Wednesday, February 03, 2016
How the
Post-9/11 Antiwar Movement Was Erased From History
An anti-war demonstrator wearing an 'Out of
Iraq Now!' bumpersticker which Common Dreams distributed by the tens of
thousands following the illegal invasion in 2003. (Photo: Portland Press
Herald/archive)
Who even remembers the moment in mid-February
2003, almost 13 years ago, when millions of people across this country and the
planet turned out in an antiwar moment unique in history? It was aimed at
stopping a conflict that had yet to begin. Those demonstrators, myself
included, were trying to put pressure on the administration of George W. Bush
not to do what its top officials so visibly, desperately wanted to do: invade
Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, garrison it for decades to come, and turn that country
into an American gas station. None of us were seers. We didn’t fully grasp what
that invasion would set off, nor did we imagine a future terror caliphate in
Iraq and Syria, but we did know that, if it was launched, some set
of disasters was guaranteed; we knew beyond a doubt that this would not end
well.
We had an analysis of the disaster to come
and you could glimpse it on the handmade signs we carried to those vast
demonstrations (some of which I recorded at the time): “Remember when
presidents were smart and bombs were dumb?”; “Contain Saddam -- and Bush”; “Use
our might to persuade, not invade”; “How did USA's oil get under Iraq's sand?”;
“Pre-emptive war is terrorism"; “We don’t buy it, liberate Florida”; and
so on. We felt in our bones that it was no business of Washington’s to decide
what Iraq should be by force of arms and that American imperial desires in the
Greater Middle East were suspect indeed. And we turned out to make that point
so impressively that, on the front page of the New York Times, journalist
Patrick Tyler referred to us as the planet’s second superpower.
(“The fracturing of the Western alliance over Iraq and the huge antiwar
demonstrations around the world this weekend are reminders that there may still
be two superpowers on the planet: the United States and world public opinion.”)
"At a time when Americans should have
been in the streets saying hell no, we better not go, the Bush administration
and then the Obama administration were repeating the same militarized mistakes
endlessly, while turning the Greater Middle East into a charnel house of failure.
"
Of course, this vast upsurge of global
opposition would prove to be right on the mark, while all the brilliant
policymakers and pundits in Washington who beat the drums loudly for war were
desperately wrong. And yet the invasion did happen and, in its disastrous wake,
we, not they, were wiped out of history. None of us would be consulted when the
retrospectives began. No one would want to hear from those who had been
right about the invasion (only officials and “experts” who had been dismally
wrong). In the process that pre-war movement of ours would essentially be
erased from history.
Mind you, we knew that, whatever we did,
George W. Bush was bound and determined to invade Iraq. As Iput it that February, “I'm not a total
fool. I know -- as I've long been writing in these dispatches -- that this
administration is hell-bent for a war. The build-up in the Gulf during these
days of demonstrations has been unceasing. I still expect that war to come, and
soon. Nonetheless, I find myself amazed by the variegated mass of humanity that
turned out yesterday... The world has actually spoken and largely in words of
its own. It has issued a warning to our leaders, which, given the history of
‘the people’ and the countless demonstrations of the people's many (sometimes
frightening) powers from 1776 on, is to be ignored at the administration's
peril.”
On that, unfortunately, I was wrong. We were
indeed ignored and it didn’t prove to be “at the administration’s peril” (not
in the normal sense anyway). The large-scale antiwar movement barely made it
into the war years. There were a couple of massive
demonstrations still to come, but as time went on, as things
got worse, as the situation in Iraq devolved and those millions of
demonstrators were proven to have been unbearably on the right side of history,
the antiwar movement itself essentially disappeared, except for scattered veterans' groups and
heroic protesters like the members of Code Pink.
At a time when Americans should
have been in the streets saying hell no, we better not go, the Bush
administration and then the Obama administration were repeating the same
militarized mistakes endlessly, while turning the Greater Middle East into
a charnel house of failure. Today, as Pentagon
officials prepare for their next set of forays, interventions, drone
assassination campaigns, and special ops raids in, among other places, Libya -- and what could possibly go wrong
there? -- next to no one is pressuring or opposing them, next to nothing is in
their way. As a result, Ira Chernus’s new piece, “America’s New Vietnam in the Middle East,” on
what’s missing from the missing antiwar movement in America couldn’t be more
timely.
© 2016 TomDispatch.com
Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American
Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute'sTomDispatch.com.
His latest book is, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a
Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World (with
an introduction by Glenn Greenwald). Previous books include Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare,
2001-2050 (co-authored with Nick Turse), The United States of Fear, The American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's, The End of Victory Culture: a History of the Cold War and
Beyond, as well as of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. To
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to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives."
Eugene Victor Debs
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