[Peace-discuss] Quondam et futurus

[C. G. Estabrook]

What follows was written for "Common Sense," an independent journal at 
the University of Notre Dame, where I began teaching in 1969.  I was 
asked to compare and contrast the anti-war movement of those days with 
the present version.  Although the piece refers rather specifically to 
Notre Dame, I thought that the general question might be of some 
interest to readers of this list, where it has been ventilated a bit 
already. Comments welcome. --CGE

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THE ANTI-WAR MOVEMENT, THEN AND NOW

When I arrived at Notre Dame almost forty years ago as the most junior 
member of the history faculty, I found a sophisticated anti-war movement 
-- consisting of students, townspeople, and even some faculty -- already 
in place in South Bend.  The American electorate had just repudiated the 
party that had invaded South Vietnam and killed a million poor peasants 
(and more than five hundred American soldiers every month) by electing a 
president who was said to have a secret plan for ending the war.

Richard Nixon's plan turned out to be even more intensive bombing -- the 
secret bombing of Cambodia destroyed that society -- and threats to the 
USSR and China, while reductions of the half-million US ground troops in 
South Vietnam got underway.  Meanwhile, the My Lai massacre showed how 
the war was being fought in Vietnam, and the police murders of Black 
Panther party members in Chicago showed how it was being fought at home.

I had been a graduate student at an east coast university where the 
student anti-war movement had seized a central administration building 
-- and then been expelled by a police riot, a small-scale version of the 
violent tactics employed at the Democratic convention in Chicago the 
previous summer.  It had been more than seven years since the Kennedy 
administration had attacked South Vietnam because the people of that 
country did not have the good grace to accept the government that we had 
picked out for them.  A movement against that war had grown slowly, 
though by the high summer of 1969, a majority of Americans felt about 
Vietnam as they do about Iraq today, that the war must end.  The 
principal anti-war organization on US campuses, Students for a 
Democratic Society -- which had begun, not as an anti-war group at all, 
but, as the name implies, a semi-anarchist civil rights organization 
("Let the people decide" was its original motto) -- could afford the 
luxury that summer of an internal split and a vicious faction fight.

At Notre Dame I was surprised and pleased to see that a whole new set of 
arguments -- ethical rather than political -- were available for use 
against the war.  Catholics were surprised to find that the American war 
in Southeast Asia clearly failed the venerable (and I think quite sound) 
analysis of the just war, when that was pointed out by Gordon Zahn, the 
pacifist and World War II conscientious objector.

The Catholic church, transformed by the recent Vatican Council, was just 
beginning to turn its attention to political questions, under the 
impress of liberation movements around the world, from the north of 
Ireland to the Congo, although Liberation Theology, which surfaced at a 
Latin American episcopal conference in Colombia in 1968, was still 
largely unknown in the Anglophone world.  I was nevertheless able that 
fall to hear the priest-poet Daniel Berrigan -- exercising the prophetic 
role proper to priests and poets -- give a reading at Notre Dame that 
adumbrated these things.  He was not welcomed by the university 
administration.

The student anti-war movement displeased the Notre Dame administration 
even more.  Journalist Alexander Cockburn described the incident (from a 
piece I wrote for Common Sense) almost twenty years later:

"Back in the fall of 1969 Notre Dame had scheduled recruiting meetings 
for the C.I.A. and Dow (Napalm) Chemical Company. The university has 
long been a prime recruitment spot for the C.I.A.; Philip Agee and Ralph 
McGehee [C.I.A. agents who exposed some of the Agency's crimes] are both 
graduates. Ten students, foolishly assuming that the university believed 
in open debate, sat down in front of the doors of the building where the 
interviews were to be held. The university immediately called the police 
and had them arrested. Notre Dame took action against the students in 
both the state courts and within the university itself. The university 
treated the issue like a case of student drunkenness, denying there was 
any moral issue involved. Ultimately all the students were punished with 
one form or another of suspension, and it was reported that the 
university notified their draft boards that they were now available for 
call-up."

The Notre Dame Ten included at least one person who courageously 
resisted the draft and went to prison for it.  With another twenty years 
gone, Cockburn now asks (in the New Left Review, July-August 2007), 
"Whatever Happened to the Anti-war Movement?"  Is it just that the US 
government was forced to abandon the draft in 1973, because the largely 
conscript expeditionary force in South Vietnam mutinied, in essence, and 
their refusal to fight forced their withdrawal that year?

"It is true that many of the soldiers deployed in Iraq have been 
compelled to serve double tours of duty; that others were facing 
criminal conviction and were offered the option of prison or enlistment 
in the army; that others again are illegal immigrants offered a green 
card or US citizenship in exchange for service in Iraq. But every member 
of the US military there or in Afghanistan is, technically speaking, a 
volunteer.  In the near future, at least, no US administration will take 
the political risk of trying to bring back the draft, even though lack 
of manpower is now a very serious problem for the Pentagon. By the same 
token, the absence of the draft is certainly a major factor in the 
weakness of the anti-war movement. But though there was no draft in the 
Reagan years, there was certainly a very vital movement opposing 
Reagan’s efforts to destroy the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua and 
to crush the insurgency of the FMLN in El Salvador."  (Noted commentator 
Noam Chomsky points out that "a good part of the Central American war 
was a war against the Catholic Church, which dared to adopt a 
'preferential option for the poor.'")

Today, says Cockburn, "To say the anti-war movement is dead would be an 
overstatement, but not by a large margin. Compared to kindred movements 
in the 1960s and early 1970s, or to the struggles against Reagan’s wars 
in Central America in the late 1980s, it is certainly inert."  Why? What 
follows is not an answer -- just an indication of some of the 
differences between then and now.

DIFFERENT WARS

The US attacks on Southeast Asia in the 1960s and '70s, and those on 
Southwest Asia in the 1990s to the present, are quite different -- the 
former more murderous, the latter more dangerous; what is constant is US 
policy, but it has evaluated the two regions differently.  We can ignore 
the strikingly parallel propaganda reasons offered for both wars -- 
stopping communism in the first, stopping terrorism in the second  -- 
and even the identical warnings that the communists/terrorists would 
"follow us home" if we failed to defeat them in Asia.

The timely arrival of the "terrorist threat" to take the place of the 
lapsed "communist threat" -- in 1991 Colin Powell, then chairman of the 
Joint Chiefs of Staff, complained that the US military suffered from an 
"enemies gap" -- should alert us to how much both Republican and 
Democratic administration have done to encourage each as a bete noire, 
the fear of which justifies US policy undertaken for other reasons.

In what is reductively called the Vietnam War, the US may have killed 
four million people -- not counting the aftermath in Cambodia or the 
US-sponsored coup in Indonesia, which killed millions more. With a 
similar reductive designation, the Iraq War has killed perhaps half that 
number (given that the Clinton administration may have killed more 
Iraqis with economic sanctions than the Bush II administration has done 
with weapons) -- although the deaths in the 1980-88 war that the US 
urged Iraq to undertake against Iran probably should be added to the 
latter count.

The US war in Vietnam was a demonstration war.  As the only undamaged 
major country to emerge form Word War II, the US organized the economy 
of the post-war world, and it had to make clear, less than twenty years 
after the end of that war, that no society could remove itself from that 
economy and pursue a form of development that contradicted US-approved 
models.  In a sense, the domino theory was correct: if the US were to 
allow such a thing in Vietnam, other areas (like Indonesia) might 
emulate it.  As a study by the Woodrow Wilson Foundation put it in 1955, 
the primary threat of communism was the economic transformation of the 
communist powers "in ways which reduce their willingness and ability to 
complement the industrial economies of the West."

Given its war aims, it is clear that the US won the Vietnam War, even if 
it did not achieve its maximum goals.  It destroyed the country and its 
people: a generation later, thoroughly integrated with the US-dominated 
world economy, Vietnam begs for Nike factories.  But it is necessary to 
emphasize that Vietnam was primarily a demonstration -- and far less 
important to the US than Iraq is.

In Iraq, the question (as even Alan Greenspan recognizes) is oil.  For 
all that the Democrats are happy to attack, for electoral advantage, the 
horrible mess that the Republican administration has made of the 
invasion of Iraq, they  support the same long-term policy in the Middle 
East that the Republicans do.

For more than fifty years, the US has insisted upon control of Middle 
East oil and gas, which are more extensive there than any place else on 
earth.  But not because the US needs them at home.  The US imports only 
a small bit of its domestic energy from the Middle East: most of it 
comes from the Atlantic region -- the US itself, followed by Canada, 
Nigeria, and Venezuela.  But control of world energy resources gives the 
US control of its major economic competitors in the world -- Europe and 
northeast Asia (China and Japan).  No US administration, Republican or 
Democrat, will voluntarily leave Iraq, with the world's second largest 
reserves of oil.

DIFFERENT OPPOSITIONS

Public opposition to the Vietnam War grew slowly -- much more slowly 
than people recall.  It took almost a decade after the initial invasion 
of South Vietnam by the Kennedy administration to build to the point 
that 70% of Americans believed, as they did, that the war was 
"fundamentally wrong and immoral and not a mistake."  That was the 
source of what Henry Kissinger called the "Vietnam syndrome" of the 
1970s and '80s -- the unwillingness on the part of the public to 
countenance a war that looked like Vietnam.  For that reason the Reagan 
administration, which desperately wanted to put US troops into Latin 
America, was unable to do so; because of it, the Central American 
demonstration wars of the Reagan administration were driven underground 
(and partly exposed in the Iran-Contra scandal).

It was the successful attack on Iraq in 1991 -- after the US rejected 
Saddam Hussein's proposal to negotiate the various territorial claims in 
the Middle East -- that prompted US President George Bush Sr. to say "By 
God, we've kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all!"

Public opposition to the Iraq War developed in the reverse order to that 
to the Vietnam war, although the outcome was similar: for some time now 
more than 70% of Americans want the war to come to an end.  Before the 
invasion of March 2003, public opposition was much higher, even among 
the US foreign policy elite -- the largest anti-war demonstrations in 
history were held around the world early in that year.

Three factors led to the withdrawal of US ground forces from Vietnam in 
1973: the courageous resistance of the Vietnamese people to invasion, 
the revolt of the conscript US army in Vietnam, and finally the 
continuing growth of an ever more deeply-rooted resistance among the 
American people.  All three factors are less present now: the Iraqi 
resistance is weaker and still fragmented; the objections from a 
mercenary and semi-mercenary military force are muted; and resistance 
amongst Americans is broad but essentially neutralized.  How has that 
last come about?

Popular opposition to Vietnam could be neutralized by withdrawal in 
1973, followed by some governmental reforms; that's not possible now. So 
into the breech has stepped the Democratic party: in a landslide 
statistically greater than the "Republican revolution" of 1994, the 
Democrats were given control of the Congress in 2006 by an electorate 
that wanted them to bring the war to an end.  But both American 
political parties -- the two wings of the Property Party, as Gore Vidal 
said -- are substantially to the right of the American populace, on this 
as on other issuers.  For all the danger represented by the increasingly 
isolated neocons in the US government (especially in regard to Iran), 
the most nefarious role is being played by the Democrats, who have spent 
this year neutralizing the mass anti-war sentiment by pretending to 
oppose the war while in fact supporting it, as their repeated votes for 
funding the war show.


[C. G. Estabrook (PhD, Harvard) is a Visiting Scholar at the University 
of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where he has taught in the departments of 
sociology, religious studies and history.]

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