[Peace-discuss] Cockburn on the anti-war movement

[C. G. Estabrook]

New Left Review 46, July-August 2007

Neither rising domestic opposition to the Iraq war, nor discussions of 
withdrawal in Congress, can be ascribed to pressure from mass 
mobilizations against the occupation. Alexander Cockburn investigates 
the disappearance of the anti-war movement: co-opted by the Democrats, 
captive to the logic of the War on Terror.

	ALEXANDER COCKBURN
	WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE ANTI-WAR MOVEMENT?

America right now is ‘anti-war’, in the sense that about two thirds of 
the people think the occupation of Iraq is a bad business and the troops 
should come home. Anti-war sentiment was a major factor in the success 
of the Democrats in last November’s elections, when they recaptured 
Congress. The irony is that this sharp disillusion of the voters owes 
almost nothing to any anti-war movement. 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.

When in March of this year Democrats in the us Congress felt obliged to 
send President Bush the message that he should bring the troops home 
before he leaves office, they were not voting in the shadow of a mighty 
throng of protesters cramming into the open spaces in front of the 
Lincoln Memorial, their slogans rattling the windows of Congress. They 
were voting in the shadow of the elections of 2008, and eager to display 
in gesture if not in substance some acknowledgement of a general 
anti-war feeling abroad in the land.

To this day the anti-war movements from the era of Vietnam survive—often 
vividly—in the texture of everyday life in America. Lives were changed 
forever by the decisions of thousands upon thousands to refuse to serve 
in south-east Asia. The great peace marches on Washington, the rallies 
in major cities, the riots outside recruiting offices, the upheavals in 
the universities smoulder still—sometimes dangerously—in popular memory. 
Just last year, a Vietnam vet in Colorado spat on Jane Fonda and said 
publicly he would be happy to shoot her because of her supposed 
treachery to the American flag forty years ago.

Of course, back in the Vietnam era, America had the draft. The imminent 
possibility that they might be compulsorily conscripted into the Army or 
the Marines and find themselves in the Mekong Delta in six months 
concentrated the minds of middle-class 18-year-olds on the monstrosity 
and injustice of war with marvellous speed, just as it concentrated the 
minds of their parents. Today there is no draft. 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.

I remember well criss-crossing America in those years, giving 
anti-intervention speeches on campuses, in churches and labour halls in 
scores of towns in nearly every state in the union. Almost every 
American town in every decade has its dissident community. At any rally 
you can see the historical strata in human contour.

Up until a decade ago there would be the old Communists, maybe veterans 
of the Lincoln Brigade that volunteered to fight for the Republic in the 
Spanish Civil War. Into the late 1980s, these red vets were often the 
best organizers. Then there would be anti-war activists like the late 
Dave Dellinger, who went to federal prison as a pacifist in World War 
Two. There were people who came of age politically with Henry Wallace 
and the Progressive Party that challenged Truman from the left in 1948. 
A slightly younger cohort learned its organizing in the years of the 
Korean war and the rise of the Civil Rights Movement. Old labour 
activists rubbed shoulders with Quakers and Unitarians. Then there is 
the Vietnam generation, many of them in their mid-sixties now. More than 
once, in the South, I have found that the still-active sparks are former 
Maoists who deployed to places like Birmingham, Alabama as their 
revolutionary duty, and who took root as civil rights attorneys or 
public defenders or labour organizers.

There are scores of overlapping ‘lefts’ in America, mustered in their 
separate struggles—for immigrants’ rights, for public control of energy, 
against military recruitment. There are the anarchists, the Trotskyist 
groups. And when a war comes along, as it does with great regularity in 
America, they generally coalesce into an anti-war movement. They 
certainly did in the late 1980s. The other day I found in a box of old 
papers in my garage a directory to ‘sister-cities’—towns in the us that 
had ‘paired’ with beleaguered cities in Nicaragua, exchanging regular 
delegations. The directory was as thick as a medium sized telephone 
book. There were hundreds of such pairings, and they led in turn to 
numerous individual pairings. People’s Express, the ‘backpackers’ 
airline’, as it used to be called, would shuttle many a demure sister in 
the struggle down from Vermont or the Pacific Northwest to Miami, for 
onward passage to Managua and a rendez-vous with some valiant son of 
Sandino or with an oppressed Nica sister, liberated by North American 
inversion from the oppressions of Latin patriarchy.

The directly personal aspect of international political solidarity is 
not just the stuff of nostalgic anecdote. In the late 1980s the Central 
American ‘resistance’ was constantly present in the us, in physical form 
and not just in the shape of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo working 
the Hollywood liberal circuit. The Sanctuary movement sheltered 
militants and sympathizers in churches and defied the efforts of the 
Feds to seize them. Labour organizers from El Salvador travelled across 
North America from Local to friendly Local. I can remember being at a 
picnic of a union Local on strike at a door factory in Springfield, 
Oregon, south-east of Eugene, where a man from a radical labour 
coalition in El Salvador got a cordial reception from the strikers and 
their families as they swapped stories of their respective battles. The 
resistance in Iraq has no such human face or presence here, not least 
because any expression of direct solidarity can be savagely penalized 
under the terms of the Patriot Act and kindred laws.

Lawrence McGuire, a North Carolinian now teaching in Montpellier, 
France, organized a meeting of anti-war Americans and various interested 
French parties at which I spoke last fall. He wrote to me recently 
regarding this matter of direct solidarity:

     I was reading a recent piece by Phyllis Bennis, she talked about 
the ‘us military casualties’ and the ‘Iraqi civilian victims’, and it 
struck me that the Grand Taboo of the anti-war movement is to show the 
slightest empathy for the resistance fighters in Iraq. They are never 
mentioned as people for whom we should show concern, much less 
admiration. But of course, if you are going to sympathize with the us 
soldiers, who are fighting a war of aggression, then surely you should 
also sympathize with the soldiers who are fighting for their homeland. 
Perhaps not until the anti-war movement starts to some degree 
recognizing that they should include ‘the Iraqi resistance fighters’ in 
their pantheon of victims (in addition to us soldiers and Iraqi 
civilians) will there be the necessary critical mass to have a real 
movement.

Now there are many obvious reasons why the direct solidarity with 
‘resistance’ fighters, visible in the Vietnam anti-war struggle and the 
Central American anti-intervention movement, has not been seen. The ‘war 
on terror’ means—and was designed to mean—that any group in the us with 
detectable ties to or relations with Iraqi resistance movements would be 
in line for savage legal reprisals. The contours of the resistance have 
been murky and in some obvious aspects unappetizing to secular 
progressive coalitions in the West. This time there has been no Wilfrid 
Burchett, or kindred Western reporter/interpreter working behind the 
lines; this has had its consequences, of the kind McGuire sketched out.
Captive coalitions

It seemed, back in 2003, on the eve of the us attack, that a vigorous 
anti-war movement was flaring into life. There were some very big 
rallies. United for Peace and Justice, the main umbrella coalition, had 
been formed during the run-up to the war in October 2002, at a meeting 
in Washington, dc. There were 40 or so organizations represented. What 
was to be one large formation had an early split-off when Win Without 
War was formed, which included now, naral, naacp and so on. That 
coalition required each member group to have some thousands of members, 
whereas ufpj had no such requirement. The latter’s rival organizing 
group was answer, conjured into existence that same year by the Workers 
World Party, a Trotskyite group. Belabouring answer as ‘hard left’ and 
thus somehow defiling a notionally ‘respectable’ anti-war movement 
became a favoured occupation—and excuse for inaction—on the part of 
fence-straddlers who basically thought some sort of onslaught on Iraq, 
preferably sporting un drapery, was not such a bad idea.

Both ufpj and answer had their successes. But across the four ensuing 
years, as the full ghastly futility and destructiveness of the war has 
become more and more manifest, the anti-war movement has got weaker. In 
late January 2007, United for Peace and Justice held a rally in 
Washington. It mustered a respectable number of people. It featured 
Hollywood stars like Sean Penn and 60s icons like Fonda and her 
erstwhile partner, Tom Hayden. But it was, alas, rather dreary, rather 
predictable. To be memorable and effective, an anti-war rally has to be 
edgy, not comfortable. Emotions should be high, nerves at least a bit 
raw, anger tinged with fear. It should not be just a picnic or a 
reunion. At the anti-wto demonstration in Washington in 2000, months 
after Seattle, the police had orders to shoot to kill if things got out 
of hand. I doubt any cop had such orders in Washington, dc this last 
January. The political temperature was way too low.

An absence on the speakers’ platform at that January ufpj rally gives us 
a significant clue to the weakness of the anti-war movement. Ralph Nader 
was not invited, even though he is a major political figure on the left, 
and a fierce critic of the war. Why was he not invited? Nader is still 
anathema to many Democrats because he ran as a third party candidate in 
2000, and they blame him for drawing crucial votes from Al Gore, thus 
enabling Bush to win. Even though the war in Iraq is a bipartisan 
enterprise, even though Democrats in Congress have voted year after year 
to give Bush the money to fight that war, the mainstream anti-war 
movement, as represented by ufpj, is captive to the Democratic Party.

The auguries of this captivity were manifest in 2004, when the anti-war 
movement invested great hopes in the candidacy of Howard Dean, who 
enjoyed a meteoric ascent towards the Democratic nomination until he 
burned out in Iowa. This right-of-centre former governor of Vermont did 
get some traction in late 2003 by opposing the war in Iraq, but soon he 
was hedging his bets, finding merit in the occupation and vowing that 
although he would balance the budget he would exempt the Pentagon’s 
funding from any cutback. Finally he surrendered even his signature 
issue, saying the war was not really a concern for Democratic voters. As 
his candidacy expired, many on the left transferred their hopes to 
Dennis Kucinich, the Ohio congressman. Kucinich was certainly a more 
robust opponent of the war than Dean, and far to the left of him on 
economic and justice issues. But it was obvious from the start that he 
did not have the remotest chance of breaking into double digits in any 
primary, and thus would lack even the clout to negotiate some rhetorical 
concessions at the Democratic Party convention in Boston. The actual 
function of his candidacy was to try to hold the progressive section 
from defecting to Nader. Those who pointed this out in the first half of 
2004 had their analysis resoundingly confirmed as Kucinich bestowed his 
unstinting support on John Kerry, a man who had so many positions on the 
war that it became a national joke.

To clarify the consequences of this occasionally petulant subservience 
of the bulk of the anti-war movement to the Democratic Party, we can ask 
a simple question. Has the end of America’s war on Iraq been brought 
closer by the recapture of the us Congress by the Democrats in November 
2006? On March 23, 2007, the full House voted 218 to 212 to set a 
timeline on the withdrawal of us troops, with September 1, 2008 as the 
putative date after which war funding might be restricted to withdrawal 
purposes only. It was not a stringent deadline. It only required Bush to 
seek Congressional approval before extending the occupation and spending 
new funds to do so.

On Democratic House leader Nancy Pelosi’s website could be found her 
portrait of what us troops would be doing in Iraq following this 
withdrawal or ‘redeployment’: ‘us troops remaining in Iraq may only be 
used for diplomatic protection, counterterrorism operations and training 
of Iraqi Security Forces.’ But did this not bear an eerie resemblance to 
Bush’s pre-surge war plan? Would the troops being redeployed out of Iraq 
even come home? No, said Pelosi, as did Senate Majority leader Harry 
Reid. These troops would go to Afghanistan to battle al-Qaeda.

So the bill—the outermost limit of Democratic ‘anti-war’ 
resolve—essentially adopted and enforced Bush’s war plan and attendant 
‘benchmarks’, as spelled out in his January 10 speech. On March 27, the 
Senate voted 50–48 to start withdrawal in March 2008, said schedule 
being nonbinding on the President. Bush promptly vowed to veto all 
schedules for withdrawal coming out of Congress, and duly did so. Amid 
all the political manoeuvrings in this phase, the war goes on, with a 
supplemental, Democrat-approved $124 billion—more than Bush himself 
requested. As Congress considered the half trillion dollar fy 2008 
Pentagon budget, there was no sign that the Democratic leadership would 
permit any serious attack on further war funding.

Thus when it comes to the actual war, which has led to the bloody 
disintegration of Iraqi society, the killing of up to 5,000 Iraqis a 
month, the death and mutilation of us soldiers every day, nothing at all 
has happened since the Democrats rode to victory in November, courtesy 
of popular revulsion in America against the war. Bush’s reaction to this 
censure at the polls was to appoint a new commander in Iraq, General 
David Petraeus, to oversee the troop ‘surge’ in Baghdad and Anbar 
province. The Democrats voted unanimously to approve Petraeus, and now 
they have okayed the money for the surge. Bush hinted that he would like 
to widen the war to Iran. Nancy Pelosi, chastened by catcalls at the 
annual aipac convention, swiftly abandoned all talk of compelling Bush 
to seek congressional authorization to make war on Iran. In early June 
the Hearst news service reported that by November 2007, the number of us 
troops in Iraq would actually double.

Although nothing of any significance actually happened on March 23, to 
read liberal commentators one would think we had witnessed some profound 
upheaval, courtesy of Nancy Pelosi’s skilful uniting of the various 
Democratic factions. What she accomplished in practice was the neutering 
of the anti-war faction. In the end only eight Democrats (plus two 
Republicans) voted against the Supplemental Appropriation out of 
opposition to the war. The balance of 202 no votes came from Republicans 
who opposed Pelosi’s bill as anti-Bush and anti-war. So, in Congress 420 
representatives officially have no problem with the war in Iraq 
continuing until the eve of the next election. Ten are foursquare 
against it, which is more or less where Congress has always been in 
terms of committed naysayers.

Anti-war forces in Congress are now weaker. Take Sam Farr of Santa Cruz, 
California and Peter DeFazio of Eugene, Oregon—both Congressmen with 
large progressive constituencies. In the last Republican-controlled 
Congress they were stout opponents of the war, voting against 
authorization to invade and money for the war thereafter. No longer. 
Pelosi handed Farr bailout money for his district’s spinach growers, and 
DeFazio got funding for schools and libraries. Who knows? Perhaps a few 
dollars of the latter will go to wheelchair access for the paraplegics 
who will come home from Iraq over the next sixteen months, maimed in the 
war for which DeFazio just voted more money.

Seeking to explain his yes vote for Pelosi’s war-funding bill, Farr 
issued a press release saying, ‘This bill brings our troops home’. But 
he also told the San Francisco Chronicle, ‘They want to go gung-ho. They 
want to escalate in Iraq. So what would our “no” votes mean?’ Actually 
they would have meant more votes against the war, and had there been 
four more holdouts against Pelosi’s palm-greasing, these no votes would 
have monkey-wrenched her bill, thus demonstrating that it is impossible 
to get a majority in the House of Representatives to endorse a piece of 
fakery designed to deceive the very people who put the Democrats back in 
power.

The real anti-war movement proved itself incapable of pressuring House 
Democrats to hold out. As noted above, the January 27 demonstration 
organized by United for Peace and Justice did involve active lobbying of 
Democrats to hold their feet to the fire, but the demo itself was really 
a Bush-bashing session, with scant reminders that Bush’s war has been 
and continues to be a bipartisan project.

Tom Matzzie, the Washington director of MoveOn.org, said after the March 
23 vote, ‘Bush is our worst enemy and our best ally.’ In other words, 
when Bush savaged Pelosi’s bill with accusations that it gives aid and 
comfort to the enemy, he cemented Democratic support for it. The focus 
stays always on Bush, over whom MoveOn will never have influence, as 
opposed to Democrats, whom MoveOn could have pressured with its three 
million-strong email list. But rather than rousing its members to accuse 
Pelosi of enabling the war, MoveOn carefully limited the available 
options in polling them. It only asked whether they were for, against or 
not sure about war funding as dealt with in her bill. MoveOn could have 
phrased it another way: do you support the Pelosi plan (fully describing 
it); do you support the Barbara Lee plan (funding exclusively for 
gradual withdrawal of us troops); do you reject war funding altogether?

The window of opportunity for that flew open right after the election, 
when anti-war forces roared in outrage after being snubbed by Pelosi and 
Reid, who omitted the war and the Patriot Act from their must-do agenda. 
Instead, the Democratic leadership chose merely to appear to oppose the 
war while continuing to fund it. This they have now achieved, amid the 
satisfied cheers of the progressive sector.

So now, after the Bush veto, the Democratic resistance has crumbled. 
Over in the House, Jack Murtha did his best, with a plan for re-review 
every three months. But when this bill went into conference, Democratic 
support for Murtha was slim. Reason: the Democratic presidential 
aspirants in the Senate—Clinton, Obama, Biden—don’t want any sort of 
determined resistance to the war to prevail, courtesy of the Democrats. 
So now they are voting the money without deadlines or reservations. In 
fact, the Republican call for withdrawal to commence as early as this 
September (unless the us position in Iraq improves, which it will not) 
is a fiercer challenge to Bush than what the Democrats have finally 
managed. The Democrats’ reward for this shameful collapse? Perceived now 
as fraudulent in their claims to oppose the war, their standing in the 
polls is as low as Bush’s.
After-effects

Do anti-war movements end wars? The Vietnam war ended primarily because 
the Vietnamese defeated the Americans, and because a huge number of us 
troops were in open mutiny. At home a large sector of society was in 
mutiny too. Anti-war movements are often most significant in their 
afterlife—schooling a new generation in attitudes and tactics of 
resistance. What has happened in the us across the intervening years 
since Vietnam is a steady, unsurprising decline in the left’s overall 
political confidence and ambition, and in the 1990s a disastrous failure 
to attack the Democratic Party, and Democratic Administration led by 
Clinton and Gore, for the onslaught on Yugoslavia and the inhumane 
sanctions against Iraq.

In the Bush years we have seen a further decline in any independent left 
with any unified theoretical and practical strategy or even political 
theory. There has been a corresponding rise in unconstructive and indeed 
demobilizing paranoia, as in the orgy of 9/11 conspiracism, along with 
devolution of political emotion—a vague word that matches the pallid 
politics involved—into clarion calls for a ‘war on global warming’, a 
metastasis of the ‘dialectics of nature’ that surely would have stunned 
Engels. The campuses are sedate. The labour movement is reeling. To 
describe the anti-war movement in its effective form is really to 
mention a few good efforts—the anti-recruitment campaigns, the tours of 
Military Families Against the War, particularly of those who have lost 
children in Iraq, the efforts of some returning vets, the stands taken 
by some enlistees refusing deployment to the Middle East—and three or 
four brave souls. Cindy Sheehan single-handedly reanimated the anti-war 
movement last year, commencing with her vigil outside Bush’s Texas 
ranch; there is also the radical Catholic Kathy Kelly, and Medea 
Benjamin and her ‘Code Pink’ activists. Sheehan has now given Nancy 
Pelosi an ultimatum that she will run against Pelosi in her San 
Francisco district unless the House speaker stops blocking impeachment 
proceedings against Bush and Cheney.

What were the big surprise demonstrations in the us last year? Quite 
suddenly major American cities saw gigantic, militant demonstrations of 
immigrants—mostly Hispanic. Their fury was at brutal treatment and harsh 
new laws against illegal migrants, without whose low-paid toil 
agriculture in states like California would come to a halt. The war was 
not an issue.


A shorter version of this piece appeared in the July edition of Le Monde 
Diplomatique, and in CounterPunch.

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