What Next, Antiwarriors?
News: Can the antiwar movement retain its broad base while struggling to find a new message?
April 11, 2003
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These are not easy times for American peace activists. Support for the war in Iraq has surged -- even in the quintessentially liberal Bay Area -- and protesters are meeting ugly resistance, both from jeering Bush patriots and disturbingly aggressive police.
Antiwar demonstrations continue, from civil disobedience actions at weapons facilities to a flurry of April 15 "war-tax resistance" rallies and vigils and another round of mass marches in Washington DC and San Francisco this past weekend. Coordinated by the oft-maligned anti-imperialists of International ANSWER, these protests coincided with large protests across Europe and Latin America. Meanwhile, there's a call for a national "showdown in Texas" targeting George W. Bush and his state's nexus of oil interests and "war profiteers" on May 3.
Still, following last week's footage of jubilant Iraqis cheering the downfall of Saddam Hussein, antiwar campaigners concede that their universal plea -- "US out of Iraq!" -- has become more difficult for the American public to hear.
Already, the war party pundits are in full gloat-mode, happily declaring victory for George W. Bush -- "the most successful war since World War II" boasts William Kristol -- while doing their best to cast antiwar activists as a bunch of misguided, Saddam-loving anti-Americans.
"We have entered the era of a new civil war between the forces of freedom and the powers of Islamo-fascist and communist darkness, " proclaims neoconservative commentator David Horowitz, "and once again the left is clearly determined to take its stand on the other side."
Even moderate voices are now openly wondering: Was the peace movement wrong about Iraq?
Such questions enrage Kevin Danaher, co-founder of the Bay Area human rights group Global Exchange. "Of course people will celebrate the fall of a dictator, who wouldn't? The military outcome of this war was never in doubt. But Bush lost the war politically, because he proved to the world that we are a barbarian nation, with no respect for international law."
Here in the US, that message will be hard to get across amid the euphoria over Saddam Hussein's rapid fall. Yet with the Bush administration now directing increasingly belligerent rhetoric at Syria, activists say the need to oppose a foreign policy based on unilateral first-strikes remains vital.
"The most immediate thing the peace movement needs to do is to delegitimize this war," says Phyllis Bennis, a research fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington DC who works closely with the umbrella group United for Peace and Justice. "Because if [the Bush Administration] gets away with this, they'll feel free to just do it all over again." The Iraqi people dancing in the streets, Danaher asserts, probably weren't those who lost family members to coalition bombs.
Peace activists may agree on the goal, but they remain divided on how best to achieve it. What antiwar activists must figure out, Bennis suggests, is how to support the downfall of a brutal tyrant while questioning the means by which he was overthrown: a reckless and globally divisive invasion which has killed and mutilated thousands, and now threatens to destabilize an entire region.
"The media keeps comparing this to the fall of the Berlin Wall," notes Gordon Clark of the Iraq Pledge of Resistance, pointing to the now-famous footage of the giant statue of Saddam being toppled in Baghdad. "But what people forget is that wall was brought down by a popular uprising, not some outside invading foreign force. There could have been other, far less violent means of dealing with Saddam Hussein than this."
Part of the problem for the antiwar movement is that the Bush administration and its neoconservative backers have co-opted the call for democracy and human rights in Iraq. The stated goal of this war has shifted from disarming Iraq of weapons of mass destruction (which have yet to materialize) to a moral crusade to liberate the Iraqi people from a hated and repressive regime.
Never mind that, during the 1980s, when Saddam gassed Iranian troops and Kurdish civilians, Washington's conservative hawks, including Pentagon boss Donald Rumsfeld, were cutting deals with the Iraqi leader in a play to check the Iranian revolution, and US firms were selling him biological and chemical seed stocks, with the express sanction of the US government. Back then, it was progressives and human rights groups who were denouncing US connivance with the brutal regime. Yet in what looks like a classic bit of Karl Rovian political jujitsu, the left got stuck holding the bag, defending a horrible status quo as the lesser evil to all-out war.
Of course, simply pointing out the right's hypocrisy in helping to create the monster they waged a war to decapitate will do little for the peace movement now. Partisan finger-pointing will not, by itself, win converts to the peace cause. Nor will it respond to the questions so many Americans were asking just a month ago: Did Saddam pose a big enough threat to US and international security to warrant a war on his regime; and would such an attack simply fuel more terrorism and what's become a self-fulfilling war on terror?
Some antiwar groups are doing their best to turn the military victory in Iraq on its head, claiming that the relative ease with which coalition forces swept through Iraq only supports their stance. "If Saddam had weapons of mass destruction," why didn't he use them?" asks David Cortright of the Fourth Freedom Foundation. "The fact that his forces were so weak and ill-equipped just validates our case that there was no need to go to war."
For much of the American public, however, delivering freedom to the Iraqi people seems a worthy cause for sacrifice -- at least for now. Whether that's still the case after a lengthy and costly occupation remains to be seen.
The long-term implications in Iraq are daunting -- even hawks and White House officials admit that much. The violence is likely to play out long after the US declares victory, as the suicide strike that injured two Marines last week shows. In Iraq's major cities, 'liberation' was followed by anarchy, with widespread looting of businesses, government offices, schools, even hospitals. The fact that US and British forces stood by while Iraq's National Museum -- the legacy of 6,000 years of Middle Eastern civilization -- was plundered has only added to perceptions across the Arab world that the Bush administration's intentions in Iraq are far from benevolent.
Saddam's forces may have melted away, but thousands of Arab fighters have reportedly crossed into the country in recent weeks, ready to sacrifice their lives to fend off the Western invaders. Kurdish fighters in the north are reportedly forcing Arab residents from their homes, and Shiites in the south are engaged in fierce power struggles. And, all too predictably, Osama bin Laden has resurfaced, calling for more suicide strikes against American and British forces. Meanwhile, in that other war on terror, the top suspects in the USS Cole attack have escaped from their Yemeni prison cell.
The question is what can the peace camp do now?
For pacifists and much of the antiwar left, the answer is fairly simple: Stop the war, pull the troops out now. Other elements of the movement, including more mainstream groups such as the celebrity-backed Win Without War, True Majority, and MoveOn.org, have been reluctant to adopt that kind of stand. Leaving now, they assert, would do little to bring peace to Iraq and would only exacerbate the humanitarian crisis.
"Now that we've destabilized the country ... to leave now would mean to leave the country in chaos, and could potentially cause lots more deaths," says Rev. Bob Edgar, executive director of the National Council of Churches and the co-chairman of Win Without War. Although Edgar has helped organize several civil disobedience protests against the war, among his coalition of religious leaders, "the best consensus we've been able to arrive at is to call for a swift close to the war and to bring the troops home as soon as possible."
While acknowledging the concern that a rampant White House may seek to broaden the war, the so-called 'realists' in the antiwar movement insist the "Get Out Now" message is too simplistic.
"We cannot pull out now. You'd be creating another Somalia, which would be much more of a nightmare for the Iraqi people," insists Steve Sawyer, a political advisor to Greenpeace International. Pointing to the threat of Iraq's religious, ethnic and tribal groups duking it out for control of the country, and the absence of any other force on the ground to oversee humanitarian aid, Sawyer says "there is an enormous power vacuum which the US is obligated to fulfill." Sadly, Sawyer notes, the United Nations has neither the peacekeeping resources, nor the willingness to take over the US role at this point. While Sawyer and others agree on the need to transition to some kind of UN-sanctioned peacekeeping force, they worry that by asking for an immediate US withdrawal, antiwar activists are failing to hold the Bush administration accountable for the immense destruction of this war. If US troops leave now, they ask, what incentive will Washington have to pay for Iraq's reconstruction?
Such talk angers many in the peace camp, like Danaher and Michael Letwin, of New York Labor Against the War. They claim the 'realists' are traveling down a slippery moral slope toward condoning the US occupation.
"Chaos is not worse than continuing what is an immoral war of conquest for control of Iraq's resources," Letwin declares. "Those who argue otherwise are buying in to the idea that the US went in there as a force for good. The US doesn't intend to stop with Iraq, and the longer it stays and exercises control there, the more tempted it will be to go on to other places."
Danaher also rejects the suggestion that the activists must accept some continued US oversight in Iraq to ensure the country's reconstruction. Expecting the White House to champion democracy in Iraq, he asserts, is a fool's wager.
"They don't believe in democracy here, so why would they bring democracy to Iraq? You can't bring democracy at the end of a tank," he argues. "Do you really think the US government is going to pay for all the handicapped children they just created over there when they won't pay for the kids we have here?"
Others say the demands are not necessarily contradictory: "The fact that there are no good solutions is because the US has screwed it up," says Bennis. "We have to stop the occupation, and we have to demand that the US pays to restore all the water, food and security it has destroyed. And we have to insist that the transition to Iraqi governance be overseen by the UN, because that is the only way the new Iraqi government will have legitimacy."
What's tragic, Bennis says, is that despite continued opposition to the war within the General Assembly, no country has been willing to risk the wrath of the US by calling for a vote to condemn the invasion on principle. The leading opponents to the war -- France, Germany, and Russia -- quickly toned down their criticism once the fighting got underway. That's made it difficult for peace activists to rally around any clear alternative, multilateral plan for the reconstruction of Iraq. In the meantime, the US steams ahead with its unilateral agenda to remake the country.
One thing activists do agree on is the need to challenge the administration's apparent efforts to turn the rebuilding process into a feeding-frenzy for US corporations. The Bush administration has routinely insisted it doesn't want to maintain a costly military occupation longer than is absolutely necessary (though it probably wouldn't mind a military base or two in the country). What activists fear is the ensuing "corporate invasion" of Iraq.
Last month, members of Global Exchange launched a new website, www.stopjaygarner.com, aimed at opposing the Pentagon's efforts to install Lt. Army General Jay Garner as the new "civilian administrator" in Iraq. While Garner won the confidence of the Kurds when he directed a UN-backed relief effort following the first Gulf War, his last post was president of SY Coleman, a defense contractor that makes some of the missile guidance systems currently deployed in Israel and Iraq. As such, activists say, he is simply, "the wrong guy for the job."
"Why do the Iraqis want someone who made money off of bombing them running the country?" demands Global Exchange's Medea Benjamin. Taking note of the Pentagon's plans to appoint the former president of Shell Oil to head up Iraq's oil production, she adds, "the nakedness is astounding."
"Strategically, we're hoping to ensure that some good comes of this," says Eli Pariser of MoveOn, which is also urging its 2 million online members to write letters to newspapers insisting that the UN have more than a perfunctory role in the postwar reconstruction and the effort to build a representative government in Iraq. "We're trying to avert a scenario where Iraq is transferred to an American general, which prompts more terrorists to be shipped to training camps, and the leadership of the country is transferred to a weak Iraqi who is overthrown and then another Saddam Hussein is back in there."
Activists, and mainstream Democrats, are also looking to play up the domestic costs of the war. However proud Americans might feel about helping free the Iraqis from a brutal dictator, they may not be so happy to see billions of their tax dollars going to rebuild Iraqi cities when their own cities and schools are slashing budgets. Focusing on the domestic costs of the war, activists reason, will help rein in hawkish schemes for expanding this war into the rest of the Middle East. It will also play into what some say should be the antiwar movement's larger goal: Unseating Bush in 2004.
That, certainly, is MoveOn's primary focus now. Pariser says his group isn't ready to back any specific candidate, and cautions the peace camp against squandering its potential influence in pursuit of ideological purity. The real goal, he says, has to be voting Bush out.
"Bush 1 was sky-high in the polls after the first Gulf War," he says. "But he quickly dropped into the abyss because of people's concern over jobs, and we're in much worse shape now. Tactically speaking, if we want a foreign policy that's not about military adventurism, we have to change the leadership."
Image: Associated Press/Wide World Photos
