The U.S. occupation of Iraq is reportedly set to come to an end, with most of the roughly 40,000 soldiers currently stationed there set to be removed by year’s end. But let’s make no mistake: contrary to what you’re likely to hear from the political and media establishment, the only thing worth celebrating is this war’s end, not what it accomplished.

On October 21, President Obama announced that, “After nearly nine years, America’s war in Iraq will be over.” By the end of 2011, he said, “The last American soldier will cross the border out of Iraq with their head held high, proud over their success, and knowing that the American people stand united in our support for our troops.”

While the words may be intended to soothe – no one likes to know they have fought for an ignoble cause – the truth of the matter is that there is no “success” for any American to be gloating over. And though the president and his surrogates are selling the announcement as the fulfillment of an oft-repeated promise made on the campaign trail, the fact is it’s a promise the Obama administration made every effort to break.

While Obama pledged just this past August that he would have “all our folks . . . out of there by the end of the year,” Wired reports that a private army of 5,500 U.S. mercenaries will be staying on in Iraq to guard the 10,000 State Department employees – yes, 10,000 – who aren’t leaving Iraq anytime soon. And CNN reports 150 troops are set to remain though 2012 “to assist in arms sales.”

If Obama had his way, it’s fair to say the U.S. presence in Iraq would be even larger.

Over the summer, for instance, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta declared he had “every confidence” Iraq would request – “request” –  an extended U.S. presence beyond 2012. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, traveled to Iraq to urge leaders there to “make the decision absolutely as soon as possible,” with the Washington Post reporting that Mullen insisted any extension “include guarantees of legal immunity for American forces.”

In the end, President Obama did not decide the bulk of U.S. forces would leave Iraq, however much his partisan supporters – and partisan detractors like Mitt Romney and John McCain – might like to argue that to be the case. Rather, Iraqi leaders rejected his administration’s generous offer to extend the military occupation of their country, forcing him to abide by the agreement to withdrawal most U.S. forces by the end of this year to which his predecessor, George W. Bush, had already agreed.

Considering what American forces did to their country, it’s not hard to see why.

Sold variously as a preemptive war of self-defense and an altruistic, humanitarian war of liberation, the 2003 invasion of Iraq tore apart a society that had already been wrecked by a decade of brutal U.S. sanctions that denied Iraqis everything from clean water to basic medical supplies, an embargo that left roughly a half-million children under the age of five dead – a catastrophic human toll that President Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeleine Albright told the world was “worth it.”

The U.S. invasion of Iraq itself resulted in the violent deaths of no less than 100,000 Iraqi civilians, according to the most conservative estimate. A 2006 study by the British medical journal Lancet found that up to that point there had been more than 650,000 “excess Iraqi deaths as a consequence of the war,” factoring in the lack of medical supplies and the civil war the invasion set off. Polling firm Opinion Research Business estimated in 2008 “that over 1,000,000 Iraqi citizens” died as a result of the conflict.

More than 4.7 million Iraqis were forced to flee their homes, according to the United Nations Refugee Agency, with 2 million forced to leave the country entirely. Many Iraqi women, three million of whom are now widows according to their government, were forced into lives of prostitution, with one refugee telling The New York Times that if “they go back to Iraq they’ll be slaughtered, and this is the only work available.”

More than 4,400 U.S. soldiers also needlessly died in a war based on lies, from bogus tales of Iraq’s ties to al-Qaeda to claims about non-existent weapons of mass destruction that were easily debunkable at the time – had anyone in a position of power been interested in doing so.

Today, Iraq is ruled by a new strong man who has used his security forces to ethnically cleanse Baghdad, gun down non-violent protesters and torture dissidents. According to Transparency International, only three other countries in the world are more corrupt than Iraq – Afghanistan, Myanmar and Somalia – and unemployment is rampant, with nearly one in three men between 15 and 29 out of work.

It might be comforting to think an immoral invasion can have a happy, heroic ending, but that’s a dangerous delusion. As Americans, we should wish nothing but the best for the people of Iraq – but we should also acknowledge that, if the country finds peace and prosperity, it will be in spite of what the U.S. government did to their country, not because of it.

Medea Benjamin (medea@globalexchange.org) is cofounder of CODEPINK and Global Exchange.

 Charles Davis (davis.charles84@gmail.com) is an independent journalist who has covered Congress for public radio and Inter Press Service.

A lot has changed since we started occupying Wall Street 24 days ago.
Voices take much longer to echo through the masses of bodies in Liberty Plaza,
requiring two or three layers of repetition via the people’s microphone. The kitchen
staff, once limited largely to serving the now-famous “occu-pie” pizzas (99% cheese,
1% pepperoni) lovingly designed by Libretto’s, are now cooking full-balanced, vegan
meals, composting the scraps, and washing the dishes through an on-site grey-water
system. The once-quaint library that started out as a few rejects from someone’s
bookshelf is now a full-blown, catalogued institution with sections ranging from
anarchism to acupuncture. Celebrities are coming down for the second, third, and
fourth visit not to make speeches, but to see how things are evolving.

Story-sharing session with Eve Ensler at Occupy Wall Street

When Eve Ensler came down for a repeat visit on Saturday night she asked if I could
gather some people together to talk after the General Assembly. She and Naomi
Klein sat with us on the concrete for the entire General Assembly, patiently listening
to over two hours of working group report-backs, announcements, and general
housekeeping. When we finally gathered on the steps by the library, Eve asked for
ideas on how she could best support us. “Use your voice to say what you see,” said
one woman. “Tell people we’re not a bunch of patchouli-wearing hippies doing
hula hoops and dancing in a circle.” As everyone laughed, she quickly added, “there
is that, and it’s beautiful, but there’s also real process, there’s real community.” “I
have to say, more than I’ve seen anywhere” Eve said, nodding. Eve asked us to tell
her what brought us here. One woman said she had just wandered over to see what
was happening: “I’ve been trying to leave for the past four hours. Every step I take
there’s something amazing happening.” As other people shared their stories a plan
evolved to bring these “stories from the heart of the park” to a wider audience.

What Brought You Here?

When long-time activist and hip-hop/funk/reggae artist Michael Franti came to
Occupy Wall Street last week he told us “starting activism is easy – all you have to do
is show up. It’s coming back the second and third time that’s challenging.”

I showed up at one of the first General Assemblies back in August as skeptical
as anyone. Occupy Wall Street? Yeah, right. We all knew it was one of the most
militarized places in the city; we knew the plan for September 17th – made by
someone in another country who didn’t seem to know anyone here or have any
intention of actually participating in the demonstration – was all over the internet;
we knew the police would be ready for us. I sat on the concrete with over a hundred
students, workers, artists, teachers, organizers, passers-by, for what seemed like
an eternity grappling our way towards some kind of agreement, structure, process,
ANYTHING that would get us closer to preparing for September 17th.

There were debates about what should be on the agenda, who should take down the agenda points, when the agenda should be formed, and whether we should even HAVE an
agenda. It was painfully – even comically – slow. It was clumsy, frustrating, ad-hoc,
and incredibly exciting. Everything about that night felt different. The faces were
new. The energy was new. We were thinking out loud. We were stumbling. We were
feeding off each other. We were learning. When I went home around midnight there
were still plenty of people milling around, forming working groups, talking and
sharing food. We were beginning to build a community.

Every day of the first week of the encampment at Liberty Plaza was filled with
the excitement that this was really happening; every day in the space was lived
with the feeling that it could be our last. The Occupy Wall Street community
survived many tests that first week – torrential downpours, dwindling numbers,
people dropping out due to illness and fatigue, and of course, constant police
violence and intimidation. As @occupywallstreet tweeted:

Building community at #OccupyWallStreet is hard, esp. when facing constant eviction threats. Now we know how so many Americans feel.

On the one-week anniversary of Liberty Plaza I watched the heart of the park galvanize before me. After the police attacked and pepper-sprayed protesters at Union Square and followed us down to our home at Liberty Plaza, we all prepared for a showdown. Paddy-wagons lined the streets. Hundreds of police officers lined the perimeter of the park, their hands poised on guns, orange nets, and reams of zip-ties that hurt my wrists just to look at. We gathered for a General Assembly (GA), as we do every evening, in a unified, determined group under an intense cloud of imminent danger, and asserted that we were not afraid. We developed contingency plans for when the police swept the square.

People lined the park with candles, creating a buffer-zone between the police and our central organ, the GA. Drums and brass instruments filled the air with an upbeat yet unavoidably ominous tone I somehow imagined accompanying the Titanic’s final hours.

Messages on the projector screen read “Love is the New Fear.” “Feeling good.” “We shall not be moved.” “In it for the long haul.”

Older activists from CODEPINK and the anti-war community checked in or came by to see what was happening – asking, but not telling, what we were going to do. “We’re staying,” I told them. Some lingered on the outskirts like guardian angels, patiently, silently watching. “We’ve got your back.” The Occupy Wall Street bike bloc slowly circled the square in solidarity. “We are watching. We are with you.” I armed myself with a hot pink “Make Solidarity Not War” sign to go with the “Make Bikes Not War” signs adorning my bike and joined them to burn off nervous energy.

Melanie Butler on One Week Anniversary of Occupy Wall Street. Photo by Tom Martinez

Putting on a brave face, I told the bloc how a cashier at a nearby cafe refused to
charge me for my sandwich earlier that day when she found out I was part of the
demonstration. Other cyclists chimed in with similar stories. One guy struck up a
conversation about what we were doing while in line for the bathroom at McDonalds and when he came out, the stranger he had been speaking with gave him a burger and fries. Slowly, as the night progressed, something incredible happened. The police started to pack up and leave. The bike bloc continued to circle until we were sure our home was safe, and then did a final victory lap, bells ringing, lights flashing, flags waving. The community had survived. The heart of the park beat stronger than ever – and we were all part of it.

Eve Ensler’s first issue of curated stories from Occupy Wall Street was featured in
yesterday’s Huffington Post. Join us next Sunday at 5 pm at Liberty Plaza library
(NE corner of Zuccotti Park) to participate in this ongoing story-sharing experience.

I arrived at sunset as the downpour ended.
Melanie is moving through the community as if it were her living room.
She has made friends and allies and nurtured relationships of mutual support.
And of course her headquarters is the Wiki-Leaks truck!

As she departs for a good night sleep and some dry clothes my son shows up with dinner just after I got my 30 seconds on the live feed.  We both agree it is shades of burning man.  Mostly because we feel that yummy sense of aliveness, community, support and love.

He offers himself fully to the task of call and response of the general assembly but after an hour wonders how everyone has the stamina.  Yet he comes up with a great idea to organize an early morning action to circle wall street with 5,000 people and is curious if we can make that happen.  He is insistant that Wall Street feel the effects of our presence.  What will their tweets read he wonders?  This is followed by an arrest of a young woman on her bike.   It is awesome to watch as those who are responsible shift from GA to monitoring the event at hand.  Cameras out, people up and like a dance the cameras move forward and those without withdraw.  The police are surrounded by those who are sharing the story in multiple forms globally.  Many in the crowd are telling stories of their recent arrests on the Brooklyn Bridge and the dry night of sleep they got in jail.  No one here is exercising power, instead they are taking responsibility and following through on it.  Beautiful to behold.

The night is full of long conversations about what this is, where it can go, what can be done as the cold moves in, how to be most effective and how to encourage others to join.  All bathed in the richness of the general assembly on one end and the non stop music and dancing on the other.  The General Assembly greeting table has a collection of our pink peace cranes as decorations and the guy from the music side came to complain that we are playing favorites and he wants his own.

The vinyl banners Kristen mothered into being were a big hit tonight, multiple requests to hold them for the cameras as they did their night stories and lots of opportunities to do photos with them.  I did meet a female corporal in the army who had come in solidarity but couldn’t hold the sign because she was in uniform.  But she likes all the messages.

The wiki-leaks truck leaves in the morning to join us in Washington on Thursday.  There is excitement in the square at the news of a push in DC.  Love and curiosity were the threads of my night.  Tomorrow more crane folding to make the welcoming table on Trinity Street feel supported.

Please join us in NYC or whereever you are.

I’m standing with Medea Benjamin, cofounder of CODEPINK, Ynestra King who organized the two women’s marches on the Pentagon in the early 1980ies, and the first eco-feminist conference, Women and Life on Earth, in 1980; and Ahmad and Ann Shirazi, an Iranian-Jewish couple, veterans of every antiwar,  and free Palestine march of this the last twenty years.  A few hundred feet away the core members of Occupy Wall St. are in the midst of their 15th General Meeting since their occupation began eight days ago.  And I’m thinking of Em Jo Basshe.  He was a progressive playwright who wrote a dynamic epic play about Jewish immigrants to the lower east side called The Centuries.  “Bread for the living. Shrouds for the dead,” are the opening lines.  His play was produced in 1927 by the anarchist New Playwrights Theater, a collective including John Howard Lawson and John Dos Passos, and funded by Jewish financier Otto Kahn.  (I have just benefited from George Soros funding for my new play, “Another Life,” about our torture program and post-9/11 madness.)  Basshe’s play had a cast of 35 actors playing the entire Lower East Side.   He later went to Hollywood to write films and then was black listed by HUAC and the McCarthyites.  He spent the final twenty years of his life in a depressive stupor on his living room couch.  His wife told me he “sat up” when the Free Speech Movement erupted in Berkeley in 1964.  Basshe was magically restored when he heard Mario Savio  fight for the right to shout “fuck you,” out loud.  The New Left had risen from the ashes of the Old.  And then he was content to die.

So we in our small group are speaking about the young.  Behind us, the General Meeting grinds on. They are using a “people’s microphone” in the plaza where no sound equipment is allowed.  A speaker says three words, which a core among the crowd repeats and so the rest of us can hear.  Everything takes twice as long. ‘I’m thinking of Athens,” says Medea, “how did they do it?”  I say, “Their only question was, ‘should we invade.’”  Ynestra says, “the microphone is a strategic invention.”  But we are happy in our little group of veteran protesters, though we lack the patience of the young for this General Assembly and its endless community-minded minutia.   The woman who announces the post-meeting meeting of the “non-male identified” occupiers of the square, follows this by saying, “you can be in a male body as long as you are not 100 % male identified,” and the man who tells us what the woman with pendulous bare breasts wants to say because she has taken a vow of silence, and the young women in hijabs, and the young (mostly) white men and women with their dreads and tattoos, all this would have been impossible but for the New Left, the Black Power and the Feminist movements that happened before these young ones were born.

Our New Left devolved into Weatherman fantasies of violent revolution, yet what remains forty years later are these new committed pacifists, reminding each other in their General Assembly to take their vitamins, stay hydrated and recycle.  They are gentle, non-hierarchical, non-doctrinaire, completely committed to non-violence.  There are egos to be seen, but, so far, so good, there are no internecine fights for dominance, no purges, no betrayals.  They paint signs with individualistic, often witty, always acute and encompassing sayings: “if you lost your house, Wall Street stole it from you,” and they have a bucket collecting money for their “adopt a puppy fund.” Yesterday, a score of them were brutally beaten and maced by New York City cops as they walked up Fifth Ave. obstructing traffic without a permit.  Today, they speak of a committee that is reaching out to local businesses to establish good working relationships. They say that Wall St. workers are coming surreptitiously to support them with funds.  Free pizzas are being delivered.  After the General Assembly, if it ever ends, there will be a collective meal.

I say to Ynestra, “Everything we fought for is here, now, today.”  The antimilitarism, the nonviolence, the feminism so accepted you simply see these young men and women working together as equals without a second thought, the anti-capitalist, pro-democratic socialist analysis, the anarchism, their concern for nature, and animals, for the immediate ecology of this place and the larger implications for the planet.

So, I feel like Em Jo Basshe, woken from a long dark sleep by the sudden emergence of these committed, radical young.  I wonder that they seem to have adopted as given the lessons we struggled so, often with such acrimony, to learn ourselves.    I marvel that from all our madness, they seem to have kept the good parts.  A gentle strength pervades their occupation.  “They are so sweet,” we say to one another standing in our elders’ tiny circle.  “Where did they come from?”   How, without a draft, did they get here, so resolutely antiwar?   Well, there are no jobs.  They went to school, graduated into the empty prospects of the decaying empire.  They looked around: whatever had been promised them was moot.  They target Wall St. because, of course, it is the brutality of unchecked, late free-market capitalist economy, brought even lower by the wars, that mars their future.  And they carry in the marrow of their bones, an Old Left, a New Left and whatever they have yet make of this, their one idealistic youthful energetic wish to change the world:  a New New Left.  A Newer Left.  At last. Rise from your stupor, your cynicism, your despair, as Basshe did, sit up and join them there.  They are our legacy, our children, and they are very much themselves.

The “compromise” approved by the House today and expected to pass the Senate tomorrow is an atrocity. It is a rich man’s coup of our democracy. Consider this: absolutely no tax increases are included in the bill. It creates a “super Congress,” with authority to slash social services when the country is still reeling from the recession. As Robert Reich noted, the President paid a ransom when there was absolutely no reason to link the increase of the debt ceiling with cutting the budget deficit.

Last week, the NY Times published, and The Atlantic promoted, a revealing graphic, reminding us how this deficit was created: with tax breaks to the rich and unfunded and unnecessary wars. Remember this when the mainstream media focuses in on the particulars of what is happening this week. Beltway leadership will not admit that it was spending decisions made during the Bush administration that led to this point.

Who will be affected the most by the budget cuts? Women, of course. Susan Feiner delineates the ways the plan balances the budget on the backs of women in the Ms. blog. If cuts in Social Security and unemployment insurance don’t piss you off, maybe the idea of cutting safety inspections will. Between those cuts and the perennial lack of funding for infrastructure modernization, you can expect more poop in your water in the coming years.

As Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-MO), the chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus noted, the debt deal is a ‘sugar-coated Satan sandwich.’ Rep. Raúl M. Grijalva, co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, denounced the deal as a give-away to the rich and corporations on the backs of working people and warned that both parties stand at a crossroads. The House of Representatives has already sold the American people down the river, will the Senate do the same?

Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) pointed out today that the media committed malpractice in covering the debt ceiling debate. The ‘center’ has been defined far away from public sentiment and few people acknowledge the cause of the deficit or the fact that the debt ceiling can be raised without cutting vital social programs.

How did we get to this point? The National Organization for Women (NOW) thinks the lack of female leadership in the negotiations was one reason real human needs weren’t taken into account. Many men are calling for the people to march on Washington, from Keith Olbermann to Rep. John Conyers (MI-D)

Join the feminist response to the rich man’s coup. Join CODEPINK in DC as we call on Congress and the President to Bring Our War $$ Home, tax the rich, and create jobs through increased federal spending. Can’t make it to the nation’s capital? Develop a cultural response to ten years and counting of war and corporate welfare through Create, Not Hate. We are the nonviolent resistance needed to overturn this shameful usurpation of democracy. Join the PINK Team today.

Any war with Iraq would be swift and not require a full US mobilisation. –US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld

For decades, Donald Rumsfeld has had his bloody finger prints all over Iraqi business. Back in 1983, he traveled to Iraq as Reagan’s personal representative to meet with Saddam Hussein. He developed strong diplomatic relationships with the country. The Chicago Tribune Magazine listed one of his greatest achievements as opening up U.S. relations with Iraq. The U.S. announced it was satisfied with the normal ties between both countries even though at the time Iraq was engaged in a brutal war with Iran. Saddam Hussein was encouraged by the White House to shop for U.S. military goods, which eventually would be used to attack the Kurds.

Rumsfeld’s tone towards Saddam Hussein began to change when Iraq invaded Kuwait, threatening western oil. The precursor to the Gulf War.

After 9/11, the U.S. charged its way into war in Afghanistan, but under the influence of Donald Rumsfeld, the Bush administration began looking at possible action against another country. Just before Thanksgiving 2001, Bush asked Rumsfeld to secretly draw up plans against Iraq.

While Rumsfeld was in Europe campaigning for the invasion of Iraq he said at an American air base in northern Italy, “It could last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months.” The Bush administration was beating the war drum while chief UN nuclear watchdogs were quickly meeting with Iraqis to show cooperation, but Washington was unimpressed.

On March 19, 2003, the U.S. invades Iraq, occupying the country for now seven years and seven months. Rumsfeld once again shapes the relationship between the U.S. and Iraq.

In 2004, as Donald Rumsfeld testified at the Senate Armed Services hearing, clad in pink and holding pink signs “FIRE RUMSFELD,” CODEPINK activists interrupted Rumsfeld as he began giving his opening statement apologizing for the abuses of Iraqi prisoners who were tortured in Abu Ghraib.

Even though Rumsfeld has over the years created disastrous, brutal and reckless diplomatic relationships and made decisions on behalf of corporations, he is scheduled to receive the Victory and Freedom award in December 2010 at the Nixon library in California. His new memoir Known and Unknown will be published by Sentinel on Jan. 25, 2011.