By Emiliano Huet-Vaughn, National Catholic Reporter, 23 February 2007
The Catholic peace and justice movement is redoubling its efforts to end the U.S. occupation of Iraq, while simultaneously insisting that the United States pay reparations to the Middle Eastern nation devastated by two U.S.-led wars and more than a decade of economic sanctions.
Specific demands — namely, that all U.S. troops and military bases be removed from Iraq and that U.S. military spending be redirected to relief and reconstruction efforts overseen by Iraqis, not the United States — are made in a petition being circulated by Pax Christi USA, the American arm of the Catholic peace movement. Such demands were reiterated in interviews conducted in early February with prominent Catholic antiwar activists across the country.
The petition is only one part of a strategy to combat a renewed war effort by the Bush administration, which in January called for increased U.S. troop levels in Iraq by more than 20,000. Despite overwhelming public opposition to both the war and the troop swell, Congress has been slow to pass a resolution against it.
In response, a coalition of antiwar organizations, including the largest national antiwar network, United for Peace and Justice, initiated a campaign of peaceful protest and civil disobedience in congressional offices across the country. The effort, called “the Occupation Project” because of the attempt by protesters to physically occupy the offices of members of Congress until they commit themselves to opposing future funding of the occupation in Iraq, is organized by Voices for Creative Nonviolence, a group formed out of the Catholic Worker movement and formerly known as Voices in the Wilderness.
“The only way people who wage wars can continue to do that is if they are supplied with the cooperation and the money of those that give them the power,” said Dan Pearsons, a Chicago Catholic Worker activist arrested along with three others at the office of Sen. Barak Obama, D-Ill. “Without that [the president] doesn’t have much to go on.”
Activists organizing against the war, both inside and outside the Catholic peace movement, oppose a U.S. military presence in Iraq for a variety of reasons, not the least of them being that the majority of Iraqis oppose it, as polls have consistently shown.
“We’re not seen as an honest broker in the region,” said Kathy Kelly, an organizer with Voices for Creative Nonviolence and a three time Nobel Peace Prize nominee. “There’s been terrible thievery” in Iraq by U.S. businesses, and the U.S. government has acted as an “imperial menace” in the region to advance this business agenda, said Kelly.
The allegation of a war initiated for profit — specifically oil profits for energy companies intimately tied to the Bush White House — is pervasive in the antiwar movement and serves as additional, often foundational, grounds for opposition to a military presence in Iraq.
Antonia Juhasz, a visiting scholar with the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies, has written extensively on efforts by U.S. energy companies to gain access to Iraqi oil fields, which were closed off to them during the Hussein regime. She explained that the Iraq Hydrocarbons Law, currently being considered by Prime Minister Nouri al Malaki’s cabinet, after sustained advocacy for it by the Bush administration, provides clear evidence that these U.S. companies — with U.S. governmental support — are making headway in their effort to open up the world’s second largest proven oil reserves to foreign investment. The law, if passed, would allow foreign investment in Iraq’s oil industry, something until now prohibited by Iraq law, and grant foreign oil companies “national treatment,” meaning no preference would be shown to Iraqi companies in contracting.
“In terms of revealing a strategy by the Bush administration to use the war to win Iraq’s oil, the law is very damning evidence that that was a motivation of the administration,” said Juhasz. “Whether or not it passes, their interest in making it happen and their focus on it and their planning for it reveals a war planned to acquire greater control of a country’s oil.”
Such considerations motivate the Pax Christi petition’s demand that the United States begin to withdraw all its troops from the region. “The message we need to be delivering in the region is that we do not have long-term military base interests,” said Jean Stokan, policy director at Pax Christi USA. With more than 3,000 Americans dead and anywhere between 50,000 to 650,000 Iraqis dead, according to differing estimates, “it’s clear that this isn’t working,” Stokan said.
But she acknowledged, as did other activists interviewed, that the withdrawal of U.S. troops is not likely to end the sectarian strife paralyzing the country. The most recent National Intelligence Estimate, a summary judgment of 16 national intelligence agencies released last week, states that a rapid U.S. troop withdrawal would likely lead to “massive civilian casualties” and refugee influxes.
“We’re not naive,” said Stokan. “It will probably get worse before it gets better.”
But the belief in the movement seems to be that the period of “getting worse” will last much longer and over time lead to more suffering with U.S. troops in Iraq, despite the expected spike in sectarian violence predicted to immediately follow a U.S. departure. With U.S. soldiers gone, activists said, a perpetual flash point for conflict will be removed as will an actor who has no real business in deciding the affairs of Iraqis. They hope a U.S. withdrawal and the threat of a regional war will spur diplomacy from internal and regional actors.
Moreover, the other plank in Pax Christi’s demands — large increases in financial aid from the United States — is thought to get at the root cause of the violence, and has been advocated by many outside the peace movement, including the Iraq Study Group.
“There is 50 to 75 percent unemployment in Iraq today,” said Kelly, who traveled frequently to Iraq prior to the war and spent time there immediately after the U.S. invasion. “People don’t have a way to feed their families so they turn to the warlords and those who do have the power and some access to food and income generation.”
While the peace movement sees the United States, along with Britain, as having the ultimate obligation to finance reconstruction and relief reparations, since these nations led the bombings that decimated the nation’s infrastructure, the movement wants the countries to have no role in administering the funds.
“The United States military and companies contracted through the U.S. military are uniquely unqualified to undertake that reconstruction in any sort of supervisory way,” Kelly said, referencing allegations of massive fraud and abuse in American reconstruction contracts, the current subject of investigation in Congress and a slew of critical audits from the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, Stuart Bowen.
Instead, Kelly and others see the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees office and UNICEF as appropriate overseers of humanitarian relief funds, and advocate giving priority to Iraqi companies in reconstruction contracting.
While not being a panacea, the combined effect of the financial aid and a military withdrawal, activists agreed, will go a long way to correcting the effects of a U.S. occupation that in the words of Bishop Gabino Zavala, president of Pax Christi USA, is “breeding hatred that will punctuate our world for generations” and increases the likelihood of terrorist attacks on our children.
“Maybe,” Kelly said, “people who don’t want to listen to the scriptures with which they were raised as children, who don’t want to listen to the Constitution of the United States, who don’t want to listen to common sense, maybe they could listen to their grandchildren and think, ‘Golly, I’d like to see that child have a decent future.’ “