Wednesday Nov. 9, 2005. The Soviet-era facility was a key focus of a European investigation into allegations that the CIA operated secret prisons where suspected terrorists were interrogated. Top Romanian leaders vehemently deny that the Mihail Kogalniceanu base in the country's southeast ever hosted a covert detention center, or that the United States ever used it as a transit point for al Qaeda captives.

 

A military judge says defense lawyers for an alleged Sept. 11 plotter held at Guantánamo don't need to inspect secret CIA overseas prisons to determine whether the accused al Qaeda terrorist is competent to stand trial.

 

Judge Stephen Henley, an Army colonel, ruled Monday that the so-called black sites have likely changed enough since 2006 that an inspection would be of no use to Ramzi Bin al Shibh's Pentagon-appointed defense lawyers.

 

President George W. Bush ordered Bin al Shibh and 13 other so-called high-value detainees transferred to the U.S. Navy base in Cuba from clandestine CIA custody in September 2006.

 

Henley issued the ruling the same day the Justice Department announced it was expanding a career prosecutor's exploration of whether some CIA agents committed crimes during interrogations at their secret prisons.

 

Henley also set Sept. 22 for pretrial hearings on the competency question of whether Bin al Shibh, 37, a Yemeni and alleged al Qaeda lieutenant, and Saudi Mustafa al Hawsawi, 41, an alleged 9/11 financier, are each competent to defend himself at any upcoming conspiracy trial.

 

The Pentagon seeks the death penalty for the two men, as well as three others, notably alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed. All five are held in a segregated prison camp at Guantánamo for former CIA captives.

 

President Barack Obama has ordered a Cabinet-level task force to decide whether the men accused of orchestrating the Sept. 11 hijackings that killed nearly 3,000 in New York, at the Pentagon and in Pennsylvania should by tried by the military or in civilian court.

 

``Assuming that any facilities used to detain the accused prior to September 2006 still exist, the physical plant and on-site conditions are not likely to be those which existed at the time of the accused's detention and an inspection of the scene now would serve little purpose to document the facility which existed at that time,'' Henley ruled Monday.

 

He noted that, for the purposes of competency, an on-site inspection would have little ``evidentiary value'' since military defense lawyers have inspected his current prison facilities and in light of ``the prosecution's apparent concession the accused [Bin al Shibh] suffers from a delusional disorder-persecutory type.''

 

Henley also wrote in an Aug. 20 ruling that he does not expect to decide whether Bin al Shibh and Hawsawi are competent to face trial following the Sept. 22-25 competency hearing at Guantánamo.

 

He said he would not rule until after the presidential task force decides how to try the accused. Also, he said he may want more evidence.

 

Henley also ruled just days after The New York Times reported that the Justice Department is investigating whether three military defense lawyers for Guantánamo detainees showed their clients photographs of possible CIA interrogators, and whether doing that may have been illegal.

Justice spokesman Dean Boyd declined Tuesday to comment on whether the investigation was still on going.

 

© 2009 Miami Herald Media Company. All Rights Reserved.

http://www.miamiherald.com

 

Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218.  Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net

 

"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/23/weekinreview/23alinsky.html?_r=2

 

August 23, 2009

Word for Word | Saul Alinsky

Know Thine Enemy

By NOAM COHEN

Saul Alinsky, the Chicago activist and writer whose street-smart tactics influenced generations of community organizers, most famously the current president, could not have been more clear about which side he was on. In his 1971 text, “Rules for Radicals,” Mr. Alinsky, who died in 1972, explains his purpose: “What follows is for those who want to change the world from what it is to what they believe it should be. ‘The Prince’ was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. ‘Rules for Radicals’ is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away.”

It is an irony of the current skirmishing about health care that those who could be considered Mr. Alinsky’s sworn enemies — the groups, many industry sponsored, who are trying to shout down Congressional town hall meetings — have taken a page (chapters, really) from his handbook on community organizing. In an article in The Financial Times last week, Dick Armey, the former Republican House majority leader, now an organizer against the Democrats’ proposals on health care, offered his opinion: “What I think of Alinsky is that he was very good at what he did but what he did was not good.”

The disruption of the town hall meetings has many Alinsky trademarks: using spectacle to make up for lack of numbers; targeting an individual to make a large point; and trying to use ridicule to persuade the undecided. Here are excerpts from “Rules for Radicals.”

 

Mr. Alinsky observes that “any effective means is automatically judged by the opposition as being unethical”:

 

One of our greatest revolutionary heroes was Francis Marion of South Carolina, who became immortalized in American history as “the Swamp Fox.” Marion was an outright revolutionary guerrilla. ...Cornwallis and the regular British Army found their plans and operations harried and disorganized by Marion’s guerrilla tactics. Infuriated by the effectiveness of his operations, and incapable of coping with them, the British denounced him as a criminal and charged that he did not engage in warfare “like a gentleman” or “a Christian.”

 

Don’t worry, Mr. Alinsky advised, if they call you names:

 

The job of the organizer is to maneuver and bait the establishment so that it will publicly attack him as a “dangerous enemy.” ... Here again we find that it is power and fear that are essential to the development of faith. This need is met by the establishment’s use of the brand “dangerous,” for in that one word the establishment reveals its fear of the organizer, its fear that he represents a threat to its omnipotence. Now the organizer has his “birth certificate” and can begin.

 

The first step:

 

The organizer dedicated to changing the life of a particular community must first rub raw the resentments of the people of the community; fan the latent hostilities of many of the people to the point of overt expression. He must search out controversy and issues, rather than avoid them, for unless there is controversy people are not concerned enough to act.

 

Being on TV can be empowering:

 

A man is living in a slum tenement. He doesn’t know anybody and nobody knows him. He doesn’t care for anyone because no one cares for him. ...When the organizer approaches him part of what begins to be communicated is that through the organization and its power he will get his birth certificate for life, that he will become known, that things will change from the drabness of a life where all that changes is the calendar. This same man, in a demonstration at City Hall, might find himself confronting the mayor and saying, “Mr. Mayor, we have had it up to here and we are not going to take it any more.” Television cameramen put their microphones in front of him and ask, “What is your name, sir?” “John Smith.” Nobody ever asked him what his name was before. ... Suddenly he’s alive!

 

Make yourself look as big and scary as possible:

 

For an elementary illustration of tactics, take parts of your face as the point of reference; your eyes, your ears, and your nose. First the eyes; if you have organized a vast, mass-based people’s organization, you can parade it visibly before the enemy and openly show your power. Second the ears; if your organization is small in numbers, then do what Gideon did: conceal the members in the dark but raise a din and clamor that will make the listener believe that your organization numbers many more than it does. Third, the nose; if your organization is too tiny even for noise, stink up the place.

 

Find a single person to focus your energies on:

 

It should be borne in mind that the target is always trying to shift responsibility to get out of being the target. There is a constant squirming and moving and strategy — purposeful, and malicious at times, other times just for straight self-survival — on the part of the designated target. The forces of change must keep this in mind and pin that target down securely.

 

In one of his sharpest passages, Mr. Alinsky tells his readers, living in their “radicalized dream world,” not to ignore the lower-middle class:

 

They are a fearful people, who feel threatened from all sides: the nightmare of pending retirement and old

age with a Social Security decimated by inflation; the shadow of unemployment from a slumping economy, with blacks, already fearsome because the cultures conflict, threatening job competition; the high cost of long-term illness; and finally with mortgages outstanding, they dread the possibility of property devaluation from non-whites moving into the neighborhood. ...Remember that even if you cannot win over the lower middle-class, at least parts of them must be persuaded to where there is at least communication, then to a series of partial agreements and a willingness to abstain from hard opposition as changes takes place.

 

His final rule is that there is no handbook for life:

 

I hesitate to spell out specific applications of these tactics. I remember an unfortunate experience with my “Reveille for Radicals,” in which I collected accounts of particular actions and tactics employed in organizing a number of communities. For some time after the book was published I got reports that would-be organizers were using this book as a manual, and whenever they were confronted with a puzzling situation they would retreat into some vestibule or alley and thumb through to find the answer!

 

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Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218.  Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net

 

"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs

 

The Constant Challenge of Creating an Effective Left Flank

The Constant Challenge of Creating an Effective Left Flank

 

by Mike Lux Author, The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in

America Came to Be

 

HuffingtonPost.com - Posted: August 24, 2009 12:33 PM

 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mike-lux/the-constant-challenge-of_b_267191.html

 

I wanted to weigh in on this whole left flank for Obama

issue (the idea that Obama needs a strong progressive

movement pushing him from the left to get things done),

because I think getting it right is probably the single

most important thing in creating transformative change.

Let me start by talking for a bit about my personal

situation, because I think it has lessons from the broader issue.

 

I am blessed and cursed by this man-in-the-middle life I've created for myself.

 

One the one hand, I am a DC insider. I have served

inside of five Presidential campaigns, two Presidential

transition teams (sadly, the only two in my adult

lifetime), and the Clinton White House. On the other

hand, I have chosen to spend most of my life outside of

government and the Democratic Party, working instead on

helping to build progressive infrastructure and issue

campaigns. This being connected to both the inside and

outside has created some interesting dynamics.

 

Last week was in some ways fairly typical for me. I had

one senior White house official tell me I was

positioning myself in a fairly helpful way, and another

who people told me was referring to me as an

"(expletive deleted), (expletive deleted),

(particularly gross and disgusting expletive deleted)."

My blog posts prompted some of my responders to say

that I was way too pro-Obama, and what could you expect

from a DC insider like me, while the same posts caused

another friend to e-mail me, worried that I was being

too tough on Obama and was endangering my relationship with the White House.

 

I am sort of used to having at least some of my friends

pissed off at me almost all of the time (let alone what

my actual enemies -- there are a few -- think of me).

In the Clinton White House, I got yelled at almost

daily from people on the outside about (a) all the bad

things we had done to progressive causes, and (b) other

White House officials who said I was just carrying

water for all the lefties outside. My job there was

described by people as being the person responsible for

having all my friends yell at me.

 

This personal experience has made me reflect a lot on

what an effective left flank is for a Democratic

President. First, on the definition: my view of what is

effective is based on my understanding of history laid

out in my book, The Progressive Revolution: How the

Best in America Came to Be: an effective left flank

pushes the more progressive party's President toward

big, transformational changes. The abolitionist

movement successfully pushed Abe Lincoln and the

radical Republicans toward ending slavery and other big

changes; the Populist and Progressive and suffragist

movements pushed Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson

toward making the big progressive era changes in the

early 1900s; the labor movement pushed FDR toward the

major achievements of the New Deal; and the civil

rights and other movements of the 1960s pushed the

Kennedys and LBJ toward the big achievements of that era.

 

Moving toward transformational change is especially

urgent when the nation is in crisis. Lincoln would not

have won the civil war without the Emancipation

Proclamation, and FDR would not have led us out of the

Great Depression without New Deal economic policies. In

both cases, the country was too broken, and needed big

changes to fix it. And the reason that Buchanan,

Hoover, and LBJ ended up as failed Presidents is that

they stayed with conventional wisdom and weren't bold

enough on the biggest crises of their times

(respectively, the lead-up to the Civil War, the Great

Depression, and the Vietnam War).

 

I believe we are at that kind of crisis moment now, and

that we can only get ourselves out of it with big,

bold, progressive policies. Lincoln, FDR and JFK/LBJ on

civil rights all started out in more of a conventional

wisdom mindset, but the combination of progressive

movement pressure and the crisis itself moved them

toward making the major changes needed to solve things.

 

So how do we create an effective left flank? Given that

(per the above stories), I tend to get everybody I know

mad at me at some point or another, I'm sure there will

be a lot of disagreement on this, but here are some

principles I believe we ought to follow in creating

that left flank:

 

1. Understand that whether we like it or not, the

progressive movement's fate, at least for the next few

years and probably longer, is inextricably tied to

Obama's. As mad as many of us progressives get at Obama

over certain policy or strategic failures, we have to

understand that him failing as President hurts the

entire progressive cause. In case you didn't notice,

LBJ's and Jimmy Carter's failed Presidencies did not

usher in eras of progressive reform, they moved the

country inexorably to the right. As President from the

more left party, most Americans saw them as liberals

even though LBJ was decidedly un-liberal on Vietnam,

and Carter was the most conservative Democratic

President on economics since Grover Cleveland in the

1800s. But progressives were struck with their failures

anyway and paid the price. People who think Obama is

failing because he's following a more moderate path,

and that eventually helps us move in a more progressive

direction, are fooling themselves.

 

If Obama fails on health care (and, by the way, I

consider failure to be either not passing a bill, or

passing a bill that doesn't work for the middle class),

we won't see another attempt at serious health care

reform for at least another generation. If he fails at

doing something big on climate change, we probably

won't be able to get anything done on it until it is

too late to make a difference. And if his economic

policies fail, regardless of demographics moving in our

favor or Republican extremism, all Democrats will be

punished at the polls, and the far-right that has taken

over the Republican Party will probably come into

power. And this isn't just about the long term, either:

for every percentage point Obama's approval drops, we

probably lose another two or three House seats in 2010.

 

Progressives' strategy, then, should not be to attack

Obama personally, to undermine voters' confidence in

him, but to shore up the backbone of progressives in

Congress -- and in his own administration, because I

guarantee you, policy debates between more and less

progressive staffers are held every day at the White

House. If Obama makes a bad policy decision, we

shouldn't hesitate to push back or encourage

progressives in Congress to do the same, and if White

House staffers are pursuing destructive political

strategies (see the "left-of-the-left" quote), we

shouldn't hesitate to bang on them. But our goal should

be to do all this while still holding up hope that

Obama will move in the right direction, and to praise

the hell out of him when he does.

 

2. We should value the different roles we all play. The

"we" in the previous sentence includes insiders and

outsiders, different players in the movement, and

people who work in that building at 1600 Pennsylvania

Avenue. We all have (hopefully) constructive and

important roles to play, even when we disagree

sometimes on tactics and strategies. I think it's a

mistake to assume anything about each other's motives.

These are big important policy debates we are having,

and it's natural that things will get heated. But we

have to respect each other's roles to make this work.

 

Frederick Douglass excoriated Lincoln for moving so

slowly on abolition even while Lincoln was inviting him

to the White House for quiet conversations about how to

move forward, conversations that were critical in

shaping Lincoln's abolition strategy. Labor leaders

loudly announced that no one, FDR included, was going

to get them to back down, even as FDR was meeting with

them privately and urging them to keep pushing. Alice

Paul was chaining herself to the White House fence and

going on hunger strikes while other feminist leaders

were meeting with Wilson and other congressional

leaders, and it took both tactics combined to get the

vote. King and other civil rights leaders refused to

back down on pleas to stop civil disobedience and the

march on Washington, but met constantly with White

House officials to keep things moving.

 

We all have roles to play. Let me throw out some specific examples:

 

DC coalitions tend, by their very nature, to be clunky,

cautious, and a little slow-moving. But they still have

incredibly important roles to play in terms of

coordinating lobbying, field, and communicating

tactics, and keeping a steady dialogue going on

important details of legislation with congressional and

White House staffers.

 

Some progressives chose to play an inside role so that

they can be at the table on the incredibly important

details of the legislative language. That is a really

good thing, but to be on the inside, you have to be a

team player, and you have to mute your criticisms. That

can leave you open to criticism by folks on the

outside, but it is an incredibly valuable and important

role. Jan Schakowsky (an old friend, so I am biased) is

a big example of this kind of person. She is both a

strong progressive and is a loyal member of the

Obama/Pelosi team. I am thankful every day she is

fighting for our cause on the inside, because I

guarantee you the important details of the bill would

be a lot worse without her.

 

The bloggers who have been demanding that Congressional

Progressive Caucus members stand firm on a public

option have annoyed a lot of insiders, but their

single-minded focus on the strategy of keeping House

progressives united is a big reason why the public

option is still alive. If the left didn't keep pushing,

this health care debate would keep shifting more and

more to the right.

 

The kind of silly attitude, that the "left of the left"

is the problem, hurts the White House. As I wrote the

other day, when progressives are being critical is

exactly the time the White House ought to be

cultivating them. If people are inside a tent, they

generally wee-wee (as the President would put it)

outward, and if they are kept out, they generally wee-

wee inward. And if you can't figure that most

progressives are trying to be your friends (even if,

yes, we are occasionally big pains in the butt), then

the White House has a very big problem.

 

Hopefully this discussion continues, because getting

this right is arguably the single most important thing

that will determine whether Obama and those of us in

the progressive movement are a success. When the stakes

are so incredibly high, tempers will flare, sharp

elbows will be thrown, and various players will be

critical of each other. All that's understandable, and

can be healthy. But we also all need to understand that

progressives and the White House need each other to get

anything big and important done. Abe Lincoln and

Frederick Douglass understood that. So did FDR and John

L. Lewis. So did Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King,

Jr. It's how big change happens in this country.

 

In the meantime, everybody feel free to keep yelling at me. I've gotten kind of used to it.

 

=====

 

[Michael Lux is the co-founder and CEO of Progressive Strategies, L.L.C., a political consulting firm founded in 1999, focused on strategic political consulting for non-profits, labor unions, PACs and progressive donors. Previously, he was Senior Vice President for Political Action at People For the American Way (PFAW), and the PFAW Foundation, and served at the White House from January 1993 to mid-1995 as a Special Assistant to the President for Public Liaison. While at Progressive Strategies, Lux has founded, and currently chairs a number of new organizations and projects, including American Family Voices, the Progressive Donor Network, and BushRecall.org. Lux serves on the boards of several

other organizations including the Arca Foundation, Americans United for Change, Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, Center for Progressive Leadership, Democratic Strategist, Grassroots Democrats, Progressive Majority and Women's Voices/Women Vote.

 

In November of 2008, Mike was named to the Obama-Biden Transition Team. In that role, he served as an advisor to the Public Liaison on dealings with the progressive community and has helped shape the office of Public Liaison based on his past experience working on the Clinton-Gore Transition, as well as in the White House.

 

On January 14, 2009, Lux released his first book, The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be. Lux's book was published by Wiley Publishing.