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

[Morton K. Brussel]

> Can you think of (m)any liberals who have had as principled a
> stand against the war?

Carl, almost all those who signed on to MoveOn.org are/were liberals  
and strongly against the war, even if they've wobbled at times since  
about the occupation. The same is true of UFPJ (United for Peace and  
Justice), Peace-Action, liberal periodicals like the Progressive, The  
Nation, Z Magazine. Internet sources such as CommonDreams.org or  
ZNet. Of course, most social-ist inclined folks, Greens,  
Counterpunchers, etc.   were strongly against the war, but I guess  
you would not classify them as liberal. Is Nader a liberal?

You are right that the so-called liberal politicians (Democrats) have  
failed miserably to stand up and speak out loudly against this war,  
but neither can I remember any "conservative" politicians who've done  
so . At least there is a progressive caucus in the House that has  
been against the war policies; there is no equivalent group on the  
other side. I could go on to list many other liberal organizations  
who've taken strong stands against the "war". There is no equivalent  
that I know on the other side.

It is for this reason that I dislike your promotion of certain  
conservative spokesmen to the exclusion of those on the left who've  
said the same things, and far longer.

--mkb


On Jul 12, 2005, at 8:37 PM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:

> When it comes to public political figures in the US, Mort, I'm
> certainly "disappointed with 'many' and gratified by 'some.'"
>
> By "some conservatives" I mean the so-called
> paleo-conservatives, in sharp distinction to the
> neo-conservatives (who are not conservatives at all, but as
> Chomsky says, statist reactionaries).  Gathered around
> journals like the American Conservative and Chronicles, the
> paleos have yielded to none in their scorn for the Bush war
> policy.
>
> Can you think of (m)any liberals who have had as principled a
> stand against the war?  Dennis Kucinich, maybe -- but he's
> generally unwilling to criticize Israel.  The Democrat
> position has been (a) we can do the war better (Kerry); (b)
> send more troops (Dean); or (c) the war's a good idea but too
> expensive.  --CGE
>
>
> ---- Original message ----
>
>> Date: Sun, 10 Jul 2005 22:41:56 -0500
>> From: "Morton K. Brussel" <brussel at uiuc.edu>
>> Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] A conservative on anti-war
>>
> movements
>
>> To: "C. G. Estabrook" <galliher at uiuc.edu>
>> Cc: Peace Discuss <peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net>
>>
>> Hi Carl. You are being quite sly in using the words "some
>> conservatives" and "many liberals". "Some" and "many" ought
>>
> to be
>
>> defined by fractions of the whole of each camp for there to
>>
> be any
>
>> lesson drawn. Or is it just that you are disappointed with
>>
> "many" and
>
>> gratified by "some".
>>
>> But I agree, 'tis an interesting piece, and refreshing coming
>>
> from
>
>> one on the "right".
>>
>> Mort
>>
>> On Jul 10, 2005, at 9:53 PM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
>>
>>
>>> [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
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Peace-discuss mailing list
>>> Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net
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>>>
>>>
>>
>>
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