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Hi Jason I am not on any committee and have no connection with Iraq. I have been deeply concerned about the genocide in Iraq since the start. I am also concerned about 'Imperialist' issues but I now never use the term. > At the last National Co-ordination Meeting of anti-sanctions groups That's the key for me - it does not say 'and anti-war'. More pragmatically, the more people and organisations that are involved and the narrower the focus (criminal, humanitarian, genocide, sanctions) the better chance we have of making progress against sanctions (and such progress would help undermine the imperialists). In terms of civilian casualties sanctions far outweigh the illegal bombings. I would dearly love to get HRW and Amnesty actively fighting these sanctions. Any sniff of anti-war or anti-imperialism and they would disapppear. It is quite possible to get middle of the road, establishment and even right wingers to fight against sanctions. They need to be told about the effects of sanctions and have the US/UK arguments answered which is easy without having to resort to theories about the underlying causes (eg imperialism). Only very recently I came across a die-hard Republican-supporting American (not a friend of mine!). He is anti-SH and believes in direct military intervention, assassination, bombing etc and thought that sanctions were a good thing. On being exposed to the facts about sanctions he fairly soon came round to the view that non- military sanctions should be lifted urgently. Even the control of oil sales income he then disagreed with when we pointed out that this produced a command economy - a communist model with no room for capitalism! >The only question is do these meetings need to run > in parallel to the current National Co-rdination Meetings (NCM) In parallel - reports from anti-war meetings can be shared with NCM members. > In essence, we cannot frame any events or discuss anything whilst > maintaining a blanket ban on political discussion within the movement. I can understand your frustration but I would support keeping the ban. I wouldn't even allow time-limited sessions for political discussion. The danger is that some people would become alienated. Time would be wasted on 'framing' the events. You gave two views of 1284. There are others possible. Only recently I had the whole scenario explained to me just in the context of Israel. I suppose a possible compromise would be to have one small session which split into two separate groups - those wanting the political discussion and those not. A paraphrased casual discussion with a former UK air force officer: me: these bombings are useless. They cost money and achieve nothing. Even worse, SH can trigger them when he wants. him: we're not seen to initiate them and they serve to keep the media and the public's eyes off the ball (the genocidal sanctions) Mark Parkinson Cornwall -- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- This is a discussion list run by the Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq For removal from list, email soc-casi-discuss-request@lists.cam.ac.uk Full archive and list instructions are available from the CASI website: http://welcome.to/casi