We’re supposed to have our tail between our legs. The United States has liberated an oppressed people and as peace activists we’re supposed to sit there dumbfounded. Of course, it’s becoming increasingly apparent that the stated motive for war—the so-called "weapons of mass destruction" now routinely abbreviated WMD—did not exist. The words "Osama bin Laden" and "Al Qaeda" have again gone on hiatus much as they did in the early stages of the PR campaign that rushed the nation to war. They’ll come out next when the recipe calls for an added dose of fear.

But we never bought the WMD argument; we knew Saddam was not a threat to his neighbors. We never embraced his rule either, so rather than being dumbfounded, we should be excited for the opportunity the Iraqi people have now that they are free of Saddam Hussein. This isn’t the road we chose, but it is the road we’re on. The challenge is to move from the old peace movement to one that remains engaged and rises to our new situation with a critique and alternative that confronts Bush’s endless "War on Terror."

After the first Gulf War in 1991 many of us disengaged; we can’t do that again. We offered viable diplomatic alternatives and mobilized in an unsuccessful effort to stop that war. Though the war was brief, more than one hundred thousand died, mostly poor soldiers who weren’t given a chance to surrender. Pentagon war planners soon thereafter admitted to the Washington Post that the worst civilian suffering resulted not from errant bombs, but ones that hit their targets, Iraqi infrastructure, especially water treatment facilities. But with the hot war over and a Presidential campaign underway, the Peace Movement went away.

Meanwhile, the Iraqi people suffered horribly as their livelihoods crumbled under the weight of economic sanctions. In a nation dependent on food imports, malnutrition became epidemic as food prices soared. Without access to clean water, water-borne disease struck children. Sanctions then kept out medicine to cure them. As the chief doctor at one of the best equipped Iraqi hospitals stated to the New York Times in December 1998, "It's very difficult to work very hard on a patient, try to care for him, and then lose him because you can’t get some silly thing that you could pick up in a drug store in any other country." By our best estimates at least one million people perished from the aftermath of war and 12 years of sanctions, and sanctions only served to strengthen Saddam’s rule. With noble exceptions like Kathy Kelly’s aptly named organization, Voices in the Wilderness, this suffering was woefully underreported and often misrepresented (blaming only Saddam), and our voices were silent for too long. This time, with a much larger worldwide movement and a President still at war with terror, we must remain vocal.

Already the American mass media is preparing to move on. Having worked to sanitize the war into a bloodless sound bite, Iraq will increasingly become an afterthought. The mass media burned two war images into our collective heads—a falling statue of Saddam Hussein and Iraqis embracing U.S. soldiers. But there are other images not seen, voices not heard. Ali Ismaeel Abbas, a 12 year old boy, now has no family, and no arms. His family had the misfortune of living too close to a military target. The impact of the blast killed his parents, his brothers and sisters, and was so great it ripped the arms from his body. But he’s lucky. Millions of people (in Europe) know about his story and are rushing to his aid. He was just airlifted to Kuwait. His story didn’t make headlines in the U.S.; you’d need to read the Reuters dispatch to discover his story. In the United States the media is careful not to humanize the enemy too much. They can report numbers, but not names and certainly not human interest stories. Ali is a human victim, but countless others won’t get their stories told. There’s only so many journalists not embedded with the troops and only so much space that can be devoted to Iraqis, if they're not kissing U.S. troops. Ultimately war victims vanish. As Mark Burgess, a researcher at the Center for Defense Information in Washington, coldly stated about counting Iraqi casualties, "We just don't know and we might as well just make up a number."

As an advocate for human rights, I feel torn. I feel good that a tyrant is gone, but I must wonder what will replace him and the human cost of the means used to remove him. The bombing has ended, but the Peace Movement must not forget the Iraqi people or that the "War on Terror" continues.

Rallying cries about imperialism or war crimes by U.S. soldiers won’t broaden the movement. It will turn off many we need to convert. Instead we should talk about priorities, values and security to develop a formidable critique of the "War on Terror." Part of the message is to confront Bush’s unyielding support of tax cuts for the rich—an issue even Republicans don’t consider important according to recent polls by the Los Angeles Times and Wall Street Journal. We can use the true cost of war to reveal the soft underbelly of Bush’s bankrupt domestic agenda. The other part is to take advantage of the fallback reason for war, liberation. In both Afghanistan and Iraq, the Administration’s stated motives for war failed. Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda survived, and the much vaunted Iraqi WMD remain as elusive as ever. In response, the Bush Administration has played the fallback card brilliantly—that of liberating oppressed people. But freedom is more than a sound bite; it’s an ongoing process that must be supported. The Peace Movement should be leaders in helping Americans see the difference between rhetoric and reality, while offering a better alternative.

Confront the Lunacy of Tax Cuts

On Iraq, our position must be forget tax cuts, rebuild Iraq. The lunacy of proposing tax cuts while financing a war must become a key part of our message as it’s the Achilles’ heel of the Bush plan—the point where the ideological supply-siders and warmonger empire builders collide, and the American people may finally smell a rat. Bush leads a crusade for tax cuts for millionaires and gives tax-dodging corporations government contracts, while teachers are laid off, families lose health insurance, and parks close—all because the Bush Administration has refused to provide aid to the states.

War is costly, but the Bush Administration will want to do this on the cheap. Let Iraq’s oil pay for the rebuilding they’ll say as if oil were some miracle elixir for economic success. Witness their failure in Afghanistan. In their latest budget the Bush Administration allocated nothing to rebuild that war-torn country, and peacekeeping there is a minimal force focused on Kabul. Yet how can you build a functioning democracy, if you can’t keep people physically secure? Americans need to learn this story, and that the U.S. destroyed Iraqi infrastructure during the first Gulf War and then wouldn’t let Iraq rebuild it. Our policy has always been to invest in the people; we shouldn’t stray from that position. Iraq needs our assistance, not a corporate profiteering free for all. The goal should be independence not dependence.

Likewise, we must remind Americans that veterans come home broken, physically and often emotionally. They especially need our support after the war. In the past our government has abandoned veterans when the fighting stopped. Veterans too often must fight the government to receive the benefits they are entitled to. In a remarkable display of disregard, the Bush Administration pushed for cuts in veterans benefits, while rallying the nation for war. Just because public outcry caused the cuts to be abandoned doesn’t make the proposal any less disgraceful.

Advocate a Better Alternative

Then there’s the tricky point of democracy in Iraq. We’re for it, and we should become advocates for how to do it. The Bush Administration is taking a dangerous road, as they go it alone and thumb their nose at those who opposed war. As an unnamed senior administration official recently put it, "Iraq will not be put under a U.N. flag. The U.N. is not going to be a partner." While the Bush Administration may be content with replacing Saddam Hussein with a client government, our standard is creating a climate of multiethnic tolerance, where power is shared, and Iraq returns to the prosperity it enjoyed before our bombs and sanctions decimated the livelihoods of Iraqi families. The path there may be elusive. Politics involves choosing who shall have power and who won’t. We need the world’s best mediators to navigate a solution here. Mediating balanced power sharing without playing favorites and being seen as the occupier will challenge even the Bush PR machine. We need to remind Americans it’s not how Americans view Iraq that matters, it’s how the Arab world views it, and failure here cannot be tolerated.

Beyond Iraq we must challenge the Bush team’s reckless use of "international terror" to turn countries into perceived terrorist threats. International terrorism in the Middle East typically has less to do with Al Qaeda, but more to do with Hamas or Hezbollah—Palestinian terrorist freedom fighters. This distinction should be part of an even-handed policy that confronts the sources of Palestinian and Israeli terror. But Bush just wants to scare Americans with "international terror," even though Americans aren’t the target. He wants "us" to be afraid of "them."

We no longer face a foreign policy that is using violence to overthrow the freely elected Sandinistas in Nicaragua or funding death squads to kill priests and peasants in El Salvador. With the Taliban and Saddam Hussein the moral high ground is murky. We’re placed in the tricky position of opposing war, but not supporting the regime. But the Bush folks are stuck defending their wars as wars of liberation, when their supposed reason for war was to destroy Al Qaeda and Saddam’s WMD, respectively. In essence, they have been forced to say human rights matters in foreign policy.

Syria may be Bush’s next target. None of us favors the current Syrian regime, so what’s the Peace Movement to do? The President may not invade Syria, but he won’t hesitate to use the indiscriminate power of sanctions to make life difficult to the point of death for countless innocent Syrians. We know ultimate success in the region requires fairly dealing with the Israeli occupation of Palestine, not Syria, so we must question priorities while offering an alternative way to confront repressive regimes.

The International Criminal Court has criteria for Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity. Such crimes involve not only murder, but deliberately inflicting conditions of life designed to bring about death, forced population transfers, arbitrary arrest, and torture. Though the United States is not willing to join the ICC, we should call for the U.S. to embrace its principles in the conduct of our foreign policy.

In opposing an endless war to fight terror, the Peace Movement should advocate the following guidelines:

1. Rather than focus on military aid to human rights abusing regimes, as the United States increasingly has done since 9/11, foreign aid should focus on improving peoples’ health, education and incomes. Recipient governments must meet minimum human rights standards; otherwise, funding must be through nongovernmental organizations or the United Nations, to whom we need to pay our dues obligations
2. Demand human rights monitors and arms inspectors. If we can have UNSCOM, why can’t we have Human Rights Monitors demanding accountability? We should be as vigilant about human rights as we are about WMD.

1. Governments resisting monitors or found in violation should have their assets frozen, international travel limited, and an investigation taken up by the International Criminal Court for Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity.
2. An international arms embargo should be enforced against such governments.

1. Security Council Resolutions should be sought and enforced as long as those resolutions don’t target innocent civilians, as the economic sanctions did in Iraq.