Anti-war demonstrator, San Francisco, CA, January 27, 2007. Photo: © Matt Cohen

"We have a foreign policy that is foreign to our core values, domestic policies that are wreaking havoc at home, and an environment that is being destroyed."

These were the words on an attractive poster issued in the spring of 2006 by the coalition that organized a powerful March for Peace, Justice, and Democracy on April 29th in New York City.

This coalition was unique because in addition to groups like United for Peace and Justice [8], whose main focus has been and is the war in Iraq, it included in its decision-making core groups whose major issues were women's rights, racial justice, economic justice, and climate/environmental issues. Because it did, the message broadcast was broader, more multi-issue, and politically stronger.

Yet the messages broadcast to the enormous crowd at the January 27, 2007 march against the war in Washington, DC were different. The message on Saturday, as enunciated by speaker after speaker at the rally, was overwhelmingly a simple anti-war message.

There were connections made by some of the speakers to broader issues -- the war at home, economic and racial justice issues, impeachment, and attacks on civil liberties. Michael Lerner [9] of Tikkun mentioned the environment in his invocation and Medea Benjamin [10] of Code Pink and Global Exchange [11] made reference to "clean, green energy." However, there was no speaker who focused on the fundamental, organically-connected-to-the-war, urgent issue of catastrophic climate change and clean energy.

Indeed, George Bush, the denier-in-chief of global heating, had more to say about this issue in his State of the Union speech than the 25 or so speakers who talked for two and a half hours Saturday morning and early afternoon.

It is extremely difficult to understand this inability on the part of smart, dedicated peace and justice movement organizers to internalize and address the extreme urgency of the climate crisis as we go about our also urgent work against the war, especially because the connections between the issues are so organic.

The war on Iraq is all about greenhouse-gas-emitting oil and US neo-colonial control of the oil-rich Middle East. Everyone knows it. The developing expansion of the war into one which targets Iran is about the same thing.

Only three percent of the world's known oil supply lies within the US. As long as the US economy remains utterly dependent upon oil for its functioning, those in power, whether Republican or Democrat, will feel the need to keep "US-friendly" governments in power in the Middle East. The region is home to 60% of the world's known oil supply.

Note that "US-friendly" doesn't mean democratic. It doesn't mean women's rights. It doesn't mean credible elections. Think of Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia.

There is a systemic, structural reason why we can expect the US to keep throwing its economic and military power around in the Middle East for a long time to come, absent a major change in energy policy.

The peace movement may be able to bring home from Iraq the vast majority of US troops within the next couple of years, but just this month Democratic Party leader and US Senator Chuck Schumer [12] spoke about how we will need to keep some US troops in Iraq for an indefinite period of time in order to deal with what he called the "threat from Al Qaeda."

Al Qaeda-terrorism is the new justification for a massive Pentagon budget, a budget that Clinton and Obama and many other Democratic Party leaders have pledged to increase even more, while at the same time they make noises about troop reductions in Iraq.

Military power is not the way to deal with terrorism. The solution to the situation in Iraq can only be political, an accommodation among its varied religions, cultures and clans. Similarly, the threat of terrorism would be eased by a foreign policy based upon social and economic justice and respect for the self-determination of nations, combined with intelligence and police work to arrest and prosecute members of hard-core Al Qaeda cells. We will decrease the threat of terrorism when we end our oil addiction via a new foreign and domestic policy, a cultural/social/political "revolution of values," in the words of Dr. King. This revolution would prioritize serious conservation, energy efficiency, and a rapid, jobs-creating transition to clean, renewable energy sources [13] such as solar, wind, geothermal, and tidal energy.

Among the great issues of our day are: the struggle against militarism and resource wars; the struggle for peaceful solutions to differences between nations; the struggle against inequality in all its many forms; the struggle for justice and popular democracy; and the struggle to reduce the power of the oil, coal, and auto corporations so that we can enact a thoroughgoing clean-energy revolution.

We need peace movements, justice-based movements, and environmental movements that appreciate, understand, articulate, and organize around the connections between these issues.