Necessary Anger: Where the Peace Movement Went Wrong

...DISSENT / Summer 2003 n 13...

...would actually do that...

...We need a clear moral message, for in a world where the U.S...

...There is absolutely nothing wrong with humanitarian intervention in principle...

...The message was too thin, and it failed...

...If we want to oppose war effectively, we 12 n DISSENT / Summer 2003 need to provide a far clearer road map showing how we plan to support those who resist oppression...

...This article is adapted from a column originally written for the Progressive Populist...

...The left was flatly outorganized on this issue, not because it had fewer resources but because its activists just didn't do the work necessary for a serious intellectual engagement...

...Despite the shift of public opinion toward the pro-war position once the war started, the earlier opposition to unilateral war making shows that there is fertile ground for organizing among the broad public, in the United States and abroad...

...There is too much self-indulgence, too many ego-driven and fundraising-driven organizational divisions, too many tiny groups without the needed heft for long-term organizing...

...So the antiwar argument had to be about alternative ways to achieve the goal of a freer and more democratic Iraq—and about the unlikelihood that Bush and Co...

...Bits and pieces of a more sophisticated response to the war, moral and political, appeared sporadically at antiwar rallies, but they were marginal to the simplistic "no war" legalisms and "unity" rhetoric...

...And that's not enough...

...That the Bush leadership had other, nastier intentions is another question—since progressive people could see the Bush administration doing the right thing for the wrong reasons...

...The left needs a positive agenda, not merely a defensive NO as its reflexive organizing response...

...But the democratic left still needs to build the right kind of organizations and develop the right message to reach them...

...There should have been broader mass outreach to the unconverted middle, whether doortodoor, going to community meetings, or just talking on street corners to those who would listen...

...That was the fatal flaw of antiwar organizing...

...Email nathan@newman.org or see www.nathannewman.org...

...That was a substantial reason why many liberals moved into a position of support for the war...

...With no long-term alliances to develop a coherent strategy and no groups with a mass of members, we end up at any moment of crisis depending on the usual list of famous names and obscure grouplets to legitimatize and organize our efforts...

...Mouthing lines about national sovereignty in cases like Iraq is as hollow as Bull Connor's using states rights rhetoric to justify keeping the National Guard out of the South...

...This ad hoc method of operating leads to little more than agreeing on NO as the only message...

...It was the first Bush administration that sold out both the Kurds and the Shias when they rose up in 1991, yet the left failed to rally to their support...

...What should be opposed is the use of military force when nonviolent solidarity is more likely to lead to a just result and to impose much lower costs on the population...

...The antiwar movement lost the argument on the efficacy of alternative means partly because of its simplistic choice of "no war" unity over a more sophisticated and positive message— which also would have required more outreach to people who don't go to rallies (and probably less focus on rallies...

...We might start by concentrating on working to guarantee that the Iraqi people get the democracy they have been promised, keep control of their oil resources, and escape their country's debt (much of which is owed to the Western governments and companies that armed the military we just fought...

...Not because they changed my view that the war was wrong, but because they meant that for some Iraqis the death and devastation of the war would be offset by their freedom from Saddam's yoke...

...And when we allowed groups such as the Workers World Party, which had defended the Hussein regime in the past, to lead some of the antiwar rallies, many folks might rightly have thought that such a movement had no real plan to challenge Saddam's regime...

...There was no counter-argument from the antiwar movement about how it was acting, or could or would act, in solidarity with the oppressed people of Iraq...

...Although there was some impressive Internet outreach by groups such as MoveOn.org and some broader outreach by select groups, the overall de-emphasis on door knocking and the attached organizing is the exact problem with the strategy of much of the antiwar left that preferred to talk to itself at rallies or in its existing media circle...

...Many of my left friends will point to the "success" of the large rallies, but what's the achievement...

...The antiwar movement was a failure...

...It was the failure of the antiwar forces to hold that 40 percent that needs to be analyzed...

...The left cannot plead lack of time, because it had all the time necessary between the Gulf War and the Iraq War to mount a public education campaign in defense of Kurdish and Shia human rights and for nonviolent strategies that could have served as an effective alternative to war...

...military has demonstrated that no military force can oppose it, only a cohesive global movement exerting clear moral force will be able to defeat Bush's unilateralism...

...For them, the war involved fighting a brutal regime that abused its own people and invaded its neighbors...

...NATHAN NEwMAN is a union lawyer, longtime community activist, and author of the just published book Net Loss, on Internet policy and economic inequality...

...Speakers at the rallies I went to were preaching to the converted, not to those who were unconvinced of Bush's complete perfidy and for whom an actual argument was necessary...

...Why should we praise tactics that coincided with an increase in support for unilateral war...

...More broadly, we need a global message of solidarity with all who are experiencing oppression and human rights violations, whether by governments allied to the United States or by governments opposing it...

...But in the case of Iraq, the lack of an articulated plan to help those resisting Hussein is exactly what strengthened the argument of the hawks that their method was the only way to "liberate" Iraq...

...The neoconservatives had been doing their intellectual outreach for years, publishing COMMENTS & OPINIONS books, holding policy conferences, organizing at the grassroots to solidify an ostensibly moral basis for their position, while the left was largely throwing its critique together on the fly...

...TROOPS entered Baghdad, I was very glad to see the pictures of Iraqis celebrating freedom from Saddam's dictatorship...

...Rallies are means, not ends...

...You can say they were all misinformed by the media, but in January and February of this year, only about one-third of the American public supported war without significant global support, as signified by UN endorsement, whereas by March and April an additional 40 percent supported Bush's unilateral intervention...

...Failing that, the only "unity" position possible was the simplistic "no war" message, and anyone, including pro-Hussein propagandists, could speak in the name of the antiwar movement...

...There is no space where the millions of people who rallied against the war ever have a chance to participate beyond showing up at a rally...

...Things need to change, and quickly...

...The problem for the peace movement is that its activists failed to argue persuasively that war was not the best way to achieve this goal, leaving many Americans with the sense that the choice was between fighting and doing nothing— which ended up tilting moderates reluctantly toward the war camp...

...T T HE BROADER democratic left is responsible for that failure: its myriad groups and endless divisions means that it cannot sustain the solidarity necessary over the long haul to debate and develop a positive political strategy...