September/October 2003
by Paul Rogat Loeb The bombs that fell on Iraq shattered the armies of Saddam
Hussein and the bodies of five to ten thousand civilians.
They also crushed the spirits of many in the peace movement,
driving participants into their shells. In the months before
the war, several million ordinary Americans marched and spoke
out to challenge the prospect of US invasion, joined by the
largest global peace demonstrations in history. Because so
many citizens marched, lobbied, held vigils, and otherwise
raised our voices, we felt as if we might stop the war. An
amazing movement bloomed, seemingly out of nowhere. Bush
invaded nonetheless. We watched the war on TV, or read about
it in the papers, and felt hopeless and powerless. Many of
us wonder now whether our actions can matter. "I did everything I could," a Minnesota college student told me recently. "I wrote letters and called Congressmen. I marched and held signs. So many other people did too. Then Bush said he wouldn't listen no matter what we did. I felt all our efforts were worthless." The student was young, but people thirty years older expressed the same demoralization—a sense of futility and dashed hopes. This response risks creating a self-fulfilling prophecy—but a movement that may still be our best hope to transform America should not be allowed to dissipate in resignation. We did well, and we got it right. Many of our predictions about the war have proved correct. Looters and fundamentalist Shi`is have dominated the post-Saddam landscape. Despite justified relief about the collapse of Saddam Hussein's brutal rule, most Iraqis have not welcomed us with cheers, but with hesitation and mistrust. Our attacks provoked riots throughout the Islamic world, from Egypt and Pakistan to Indonesia and Malaysia. Weapons of mass destruction still have not been found, and may never be. Contracts are being handed out like Halloween candy to Republican-linked corporations like Halliburton and Bechtel, equal-opportunity merchants who had no problems dancing with Saddam Hussein when he was in power, Halliburton as recently as three years ago. The global peace movement may have actually helped pressure the US military to limit what it called "collateral damage," as its strategists scaled down initial plans for the massive bombardment they named "Shock and Awe." Now, however, placed in what psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton called, during Vietnam, "an atrocity-creating situation," our scared young soldiers have responded to suicide bombers and snipers by shooting up cars full of women and children and firing on unarmed demonstrators. Given the occupation's continuing chaos and the developing bitterness of ordinary Iraqis, our troops stand to be vulnerable targets for years. We did well, and we got it right. But watching the complications develop hasn't helped peace movement morale. During the war itself, communities that had held massive demonstrations just a few weeks earlier saw the numbers of visible protesters quickly melt away. Although public witness remained critically important, we wanted to do more, even to stop the bombs physically. We wanted to prevent the destructive actions from unfolding—but within the war's abbreviated time-frame, that was something we simply couldn't do. As a result, many who'd just recently felt an enormous common strength suddenly felt marginal and confused. Many still do. It's not that we bought into the administration's propaganda juggernaut, or that we buy its line now that the war is over. But it's hard to know how to challenge it, especially in an atmosphere that attacks even the mildest dissent as allegiance to terrorism. And without the clear focus of working to prevent a looming war, it has become harder to define our common tasks. As conservative pundits talk glibly of moving on to Syria and Iran, we might start with questioning the ethic of arrogance that would make this war just a first step toward a new imperial America. On the eve of the invasion, an army mother from El Paso, Texas wrote to me, describing why she'd began attending peace vigils. She prayed every night for the safety of her son and the others in his unit. "I have no doubts," she wrote, "about our military and the job it can do. But does that make it right and just? I know that Saddam is an evil dictator but he is but one in a long list, and I worry that this administration will not want to stop with just him. I heard Bill Bennett on TV last night and he was actually grinning and saying that we were a superpower and we have every right to show our might. What happened to 'being humble?'"
We need to challenge the politics of denial and contempt. We must offer alternatives that honor our common ties: working with other nations, respecting communities at home, treating democracy as more than just a rhetorical cloak for bullying and greed. To do this effectively, we can begin by working to re-involve those millions of ordinary citizens, who, despite all the polls, do not believe the Bush administration's actions, whether at home or abroad, have made the world safer, more democratic, or more humane. For the moment, many have grown quiet—isolated, intimidated, and demoralized. But this past year, so many people got involved—either again or for the first time—that they could form the core of the largest American peace and justice movement in decades. A prime task, therefore, has to be connecting with those people who participated at the periphery of the movement but melted away when the war began: the neighbor who displayed a peace sign, the co-worker who went to a march or a candlelight vigil, the friend who raised hesitations. We need to validate their original impulse to participate by listening to their concerns and referring them to groups that are acting. We need to give them ways to reclaim their voice and begin reaching out again in their communities. Just the process of working to raise issues together will help us recover some of our sense of power, because nothing is more depressing than watching the bad news in withdrawal and silence. We have powerful potential allies institutionally as well as individually. The recent movement brought together key organizations and voices of conscience in ways that didn't remotely occur even at the height of the opposition to the Vietnam war. United for Peace and Justice and the Win Without War coalition joined the National Council of Churches, the Sierra Club, the NAACP, the National Organization for Women, national peace groups like FOR, major union leaders, and cyberactivists like www.MoveOn.org and Working Assets. We saw strong peace statements from every major Catholic leader and the heads of every major mainline Protestant denomination except the Southern Baptists. ACLU membership has soared in the wake of the PATRIOT Act's gross invasion of the most basic elements of privacy. If these institutions and institutional leaders can keep working together, they can offer powerful ways to create a common voice. Add in a continuing global peace movement, and we have a powerful base for change. Making progress on any of these issues will be vastly easier, of course, if we can get George Bush out of office. Many peace, justice, and environmental activists are already shifting gears to begin working toward this end. Many are backing the more progressive Democratic candidates, like Howard Dean and Dennis Kucinich. Some are supporting other contenders, like Richard Gephardt and John Kerry. (Though Gephardt's support of the war and Kerry's waffling hardly make this an easy task, either would be far better than Bush in a dozen key ways if he got in.) Others are focusing on registering disengaged voters, and on beginning anew to talk about issues buried beneath Bush's media whitewashing. Come the 2004 election, I hope those who marched against this past war will unite in doing their best to get Bush out office, which means avoiding any strategies that split the vote. Bush's agenda is ruthless and regressive enough that we have to be united in voting, in helping to get out the vote, in doing whatever we can to defeat him. But between now and November 2004 it will be our energies that do or don't build both the grassroots movement that can hold this administration accountable for its actions and the political context that can give us a chance to replace it. We live, alas, in a time of lies. If we stay silent, they build up like mud piling in front of a door. The deeper the mud, the harder it is to dig out from it. We need to find ways to help our fellow citizens recognize how little this administration has ever cared about democracy, and how much about its own power. We need to help people see how that power makes both individuals and communities expendable, whether that means American troops deployed in the Gulf, Iraqi civilians killed by our bombs, ordinary citizens living in communities seeing cuts in every institution that serves the poor and vulnerable—or even the middle class, as teachers get laid off from all but the most affluent public schools. We need to start local dialogues about our choices and priorities, who wins and who loses, and the long-term implications of everything from waging pre-emptive war, to ignoring global warming, to transferring unprecedented amounts of money from the poorest to the wealthiest. We have to start those dialogues now, and with people who don't necessarily agree with us. We need to give our fellow citizens the courage to do more than duck and cover when told they've no right to speak out. We need to stand by those who are attacked. Finally, we need to persist. The roots of the Iraq war go back decades, from the "Southern Strategy" that handed the Republicans so much political power to the US role in bringing Saddam Hussein and his Baathist party to power to begin with. These roots won't be instantly untangled. If we look only at the past few months, we didn't win what we'd hoped. We ran out of time to stop the war. But we were never in this simply to stop a single war. Our goal is to redirect this country down paths that treat the world with respect. And that's a task to take on not in a single month or political season, but throughout the course of our lives. Immediately, we need to do whatever we can between now and November of 2004 to elect a different president. But we also have to be in this for the long haul. If we act with enough courage, and persevere long enough in raising the real and difficult issues, the turnings of history may surprise us in powerful and hopeful ways. Despite the Bush administration's insistence to the contrary, we are far from alone in this task.
Paul Rogat Loeb, an associated scholar at Seattle’s Center for Ethical Leadership, is the author of several books, including Soul of a Citizen: Living With Conviction in a Cynical Time (www.soulofacitizen.org; book available from FOR).
©2003 Fellowship of Reconciliation |
