Where now?

What next for the antiwar movement? It's a question a lot of people are throwing around.

Matt Taibbi thinks those who denounce what's going on in Iraq right now should get tough and hit America where it would hurt, by targeting its consumer-based economy. He calls for a boycott of everything and anything you can think of.

For years, corporate America and the media have tried to convince us that buying things is a political act, a way of expressing our individuality (Fruitopia instead of flower power, Nikes sold to the tune of "Revolution," peace signs on the walls of Starbucks). Well, let’s call their bluff. Let’s non-participate. Let’s go on consumer strike. Pull a slowdown. We don’t have a lot of choices when it comes to voting for politicians, but when it comes to buying, where our existence is actually necessary, we have a thousand choices a day. It might be the only method we have of making the decision-making class pay attention to our concerns.

Michael Neumann is a bit harsher in his criticism of the failures of the antiwar movement, and instead suggests that we get tough on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The antiwar left, he writes, "needs to demand, as it should have demanded a long time ago, that the US switch sides in the Israel/Palestine conflict. This means that the US should ally itself with the Palestinians and with the Muslim world, against Israel, to secure prompt, unconditional and complete Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories."

"It is not that the Israel-Palestine conflict is the only important issue in the world; it is just that it is the crucial one," he continues. "Until the US reconciles with the Islamic world on Palestine, it can never demonstrate a commitment to international conventions, or change the tenor of its self-destructive war on terror, or overcome the petulant bitterness that now poisons any attempt to develop a fruitful foreign policy. Get on the right side of this issue, and there is still much to do, but the way is open to doing it."