Oct. 12: Wednesdays Against War: The Withdrawal Syndrome

(Photo by hirodog)

Oct. 12, 7:30pm

Wednesdays Against War:
Which Way Out of Iraq (and Palestine and New Orleans)?: The Withdrawal Syndrome

The Brecht Forum
451 West Street
(the West Side Highway) bt Bank & Bethune Sts

Invited panelists include:
Sinan Antoon, Iraqi poet, novelist and translator;
Anthony Arnove, the editor, with Howard Zinn, of Voices of a People’s History; Haytham Bahoora, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature at NYU;
Anjali Kamat,a freelance journalist currently based in New York;
Sherene Seikaly, a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at NYU. She is a senior Editor at the Arab Studies Journal;
and Thenmozhi Soundararajan, a reporter for Hard Knock Radio (Pacifica Radio) and Third World Majority.

This event, the second in the new "Wednesdays Against War" series at the Brecht Forum, will be an open discussion with a panel of speakers, dedicated to the following questions:

Why is there hesitation among some in the anti-war movement about calling for the unconditional and immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq?
What are some of the qualifications that have been suggested to unconditional withdrawal (for example, a timetable for the pull out, or the
presence of international "peacekeeping" forces)?
How do we begin to address the "we broke it, we bought it" tendency among many who want U.S. troops out of Iraq but feel that they are somehow "necessary to prevent chaos"?
What lessons can we learn from the sham Israeli "withdrawal" from Gaza?
How is this question of "preventing chaos" related to the situation in New Orleans?
When you have troops coming in to "protect" residents from "looters" through the barrel of a gun, who are the real "armed gangs"?
How do we begin to talk about the idea of responsibility-for example, the payment of reparations to the people of Iraq by the U.S. government and its allies?
How can we demand accountability and punishment for those among the U.S. government and its allies who are responsible for this criminal war and occupation, and how can this call for accountability become part of the call for immediate withdrawal?