The emerging antiwar movement

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Although I did not make it down to Washington yesterday, I listened to
the rally over Pacifica radio in NYC. This was just one of the fruits of
the recent victory at the network, which used to provide regular
coverage of such events before it was hijacked by the NPR-izing clique.

Most speakers were clearly reflective of the Workers World Party
orientation, which was understandable given its key role in ANSWER, the
protest organizer. But I was pleased to hear Medea Benjamin as well. She
is the executive director of Global Exchange, a west coast group that
has been heavily involved with anti-globalization protests and not part
of the WWP network. Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry ice cream fame also spoke.
He has launched a businessmen against war in Iraq group that took a full
page ad in the NY Times about a week ago. Figures like Cohen played a
significant role in the Vietnam antiwar movement and it is gratifying to
see him speak from the ANSWER podium. But most importantly, Jesse
Jackson spoke as well. It is of key importance for the emerging antiwar
movement to integrate Democratic Party operatives like Jackson without
giving an inch to reformist illusions. Why? Most Americans identify with
the Democratic Party and would find the presence of a politician like
Jackson at a rally welcome, just as the presence of a Ted Kennedy was
important for antiwar actions in Massachusetts in 1971.

After the march began, the Pacifica station switched to a discussion of
what next for the movement, which included Leslie Cagan, the new head of
the network board and a veteran of the Vietnam antiwar movement. She
said that not only is there a growing conviction that a broader movement
is needed, but that key figures have already begun to act on that. She
stated that a meeting was held in Washington the day before the protest
that involved ANSWER people and others who were not part of that
formation. This is excellent news in my opinion and the rally probably
reflected this development.

Finally, I refer you to an interesting report on the antiwar movement
and the role of ANSWER from Sarah Ferguson, a NYC journalist who might
be regarded as everything that the red-baiting Liza Featherstone is not.
Like Featherstone, Ferguson's beat is the organized left and the antiwar
movement but she is fair-minded and honest. I used to rub shoulders with
Sarah when she was a Central American solidarity activist in the 1980s
and actually went down to Washington in a rented car to participate in a
rally against the first Gulf War organized by IAC, another WWP initiated
formation.

===

Mother Jones, October 24, 2002
Antiwar Forces Face a Test

This weekend, demonstrators in Washington and San Francisco will try to
build support for the preemption of Bush's preemptive war.

By Sarah Ferguson

On the eve of concurrent mass demonstrations in Washington, DC and San
Francisco, antiwar activists are predicting that more than 150,000
people from across the country will gather for what would be the largest
display yet of domestic opposition to a US-led war against Iraq.

These national protests will be the first test of whether the
groundswell of voices calling for an alternative to military action can
congeal into a movement -- and whether that movement can succeed in
preventing a war before it starts.

Given that Pentagon planners are hoping to deliver a brief military
campaign, activists say they cannot wait for the bombing to begin before
organizing opposition. "For the first time, we're really mobilizing to
preempt a war," says veteran organizer Leslie Cagan, who helped
coordinate mass protests during the Vietnam and Gulf wars.

Organizers have already chartered more than 500 buses for the event in
Washington, which will features speakers including the Reverend Jesse
Jackson, actor Martin Sheen, former United Nations weapons inspector
Scott Ritter, and Hans Von Sponeck, the former director of the UN
oil-for-food program in Iraq. Simultaneous demonstrations will take
place that day in Berlin, Copenhagen, San Juan, Mexico City, and Seoul.

While the weekend protests will no doubt be judged by the numbers they
draw, opposition to the Bush administration's rush to war has come from
surprisingly diverse quarters. What remains to be seen is whether those
groups and individuals -- from faith-based pacifists and left-wing
anti-imperialists to moderates favoring containment and
anti-interventionist conservatives -- can join to create the kind of
broad-based antiwar movement many believe is necessary.

Already, several pundits (including MotherJones.com's own Todd Gitlin)
are warning that the nascent movement has been hijacked by a 'hard left'
leadership, and that the peace cause could be marginalized as a result.

In particular, progressives have questioned the central role being
played by the International ANSWER Coalition, which is the main
organizing group behind this weekend's demonstrations. The coalition was
formed after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks by the International Action
Coalition -- itself an outgrowth of the Workers World Party. (ANSWER
front-man Ramsey Clark, a former US Attorney general, is on the legal
committee for Slobodan Milosevic, and the IAC has been an apologist for
both the Iraqi and North Korean regimes.)

During the Gulf War, the peace movement split because of the IAC's
refusal to condemn Iraq's invasion of Kuwait -- and most antiwar
activists insist this movement will need to condemn the dictatorship in
Iraq while criticizing the Bush administration's war plans. Still,
organizers say the push at this point is for unity -- at least at these
demonstrations.

"The fact that WWP is calling the shots is unfortunate, but it's less
important than getting out mass numbers," says David McReynolds, the
73-year-old stalwart of the War Resisters League, which has been
advocating alternatives to war since 1923.
Activists say opposition to a US-led preemptive strike on Iraq is
emerging far more quickly -- and in far more ways -- than both critics
like Gitlin and the mainstream US media have recognized.

"The antiwar movement during the Vietnam War was nowhere as strong at
this stage of the game." says Karen Dolan of the Institute for Policy
studies, a progressive think tank in Washington, DC, which has been
tracking protests by students and faith-based groups. "It's quite
astonishing that, in the wake of all the patriotism that followed 9/11,
people have been as skeptical of Bush and of going to war as they have."

Surfing for Peace

One reason the media may be overlooking the depth of dissent is because
unlike the Vietnam era, today's antiwar forces are mobilizing largely
without the direction of any easy-to-identify umbrella groups.

"It's the anticorporate globalization model of not having individual
leaders, but lots of coalitions and affinity groups and nodes of
action," says Medea Benjamin of Global Exchange, a Bay Area
environmental and human rights group.

Much of the momentum is being fueled via the Internet. During the
congressional debate on the Bush administration's war resolution, House
and Senate members were deluged with emails, faxes, petitions and phone
calls from literally hundreds of thousands of constituents, most of them
initiated by online campaigns coordinated by groups such as
TrueMajority.org, MoveOn.org, UnitedforPeace.org, and the faith-based
EndtheWar.org. Moreover, many of the individuals who took part in the
online campaigns went on to participate in meetings with their
congressional representatives -- a handful of which became sit-ins.

This remarkable wave of grassroots lobbying may not have swung the vote,
but the online agitators aren't backing off. In just one week, the
MoveOn.org PAC raised $1.65 million from its base of 600,000 subscribers
in a campaign to reward those members of Congress who voted against the
resolution.

"We want to demonstrate that peace is a mainstream, patriotic value,"
says executive director Peter Schurman of MoveOn, which was formed four
years ago by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs Wes Boyd and Joan Blades to
oppose the impeachment of President Clinton. Specifically, MoveOn has
encouraged its email subscribers to back the campaigns of five Democrats
who voted 'no' and now face tight races in November: Sen. Paul Wellstone
of Minnesota and Reps. Rush Holt of New Jersey, Jay Inslee and Rick
Larsen of Washington, and Jim Maloney of Connecticut.

For Wellstone -- whose state is considered one of the critical
battlefields in the contest for control of the Senate (President Bush
has stumped there four times already, garnering record sums for
Wellstone's Republican opponent) -- the $560,000 that MoveOn's
subscribers contributed could prove crucial.

"We were absolutely astonished by the response around this. We didn't
even know what MoveOn is" says Wellstone campaign spokesperson Jim Farrell.

Buying Access

Frustrated by a mainstream media they say has failed to adequately
convey antiwar views, celebrities, corporate CEOs and even average
citizens have taken to buying ads in national newspapers

Earlier this month, a coalition of business leaders took out a full-page
ad in The New York Times featuring the blunt message: "They're Selling
War. We're Not Buying It." The ad was signed by 500 members of Business
Leaders for Sensible Priorities, including Dee Hock, the founder of Visa
International, and New York real estate magnate Douglass Durst.

"Bush, by being this unilateralist cowboy, is giving the moderate
elements of the left a reason to act," says Gary Ferdman, executive
director of the business group, which is an outgrowth of
TrueMajority.org, the progressive lobby founded by Ben Cohen of Ben &
Jerry's. Other prominent ads opposing war have been taken out by the Not
In My Name campaign, TomPaine.com, New York's health and human services
union, and actor Sean Penn.

Even ad-hoc groups are getting into the act. Three months ago, Lyla
Garrett, a longtime Democratic Party activist in Southern California,
held a dinner party at her Los Angeles home to discuss ways to support
progressive candidates and causes. Instead, she and her friends decided
the most pressing issue was stopping an invasion of Iraq. So, they
collected $12,000 from 1,000 donors, formed Americans Against War With
Iraq, and bought a full-page ad in the Los Angeles Times that asserted:
"What will War with Iraq Accomplish? A million new terrorists."

"The response from was so overwhelming, we decided to take another ad in
The New York Times with more than 2,000 signatures, including Jesse
Jackson, Lily Tomlin, and Maxine Waters," says Garrett. "We spent
$38,000 for the ad, and got back more than $45,000, along with thousands
of new names."

"All of these ads and protests and write-in campaigns are spokes in the
same wheel to stop Bush's permanent war agenda," argues Garrett whose
campaign generated 140,000 phone calls to Congress.

An "Immoral" War

Last week, the president's own United Methodist church rejected his
administration's plans as "without any justification according to
teachings of Christ." In fact, with the exception of conservative
evangelical, just about every Christian denomination, including the US
Conference of Catholic Bishops, has issued a statement opposing a US-led
attack.

"I was surprised at how easy it was to get these church leaders to drop
their schedules and come to Washington to lobby against a war," says Dr.
Bob Edgar, executive director of the National Council of Churches.
Several leading bishops joined Edgar in a candlelight prayer vigil
outside the Senate offices on the day the Senate voted to grant the
president sweeping authority to launch an attack.

Similarly, organized labor, which backed the war in Afghanistan, is also
beginning to openly question the Bush Administration's go-it-alone
stance on war. Just prior to the congressional vote, AFL-CIO president
Jon Sweeney wrote a letter to President Bush urging him to seek a
diplomatic solution to conflict with Iraq. Though his letter stepped
short of opposing war, Sweeney blasted Bush for seeking to "politicize"
the Iraq issue by timing the vote before Congressional elections.
Meanwhile, several labor groups have already adopted antiwar resolutions
-- among them the Washington State and San Francisco Labor Councils, the
California teachers union, Local 1199 in New York, and the United
Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers.

Many of these labor groups are encouraging their members to attend the
mass demonstrations this weekend. But antiwar activists have yet to draw
the support of mainstream women's groups. And other than Greenpeace, no
major environmental groups have joined in the call for alternatives to
invasion -- despite the oft-stated accusation that Washington's plans
for a war in Iraq are motivated by America's thirst for oil.

"We're trying to get them to realize that they could be capitalizing on
this oil issue," says Benjamin.

What's significant is the degree to which peaceniks are hearing their
arguments against the Bush administration's first-strike doctrine echoed
by senior military officers, such as former Marine General Anthony
Zinni, who helped command US troops during the Gulf War, and respected
conservative policy-makers like former National Security Advisor Brent
Scowcroft.

"I think we're seeing a very interesting dynamic where you've got people
in the military and intelligence communities and business community
asking these same questions as the people on the streets," says Dolan.

That's momentum that veteran organizers say the antiwar movement can't
afford to squander -- momentum that could carry past this weekend,
provided the many opponents of war can move beyond their factional and
ideological differences.

"I think Bush is in serious trouble. I have never seen the op-ed page
turn into an oppositon page before ... I've never seen the leaks like
the CIA saying that there isn't a threat from Iraq at the same time that
Bush is saying that there is one," McReynolds argues. "So I think you
have a very combustible situation -- and the White House is starting to
see that."  What do you think?

Sarah Ferguson is a New York-based freelance writer.


--

Louis Proyect
www.marxmail.org



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