Marching Off Course

The Bush Administration got it all wrong in Iraq, so why are some protesters burying the message this weekend?

By Ben Adler, Campus Progress

Lisa Simpson has long been my favorite television character. I relate to her passionate liberalism. And nothing makes me laugh harder than when Lisa does the same silly things I might be prone to, like putting a “U.S. out of Everywhere” sticker on her bicycle.

So a flier reading “End the colonial occupation of Iraq, Palestine, Haiti and everywhere!” caught my eye recently. Were Lisa Simpson’s well-intentioned, if simplistic, politics catching on in Washington? Sort of. The flier was from the group ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism), advertising the major rally against the Iraq war planned for Saturday, September 24th. ANSWER, a Washington-based umbrella organization, is one of the lead organizers of the rally, along with another coalition, United for Peace and Justice.

The flier captures exactly what I find troubling about ANSWER’s approach. Here we have the opportunity to bring together tens of thousands of Americans to implore someone (the president) with the power to grant a specific, achievable request (withdrawal from Iraq), and it may well be wasted. Where activists could demand a policy change that has significant and growing public support, too many choose to protest every U.S. policy under the sun.

Never mind that a conflict like the one in Haiti arouses less widespread public passion than the Iraqi occupation in the U.S. for all the obvious reasons. The assertion that Haiti and Iraq suffer under colonial occupation is factually false. Who are these colonists moving there? Surely ANSWER must mean imperial, rather than colonial, occupation. This is not a niggling distinction. You cannot expect to convince anyone of your reasoning when it proceeds from a factually false premise.

Even if the “colonial occupation of Palestine, Haiti and everywhere” were as tangible and reversible as the U.S. military occupation of Iraq, they are better off as the subject of separate rallies. We’ve all heard someone bellow about how every imperial U.S. adventure is interrelated and so on. But this view, in its attempt to be all encompassing, is in fact quite myopic; it trades actual gains for people suffering under occupation for the immediate satisfaction of unloading invective on every aspect of U.S. foreign policy for a day.

Obviously the place to start with this is not a nebulous accusation of proxy occupation (Palestine) but rather a direct U.S. occupation of a sovereign people (Iraq). Whatever the motives (and most of them, other than ending Saddam’s nasty dictatorship, were ill-conceived), this is the most egregious, clear-cut example of American imperialism. At the moment it is unpopular, and it is also the one causing the most suffering – both for Iraqis and Americans. A major rally, or a series of them, in Washington, DC, specifically urging withdrawal from Iraq and limiting themselves to that topic could actually help move politicians in that direction.

ANSWER’s overbroad approach is also a tactical error for the anti-war movement because it alienates would-be participants. Personally, I opposed the war from the get-go, and I support withdrawing now by turning political and security control over to multilateral forces. But I don’t feel comfortable lending my support to a rally that demands “U.S. out of everywhere.” Presumably “everywhere” includes Afghanistan, which is a country that I, like the overwhelming majority of the American public, supported invading, and which I still think would benefit from more American troops, not fewer.

Indeed, one of the anti-war movement’s strongest arguments has always been that putting so many soldiers in Iraq weakens our ability to secure a peaceful and just society in Afghanistan and to comprehensively respond to any future terrorist threats or attacks. It is much harder to make this argument credibly while simultaneously arguing for U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and opposing all past, current and future deployments of American troops abroad.

Similarly, ANSWER’s demands on its website includes this gem: “Stop the Threats Against Venezuela, Cuba, Iran & North Korea.” And their call to action asserts: “While the Pentagon possesses the largest nuclear arsenal on the planet, the White House and Congress and both parties join together with the Corporate-owned media to paint Iran and North Korea as looming nuclear threats.”

This implied moral equivalence between our government and that of Kim Jong-Il is an embarrassment to the vital anti-war and anti-nuclear left. If they wish to hold a rally for global nuclear disarmament, that is a worthy goal. If they wish to hold a rally urging our government to avoid war with North Korea or Iran, that’s fine, too. But to pretend that George W. Bush, reckless cowboy though he most certainly can be, poses the same danger with nuclear weapons that Kim Jong-Il does is so preposterous that it destroys their credibility.

And ANSWER’s demand that the U.S. “stop the threats against… Iran and North Korea” seems to undercut one of the best potentially bipartisan critiques of the Iraq war: that by overstretching our armed forces we have weakened our ability to deter Iran and North Korea from pursuing nuclear weapons. You can’t make this argument if you reflexively oppose deterring Iran and North Korea anyway.

Then there is always the Jewish Question. Even as a non-hawkish member of the tribe, I feel uncomfortable with the overheated anti-Israel rhetoric that is par for the course at every anti-war rally since September 11th. The inevitable signs will show Ariel Sharon as Adolf Hitler, an Israeli flag as a swastika. These comparisons are more than just outlandish. They are deeply hurtful to Jews who lost family in the Holocaust – so much so that even an anti-occupation Jew such as myself feels uncomfortable lending his implicit support to such a rally.

In my experience as an activist in college, activism can lead to tangible improvements when it’s done correctly. That means making a specific, achievable request and going to an authority with the power to grant it. For example, in the United Student Labor Action Coalition (USLAC), I helped badger the Wesleyan administration into joining the Workers Rights Consortium to monitor the conditions in the factories that produce school apparel. I also lobbied the Connecticut state legislature on behalf of a campaign finance reform bill, which passed.

Now imagine, on the other hand, if USLAC had instead devoted our energies to rallying for “fair working conditions for all workers everywhere.” There is no authority with the power to grant that request, and not only would our wish go unfulfilled, but we would have no smaller accomplishments to point to either. Similarly, if, instead of lobbying the state legislature for a specific campaign finance reform bill, we had rallied outside for “an end to all corrupt political contributions in the entire world,” we’d have nothing to show for it. Moreover, we had broad student support, a powerful force in our negotiations with the administration, precisely because we limited ourselves to specific issues that anyone on campus could understand and sign on to, rather than overbroad tendentious declarations on a wide array of distant and diverse causes.

With so many lives at stake, this is a lesson ANSWER should learn, and quickly.

 
Discuss Ben Adler’s piece and this Washington march on the Campus Progress blog.

 
Illustration: August J. Pollak

Related Stories

• Gender-Neutral Housing Comes to Princeton
• Campaign Communications Director, Repower America
• Toke Up Marijuana Laws
• Send a Health Care E-Card
• The Battle for Pittsburgh