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A stalled U.S. peace movement?Antiwar activity since 2001Asked to contribute to a panel on the antiwar movement at the recent “Historians Against the War” conference, I decided to assemble a chronology to ground my thoughts. The material that follows, previously published in five parts on my blog at Happening Here is the result. Part One: Trying to find the ground under our feet: 2001-2002The attacks of 9/11 left the small contingent of progressive individuals and organizations in this country just as horrified and nearly as confused as everyone else. I remember watching the towers fall and thinking “some guys somewhere are seeing their ‘made for TV’ movie succeed beyond their wildest dreams — and everything I care about is in deep shit.” I imagine most “Historians against the war” felt similarly. At first, the chief venue in which we tried to comprehend the new terrain and new tasks ahead of us was via a series of emailed “letters” that buzzed around the internet. Revenge was the order of the day in the public at large; anything but the most bellicose posture made the speaker suspect. These internet communications have mostly disappeared into the ether. I want to make sure that we capture some of the expressions from those times here. Bill Quigley of Loyola Law School sent around “Ten Principles for Social Justice Organizing in A Time of Crisis.” These were good tips — I think they are still sound and worth reading. He concluded:
This seems to me prescient. Bob Wing, then editor of Colorlines Magazine, tried to explain to the left what had changed:
How right he was. Wing went on to urge that progressives recognize a new challenge and opportunity:
That is, 9/11 meant we had to conceptualize what a peace movement would mean in a nation that had lost its certainty of invulnerability while still grotesquely able to inflict damage on the world. The attacks revealed that we are dependent for our security on “playing well with others.” But could we learn this? I don’t think we’ve built that kind of “new kind of peace movement.” Instead of trying to move the U.S. into a post-imperial posture, we’ve predominantly relied on the inertia of an historic American isolationism to drag the U.S. away from its wars. We’ve got a strong force at our backs when we rely on U.S. ignorance of and indifference to foreign realities, but this is not necessarily the force that can carry us forward. The peace movement has notably failed to organize by attraction. We have not imagined or presented an animating vision that draws ever wider circles of people into the fold with us. In part this is because post-2001 U.S. military adventures have been undertaken against states and individuals who do not look attractive to us, except perhaps as stubborn people who display admirable tenacity in resisting foreign occupation. But there is nothing much to inspire most of us in the communal and religious loyalties that seem to underlie most of the opposition to the U.S. in Iraq. People who came into the movement from the experience of supporting Vietnamese communist nationalism, or the popular forces in Central American in the 1980s, or the anti-apartheid struggle, found no parallel in this peace movement because there were no indigenous allies in Afghanistan and Iraq who we would want to campaign in favor of. Iraqis can be sympathetic victims (and many are) but we have not come to know them as sympathetic allies, a far more inspiring posture. And we have failed to project a convincing picture of non-militaristic, peaceful United States, as an alternative to the paranoid authoritarian direction provided by our rulers. Apparently the conditions don’t currently exist for elaborating such a vision. Yet with all these obstacles, we have created something of an antiwar movement. Part Two: Afghanistan and the Iraq invasion; the antiwar movement builds some infrastructure and tries some initiatives:2002-2003In October 2001, peace movement forces were run over by the U.S. rush to overthrow the Taliban and take revenge on Al Qaida, mostly in the person of miscellaneous Afghans. We also most emphatically did not have the US people on our side. Close to 90 percent of the U.S. population supported the U.S. war in Afghanistan in late 2001. For many months, though we now know there was never any doubt that U.S. rulers were bent on invading Iraq, folks in the peace movement wondered whether an Iraq war would happen — and often asserted that our rulers couldn’t be foolish enough to do anything so obviously stupid. Very gradually we built some weak, but increasingly real structures of resistance. The organization I’m associated with, War Times/Tiempo de Guerras, published its first issue of the free newsprint tabloid in February 2002 and promptly had to reprint to meet demand. The War Times steering committee thought of ourselves as providing infrastructure for a peace movement not yet in being. The broad coalition of U.S. peace groups that would become United for Peace and Justice was also beginning to talk with each other at this time. By February 2003, there was a visible U.S. peace movement and a vigorous world peace movement. Across the entire world, millions rallied against the looming invasion of Iraq; The New York Times famously described this international outpouring:
The enormous scale of this public manifestation gave peace forces a benchmark we’ve never come close to repeating. Many participants from that day apparently concluded: if they aren’t going to listen to us, why bother to assemble? The movement’s underlying lack of deep ongoing organization made it easy for war opponents to retreat into the woodwork. And since what they had done didn’t work, why shouldn’t they turn to other concerns. When President Bush pulled the trigger on Iraq in March, 2003, 75 percent of the U.S. population believed the war as necessary and justified — not as nearly unanimous approval as greeted the attack on Afghanistan, but nothing for the peace movement to cheer about. As the invasion quickly became a violent, contested occupation and no WMD turned up, support for the war began to erode as early as the summer of 2003. In June of 2003, United for Peace and Justice formalized its existence as a representative coalition of hundreds of peace groups with an elected board from member organizations led by a full time staff in New York. Traditional peace organizations joined with more recent and often more local efforts to try to rein in the Iraq occupation. Code Pink, the feisty “women-initiated grassroots peace and social justice movement working to end the war in Iraq, stop new wars, and redirect our resources into healthcare, education and other life-affirming activities,” began to demonstrate imaginatively wherever politicians supported the war. Local vigils proliferated. International human rights organizations raised an outcry against the U.S. gulag at Guantanamo. From early on, Military Families Speak Out was able to break through the silence imposed by anguish after 9/11. They worked to publicize the devastating effect extended tours of duty and call ups from the reserves were having on U.S. soldiers. Donald Rumsfeld at the Defense (War) Department, had calculated that the U.S. could fight two concurrent campaigns with very few soldiers on the ground. When this failed, military necessity quickly stretched the human beings who had to fight to the breaking point. In the year after the Iraq invasion, the peace movement put down some roots and worked at educating the rest of the United States about the realities of war that the administration conspired to hide from us. In that time period, a clandestinely captured photo showing the flag-draped coffins of dead U.S. soldiers became an act of resistance. And we kept on keeping on. Part Three: Liberal elites get the bad news: U.S. has “lost” Iraq war; Presidential election subsumes activism: 2004-2005While the various Iraqi nationalist and religious insurgencies increased their ability to contest the occupation, the U.S. administration mucked around with constitutions and elections to try to create a compliant but also legitimate Iraqi government. Occupation authorities were transparently inept; Iraqi collaborators were transparently self-serving and venal. Iraq drifted toward becoming a bloody failed state torn by civil war. The fact that, against all expectations, the U.S. was actually losing the war has been the backdrop against which all U.S. antiwar activism has played out since at least early 2005 — though this is usually unacknowledged, even among peace movement people. The U.S. can’t “win” in Iraq, or even project a meaningful description of what “winning” would look like. And gradually, mainstream elites have figured this out, largely without reference to the activities or demands of the antiwar movement. And Iraqis and U.S. troops kept dying. The U.S. fatality count reached 1000 in September 2004. The Iraqi casualty count was and remains extremely disputed; for an overview of counts, see this article. Two events in this period belatedly forced most liberal opinion makers — and lots of Democrats — to turn against a war they’d supported as long as they thought it would be successful and cheap. In April 2004, U.S. forces laid siege to the Iraqi town of Fallujah, wreaking havoc apparently in revenge for killings of four U.S. contractors/mercenaries. To the shock of many, after inflicting awful casualties on Iraqi civilians, the US units were forced to withdraw. Leveling centers of opposition was obviously going to be more brutal and bloody than liberals had bargained for. Smarter war supporters and opponents began to realize the U.S. could not “win” in Iraq at any acceptable cost. All that military might could not be usefully employed to reach any imaginable goal, not to mention any goal remotely acceptable to Iraqis. (Bush ordered the militarily useless but brutal destruction of uppity Fallujah after his re-election.) Just weeks later, the Abu Ghraib torture photos hit the U.S. press. Iraqis of course knew that prisoners swept up by U.S. forces were being abused — the revelation was to the world outside Iraq and particularly to the U.S. population. Widespread, visceral revulsion followed, This too showed liberal elites they had backed the wrong horse. With Democrats now by and large leery of the war though not yet calling for withdrawal, antiwar activism was easily subsumed into the 2004 campaign. John Kerry failed to articulate an attractive antiwar position, but millions worked to elect him in place of George W. Bush as the only hope of ending what more and more was seen as a disaster. Folks in the peace movement made noises about keeping the war at the center of the campaign, but we didn’t really have access to the megaphone — the candidate and conservative elements in the Democratic Party held tight to their wishy-washy message. We fell in with the chorus of voices blaming George Bush for all the country’s ills without being able to project any more sophisticated or positive critique. Polls from that time illuminate the deep ambivalence about the war that helped Bush to eke out his victory. Sometime in 2004, both Bush’s approval rating and the number of people in the U.S. who thought the war was not worth it slipped under 50 percent. But a majority continued to say that the U.S. “done the right thing” by going to war in Iraq. That is, a majority essentially still endorsed the right of the U.S. to wage preemptive war, or a war of revenge, or a war of conquest, on the say-so of its government, even if they didn’t like this war. No wonder the peace movement felt we weren’t making a dent — though we kept trying. Those who came to believe that the Iraq war had not been “the right thing to do,” only fell consistently below 50 percent after Bush was re-elected and 2005 began. By October 2005, the number of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq topped 2000. Part Four: Peace movement finds causes to support; Insurgent new Democrats and a counterculture emerge: 2005-2008Despite all the rallies and vigils, the web postings and speeches, probably the most energizing antiwar demonstration since the Iraq invasion was Cindy Sheehan’s Camp Casey. Plopped outside Bush’s ranch in the baking summer of 2005. Sheehan’s demanded that the Commander in Chief tell her why he had sent her son to his death. Her question became the nation’s and helped galvanize peace work. This devastating condemnation of the Bush regime was shortly reinforced by the spectacle of its abandonment of New Orleans to the Hurricane Katrina. We all saw on TV that the people in power didn’t give a damn about caring for anyone — not only faraway Muslims, but also ordinary U.S. residents, especially those with dark skins. The two events, painfully, gave a U.S. peace movement real live people to fight FOR — Katrina refugees and “the troops.” Though the connections were not always articulately drawn, ever since that time, there has been a powerful infusion into the peace movement of the sort of energy which people have fighting for their own well-being and the well-being of people whose lives they can imagine. And a significant majority of people in the United States have now turned against the war, firmly convinced that somehow, the Iraq war was a mistake. In December 2006, the number of U.S. troops killed in Iraq hit 3,000; 4,000 troop deaths was reached in March 2008. Counter recruitment — organizing to discourage enlistment in the military — had been a named antiwar project from the get-go. The historic peace group American Friends Service Committee provided resources. But as it became more and more clear that U.S. deaths in the Iraq were for no purpose embraced by the majority of the country, as the abysmal treatment of injured vets was revealed, counter recruitment gained energy. Moreover, this work provided an entry space to younger activists. Counter recruitment challenged the daily presence of the military in high schools — it was real and tangible and often considered disruptive by schools and adults — an attractive project for young people asserting their own voice. Aimee Allison and David Solnit record the movement in Army of None. Concurrently, people seeking to remake the Democratic Party as a loosely progressive coalition shoved their way into prominence and some power. The opportunity created by a new technological and media environment came together with a vigorous push for a generational transition in the party’s hierarchy. A new generation wants to be heard by the Democrats. This first showed its force in the 2004 Dean campaign. It has the feeling of a domestic insurgency on the rise, of people who know they are sweeping dead wood away and can’t be stopped. As such, it has an attractive force that a peace movement unable to find its imagination notably lacks. There is no question that these new Democrats’ animating issue is the war. They view it as a Republican crime against the country. It is easy sitting within a stalled peace movement to underestimate the excitement and sheer grit that have been expended to breathe new life into the Democratic Party by people who have largely never related to antiwar movement activities. Political blogs, Move-On, and local Democratic committees have become their arena for giving political expression to their antiwar convictions. They take antiwar opinions for granted. They are extremely unhappy with the inaction of the Democrats they believe they put into office in 2006. Perhaps most important of all, because they found their concerns and beliefs erased in the MSM, as they label old mainstream media, a very substantial fraction of people in the United States generated our own cultural markers. From early anti-Bush outbursts by the Dixie Chicks through Jon Stewart’s alternative “news”, expressions of revulsion against the regime in power have become commonplace. Open access to new media platforms has unleashed a torrent of creative resistance, apparently shapeless to observers outside it, yet forming to an oppositional culture in which millions live. This somewhat amorphous oppositional culture, this new “counter culture,” is currently fueling the Obama campaign — and winning a victory over the old culture it sees represented by Hillary Clinton. This new counter culture is not anti-imperialist. It is not in any way classically left. It is sometimes aware that it is more white than U.S. population demographics warrant. (Concurrently, people of color have long been far more critical of the post 9/11 wars than white folks.) It is often ignorant of the corporate loyalties of its Democratic Party leaders — but it is a force that wasn’t there in 2001. It is far larger and more influential than anything that the self-conscious peace movement has accomplished. A peace movement that is not in some way of this counter culture risks irrelevance. Part Five: Lessons: 2001-2008So here we are: on the one hand, we, the peace movement, have won. Majorities of us clearly have had it with imperial wars. Young people are especially clear:
And nevertheless, our rulers are determined to go on.
What does looking back over what has happened since 2001 tell us? Making peace is long, hard work. The attacks of 9/11 gave our rulers an excuse to run with their wildest imperial ambitions. As my WarTimes/Tiempo de Guerras coworker Max Elbaum always reminds groups, stopping an empire in full charge is hard. Lyndon Johnson knew that Vietnam was not a war the U.S. could win before he made a major troop commitment. Yet that war dragged on another eight years. We shouldn’t be kicking ourselves that we haven’t stopped this one. We need to build a movement based on what people really care about, not what we think they should care about. Sounds simple, but it isn’t. There’s a reason corporations and politicians do market research before they launch their campaigns. A peace movement doesn’t do that; we seek to inject a value into public discourse, not ride existing values. But we can look at what has really moved people to action and build from there. To that end, here’s a short list of people who I’ve met in the course of my work and peace activities since 2001 who stand out for me as exemplifying activism that comes from deeply internalized values.
All these individuals have created the ethos of the antiwar movement — and been changed themselves by working within it. The peace movement may be stuck — but these people are not stuck. Our stumbling peace movement has tried to form itself alongside, but not so much inside, momentous changes in the generational/technological environment. And the peace movement has in some ways been more a spectator to these changes than a catalyst. The open internet has created a vast arena in which a counterculture, mostly inhabited by people who don’t remember 1968, thrive amid oppositional attitudes. And this population is far larger than the peace movement. Here’s a description from within:
This can be read as more than a little fuzzy-wuzzy, and obviously there are millions who have no part of this cultural shift. But there are also millions who do and they are very much influencing adaptations in the Democratic Party and the Obama campaign that may determine who’ll occupy the ruling seats next November. In conclusion, I want to go back to what Bill Quigley wrote in 2001.
Repeating what we have always done has not been all the peace movement has done, but it has been a great deal our activity. Meanwhile, mostly outside the peace movement, others have taken a stab at the necessity Bob Wing named on Sept. 14, 2001.
A more effective peace movement needs to be offering a vision of a plausible, sustainable global community that doesn’t hinge on U.S. use of force to maintain empire. Elements of that vision clearly need to include challenges related to technology, climate change, and how to rein in cancerous capitalism. We really haven’t known how to put out such a vision yet. That’s not surprising — it is hard and perhaps, also, the struggle against empire may not have changed us enough so that we could see it. But the group(s) that find elements of that vision will discover that millions are already with them, looking for something similar, ready to elaborate something as yet unknown. They just don’t currently identify with the peace movement. |
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