[Peace-discuss] A failed anti-war strategy

[C. G. Estabrook]

AWARE was founded shortly after 9/11/2001 on the conviction that the US 
government would treat the crimes of that day not as a problem for 
international law enforcement but as an excuse for imperialist war. 
That's obvious now, but it took some insight then.

So, like groups across the country, AWARE organized against the illegal 
US attack on Afghanistan and, in the next sixteen months, against the 
invasion of Iraq.  Across the country and the world, such organization 
was quite successful: the largest anti-war demonstrations in history 
occurred in the spring of 2003 – but the invasion went ahead, Iraq was 
devastated, more than a million people were killed, and millions more 
wounded and displaced.

The US occupation of Iraq was a disaster.  Germany occupied all of 
France much more easily in World War II.  And as a result even Americans 
not appalled at the administration's crimes in the war were shocked at 
its ineptitude.  The shock was redoubled when it was revealed that the 
administration was running the sort of torture program that Americans 
thought characterized only 20th-century totalitarianisms.

A large majority of Americans – more than 70% – came to oppose the war. 
  Three years into the Iraq war, American voters gave control of the 
Congress to the Democrats in the mid-term elections of 2006 -- for the 
purpose, as practically all admitted, of bringing an end to the war. And 
in the two-year run-up to the presidential election of 2008, at least 
one Democratic candidate emerged who claimed to have been “against this 
war from the start” -- Barack Obama.

The anti-war movement's strategy seemed clear, and necessarily 
successful: with at least the tacit support of the three quarters of the 
population, to work though the Democrats in Congress to bring an end to 
the war, and promote a presidential candidate who would do the same 
thing – either Obama, or another Democrat who it would seem would have 
to respond to the will of the people.

But the movement was betrayed, co-opted, and finally neutralized by the 
Democrats.  In a purposely misleading fashion the Congressional 
Democrats pretended that they lacked the necessary votes to use their 
constitutional right to cut off funding for the war; the party 
established and funded front groups to turn the anti-war movement solely 
to the support of Democratic politicians; and the party's leaders made 
it clear that they were attacking only the Bush administration's conduct 
of the war, not the general Middle Eastern war policy – the policy of 
all administrations for a generation – of which it was a part.

And the presidential candidates, including Obama, did the same thing. 
They avidly supported the suppression of the Palestinians, the 
continuation of the occupation of Iraq until “stability” was obtained, 
“finishing the job” in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the belligerent 
prosecution of the traditional American control over the energy 
producing region of the Middle East, from Somalia to Georgia, at the 
cost of many lives.

By the end of the presidential campaign, Obama, the “anti-war candidate” 
was chiding both his Republican opponent and the Bush administration for 
not being more aggressive in “AfPak,” which Democratic theorists like 
Richard Holbooke (soon to be Obama's secretary of state?) pronounced the 
vital center of the Mideast war – the “war on terrorism,” which the 
Democrats now revealed themselves to support.  The Bush administration's 
killings in Pakistan were only “baby steps,” said the Obama campaign.

Once elected, Obama gave no indication that he would reverse any part of 
this stance. Just the opposite: his very first appointment  – the 
Clintonoid Rahm Emanuel as his chief of staff -- was an Israeli army 
veteran who as head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee 
had removed a successful anti-war Democrat from Illinois' 6th 
Congressional District.

In the two years since the 2006 election – and the five and a half since 
the high water mark of the anti-invasion demonstrations – the anti-war 
movement has been neutralized, and its strategy of influencing elected 
officials has failed.  In 2008 the American political system – one can 
hardly call it democratic – produced two pro-war presidential 
candidates, and the party elected to end the war, supported it – despite 
the views of the majority.

Anyone looking at this situation from abroad, or regarding it from an 
historical distance, would have to admit that more than seven years of 
anti-war work by groups like AWARE across the country has accomplished 
almost nothing.  The war goes on, and the new president has promised to 
expand it; the people who are now prosecuting the war – Gates, Petraeus 
et al. – are in place to continue in the new administration; and the 
traditional American policy of military domination of the world's 
greatest energy-producing region shows no sign of changing.

As the Irish political leader James Connolly said at the outset of the 
20th century,

“One great source of the strength of the ruling class has ever been 
their willingness to kill in defense of their power and privileges. Let 
their power be once attacked either by foreign foes, or domestic 
revolutionists, and at once we see the rulers prepared to kill, and 
kill, and kill. The readiness of the ruling class to order killing, the 
small value the ruling class has ever set upon human life, is in marked 
contrast to the reluctance of all revolutionists to shed blood.”

The million dead in the Middle East, killed by a government for which we 
are responsible, suggest that we need to find a more effective strategy 
to prevent the continuation of that killing.  What can it be?  --CGE