The Voice for Peace
Originally published in the Austin Chronicle
The Voice for Peace
In this glum context, it was refreshing for Austin to be paid a spirited, if brief, visit by the Dennis Kucinich campaign, which for all its pragmatic shortcomings has the enormous virtue of maintaining a rational rhetorical standard on U.S. foreign policy. Kucinich can at least declare himself without apology to be a "peace candidate." It is a measure of how far to the imperial right public debate has tilted that Howard Dean, who objected more to the unilateralist nature of the U.S. war on Iraq than to the invasion and conquest itself, is being portrayed in the press as the terrifying second coming of George McGovern. Would that it were so.
Kucinich, and to a less prominent degree Carol Moseley Braun and Al Sharpton, serve as useful reminders to the party's institutional front-runners that to the vast majority of the world, and even a sizable plurality of the U.S. voting public, the war on Iraq is not just impractical, expensive, distracting, or counterproductive. Rather, this war is criminal and lunatic, part of an all too consistently militarist U.S. policy of domination, control, and (when necessary) conquest of designated enemies, or former allies, when they get too far out of line from the perspective of U.S. policy elites. Kucinich's uncompromising opposition to the war on moral, and not just political, grounds makes it more difficult for Dean or the others to ignore the fact that the current Democratic energy has been fueled most prominently by opposition to Bush's illegal, dishonest, and unjustifiable military adventurism. If these guys are serious about rebuilding the Democratic Party, it's about time they start listening to Democrats.
More importantly, as he said last week, Kucinich's campaign (like those of Nader and the Greens) continues to help "create the space" for a truly internationalist and anti-war foreign policy and a worker-focused economic policy. There will be plenty of time, next summer, for Bush and the Dem nominee to lob rhetorical missiles at each other. Right now, it is helpful to be reminded that at the ground level, the populace is much more independent-minded and less bellicose than its anointed leadership.
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