- CounterPunch.org - https://www.counterpunch.org -

Why Won’t Moveon.org Oppose the Bombing of Iran?

Why Won’t Moveon.Org Oppose the Bombing of Iran?

John Ross
A Real Day Without Mexicans?

April 15 / 16, 2006

Jeffrey St. Clair
How Star Wars Came to the Arctic

Ralph Nader
Remembering Rev. William Sloan Coffin

Thaddeus Hoffmeister
The Ghost of Shinseki: the General Who Was Sent Out to Pasture for Being Right

Kevin Prosen / Dave Zirin
Privilege Meets Protest at Duke

Thomas P. Healy
Taking Care of What We’ve Been Given: a Conversation with Wendell Berry

Kristoffer Larsson
Are 40 Percent of All Swedes Anti-Semitic?: Anatomy of a Statistical Flim-Flam

Fred Gardner
Continuing Medical (Marijuana) Education

Edwin Krales
New York’s Katrina: the Hidden Toll of AIDS Among Blacks and the Poor

Brian Cloughley
Don’t Blitz Iran: Risking the Ultimate Blowback

John Holt
Walking Off Vietnam with Edward Abbey’s Surrogate Son

Seth Sandronsky
What Billionaires Mean By Education Reform: Oprah, Bill Gates and the Privatization of Public Schools

Rafael Renteria
Making It Plain About New Orleans

Michael Ortiz Hill
In the Ashes of Lament: an Easter Meditation

William A. Cook
An Israel Accountability Act

Gideon Levy
Shooting Nasarin: a Story About a Little Girl

Andrew Wimmer
Stopping the Bush Juggernaut: a New Citizens Campaign

Madis Senner
Talking Points for Easter Weekend: Jesus Didn’t Lie, Mr. Bush

Michael Kuehl
The Sex Police State: Women as “Rapists” and “Pedophiles”?

Mark Scaramella
When Even God Can’t Follow His Own Commandments: the Timeless Scarcasm of Mark Twain

Nate Mezmer
187 Proof: Living and Dying Hip-Hop

Jesse Walker
Playlist

Poets’ Basement
Engel, Laymon and Subiet

Website of the Weekend
Pink Serenades Bush

April 14, 2006

Col. Dan Smith
Candor or Career?: Why Few Top Military Officials Resign on Principle

Saul Landau
Ho Chi Minh City Moves On Without Regrets

Stan Cox
The Real Death Tax

Kevin Zeese
Hersh vs. Bush on Iran: Who Would You Believe?

Brian McKinlay
Bad Times for Bush’s Buddies

Howard Meyers
Dwarves, Knives and Freedom: Bush, Jr. is No LBJ

Ishmael Reed
The Colored Mind Doubles: How the Media Uses Blacks to Chastize Blacks

Website of the Day
Asshole: a Film Strip

April 13, 2006

CounterPunch News Service
Powell’s “Bitch”?

NORMAN SOLOMON
The Lobby and the Bulldozer

Stanley Heller
Time to Shake Up the Peace Movement

Jeff Birkenstein
Bush and Freedom of Speech

Evelyn J. Pringle
Not So Fast, Mr. Powell

Michael Donnelly
The Week the Bush Administration Fell Apart

Kamran Matin
Synergism of the Neo-Cons: What’s Going On In Iran?

Website of the Day
“Don’t Be Afraid of the Neo-Cons”

April 12, 2006

Vijay Prashad
Resisting Fences

Alan Maass
The Suicide of Anthony Soltero

Dave Lindorff
Bush’s Insane First Strike Policy: If You Don’t Want to Get Whacked, You’d Better Get Your Nation a Nuke … Fast

Ron Jacobs
Resistance: the Remedy for Fear

Ramzy Baroud
The Imminent Decline of the American Empire?

Randall Dodd
How a Wal-Mart Bank will Harm Consumers

Missy Comley Beattie
The Boy President Who Cried “Wolf!”

P. Sainath
The Corporate Hijack of India’s Water

Website of the Day
“The System is Irretrievably Corrupt”

April 11, 2006

Al Krebs
Corporate Agriculture’s Dirty Little Secret: Immigration and a History of Greed

Lawrence R. Velvel
The Gang That Couldn’t Leak Straight

Sonia Nettinin
Palestinian Health Care Conditions Under Israeli Occupation

Willliam S. Lind
The Fourth Plague Hits the Pentagon: Generals as Private Contractors

Robert Ovetz
Endangered Species in a Can: the Disappearance of Big Fish

Pratyush Chandra
Nepalis Say, “Ya Basta!”

Grant F. Smith
The Bush Administration’s Final Surprise?

Laray Polk
Loud, Soft, Hard, Quiet: Marching Through Dallas for Immigrant Rights

Francis Boyle
O’Reilly and the Law of the Jungle: How to Beat a Bully on His Home Turf

José Pertierra
A Glimpse into the Mindset of Terrorists: Posada Carriles, Orlando Bosch and the Downing of Cubana Flight 455

Website of the Day
The Dead Emcee Scrolls

April 10, 2006

Ralph Nader
Tinhorn Caesar and the Spineless Democrats

Heather Gray
Atlanta and the Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Uri Avnery
The Big Wink

Joshua Frank
Big Greens and Beltway Politics: Betting on Losers

Seth Sandronsky
Immigration and Occupations

Michael Leonardi
The Italian Elections: “Reality is No Longer Important”

Evelyn Pringle
Did Bush Pull a Fast One on Fitzgerald?

Tom Kerr
FoxNews Does Ward Churchill

Lucinda Marshall
The Lynching of Cynthia McKinney

Website of the Day
Brown Berets

April 7 -9, 2006

Alexander Cockburn
If Only They’d Hissed Barack Obama

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Saga of Magnequench: Outsourcing US Missile Technology to China

Patrick Cockburn
The War Gets Grimmer Every Day

David Vest
The Rebuking and Scorning of Cynthia McKinney

Dave Lindorff
The Impeachment Clock Just Clicked Forward

Gary Leupp
“Ideologies of Hatred:” What Did Condi Mean?

Elaine Cassel
The Moussaoui Trial: What Kind of Justice is This?

Saul Landau
Vietnam Diary: Hue Without Rules

James Ridgeway
“This is Betty Ong Calling”: a Short Film

Ron Jacobs
Why Iran was Right to Refuse US Money

John Walsh
Kerry Advocates Iraqization: Too Little, Too Late

Ramzy Baroud
The US Attitude Toward Hamas: Disturbing Parallels with Nicaragua

Christopher Brauchli
Bush Finds Democracy Has Its Limits

Todd Chretien
What the Pentagon Budget Could Buy for America

Jonathan Scott
Javelins at the Head of the Monolith

John Bomar
What They’re Saying About Bush in Arkansas

Michele Brand
Iran, the US and the EU

Ronan Sheehan
Remember When the Irish First Met the Chinese?

Mickey Z.
Let Us Now Praise OIL

Don Monkerud
March of the Bunglers

Michael Dickinson
The Rich Young Man: a Miracle Play

Website of the Weekend
The Case Against Israel and Munich: Compare and Contrast

April 17 , 2006 The Wages of Consensus Why Won’t Moveon.org Oppose the Bombing of Iran?

By NORMAN SOLOMON

MoveOn.org sent out an email with the subject line “Don’t Nuke Iran” to three million people on April 12. “There is one place where all of us can agree: Americans don’t support a pre-emptive nuclear attack on Iran, and Congress must act to prevent the president from launching one before it’s too late,” the message said. And: “Please take a moment to add your name to our petition to stop a nuclear attack on Iran.”

The petition’s two sentences only convey opposition to a “nuclear” attack on Iran: “Congress and President Bush must rule out attacking Iran with nuclear weapons. Even the threat of a nuclear attack eliminates some of the best options we have for diplomacy, and the consequences could be catastrophic.”

In MoveOn’s mass email letter, the only reference to a non-nuclear attack on Iran came in a solitary sentence without any followup: “Even a conventional attack would likely be a disaster.”

“Likely” be a disaster? Is there any U.S. military attack on Iran that plausibly would not be a disaster?

There’s no way around the conclusion that the signers of the letter (“Eli, Joan, Nita, Marika and the MoveOn.org Political Action Team”) chose to avoid committing themselves — and avoid devoting MoveOn resources — to categorical opposition to bombing Iran.

* * * * *

In preparation for this article, I sent emails to each of the four signers of MoveOn’s “Don’t Nuke Iran” letter, asking them:

1) Why does the letter say nothing against a prospective non-nuclear attack on Iran other than comment that “a conventional attack would likely be a disaster”?

2) Why was the petition confined to opposing a “nuclear” attack on Iran rather than opposing any military attack on Iran?

3) Has MoveOn ever sent out a message to the three-million list taking a clear position against the U.S. attacking Iran (no matter what kind of weaponry would be used)?

4) If the answer to question #3 is “no,” why not?

A response came on April 13 from Eli Pariser, executive director of MoveOn. Here is his three-paragraph reply in its entirety:

“As you know, our focus is on bringing people together around points of consensus. We build our advocacy agenda through dialogue with our members. Since we haven’t done any work around Iran thus far, we saw the prospect of a nuclear attack as a good way to begin that conversation — something everyone can agree was nuts.

“As I mention in the [‘Don’t Nuke Iran’] email, a conventional attack poses many of the same risks as a nuclear one. But just as our Iraq campaign started with a position that attracted a broad membership — ‘Ask Tough Questions,’ in August 2002 — and then escalated, so we’re trying here to engage folks beyond the ‘peace’ community in a national discussion about the consequences of war.

“We wouldn’t have had the membership to be able to run ads calling for an Iraq exit today if we’d confined our Iraq campaign to the true believers from the very beginning.”

* * * * *

I believe that the MoveOn decision-makers who signed the “Don’t Nuke Iran” mass email are almost certainly aware that if they surveyed a cross-section of those commonly referred to as MoveOn members (people who are currently signed-up for MoveOn’s emails), the overwhelming majority would say that they’re opposed to an attack on Iran with any weapons — not just nuclear weapons.

Opposition to any bombing of Iran inherently includes opposition to bombing Iran with nuclear weapons. But vice versa is not the case. And so far it is (so to speak) precisely the ambiguity of confining the MoveOn position to “Don’t Nuke Iran” that MoveOn’s leadership has embraced.

As MoveOn’s mass email stated on April 12, “There is one place where all of us can agree: Americans don’t support a pre-emptive nuclear attack on Iran, and Congress must act to prevent the president from launching one before it’s too late.”

As Eli Pariser wrote to me the next day, “our focus is on bringing people together around points of consensus.”

This approach debases the role of consensus in progressive political organizing. It shouldn’t mean tailing the opinion polls or waving an organizational finger in the wind; nor should it mean taking cues from power brokers among congressional Democrats.

Nor should a progressive organization avoid taking historically imperative positions in real time because they might interfere with feeding cash cows a diet of lines that seem optimum for maximizing the flow of “the mother’s milk of politics” to pay for ads.

The voices in Congress denouncing the prospect of a military attack on Iran, period, are in short supply right now. Yet as it happens, according to a nationwide poll jointly released by Bloomberg and the Los Angeles Times on April 13, the current inclinations of people in the United States are about evenly divided: “Forty-eight percent said they would support military action against Iran if it continues to produce material that can be used to develop a nuclear bomb, down from 57 percent in January. Forty percent oppose military action, up from 33 percent in January.”

As long as MoveOn’s leaders (not to be confused with MoveOn’s email recipients) want to confine MoveOn to mobilizing against use of nuclear weaponry in an attack on Iran, they’re actually aiding a process that can dangerously reframe policy options — so that some kind of military attack on Iran becomes increasingly accepted while much of the debate shifts to arguments over whether use of nuclear weapons in the attack should be ruled out.

Of course the official scenarios for use of nuclear bombs are deranged and must be condemned. At the same time, in logical and practical terms, unequivocal opposition to bombing Iran signifies clear opposition to bombing Iran with nuclear weapons.

Will those who put out MoveOn’s email alerts and green light its advertising campaigns eventually use some of the group’s resources to promote opposition to any and all bombing of Iran? It’s probably a matter of time — but every day of holding back from engaging in solid unambiguous opposition to any military attack on Iran is a day lost that can never be regained.

The MoveOn apparatus is the largest single online mechanism for U.S. progressives to share information, present analysis and take action. But no one should wait for the people who control MoveOn’s mass email flow to come around. There are significant efforts underway to utilize the Internet as part of efforts to prevent any attack on Iran.

For example, as part of broader organizing campaigns, a coalition of groups has begun a Don’t Attack Iran petition. And TrueMajority is promoting an equally valuable Don’t Bomb Iran petition.

An April 14 letter from TrueMajority says: “Click here to send a message to top Democrats, including Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid and House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, insisting they speak out loudly, now, against any plans to bomb Iran.”

That’s a message that MoveOn.org hasn’t been willing to send.

NORMAN SOLOMON’s latest book is “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.” A link to his recent public radio interview on agenda-building for an attack on Iran is posted at: www.WarMadeEasy.com
Now Available
from CounterPunch Books!
The Case Against Israel
By Michael Neumann

 

Click Here to Order Michael Neumann’s Devastating Rebuttal of Alan Dershowitz
Grand Theft Pentagon:
Tales of Greed and Profiteering in the War on Terror

by Jeffrey St. Clair