The sun was shining as I sat down at the Cenotaph. Like most war memorials it looks like a giant penis. No-one else was there, but I was I knitted a few rows, and the mother of kids I used to babysat for walked by. We talked a bit, mostly about knitting and she left. I knitted a few more rows; no-one else showed up. I packed my knitting away, and walked off. For ten minutes, I’d vigiled alone in solidarity with the people of Iraq.
That was the political action in Wellington on the fifth anniversary of the War on Iraq. Maybe the people who had called the vigil turned up after I left, I don’t know. It’s been a hard six months for many of us here – there are extenuating circumstances
But it’s not just here, the movement against the war in Iraq was at it’s peak in the first six months of 2003. I own this book:
I’ve always loved it, I flick through and look at the sea of placards in London, the shivering scientists in Antarctica, the incomprehensible naked demos and the mass of people in Santiago. I think back to what we were doing on the fifteenth of February 2003, and what a crazy chaotic time it was, and how much we managed to do.
But tonight, I thought different things at I looked at the photos of the young woman in Sydney who had written ‘Make Love Not War’ written on her arm and was making out with an equally young man; the school kids on strike in London, on the first day of the war; the soccer fan who ran on the pitch with “Stop Bush” written on his backs; the hundreds of windows in Milan with peace flags flying; the two women in Washington DC who had written Peace Womb on their pregnant bellies – their children would be five by now. I want to know where they all were on Thursday, the fifth anniversary.
Almost everyone in those pictures must still oppose the war, five years later. It’s not as if it’s gone better than planned. But in those five years they must have lost something, all those people who came out and took action in so many ways. They must have lost hope.
I think we, by which I mean the anti-war movements in the broadest sense, must have done something wrong, not to be able to build on that hope that existed in those months. I can tell you some of the specific things that I would do differently in Wellington. But those details are too specific to explain the world-wide shrinking in the anti-war movement (unless every anti-war group had massive disagreements around meat).
The fifteenth of February 2003 was amazing, but a war cannot be stopped in one day, even one day with millions of people. Anything we do must be sustained longer than the period where urgency overwhelms us. I think the question for those of us who took part is how we can build, next time.
In order to keep the discussion focused, comments on this post are only open to those who supported the goals of stopping, and then ending, the war on Iraq.
I know my kids asked me, after we had been at a big antiwar demo just before the war, why the war started anyway?
I could blame the media here in the States, who were almost all cheerleaders for the war (though not as much as during the First Gulf War), and who downplayed the antiwar demonstrations.
But I know that I had the feeling that nothing we could do, letters to Congressman, letters to the paper, demonstrations, was going to have any effect at all. This is not an excuse, but it is the feeling I had. I feel guilty that I have done so little.
Well, I think a lot of the people who were against the war still subscribe to the “we broke it, we bought it” theory. So at this point there’s no point in protesting the war itself. However, the Bush administration is a different story. To me, 2004 was one of the saddest moments in the history of politics – the day the USA looked at the Iraq war and said “most of us are okay with this”.
I subscribe to the “we broke it, we bought it” theory.
Except that we don’t have the kind of coin needed to buy it, and hanging around and breaking more stuff is a poor substitute.
I think the shrinkage in the anti-war movement is just plain old fatigue and a feeling of impotence. I skipped the 5th anniversary anti-war rally: I’m tired of going to rallies, tired of not getting media attention, and tired of clearly expressing my opinion to my Senator who is secure in her seat not because she’s the best person for the job, but because her opponents are even scarier than she is.
I think the US anti-war movement basically became an adjunct to the democrat party. In 1996 the congressional elections became a referendum on the war and the “anti-war” democrats knocked the republicans out of the majority. A year later there were more troops in Iraq than when the republicans were controlling congress.
That said I don’t think US troops are leaving Iraq if the oil is somehow up for grabs. Well unless they are forced to leave.
PS In the 2/13 book, I hated the photos of the bay area protests, pictures of stoopidass naked exhibitionists.
i have been unpeopled and invisibled and defeated everywhere in life.
you know yesterday was the last episode for Jericho. a show with a devoted fan base that fought to resurrect the show after cbs cancelled it last year. 6 million rabid viewers in a fragmented market and no more show for us. i do not have an entertainment budget. i have tv. i watch maybe 2 hours of tv a week because that is all i can find that is not disgusting.
i pay bills to corporations that force me to talk to computers or to wait and listen to muzak for 15- 20 minutes routinely for routine service.
like many others i do not presently have health insurance or a job that nourishes my soul.
i have been fighting this war since it began back under the first Bush and it is now close to 20 years of war against Iraq and i am out of ideas and enthusiasms.
i do not know the answer. but the war in Iraq is not the only problem- the war on ordinary Americans by corporate america is draining me and also requires some action.
I think a key element of this decline was the strategy of the US anti-war movement to channel energy into John Kerry’s pr0-war presidential bid. That is not the only explanation, but I tend to think it is a major one.
It is very difficult to stop a war through activism and demonstrations, so I would not feel too bad at the failure to stop this one. Anti-war activists were able to put enough of a spike in the Vietnam war effort to cripple and then end it, but that was because the Vietnam war was fought primarily by draftees on the US side. That created a real injustice that even people not opposed to US hegemony – even people in favor of US hegemony – responded to.
There’s no such injustice being perpetuated this time around; stop-loss orders make enlistees who don’t read contracts unhappy, but leave most of the rest of us unmoved. It’s also not helping that the bulk of the military is either resigned to slugging it out for another ten years, or enthusiastic about the mission. So the anti-war movement is reduced to the whole US-bad, stop-the-imperialism theme that has not done so well at attracting majority political support here.
The US establishment learned the lesson of Vietnam – don’t fight a voluntary war with conscript troops.
No, no, no!
It’s not that we don’t have a draft. It’s not that people don’t care because the war doesn’t hurt them personally. Those are proximate excuses but not the ultimate ones.
Poverty continues because people lack money. The war continues because we haven’t taken to the streets. A large scale protest could end the war tomorrow.
We are too comfortable. We are in the thrall of people who say it’s okay not to have draft (let the poor defend our principles), that say that oil is necessary for our economic growth (we have to excuse Saudi Arabia and American oil and auto companies), that say that growth is always good (11% annual economic growth in China is a good thing), that say we can sustain a world with 9 billion people in 2050.
We must begin to face real facts — not the pablum served up by the nightly or 24×7 news channels.
as i was saying i am invisible and unpeopled by everyone-
i was just saying that i am far from comfortable and i have been fighting this war for 20 years! lots of us are not comfortable and there is a big connection betweeen the attack on america- it’s constitution, it’s peoples by corporate america and the foreign wars- we need a grassroots, precinct or neighborhood movement to reclaim participatory democracy and stop war and aggression
the war is not going to end from a big demo-
impeachment may make it happen sooner than later
big demonstrations again may help
continued lobbying and antiwar presence everywhere may help
people uniting and building a general movement may seem cliched but that is the only way
IMO there were 3 main factors that ended the war in Vietnam:
1. Vietnamese resistance (the stalinist NLF)
2. Domestic unrest
3. GI rebellion (that Robert alludes to above)
In Iraq similar factors have no come into play. The Iraqi resistance, such as it is, has heavily focused on inter-ethnic sectarian slaughter. Domestic unrest hasn’t happened. And in this war there’s not a bunch of pissed off (black) GI’s fragging their officers, doing drugs, refusing orders and demoralizing the rest of the troops.
Suppose we pull out right away and defund the Iraqi government.
What will be the results?
Will you consider those results to be right?