Going to war is habit for Americans. Essentially, we’ve done it every twenty to
forty years since we became a country, but really, if you count the wars waged
against all the different Native American communities throughout the lands and
especially if you count the quashing of slave revolts, the first 100 years of
the United States was a time of more or less constant war. And since the Civil War, rather than getting
less warlike, we’ve actually gotten bloodier and bloodier. For all the talk of peace dividends and the
end of the Cold War in the nineties, Clinton bombed or invaded 12 countries during his eight years.
It's not very surprising that the US public doesn’t
have much faith in the prospects of antiwar movements. Our record of stopping wars before they
started is pretty dismal, and only two have been noticeably shortened by the
presence of a grassroots antiwar movement – the Mexican War and Vietnam.
That makes what has happened in the last two weeks pretty
remarkable.
Last Saturday, the San Francisco Chronicle’s lead afternoon
story was “Possible US-led attack on Syria sparks rallies.” The article, from the Associated Press wire, covered
demonstrations of 100 people in Houston, 200 in Boston and Los Angeles, two
dozen in Arkansas and 40 in Chicago. The
15 or so in Oakland didn’t make the cut.
Today’s paper contains this news:
“More than 30 protesters gathered Saturday outside the federal building in Lincoln to oppose possible U.S. military action in Syria. The Lincoln Journal Star reports that among the crowd was 32-year-old Haidar Kazem, holding a Syrian flag and a sign aimed at throngs of Nebraska football fans that read "Go Big Red, No 'Little' War.”
Excuse me, 30? Need I detail the demonstrations of hundreds
or thousands I’ve attended that have been completely ignored by the press? Remember when the New York Times justified
not covering Occupy Wall Street by saying there were only a few hundred people
involved? The baffling fact that the
demonstration in San Francisco today, which drew at least 1500 people, didn’t get
a mention does not lessen the marvel that the mainstream media seems to be beating
the bushes for antiwar activity to report on.
Even more extraordinary is that Obama and his team, who appeared
all set a week ago to go it alone, despite being rebuffed by the British
Parliament, suddenly backed off. CBS
News mentioned the US public’s 20% support of an attack as one factor in that
decision. Another was that 140 Congresspeople,
led by the East Bay’s own Barbara Lee, signed a letter demanding a say. It’s easy for us here, and I’m certainly one
of them, to assume that we just vote for Lee to make ourselves feel good, that
she and other progressives in Congress don’t have any real power. Indeed, it usually seems that way, but lo and
behold, one of the most out-there members of Congress set something in motion
that – at least momentarily -- stopped the war machine in its tracks.
Obama has backed himself into a corner, because on one
hand he drew a red line, so his ego and all that are at stake, but on the other
he made this big speech about democracy and letting Congress decide, so if he
can’t get Congress on board, then he will look bad if he does it. Which makes a call to your Congressperson a
little less futile than usual.
Obama and the media have told us we’re “war-weary,” and
that’s kind of nervy. Afghans are
war-weary. Iraqis, Pakistanis, Yemenis,
the guys still stuck in Guantanamo. Except
for the troops themselves – who are actually speaking out against a new war
themselves
-- and the very small percentage of people who have a family member in the
military, we have no right to be “war-weary.”
Weary of what exactly? We don’t
even hear about the wars most days.
Nonetheless, it seems like even the media folks who couldn’t
wait to attack Iraq, while they are not challenging patently false assertions like
the 1400 dead in the chemical weapons attack that the US officials are hammering
like a drumbeat (the Syrian Human Rights Observatory puts it at 502), are
saying, “Enough already.” It seems like
our taste for blood may be waning slightly.
And that’s a good thing.
A study released last week purports to find that “the
absence of a strong and visible anti-war movement, the way there was during the
George W. Bush Presidency” is due to the desertion of Democrats following the
election of Obama. Now the authors’ data
documenting a decline in participation by identified Democrats seems solid, but
I dispute that there was a “strong and visible” peace movement during the
period of the Bush presidency they’re looking at, which starts in 2007. My recollection is that our ability to pull
out more than a few hundred people plummeted in the six months after March 19,
2003, and that by 2006 the antiwar movement was more or less dormant. I credit the decline much more to the
perception that demonstrating just doesn’t do any good – that when millions out
in the street couldn’t stop the Iraq war, the balloon essentially popped.
Now is a good time to blow it up again. It actually turns out that the record of
movements for stopping wars in recent times is not quite as poor as we
think. Historian Lew Rockwell reminds us that
“Popular pressure against U.S. military intervention in Nicaragua [in the 1980s] not only blocked the dispatch of U.S. combat troops, but led to congressional action (i.e., the Boland amendment) cutting off U.S. government funding for the U.S. surrogates, the contras.”
Rockwell further points out that during the consumerist eighties, the dead
period following the activist sixties and seventies, “the Nuclear Freeze
campaign … organized the largest political demonstration up to that time in
U.S. history, and drew the support of more than 70 percent of the public. In
Europe, much the same thing occurred, and in the fall of 1983 some five million
people turned out for demonstrations against the planned deployment of
intermediate range nuclear missiles. Reagan was stunned.” Rockwell posits that this led Reagan to
pull back from Cold War rhetoric and seek an arms control agreement.
I was part of those movements in the eighties and I never
before thought about how successful we were.
When people talk about successful social movements, they don’t talk
about Central America. That’s partly
because for many of us, our goal was an end to US imperialism, if not social
revolution at home, and we didn’t get that.
It’s also because the media never credited us; they continued to make
fun of us as a throwback to the sixties.
But we did do it, and we can do it again. Today.
