MARCH 17 – On the third anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the imperialist invaders are in deep trouble. With close to 200,000 “coalition” troops and mercenaries, plus an Iraqi puppet army, police and paramilitary forces of over 350,000, they have been unable to reduce the insurgency. Well over 100,000 Iraqis have died as a result of the war and occupation, in addition to 3,000 deaths among the occupation forces (U.S., “allies” and “contractors”). After every bogus gunpoint election, the corrupt quisling politicians are at each others’ throats, dispelling any pretense of “democracy.” The Iraqi economy is a wreck, with oil production, electricity and water supplies still well below the levels achieved by Saddam Hussein, despite United Nations sanctions. The Iraqi strong man (and former CIA hit man) has made a mockery of the show trial against him, using it as a platform to denounce the “victors’ justice” and call for resistance to the occupation. And day by day, the country lurches toward full-scale civil war between Shiite, Kurdish and Sunni communalists.

Meanwhile on the home front, popular support for the war has gone up in smoke. The most recent polls show that 57 percent of the American public think the Iraq war was a mistake, 60 percent say the war is going badly or very badly, two-thirds say George Bush doesn’t have a clear plan for dealing with Iraq. Last November, the first leading Democrat, Pennsylvania Congressman and longtime war hawk John Murtha, came out for pulling U.S. troops out of Iraq. Now even far right-wing Republicans like William F. Buckley are saying that the U.S. has “failed” in Iraq and that Bush’s problem is “acknowledgment of defeat.” Currently, the administration wants to deflect attention from its Iraqi debacle by rattling U.S. nukes at Iran.

Yet even though the U.S. war machine is mired in the quick sands of the Near East, the “antiwar movement” is in the doldrums. It has long been rent by squabbling that has now escalated to an internecine war that oscillates between cold and hot. This weekend each antiwar group is holding its own separate protest. In New York, the Troops Out Coalition (TOC) and its parent, the International Action Center (IAC) led by the Workers World Party (WWP), will demonstrate on March 18 at the armed forces recruiting station in Times Square. Simultaneously, Not in Our Name (NION), led by the Revolutionary Communist Party, will be at the army recruiting station in the Bronx. International A.N.S.W.E.R., led by the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL – a 2004 split from the WWP) will go to the Bronx recruiting station the next day. The Campus Antiwar Network (CAN), led by the Internationalist Socialist Organization (ISO), is limiting itself to low-key campus actions. And the other major player, United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ), led by the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CoC) along with the Communist Party (CP), is making its big push a month later, on April 29.

Yet in their demands, these outfits hardly differ at all. They all call for “stop the war,” “bring the troops home,” and some variant of “money for jobs, not for war” – as if the imperialist slaughter in Iraq was a matter of foreign policy, budget priorities and U.S. casualties. From the standpoint of Marxism, of the revolutionary internationalist program of V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky, these antiwar coalitions are all class-collaborationist “popular fronts.” They seek to “unite” reformist pseudo-socialists with bourgeois liberals on the basis of cleaning up the U.S.’ act, appealing to the “peace is patriotic” crowd with calls like “Support our troops, bring them home.”

The Internationalist Group and League for the Fourth International fight instead to defeat U.S. imperialism and defend the peoples and countries under U.S. attack. In contrast to the opportunists’ red-white-and-blue appeals to “bring the troops home,” we call to drive the colonial  occupiers out of Iraq and Afghanistan. Rather than spreading pacifist illusions about “stopping” the war, we call for class war against the imperialist war. We defend the right of the theocratic Iranian regime and the North Korean deformed workers state to get any weapons necessary to defend against the imperialist warmongers. Instead of tailing after “antiwar” Democrats, we fight for workers strikes against the war, for transport workers to “hot cargo” military goods and for building a revolutionary workers party.

So what is behind all the sniping between the competing pop-front antiwar coalitions? In a statement last December 12, the UFPJ announced it “Rejects Future Work with ANSWER.” The stated grounds were complaints about organizational problems in the Washington, D.C. march last September 24 that was co-sponsored by the two groups. ANSWER responded on December 16 with its own complaints, but beyond disputes over who went over their allotted platform time or was responsible for the lead banner ending up in the middle of the march, it pointed to broader political reasons for the UFPJ’s decision to break off relations. These include the latter’s unwillingness to include slogans in defense of the Palestinians against Israeli occupation as central demands of antiwar demos; and “UFPJ's increasing orientation toward and flirtation with the Democratic Party.”

ANSWER noted that “In the core of UFPJ's leadership are political parties and organizations that worked tirelessly for John Kerry and the election of Democrats.” It accused the UFPJ, from its inception, of being on a “relentless path of splitting the movement,” and traced the disputes back to the 1990-91 Gulf War, when the predecessors of the UFPJ called for U.N. sanctions instead of U.S. invasion. It pointed to the “great excitement about John Murtha's disaffection with the war” in the UFPJ, which wrote that the Pennsylvania Democrat “deserves praise and support for his courageous leadership.” Murtha isn’t for withdrawal of U.S. troops from the Near East, ANSWER points out, only for their “redeployment” somewhere outside Iraq. But, it quickly adds, “fewer U.S. soldiers...in harm’s way” would be “a welcome development.”

It is certainly true that UFPJ tailors its politics to the measure of the Democratic Party and bourgeois liberals generally. Its political complaints against ANSWER (laid out in an article by Bill Weinberg of the War Resisters League, “The Question of International ANSWER”) echo the litany of right-wingers and professional red-baiters like Christopher Hitchens, pointing to the WWP/IAC’s adulation of Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and the Kim dynasty in North Korea, and the WWP’s support for the crushing of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. In fact, Workers World split from Trotskyism to embrace Stalinists from Mao Zedong to Fidel Castro and Kim Il Sung, as well as nationalist anti-communist butchers like Milosevic and Hussein. Yet the central leadership of UFPJ is chock full of Stalinists and ex-Stalinist social democrats who also supported the suppression of the Hungarian workers uprising, hailed Kim, etc. What hypocrisy!

Seeking to cohabit with liberal Democrats is no preserve of the UFPJ. Workers World and its various offshoots have always done it. In the 1990s, they were the “best builders” of demonstrations for black Democrat Jesse Jackson. In fact, all the antiwar coalitions are desperately seeking Democrats to grace their speakers’ platforms – class collaboration is the name of their poplar-front game. The UFPJ is just cruder about it than the IAC/ANSWER/TONC. Thus in the run-up to the 2004 election, the UFPJ sponsored the huge march outside the Republican convention in NYC on the slogan, “No to the Bush Agenda” – not-so-veiled support for the “anybody but Bush” agenda of voting for Democrat John Kerry (who wanted more U.S. troops in Iraq) or at most for xenophobic populist Ralph Nader. Equally blatant is the RCP/NION whose latest campaign, “The World Can’t Wait – Drive Out the Bush Regime,” is endorsed by Democratic Congressmen John Conyers, Bobby Rush and Maxine Waters, Jesse Jackson Sr. and none other than Brig. General (retired) Janis Karpinski, the war criminal who commanded the Abu Ghraib torture prison in Iraq. Talk about shameless!

Under pressure from the right, ANSWER has lately been affecting an “anti-imperialist” stance. At a March 11 session of the annual Left Forum in New York, the UFPJ’s Leslie Cagan faced off with ANSWER’s Brian Becker, who declared that it was necessary to go back to the Bolsheviks in World War I, that the Democrats supported the war, etc. But as a spokesman for the Internationalist Group noted in the discussion, ANSWER has always sought Democrats as star speakers for their antiwar demos. If they can’t get Jesse Jackson they’ll go for Dennis Kucinich, Al Sharpton or Charles Rangel. And, the IG speaker pointed out, in claiming to be guided by the Bolsheviks, Becker leaves out a key point: Lenin’s call for the defeat of “one’s own” imperialism in an imperialist war.

Anyone serious about combating imperialist wars would demand capitalist politicians out, as they are all defenders of a system of war, poverty and racism (and this goes for minor bourgeois parties as well, like the Greens and New York’s Working Families Party, who seek to keep the discontent of those who can’t stomach voting for the Democrats safely within the bourgeois electoral system). It is necessary to fight for the revolutionary class independence of the workers from all wings of the capitalist ruling class.

We Trotskyists call to mobilize working-class struggle against the war. In New York City, where Transport Workers Union Local 100 gave a demonstration of workers’ power in a three-day transit strike in December, a refusal by dock workers to handle war cargo or any strike action against the war by the transit workers would be worth a thousand “peace crawls” dominated by bourgeois politics.

Unlike fake leftists who call for “unity of the antiwar movement,” we say the capitalist war machine cannot be stopped by voting out the current war party or having a bigger peace parade. It’s not just “Bush’s war,” it’s a bipartisan war drive. It’s not just “neo-liberalism,” it’s capitalism. It’s not just “globalization,” it’s imperialism. It’s not a policy, it’s a system that will keep producing war after war after war until it is smashed by international socialist revolution. n