The Election & the Antiwar Movement

• Kerry voted for the 2002 Congressional resolution authorizing the assault on Iraq 
• Kerry voted for the uncivil assault on civil and constitutional liberties legitimized under the
  PATRIOT Act 
• Kerry has been saying for a while that more troops are needed in Iraq—approximately 40,000 more, for now 
• Kerry expects at least a six-figure presence of U.S. troops to remain in Iraq a year from now—when he hopes to occupy the White House 

Nonetheless, the presumed Democratic nominee says we must elect him because he will do a better job at “internationalizing” the Iraqi conflict and mending relations with European allies and the United Nations for the imperial mission. 

Of course, no matter how disappointing Kerry’s campaign—Ruth Coniff writes for The Progressive that this may be the year Kerry finally loses the liberal label for good—the desire to defeat Bush will not deter many who have marched against the war from also voting for Kerry. Nor will it prevent some in the progressive media from creating their own spin machine on the Democratic candidate’s behalf. “The right to choose, environmental sustainability and economic justice will all be hanging in the balance on Nov. 2, 2004,” wrote Don Hazen and Tai Moses for Alternet (March 5), the progressive, San Francisco-based news service. “With positions, messages and values this starkly opposing, there won’t be many undecided voters in this race.”  

Admittedly, Hazen and Moses penned these words in early March, when some of the free-for-all rhetoric of the primary campaigns, with multiple candidates raking Bush’s handling of the economy and WMD issue, was still fresh. But flash forward two months and Hazen is now interviewing a linguistics expert on the problem Kerry is having finding a defining theme for his campaign. Such is the Unbearable Lightness of Being a Progressive Apologist for Anybody But Bush. 

Kerry’s preeminence as the party’s front-runner has had some time to hang in the air, enough to smog up some of the hype of pro-Kerry groups like MoveOn.org with the grimy reality that the election is shaping up as a choice between a bad pro-war candidate and a really bad pro-war candidate. Of course, there are differences on issues (there are always differences). Kerry is pro-choice and Bush is not, for example. On the war issue, there’s not much difference at all. It’s also unlikely the great wash of non-voters (somewhere in the range of half the adult population) will be so motivated by the program of either of the two parties to begin an unprecedented rush to the ballot box. 

If Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction turned out to be illusory, so will the fantasies of some in the Democratic Party that the Iraqi occupation can be transformed into a “socially responsible” occupation—United Nations sanctioned or not. In this way, Democrats like left-leaning Illinois U.S. Senate candidate Barack Obama, who ran in the state’s primary boasting of his antiwar credentials, are selling something even more insidious than the rank Republican rhetoric. These are the “antiwar” Democrats whose opposition in the build-up to the war melted into air the moment U.S. troops crossed the border into Iraq. 

Now they attempt to paint an increasingly brutal military occupation with the veneer of hopes for resuscitated U.S. good intentions. As if it’s possible for the U.S. presence in Iraq to transform into a benevolent mission. As if the United States (or the United Nations) has a track record of supporting democratic revolutions in the Middle East. 

Of course, the wild card in the western debates over the fate of Iraq is the Iraqi people themselves. When asked in the New York Times/ CBS poll if they saw the U.S. military as “liberators” or “occupiers,” 71 percent of Iraqis said occupiers. Yet the architects and apologists for the war cling to the delusion that the resistance reflects only politically isolated “regime remnants” and “terrorists.” But then winning the hearts and minds of the locals can become problematic when you’re also dropping 500-pound bombs on the neighborhood. 

Internationally, the United States has never been more isolated before the court of world opinion. Spain has announced it is withdrawing its troops, while six other countries are restricting their small regiments to their bases. Nor does the United Nations show signs of becoming anything more than what Naomi Klein in The Nation calls “the political arm of the continued US occupation.” The desire by many Democratic critics to push the United Nations, or even a NATO intervention, as some kind of salvation for the U.S. war (as a desperate Bush also turns to the UN) is, under the circumstances of the nationalist uprising, unlikely to succeed. As Klein notes, “The post-June 30 caretaker government being set up by UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi will be subject to all the restraints on Iraqi sovereignty that sparked the current uprising in the first place.” 

You Get What You Pay For 

T he Anybody But Bush vision now has most of the progressive milieu in its trance, but it is not a vision as much as it is a paucity of vision. Faced with a war sparked by the extremist right-wing politics of the Bush administration, the best so many otherwise articulate and powerful voices for justice can muster is an insistence on supporting whoever happens to win the Democratic nomination. It’s revealing just how desperate progressives are that a return to the Clinton-style politics Kerry embraces is now considered almost a godsend. 

In fact, the social policy of the Clinton administration was the most conservative of any Administration since the end of World War II, as historian Howard Zinn reminds us in the revised edition to A People’s History of the United States . The entire tenure of the Clinton administration was defined by erosion of New Deal social policy, gutting welfare and other safety net programs, deregulating industries, undermining union and environmental protections, and generally cozying up to the interests of silver spoon investors and corporate executives—the principal beneficiaries of the era’s market prosperity. The campaign slogan of 1992, “Putting People First,” came to mean “putting the bond market” first, as Edward Herman remarked a few years ago in a Z M agazine round-up on the Clinton legacy. 

Is the only choice now one of the speed of the retreat from the promise of a better, more just society? Unfortunately, if the possibilities for political change are viewed only through the lens of Bush versus Kerry in November, then that is the sorry reality. But it’s a mistake to view the election as the be-all and end-all of our hopes. Let’s instead get heretical in our thinking and declare that a neo-con Republican in power is not inherently less responsive to pressure from “the street” than a liberal Democrat. 

Historically, when has progressive social change ever depended more or even mostly on whether a Democrat or Republican is in office, rather than on what happens outside the corridors of power, in the workplaces, campuses, and neighborhoods, among the officially voiceless and disenfranchised or excluded? This is the story of the Civil Rights movement, when sit-ins and marches and a growing, relentless dissent compelled a bipartisan power structure, long comfortable with Jim Crow racism, to finally sit up and take action. This is also the story of woman’s suffrage, the Vietnam peace movement, and labor’s quest for the eight-hour day, benefits, and such radical ideas as vacations. This is the story of the movement for democracy. 

In 1970, labor activists helped secure passage of the Occupational Safety and Health Act, viewed by many as “the most important pro-worker legislation of the last 50 years,” as Steven Greenhouse noted in a 2002 New York Times profile of veteran labor leader Tony Mazzochi. Notably, the OSHA legislation was passed under a Republican administration. Those same Nixon years also saw an end to the military draft and legal recognition of a woman’s right to choose. Again, no thanks to Nixon or even to a “progressive” Supreme Court (it didn’t exist), but to the popular, organized activism and mobilization of public opinion of millions of U.S. citizens. In this context, the million-plus March for Women’s Lives on April 25 did more to secure women’s reproductive rights than anything that will happen on November 4. 

It might similarly be easy to credit President Clinton for passage of such legislation as the Family Medical Leave Act, but the real impetus came from women’s groups and unions, who had pushed for such legislation for years. Likewise, the belief that Clinton’s early health care reform initiative failed because it was too liberal or visionary turns reality on its head. The proposal failed because whatever reformer’s vision it could claim sank in the bog of endless reassurances by the Administration to sectors of the insurance industry that their profits would remain sacrosanct. But without a mobilized public movement, even that was not enough to ensure passage of the health-care reform. This was not the case in Canada, where historically active public support for the independent, union-based New Democratic Party helped to eventually win passage of a single payer health system.

If Ralph Nader, an early endorser of the small Labor Party group founded by Mazzochi, was actually running a campaign advocating Mazzochi’s idea of truly independent, working-class campaigns for office, in opposition to the corporate-dominated two parties, it could at the very least set an example of the direction grass-roots organizing needs to go if independent political action is ever going to gain momentum in this country. 

Unfortunately, that is not what Nader is doing. The Nader campaign seeks to oppose the Democratic Party while ostensibly trying to boost the Party, hoping to pressure Kerry from the grass-roots left to take better positions on a host of issues. Accordingly, Nader thinks he can pull large blocs of disillusioned non-voters, independents, and even Republicans into voting booths; blocs otherwise beyond Kerry’s reach, who, the thinking goes, will then invariably translate part of their presence in the voting booth into backing for various progressive Democrats running for local and state offices. It’s a confused, ambiguous strategy and it makes about as much sense as Michael Moore’s endorsement of General Wesley Clark, who led NATO in bombing civilian targets in Belgrade in 1998, as a “peace” candidate for the Democratic nomination. 

The problem now with all the elite debates about the future of Iraq is the thorny problem of the Iraqi insurgency, which, in one way or another, is likely to continue growing. Of course, it’s possible the U.S. military may perpetrate a repression so thorough and bloody that it effectively puts down the rebellion—for now. But weapons can never obliterate the spirit of human resistance. They also cannot kill everyone. The spirit of nationalism is such that the Iraqi people will, in the long run, never countenance the ongoing occupation of their country, puppet government or not, especially with the current atrocities and killings becoming part of their collective memory. They will, one way or another, be the final arbiter of the future of Iraq. 

More Demonstrations 

A s a labor organizer, Tony Mazzochi understood that the type of progressive social change that endures always originates and grows from the grassroots, from the cellar floor, challenging the existing status quo as well as whatever conventional wisdom tells us about the limits of what is “practical” to achieve. Social change happens when the dissent in the air gets organized and visible and takes to the streets as well as the ballot box. Getting organized has never depended on “lesser-evils” or benevolent elites. Our battle now is not just against a military occupation, but against militarism itself. 

Undoubtedly, last year’s antiwar protests lost some of their urgency following the quick military victory by U.S and British forces over Saddam Hussein’s government. Yet mainstream U.S. politics is as much a creature of paradox as it is an exercise in sound bites and personality contests. It was thus, perhaps, at the moment of President Bush’s most triumphal war posturing that when he paraded macho style in full flight uniform on the flight deck of a U.S. aircraft carrier, celebrating “Mission Accomplished” in Iraq—that a sense of the seismic credibility chasm the Administration was about to plunge into began to edge into fuller view. 

What is unfolding now in Iraq is a political disaster for the United States. The evidence mounts of the utter moral collapse this war represents for the government of the United States. 

The beginnings of a classic nationalist rebellion against occupation by a foreign power are now underway. Think Vietnam. Think Algeria. With the infrastructure still in crisis, electricity spotty, hospitals in disrepair, cities under siege, unemployment over 50 percent, union rights denied under the same Hussein-era laws, and world opinion largely in opposition to U.S. policy, the corporate CEO- think that defines the Bush mind-set has proven its profound inability to lead; if political leadership still has anything to do with social justice, peace, and prosperity in the world. The Democratic front-runner John Kerry equally shows no signs of a fundamentally different mind-set. 

The antiwar marches before the war and most recently on March 20 sent a vibrant, defiant message that international and domestic opposition to the U.S. war and occupation of Iraq runs deep. They must continue. Now more than ever. Louder than ever. Bigger than ever. No matter who is in office. The killing must stop.