The War on Iraq and the mythical "war on terror" must be unconditionally opposed and brought to and end.

Recently the US media and government agencies have taken up a new strategy to convince the American people of the need to continue the military occupation of the nation of Iraq more or less indefinitely. This strategy is insidious and is being adopted to a greater or lesser extent by both major political parties, and is premised rather faultily on the assumption that the US is responsible for "fixing" Iraq after breaking it.

Of course this is immediately a questionable claim to be putting forward as it assumes that the US is capable of "fixing" Iraq - a claim which cannot stand the truth of the matter and falls apart especially quickly when one considers the brutality of the US occupation, which has led to the violent deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, mostly as a result of the use of so-called precision munitions in aerial bombardment. The American right wing assumes all this away and callously only focuses on the effects of the war on US soldiers and personnel, totally ignoring the murderous policies we have carried out there - and all the while clings to a bizarre and phony perspective that the US military is somehow a noble institution (we have noble soldiers, no doubt, but as an institution, the debate is certainly not closed in manner that the mainstream media and politicians have portrayed) capable of enforcing a lasting peace. This view culminates in the total disregard for Iraqis reminiscent of the old-fashioned imperialism of the late 1800's and the potential to remain in Iraq indefinitely and to administer the country as a colony - as John McCain has recently hinted. On the other hand the democrats, while remaining mute on the extremely central matter of Iraqis deaths, opt for a different view of the matter which instead of placing complete faith in increased escalation takes the alternate position that US soldiers must remain in Iraq to protect something called "vital American interests" and continue the fight against those deemed to be "terrorists". Of course anyone the US kills in Iraq, "rightly" or wrongly, is ex post facto labeled a terrorist or al-qaeda, so this definition of whom to fight still potentially encompasses the entire population of that country - and the designation of "vital American interests" is certainly flexible enough to be interpreted with varying degrees of vastness by different US policy-makers and politicians, suggesting that what Hillary Clinton has referred to as a "residual force" will likely number in at least the several tens of thousands.

All of this is nothing more than the continuation of mass-murder. Out of cowardice politicians in this country and indeed Americans by and large have opted to not criticize the military, choking under a "support the troops" gag-order and simple-mindedness imposed in the aftermath of the attacks on New York City and Washington DC on September 11th, 2001. The US military is operating in both Afghanistan and Iraq as it did in Vietnam: under the purview of certain rules of engagement, which just like in Vietnam are designed to protect US troops at the expense, quite literally, of the safety of the people our soldiers are supposed to be "liberating". Long speculated on and recently leaked to the media (http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article19290.htm), these rules are constructed in such a manner that incentives to wrongly report civilian deaths and enemy casualties abound, the protection of US troops in nervy situations with the sanctioning of constructed scenarios designed to deflect moral culpability arising from an approach which can only be described as "shoot first and ask questions later" is made a part of the normal routine, and within certain limits civilian deaths are permitted in decentralized operational environments at the behest of field commanders without oversight or approval for missions which often boil down to revenge attacks against an invisible "enemy" with support among the civilian population. All of this, with the additional shifting "precision" reliability of air strikes (often conducted as revenge, as evidenced by the recent barbaric flattening of Baghdad neighborhoods), has made for a situation where the US military acting according to its current strategic and tactical doctrines, even if torture is banned, cannot prevail in Iraq. Or for that matter in any other war against a hostile civilian population supporting a guerrilla insurgency defending the people"s freedom to be free of foreign diktat.

These points are all backed up by evidence obtained by the few unembedded western journalists in Iraq, prominently Dahr Jamail of Alaska, and the reports from independent media and the Iraqis themselves at uruknet.info. Among other points refuted by Iraqis and courageous independent reporters on the ground is that one Bush made in his recent state of the union address that the so-called "surge" is working - nevermind that recent reports suggest that there will be increased troop deployments to Iraq after the surge, implying that the surge as a willpower-driven effort followed by a drawdown after a decisive battle was a myth used to sell the strategy - much like all those attempts by the Johnson presidency to convince Americans that "victory was just around the corner" in the American-Vietnamese war. Just as in that war, which used a policy of constructing "strategic hamlets" which sought to separate the population from the guerrillas of the Viet Cong, the so-called troop surge is nothing more than the application of divide and conquer tactics to prevent the unification of armed resistance to the US. In addition to this, the separation walls in Baghdad and other areas of Iraq with mixed populations allow the US to foment sectarian hostilities with much ease - as evidenced by the use of the so-called "el Salvador" option - the use of death squads (mainly Shia operating through the interior ministry) - to bring "stability" in the form of forcible homogeneity in the country through US-sanctioned ethnic cleansing in the form of population transfer and increasingly costly and gruesome massacres. This is not how to found a liberal and democratic country loving freedom - George Bush simply has no understanding of what freedom is - this is how one lays the groundwork for prolonged manipulation and factional politics, distrust and illiberality and intolerance among the communities of Iraq, and the eventual partition of the country and the miseries of population transfer on a mass scale. Finally, the surge can only be seen as a success if one takes the perspective that only US lives matter in Iraq, which is a perspective that is racist and has led to the license of the US army to engage in murder of innocent civilians.

This was supposed to be about getting whomever was involved in the brutal attacks on America in September of 2001 - at this point our armed forces and the mercenary auxiliaries have killed tens of thousands of innocent Afghans and hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis. The same ideology which seeks to essentialize and simplify the identities of Iraqis into their distinct camps is what can justify attacking people of the same religion as the 9/11 attackers (if indeed this was done by whom we say) - and it's the same ideology that precludes conscientious dissent in the US and the Western world from these barbaric policies. When connected up to the "logic" of the so-called "war on terror", the wars the US is fighting goes hand in hand with the need to discipline contingent and diverse experiences into a predictable pattern - for one major reason: to establish stable and dependable relationships governing the exploitation of resources, mainly energy resources, and the attitudes of citizens such that they remain reliable worker-consumers and stay in line politically so as to not disturb these utopian arrangements concocted by those advancing the corporate domination of the world and its resources. This is a profoundly anti-american policy, and will extinguish the prospects for liberal government - something requires that people are judged on their actions and not their erroneous and racist-tinged perceptions of essences from which people inalterably act. It reverses the basis of our democracy and rule of law - that one is innocent until proven guilty - in exchange for the view that one is guilty potentially according to an actuarial mapping of their essential (racial) traits until proven innocent. This sows distrust into the community at large, as the containment of people's contingent experiences, especially in a world which considers both individual and collective freedom to be the most gilded of values, requires a great deal of coercive reconditioning of people"s interpretations of their own lives to fit into a disciplinary norm - this is and always has been in the history of internal and external US imperialism a bloody and horrific process, leading to the near-extermination of the unique peoples of north America and the mass murder of Filipinos, Vietnamese, Iraqi, Salvadoran, Colombian, Argentine, Chilean and many other peoples by at times the millions, in the last hundred or so years alone.

This is what John McCain promises us in Iraq and the middle east - even suicidally threatening Russia and Vladimir Putin - it is what Hillary Clinton promises for at least 5-6 years under the guise of "residual forces" to protect a neocolonial embassy and headquarters for domination of a castrated Iraq - it remains to be seen what Obama will do, although there is reason to believe that absent strong pressure from activists like us he will dither and meander on this issue, as he has already indicated that he will likely do similar maneuvers as Clinton has promised in Iraq - the myth of "strategic redeployment" as ending the occupation. His bluster toward Pakistan and call for increasing the size of the military suggest that he will not resist unleashing the cycle of irrational retribution killing, creating yet another self-fulfilling prophecy instead of resolving to do justice to those who were involved in the attacks on the US in 2001. This is why we must march. This is why we must create the strongest antiwar movement in the history of the world to put an end to this barbaric madness engaged in by the idiots in our government who are so full of hubris as to be unable to learn reality - who are so bogged down in a battle with dead ideas and in the process desecrate the memories of the dead from the World Trade Center that they ignore the people"s day to day experiences in favor of their mad quests for power and crusades of imaged pious cruelty necessary to cleanse the world they have no comprehension of.

But we also must march because these people are colonizing America and our own communities. Right here in Santa Barbara and at UCSB we have numerous links with the military-industrial complex. In San Francisco there lies the headquarters of Bechtel corporation, in Houston, those of Halliburton and in North Carolina those of Blackwater mercenaries corporation. The business of war is all around us and requires our freedom to be extinguished in the name of an economy based on corporate culture, continuous warfare, and the disinvestment of resources in other technologies and ideas - causing our economic decline and our being surpassed in nearly all areas by the Europeans and Asians and Latin Americans, as they innovate and we innovate only systems of destruction and farcical reconstruction. In her recent work, The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein details how these corporations benefit from crises to reap contracts and rewrite economic laws as per the recommendations of the IMF and Milton Friedman, who argued that crises create opportunities to instigate massive social changes in a managerial fashion. The Iraqi Oil Law is an example of this, as are Bremer"s laws, edicts declared by the US viceroy Paul Bremer shortly after the invasion was commenced, which sweep aside all protections for the Iraqi economy in its crucial redevelopmental phase. This just yesterday, February 6th, 2008, culminated in the undemocratic decision of the non-representative and sectarian Iraqi government to begin opening up bidding for oil contracts to western and foreign firms. This is outright theft, and to ensure the capitulation of the Iraqi people, our government is using the tactics of terrorism on a massive scale.

These economics are entirely out of balance with nature and the human body, and will eventually make their thing felt in the US and other privileged parts of the globe as the search for profits and resources will likely continue in a bloody fashion so long as some are viewed as inferior and some as superior. This is the mind of the colonizer - it is premised on racism. Henry Kissinger argued that the connection of Iraq and Afghanistan to 9/11 and al-qaeda was that America was "humiliated" and needed to "humiliate brown skinned people in return". There is nothing true about this statement and is only reflective of a way of thinking reliant on groupthink, a lack of appreciation for individuality and freedom, and a cro-magnon style of thinking in which everyone is a fixed essence and with no value inhering to their status as an existential being capable of thought, choice and memory. This crass reductionism of the individual is concomitant with what military industries, the Hollywood war movie propaganda outlets, the consumer economy and paranoid leaders jealous and zealous over power want us to embody. These values are opposed to the American values of freedom embodied by Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, the spirit of the 1960"s, the Civil Rights Movement, the brilliant liberality of our aware citizens, the idea of freedom and our constitution which seeks to distribute power and responsibility to the people and their conscientious representatives. The only American thing to do is to rebel, and to use all political means available to change the situation and save our nation from global shame of epic proportions and internal collapse.

We must withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan and not under any circumstances involving air strikes or otherwise make Iran our equivalent of Nazi Germany's attack on Poland in 1939. Our withdrawal from Iraq, contrary to fear-mongering by the right wing will not lead to massive genocide as the result of some natural process which will return once we return the Iraqis to their "state of nature" - rather we are responsible for this. John Negroponte, previously ambassador to Iraq, in cooperation with cronies of his from his days overseeing a US-back death squad campaign against civilians perceived to be irredeemable leftists in Central America in the 1980's, oversaw the creation of Shia death squads in Iraq. This makes him America"s international, colonial equivalent of Germany old SS - a political death squad with a mission to exterminate enemies. In conjunction with the campaign of terror against the Iraqi people, and its many facets - Guantanamo, air strikes, death squads, infiltration and provocation, checkpoints of death, civilian massacre and collective punishment - our policy toolbox is incapable of solving the problems we have created and/or exacerbated there. We should withdraw from Iraq, UN peacekeepers should be put in, Iraqis should be given all the jobs to rebuild their unique and historical country, and the US public should have those people responsible for this act of mass murder put in jail for the remainder of their pathetic and useless lives. If we fail to withdraw now the only outcome will be more death, more Americans dying on lies of our government, and the opprobrium of the human community across the globe. The Iraqi people, the Afghan people, the people of the Middle East and those who have been persecuted in this war of terrorism against all of us different and unwilling to live in conformity because we love life are owed an apology by the American people and a penance which we will have to negotiate with them as they dictate the terms to us. We must end this horrifying genocide against people in general and each individual and their freedom to be themselves in particular.