Below is part four of a four-part antiwar organizing primer that was originally published four years ago today (January 27, 2007) - in time to distribute at the mass protest in Washington DC (organized by United for Peace & Justice).
Building a Successful Antiwar Movement is written for a particular audience at a particular political moment - at the height of the unpopularity of the Iraq occupation, and a week after the new Democratic-controlled Congress had been sworn in. However, the pamphlet provides some "tools and methods for people organizing to end the war" that are still relevant today. And the frameworks can be applied to other social justice issues as well. So I thought I'd share it over here at Open Left.
There is a tendency among people active in social movements (like the antiwar movement) to look at ourselves and think that this is it, that we are the whole of the movement, that we know all the players. When we think we know all the players, as well as how to talk to them/ourselves, then we can become lax on communicating with a broader public. This limits efforts to recruit, activate, or make alliances with, additional players. If we think about the antiwar movement only in terms of its kinetic energy (i.e. that which is already in motion) we will look around at the actors currently on the stage and think that it is up to us alone to end the war and prevent future wars of aggression. This would require magic. We can- not realize our vision of peace and justice with only our current numbers mobilized. We must build a far larger movement. We have to activate potential energy.
I went to a protest in Philadelphia this past Saturday, and it was more disheartening than anything else. It was against the wars and various other injustices, with a special focus on he recent FBI raids of peace activists and Pennsylvania Homeland Security spying on innocent civilians and activists.
By the end of it, I kind of just felt like going up to the megaphone and asking, "How much moral outrage can one person muster? There are more people handing out fliers here than not, and with this country committing so many disgusting, outrageous acts, I don't blame you." I won't lie, I handed a few out myself. Yet the contrast between the righteous causes featured in the speeches and on the signs and on the fliers and the, as a fellow protester said to me, "complete lack of solidarity" was striking.
This is going to be an action packed weekend in DC and around the nation. On Friday, there will be protests of Yoo. On Saturday, there will be a massive antiwar demonstration (there will also be demonstrations in Philly, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, and South Dakota, among other places). On Sunday, there will be a large march for immigration reform. And there will be other related events around the country, along with the small protests and events that happen all the time.
So join me below the fold to see how you can effect change this weekend.
I'm beginning to tire of the notion that there has been some great pressure brought to bear by the antiwar base of the Democratic Party.
In the Senate, the crucible of the debate, many Republicans have grown increasingly skeptical of the president's policy, though they are unwilling to go as far Democrats. And Democratic leaders, determined to end the war on their terms and under intense pressure from their antiwar base, have refused to yield enough ground to accommodate them.
In reality, the antiwar base has been as meek as lambs to the Democratic Party. First of all, the idea that there is nothing the Democrats can or could have done to stop the war is simply nonsense. The Bush administration admits as much in an article in the Washington Post on dissent around the surge strategy when it was first announced.
"There was a real question about whether we'd be able to do this at all," said a White House aide. Within five weeks, the House had voted to oppose the troop buildup, and Democratic leaders were vowing to tie Bush's hands. Most worrisome was the discontent among Republicans. "It could have potentially strangled this strategy in the crib," Wehner said.
The Democrats could have stopped it. They didn't. Democrats like Joe Biden are saying there's nothing they can do to stop the war, and progressives like Barbara Boxer are echoing his point. The narrative undergirding a lot of the stories here are that Democrats are under pressure from their antiwar base, but are standing up to it. That is a false narrative. Politicians respond to pressure, and that means the backsliding we've seen over the past six months is a result of the Democrats not feeling pressure on Iraq, or more likely, feeling more from elites and the right than from the Democratic base. When you look at the Presidential context, this is basically indisputable. Democratic base voters think that the leading candidates will withdraw all troops from Iraq, which is simply untrue. While the argument that Democrats in Congress are boxed in by procedural contraints holds some water, there is no conceivable reason why Democratic Presidential candidates should support keeping troops in Iraq... unless they really just want to keep troops in Iraq. That this mass deception is allowed to continue suggests that there is very little pressure on Democrats to end the war.
Moveon, for instance, has run one ad against Brian Baird, which was an extremely small purchase. By contrast, the White House approved group Freedom Watch is spending $15 million targeting Republicans, including an incredibly quick response helping Brian Baird. And though I have heard compliments from insiders about going after Baird, the anger at the Bush Dog campaign, which is simply designed to offer criticism, is remarkable. Anonymous Democratic aides are now yelping, 'what in the world are they thinking', as if offering pressure in the form of criticism and primary challenges is completely novel. And in fact, it is. There is still no organized funded campaign to recruit antiwar or progressive primary challengers (paging 'They Work for Us').
But it goes beyond primary challenges. Joe Biden went on Meet the Press yesterday and said there is nothing Democrats can do to end the war, and that he will vote for funding no matter what. He's up for reelection in 2008, and he's running for President. There was not one statement attacking Biden for his hawkish stance. This is consistent. The very liberal George Miller has echoed the line of funding the troops, and only Markos is pushing back on the Presidentials refusing to talk about the next supplemental; funding the troops, which is exactly 100% the wrong frame, is the message of the Democratic Party, and there is zero organized pushback.
If we can't get the Presidential candidates to even have a debate about troop levels in Iraq, don't tell me there's an antiwar movement in this country putting pressure on the Democrats.
Now, what this means is that we do start putting pressure on Democratic leaders, it's going to draw squeals very quickly. There's a lot of upside here. Moreover, the strategy of the antiwar movement has been to pressure the Republicans, assuming good faith behavior by Democratic insiders. That was a strategy that has helped move numbers against Republicans, and it has usefully showed Democratic leaders to be acting in bad faith. Now that the argument has been made, it's incumbent upon all of us to genuinely begin putting pressure on Democratic leaders, especially the Presidential canddiates, as aggressively as possible.
This is another in the regular series called Strategery, which is written by David Sirota and appears Wednesdays on OpenLeft.
When news came down last week that President Bush's top war adviser wants to consider a military draft, I got a lot of email and saw many progressive blogs light up in outrage. But here's the question: Assuming a draft would be administered fairly (admittedly a big assumption), would stopping a draft really be the best strategy to serve the cause of ending the Iraq War and stopping future misguided wars?
A rule of thumb for understanding American politics: The federal government only reacts to popular will when the upper-middle professional class starts making noise. Everyone else's voice falls on deaf ears. This is an unfortunate reality, but it is reality.
Consider the last few decades. Many historians believe anti-war pressure during the Vietnam War only really changed public policy when, in 1969, the draft lottery was created. At that point, a whole swath of upper-middle-class parents was galvanized because it became much harder to use loopholes to shield their kids from combat.
This passage relates to one of the big problems we face today in trying to stop the Iraq War and future misguided wars: Because we have no draft, life and death military are no longer affecting the whole country, and wars are not really a shared sacrifice. As Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-NY) has basically said, the decision to make the military an all-volunteer force was a decision that actually helped (whether deliberately or accidentally) the cause of the neoconservative right by severing the broader society from the injury, death and other sacrifices that wars incur.
Think about it in concrete terms. One of the Republican Party's leading presidential candidates, Mitt Romney is campaigning on an extreme pro-war platform - all while stumbling around trying to explain why if he's so pro-war he hasn't sent his kids off to fight. (Heck, at least he's had to answer those questions about his kids - though the only reason he has is because he made a stupid comment, which by the way, while poorly and offensively phrased, was actually rooted in something valuable. In a country where kids are lauded for simply going corporate, making a decision to work in the trenches of politics - aka. public/citizen engagement - is an honorable and societally valuable decision, even if it is not equivalent to military service...but I digress).
Romney is like almost every other elite in American politics. Most Republican and Democratic congressional lawmakers who voted us into this war - not to mention the pro-war yet draft-dodging President and Vice President themselves - have no firsthand, family or personal connection to the sacrifices they are demanding other people's kids make. And they have never had to answer questions about why if they are so intent on sending other people's kids off to Iraq, they haven't sent their own kids off as well. Same thing for the reporters, pundits and 101st Keyboard Commanders. Most of these people have absolutely no direct, personal connection to the blood, sweat and tears that wars incur. Should we really have been surprised, then, that they refused to ask serious questions before the invasion or that their laziness and ideological browbeating helped get us into this mess?
So I say before the antiwar movement comes out angrily opposing the concept of a draft, let's think carefully about what we are really doing. There's a good case to be made that if a draft was instituted today, the Iraq War would be over in a matter of weeks because the vast majority of Americans would go from merely telling pollsters they opposed the war, to marching in the street to stop the war for fear that their kids and their friends are going to be getting a one-way ticket to the Baghdad shooting gallery. More long-term, there's an equally good case to be made that if a draft was instituted today, all of the Beltway's reflexive talk of going to war with countries like Iran and all the craven career politicians like Rep. Lincoln Davis (D-Tenn.) who are demanding that his colleagues become "pro-war Democrats" would immediately be muzzled for fear of a voter revolt like this country has never seen.
If we want an ongoing antiwar movement, one that actually starts changing the country's whole attitude towards war as the first tool of international relations, then perhaps we should keep quiet and let the most unpopular president in contemporary American history keep talking about a draft. He may inadvertently scare the country into more antiwar action. But more importantly, the draft concept - which is at its heart a concept of shared sacrifice and national service - has intrinsic long-term value to our movement because if it was instituted, it would likely take out our movement from primarily the politically engaged/interested and overnight broaden it out to the larger mass public.
Not only is there something immoral about our wars now being fought without shared sacrifice, but politically the all-volunteer situation we have now is actually set up to allow a handful of elite politicians in Washington get us into and keep us in wars that the public doesn't support. If that ends up changing because the entire society is forced to deal with conscription, then we may very well see nebulous antiwar opinion turn into the truly powerful, broad-based and organized antiwar MOVEMENT that this country clearly needs.
ADDENDUM: Though this is a separate issue from the war, I want to state very, very clearly that I actually think if a draft is instituted, it should not be just about the military but about all sorts of national service - from community service to civil defense to police/firefighting. That said, I do think a military option in such a draft would be a positive influence on our international policy in that it would create inherent political pressure on Washington elites not to just indiscriminately send troops to fight on behalf of half-cocked armchair theories cooked up by neoconservative think tankers and magazine editors (who, of course, continue to be given media platforms to advocate for wars they refuse to fight but demand other kids die for).
UPDATE: There's a good debate over this post in the comments section. I'd say this to sum it up: Many people think a draft wouldn't be administered fairly - a very real, very worthy concern. However, what I find troubling is that assuming a draft WOULD be administered fairly, a lot of folks in the comments section nonetheless seem to say the concept of a draft of compulsory national service would be immoral and that it "plays games with our kids" for a political ploy. But then, if you believe we need a military to defend this country, and if you believe we need police and firefighters and community service workers, why do you think its moral that OTHER people should do that FOR society, rather than EVERYONE having to contribute to those efforts? I'm sorry, but that's not moral - that seems selfish. Now, maybe you don't believe we need a military or police or firefighters or any of that. Fine, then your argument against a draft is consistent. But if you believe we need those things but oppose any sort of draft or national service requirement, why do you think its fair or equitable or moral to ask only others to do that, but not yourself or your family? Food for thought...
UPDATE: There's a good debate over this post in the comments section. I'd say this to sum it up: Many people think a draft wouldn't be administered fairly - a very real, very worthy concern. However, what I find troubling is that assuming a draft WOULD be administered fairly, a lot of folks in the comments section nonetheless seem to say the concept of a draft of compulsory national service would be immoral and that it "plays games with our kids" for a political ploy. But then, if you believe we need a military to defend this country, and if you believe we need police and firefighters and community service workers, why do you think its moral that OTHER people should do that FOR society, rather than EVERYONE having to contribute to those efforts? I'm sorry, but that's not moral - that seems selfish. Now, maybe you don't believe we need a military or police or firefighters or any of that. Fine, then your argument against a draft is consistent. But if you believe we need those things but oppose any sort of draft or national service requirement, why do you think its fair or equitable or moral to ask only others to do that, but not yourself or your family? Food for thought...
UPDATE II: Already, some folks have accused me of "loving the draft" and actually unequivocally advocating FOR a draft - a deliberate misrepresentation of this post. Please reread the post again. What I said was that I'm not so sure the antiwar movement or progressives should loudly protest the Bush administration's recent floating of the idea of a draft. As explained in the post, I said that for two reasons: 1) The most unpopular president in contemporary American history continuing to push a draft will likely in the short-term make the Iraq War even more unpopular than it already is. (This is the old axiom of standing back when your opponent is hurting himself) and 2) I think a draft is a mixed bag with some obvious negatives (if done improperly, unfair administration of a draft, and compulsory service in purely military activities) but also some very important positives that we are missing in America right now (reconnecting Americans to the concept of national service, etc.). The point of the post is to get us thinking through all of these things both strategically and morally - and not ramming one position down people's throats. I know that's hard for some to deal with in a polarized political debate, but there should be at least some room for careful consideration of something so big and multifaceted as a draft, shouldn't there? I mean, last I checked, our country had some of its greatest social and economic days when we actually did have a draft. We also had some of our worst days as well. Point being that this is just not a cut-and-dry issue. At all.
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