Gregg M. Horowitz
Associate Professor of Philosophy
March 28 2003

Text of Professor Horowitz's Speech at the March 28, 2003 Peace Rally on Rand Terrace:

These are strange and dark times. As we stand here today, American soldiers are dying, as are Iraqi soldiers; Iraqi civilians, including children and old people, are also dying or suffering injuries and losses from which they will never recover. The resources of an increasingly strapped nation are being squandered in battle while that nation's needs for food, medical care, and other forms of public investment required for a decent human life remain unmet - and that's here in the US! In Iraq, the lack of even the most basic necessities in parts of the country is making the condition of an already long-suffering people into the sort of desperation we can only hope no one in this crowd ever comes near. And things can only get worse, as even the most hawkish commentators on the war, who had argued initially that the conquest of Iraq would be, as Kenneth Adelman called it, a "cakewalk," are now admitting.

Those parts of Iraq in which the war has been fought so far include groups that, we were told, would open their arms to their American liberators and turn to fight against Saddam Hussein. That, we now know, was false - indeed, it was propaganda pure and simple. For days, the British government promoted the view that there was a popular uprising in Basra when, in plain fact, there was, at most, some low-level political score-settling going on, as there always is in wartime. The function of this propaganda, which has almost disappeared from the media, is by now crystal clear: to create the appearance of the need to send troops into the city to engage in the sort of urban warfare that is most deadly to civilians.

To "protect" the citizens of Basra, the so-called coalition aims to pursue a strategy that is maximally dangerous to them. Indeed, the Bush administration has just announced that 130,000 more troops are now being sent to Kuwait because - giving the lie to the propaganda - it turns out that in order to save the village we must first burn it down. More of our soldiers will suffer, and more Iraqis will suffer, in pursuit of the what is propagandistically being called the liberation of Iraq. I believe this war never should have been started. But we must face the fact that those of us who signed petitions and called our representatives and e-mailed the White House and held up signs for the television cameras - those of us who exercised our democratic rights and duties to try to prevent this from happening - lost the struggle. The war is on.

Why, then, are we here today? What must we do now? Why should we continue to speak out against the policy of the Bush administration? There are those who think we should not speak out, that doing so is traitorous and cowardly. Now, cowardly it surely isn't. We are in the minority, if public opinion polls are accurate, and a portion of the majority - a small but vocal portion - tries to bully us into believing that our patriotic obligation is just to shut up. Some in that small but vocal portion, which falsely takes itself to speak for America in general, have gone so far as to say that even to mention in public that the war is not going according to plan is treasonous - Rush Limbaugh, for instance, has threateningly accused the Washington Post of "undermining" the war effort by reporting that the war may take longer than planned.
I guess that must make General William Wallace, head of the Army forces in Iraq, a traitor, too, since in an interview yesterday he said exactly that. Now, I doubt that General Wallace is a traitor, but I am certain that he isn't a coward. I say that speaking the truth as you see it, especially in the face of the shameful but threatening charge that to do so is traitorous, is the mark of courage, not cowardice. And neither is it the mark of treason.

Consider: in the same interview, General Wallace said "the enemy we're fighting is a bit different than the one we war-gamed against ... we knew they were here but we did not know how they would fight." To say that the Iraqis would welcome their American liberators with open arms, as did propagandists like Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz, is, it turns out, politically-driven nonsense. It is not, though, innocent nonsense; it has influenced military policy in such a way that American troops are now in the way of greater harm. If political speech that endangers the lives of American soldiers is the mark of treason, then the first one to be put on trial ought to be that ethically-challenged influence-peddler Richard Perle who in February said to Chris Matthews that "there may be pockets of resistance, but very few Iraqis are going to fight to defend Saddam Hussein."

Richard Perle is, of course, the now-ex-head of the Defense Advisory Board at the Pentagon whose views about this matter played such a significant role in sending American troops into Iraq while, as General Wallace has said, they are under-trained and so under-prepared. It is the politics of Perle and his ilk, and not our politics, that is the major threat to life and limb. So to say this out loud is, therefore, the mark of a critical patriot, not of a traitor. For the sake of the country and the sake of the troops, we must speak out against the cavalcade of propaganda. There are, though, two more reasons we must continue to speak out. First, American politics is at a significant turning point.

If this war is not a war of liberation, if the political objective turns out to be to replace the regime of Saddam Hussein with an occupying army and a McCarthur-like military administrator, then we must say out loud what this war really is - it is a war of conquest. Even Colin Powell - who, recall, is the most reasonable member of the war team - has said that the aim of the war is to establish American dominance in the middle East.

And so we must remind ourselves and others again and again that this is a war of conquest, and that the doctrine of pre-emptive war commits us to further wars of conquest, and we must do so because our way of remaining loyal to America is by helping us all to see past the propaganda so that we may debate openly and in public the dangerous prospect of an emerging American empire. Because I am loyal to an America that is not a nation of conquerors, I do not believe that, if we come to see what we are really up to right now, we would not stand for it.

The America I am loyal to is not the seat of an empire - it is a nation of free citizens collectively committed to democratic self-determination and the rule of law, including international law. This America does not take over other countries and destroy international treaties in the process; it does not take prisoners of war and lock them up in two-square-meter cells for months on end in flagrant violation of the Geneva Convention; it does not submit prisoners of war to "extremes of heat and cold" and, in some cases, hand them over to the security services of other countries where more egregious forms of torture are practiced; it does not withhold information about its policies and how they are developed from the public scrutiny of its own citizenry; and it does not demonize the self-criticism that is the life-blood of democratic politics. Only empires and police states do that, and my America, the America to which I am loyal, is not an imperial police state. But, indeed, the dark and strange days are here when the features of this democratic America need to be spelled out in long and loving detail because this America is in danger at the hands of those who see reminding ourselves of our abiding democratic commitments as treason.

Loyalty to democratic America demands, now more than ever, saying why we believe this war is wrong. There is one more reason we must continue to speak out even though the war is already underway. We may have lost the struggle to stop the war, but the struggle over the future is just beginning. This struggle has two fronts. First, we must continue to challenge the Bush security doctrine of pre-emptive war according to which America attacks any country that might represent a threat to it. This is a perverse doctrine that might more properly be called the Bush insecurity doctrine, for it makes every country with which we disagree scramble to find the maximum deterrent against us, thus forcing those with whom we are in significant political disagreement to rapidly and dangerously militarize. This is what is happening in Iran right now. The Iranian government, already targeted as one of the members of the axis of evil, looks at Iraq and North Korea, sees that one is pre-emptively invaded and the other not, and draws the inevitable conclusion: get nukes now! Does this actually make anyone more secure? Second, we must continue to challenge the delegitimation of the only institution that is capable of offering a secure alternative to the empire builders, the United Nations.

This war will end, later and bloodier rather than the propagandists would have had us believe, and at that point the question of order and reconstruction will emerge. The Bush administration has no intention of allowing the UN to play a significant role in anything except humanitarian relief, and that means its aim is to establish the new political institutions of Iraq unilaterally. Now, that might not be a practical disaster for the Iraqis, although it is worth remembering that no people appreciates having its institutions imposed on it. But even if unilateral imposition enables the Iraqis to begin to rebuild the village that we are burning down, it will be bad for us. We will then be masters of an empire, and the moment we begin to get comfortable with domination is the moment that America forgets its highest aspirations.

Empire is bad for the democratic soul. As Iraq rebuilds, we will need, then more than ever, to renew the struggle for international law and justice. The struggle against pre-emption and for secure international institutions remains in front of us, and so we must continue to speak out.

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