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Building the Antimilitarism Movement

By Brad Simpson

he last issue of the Nonviolent Activist (May-June) offered an editorial on the aftermath of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Here I attempt to expand on that analysis in light of my recent tenure as part-time Disarmament Coordinator for the War Resisters League, during which time I was fortunate to work with many sectors of the peace and antiwar movement.

With U.S. occupation forces now spread across Iraq, the antiwar movement is in a transitional period, wondering where to go from here and how to evaluate the movement’s successes and shortcomings, reinvigorate supporters and regain the initiative against the global juggernaut of U.S. militarism.

The War Resisters League shares the relief of many Iraqis at the ouster of the brutal Saddam Hussein regime. We share their relief at an end to 12 years of devastating U.S.-backed sanctions and weeks of U.S. heavy bombardment. However, we reject the retrospective argument that Hussein’s ouster (or evidence of his many human rights atrocities) justified an illegal and destructive U.S. invasion, or that the swift military defeat of a weak and battered nation is cause for celebration.

The War Resisters League opposed this war as it has opposed all wars for 80 years: as a crime against humanity whose main victims are inevitably the weak, the poor and the vulnerable. U.S. bombardment and gunfire killed or wounded thousands of Iraqi civilians. Some U.S. troops—many of whom joined the military to escape poverty at home—openly questioned what they frankly called the “massacre” of thousands of ill-trained, ill-fed, ill-equipped and conscripted Iraqi soldiers. Millions of Iraqis remain at risk from unexploded cluster bombs, untreated drinking water, the toxic residue of depleted uranium munitions and the wholesale destruction and looting of the country’s infrastructure and cultural heritage. U.S. occupation forces continue to regularly kill innocent Iraqi civilians, including those whose only “crime” is to protest the foreign occupation of their homeland. Moreover, the postwar breakdown of civil authority and the resultant endemic crime and shortages of basic goods, food, spare parts and medicine now pose a grave threat to the entire population. In short, the so-called liberation of Iraq is rapidly becoming a human and humanitarian disaster, a condition that “liberated” Afghanistan—now run again by heavily armed feudal lords who pillage and brutalize that broken country—understands all too well. The U.N. system stands in tatters as well, a victim of Washington’s determination to undermine any institution that might constrain its awesome power.

The Bush administration has laid bare its view of the world: U.S. might makes right and to the victor go the spoils. Administration hawks are scanning the horizon for the next target, suggesting that Syria, North Korea, Iran or even Cuba might be next. Meanwhile, the United States has rejected any substantial U.N. role in Iraq, opposed the return of U.N. weapons inspectors and declared that as the conquering power it has the right to govern Iraq and determine its political future. In an obscene act of imperial arrogance, the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee recently voted to allow this country to develop low-yield nuclear weapons—this after invading Iraq presumably to rid it of “weapons of mass destruction”—that could more easily be used in battlefield situations, even against non-nuclear states.

Washington has pledged that the U.S. occupation will benefit ordinary Iraqis. But it is well-connected war profiteers such as the Bechtel Corporation, Halliburton and the Carlisle group that are lining up for lucrative “reconstruction” contracts, the costs of which will be borne by U.S. and Iraqi citizens. Preliminary planning documents strongly indicate that Washington plans to impose a “free-market” constitution and economy on Iraq that will involve the wholesale privatization of public services and resources, including water, electricity, housing, telecommunications and, most important, oil. With Iraq firmly enmeshed in a web of ties to Western governments, multinational corporations and multilateral institutions, it will hardly matter what the “democracy” being imposed on it looks like. Ordinary Iraqis will have no greater role in their country’s governance than before.

Looking Ahead
How is the antiwar movement to respond to such developments? For starters, we should acknowledge our strengths and limitations in the period leading up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq. In a few short months, millions of people in scores of countries organized on an unprecedented scale to oppose the Bush administration’s war plans, a global mobilization of enormous historical significance. To offer but one analogy, the U.S. war against Vietnam raged for nearly five years before sparking comparable levels of protest.

This movement took root in communities across the United States, many of which had not seen an antiwar demonstration since the Vietnam War, if ever, demonstrating the deep and widespread mistrust millions of Americans have of the Bush administration’s foreign policy goals. In addition, thousands of people participated in coordinated acts of nonviolent civil disobedience in scores of cities, the largest such actions since the peak of the Central America solidarity movement. At the same time, many traditionally marginalized communities expressed feelings of exclusion from antiwar organizing efforts. While many local organizations built strong, diverse antiwar coalitions, activism on a national scale remained disproportionately white, reflecting long-standing patterns in the movement for which there are few easy solutions.

That this mobilization failed to prevent the Bush administration from invading Iraq points to a fundamental shift in U.S. foreign policy and war-making strategy: the country will probably never again fight a prolonged war. America’s overwhelming military and technological dominance, not to mention its propensity for attacking weak (or defenseless) states, sharply reduces the likelihood of another Vietnam-style conflict. This shift has important implications for the antiwar movement. It means we are unlikely to enjoy the luxury of having months or years to build sustained opposition to future wars and gain strength by feeding off growing public cynicism over them. Moreover, swift wars against defenseless states with relatively low U.S. casualties are unlikely to produce critical media coverage. Newspapers and television networks during the invasion of Iraq acted as the virtual public affairs arm of the Pentagon, covering the war wholly from the perspective of U.S. combat personnel.

The U.S. invasion of Iraq also points to an important paradox: While the United States enjoys overwhelming military dominance in the international system (and will continue to do so for decades to come), it has become politically weak and isolated. George Bush’s seemingly high personal approval ratings mask widespread domestic opposition to his reactionary domestic agenda and his unilateral, imperial foreign policy vision. Internationally, every member state of Bush’s so-called coalition of the willing, without exception, endorsed unilateral war on Iraq in the face of overwhelming popular opposition (a development cheered in Washington as a victory for democracy!).

Moreover, the globalization of repressive PATRIOT Act-style legislation since September 2001, the burgeoning U.S. military presence in the Middle East and Central Asia and Washington’s undermining of international agreements on public health, weapons and human rights have convinced much of the world that it is the United States, not Al Qaeda, that is the chief threat to world peace and stability. As a result, there are now at least three distinct global movements against U.S. power: a revolt against Washington’s fundamentalist, neoliberal international economic agenda (the anti-corporate globalization movement); a revolt against U.S. military power (the antiwar movement); and a faith-based resistance to American power (of which political Islam is only the most noteworthy) that is reinforcing conservative religious and political forces the world over.

A Broader View
Antiwar organizations and coalitions are meeting this summer to explore these issues and examine their implications for antiwar movement strategy. During my short tenure at the War Resisters League, I have come to the conclusion that the principles of nonviolent resistance for which we stand are more needed (and relevant) than ever.

In order to confront these realities effectively, however, the antiwar movement must become an antimilitarism movement that takes a principled stance against all wars and against the Bush doctrine of so-called “preventive war” in particular. Our goals must extend beyond stopping the next war and challenge the deeply rooted belief that U.S. military might makes this country (and the world) a safer place. This means rejecting use of military force in international affairs, calling for an end to U.S. arms sales and military assistance that fuel conflict around the world, demanding disarmament and supporting nonviolent conflict resolution through international institutions. As a first step we should insist on a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, U.N. control over the political and economic reconstruction of that country, a just solution to the Israeli- Palestinian conflict and the implementation of U.N. resolutions calling for substantive demilitarization of the Middle East. Even this is just a beginning.

We must also recognize that the antiwar movement’s goals are inseparable from the goals of the global economic justice movement. Each aims to challenge and ultimately dismantle a part of the interconnected corporate-military nexus that, as Indian writer-activist Arundhati Roy points out, has rendered much of the world either subjects or victims of U.S. empire. Our military power serves the long-range goal of locking in the advantages of the United States and other powerful nations in the world economy, just as it locks in the advantages of the powerful at home. We cannot defend our privileged position in an unjust global economic order with nonviolence, nor can we hope to gain allies unless we also struggle against the structural violence of poverty, environmental degradation, sexism and racism that threatens much of the world on a daily basis.

What this means in terms of short-term tactics is not at all clear. But we can hardly expect poor and marginalized communities to organize against war when they are simultaneously fighting devastating budget cutbacks and civil rights rollbacks, especially if traditional peace organizations fail to make these links themselves. Failure to do so also gives political breathing space to politicians (mostly Democrats) who enthusiastically support war abroad and then decry the consequences at home. The views of pacifist civil rights leaders Bayard Rustin and Martin Luther King Jr. are instructive: Both recognized the intimate links between poverty and militarism and sought to build alliances that would fuse those concerns. The antiwar movement should do the same. The Kensington Welfare Rights Union, for example, is calling for a Poor People’s March for Economic Human Rights to continue Dr. King’s efforts to build a united movement for peace and economic justice. The War Resisters League and other antiwar organizations should be part of such efforts as a matter of long-term strategy, and not just short-term expediency.

Thinking this way requires that we shift our horizons a bit and remember that we are in the struggle against U.S. militarism for the long haul (the War Resisters League has been working at it for 80 years!). While doing everything we can to mitigate the consequences of the U.S. invasion of Iraq and to prevent the next war, we must also seek creative, sustainable ways of withdrawing our support from a government determined to wage war on the world. The coordinated acts of civil disobedience taken under the auspices of the Iraq Pledge of Resistance (of which the WRL was a part), for example, effectively demonstrated the capacity of war opponents for escalated resistance in the short run, but what now? Here the War Resisters League’s experience and philosophical commitment to radical nonviolence puts it in a position to exercise effective leadership by example.

The vast upsurge in antiwar organizing points to the need for vastly expanded nonviolence training—not just in the ABCs of getting arrested but in the theory and practice of effective nonviolent action, linked to campaigns and geared toward concrete goals that build and deepen our movement. If the U.S. government feels free to ignore mass protest against its warmaking plans, the peace movement needs to develop the capacity to quickly plan and engage in mass nonviolent resistance, as thousands of activists did in San Francisco in March. Additionally, we need to educate people about and encourage participation in ongoing acts of nonviolent resistance such as income tax and phone tax refusal, which could channel the activist militancy of recent months and provide people with concrete, individual ways of acting out their opposition to war on a daily basis. Such “practical utopian” suggestions are rooted in a clear analysis of our present political crisis yet flow from the absolute opposition to war and reverence for life that is at the core of what the War Resisters League stands for.

Brad Simpson served as part-time Disarmament Coordinator for the War Resisters League from January to June 2003. He is leaving to begin teaching U.S. History at Idaho State University.