But while America marches rightward, it fails to drag the rest of the world along with it. Indeed, most of the rest of the world is headed in the opposite direction. Nothing illustrated this more than the fact that in the very week Bush was reelected, a coalition of left parties came to power in Uruguay, Hugo Chavez, Washington’s new nemesis in Latin America, swept state elections in Venezuela, and Hungary served notice it was withdrawing its 300 troops from Iraq. Although the American Right is consolidating its hold domestically, it cannot halt the unraveling of Washington’s hegemony globally.

The principal cause of what we have called the crisis of overextension, or the mismatch between goals and resources owing to imperial ambition, is the massive miscalculation of invading Iraq. This crisis is likely to continue, if not accelerate, in Bush’s second term. The key manifestations of the imperial dilemma stand out starkly:

• Despite the recent US-sponsored elections in Afghanistan, the Karzai government effectively controls o­nly parts of Kabul and two or three other cities. As UN Secretary General Kofi Annan has said, despite the elections, “without functional state institutions able to serve the basic needs of the population throughout the country, the authority and legitimacy of the new government will be short-lived.” And so long as this is the case, Afghanistan will tie down 13,500 US troops within the country and 35,000 support personnel outside.

• The US war o­n terror has backfired completely, with Al-Qaeda and its allies much stronger today than in 2001. In this regard, Osama bin Laden’s pre-election video was worth a thousand words. The invasion of Iraq, according to Richard Clarke, Bush’s former anti-terrorism czar, claims, derailed the war o­n terror and served as the best recruiting device for Al-Qaeda. But even without Iraq, Washington’s heavy handed police and military methods of dealing with terrorism were already alienating millions of Muslims. Nothing illustrates this more than Southern Thailand, where US anti-terrorist advice has helped convert discontent into an insurgency.

• With its full embrace of Ariel Sharon’s no-win strategy of sabotaging the emergence of a Palestinian state, Washington has forfeited all the political capital that it had gained among Arabs by brokering the now defunct Oslo Accord. Moreover, the go-with-Sharon strategy, along with the occupation of Iraq, has left Washington’s allies among the Arab elites exposed, discredited, and vulnerable.

• The Atlantic Alliance is dead, and in the coming period, trade conflicts will combine with political differences to push the US and Europe even further apart. Europe is key to the sustainability of the American empire. As the neoconservative writer Robert Kagan notes, “Americans will need the legitimacy that Europe can provide, but Europeans may well fail to grant it.”

• Latin America’s move to the left will accelerate. The victory of the leftist coalition in Uruguay is simply the latest in a series of electoral victories for progressive forces, following those in Venezuela, Ecuador, Argentina, and Brazil. Along with electoral turns to the left, there may also be in the offing more mass insurrections such as that which occurred in Bolivia in October 2003. Speaking of the turn towards the left and away from the empire, o­ne of the US’ friends, former Mexican Foreign Minister Jorge Castaneda, assesses the situation accurately: “America’s friends…are feeling the fire of this anti-American wrath. They are finding themselves forced to shift their own rhetoric and attitude in order to dampen their defense of policies viewed as pro-American or US-inspired, and to stiffen their resistance to Washington’s demands and desires.”

Fallujah’s “fall” won’t stop the spread and deepening of a decentralized resistance movement throughout Iraq.

Iraq, of course, is the main source of the empire’s unraveling. The Iraqi people’s resistance has not o­nly frustrated a US colonial takeover of their country. Equally important, it has shown a new generation of anti-imperialists all over the world—for whom Vietnam is ancient history—that it is possible to fight the empire to a stalemate and eventually to victory.

It is unlikely, however, that the Bush administration will acknowledge the handwriting o­n the wall any time soon. It will assault Fallujah with the desperate illusion that this will destroy the operational center of the insurgency. Fallujah, however, is not an operational center but a symbolic center that has already played its role, and its “fall” is not going to stop the spread and deepening of a decentralized resistance movement throughout Iraq. Moreover, the Fallujah insurgents are likely to retreat after giving battle, trading, as in Samara, a conventional defense of a city for a guerrilla presence that harasses and pins down the US army and its Iraqi mercenaries.

With 55 cities and towns already classified as no-go zones for US troops, the Bush administration will soon realize that retaking and occupying urban centers en masse simply will not work. There are some 130,000 US troops in Iraq today. Simply to fight the guerrillas to a stalemate, o­ne would need at least 500,000 troops for the level of resistance that o­ne finds in Iraq today. That will not be possible unless Bush brings back the draft, and this will surely produce the civil disorder that would threaten the current Republican hegemony.

Washington’s alternative would be to withdraw to and dig in behind super-fortified bases and sally forth periodically to show the flag. While this would mean de facto defeat for the US, it would also mean that the Iraqi people’s resistance would not have de jure territorial control from which to declare sovereignty and begin the process of coming up with a truly national government.

Challenges to the Anti-War Movement

The anti-Vietnam war mobilizations (1968-1972) put millions of people in a constant state of activism.

Supporting the Iraqi people’s struggle to create the sovereign space for a national government of their choice continues to be o­ne of the two overriding priorities of the global anti-war movement. The other is ending the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the trampling of the Palestinian people’s rights. At a moment marked by the conjunction of a resurgent Right in the US and a continuing crisis of empire globally, what will it take to advance this goal?

First of all, the movement has to graduate beyond spontaneity and arrive at a new level of transborder coordination, o­ne that goes beyond synchronizing annual days of protest against the war. The critical mass to affect the outcome of the war will not be attained without a rolling wave of global protests similar to that which marked the anti-Vietnam war mobilizations from 1968 to 1972—one that puts millions of people in a constant state of activism. Coordination, moreover, will mean coordinating not o­nly mass demonstrations but also civil disobedience, work o­n the global media, day-to-day lobbying of officials, and political education. More effective coordination and, yes, professionalization of the anti-war work must not, however, be achieved at the expense of the participatory processes that are the trademark of our movement.

Worldwide coordination, civil disobedience, and non-violent disruptions are fundamental to the next anti-war move.

Second, in terms of tactics, new forms of protests must be engaged in. Sanctions and boycotts are methods that must be brought into play. At the Mumbai WSF earlier this year, Arundhati Roy suggested starting with o­ne or two US firms benefiting directly from the war such as Halliburton and Bechtel and mobilizing to close down their operations worldwide. It is time to take her suggestion seriously, not o­nly with respect to US firms but also with Israeli firms and products.

Moreover, the level of militancy must be raised, with more and more civil disobedience and non-violent disruptions of business as usual encouraged. We must tell Washington and its allies that there can be no business as usual so long as the war continues. The kind of debate taking place in Britain, whether to push peaceful demonstrations or civil disobedience, is fruitless, since both are essential and must be combined in innovative and effective ways.

In the US, activists can draw o­n the immensely powerful tradition of disobedience to unjust law that motivated people such as the abolitionists, Henry David Thoreau, the Quakers, and the Berrigan Brothers. Indeed, this kind of resistance might be the key in stopping not o­nly the imperial drive but also the rush to restrict political liberties and democracy. At no other time than today, when the electoral option is gone, is it more necessary to resist the imperial writ nonviolently by invoking a higher law.

Third, it is clear that Great Britain and Italy—Britain especially—are the principal supports of Bush’s war policy outside the United States. Bush constantly resorts to invoking these governments to legitimize the US adventure. What happens in Italy, in turn, affects what happens in Britain. Both countries have solid anti-war majorities that must now be converted into a powerful force to disrupt business as usual in these countries ruled by governments complicit in the American war.

US labeling should not stand in the way of people reaching out to o­ne another and working together.

Both countries have the hallowed tradition of the general strike that, combined with massive civil disobedience, can significantly raise the costs to their governments’ support for Washington. When asked why the demonstrations of March 20, 2004, drew significantly fewer people than those of February 2003, many activists in Britain and Italy responded: because people felt their actions were not able to prevent the US from going to war anyway. That sort of defeatism and demoralization can o­nly be countered not by lowering the demands o­n people but by upping them, by asking them to put their bodies o­n the line through acts of nonviolent civil resistance.

Fourth, with the Middle East being the strategic battleground of the next few decades, it will be essential to forge links between the global peace movement and the Arab world. The governments of the Middle East are notoriously supine when it comes to the US, so that, as in Europe, it is forging the ties of solidarity among civil movements that must be the main thrust of this effort. This will actually be a courageous and controversial step since some of the strongest anti-US movements in the Middle East have been labeled “terrorist” or “terrorist sympathizers” by the US and some European governments. What is important is not to let US-imposed definitions stand in the way of people reaching out to o­ne another to see if there is a basis for working together.

Likewise, it is critical for the Palestinian movement and the Israeli anti-Zionist and peace movements to get beyond the labels imposed by governments and find ways of cooperating to end the Israeli occupation. Process has a way of bringing people together from seemingly non-reconcilable political positions. In this regard, the Beirut Anti-War Assembly that took place in mid-September 2004, with strong representation from the global peace movement and social movements from all over the Arab world, was a significant step in this direction.

As it enters its second term, the Bush agenda remains the same: global domination. Our response is the same: global resistance. There is o­nly o­ne thing that can frustrate the empire’s dark aims in Iraq, Palestine, and elsewhere: the militant solidarity among world’s peoples. Making that solidarity real and powerful and ultimately triumphant is the challenge before us.

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Walden Bello, PhD, is Executive Director of the Bangkok-based Focus o­n the Global South and Professor of Sociology and Public Administration at the University of the Philippines.

*This article was originally published in Focus on the Global South (a program of development policy research, analysis, advocacy and action on the grassroot level) under the title “The Bush Victory, Fallujah, and the Republican Right’s Challenge to the Global Peace Movement.”

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