International links are important, but only if they represent links on the ground TC: Sure but I think they can also give people confidence. 30 million people marching on February 15 across the world was a real inspiration. Where it has been possible to co-ordinate strike action, it helps to argue "come out and be part of something that is happening in many different countries. ML: If I didn't believe that I wouldn't be here. We send out information about labour action being taken across the globe for precisely that reason.
But I'm trying to be honest and realistic, that is to make the small number of labour activists feel less isolated. But it wouldn't mean much to even the most advanced, most union-conscious American workers to say we are doing this because they are doing it in Greece today. They would regard that as like Mars.
In the end, what it is about is people organising in their shops, in their neighbourhoods and talking to the unconverted.
We need to focus on how can we organise people to take even the most minimal action. It won't be a general strike that we start with. If we could pull off even a minute's strike I'd be happy. I'd like to get us to the point where we can crawl - and hope that one day we can walk and run.
US society is further to the right, not as class conscious as Britain, though there is a process of politicisation because the American economy is a shambles and because of things like Enron.
Economic opportunity is seen at the moment to be very limited - thousands of kids coming out of high school and college just don't have anything to look forward to.
And there are all these cuts beginning to take place. The deficits that states and the federal government are running are phenomenal, and now they have passed these huge tax cuts, which means that it will get much worse.
So I think that people will become aware ultimately through their own experience fundraising. Their slogan implies that the battle that American workers should be fighting is with Saddam Hussein.
Our problem is not Saddam, though I have no use for him - it's George Bush and the people he represents that are the threat to the world. But I'm pleased that they are sending lots of messages to Congress against the war
There is a certain amount of red baiting that goes on, encouraged by the mainstream press but also taken up by conservative elements in the movement.
That is not to say that the left forces are perfect, but you can't pander to anti-communism or red baiting which of course is rooted in the tradition of McCarthyism.
NYCLAW is not a political party and there are many different groups - and people in no group - who are in our organisation. We have basically an anti-imperialist view of the war and how to build a movement. We try to work with people regardless of their analysis, who are opposed to the war and especially in grass roots communities, communities of colour, working class communities.
We push for unity between the different coalitions around specific events. Unfortunately, there is a certain amount of resistance to that, usually for sectarian reasons.
The national coalitions are typically behind the grass roots in terms of unity. The grass roots are asking why do we have to have these different coalitions, or why cant they work together?
I think that there needs to be many different ways in which people can express opposition to the war:
There are people that will come to a demonstration, there are people who will do direct action or civil disobedience and l hope that there are people that will resist within the military as three British soldiers did this week and that will take industrial action, as did the Motherwell train drivers.
I think those two later things, although they are further removed from where we are now are ultimately the most important things of all because they could bring the war to an end. executions, torture, brutality... America. bombs have maimed whole peoples for generations to come. Their brutal torture, copied by dictators around the world. Iraq. It's time to force a halt. Chemical weapons, mass destruction, summary US imperialism has fine-tuned these barbaric methods over the last half century in Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, in the Gulf, and in Latin Time and again, they have reduced whole cities to rubble. Their poisons have stripped forests, polluted water tables and agricultural land. Their humiliation and murder of prisoners has been Now once again we face a new round of horrors in
"Interrogating" a Vietnamese prisoner The ruins of the Vietnamese capital, Hanoi, after US carpet bombing
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After the Iraq war Despite the fact that one of the most frequently shown images of the war against Iraq was the rescue of Private Jessica Lynch, it is as civilians not combatants that most women have been most affected by this war as by others before it. Children are being killed May 2003