Tom Hayden

Part I Tom Hayden’s Formal Remarks

(Remarks in italics and emphasis with bold face type or underlining are by Woody Williams)

On the Notion of Empire

(the recording started after Tom Hayden had introduced himself and had been talking for about 5 Minutes. Does anybody have notes of this??)

“This is an indicator of nervousness about becoming the successor of the previous empires, including the British Empire that America rebelled against. Nonetheless there is a lot of discussion about empire. One version of empire is that it is a global system dominated by the United States economically and militarily. Another version of it in Hardt & Negri’s book ( i.e. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri EMPIRE, Harvard University Press, 2000) –the Italians—is that it is a global system of capital, in which nation states come and go. There are I suppose others who think that the coming empire will be a caliphate of some kind, some kind of religious organization of the world. What I do know about empires is that their time is brief. Now sometimes that is five hundred years, but in the long spin of things that is still brief, but usually it is much shorter than that. In other words, empire is an unstable concept. When one becomes an empire, one views the world as a hostile place. I think it is an exaggeration to say that we are entering into an age dominated by the United States. If the United States for instance dominated the world, why is it having such a hard time dominating Irak? More on that in a moment…

But there are plenty of people who believe the world needs to organized around some kind of benevolent or hegemonic power structure backed by force; and that is a very strong current of thought intellectually and particularly among the Neoconservatives in the U.S.

2. The second idea, which I associate with the Europeans in a sense is the multi-polar concept enunciated by the French and certainly on the grassroots level by many people in this country (i.e., Germany). The multi-polar idea is that there is not an empire that is a single super power, but there are multiple poles of power—right?—the European Union, or countries within Europe, the Southern Cone of Latin America, perhaps South Africa, certainly China, probably Russian. The interesting thing about the multi-polar concept is that it seems to me to be grounded in reality—just as empire is grounded in certain kinds of realities—but the interesting thing is that the multi-polar concept seems to be composed of people in countries that have been colonized and fought back—you know like Brazil—and countries that have been colonial powers and are proving to us that there is life beyond empire—that have a better quality of life in many respects than we do in the States. That is why there has to be such a campaign against the Europeans—the French in particular—by the Neoconservatives, because they don’t want Americans to know that the quality of life in Europe is better in many respects: the people work far less, have much longer vacations, have better health care, have environmental standards that we only wish we would have in California (laughter). There is this onslaught against any good news coming out of Europe in this attempt to reinforce a U.S. provincialism in favour of the notion of empire. But I think the multi-polar world with the idea of things being negotiated, things being handled through the United Nations, things being handled through treaties that are enforceable, is a fascinating alternative to the empire notion. And (they are) certainly equally potent.

The third notion, the one that my life is about, is the notion of social movements for global justice. As I said I have been in the civil rights movement from the early days, all through these movements, and I have noticed academically and in the media that these movements get little credit for their actual effect in both stopping empire—or putting containment around empire—and invigorating what is possible within the multi-polar concept. For example the anti-Iraq movement in the world, which I take also to be, in some sense, an anti-U.S., anti-empire movement—pro-democracy—seems to me—and you can correct me if I am wrong—was fundamentally responsible for giving European countries at the level of their politicians the backbone necessary to stand up to the United States at the UN around the authorization for the war. Just as the German movement against the Euro-missiles affected political parties (i.e., in the 80s), so did the German social movement affect your chancellor, so did the French social movement, and so on. In this view of things, what seems to be most obvious and get the most attention, the big power players on the world stage, are in fact influenced by such social movements. In the case of Iraq, in the case of the Kyoto treaty … in the case of the Montreal protocol, womens’ rights. There are these emerging mechanisms of human rights and protection that are written in treaties under the influence and direct participation of the social movements and then they become somewhat enforceable at the grassroots level without even having to go through the politicians. I suppose where this system would work best, the social movements would be represented by the political parties and together the movements and the parties would forge a different international order, which would have citizen participation as the foundation. But I am not sure that political parties can ever represent social movements. I think of political parties as being about assembling majorities and social movements as being about assembling large numbers of people to fight—for what they believe in.

OK, having said that, where are we? I am only going to speak now about the United States for a moment, because it is the only thing I really know. There was the beginning of a huge social movement in the 90s in the States. That was part of the global social movement, just as the 60s were global and perhaps we in the States only saw it from Chicago or Mississippi. Nobody has really explained how these global movements start. But certainly around the 90s you had the beginnings of a global movement in response to the announcement after the fall of the Soviet Union that there would be a new international order dominated by the United States, that new mechanisms would be created, the World Trade Organization, NAFTA in our hemisphere, and when it became clear that the end of the Cold War did not mean an end to arms expenditures or weapons sales but the search for new enemies, or new markets for those weapons. So the symbol in the States was “Seattle”. Seattle was a surprise. You don’t even have to have a sentence around the word “Seattle”. You can go anywhere in the world and say “Seattle” and it speaks for itself, because certain things take on a mythic dimension, they touch us emotionally and nothing more needs to be said. Essentially what happened as a result of Seattle was the WTO was derailed and prevented from completing that round of negotiations, and has never really recovered. The next effort at Doha was marginal, mostly an image building opportunity; the effort at Cancun was a complete failure; the effort to extend NAFTA to Latin America is at best from Bush’s point of view unhold (?). Latin American countries have moved to the left on the issue of trade. And who knows what will happen in Hong Cong at the next WTO meeting this fall, but there was this amazing movement that developed—as it did in the 60s and the previous century—a trans-national social movement—as Capital became internationalized, so did conscience in response to it and resistance in response to it. It is still there, but I think it has been diminished in terms of its energy by the invasion of Iraq and the necessity for the resistance to the war in Iraq.

But these were big movements that didn’t get credit—I’ll tell you for example when the first big anti-Iraq demonstrations were called nationally, six months before the invasion in the U.S., both the New York Times and NPR announced that the demonstrations had failed to materialize. This was after 100,000 minimum had been on the streets of Washington (D.C.). I was very puzzled by this, because I am a big critic of the media; I’m a big believer in the independent media, I read all my stories in the New York Times backwards because I know that the good things are only at the bottom—but I would have imagined that reporters could conceive that there were 100,000 people on the streets. The fact that they couldn’t told me that this idea of framing and filtering has affected the press corps as well. There was a big uproar and then they had to apologize the next week—the New York Times and NPR both announced that the demonstrations had occurred (laughter); they had been between 100,000 and 200,000 people—which makes you wonder, like what was really going on?—if you go back through the clippings you will find that the New York Times speculated … (at the time) that the demonstrations had been a disappointment and had virtually not happened, that it was fear of the Washington, D.C. sniper that had kept people home. So it was not merely an inability to count bodies in the street—like I know how many people are in this room—an inability to count is a fundamental failure for a reporter—but to then frame the misconception with your own projection that it is the fear of a sniper said a lot about the post 9-11 era. Nevertheless there was recovery by the press—in February, just before the invasion, when there were demonstrations in 600 places around the world, maybe 800 places around the world, I am sure here—my favourite place was Montreal, where it was 20 below zero and there were 200,000 people in an ice storm, only rivalled by the demonstration in Antarctica, at the weather station there, where everyone turned out (laughter), so then of course the New York Times went the other way—lurched the other way—and said there was now a new super power in the world, public opinion. (This) went to everybody’s head, they started walking around feeling that we had been validated at last by the New York Times; we are a super-power, …(??) is Bush. There is something to that; it is rare that the established media or New York Times recognize the force that public opinion has. But it was quickly taken back. What I think happened is then that people spilled over into the Dean campaign—that I supported—, the Kucinich campaign on a lesser scale, and eventually the Kerry campaign.

Why is that? Because in my view of social movements they begin in the streets, because they have to; but where there is an opportunity to make a difference, they will surge into mainstream channels as well; and Dean had a phenomenal effect, both in terms of the number of people and the amount of money that he managed to raise on the internet. I put the Dean campaign definitely more in the realm of social movement than political—a very enterprising and significant campaign. The Kerry campaign—you get a lot of debate about it—but what I notice from the social movement perspective is, by this time, people in the peace and global justice movements, people in the rank and file of the Democratic Party, people like myself, had made a strategic decision to support Kerry despite whatever Kerry was saying. Because the issue had become—for some of them, guilt over Nader four years before and this deep questioning of “did we have something to do with the bringing of a dictatorship of the Supreme Court to power? We’re never going to do that again.”—but it was also not (only) a response to the 2000 election, it was also a response to Iraq and to Bush. With respect to Iraq it was seen I think on a gut level as a referendum on Iraq; you know—the world is watching us. Just like we said in Chicago in 1968, you know we have got to come through. Despite Kerry’s ambivalence on his own record and on what he says about Iraq, the defeat of Bush would have spoken well for the American people and it would have opened up possibilities for social movements with the inauguration of Kerry. Just as nobody knew that social movements would begin after the inauguration of Kennedy, but they did. So, people really united almost fanatically, and I think they did well, particularly because the Democratic Party had all these front groups that are called 527s—that is a section of law that permits you to set up an organization, put money in it, and advocate on an issue, as long as you don’t advocate for a candidate; you can register and mobilize voters, as long as you don’t do it for a single candidate. They had them on health issues—health care—environmental issues, but there was none on Iraq or foreign policy.

So, it was a campaign that was sort of poisoned at the beginning by the inability or unwillingness of the Democratic Party at the level of organization to decide “Iraq: For or Against.” Why was that? I think it is quite simple, if you look at it from an organizational point of view. I will give you an example. Why is the Democratic Party relatively united against Bush’s plan of Social Security? Because the anchor tenets of the Democratic Party—the AFL-CIO and the AARP, those groups—are 100% united on Social Security. There is no anchor tenet of the Democratic Party Organization that wants to privatize Social Security. There are individual Senators, who in response to fundraising opportunities, will drift off, but organizationally the Democratic Party has no internal schism. With respect to Iraq the Democratic Party has an internal organizational schism. 1) The AFL-CIO institutionally is not against the war in Iraq. This goes very far back to the days when the CIA ran the AFL-CIO operations internationally and the CIO acted like the German Social Democratic Party domestically. The AFL-CIO is only slowly coming out of that heritage. For instance, they were quite active covertly and overtly in the Anti-Chavez activities in Venezuela. But they also are becoming anti-empire, anti-imperial because of the trade issue; they see that jobs are lost, and because some of their union activists are being killed in Central America. But they are not there yet; they are officially neutral or mixed on the war in in Iraq. 2) AIPEC, the American-Israel Political Action Committee-they are enormously important within the Democratic Party. They supported the war in Iraq and they are pounding away about the need to escalate into Iran. So the Democratic Party is neutralized because two of its anchor tenets are pro-war. Their big problem—as the right wing likes to point out—and the right wing is correct on this—the big drag for the Democratic Party are those rank-and-filers. The base of the Democratic Party is anti-war, overwhelmingly, overwhelmingly, so the problem for the Democratic Party is how to satisfy the base without losing it again to a Nader or a third party, while at the same time paying its respects to its internal organizational interest groups. And if you read it that way, you see why Kerry campaigned the way he did.

You also wonder what it would take to get the Democratic Party to become anti-war. My answer to that is, you have to inspire and instigate the rank and file of the Democratic Party to pressure their leaders and to create a climate of opinion in which their leaders have to act, rather than taking a third party route, which I think is very difficult in national politics in the U.S., because in the short run the Republicans benefit from the loss of third party votes from Democrats and so on. So it is a quandary; we do not have and in the near future will in the near future not have a multi-party system. Our Green Party types, our Social Democratic Party types are buried under the big tent of the Democratic Party, but you can see the same machinations within the Democratic Party.

Now on the issue of Iraq I’m not one of these humanitarian hawks. I have a rather hard view. I believe that it is a politically expedient view as well, but I can’t convince the Democrats, I am aware of that. My view is that the invasion of Iraq is unwarranted as a matter of moral principle, that the longer we stay in Iraq, the more we will suffer in terms of the loss of life on all sides, the loss of budget money, dollars—a billion dollars a week that could go elsewhere, and the loss of any remaining moral reputation of the United States of America. So I am for immediate decision to withdraw. I think I represent about 40 million Americans. There is another 60 or 80 million who believe that the war is unwarranted, but they are ambivalent about whether an immediate withdrawal will create more trouble. In other words, “it was a mistake to get in, but it would be a mistake to get out.” Those people have to be addressed and convinced that the mistake only worsens if we stay in; they have to be convinced that there is an alternate strategy. And if they are not convinced, then the war will run its course; and if it continues to be bad, more of those people in the 60 million category will move to the 40 million category of getting out. That would be terrible, because it would mean Iraqi people and American soldiers would suffer because of the ambivalence of the American public about whether it would be a bigger mistake to leave than the mistake to go (was). So that’s where we are. I see the following:

These are the scenarios:

The first scenario: that the Iraqization policy will collapse and the United States will be forced into an embarrassing retreat. The argument goes like this: that no way can Iraqi forces be trained in sufficient numbers and with sufficient morale to kill other Iraqis on behalf of the United States’ occupation. Since the U.S. policy is to withdraw as far as possible from our own soldiers being killed and push Iraqis out into the battlefield, the insurgents will overwhelm the Iraqi forces—just as happened with Vietnam—and when the Iraqi forces (fail), that leg of the occupation will collapse and will tip. We then will be at a crisis point of unknown proportions. Obviously world and domestic anti-war sentiment will go up. The nightmare of the neoconservatives will have reached a kind of apex: do they have to cut and run?

the second scenario is that the United States persists in a quagmire indefinitely. This is a fairly likely possibility. The quagmire means nobody wins; it is a standoff, and it stays on television. The blood is still on television—unlike Afghanistan, where the blood is off television. This is a big problem; the quagmire is a political problem for Bush, because it means the war will be on television as we head into elections. His goal is to steer public opinion into believing that he has an exit strategy, as is proven by creating a client government, writing a constitution, having an election by December. All of that is on the political timetable of the United States, but if the battlefield timetable of Iraq is out of sync, then Bush and Carl Rove will be facing a political problem, going into next year, which is that the war will still be a billion dollars a week, Americans will still be dying, we’ll be at the 2500 range of Americans dead, Iraqis will still be dying and the Democrats will start coming out of the bunkers and raising questions, because they have to go back to the voters. It is a terrible pressure on politicians, I know, but they’ll have to (laughter).

The third scenario is the one that I think is likely, even more than the first two. And that is—in the Vietnam war and in almost any war which you watch—when you see the dominant powers’ troops, the military strategy being defeated, or a stalemate or a quagmire, then the solution is to escalate. Never think that escalation comes from strength, escalation comes from weakness. All the escalations during Vietnam were when the United States was facing defeat, and the generals or others would go in and say, we can’t tolerate defeat, we’ve got to add 100,000 more troops, or more money, or more weapons. Or we have to invade North Vietnam or we have to bomb Cambodia. So escalation is to me the scenario to watch. Escalation could mean several things:

Bombing Iran perhaps in collaboration with the Israelis. That would be the summertime or fall.
Inadvertently winding up in a battle with North Korea, which would take the administration far off track, but it could happen.
Another intelligence lapse and security lapse, despite the hundreds of billions of dollars spent, and the United States is attacked. That drives the country to the right.

The result of that politically is to re-impose the draft. So escalation abroad; draft at home. This is not the preferred course of Carl Rove, it’s not the preferred course of George Bush; it is the preferred course perhaps of some die-hards, but I am describing it as what could possibly unfold, and you need to be ready. The peace movement is not ready. The peace movement is just coming out of a kind of depression or funk, because the election of Bush—I am told even by people here—was a troubling development and depressed them—just what Rove wanted, he wanted you to become depressed and remain depressed. And then the Iraqi election came, which I warned against—I said this is a sucker punch. They’re going to have millions of people vote. Nobody is going to examine the voting process. It is designed to have an election in Iraq in order to prevent an anti-war movement in the U.S., because the middle of the road Democratic Party will say, “how can we pull out, when all the Iraqis are voting under these wonderful elections we have created?”

So war is a terrible thing to strategize about, because anything is possible. Now it is two or three months later (i.e. after the elections in Iraq) and now the election in Iraq has spent its fuel. It no longer impresses Iraqis; it no longer whets the appetite of Americans or the media. This may be premature also; but currently—you know you’ve had five hundred Iraqis killed in highly public attacks in the last two or three weeks. Condoleezza Rice—as I would expect—is rushing over there. They don’t want to do that, because they want to make it appear that it is a purely Iraqi self determining process. In fact, what we set up is capsizing and she had to go and put her feet on Iraqi soil in order to tell those pesky Iraqis that they’ve got to get in line. The problem is, when Condoleezza Rice talks about “inclusivity”, remember where she is coming from: the inclusivity of the Republican Party that makes her—an African-American woman—the Secretary of State—a token; the inclusivity that allowed Chevron to name an oil tanker after her and put her on the board of Chevron for ten years—a token. But when you look at Iraq, the solution is not to find 5 token Sunnis, imperil their lives by making them come to meetings to discuss the constitution. No. That won’t work, because a poll of Iraqis, the latest poll we have from January, showed that of Sunnis 89% want a near term U.S. withdrawal, military withdrawal; of Shia 69% want the same thing, so you have—I don’t know about the Curds, whether they were polled—so you have over two thirds of the subject population wanting an American military withdrawal with a time line.

So how do you become inclusive in a situation where you are trying to run a country and you want to include the sentiment of the vast majority? Here is where the peace movement should go in my opinion, and then I am done:

“Immediate withdrawal” is the wrong buzz word, because you can’t immediately withdraw. We couldn’t immediately withdraw from this restaurant. So you set yourself up for attack: “What do you mean immediate withdrawal?” I always say immediate decision to withdraw; immediate decision to end the occupation. It’s a little bit more understandable for people. If they say, “shouldn’t we wait it out?” I think the best argument is to say, “How long are you willing to wait?” “I saw 26 Iraqis were just killed, you’re saying they will be more violent if we leave. But when are you going to acknowledge that our occupation is the immediate cause of the violence?” They are being violent against the occupation. So how could the end of the occupation create more violence? It might create continuing violence, but at least answer the question: “how long will you sit on the fence? If you don’t want to withdraw tomorrow morning, what set of conditions, what cost to the American people, what cost in dishonour to our country, what cost in blood would make you get up from your fine couch and say, ‘I am for getting out’?” I guess the Iraqis will have to wait to find out from these Americans.

Here is the way to do it: Kennedy was right, and then he pulled back, because the party undermined him—Ted Kennedy—he said two-three months ago, “Set a one year timetable for military withdrawal.” Forget the one year part; the core of this is to put an incentive on the table for the Iraqi resistance with all of its diversity and all of its factions to look at. In other words, if the United States wants something, what does it want? It wants a continuing share of Iraqi crude (oil), right? And it wants its friends in Israel not to be attacked the day after we leave, from missile silos in Baghdad, and it wants its troops not be humiliated in battle—you could add to the list. Those are reasonable demands, but to get those, you have to offer something, namely, the end of the occupation and the war by a date certain. Why would people that you haven’t defeated on the battle field join your client government? It isn’t possible. She’s (i.e. Condoleezza Rice) undertaking the impossible. She cannot even—I think she is just playing out this sad stage of the conflict, but if the resistance can’t be quashed militarily—and I doubt that it can, but who knows, but if it can’t be—then you have to acknowledge the resistance demand—and it is not enough to say, they don’t have leaders to talk to—I think the resistance is a resistance against the war and occupation, right? So you have to offer the end of the war and occupation, you have to offer contracts to those Iraqi firms that are being privatized, by order of Viceroy Bremer. You remember those orders he left behind? You have to say, the American troops will leave by this date. You have to have a bargaining chip. It is just that simple. But to get there Bush and Rove have to decide that they have no alternative. I don’t think we’re there yet, but I think we could be there.

The Democratic Party is dormant right now. But in a democratic system the Democratic Party has to wake up. Right now they are doing social security and Iraq doesn’t exist, but by next year they have to run for office.

So we need Progressive Democratic Clubs in all the congressional districts, saying, “We’re not going to vote for you until you come and sit down at the table with us to talk to us about Iraq. It’s not enough just to keep saying it was a mistake and then vote 85 billion dollars to continue funding the mistake.
Secondly, we need to look for a presidential candidate in 2008 now, because the presidential campaigns have already begun. They need to know that there will be another Howard Dean; if not Howard Dean, that there will be another Howard Dean.
Three, we need to keep up the pressure on the cost. On my website it will show how much money has been spent this second in Iraq, and what that would pay for in terms of 4 year college scholarships. You can go to www.costsofwar.com and adjust it any way that you want to, the cost to Missouri, the cost to Michigan. That has not been emphasized enough, but that is a winning political issue, overwhelmingly.
We have to prevent the resumption of the draft. Even if it seems strange to fight against something that is not in place, you have to understand—as Krugman said yesterday, that something has to give here. They are out of recruits. The only people they are recruiting are misfits, people with criminal records, people with drug habits, people they would never recruit into the U.S. military. They are out. Forty percent (40%) of the troops on the ground are people who signed up for things like flood control in Pennsylvania. They didn’t read that fine print of the contract, that took them to Iraq and keeps them doing duty over and over and over again. The morale in the armed forces is not good, but the essential point is that they are overextended on the war in Iraq when they claim to be a superpower. If they are needed anywhere else we don’t have the troops. If they need more troops for Iraq, we don’t have the troops. And the troops we do have are heading into another 125 degree F summer. With no end in sight. So I think that these are the kinds of pressures that add up: pressure on the Democrats, pressure around the cost, pressure around recruiting, and then the final one:
Replace the “Coalition of the Willing” with the “Coalition of the Unwilling”. To end international support for U.S. policy. This is where you (i.e.those of us in Germany)come in. You may say, “Well, if it is an empire, why does it have to have a coalition? Because empires need cover. They need clients. Bush is very proud of the coalition of the willing; he trots it out all the time. But what is happened to it is that thirty four countries at the beginning are now (reduced to) twenty. Even the Ukraine—the United States put 60 Million Dollars into the Ukraine election—after the new Ukraine leadership was elected, they withdrew their 150 troops. Italy is tottering on the edge. Berlusconi will lose the election if he doesn’t do something about Iraq. He has been humiliated by the United States that killed that Chief of Security. And the United States will not apologize. Blair has been fatally wounded in the British elections—a great outcome from my point of view—and something that the Democratic Party will look at very, very closely, because it was of course Democrats from the United States that ran that British Labour Party elections. They were the paid consultants, the whiz kids, the focus group people, and the advisors. So the coalition of the willing is going down and being replaced I hope by a coalition of the unwilling. That will take tremendous pressure by the global social movements in America and Europe to keep the pressure on the German government, the French government, and other governments to isolate the United States, make the United States do what it says its first principle is, be unilateral (laughter): all right, if you want to pursue unilateralism, you want to put John Bolton in as the UN ambassador. Fine, don’t expect any support from anyone anywhere in the world. See how long unilateralism will last in Iraq. It will not last.

So this is the strategy. Convince the moderates to get out. Convince the Democrats they have to speak to the war when they run for re-election. Educate people as to the actual daily cost in dollars and lives. Keep up the counter-recruiting, so that there is no possibility of a draft and the Army simply runs out of the ability to fight, because it is totally overextended. And end any international alliances until the war in Iraq is concluded.

This is an anti-war strategy that I believe will work. We can’t predict the outcome on the battlefields.

But it seems to me that we need to put the war in Iraq behind us and return to the issues of global justice and alternatives to war in international affairs. And the road to a better world economically, socially and in terms of multilateral diplomacy leads through Baghdad. That is the exit strategy I am looking for.