AN ACTIVIST GUIDE TO ENDING THE WAR IRAQ:
THE PRESSURE OF PEOPLE POWER AGAINST THE PILLARS OF POLICY.
This is a strategy for sustaining the anti-war movement through the ups and downs of the long war in Iraq. I do not believe the war can be ended just by a moral escalation of protest. Nor is resistance likely to "drive" the Bush Administration out of office. For those who want to end the Iraq War, not just witness against it or resist it, I offer this strategy:
It will be ended by enough people power pressure against the pillars of the policy.
The Iraq War rests on certain "pillars":
1. the pillar of public opinion, above all;
2. the pillar of political support;
3. the pillar of public funding;
4. the pillar of military capacity;
5. the pillar of international alliances;
6. the pillar of moral reputation.
As these pillars erode, the war policy will become unsustainable.
A good strategy is one aimed at impacting one or more of these pillars.
Let me go through them briefly.
1. PUBLIC OPINION is the most important pillar, from which all others derive. For example, it is public opinion which prevents the resumption of the military draft, which in turn weakens the US military capacity. It is public opinion which sets liimits on how many American casualties will be tolerated, a far lower number in Iraq than during Vietnam, Korea or World War 2.
Currently a strong majority of Americans believe that Iraq is a "mistake", a percentage reached more rapidly than during Vietnam [according to Gallup]. More or less 20 percent favor immediate withdrawal, 30-40 percent favor withdrawal in approximately one year, and only 30 percent [nearly all Republican] favor "staying the course."
2. THE PILLAR OF POLITICAL SUPPORT. Anti-war sentiment among Democrats is so high that the party's leadership now favors the posture of withdrawal, either beginning by the end of the year [Reid-Levin] or a fixed date of one year [Kerry-Feingold]. Public opinion is pulling down the pillar of bipartisan party support for the war. Against all previous mainstream expectations, the war clearly is a serious burden for its political defenders, primarily Republicans. We need to see Democratic challenges and Republican losses this November, and guarantee the success of anti-war platforms in the 2008 presidential primaries.
The anti-war movement is the small wheel that turns the big wheel of public opinion. The anti-war movement therefore needs to engage and push public opinion, turn the wheel. [This is a different approach than either jamming the big wheel or spinning our wheels].
This means we need to listen to and answer the concerns of those voters who lean towards withdrawal but are worried about the consequences. An appoach that only emphases immediate withdrawal reaches the twenty percent core supporters, not the 35 percent who favor another year or more.
3. THE PILLAR OF PUBLIC FUNDING. The Vietnam War ended with the 1975 Congressional cutoff of public funding, after years of protest and targetted lobbying by anti-war groups. But because "staying the course" carries a lesser cost in lives than Vietnam, and because public opinion favors a gradual rather than immediate withdrawal, the strategy of cutting funding cannot succeed at present. The Administration continues to blackmail Congress into funding a disaster. What can succeed, however, is targetted pressure on funding in the form of conditional amendments. The most interesting of these is the amendment to ban any permanant military bases, first proposed by Rep. Barbara Lee and a handful of others, which now is a bipartisan consensus opposed only by the White House. Such amendments are useful grass-roots organizing tools, and good challenges to the Executive Branch, but funding continues nonetheless. This was true in the Indochina case for ten years.
4. THE PILLAR OF MILITARY CAPACITY. Many observers, mostly hawks, claim that the US needed to send more troops to invade Iraq in 2003, and blame Donald Rumsfeld's military doctrines, without admitting the political limits imposed by public opinion against the draft and ground wars deploying American troops. These limitations have proven decisive in weakening the military pillar. There is no question that the US military is over-extended, that our ground troops are strained to the limit, that military recruiting has fallen to historic lows. Military recruiters, according to the New York Times, blame "parents" in large part for the recruiting crisis, which is a code word for those Americans who remember Vietnam and the Sixties and refuse to offer their children to die in a pointless war for another deceitful Administration. The efforts of Iraqi Vets Against the War and anti-recruitment campaigns at high schools and community colleges are prime examples of pressure against a crucial pillar of the war.
The only way the military pillar might be restored would be after another 9/11-type scare and/or a huge escalation of the present war. I say "might", because public opinion is far more skeptical now towards Administration claims than in 2002-03.
5. THE PILLAR OF INTERNATIONAL ALLIANCES. Despite claims of unilateral superpower status, the US has always relied on the appearance of global support in the "war on terror". The President went to the United Nations seeking cover, and failed. He then put together the "coalition of the willing", a ragtag network of US-dependent governments led by the United Kingdom. Over time the "coalition" has disintegrated. The largest "ally" after the US is the contingent of some-20,000 private contractors. Then come the British in the range of 6,000 troops. At least a dozen of the original 34 "willing" countries have withdrawn, and more will follow by next year. The "donor" nations are unlikely to invest in Iraq as long as the insurgency rages. Neither will they be responsive to calls for international security arrangements as long as the US seeks to maintain the occupation. Beyond this, world public opinion has turned permanently and dangerously against the US government, a situation that a "superpower" cannot sustain for long.
The global peace movement has been instrumental in keeping other governments from providing diplomatic and material assistance to the US.
It may be time to call for the global movement to demand the end of the US occupation when the authorization comes before the UN Security Council later this year. Improbable as this scenario now seems, it would provide an ideal exit strategy for the US by transferring authority for the stabilization of Iraq and reconstruction of Iraq to a UN-approved group of countries including Arab states, the Europeans, Russians and, of course, Iraq.
6. THE PILLAR OF MORAL REPUTATION. By "moral reputation" I mean those ideals by which Americans like to judge themselves and, equally, wish to be judged by in the world. When a war like Iraq runs counter to those ideals too deeply, the affect on the American reputation becomes an important factor in public opinion. We have long gone beyond the moral tipping point, beginniing perhaps with the Abu Graeb torture revelations - which, it should be noted, became public because someone released them over the Internet. The facts that both houses of Congress have passed "anti-torture" policies, that the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo and elsewhere remains a festering issue, and the widespread belief that the Bush Admininstraton lied in taking us to war, are evidence that contradictions between American ideals and American realities are extremely potent factors in undermining the basis of this war.
The American clergy can and should play the leading role in prophetic moral denunciation of the war, the torture scandals, the hidden civilian casualty numbers, and the moral emptiness of the supposedly "moral" defenders of the war among the Christian Right and pro-Israel neo-conservatives.
Americans don't like to think of themselves as condoning or funding torture or civilian massacres and, realistically, understand the consequences of our shocking moral isolation in the world. This moral pillar is crumbling like the others.
The gradual collapse of these pillars will end the Iraq War and, in doing so, will make similar wars in the future more difficult to fight. As the pillars collapse, a moment of opprtunity will open to teach and understand the lessons of this war before the lessens fade. There even will come a political moment, from either right or left, when the country will debate who "lost" Iraq and who should be entrusted to set us on a better course...#