Tom Hayden was introduced by Medea Benjamin, leader of the Code Pink antiwar organization. Tom is in his later sixties now and still looks good, although he did seem to be a bit tired by the end of the presentation. He's been an activist and politician pretty much his entire adult life, so he is good at communicating what he wants to get across to a crowd.

He was jazzed about last Tuesday's election results which he confidently asserted represented a mandate to end the Iraq War. He praised San Francisco's Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Barbara Boxer. He mentioned at one point that a year or so ago, some San Francisco activists were making noises about finding an antiwar challenger to Pelosi, which prompted her to become a partisan of John Murtha and a more vocal critic of the war.

Tom wasn't using that as a criticism of Pelosi. He said we shouldn't look at that as "opportunist", because every politician looks for an opening or an opportunity to take a position they may have wanted to take anyway. The pressure from the grassroots (and I would add netroots) is critical to keeping the pressure on the Democrats to oppose the war. And speaking of netroots, he said that the Internet had been critical to making the war such a salient issue in this year's election.

He defended the concept of "San Francisco values", which the rightwingers are frothing at the mouth about now that Pelosi will be Speaker of the House. He mentioned some of the items on Pelosi's proposed "100-hour plan" like raising the minimum wage and her opposition to the Iraq War, which are San Francisco values that last week's election shows are very much mainstream American values. He proposed we think of it as setting a "San Francisco standard". Sounds right to me.

One thing he said that I hadn't heard before was that in 80 of the races last Tuesday (I think he meant Senate and House races; he only mentioned the Ohio Senate race specifically) the issue of "fair trade" versus the corporate version of "free trade" was an important issue. And it cut heavily for the Democrats.

For me, the free trade/fair trade issue is a muddled one. I favored NAFTA and other "free trade" agreements during the Clinton administration. But now we have the experience of seeing that NAFTA in particular failed to deliver on many of its claimed benefits for environmental legislation, labor rights and job creation in México. So I count myself as not being much of a free-trade fan at the moment. But more on that some other time.

Tom devoted about half of his talk specifically to ecological issues, referring to ideas he elaborates in his 1996 book The Lost Gospel of the Earth, which has been re-issued in a revised 2006 edition (technically 2007, but it's already out). He said that in America there have been three broad categories of attitudes toward the environment. There are the Lords of the Universe, to whom the Cheney-Bush administration are of course devoted. Then there is the religious concept of stewardship. He joked that among fundamentalist Christians those taking a "stewardship" approach to the environment are a bit like an anachronism, sort of like "reform Democrats". Thirdly, there are those who view nature and the earth in terms of a feeling of kinship. Although he distinguished that approach from the religious stewardship idea, he gave St. Francis of Assisi as an example of someone who had a kinship idea, one that also occurs in many native religions.

He took a number of questions from the audience. I've always noticed in appearances like that, the first question seems to be from some crackpot. But this time I was the one who got in the first question. (Wait, I'm not sure I phrased that just right.) Anyway, I asked him about the Baker-Hamilton commission, formally known as the Iraq Study Group (ISG), and what he expected from their upcoming report.

He said that co-chairman Lee Hamilton had telephoned him and they talked at some length about Tom's ideas on the Iraq War. But he said the ISG is shaping up to be a political exercise in which they try to develop a "no-fault" kind of solution that would start an American withdrawal but never actually get there. He's expecting what I've called Baker's Secret Plan to End the War to be a lot like Nixon's Vietnamization plan after he got elected President with a secret plan to end that war. (One that has never yet come to light, I might add.)

He thought that Baker and the administration for Iraq will probably want a short-term increase in the number of American troops to secure Baghdad and also to replace the Maliki government with a strongman-type regime. He stressed that politicians are especially good at double-talk, so the antiwar movement will have to keep the pressure on all of them to continue to pull the troops out. That will be especially true as some troops are pulled out and the war may have a tendency to become less prominent in the news.

One of the problems with withdrawing some troops but leaving a smaller number there is that the soldiers and their families will start to ask, hey, why am I still stuck here? Is this just to cover some politician's behind?

Tom said that he thought a real exit plan would need three central elements: a special envoy that would be appointed as part of a commitment to exit Iraq; a one-year timetable to get all American troops out; and, bringing in the United Nations to help set up some kind of transition arrangements. He also described the latter as, "Get the US out and the UN in", a play on the old John Birch Society slogan now accepted by a large part of the Republican Party, apparently: "Get US out of the UN".

He commented that the "lessons of Iraq" were much like the "lessons of Vietnam", which from his viewpoint included no imperial Presidencies, no torture centers and no attempting to police the world. He said that people talk about the "Vietnam syndrome" and that we need now to have an "Iraq syndrome" that will make it impossible for our leaders to plunge into another adventure and disaster like the Iraq War.

He made a very important point in connection with that, which is that the discussion on the "lessons of Iraq" is already underway even though the war is still raging, and that war critics need to be very much a part of that discussion.

Someone asked - mostly in jest, I think - about the idea of letting Saddam free and having him run for election to lead Iraq. Tom made an intriguing response, that Saddam should be kept alive because he could be part of a negotiated settlement. He commented that that was sort of a CIA-type idea: "Never get rid of an asshole".

To a question about the mainstream media, he said, "We need to be proud of the fact that we're going to end the war before the media recognizes it". He cited four failures by our so-called "press corps" on the Iraq War: supporting it in the first place; ignoring the issue of the number of Iraqis killed; trying to avoid covering the torture issue; and, still refusing to take a stand for a withdrawal deadline.

He said that the independent media, both Internet and otherwise, have an important role to play, part of which is to keep the pressure on the major media to improve their coverage of war issues. He noted in this regard that Seymour Hersh got his start as an investigative reporter for Pacifica News Service, a reminder of how important those alternative sources really are for American journalism. I would say even more so today, when the media is so much in thrall to corporate demands and the "work-the-ref" onslaught of the conservative noise machine.

On the prospects of the Cheney-Bush administration expanding the war to Iran, he said that although a faction in the administration wants to, he doesn't expect to see it. That's because we don't have the military capability to do it since the ground troops that would inevitably be needed just aren't available, and also the generals oppose it. Plus the election was a clear antiwar mandate.

Responding to a question about the Green Party, Tom commented, "The Green Party has an organizational incentive to see the two major parties as the same." But they are not the same, he said, and the people see a significant difference between the Democrats and Republicans. The Greens, he said, have to find a way to keep pressure on the Democrats and surface important issues without undercutting the Dems in a way that gets Republicans elected.

I would add in that connection that although Tom served for years as a Democratic state senator in California, he was always known as a "reform Democrat". In 1976, he infuriated more Establishment-minded Dems by running against incumbent Democratic Senator James Tunney in the party primary. So he knows about putting pressure on the Democratic Party.