Phyllis Bennis'Closing Speech at the Security Without Empire conference, Washington DC, American University, March 2, 2009

Phyllis Bennis  is a fellow of the Institute of Policy Studies in Washington DC, and of the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam.

Thank you all, it's really fabulous that this conference is happening here and now. It's an amazing time for those of you who have come to Washington, either from other parts of the US or certainly from outside the US. It's an amazing time to be here. It's a moment when, there were great celebrations, for some good reasons, the defeat of the Bush agenda was clearly something to celebrate. And somebody has said recently that the problem that we have now is that everything is different, but nothing has changed. Or you can say it the other way around -- everything has changed, but nothing is different.

And I think that's not entirely true, I think there are things that are different. I think in some of the speeches that we've heard from our new president. (I've got to say that one of the great things about having a new president is that we don't have to pretend to be Canadians anymore! Which is something a lot of us did for a long time, it had its value, wearing those little pens with the maple leaf, but we can toss the maple leaf, or at least put it in a drawer for a little bit!) Things have changed. Hearing President Obama speak about ending torture, speak about universal health care, speak about the environment, speak even about CEO pay -- although he didn't do all he should have done about it -- these are new phenomenon, these are not things that were used to hearing from any US official, let alone the president. So that's an extraordinary moment, and one of the things that were facing, is that we're having to figure out what to do in this moment when everything is being redefined.

So, part of it is very difficult. President Obama campaigned on the basis of his claim "I will end the war." That was the single most important reason -- there were lots of reasons people voted for him, not being George Bush was kind of top of the list -- but of the substantive things he said he do, "I will end the war" was by far the single most important thing he said. Now for anyone who read past that first line, we all knew that what he meant by ending the war wasn't exactly what we had in mind.

He never promised that he would bring home all the troops, he never promised he would bring home the mercenaries, he never promised he would close the bases, he never promised that he would stop trying to control Iraqi oil -- all the things that we have said for seven years now are necessary for ending all these wars of empire, these wars supposedly against terrorism. And in the years since the invasion of Iraq we have said that as well. We have defined what ending the war means, and we know President Obama never promised that. You got to give him credit, in his recent speech, for abiding by what he promised, well at least part of it. He promised to bring home combat troops in 16 months -- 16 versus 19 months, that's not the big deal -- the big deal is 16 or 19 months is way too long, that's a problem. But it is what he promised, okay gets credit for that. He didn't tell us that he was going to pull them out, and that's another thing, because he never said he was going to bring them home, he said he was going to withdraw them from Iraq. We know he was going to send them to Afghanistan.

But, he did say "combat troops" and that's a problem, because that's only about two thirds or less of the troops that are there. That means he can leave a time of troops there. He says it will be 50,000 or more. This time, in his speech, he didn't even say "combat troops," he said "combat brigades." That's an even narrower category. On one level, you ask any woman or man who is in the US military in Iraq, "Are you encountering combat?" And they'll say "Are you out of your mind? Of course I'm in combat, I could be killed at any moment! I could be ordered to shoot at any moment!" So it doesn't matter if they're in a "combat brigade" are not. The people who cook the food and clean the latrines, and fuel the trucks, are in combat -- but they're not part of "combat brigades."

So when President Obama says he's going to bring home all the combat brigades, on the one hand that's good -- bringing out anybody from that occupation is a good thing. But is it an end to the occupation? Is even a step towards it? That's where we come in.

If it was left to President Obama's advisers, the answer would be no. Left to us, the answer is maybe. The military you know, if any of you read the New York Times the day before his speech, they were already being quoted on the record, this was a secret or anything, these generals were talking about, what did they call it "re-labeling" and "re-missioning." What is that mean? Well, think about it. It means when you pull out combat troops, or combat brigades, but you re-mission a combat troop and call her an adviser. She can stay, he can stay, because they're no longer a "combat troop." They're now an "adviser," or a "support troop" or an "extraneous troop" -- whatever you want to call them. Call them "George," call them whatever. Because they have been "relabeled," they have been "re-missioned." But what they can do, is anything you tell them to do. They can do combat, if they're not going to be called combat troops.

And it's as if, they think this is going to work. They think they're going to fool us. More importantly, they think about a full the Iraqis. Like the Iraqi resistance is gone to fade away, if you don't call our troops "combat troops." Like the Iraqi resistance, both the civil resistance and the military resistance, care what we call them? The point is, they will still be occupying Iraqi land. We're going to have trouble with this...

But, there's an upside here. And the upside is that we have a moment where everything is being redefined. And we can, and I would say we must, take the lead in carrying out that redefinition. That goes to the question of "empire". It used to be easy to define "empire." There were three or four definitions. There was the old, British style colonial definition that the US took when it moved to westward expansion, what was known as "manifest destiny," the "white man's burden," this notion that we were bringing enlightenment to these benighted savages. That's one definition of "empire," actually it was very popular for a while. Those of you who've never been to San Louis, I urge you to go. Underneath the St. Louis Arch, which is one of the more bizarre monuments in the world because it just sits there and doesn't do anything, it's not a statue or anything, it's just this arch that is supposed to symbolize the "gateway to the west" -- the gateway to the conquest of native lands across this country. If you go to the museum which is underground, under the arch, there's a whole room dedicated to this "white man's burden," they don't quite call it that, but practically they do, if you look at the quotes, they are sort of celebrating that.

The question of how to define "empire" is one that has been contested for a long time, and is still contested. For those of us on the progressive side, who are always against empires -- whether it was the old empires, the Romans are the Greeks, or the newer ones like the Ottomans are the Russians, or the quite new ones like the British or some of the others -- we were against all of them. That was pretty easy, because all of them were about stealing land, seizing land, occupying land, oppressing native populations of various sorts. There were various kinds of empires, there were various kinds of colonialism, there was settler colonialism, there was economic colonialism, but we kind of knew what it looked like. It looked like troops on the ground, occupying and stealing somebody else's land. It might have different characteristics, but that was the essential feature of it.

That was then, this is now. There is a fascinating moments in 2002, I guess it was, shortly after 9/11. When the so-called "global war on terror" -- the "GWAT," one of my favorite acronyms, because it sounds like what it is, it sounds so ugly, you know, "GWAT." In the early days of the GWAT, President, oops a Freudian slip, I meant Vice President Dick Cheney went to the DAVOS World Economic Forum, and he said, quite boastfully at the time, "people talk about empire, that we are driven by empire in United States. Clearly were not, if we were driven by empire we would control a lot more territory than we do today." Now, what was interesting about it is that he had his finger on something. Dick Cheney is many things, stupid, unfortunately is not one of them. I sometimes wish he had been more stupid when he was in power.

What he was right in pointing out was that the control of empire, the notion of empire, is changing. It is sometimes about land, and we saw that very powerfully in Vicenza, among other places -- the control, the theft of land, and very much still be at the center of empire. But it's not always about land per se. And that's why this new understanding of the role of the 1000 plus US military bases around the world is giving us the beginnings of a new definition of empire.

Now I don't think it's yet a coherent understanding, I think in this conference we're seeing lots of different discussions on different definitions that we're all using about "empire" and what it means and how it works. Now I'm looking around the room I think most of you are old enough to remember -- and those of you that aren't just keep your mouth shut and stop gloating -- but those of you are, there was a folk singer in the US who was very popular in the 60s, before I was old enough to appreciate folk music I should note, but later I came to appreciate him, named Phil Oakes, who wrote incredible music about the war in Vietnam, and the civil rights movement, mainly in the period from about 1963 to about 1968 or so.

And his songs, all reflected this early understanding about empire. They had evocative, poetic, vague titles like "The Marines Have Landed on the Shores of Santo Domingo." That was the title of one of his songs. Another was called "White Boots Marching in A Yellow Land," that was one of his more popular songs. Now, those songs reflected a very particular understanding of what "empire" looks like. It's boots on the ground, its air power to support those boots on the ground. It's "hold," and this is a term they still use, they were using it in Iraq until a year ago, the strategy of "clear and hold." This language, "clear and hold," it's the language exterminators used in my building, against the cockroaches. If this notion that you clear out the vermin, you clear out, and then you hold it. You hold the land.

But that isn't the only issue now. We are looking at a withdrawal from Iraq. And it's a very serious withdrawal. I was struck, on the day of President Obama's speech, I spent pretty much the whole day responding to the speech on various media and whatever. I watched the speech with the Arabic division of Al Jazeera here in DC, because they wanted me to do an interview right after. And watching it with them was very interesting in terms of the responses and the reactions of various parts of the speech. But the response to it, for me and a lot of other people, was "a ha, that's the wiggle room, that's another point where he's not going to live up to it, that's how he's going to get around it."

And that's, I think they're a very important. Even when he said, "my intention is to bring all the troops out by the end of 2011," that's an incredible statement. But intention is not commitment, that's not the same thing, he's giving himself wiggle room. Well that's true, but he said he intends to pull out all the troops. And that's amazing, and that's because we changed popular opinion in this country, with the help of our friends all around the world, so that he had to say that his intention was to pull out all the troops. That's a huge accomplishment, that we can take great pride in. No it's not a guarantee, it doesn't mean that we can sit back and take a vacation, I wish, but that's not the way this works. But it does give us a huge important tool to hold him accountable: "You said you intended to pull out all the troops." So if somebody to say, later, that they're not ready -- they better have a damn good excuse. And damn good excuses are a lot easier for us to challenge.

There will be at least 50,000 "residual troops" until at least 2011. We've heard US generals say "were putting in place structures for those troops, 20,000 or 40, 000, to be in Iraq until 2020." Now how will they do it? Well there's a lot of possibilities.

One possibility, look at all the treaties this government has already violated. Look at the first treaties of this government, with the native governments on the land they were stealing. How many of those treaties were kept? The only ones they kept were the ones that said they would take land. The rest they never kept. The treaties they violated all around the world. So that's one possibility, they'll simply violate any treaty they sign.

An easier possibility, they'll simply ask the Iraqi government to please renegotiate the US-Iraq agreement, to allow troops to stay longer, to allow troops to remain on those permanent bases, which, if you notice, -- what famous word was not ever mentioned in President Obama's speech on Friday? (I did a word check on it this morning, just to be sure I hadn't missed it.) "Bases." Not mentioned. The contractors were mentioned, it was a little vague, but they were mentioned. Bases? Never came up. Oops, what an oversight -- we forgot.

We have a lot of work to do. We have some advantages. We have somebody in the White House now who is launching an ideological struggle against the ideology that came to life for the last eight years -- an ideology that was grounded in unilateralism, reckless militarism, trumpeting, proudly violating international law. Not defensively, you know, this is one of the important differences between the Bush years and the Clinton years, and had to do with international law. They both violated it. That wasn't the difference. Yeah, Bush violated it more, but that's quantitative not qualitative. The big qualitative difference was Clinton denied it. He used the language, and his people used the language of multilateralism -- everything was done "through the UN." George Bush said "to hell with the UN, we don't need the UN, international law applies to everybody else, not us. We're immune, were proud of that."

And that is worse, that is worse. Because it trains a generation of Americans to believe that American exceptionalism isn't bad enough, when it's simply arrogance, but that it's legal, and it's something to be celebrated. That we are different than every other country, that we're not obligated to the same laws as everybody else. That is much worse, that has long-term impact.

Now, is it worse on the people where the bombs are falling? No, there is no difference in the world. The question is, what's it going to take to stop those bombs? So that ideological struggle is hugely important, and we have a president in the White House now who is on the other side of that ideological struggle. That makes our job a lot easier. But, it doesn't mean we can give up our job.

I think that we have to figure out as we rework these definitions -- definitions of empire -- where the bases fit within the empire. We been talking a lot here, during the conference, about the question of how we work with other movements. It seems to me that there's an incredible particularity about the anti-bases movement. That is a very exciting moment. And that is that we both are at the moment when we can lift up his movement, and make it stronger and more global and more visible than it's been, by bringing together the work is going on against XXXAmalee in Vicenza(Not clear what his means is)XXX; the extraordinary work in Ecuador, that is ending the US base at Manta; the work all around the world. Some of which, we can't claim credit for -- the decision of the government of Kirgizstan was basically about wanting Russian brides rather than US warplanes, okay that's a pretty good decision, I would agree with that. I don't think we can claim credit for that decision, but we can certainly take advantage of it.

So, we are at a moment when this movement is rising, and that's huge. But another thing, that's even more huge, in some ways, is that the issue of bases affects and is affected by so many other movements. When we look at the environmental movement, my god, what does more damage to the environment than these military bases around the world? The woman's movement, we don't even have to start talking about that, that's one of the easiest ones. The broad peace movements that are focused on specific wars, it's the perfect model for how that happens. And let's be clear that those boots on the ground in Iraq, they're not just walking around. They live places, those boots go home at night. They go home to 50+military bases, controlled and owned and operated by US Inc. Because of those contractors -- the movement against war profiteers, what are those war profiteers building all round the world? Military bases.

And, it's a moment, when we have that opportunity to say "okay, this is something we all need to be challenging, and this is a moment when this is an issue where we can win. Because one of the biggest issues we all face, is the movement, the issue, the movement against the way that Washington is responding to the economic crisis. That affects everybody all around the world. Because remember, when we think about Barack Obama, I remember in the days just before the election, I was on an e-mail back and forth with a dozen or so people, several people were saying, "why isn't Obama saying this?" and "why isn't Obama saying that?", and my old friend, the great activist and agitator songwriter, XXXHolly Meer(check)XXX wrote an e-mail to everyone saying "get a grip, people! He's running to be president of the empire!"

I was like, oh yeah, right. Let's just keep our expectations here within reason. He's a pretty good guy, as empire presidents go, but that's a fairly low bar. So let's not get too carried away here. But, we have a moment when the question of how to respond to the economic crisis is huge. And everybody is trying to figure that out. And all the movements are trying to figure that out. The movements for better health care, the movements for the environment, the moments for climate justice, the movements against racism, the moments for women's rights, GBLT rights, all of these things -- everything is being built in new ways, with new definitions. And the low-hanging fruit, of all of it, might be military bases.

Because we all know the single biggest pot of money that's going to make it possible to pay for all this stimulus stuff, new healthcare, new environmental stuff, new energy stuff, education, all these things -- is the military budget. But one of the things that makes it so hard, and you heard this yesterday from my colleague Miriam Pemberton, one of the hardest reasons to cut the military budget in United States is not just the militarism that's built into the ideology that says "we need to be a military power all around the world," that's how they justify it, but the real reason is, they have been so smart, these people, in how they build weapons systems.

So that you have the F-22, "the raptor" -- this thing named for a carnivorous bird -- the raptor, which is now taking out full-page ads in the New York Times and Washington Post on a daily basis, is not focusing on "we will keep you safe," that's in there, but that's not the headline -- the headline is "we provide jobs and 30 states." These people are no fools. When they figure out how to make something like "the raptor," or some other weapon system, the problem you face is that that thing, that one plane, is made in perhaps 200 congressional districts. And in every congressional district provides anywhere from 30 to 3000 jobs. How likely is that member of Congress to vote against it? They are really care whether the Air Force gets it or not, they care that they will lose votes if their district loses jobs.

So this is an incredibly difficult task. It's fun we have to work on. This is the moment to do it! But, military bases? They're not in anybody's backyard. Nobody in this country earns money from them. Now you can certainly argue that nobody in the other countries gets money or jobs from them either. The only people that do are these contractors, these mercenaries. And they don't to come to public, because they're getting jobs overseas, the money's not coming back here. This is an easy one. This is an easy one. They have no domestic constituents. So, this is where we have, this concept of the low hanging fruit. This might be the ripe, first victory against militarism in the Obama era. Could be massive cuts in military bases.

So, the fact that he didn't mention it in Iraq, is troubling. But we still have movements that are devoted to this. We still have a lot of potential on this. And I think it's an incredibly exciting moment. Because were not telling people they need to stop working against the Iraq war and take up the work on bases. It's more like "you know your work on the Iraq war? We've got this whole other aspect of it that you haven't really necessarily known about. Here's a gift to you, to make your work easier!"

The women's movement, which has worked so hard to become international, to become global, Wilbert Van Der Zeijden spoke yesterday about the globalization of our movement. That's such an important concept! Here's our link. Here's our way to do it. There's 134 countries with US bases! Do you think anyone of them has a women's movement that's not looking at the effect of those bases on women's rights? You know, they're there, it's the low hanging fruit, we just have to contact them. It's a gift, it's a huge gift to building these global movements.

So, I think as we look at the harder part, as we look at the work around cutting the military budget, transforming this downsizing of the occupation of Iraq into the end of the occupation of Iraq. As we look at issues of preventing war in Iran, and crucially, as we look at how to stop the war in Afghanistan, had a moment when our anti-militarist President is looking to escalate the military component of a war that his own generals say cannot be won militarily -- and they all agree they don't have a strategy -- so what are we doing, we're going to send 17,000 new troops, and then figure out a new strategy! Now is that ass backwards or what?!

This is nice, and this is what we have to point to. It shouldn't be a difficult one I think, about a year ago, when we started refocusing more attention on Afghanistan, I think a lot of us were thinking "hmm, this one's going to be really hard." Now, the work against the war in Afghanistan has always been far stronger in Europe and other places around the world, where NATO troops are still fighting, when they are not any longer fighting Iraq. That's understandable, and the vantage point of that is where troops are, troops are in harm's way, it's easier to build a movement focused on that. They've always been in harm's way, they've always been dying as well as killing, from United States. But we had Iraq to worry about, where there was a lot more dying, a lot more Iraqis were dying than Afghans, and a ton more US soldiers were dying and being injured in Iraq then in Afghanistan.

But we also thought, at least I did, and I think a lot of people did, that it was going to be really hard to mobilize against the war in Afghanistan, because everybody believed Afghanistan was the "good war," right? Afghanistan was the legitimate war -- "It was 9/11, they killed 3000 of our people!"

Well, think about it though, a minute who's the "they" that we're talking about? The people of Afghanistan didn't kill 3000 of our people. There was no Afghan on those planes. You know, if you're going to talk about "well, where did they train?" Well they trained, actually, in Florida. What about "where they studied?" well they studied in Hamburg. "How about their flight school?" That would be the Midwest. So, if you're talking about attacking were the people responsible for those attacks actually came from, we'd be bombing Florida, we be bombing Germany, and we'd be bombing Chicago. I'm not advocating that, let's be clear.

But, the point is, they may well have been inspired by somebody who was living in Afghanistan. That doesn't give us the right to go out and attack a whole country. It just doesn't. And some of you will remember, the very first antiwar protest of this so-called global war on terror, was held in New York on October 7, 2001, just three weeks after the attacks on 9/11, when we knew that the response was going to be a military response. And it was in the midst of that demonstration, I remember calling XXXLeslie Kagan's(check)XXX cell phone and reaching her backstage at the rally that it just started, to tell her that CNN had just reported that the bombing of Kabul had begun. It was on that day.

So we have been building a movement, since that war began, but we left it. We were little too careful. We were afraid he was going to be really really hard to convince people. But you know what? It turns out people are a lot smarter than be given credit for. As of, it was a few months ago, a new poll indicated that it's about a 50-50 divide between people who think the Afghanistan war is legitimate, and those who don't. That's very cool, if you ask me, given that we've almost done no work, at least relative to your what's needed. We've done nothing close to what's needed. People figured it out for themselves. Now's our chance, now's our chance.

The building of new bases outside of Kandahar, I mean, how we define the issue of bases. We've heard Obama say "the US does not torture." That's, on the one hand, an incredible, fabulous statement -- which we never heard from George Bush. We never heard it from a lot of people, but we're hearing it now from the president. Now, it's still not good enough, because the problem before wasn't primarily the US torturing, it was the US "rendering" our prisoners to other countries -- outsourcing our torture. It's much more efficient! We don't have to dirty her hands with, you know, electrical wires and things.

The real Guantánamo that will face President Obama is not Guantánamo, it's Bagram, in Afghanistan. That's a military base. So, when we work with the movement against torture, that's part of our anti-bases movement and we need to claim it. So, if this broadening of our definition, we're going to grow exponentially, overnight, because we're going to claim every movement! The woman's movement is an anti-bases movement! The environmental movement is an anti-bases movement! The movement for sustainable energy and to end the dependency on oil is clearly an anti-bases movement! Because obviously you need the bases to defend US access to oil!

It's an amazing moment. We can claim them all. And we become part of one giant movement!

And you remember the call, when the unions came together, in this country it was the anarchist influence in Wobblies, "one big union," was the slogan. We need one big movement. One big movement.

The movement for social development and economic rights in this country, as well as globally, is an anti-bases movement. That's a huge pot of money -- how many billions of dollars today spend every year on bases? (Asking audience)  somebody must know this figure? $140 billion?! There's a figure I need to get into my head. Now, how many schools can rebuild with that? How many miles of highway? All that stuff, aside from issues of reparations in Iraq, reparations to come in Afghanistan.

We could get another $3 billion from ending the US military relationship with Israel. We spend 3 billion dollars in US military aid to Israel. We end that and it's $3 billion more! All of these are connected. And the fact of the whole country right now are saying "where is the money going to come from?" We've got the answer. Hello! Here we are, we've got the answer!

IPS just put out a set of tax related answers, seven of them, that start with a huge raise in taxes for the rich. My colleague, John Gabbana, who's the director of IPS, was invited to that White House summit last week -- how much of the changes that? IPS gets invited to the White House summit! This is very bizarre, I wasn't sure what I thought of it, but it was interesting -- I have to get used to this new era! John was in a breakout group, they have breakout groups, just like we do, and he was in a breakout group with John McCain and Joseph Lieberman, and it was on taxes, and they went around the room people said their various ideas about taxes.

My friend John, said "you know, we should not forget that in the era of a moderate Republican regime, that of Dwight Eisenhower, the highest income tax level for the richest Americans was 91%." And all around the table, he said you heard this silence. And somebody said, "I don't suppose you're proposing that that's a good thing?" And he said, "well, I think we should be very serious about massive increases for the richest people, and you should remember that under the FDR administration, the highest income tax rate was 95%!" So, this is a moment for a big new ideas.

When somebody asks you, "well, you want to talk about fixing schools, and fixing the environment, whatever, where you're going to get the money for that?" I have an idea, will get $140 billion right off the bat, just from closing US military bases abroad that don't keep anyone safe, destroy the environment, affect women's rights, and we don't need them anyway! There you go, there's your answer!

The last thing I want to say, well the second to last thing, is that our movement can be mobilized through this bases movement. How many of you are on the street on February 15, 2003 -- the day the world said no to war? In the run-up to the war on Iraq -- you see, most of you were. It was an amazing thing, the Guinness Book of World Records says there were between 12 and 14 million people in the streets that day, in 665 cities around the world. Now what was significant about it was that, well many things were significant about it, but one of the things that was significant about it was that everyone in all of those demonstrations all around the world in all of those languages, was saying the same thing: the world says no to war. It was a moment when the whole world's people came together, and a globalized that movement overnight. The whole thing was planned in six weeks. It was amazing

And, the other thing about it, that was so extraordinary, was that it was a moment when governments, for their own opportunistic reasons, were also saying no to that war at least, not to war in general, but to that war. And that made them our allies, in a perverse and weird and cautious kind of way. So you had not only powerful countries -- France, Germany, China, Russia -- that for their own internal interests were against the war; you had in the Security Council, what became known as the "uncommitted six" -- poor, marginalized, mainly not very influential countries -- ordinarily completely dependent on the United States, who don't stand up and go head-to-head against United States -- but because of those large, powerful countries that were saying no to Washington, and because of the fact that their own people were in the streets, in collaboration with people all over the world who are in the streets, those six countries: Guinea, Cameroon, Angola, Mexico, Chile, Pakistan, those were the six, continued to say no, they stood fast, they stood up to the US.

And the biggest demonstrations were in the capitals of those countries whose governments who were sending troops to Iraq in defiance of popular demand. So the biggest ones were the UK, Italy, under Berlusconi at the time, Spain, under Aznar at the time -- Bush's allies, saw the biggest protests. And that's the model that we can look to again. We have now, governments that are responding to social movements in their own countries, and some, on their own, like Kirgizstan, are taking an anti-bases position.

We need to figure out a whole new ways of relating to governments. In Italy, maybe it's the local government that's the key ally, and then you figure out how to struggle with the national government. In Ecuador, and Bolivia, you see new constitutions that make it unconstitutional for the government to invite in a foreign military base. It's an amazing moment, you have the possibility for places like Italy, in the future, maybe South Africa, in the context of Africa every country except for Liberia, every other country on the African continent has said no to US bases on their turf. The organizations that made that possible are part of our movement. We need to work with them, to join with them, to support them, to find out how they did it, but did it take, what can we learn, what can they teach us? This is an amazing moment.

In the last thing, is that the UN becomes part of the equation. The book that was mentioned a few minutes ago, Which is called "Challenging Empire," the subtitle of it is "how people, governments and the UN defy US power." That book looks at the model of the February 15 protests and that period of resistance to the US war. At the UN level, it began in the fall of 2002, and collapsed in May of 2003. But it was this eight-month period of extraordinary mobilization.

That can happen again, we almost saw it around the Gaza crisis, when the new General Assembly President, Father Miguel d'Escoto, the former foreign minister of Nicaragua, who took the lead in mobilizing nonaligned countries all around the world, to say no to the Israeli attack on Gaza, and refused to back down in the face of US and European pressure. It didn't work, ultimately because not enough countries were willing to say that that's what had to happen, and unfortunately even the Palestinian diplomatic team was supporting a softer position.

But there was a chance for it, it showed it can happen again. But it can only happen, and this is my last point -- the governments can do it, the UN can be pulled into it, but it's the popular movements, it's us, that are still the centerpiece of it. It's only if we are holding our governments' feet to the fire that it's even a possibility, let alone likely. It's only, and this is true, was true of President Bush and is true of President Obama, there's this famous statement from FDR when he was meeting with his progressive advisers about what became the New Deal, and he finally said to them late one night call: "okay, I get it, I know what I have to do, now you go out there and make me do it."

The best we can hope from President Obama is that he will recognize that he knows what he has to do, and knows that he's got to tell us to get out there and make him do it.