Drums of War, Calls for Peace: How Should the Left Respond to a U.S. War Against Iraq?
Berman, Marshall
I DREAD an American attack on Iraq, and I completely oppose it. Smart as our bombs may be, in a country with a regime famous for using its people as human shields, there is no way we can avoid...
...Will Saddam Hussein go down in history with them, and take millions of people with him...
...Smart as our bombs may be, in a country with a regime famous for using its people as human shields, there is no way we can avoid killing thousands of innocent civilians...
...they don't care when they die, so long as they can kill...
...MARSHALL BERMAN, Distinguished Professor of Political Science at CCNY/CUNY, has been working for some time on Times Square...
...A leader can control a people most completely by "keeping the people on a perennial war footing...
...How can anyone who cares about Israel see this prospect with anything but horror...
...6 n DISSENT / Winter 2003 It's clear that the president and his men, the people who are actually bringing us this war, are having fun...
...Colin Powell and our five-star generals, who have done hard time under fire, can imagine the landmines along this yellow brick road...
...I guess I shouldn't ask rhetorical questions...
...What did I do in the antiwar...
...I often thought, Wouldn't it be nice if we could have an antiwar movement without a war...
...They don't know Machiavellian irony) I teach The Prince, and I feel like I'm reading the Times...
...Lately, the chicken hawks have been dissing the generals as sissies...
...they're sure their hour has come round at last, so they needn't keep time...
...I got to feel like an American citizen in the best sense, fighting for my country, and feeling, in our movement, the kind of generous, inclusive solidarity that was supposed to make America special...
...In last year's demonstrations, the new-model movement showed its impressive diversity, as well as deep inner tensions, which the White House was only too glad to exploit...
...For that matter, after 9/11, how can anyone who cares about America not see the horror...
...American leftists need a more nuanced perspective on the army, as we join the list of countries where the military men are relatively sane and the militarist megalomaniacs are civilians...
...Not long after the 1964 election, I had an argument with Marty Peretz about Vietnam...
...For a little while, the antiwar movement became a microcosm of the war...
...In the Reagan era, Jack Newfield anointed men like these as "chicken hawks...
...Have we learned something...
...they don't slouch, they've learned to fly...
...And, like the war, it went on for years and years and years...
...Eventually, there would be as many soldiers in the antiwar movement as in the war itself...
...Even if you don't read the classics, anyone old enough to remember the early sixties will know the scene...
...I thought of LBJ as a man of supreme clarity and common sense...
...full disclosure: I teach him, too), you'll remember the pathos of a war party riding high at the beginning of a war...
...Many people were soldiers in both...
...The president is getting his irrational exuberance from guys like himself, who spent the Vietnam War making money in Texas oil or else learning the Leo Strauss canon at the University of Chicago...
...Some were so depleted they didn't even notice it...
...But it was great to be there...
...At its worst it was pure pathology...
...For decades they have been at each others' throats...
...If Saddam Hussein is a murderous madman, as we think he is, and if he has developed "weapons of mass destruction," as we think he has, and if he feels us closing in on him, what will stop him from setting off his monstrous weapons...
...There are more rough beasts out there today...
...He was right, of course, and so I spent my youth as a soldier in the movement against the war...
...It is perfectly natural and normal to want to acquire new territory, and whenever men do what will succeed toward this end, they will be praised...
...the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s is said to have killed more than a million people...
...It's a reasonable question...
...Radicals became rough beasts, ripped each other to pieces, slashed and burned friendship and love...
...But that will only be the start...
...Now another war is crashing down on us...
...Avanti...
...They are tough guys on paper...
...I hope some combination of the UN and some regard for his people's welfare—an idea he has laughed at till now—will hold him back...
...We need to put together—somebody needs to put together—a movement that can confront this war, in both its short and its long runs...
...In any mass movement that arises in such a place, people are bound to have radically different styles, vocabularies, and views of the world...
...I can't imagine what outer or inner forces will hold back George W. Bush...
...If the King of France could have taken Naples, then he should have...
...In 1973, when American combat troops finally left Vietnam, it was a remarkable victory for the movement...
...But many of my fellow soldiers were too wrecked to enjoy it...
...But it's worth remembering that if America's Abolitionists, labor organizers, fighters for women's rights and for civil rights had got stuck on that question, our noblest movements would have died before they could be born, and our country would be far less human a place than it is...
...If you've read Thucydides, an Athenian admiral, exile, and great historian circa 400 B.C.E...
...Some of the things I did probably helped, others probably didn't...
...And I don't mean the army...
...They know their Machiavelli— at least they know Machiavellian sound bites...
...They're big with oil money and the best bombs money can buy...
...Just you wait," Marty said: We would be lucky if it was over in a decade, and God only knew how much we would destroy, and how much we as a nation would be destroyed, as long as it went on...
...Can the grizzled veterans of yesterday's movements overcome our post–traumatic stress in time for tomorrow...
...I couldn't imagine that he would carry SYMPOSIUM on, let alone expand, what I saw as Kennedy's war...
...How do you expect us to organize/march/occupy a platform/go to jail with them...
...Freud must have had people like us in mind when he spoke of "the narcissism of small differences...
...In the Nixon years the movement took some bad turns...
...They have edged the American people ever closer to a war footing and ducked any reckoning of the war's costs—its costs in money, its costs in freedoms lost, its costs in lives, theirs and ours...
...The most triumphant princes are those "who have been able to confuse and disorient men's brains...
...But an American invasion, more than anything else I can imagine, could turn these mortal enemies into instant allies...
...Both possess great arsenals, and both are nonchalant, even extravagant, about expending their peoples' lives...
...Shalom...
...By these standards, the president and his men have done well...
...Paul Simon's beautiful dirge, "American Tune" captured our movement's very own special form of post–traumatic stress...
...Eighty years ago, in his poem "The Second Coming," William Butler Yeats asked, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born...
...Nothing thrilling...
...DISSENT / Winter 2003 n 7...
...Mostly I marched when I was told to march, sat down where I was told to sit down, schlepped what I was told to schlepp...
...It could go on for years, even for decades, if Iraq becomes, in James Fallows's phrase, "the 51st state...
...Can we teach it...
...We have to find ways to live and work in peace with each other, even when we can't stand each other...
...I don't want to imagine what floodgates our bombs could open, in what is already the most explosive part of the world...
...We need to remember that the USA is a rich and amazingly differentiated civil society...
...When it was good, it surpassed its immediate aim of stopping something evil, and it nurtured and developed some luminous visions of how to live...
...Ironically, in recent years, one force for stability in the Middle East has been an impasse between the theocratic fascism of the Islamists and the secular fascism of the Ba'ath...
Vol. 50 • January 2003 • No. 1
