[Peace-discuss] A conservative on anti-war movements

[C. G. Estabrook]

[I disagree with a good bit of the following -- it's
credulous about anti-war leadership and simply wrong about the
nature of the Vietnam war -- but it's another example of how
some conservatives have more clearly principled anti-war views
than many self-styled liberals. --CGE]

   July 4, 2005 Issue
   Copyright © 2005 The American Conservative
   How They Get Away With It

Three reasons Washington’s empire-builders don’t have to worry
about ’60s-style dissent —- not including the volunteer Army

by Scott McConnell

It was surprising how many people seemed to take genuine
pleasure in British MP George Galloway’s contentious
appearance before the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations.
He was, after all, only a former left-Labor Party backbencher,
a bit pink in his associations. And notwithstanding the vigor
of his denials, the nature of his financial relationship to
Saddam’s Oil for Food program was not entirely cleared up.

But it wasn’t Galloway’s protestations of innocence or his
political character that made his turn noteworthy. What was
striking was the sight of a man inside the Senate chamber
using the full force of the English language to denounce the
pack of lies behind President Bush’s Iraq policy. Galloway
didn’t submit to the Democratic Party script and pretend that
the war was due to a “massive intelligence failure,” that
President Bush was somehow misinformed about Saddam’s weapons
(or lack of them). He went instead for the jugular of the
whole enterprise, reiterating what he had said well before the
war -— that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, no
connection to 9/11, no ties to al-Qaeda -— and on these
crucial points he was right and Sen. Norm Coleman and the
other Republicans hoping to milk his testimony for electoral
gain were dead wrong. The fruit of their error, Galloway
continued, was 100,000 dead, including 1,600 Americans, and
another 15,000 U.S. soldiers wounded, many of them permanently
maimed —- not to mention that the United States now has the
worst international image in its history or that the volunteer
army can no longer meet its recruiting goals and may have its
back broken by the burdens of an extended Iraq occupation.

One never hears words like this spoken in the Senate. A search
for successors to William Fulbright or Wayne Morse or Eugene
McCarthy or Bobby Kennedy yields only empty chairs. Big-name
Democrats scramble for microphone time to denounce as
“extremist” judges who are pro-life, but about the fomenters
of a foreign policy that is manifestly extremist, they fall
into timid silence. Howard Dean, the reputed mad dog of last
year’s primaries, has turned toy poodle as head of Democratic
National Committee, full of fighting barbs about Tom DeLay’s
ethics but silent about a war that is hardly despised by his
party’s big donors. It took a Brit to remind Americans turning
on the evening news what it might be like to have an
opposition party.

The failure of Americans to generate a politically significant
domestic opposition to the war is now one of the most
important developments in world politics. It means that the
Bush administration can contemplate, without any fear of
adverse domestic political consequences, expansion of its war
to Syria or a large-scale bombing of Iran. The only
constraints on its behavior are international.

In the year and a half after September 2001, observant
outsiders could intuit much about the administration’s plans.
It was clear that the neoconservatives around Cheney and
Rumsfeld wanted war not only against Iraq but against six or
seven countries in the Middle East. Details were filled in by
memoirs such as Richard Clarke’s and the reporting of Bob
Woodward. The recent publication of the so-called Downing
Street memorandum, recording the minutes of a meeting of Tony
Blair’s top advisors in July 2002, confirms that Bush had
already decided upon war and that “the intelligence and facts
were being fixed around the policy.” The British document
indicates that Bush was lying outright when he told the
Congress, in the fall of 2002, “I hope the use of force will
not become necessary,” that “if Iraq is to avoid military
action … it has the obligation to prove compliance with all
the world’s demands,” and further, that the United States
would go to war only “as a last resort.” The Iraqis at that
point had no way to avoid Bush’s invasion, despite the fact
that, in denying that they had any WMD, they were, in the
words of U.S. weapons inspector David Kay, “telling the truth.”

Not only was the administration silent about the Blair
memorandum, a silence that confirmed its contents, but the
rest of the political class ignored it as well -— save for
Congressman John Conyers and a rump group in the House. There
were no major antiwar demonstrations this spring, no campuses
shut down by protest, no marches on Washington big enough to
notice. In the capital itself, a journalist can go to cocktail
parties full of foreign-policy establishment types, all
prudently opposed to the war, their talk spiked by witticisms
about the failings and hypocrisy of the Bushites. But none are
public about it, and the realists now say that an American
assault on Iran is a virtual certainty.

For someone who grew up in the 1960s, when protests against
the Vietnam War dominated the culture, the question that
raises its head almost every day is, “How do they get away
with it?” Of course, the wars are different: Vietnam, however
much Kennedy and Johnson erred in terms of overestimating what
U.S. Armed Forces could accomplish in Southeast Asia, at least
corresponded to a general strategy of containment and of
maintaining the existing East-West boundaries. On the borders
of the Cold War, divided states like Germany and Korea had
become a kind of norm, and the United States was protecting in
South Vietnam a weak and unstable status quo. Iraq was clearly
something completely different: a war initiated under the
falsehood that Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11
and clearly in violation of international law.

In terms of the domestic climate, one key difference is the
absence of a draft: we fight in Iraq with a volunteer Army,
working-class in origin -— men and women who may have signed
up originally for good pay and benefits or the possibility of
a college education they couldn’t otherwise afford. The
professional class is hardly represented, the political class
not at all. Unlike the 1960s, the children of the
establishment don’t have to calculate how they will avoid
service or maneuver to find safe spots in the National Guard.
This changes the political atmosphere on campus considerably,
where there is now as much a likelihood of unrest about
something to do with gays and lesbians or the wages of
janitors as an aggressive war.

But three other developments, of impact perhaps even greater
than the absence of a draft, make a culture of protest harder
to sustain than it was in the 1960s.

The first is a different, less industrial, more
service-oriented and more globalized American economy, which
produces as great a change in the way citizens think about
economic life as it does in the goods they consume. The United
States of the 1960s was “The Affluent Society” in the John
Kenneth Galbraith phrase, and it was a secure affluence. Tens
of millions of relatively well-compensated manufacturing jobs
were available, it seemed, for anyone willing to take them.
You were supposed to finish high school, and a diploma was
necessary to get a secure job, but a college diploma was not
yet what it is now -— the required admission ticket for any
kind of upward mobility. So there was no burden on parents to
worry about how they were going to afford college for their
children -— at least in comparison to today. Similarly, no one
seemed to worry about health insurance; medicine could
obviously accomplish less, but the United States was in that
interlude between the time when a family could get wiped out
by the costs of a child’s long-term illness and the present,
when the cost of health insurance and the fear of losing it
weighs on the calculations of nearly everyone in the middle
and lower classes.

In the 1960s, therefore, a huge proportion of Americans felt
little fear of losing their jobs. In affluent America, one
could “drop out” of the regular career train -— many did for
reasons more cultural than political —- and then rejoin the
rat race at the time and place of one’s choosing. Those who
dropped out didn’t fear slipping into poverty. For those with
reasonable modern-economy skills, lower-middle-class jobs were
there for the asking -— and there was no reserve army of
desperate Latin Americans ready to work for almost any price.
This was a political economy that not only allowed dissent,
but indeed one that seemed to make it, in economic terms,
nearly cost-free. The contrast with the present day -— where
one hears continually from those with a stake in the
middle-class that dissent is something only the wealthy (or
very poor) can afford -— could not be more striking.

A second reason for the low ebb of dissent is an attitudinal
shift in the American Jewish community, particularly among
those active politically, a shift exemplified by the rise of
neoconservatism. It is clear to anyone remotely interested in
the question that the Old Left (the American Communist Party
and its related organizations) was in great part Jewish, the
New Left in great part the direct offspring of the Old.
Without the radical Jewish children of radical parents, there
would have been no early SDS, no Free Speech Movement at
Berkeley, no New York kids going South for Freedom Rides to
turn the civil-rights movement into a matter of national
conscience. By the late 1960s, the Left was more ethnically
diverse, but young Jewish radicals had been its leavening agent.

The Jewish turn from the New Left, marked by such signposts as
the collapse of the black-Jewish alliance in the late 1960s
and the recognition that the Pentagon and an airlift ordered
by Richard Nixon might have been necessary to Israel’s
survival in October 1973, may have been a turnabout in the
mentality of no more than a few hundred activists and
polemicists, but the effect on the political tone of the
country shouldn’t be underestimated. The political biographies
of Marty Peretz and David Horowitz, two emblematic figures of
this sea change, with a corresponding shift in the mentality
of thousands of politically astute and engaged people in their
cohort, had a huge impact on the country’s political culture.

Of course, it is true that most American Jews are still
politically liberal and a majority now tell pollsters they
oppose the Iraq War. But this is beside the point. Nowadays,
political passion, engagement, and activism are as likely to
be found on the Jewish Right -— at least a Right favoring a
pro-war, pro-imperialist (and very pro-Israel) foreign policy
—- as they are on the Left. Nothing could be more different
from 1968.

A third way in which the America is a very different country
today can be traced to the political transformation of
American Protestantism. In his outstanding book The New
American Militarism, Andrew Bacevich describes how
evangelicals -— who once were both politically quiescent and
skeptical of the culture that surrounded military life -—
came, in the wake of Vietnam, to embrace the military as a
sort of bulwark against national moral decay. With the
corresponding decline in political numbers and influence of
the mainline Protestant churches, this increased energy on the
evangelical Right changed dramatically the way most American
Christians regard war. In the hands of evangelicals, Just War
principles became, in Bacevich’s words, “not a series of
stringent tests but a signal: not a red light, not even a
flashing yellow, but a bright green that relieved the Bush
administration of any obligation to weigh seriously the moral
implications of when and where it employed coercion.”

And thus, in the developed world’s most devout country,
Christian witness against war “became less effective than in
countries thoroughly and probably irreversibly secularized.”
Evangelicals have in great part transformed the Christian view
of Just War into a crusade theory in which the United States
is believed to embody God’s will and its enemies are “God’s
enemies.”

For those yearning for a revival of a peace movement that
might slow down this administration, there is nothing
reassuring about this analysis. It is far from clear that even
the revival of the draft could ignite the kind of campus
protest that would make an impression on Congress and the
administration. Where would the leaders of campus protest come
from? For if they are less likely, given the rise of
neoconservatism, to come from ranks of activist Jews, it is
even more implausible to imagine them emerging from the
remains of the WASP establishment, whose children are not the
academic and social leaders on the nation’s elite campuses. It
is perhaps only slightly more likely to come from the new
Asian immigrant groups, who are generally still focused on
professional advancement or purely ethnic concerns. And only
the wooliest of neo-Marxist romantics can see it emerging from
the poor or working classes.

In the absence of an antiwar movement or serious domestic
political opposition, only the outside world can put the
brakes on American policy -— only when Bush’s war plans come
up against foreign obstacles that produce a dramatic defeat or
humiliation or generate a financial crisis that the
administration can’t overcome. Barring that, the American
future may be war for as long as anyone can foresee.  

July 4, 2005 Issue