Six months into the administration of Barack Obama: the unjust wars continue, and further confrontations loom. Millions of people dead, uprooted and displaced; new military offensives begin in Afghanistan, and a military occupation in Iraq is presented as “withdrawal”. Guantanamo and Bagram remain as hellholes of the systematic torture the U.S. has developed as routine policy, and the architects and perpetrators of this barbarism remain at large. Obama and his top officials refuse to release further evidence of the war crimes committed by his predecessors, or to prosecute the criminals.
An important juncture has been reached. How to advance and build a massive and powerful movement that can put an end to the wars and torture, the rendition and spying; who are the forces in society to be reached and relied on, what form must the actions of the people take to truly shape and influence society, how should demands and slogans be framed, how can the broadest number of people possible be brought into determined resistance?
On this page are two articles, with proposals from the Steering Committee of World Can’t Wait, and from David Swanson of After Downing Street. They demand close study; they demand that people come to grips with their ideas, plans and proposals.
We are publishing them both in the interest of stimulating a debate over the way forward, and encourage people to join in this debate by posting their ideas and thinking on this site. We are looking forward to your insights and comments, and we are looking forward to joining together to build our common efforts to end the unjust wars and the torture as powerfully and as quickly as possible.