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Antiwar Forces Face a Test
This weekend, demonstrators in Washington and San Francisco will try to build support for the preemption of Bush's preemptive war.By Sarah Ferguson
October 24, 2002
Former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter will be among the featured speakers at the Washington event.
On the eve of concurrent mass demonstrations in Washington, DC and San Francisco, antiwar activists are predicting that more than 150,000 people from across the country will gather for what would be the largest display yet of domestic opposition to a US-led war against Iraq.These national protests will be the first test of whether the groundswell of voices calling for an alternative to military action can congeal into a movement – and whether that movement can succeed in preventing a war before it starts.
Given that Pentagon planners are hoping to deliver a brief military campaign, activists say they cannot wait for the bombing to begin before organizing opposition. "For the first time, we're really mobilizing to preempt a war," says veteran organizer Leslie Cagan, who helped coordinate mass protests during the Vietnam and Gulf wars.
Organizers have already chartered more than 500 buses for the event in Washington, which will features speakers including the Reverend Jesse Jackson, actor Martin Sheen, former United Nations weapons inspector Scott Ritter, and Hans Von Sponeck, the former director of the UN oil-for-food program in Iraq. [Ron Kovic ("Born On the 4th of July" w/Tom Cruise – remember when he was an actor?) was there, too. –Webscribe] Simultaneous demonstrations will take place that day in Berlin, Copenhagen, San Juan, Mexico City, and Seoul.
While the weekend protests will no doubt be judged by the numbers they draw, opposition to the Bush administration's rush to war has come from surprisingly diverse quarters. What remains to be seen is whether those groups and individuals – from faith-based pacifists and left-wing anti-imperialists to moderates favoring containment and anti-interventionist conservatives – can join to create the kind of broad-based antiwar movement many believe is necessary.
Already, several pundits (including MotherJones.com's own Todd Gitlin) are warning that the nascent movement has been hijacked by a 'hard left' leadership, and that the peace cause could be marginalized as a result.
In particular, progressives have questioned the central role being played by the International ANSWER Coalition, which is the main organizing group behind this weekend's demonstrations. The coalition was formed after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks by the International Action Coalition – itself an outgrowth of the Workers World Party. (ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) front-man Ramsey Clark, a former US Attorney general, is on the legal committee for Slobodan Milosevic, and the IAC has been an apologist for both the Iraqi and North Korean regimes.)
During the Gulf War, the peace movement split because of the IAC's refusal to condemn Iraq's invasion of Kuwait – and most antiwar activists insist this movement will need to condemn the dictatorship in Iraq while criticizing the Bush administration's war plans. Still, organizers say the push at this point is for unity – at least at these demonstrations.
"The fact that WWP is calling the shots is unfortunate, but it's less important than getting out mass numbers," says David McReynolds, the 73-year-old stalwart of the War Resisters League, which has been advocating alternatives to war since 1923.
Activists say opposition to a US-led preemptive strike on Iraq is emerging far more quickly – and in far more ways – than both critics like Gitlin and the mainstream US media have recognized.
"The antiwar movement during the Vietnam War was nowhere as strong at this stage of the game." says Karen Dolan of the Institute for Policy studies, a progressive think tank in Washington, DC, which has been tracking protests by students and faith-based groups. "It's quite astonishing that, in the wake of all the patriotism that followed 9/11, people have been as skeptical of Bush and of going to war as they have."
Surfing for Peace
One reason the media may be overlooking the depth of dissent is because unlike the Vietnam era, today's antiwar forces are mobilizing largely without the direction of any easy-to-identify umbrella groups.
"It's the anticorporate globalization model of not having individual leaders, but lots of coalitions and affinity groups and nodes of action," says Medea Benjamin of Global Exchange, a Bay Area environmental and human rights group.
Much of the momentum is being fueled via the Internet. During the congressional debate on the Bush administration's war resolution, House and Senate members were deluged with emails, faxes, petitions and phone calls from literally hundreds of thousands of constituents, most of them initiated by online campaigns coordinated by groups such as TrueMajority.org, MoveOn.org, UnitedforPeace.org, and the faith-based EndtheWar.org. Moreover, many of the individuals who took part in the online campaigns went on to participate in meetings with their congressional representatives – a handful of which became sit-ins.
This remarkable wave of grassroots lobbying may not have swung the vote, but the online agitators aren't backing off. In just one week, the MoveOn.org PAC raised $1.65 million from its base of 600,000 subscribers in a campaign to reward those members of Congress who voted against the resolution.
"We want to demonstrate that peace is a mainstream, patriotic value," says executive director Peter Schurman of MoveOn, which was formed four years ago by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs Wes Boyd and Joan Blades to oppose the impeachment of President Clinton. Specifically, MoveOn has encouraged its email subscribers to back the campaigns of five Democrats who voted 'no' and now face tight races in November: Sen. Paul Wellstone [RIP – Mondale, perhaps? –Wbscrb] of Minnesota and Reps. Rush Holt of New Jersey, Jay Inslee and Rick Larsen of Washington, and Jim Maloney of Connecticut.
For Wellstone – whose state is considered one of the critical battlefields in the contest for control of the Senate (President Bush has stumped there four times already, garnering record sums for Wellstone's Republican opponent) – the $560,000 that MoveOn's subscribers contributed could prove crucial.
"We were absolutely astonished by the response around this. We didn't even know what MoveOn is" says Wellstone campaign spokesperson Jim Farrell.
Buying Access
Frustrated by a mainstream media they say has failed to adequately convey antiwar views, celebrities, corporate CEOs and even average citizens have taken to buying ads in national newspapers.
Earlier this month, a coalition of business leaders took out a full-page ad in The New York Times featuring the blunt message: "They're Selling War. We're Not Buying It." The ad was signed by 500 members of Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities, including Dee Hock, the founder of Visa International, and New York real estate magnate Douglass Durst. [For now, see NYPN.org – as of this writing the BLSP Webpage (http://www.businessleaders.org/) is temporarily down. –Wbscrb]
"Bush, by being this unilateralist cowboy, is giving the moderate elements of the left a reason to act," says Gary Ferdman, executive director of the business group, which is an outgrowth of www.TrueMajority.org, the progressive lobby founded by Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry's. Other prominent ads opposing war have been taken out by the Not In My Name campaign, TomPaine.com, New York's health and human services union, and actor Sean Penn.
Even ad-hoc groups are getting into the act. Three months ago, Lyla Garrett, a longtime Democratic Party activist in Southern California, held a dinner party at her Los Angeles home to discuss ways to support progressive candidates and causes. Instead, she and her friends decided the most pressing issue was stopping an invasion of Iraq. So, they collected $12,000 from 1,000 donors, formed Americans Against War With Iraq, and bought a full-page ad in the Los Angeles Times that asserted: "What will War with Iraq Accomplish? A million new terrorists."
"The response from was so overwhelming, we decided to take another ad in The New York Times with more than 2,000 signatures, including Jesse Jackson, Lily Tomlin, and Maxine Waters," says Garrett. "We spent $38,000 for the ad, and got back more than $45,000, along with thousands of new names."
"All of these ads and protests and write-in campaigns are spokes in the same wheel to stop Bush's permanent war agenda," argues Garrett whose campaign generated 140,000 phone calls to Congress.
An "Immoral" War
Last week, the president's own United Methodist church rejected his administration's plans as "without any justification according to teachings of Christ." In fact, with the exception of conservative evangelical, just about every Christian denomination, including the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, has issued a statement opposing a US-led attack.
"I was surprised at how easy it was to get these church leaders to drop their schedules and come to Washington to lobby against a war," says Dr. Bob Edgar, executive director of the National Council of Churches. Several leading bishops joined Edgar in a candlelight prayer vigil outside the Senate offices on the day the Senate voted to grant the president sweeping authority to launch an attack.
Similarly, organized labor, which backed the war in Afghanistan, is also beginning to openly question the Bush Administration's go-it-alone stance on war. Just prior to the congressional vote, AFL-CIO president Jon Sweeney wrote a letter to President Bush urging him to seek a diplomatic solution to conflict with Iraq. Though his letter stepped short of opposing war, Sweeney blasted Bush for seeking to "politicize" the Iraq issue by timing the vote before Congressional elections. Meanwhile, several labor groups have already adopted antiwar resolutions – among them the Washington State and San Francisco Labor Councils, the California teachers union, Local 1199 in New York, and the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers.
Many of these labor groups are encouraging their members to attend the mass demonstrations this weekend. But antiwar activists have yet to draw the support of mainstream women's groups. And other than Greenpeace, no major environmental groups have joined in the call for alternatives to invasion – despite the oft-stated accusation that Washington's plans for a war in Iraq are motivated by America's thirst for oil.
"We're trying to get them to realize that they could be capitalizing on this oil issue," says Benjamin.
What's significant is the degree to which peaceniks are hearing their arguments against the Bush administration's first-strike doctrine echoed by senior military officers, such as former Marine General Anthony Zinni, who helped command US troops during the Gulf War, and respected conservative policy-makers like former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft.
"I think we're seeing a very interesting dynamic where you've got people in the military and intelligence communities and business community asking these same questions as the people on the streets," says Dolan.
That's momentum that veteran organizers say the antiwar movement can't afford to squander – momentum that could carry past this weekend, provided the many opponents of war can move beyond their factional and ideological differences.
"I think Bush is in serious trouble. I have never seen the op-ed page turn into an oppositon page before ... I've never seen the leaks like the CIA saying that there isn't a threat from Iraq at the same time that Bush is saying that there is one," McReynolds argues. "So I think you have a very combustible situation – and the White House is starting to see that." What do you think?
Sarah Ferguson is a New York-based freelance writer.
