While recent polls reveal that 60 to 70 percent of Americans have soured on the war in Iraq, most of these people should not be mistakenly labeled "antiwar."
Many of those calling for the troops to come home could more properly be called "anti-this-war." "We never should have gone into Iraq," the argument typically goes, "but World War II was a war we could all get behind." It's the tired "just war" argument rearing its ugly head, and Iraq just didn't meet the criteria. While this may aptly describe the thinking of a certain part of the population - thanks to patriotic history textbooks and a popular culture that continually reinforces the myth of the "good war" - it fails to explain the increasing numbers that are now ready to pull the plug.
More to the point, most Americans are simply "anti-losing-this-war." As Alexander Cockburn explains in The Nation, people have turned against the war in Iraq because they "looked at the casualty figures and the newspaper headlines and drew the obvious conclusion that the war is a bust." Had the invasion and occupation not been completely botched from the start, and if there was even some distant glimmer of hope that we might still "win" - however that is defined - many of the currently discontented would readily give their approval.
To be truly antiwar then means being opposed to all war, irrespective of the casus belli offered by those in power. It means complete rejection of the notion that violence has some role to play in bringing about a more just world, and actively resisting in ever more creative and daring ways what the New York Times last week called America's "voracious war machine." This critical work can take many forms, including: supporting GI resisters and the growing counter-recruitment movement, organizing against ROTC programs and war profiteers, not paying war taxes, engaging in nonviolent direct action, and educating others about peace and the power of nonviolence.
If this is how antiwar is defined, then far too few fit the bill.
Taking such an absolute stand against the utility and morality of war, however, is exactly what is needed if we are to ever be rid of this barbarism. As long as we leave the door open even a crack for violence, and argue that there are some instances when we must kill, the flood gates for unspeakable horrors will be opened. To guard against this imagined evil we must then prepare for war, with no amount of money for the Pentagon being too much to spend for our protection. Following this logic, we end up right back at the current untenable status quo.
Some might call this wide-eyed idealism. But if spending hundreds of billions euphemistically on "defense" every year, while 47 million Americans have no health insurance and billions of human beings live (and too often die) in desperate poverty around the world is what realism looks like, I'd choose idealism any day of the week.
I think Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had it right when he passionately declared in Memphis the night before his assassination, that there is "no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence in this world; it's nonviolence or nonexistence."
Eric Stoner is a writer based in New York, whose writings have appeared in The Nation and a variety of newspapers. He can be reached through his website, at: ericstoner.net
We fought Spain even after Spain had agreed to ALL of our demands. We don't say that in our history books. We also do not say that the Philippine war which followed to suppress the freedom of the Filipinos who had defeated Spain was a real war as opposed to the play acting with Spain.
We do not say that our purposes were hegemony in the Caribbean and an imperial base in the Orient.
And that occurred in the good old days when we were still idealists!
Our politicians then were dreaming of Imperial glory for the nation.
Now that was reprehensible and our best thinkers, such as Mark Twain, were opposed to it.
But those were good guys compared to the cynical crooks now running things. It isn't really the glory of American world domination they seek as their personal (or group) interests to be brought about using American military might.
A lot of unthinking and immature types still view Empire as a great goal. They are tools of those running our military-industrial-corporate-government . They love to kick ass, and gloat about our military technology. But they don't give much thought about the humanity of those we kick or why we do it. But they turn anti-war when we look incompetent and are blundering.
When the idiots of this country wake up to the reality that this statement is the truth - as every holy man/woman or prophet from Jesus, Buddha, Ghandi, Mohammed, Confusius, Mother Theresa has tried to tell us since the beginning of time - "LEARN TO GET ALONG AND LIVE IN PEACE WITH ONE ANOTHER!" It will be a better place and not once second before!
What would we do if 80% of our oil source was threatened?
That, plus fighting over China and Russia, ie. Asian trade. Hmmmm! China, Russia, and Oil!
So, it's still about oil, just a different theater.
I was non violent and strictly anti war for 10 years during Viet Nam,(at 12 yo I hitch hiked to my first anti Viet Nam rally.) I'm no longer non violent, being queer bashed and raped does that to a person, and if you haven't experienced either, don't say sh*t about my militancy.
Sometimes war is forced upon a people by forces outside its control. You either fight such wars to win or you cease to exist. The truth behind the phrase "freedom isn't free" (which belies the corruption of its use to promote the current war) is that if you can't defend your territory you will someday no longer govern yourself.
The problem with our country is that many have taken the lesson of WWII to be that America is tasked by God in heaven with bringing freedom to the world at the barrel of a gun. But Bush and pals aren't Churchill, standing bravely as the last bastion of freedom in Europe against the rushing tide of fascism. They are Napolean, filled with the zeal of revolution and their own self-importance...bringing his brand of freedom to Europe with cannon and musket.
The only thing this article can accomplish is to divide the anti-Iraq-war coalition into the pure pacifists and the impure situational anti-war factions. We need to stand together to stop this war and prevent the US from becoming an imperial dictatorship.
The problem with the US is that we've gone Napoleonic. Like Napolean after the French Revolution we think we're responsible for spreading God's gift of freedom the world over and we'll do it at the point of a bayonet if necessary. It's this militaristic, American exceptionlist thinking that's a big part of the problem. Add in pork-barrel military spending and Presidential war powers running out of control and viola, you have today's US military.
And I REALLY hope you're not trying to divide anti-Iraq-war efforts into the pure pacifists and impure situationalist crowd. We need to hang together on this to bring America back from the brink of an imperial dictatorship.
Tell you what, ask the jews liberated from Aushwitz whether or not there any such thign as a just war.
Ironic that name matches the way you think.
I've been against every war fought in my lifetime and not only after the fact.
But how do you reach a point where pacifism on a global scale is possible? Where the good of humankind is actually put at the forefront of every nation's priorities? As we sit now, any country solidly enacting such an enlightened philosophy would be targeted by greedy opportunists for exploitation within minutes and a plan for such set in motion the moment it was readied.
Until every ideology; political, corporate, nationalistic or religious that contain or exhibit violent, expansionist, greedy, xenophobic, supremacist or lawless variables within their makeup are either reformed or outlawed, the talk of pacifism on a global scale is just so much air passed between lips.
I'll gladly add my name to the list of people who are "truly" anti-war.
I think a good start (this time around) would be to stop referring to our current occupation of Iraq as a "war." Then you might see more anti-invasion/occupation people.
What I think is far more important than everyone becoming a pacifist is a true understanding of what war is, beginning with the understanding that it is organized murder and going from there, recognizing all its barbarities and horrors, and refraining from glorifying any aspect. There should be no question that survivors as well as those who do not survive will pay a price that governments and societies rarely if ever recompense, and there should be the understanding it should, therefore, be only taken up when there appears to be no viable alternative for justice.
That why the surge was started. It was to give a boost to make the *war* appear to be turning a corner. That's why the big whoop-ti-do about whether it was working. That's why the outrage over the Moveon ad.
The surge was always about making the war
saleable to the public.