For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Our guest is Deborah Sweet from World Can't Wait.
The website is worldcantwait.net.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing?
I'm good, Scott.
Thanks.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here.
I'm glad to be here, too.
You're stirring up a lot of controversy.
Oh, well, I'm trying.
In the antiwar movement, and I have a reputation for that, too.
Well, good.
Let's be controversial.
I'll start with kind of a mea culpa.
I'm really a mean guy, and I paint too broad a brush a lot of times, and I say things like, damn, antiwar left just picked up and left, and here they, you know, black guy with a D by his name is the president, and so now all of a sudden war is perfectly fine.
But you know what?
That's not right, because liberals are individuals, too.
Leftists and progressives are individuals, too, and there are people who are just as antiwar as they were on January 19th when George Bush was the president of the United States, and that's what you guys are.
The world can't wait there, right?
Yeah, you're right.
There's some of us, but there's not enough.
There's definitely not enough, and we...
Have you really felt a hit?
You really felt...
Oh, look, the antiwar movement collapsed for the most part.
There were a handful of organizations that all the way through the election last year were saying, no, okay, no, this is not a peace president.
Watch what he's saying about Afghanistan and many other things.
So when the election took place and the inauguration took place, the world can't wait.
I think we were one of the few antiwar organizations that was at the inauguration protesting the continuation of two illegitimate occupations.
Yeah, you know, it is interesting, isn't it?
Because for a year and a half, two years leading up to the election, everybody knew that there were two guys on the Democratic side in the primaries who were real antiwar guys, and that was Denis Kucinich and Mike Revelle.
And if either of those guys were the president, our troops would be on ships on their way home from the Middle East and Central Asia right now.
And we all know that.
And everybody knew, didn't they?
I thought that during the election that Barack Obama was Hillary Clinton, only a black dude instead of a white lady.
But other than that, you had your surface differences, and then you had your policy.
It's not really a coincidence, is it, that she is his secretary of state?
No, it's not a coincidence at all.
It's just amazing to me that people can forget.
If Barack Obama was a warmonger compared to Denis Kucinich, then how is it that he's supposed to be Denis Kucinich now, when we know that, no, he's not.
Denis is still in the House.
Well, I think Barack Obama was created, actually.
His candidacy was created and supported off of the tremendous opposition and hatred of the Bush regime.
And through the work of the anti-war movement, and a lot of us who were persistently calling people to deal with reality and the direction that the Bush administration was taking things.
And, in fact, it would have been much better if the call, World Can't Wait made in 2005, to drive Bush and Cheney from office by a mass independent political upsurge of the people, rather than an election where people thought, well, we're solving this problem by electing someone who's going to be better.
But you had not had the kind of movement from the people against the direction that was necessary to not just change the face, but to force the people in power to respond to this mass demand against the war and against the torture.
And that's just the beginning of it.
There's a whole Bush program in place that many of us were protesting in Washington two days ago.
The attacks on gay people, the attacks on women's rights.
On our telephone lines.
Yeah, what about the mass surveillance and the push by the Obama administration to keep the Patriot Act intact?
Yeah, well, indeed.
So tell me this, what are your people telling you?
You have your core group that runs World Can't Wait with you there, but all your supporters, do they say to you, well, we just have to give Obama some time?
I mean, because, again, these are the people who understood the difference between Obama and Kucinich back during the primaries, but who are now trying to forget it, right?
Well, just, you know, your earlier question was, didn't everybody know?
I think people may have had doubts, but in fact they wanted to believe the hype.
They wanted to believe that there's hope in somehow Obama or anyone would come in and change policy.
And what we're dealing with here, I believe, is a whole system of imperialism, a system bent on empire that is not just made up of the policies of one president after another.
All of this is much bigger than the decisions of one man or one group of people in Congress, in a certain sense.
However, Bush came to really represent a whole direction of sort of a unity between the theocrats, you know, the Christian fundamentalists in positions of power and the neocons.
So we had a situation where we believe it would have been possible, given the direction they were going, to unite huge numbers of people in driving them from power in shame.
And, you know, there were moments in 2005 and 2006 where I think it could have gone that way.
However, you know, we didn't succeed in that.
So there were many reasons over the last few years that gave people pause and made them sort of give up hope that anything was going to be better.
And then along comes Barack Obama and, you know, we've never seen a politician get so much endorsement from all the mainstream editorial departments.
You know, for instance, it was not even contended.
He got a whole lot of support.
It was really pushed.
And he was elected.
So I beg to differ a little bit that everybody saw this.
People really wanted to hope things were going to be different.
We have seen a turnaround since Obama has been president, you know, nine or ten months now, where people are looking at exactly what has happened with the escalation in Afghanistan.
They're not seeing Guantanamo being closed.
They're seeing him argue for indefinite detention, continued, and, in fact, suggesting things that Bush never would have gotten away with suggesting without mass protest.
I've felt that the Obama presidency in many ways is worse because things are continuing that started under Bush and even before that, of course, but people are not protesting because they're feeling like, oh, let's give him some time.
He has our best interests at heart.
Yes.
You know, really, if Bush had gone ahead and scrapped the, what, 21st Amendment or 22nd Amendment and stayed in office for a third term, we'd have basically the same policies.
Only everybody would hate him instead of, oh, look, a fresh-faced team of new people to come in and carry out the same policy, but for some reason with a blank slate to start with.
Angela, you wanted to get in here, right?
Yeah.
Hi, Debra.
This is Angela.
I have a question regarding, as a feminist, I had a visceral reaction to Code Pink's rationale for rethinking the occupation of Afghanistan.
Oh.
And what I'm wondering is, do you think there's going to be long-term damage with linking feminism to occupation and militarism?
Well, it's not, you know, Code Pink didn't come up with that.
It was, you know, to be really fair, the first argument I heard in 2001 was from Ellie Smeal from the Fund for the Feminist Majority, who actually supported the Bush invasion of Afghanistan on the rationale that the U.S. would come in and save the women who were being certainly severely repressed by the Taliban.
Nobody is arguing that there was any good that came from a Taliban-controlled country.
Religious fundamentalism of any kind is always going to be a horror for women.
But, you know, I think people are very confused and wrong-headed if they think that a U.S. occupation of any country, especially one of the poorest countries of the world, is done in order to bring democracy, freedom for women, you know, to leave the people in better shape, that has nothing to do with it.
That's a way of selling an occupation to us.
Well, and I think that is such an important point, that kind of, you know, I tried to mention this in the interview with Medea Benjamin, but I guess I didn't make a real point out of it, that they can come up with excuses from here to there if they want, but the real question is, what is the American government doing in Afghanistan, really?
I mean, certainly it's not because Laura Bush wanted to teach little girls to read, you know.
Yeah, we would have left a long time ago, but for the rights of women, which the Pentagon cares so much about, and the neocons, of course, are so concerned about the rights of the posh-tune female, right, of course.
Well, really, and in both of the governments of Iraq and Afghanistan, which are puppet governments created by the U.S. and who have, especially in the case of Afghanistan, very little popular support in Afghanistan.
I don't think that Hamid Karzai could go, you know, a mile outside of Kabul right now in any kind of safety.
These are governments that have installed, in the case of Afghanistan, warlords into the ruling circles.
These are people who every bit as much as the Taliban have oppressed, especially women.
These are serial rapists in some cases who are in the ruling circles now in the Karzai government.
This is not a government that has any care of the people.
They've brought in, you know, I heard an Afghani woman speak here in New York last week, and she said, oh yeah, Afghanistan, it's a free country.
It's free for rapists, it's free for drug runners, it's free for foreign troops.
That's where all the freedom is right now.
Mercenaries, don't forget the mercenaries, they're free.
The private contractors.
And you know that Obama has more private contractors coming into Afghanistan than troops.
Even on the point of the women who, and I think that Medea Benjamin did have a fair point, at least in citing the lady that's participating in the American occupation government there, that these people would be in trouble if America packed up and left.
But it seems to me like if that specifically is the concern, then we ought to leave now.
Because the longer we stay and the more women we bring into the Vichy government there, which is, pardon my language, but certainly that's the way the people of Afghanistan see it, as a quizzling puppet government.
The more women we bring into the thing, the more of them are going to get killed when we finally go.
Well, the occupation does nothing to bring any stability to the country.
It brings in money for, as we said, drug running.
It brings in money for graft and corruption.
It is pitting different Afghani forces against another.
And it is actually fostering and probably going to end up, you know, this is the irony of it, Obama's going to bring a lot more troops in and is most likely going to end up with some form of negotiation with the Taliban.
He's going to end up turning the country back over to some form of religious fundamentalism.
And people who have cooperated with the foreign occupiers all this time.
And it's going to continue to be a disaster for the people.
Better for the interest of humanity, for the interest of people in this country, and especially in Afghanistan and Iraq, if the occupiers just leave.
However, you know, they have no interest in doing that.
They are not going to easily give up the Middle East by any means because the U.S. right now does not want to be seen as a defeated empire.
And in fact, they need to keep control of the Middle East.
And they have ambitions of going further.
I'm sure you guys have been talking about the negotiations with Iran, which is really bullying posed as negotiations.
Oh yeah, absolutely.
Demanding that they drop their inalienable rights to civilian nuclear power and beating them over the head with the Non-Proliferation Treaty that they're completely in line with.
The whole thing is, of course, a disaster.
And Hillary Clinton has made it clear, even though the Iranians actually are very willing to deal, as they've proven on nuclear issues, they've already reached an agreement about the exportation and re-importation of uranium, have the Russians increase it from 4 to 20 percent, 235 and so forth.
And even still, Hillary Clinton says, we want to see action, we want to see changes.
We don't believe that these negotiations can possibly work.
And now, I guess someone could try to argue that she's undercutting the authority of the President, but that's only if they close their eyes and believe real hard that he's any less of a warmonger than her.
I mean, he's the boss and she works for him, right?
And I understand now she's really cozy with Robert Gates.
Right, and pushing for more troops.
Yeah, Robert Gates was in the Bush administration and then he's in the Obama administration arguing for the continuity of the same illegitimate, unjust, immoral war.
Yeah, well, she's a Goldwater girl.
He was willing to nuke all of the eastern side of Eurasia, right, in order to protect Americans from the Viet Cong or the North Vietnamese Army, I guess, at least I'll give him that much credit.
Anyway, yeah, and she threatened, of course, to obliterate Iran.
I remember that.
If they were to attack Israel with weapons that they don't have.
Yeah, they're in unity on this.
But she's really good for feminism, too, I've read.
Well, you know, the interests of women just have nothing in common with these people who want to rule the world on the basis of a capitalist, imperialist empire.
They're not going to be able to bring justice for women.
In terms of Angela's question, which I think is a really important one, it does fundamentally have to be solved by the people in Afghanistan and Iraq themselves.
You have these huge embassies coming in.
The U.S. built the largest embassy in the history of the world in Baghdad, and I understand now they're building another big one in Kabul.
They don't intend to leave.
They may switch all this to be outsourced and privatized, but having the military there and Strangleholding the economy and the people is all part of the plan.
And in terms of rights for women, under the Baathists, women could teach university and be doctors and wear jeans and all these things, and now the place is run by ayatollahs, at least from Baghdad to Basra is anyway.
Yeah, and I mean, maybe it was more like U.S. society, and as we know, women are not free in U.S. society either, even if we're not made to wear burkas.
Now what we have is a situation where the right to abortion and even birth control is still under threat, even though George Bush was voted out of office.
This direction is continuing, and when you have a president like Barack Obama who says we have to find common ground with the people who want to kill abortion doctors, which is what he said several weeks before Dr. Tiller was killed in Omaha, then we have a real problem.
And again, we know that all of those rights have to be established coming up from the people by a really determined movement that expresses directly, not mediated through Congress, but expresses directly what are our interests and what is it we need.
And right now World Can't Wait is very encouraged because we had a very good protest with other groups last Monday in front of the White House.
Sixty-one people arrested, about 500 people there to protest Obama's war in Afghanistan.
We, along with Cindy Sheehan and other groups, plan a lot more in the next year of very determined protests, but we are also going to stay demanding prosecution of the people in the Bush regime who put together the torture laws and the whole U.S. torture state.
We're going to stay on all this, and we very much expect that as things get worse under the Obama administration, more people will sort of wake up and come to the land of reality and decide, well, it is up to us.
We have to do something about this and stop it.
Deborah, I have a more practical approach question.
For a lot of the listeners in our audience who come from an activist background, what should people start doing now?
What's the next step?
Because we're obviously in a bit of chaos because of the Nobel Prize and what happened with Code Pink.
So what is a very practical move we can make?
Well, you know, one thing I called for on Friday on my e-list, and people can sign up for that at worldcantwait.net, was for people to get very busy on writing letters to the editor in response to the Nobel Peace Prize.
And, you know, I am completely disgusted by polls that say, oh, let's congratulate Obama, I mean petitions, let's congratulate Obama and tell him he has to earn the Nobel Peace Prize.
No, there's a very clear direction here.
And we need to think about what the interests of humanity are.
And really, it's very important to get on the airwaves like this and to get into print and write letters to the editor.
It's also important to be out protesting.
There are anti-war protests on this Saturday, October 17th, in I think about 40 locations around the country.
You can find those also at worldcantwait.net.
I always encourage people to be visibly in the streets.
The other thing that we're doing that I think is extremely important, we have a tour of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who are willing to go into high schools to talk to high school students about why they should not sign up for the military right now.
They have an 85% chance, if they go in the military, of being deployed to a war zone.
And we know what that means, but they don't.
They have recruiters lying to them.
They don't have recruiters saying, look, if you're a woman, you have a one in three chance of being raped while you're in the U.S. military.
Hey, that's actually a big improvement.
It used to be like 52%, right?
So I'm happy to hear that it's now less than a majority of American female recruits being raped.
That's progress right there.
Well, you know what?
We don't know.
We actually don't know the statistics because it's so hard for women to ever report this.
It could be much higher.
Anyway, you're making a serious point about getting these IVAW guys into elementary schools, junior high or what.
And are you successful at this?
Actually get a government school to let anti-war soldiers come and talk to the kids?
Well, you go through the teacher because the teachers care very much about the students.
And they see the recruiters getting such extreme access to the students before, during, and after school and at home at night.
And they don't like this either.
How can people participate in this project and help with this?
That sounds really important to me.
We are not your soldiers.org or they can call us at 866-973-4463.
And, you know, we have resources.
We can work with the teachers or the principals or the students themselves in putting together classroom presentations or assemblies or even working with them outside of school.
If this war is going to stop, we have to intervene and stop them from getting another generation of cannon fodder.
I think it's so important that you guys at World Can't Wait, again it's Deborah Sweet from World Can't Wait.
The website is worldcantwait.net.
I think it's so important that you guys are sticking by your guns and trying to still be as loud as you can.
As you well know, there's this, you know, the narrative, the common narrative of the popular conversation about these subjects in general in the society is Obama is some kind of peacenik and the right wing only criticizes him for not waging war enough.
And as long as there's not a very clear voice explaining why actually what's wrong with Barack Obama is how much he's like Rush Limbaugh, not how much different he is in terms of what he's about, then I think we're going to really be stuck with this, the way the left right thing is set up.
And the best thing that can happen is for him to be consistently attacked from the left and not for not being a hardcore leftist, but simply for, you know, the basic things like the war, violating the law in terms of his indefinite detentions, you know, reauthorizing the Patriot Act, as you mentioned earlier, these kinds of things.
He's got to be attacked from the principled left loudly and consistently or the conversation falls by default back into the hands of David Brooks and people like that.
Exactly.
It's a constant battle where they're trying to reframe reality and we just have to be reality based people.
I think if we tell people, and I found this to be true, including this morning at the Times Square recruiting station, what this military and what this occupation is doing to the people in Iraq and Afghanistan, this is people living in this country who just see the news.
If we tell them that a million civilians in Iraq were killed, 4.5 million displaced, that that country is not going to recover under occupation.
The sewer system, the educational system, the legal system, it was all destroyed by the U.S. occupation and you don't rebuild that by sending in these huge multinational corporations, you know, outsourcing this with contractors from a hundred other countries, paid nothing to come in and occupy them and try to set up something that mirrors the worst of this country.
These elections in Afghanistan were a fraud.
People in this country have some experience with stolen elections and I think we ought to be sympathetic.
This is what happened to us in 2000 and many people feel also in 2004.
That's really a great way to put it, that we're exporting the worst of us, only it just makes us worse and worse too.
It's not like we get rid of that worse and put it on them and then we can be okay again.
We just become more and more like the Taliban as we force our Taliban-like structure on their country, whether it's the Taliban's ruling or Karzai.
It's true.
This is why we call ourselves the world can't wait and we are really arguing on a very basic moral level with people that American lives are not more important than anybody else's lives.
If we care about humanity, then we have to stop these occupations and the direction that this country is going.
All right everybody, that's Debra Sweet from World Can't Wait.
The website is worldcantwait.net.
I really appreciate your time on the show today.
Great, it's fun.
Let's do it again.
Indeed, I hope so.
Okay.
