After the demos: troop withdrawals? posted by Richard Seymour

Withdrawal symptoms.
The pro-war Observer today suggests that the UK is to begin withdrawing troops from Iraq in May 2006:

The document being drawn up by the British government and the US will be presented to the Iraqi parliament in October and will spark fresh controversy over how long British troops will stay in the country. Tony Blair hopes that, despite continuing and widespread violence in Iraq, the move will show that there is progress following the conflict of 2003.

...

The increasingly rapid pace of planning for British military disengagement has been revealed on the eve of the Labour Party conference, which will see renewed demands for a deadline for withdrawal. It is hoped that a clearer strategy on Iraq will quieten critics who say that the government will not be able to 'move on' until Blair quits. Yesterday, about 10,000 people demonstrated against the army's continued presence in the country.

Predictably, the Prime Minister has immediately pounced on this, saying no 'arbitrary date' has been set. Further:

The prime minister also told Andrew Marr he had not expected the "ferocity" of resistance from Middle East elements following the invasion of Iraq.

That old foreign fighters schtick again.

What's most telling about this is that the Observer links the disavowed report to the Labour Party conference. It doesn't exactly require a ferocious journalistic intellect to figure it out (which is lucky for the Observer, since they don't have one on staff), but it's worth paying attention to. The clear intention is to disarm the trade union delegates who will call for a withdrawal by 'sending out signals'.

What's curious about this is that the story is continually repackaged with slightly different details. In June, they announced that forces would be withdrawn in 2006, but only to be transferred to Afghanistan. In July, they spoke of withdrawing in Spring 2006. Then that was scrapped as 'everyone' agreed that it was out of the question now that the natives were getting uppity. Now, with polls in both the US and UK supporting a swift withdrawal, the story emerges again. I suspect that what is actually happening is that the UK would like to declare success in the South and hop it over to Afghanistan to join the Nato-led forces there, while the US withdraws to its permanent bases.

News on the march.
Nostradamus got it right again. Never mind The Observer's ridiculously low numbers for the demo, which they've got from an early police estimate - it happens quite a bit. I was there, and it was visibly by no manner of means 10,000. They've left out a zero.

Great to see Gate Gourmet workers there with their own placards expressing solidarity. Some good coverage and an excellent picture of the US demos here. In the US a total of 300,000 are estimated to have turned up at various demonstration points, with at least 100,000 in the capital. Demonstrations filled the streets in Rome, London, Washington DC, Los Angeles and San Francisco.

What is most encouraging is that the US antiwar movement has built up a remarkable head of steam again, after the deflation that followed Kerry's defeat. And they are not going easy on the Democrats, who skipped town to avoid the demonstrations. Cindy Sheehan, who deserves a lot of the credit for pulling the antiwar movement out of its unhappy little rut, is taking on the Democrats, particularly that loathsome ambulance-chaser, Hillary Clinton. Several punch-ups afoot, then. British trade union delegates might - might - just retain their spines this time and try to implement their democratically agreed policies on ending the occupation of Iraq at the Labour conference. More likely, they will block all that and attempt to keep the focus on the government's proposals for pension reforms and on workers' rights - which might be reasonable if there was any chance that the delegates would not back down and accept some miasma of proffered compromise and 'consultation'. The US antiwar movement is to take it to the Democrats as well as the Bush administration, not just in Cindy's big show-down with Hillary, but also with a mock trial of leading Democrat Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi, a consistent warmonger. All of which must point toward finding an appropriate electoral vehicle to make a satisfactory incursion of US street politics into the mainstream. Nader may have had enough of the timidity of the US left and decide not to stand. On the other hand, he may well have blotted his copybook by sidling up to the Newmanites and with his intervention on the Schiavo fiasco. But something has to give, and someone has to undertake the dirty task of repoliticisation.