The Rag Blog

WASHINGTON (IPS) – Newly released documents have made public hundreds of claims for damages by Iraqi civilians requesting compensations for the death and injury of family members as a result of operations by Coalition Forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“It’s a first glimpse at the claim process that’s used in Iraq and Afghanistan but it’s only a limited glimpse and is not indicative of the number of claims,” Jon Tracy, military and legal advisor at the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict (CIVIC), told IPS. “There are a lot more claims out there that could be released and should be released.”

“Since U.S. troops first set foot in Afghanistan in 2001, the Defense Department has gone to unprecedented lengths to control and suppress information about the human costs of war,” said Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

“Our democracy depends on an informed citizenry, and it is critical that the American people have access to full and accurate information about the prosecution of that war and the implications for innocent civilians,” he said in a statement.

The ACLU, which filed the Freedom of Information Act request for the documents, points out that the Defense Department has instituted numerous policies to limit the dissemination of information about casualties.

Photographers are banned from covering the arrival of caskets at U.S. military bases, Iraqi journalists have been paid to write positive accounts of the U.S. war effort, “embedded” U.S. journalists are required to submit their stories for pre-publication review, journalists’ footage of civilian deaths in Afghanistan has been erased and statistics on civilian casualties have been consistently withheld.

The newly released documents show that the families of more than 500 Iraqi civilians killed by U.S. soldiers have asked for compensation for their dead relatives but only a third have been granted it.

In one file, a civilian from Salah Ad Din province in eastern Iraq stated that U.S. soldiers fired more than 100 rounds on his sleeping families’ home, killing his mother, father and brother as well as 32 of the family’s sheep. The Defense Department admitted responsibility and issued a compensation payment of 11,200 dollars and a 2,500-dollar condolence payment.

In another case, in 2005, a U.S. soldier killed a boy whose book bag was mistaken for a bomb satchel. The boy’s uncle was paid 500 dollars.

“It is commendable that the U.S. pays compensation to the families of Iraqis killed by American soldiers, but the military should maintain clear and fair standards for making those payments,” said Marc Garlasco, senior military analyst at Human Rights Watch (HRW).

“The U.S. government should also investigate shootings by civilian contractors, compensate for deaths by contractors and hold accountable all personnel who have acted in violation of their duty,” he said.

The documents revealed that out of the more than 500 cases of civilian deaths, 164 incidents resulted in cash payments to family members. In around half of those cases, the Defense Department acknowledged responsibility for the deaths under the Foreign Claims Act, which authorizes the armed forces to issue settlements of up to 100,000 dollars. In the other half, the U.S. government did not acknowledge fault but issued “condolence” payments — capped at 2,500 dollars — “as an expression of sympathy.”

“The 2,500-dollar cap has never made sense to anyone who looked at this program. It’s not fair and should be based on other calculations,” Sarah Holewinski, executive director of CIVIC, told IPS. “We need a claim act for civilians in combat that mirrors the Foreign Claims Act.”

In numerous cases where the Defense Department acknowledged responsibility, deaths of Iraqis were determined as being due to the “negligent” actions of U.S. soldiers. However, very few cases were forwarded for further investigation.

Contradictory interpretations of the rules of engagement appear to have resulted in a lack of uniformity in the system and inconsistent rulings on compensation.

One Iraqi was granted compensation for the death of a relative, shot by U.S. soldiers who fired to clear a road, a violation of the rules of engagement according to a judge-advocate-general (JAG) who ruled in the case.

But similar claims were denied by other JAGs, who ruled that firing to clear a road is a legitimate combat operation.

U.S. policy states that civilian deaths in “combat” are not eligible for compensation.

Civilian deaths or injury caused by U.S. government contractors were consistently denied on the grounds that the Defense Department only processes claims against U.S. government employees, and contractors “are not government employees.”

Checkpoints and convoy actions are the two areas most likely to lead to civilian deaths. The U.S. Army has improved checkpoint procedures but has not yet addressed the way soldiers can fire from moving convoys to clear roadways, says HRW.

04/16/07 “Harpers” 04/14/07 — — I want to give a bit of pre-constitutional history, and share with you the story of John Lilburne, an Englishman born in the early 1600s because his story—the story of an agitator who directly challenged the English legal system—has a great deal to tell us about the issues we’re facing today. Lilburne’s story explains why these matters—torture and secrecy—were not issues to the Founding Fathers, and it helps us understand the true nature of a government which, like the current administration, thrives in that matrix of torture and secrecy.

Secrecy was what the Roundheads found most odious about the Stuart monarchs’ justice. Certainly unjust practices accompanied some of our Puritan forefathers to this country; we can’t forget the Salem witch trials, for instance. But so too, did a healthy contempt for the abuses practiced by the Stuart monarchs, starting with the notions of torture and secret courts with secret evidence. The contempt was reciprocal of course—they say that King Charles’ lip would curl at the very mention of the word “Massachusetts,” and seven of the ten members of the first graduating class of Harvard—the class of 1642—returned to England to enlist in the Model Army and fight against the King. The practice of secret courts. The use of torture to secure confessions. The receipt of secret evidence. The exclusion of the public from proceedings. The offering of evidence in the form of summaries delivered to the judges, without the defendant being able to confront the evidence or conduct a cross-examination. These practices were the definition of tyrannical injustice to the Puritan fathers and the Founding Fathers. We thought them long-banished a hundred years and more before our own revolution. And now suddenly here they are again.

Secrecy has reemerged just as torture has made its comeback, being justified on the public stage, by government officials for the first time since the famous gathering at the Inns of Court in 1629 at which the judges declared “upon their and their nation’s honor” that torture was not permitted by the common law.

The two fit together, hand in glove: torture and secrecy. Torture and secrecy. Where one is used, the other is indispensable.

Torture is no longer a tool of statecraft. Today it is a tool of criminals, though sometimes of criminals purporting to conduct the affairs of state. Having resorted to these “dark arts,” to quote Dick Cheney, the torturers now have the dilemma faced so frequently by criminals. They seek to cover it up. And so the path flows from torture to secrecy, the twin dark stars of the tyrannical state.

If we look quickly at the proceedings that held the world’s attention down in Gitmo over the last two weeks, we see what the secrecy is all about.

For forty years, Seymour Hersh has been America’s leading investigative reporter. His latest scoop? The White House’s secret plan to bomb Iran

04/16/07 “Rolling Stone” 04/02/07 — — – On May 29th, 1975, an aide to then-White House chief of staff Donald Rumsfeld sat down with a yellow legal pad and in careful longhand sketched out a list of possible responses to a damaging investigative report in The New York Times. “Problem,” the aide wrote. “Unauthorized disclosure of classified national security information by Sy Hersh and the NYT.” He then laid out five options, ranging from the most ominous (an FBI investigation of the newspaper and a grand jury indictment) to the least offensive (“Discuss informally with NYT” and “Do nothing”). Number three on the list, however, read, “Search warrant: to go after Hersh papers in his apt.”

The note’s author? A viper-mean Beltway apparatchik named Dick Cheney, who was making his name doing damage control for the Republican White House after the Watergate disaster. Coming so soon after Nixon was burned at the public stake for similar targeting of political enemies, the Cheney memo was proof that the next generation of GOP leaders had emerged from the Watergate scandal regretting only one thing: getting caught.

This year, an almost identical note in Cheney’s same tight-looped, anal script appeared as a key piece of evidence in the trial of another powerful White House aide, Scooter Libby. The vice president’s handwritten ruminations on how best to dispose of an Iraq War critic named Joe Wilson are an eerie reminder of how little has changed in America in the past three decades. Then as now, we have been dragged into a bloody massacre in the Third World, paying the bill for the operation with the souls and bodies of the next generation of our young people. It is the same old story, and many of the same people are once again in charge.

But some of the same people are on the other side, too. In the same week that Libby was convicted in a Washington courthouse, Seymour Hersh outlined the White House’s secret plans for a possible invasion of Iran in The New Yorker. As amazing as it is that Cheney is still walking among us, a living link to our dark Nixonian past, it’s even more amazing that Hersh is still the biggest pain in his ass, publishing accounts of conversations that seemingly only a person hiding in the veep’s desk drawer would be privy to. “The access I have — I’m inside,” Hersh says proudly. “I’m there, even when he’s talking to people in confidence.”

America’s pre-eminent investigative reporter of the last half-century, Hersh broke the story of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and was on hand, nearly four decades later, when we found ourselves staring back at the same sick face in the mirror after Abu Ghraib. At age seventy, he clearly still loves his job. During a wide-ranging interview at his cramped Washington office, Hersh could scarcely sit still, bouncing around the room like a kindergartner to dig up old articles, passages from obscure books and papers buried in his multitudinous boxes of files. A hopeless information junkie, he is permanently aroused by the idea that corruption and invisible power are always waiting to be uncovered by the next phone call. Somewhere out there, They are still hiding the story from Us — and that still pisses Hersh off.

During the Watergate years, you devoted a great deal of time to Henry Kissinger. If you were going to write a book about this administration, is Dick Cheney the figure you would focus on?
Absolutely. If there’s a Kissinger person today, it’s Cheney. But what I say about Kissinger is: Would that we had a Kissinger now! If we did, we’d know that the madness of going into Iraq would have been explained by something — maybe a clandestine deal for oil — that would make some kind of sense. Kissinger always had some back-channel agenda. But in the case of Bush and this war, what you see is what you get. We buy much of our fuel from the Middle East, and yet we’re at war with the Middle East. It doesn’t make sense.

Kissinger’s genius, if you will, was that he figured out a way to get out. His problem was that, like this president, he had a president who could only see victory ahead. With Kissinger, you have to give him credit: He had such difficulties with Nixon getting the whole peace package through, but he did it. Right now, a lot of people on the inside know it’s over in Iraq, but there are no plans for how to get out. You’re not even allowed to think that way. So what we have now is a government that’s in a terrible mess, with no idea of how to get out. Except, as one of my friends said, the “fail forward” idea of going into Iran. So we’re really in big trouble. Real big trouble here.

Is what’s gone on in the Bush administration comparable or worse than what went on in the Nixon administration?
Oh, my God. Much worse. Bush is a true radical. He believes very avidly in executive power. And he also believes that he’s doing the right thing. I think he’s a revolutionary, a Trotsky. He’s a believer in permanent revolution. So therefore he’s very dangerous, because he’s an unguided missile, he’s a rocket with no ability to be educated. You can’t change what he wants to do. He can’t deviate from his policy, and that’s frightening when somebody has as much power as he does, and is as much a radical as he is, and is as committed to democracy — whatever that means — as he is in the Mideast. I really do believe that’s what drives him. That doesn’t mean he’s not interested in oil. But I really think he thinks democracy is the answer.

A lot of people interpreted your last article in “The New Yorker” as a prediction that we’re going into Iran. But you also make clear that the Saudis have reasons to keep us from attacking Iran.
I’ve never said we’re going to go — just that the planning is under way. Planning is planning, of course. But in the last couple of weeks, it has become nonstop. They’re in a position right now where the president could wake up and scratch his, uh —

His what?
His nose, and say, “Let’s go.” And they’d go. That’s new. We’ve made it closer. We’ve got carrier groups there. It’s not about going in on the ground. Although if we went in we’d have to send Marines into the coastal areas of Iran to knock out their Silkworm missile sites.

So the notion that it would just be a bombing campaign isn’t true at all?
Oh, no. Don’t forget, you’d have to take out a very sophisticated radar system, and a guidance system for their missiles. You’d have to knock out the ability of the Iranians to get our ships.

After an absence of 30 years, the finest US detective finally returned to British television screens last summer. The decision of the BBC to rescreen several episodes of the classic 1970s whodunnit series Ellery Queen, with Jim Hutton as the deceptively absent minded sleuth was a cause for unmitigated celebration.

Ellery Queen was a great programme, not just on account of its ingenious plots and fine acting or for its glorious recreation of late-1940s New York but for the revolutionary way in which the audience was kept fully involved in proceedings.

Ten minutes from the end of each episode, Hutton would turn to the camera and ask us, the viewers, if we had worked out “whodunnit.” More often than not, we hadn’t.

Ellery Queen mysteries were always hard to solve, even if all the clues had been up there on the screen before our very eyes, but the point was that we were consulted. Unlike much of television today, Ellery Queen was a programme which didn’t treat us like idiots, but as reasoned, intelligent human beings. How different to our political masters in the so-called “democratic world.”

Rather than consulting us, the people, and acting in our interests as ought to happen in a democracy, our politicians treat us with contempt and pander only to the interests of global capital.

One opinion poll after another shows majority public support for the renationalisation of the railways, yet neither of our two main political parties went into the last election promising any change in the status quo.

A clear majority also want to see British troops withdrawn from Iraq, yet, again, both of our leading parties continue to support the occupation.

The reintroduction of a new top rate of income tax, caps on executive pay and the end to the creeping privatisation of the NHS are other popular policies which Britain’s political elite won’t even countenance. There are many others.

The type of democracy which the elite in Britain, the US and Brussels favour is not the dictionary definition of “rule of the people,” but a much more restricted form, which is best described as “Henry Ford democracy.”

The famous US automobile manufacturer said that his customers could have any colour car they liked so long as it was black. Henry Ford democrats tell us that we can elect any colour government we like, so long as it’s neoliberal and supports the new world order.

Woe betide the people if they vote for parties which Fordian democrats deem to be “off limits.” For having the temerity to elect Hamas, Palestinians were punished with suspension of aid. Fordian democracy was again illustrated in the peevish US and EU reaction to January’s elections in Serbia.

Despite the West’s exhortations, the Serbs voted “the wrong way” by making the anti-NATO, EU-sceptic Radicals the largest party in the new parliament. Straight away, Serbs were told that “the international community” would not accept a government in which the country’s most popular party played a role. Just how democratic is that?

Instead of allowing the disciples of Henry Ford to set the agenda, the left ought to be going on the offensive. Socialists have nothing to fear about the shift to a more direct, consultative democracy.

It’s the sham Fordian democrats who should be worried. The first step in building a genuine democracy, as opposed to the current mutation, is root and branch economic reform, a process which Hugo Chavez is currently undertaking in Venezuela.

Whoever holds economic power holds political power, so an extension of public ownership and measures to redistribute wealth are essential prerequisites.

Neoliberalism is inconsistent with democracy as it leads to power being transferred from the ballot box to the wallet, which is why Henry Ford democrats insist on countries running “market economies.”

Only when an unelected chairman of a multinational company has no greater influence in the political process than you or I can we even begin to label our country “democratic.”

Of course, democratising Britain doesn’t mean that we, the people, will always get decisions right, in the same way that we don’t always work out who the murderer is in Ellery Queen. But the main thing is that, in a country which calls itself a democracy, it’s the majority and not a tiny, unrepresentative, warmongering elite who should be making the calls.

By all indicators, America’s Iraqi expedition has failed miserably. One by one, American allies draw down their forces or resist increasing public pressure to do so. The central Iraqi government exercises little control–its main means of exercising power is negative–the use of Shiite death squads. A bloody civil war has created a feedback loop of ethnic violence that cannot be stopped. In the north, the Kurds lie in wait for the perfect opportunity to break away. And Iran is quietly grooming the Iraqi government to act as a client state.

Although President Bush’s handling of the war has become extremely unpopular and the majority of the public seeks a form of withdrawal or drawdown, the public does not want immediate withdrawal. This can be explained as a defensive psychological reaction: few want to admit that so many were sacrificed for so little. In addition, Americans fear for the lives of the U.S. troops currently engaged in battle with the various ethnic factions and terrorist groups in the Iraqi maelstrom. While the public generally accepts the necessity of withdrawal, they blanch at the instability that could result. Proposals for withdrawal focus on a year-long redeployment rather than the quick withdrawal many anti-war advocates like.

Iraq’s Sunni insurgency is not going to patiently wait for American will to collapse. They can sense that public support is fading and that the end of American involvement is near. They know that they can strike a fatal blow at public support for the war and possibly shorten the conflict, preserving their strength for the inevitable internecine feuding that will result after an American withdrawal. Such feuding has already begun, as Sunni insurgents have openly broken with Al Qaeda in Iraq.
While the public generally accepts the necessity of withdrawal, they blanch at the instability that could result. Proposals for withdrawal focus on a year-long redeployment rather than the quick withdrawal many anti-war advocates like.

To do so, however, they must go beyond merely bleeding the Americans to death, as such a war of attrition is inevitably slow and painful for them as well. They are looking for a shocking, media-worthy incident or series of incidents that will finally destroy American will. The recent attacks with chlorine bombs, though flashy, have failed to do the trick, as they are not lethal enough to inflict lasting damage. Thus, elements within the insurgency are trying two different approaches: overrunning an American unit and striking within the Green Zone.

Counter-terrorism consultant John Robb noted in a blog post that “As the [insurgency] continues to improve its methods and the US counter-insurgency effort becomes more of a police force to bolster street level security, the potential for successful assaults and overruns of small US outposts becomes a major threat.” General Petraeus’ strategy for the “surge” hinges on moving American troops from their fortress-like bases into small outposts within Iraqi cities, enabling them to police volatile insurgent strongholds in a manner reminiscent of big-city “community policing” in the continental United States.

These outposts are the urban equivalents of Vietnamese firebases, small islands of American power vulnerable to being overrun by “swarming” attacks. They also are dangerously dependent on Iraqi units infiltrated by factional fighters. Iraq’s insurgent factions are keen to exploit this vulnerability. In the last few months, insurgents have mounted a number of attacks against these bases, employing a mixture of car bombings, chlorine bombs, and small arms attacks.

The April 2002 coup attempt against President Chavez represented the perhaps most important turning point of the Chavez Presidency. First, it showed just how far the opposition was willing to go to get rid of the country’s democratically elected president. Up until that point the opposition could claim that it was merely fighting Chavez with the political tools provided by liberal democracy. Afterwards, the mask was gone and Chavez and his supporters felt that their revolution was facing greater threats than they had previously imagined. A corollary of this first consequence was thus that the coup woke up Chavez’s supporters to the need to actively defend their government.

Second, the coup showed just popular Chavez really was and how determined his supporters were to prevent his overthrow. They went onto the streets, at great personal risk (over 60 people were killed and hundreds were wounded by the police in the demonstrations that inspired the military to bring Chavez back to power), to demand their president’s return to office.

Third, the coup woke up progressives around the world to what was happening in Venezuela. It forced them to examine why a supposedly unpopular and authoritarian government would be brought back to power with the support of the county’s poor. As such, the coup shone a spotlight on what was happening in Venezuela and eventually rallied progressives around the world to support the Bolivarian (and now socialist) project.

Fourth, and perhaps most importantly for the future evolution of the Venezuelan conflict, the coup was the third nail in the political coffin of the country’s old elite. The first such nail was Chavez’s election in 1998, which brought an explicitly anti-establishment figure into Venezuela’s presidency for the first time in forty years. The second nail was the passage of the 1999 constitution and Chavez’s confirmation as President, in 2000, which democratically swept the country’s old elite almost completely out of political power, such as the governorships, the Supreme Court, and the National Assembly. With the third nail, the failure of the 2002 coup, the opposition lost a base of power in the military and a significant amount of good will in the international community. The next three nails, the failed 2002-2003 oil industry shutdown, the August 2004 recall referendum, and the December 2006 presidential election, only further solidified the old elite’s demise as a political force in Venezuela.

Each of these victories against the opposition heightened consciousness in Venezuela about the need to take the Bolivarian revolution further and thus also allowed Chavez to further radicalize his political program. The coup attempt represented a crucial moment in this process because it was the most dramatic expression of the Venezuelan conflict between a charismatic President and a mobilized poor population on the one hand and the country’s old elite and their supporters on the other.

Preconditions for a Coup

With Chavez’s popularity rating apparently sinking in late 2001 and early 2002,[1] especially among the middle class, and the general inability of the country’s old governing elite to accept Chavez as the legitimately elected President of Venezuela, it became just a matter of time for this old elite to form an alliance with dissident military officers and to organize a coup. The events in 2001 that led up to the coup can be summarized as the following:

* The departure of key former supporters from Chavez’s coalition (half of the MAS – Movement towards Socialism – party, Caracas Mayor Alfredo Peña, and MVR – Chavez’s party Movement for a Fifth Republic – co-founder and Minister of the Interior Luis Miquilena).
* The business sector’s uproar over 49 law-decrees passed in November 2001 that revamped the country’s banking, agriculture, oil industry, and fishing industries, among other things.
* The union federation’s (CTV) anger over the government’s push for union elections in October 2001.
* Chavez’s opposition to the Bush administration’s “war on terrorism.”
* The mass media’s active participation in the political conflict, largely taking the place of the discredited centrist and conservative parties.
* A developing recession, due to a rapid decline in world oil prices following the September 11, 2001 attacks in the U.S.

Out of war nations acquire additional territory, if they are victorious. They just take it. This newly acquired territory promptly is exploited by the few — the selfsame few who wrung dollars out of blood in the war. The general public shoulders the bill. And what is this bill? This bill renders a horrible accounting. Newly placed gravestones. Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability. Depression and all its attendant miseries. Back-breaking taxation for generations and generations.

Major General Smedley Butler
From: War is a Racket

I met the aunt of number 3291 today. I was sitting in seat 11E and a flight attendant gave me a note from a woman in seat 33C: “My nephew was killed in Iraq yesterday. I would like to meet you.”

Seat belt light or not, I headed back toward the rear of the airplane. We held each other and she said: “What can I do? My brother was in the Army and he initially supported the effort. Yesterday, he made a sign with a picture of his son saying: ‘Murdered by George Bush.’” I prayed for the Universe to give the families strength yesterday as I do everyday our soldiers are killed, as I pray for the Iraqis and their families who are also murdered unnecessarily. I don’t often get to meet the people I pray for in such a timely manner.

Four of our brave and abused troops were killed in King George’s escalation of the conflict in Iraq. Ten over the Easter weekend while George was hiding out at his ranch in Crawford. George Bush and his bloody gang of war-bandits have caused so much pain and heartache in the world without so much as a blink of the eye. Number 3291’s aunt recounted how she heard her sister ‘screaming for her son,” on the other end of the phone. Number 3291’s family is just beginning to realize the true meaning of broken heart and betrayals.

Number 3291 has a name: Brian. The only thing I know for sure about Brian was that he was in the army, he was probably blown up by an IED (which could have been avoided with an IED detector in his vehicle), and he has a loving aunt named Sheryl. His family lives in North Carolina and that’s where his body will be returning to under the cover of darkness to hide the shame of the Bush Regime.

Brian will never be a number to his family or friends. To the few people in this country who still incredibly support this horror and his war, Brian’s sacrifice will be noted as “freedom isn’t free,” or “he volunteered.” To the anti-war movement, Brian will be commemorated in a candlelight vigil when the 4000th troop is killed in Iraq. To the man sitting next to me in seat 11D, Brian is a non-entity because he: has no opinion on the occupation one way or the other because he has no “time to worry about it.” Trust me though, that’s all Brian’s mom did for the entire time he was in Iraq and there are 160,000 moms who lie awake at night worried about their child and Iraqi moms who never know when the last “I love you,” is the last one forever.

To me Brian represents a failure. I have been struggling with all my energy and resources to insure that Brian’s mom never had to fall on the floor screaming in agony or so that Aunt Sheryl would never have to take a sad and lonely trip across the country to be with her family in this terrible occasion for mourning. Every death since Casey’s has hit me with a fresh assault of suffering. How can my wounds heal when so many new ones are being opened up on a daily basis in three countries that are being devastated by the Bush doctrine of inflicting immeasurable damage with his war for profit being masqueraded as a war on terror?

The anti-war movement is failing in many areas. First of all, like the man sitting next to me, there are too many apathetic people in this country. How can anyone still be so indifferent to so much death and destruction? Even the people who are still confused and support the war have an opinion. The anti-war movement is also failing in its lack of influence on the policy makers. When such pro-occupation entities as MoveOn are being hailed as the “anti-war left” and our Congressional leadership are listening to them and using their corrupt polls as tools to hammer theoretically anti-war Reps into voting for a bill that would extend our troop presence in Iraq indefinitely, then the true anti-war movement has not been effective in getting our message out.

Another goal that the anti-war movement should have would be to move the overwhelming majority of Americans who are against the occupation of Iraq off of their couches and into the streets. The leaders of our country are in the obscenely deep pockets of the war machine and are exceedingly comfortable there. Only a massive electoral revolt will be able to pick the pockets of the war profiteers and force our elected officials to represent us and not the wealthy.

Brian’s family, my family, 3293 other families, our military families who are financially and emotionally strapped by the constant deployments and getting ready for deployments are sacrificing too much on the altar of greed. The Iraqi people who did not ask for Bush’s help are sacrificing horribly on this imperial altar. The rest of this nation is not sacrificing the way that so many others have. I am working so you don’t have to.

But if we, as a nation, want to end the farce of false patriotism to justify wars for profit and empire, we will have to sacrifice until it hurts. In this cleansing act will come redemption, because we can be assured that all of the children of the world are safe and sound. If we don’t work to end the absolute stranglehold of violence we are clutched in, then we deserve what we get.

Our movement has to move toward peace…at all costs.

This article is adapted from Laura Flanders’ new book, Blue Grit: True Democrats Take Back Politics From the Politicians (The Penguin Press).

An odd thing happens on the way to an American election. For months politicians talk about the importance of voters, voting and the power of majorities. Then on election night–wham–suddenly the only person who matters is the candidate. Thanks to media that cover elections as if they were races, all the attention goes to the horses; there’s little left for the people in the stands. Consider what happened in the wake of the Republican rout in the 2006 midterm elections. Just days after election night, the Sunday-morning TV talk shows were in full gallop, training attention away from the hordes of people and the organizing that had just flipped both houses of Congress and focusing instead on the few politicians who might be expected to run for President.

The brighter the spotlight on the candidate, the dimmer the darkness that falls on everyone else. Take Montana. The first Democrat to win the governorship in sixteen years, Brian Schweitzer, sparked breathless talk about a “Montana Miracle” when he won office in 2004, the same year that Democrats gained power in both chambers of state government after twelve years of GOP dominance. The national public heard more about Schweitzer’s bolo tie and boots than they did about his politics–but no matter, when his protégé Jon Tester pulled off a nail-biter win in the Senate two years later, Democratic hopes rose even higher. Maybe the Montana magic will rub off and herald Democratic victories across the West.

When the Democrats hold their national convention in Denver in 2008, Schweitzer and Tester are bound to be headliners. “The future is wearing a turquoise bolo tie wrapped around the open collar of a blue-and-white-striped button-down dress shirt,” began a typical article on Schweitzer in Salon. Tester, an organic farmer with a big frame and a flattop haircut, has stimulated similar style-over-substance talk. But the big men are not all that’s going on in the Big Sky state. To talk about a one- or even a two-man miracle is to ignore what’s really interesting about politics in Montana. As two local feminists, Judy Smith and Terry Kendrick, put it in their essay “Revisiting the Montana Miracle,” “rather than a miracle [what happened in ’04] was closer to a perfect storm.” As I discovered during my travels out West last spring, what’s been happening there may indeed have lessons for national Democrats–but not if the analysis stops with the candidates.

The day I arrive in Missoula, in March 2006, I meet a bright, blond athlete named Betsy Hands. As we drive around town, Hands tells me she is a former Peace Corps volunteer and environmental scientist who spent years in various African countries and once led wilderness trips for Outward Bound. She is program director at homeWORD, a community housing organization that helps low-income women and families buy affordable homes. She’s also a competitive telemark skier and, oh yes, she’s running for office, a seat in the State Assembly. “Somebody’s got to step up, and why not me?” Hands tells me cheerfully. It’s an attitude I hear a lot in this state.

On March 8 at the Missoula Women’s Day Potluck, trestle tables sag under the array of food. A cheerful noise spurts from a childcare room next door. Around the hall, women’s groups working on violence, healthcare and workplace discrimination are scattered about. What they have in common, I gradually learn, is that they are all members of something called Montana Women Vote, a coalition of ten statewide women’s organizations focused on increasing women’s participation in elections and encouraging women to run for office. This isn’t presidential election season; it’s eight months before a Congressional midterm race, yet on just about every table there is something about voting, a flier for a fundraiser or an invitation to attend a training for candidates. Voter registration forms are everywhere.

“The thing I often say about electoral politics is that I never thought I’d find myself doing it,” Judy Smith told me the next day. Smith is a longtime activist and a founder, with Terry Kendrick, of Montana Women Vote. “I was part of that radical contingent in the 1960s and ’70s which thought that electoral politics was not something that would make real change,” continued Smith. Her beliefs haven’t changed that much, but the possibility of affecting policy-makers through movement pressure has. In 1994 the Democratic Party in Montana found itself in the same fix that national Democrats woke up to in 2002: Out of power in both houses of the legislature and the governor’s mansion, “we were out in the wilderness, lost, trying to figure out why we were lost,” Tester’s state director Bill Lombardi, a longtime Democratic consultant, recalled. Montana was once a comfortably Democratic state that had only returned one Republican to the Senate in its history, but its demographics and its economy had shifted such that a whole lot of traditional Democratic voters (women, blue-collar workers, low-income urban dwellers) had abandoned the Democratic Party, or the state. Republicans, meanwhile, were reaping the benefits of years of investment in Western states by the organized right, including the Christian Coalition and the corporate-backed Wise Use anti-environmentalist movement. In 1994, the year that swept Newt Gingrich to power, Montana Democrats won just thirty-three of 100 seats in the State Assembly and nineteen of fifty in the Senate.

Local women’s groups, like homeWORD, had no allies left to lobby. “Instead of running into that wall over and over, we had to crack that wall open,” said Smith. And they weren’t the only ones who felt that way.