Voting to Bring the Troops Home

Referendum advocates elsewhere gathered hundreds of signatures, as in Chicago and its suburbs. “We have tens of thousands of signatures,” says Carl Davidson of Chicagoans Against War and Injustice, “and a map. There are clusters of people who signed. We plan to contact them and try to start up to 50 new neighborhood groups in the Chicago area.” 

A few communities in Illinois also failed to get their referendum on the ballot due to technicalities or challenges from local officials. 

The easiest win may have been in twin cities Champaign and Urbana, Illinois. At a statewide conference of the Illinois Coalition for Peace and Justice in Champaign in March, local activists with the Anti-War Anti-Racism Effort (AWARE) learned of an annual town meeting, prescribed by state law, where a majority of those who show up can add a referendum to the November ballot. The township meeting was in two weeks. 

AWARE activists hit the ground running. They faced no opposition in Urbana, but in Champaign the conservative mayor, former cop Jerry Schweighart, attempted to turn out local veterans’ groups to block the referendum, to little avail. In the end voters crammed the town meetings in both cities and added a “troops home” referendum to the local ballot in each town (by one vote in Champaign). 

In November the “troops out” referendum passed in Urbana by 65 percent, in Champaign by 58 percent. Champaign-Urbana also joined San Francisco and Berkeley, California, as well as a handful of smaller cities in Wisconsin and elsewhere, in calling on Congress to begin the process of impeachment for both the president and vice president for “misleading our nation to war with Iraq, for permitting the illegal use of torture, and for conducting domestic spying on U.S. citizens.” 

Mayor Schweighart told the press, “I can’t understand it.” Central Illinois’s conservative Republican Congressperson Timothy V. Johnson, a war supporter, was forced to admit in his victory speech on election night that Iraq was a “quagmire” and that “the American people will not tolerate another two years” of war. Referendum results by election district showed that even Johnson’s supporters had voted for withdrawal. All told, organizers say, referendum results showed that opposition to the war in Iraq cuts across party and other ideologocal divides. 

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who had promised to “drain the swamp” if the Democrats took over, was very clear as soon as the election results were in: impeachment is “off the table.” Pelosi and others in the Democratic leadership, when asked about the details of their alleged “new direction” for U.S. policy in Iraq, hedged. Asked about the possibility of cutting off funding for the war, as in the Harkin Resolution (SR 93), Democratic leaders were pretty clear about what their “new direction” was not . SR 93 provided that after December 31, 2006, there would be no further money for military activities in Iraq except those related to withdrawal. “We can’t cut off money to troops in the field,” Pelosi said, borrowing the Republican spin. 

“We have to make the Democrats listen to us,” says Laurel Lambert Schmidt of Near West Citizens for Peace and Justice in Illinois. “They’re going to do nothing if we don’t pressure them.” Antiwar organizers elsewhere offered the same warning. 

“The Democrats and the Republicans are both completely supportive of the goal of U.S. domination in the Middle East,” says Paul Shannon. 

On the other hand, organizers see the election as having created a much-needed opportunity for leverage. “The peace movement has earned some political capital,” says Schmidt. “We have to spend it. We can’t just put the Democrats in office and trust that they’ll do the right thing, because they won’t.” Still, she says, “The election gives us hope and a lot of possibilities.” 

“What’s been debilitating for the peace movement,” says Steve Burns, “and what’s kept a lot of people away from demonstrations, is not apathy. It’s that nobody in Washington has been listening for six years. Now at least there is some hope that we can make some difference.” 

Several national peace groups are promoting a “Mandate for Peace” petition as a follow-up to the election, which as an organizing tool could have value. National demonstrations in Washington, originally delayed until March, have also been added for January to greet the new Democrat-controlled Congress with anti-war demands. And local grassroots activists are busy. Carl Davidson’s plan, with Chicagoans Against War and Injustice, to springboard new neighborhood peace groups is indicative of efforts around the country to build on the success at the polls. “Organizing,” Davidson says, is how you keep the pressure on, plus a healthy dose of “street heat.” Elsewhere activists are starting new postcard or letter-writing campaigns and Congressional visits to remind representatives of the recent votes and to press the anti-war agenda, even state resolutions in favor of withdrawal. 

In 1968, Shannon notes, with opposition to the Vietnam War growing, the Nixon administration developed a “new direction,” after which thousands more Americans and Vietnamese were killed. There is already talk in Washington about “new directions” that do not involve keeping U.S. hands off Iraq. 

Exhausted as activists are, Shannon says, the next few months may be the most critical in the anti-war effort. “We have to focus on undermining the negotiations that are now taking place within the Democratic Party and the Republican Party and between the Republicans and Democrats over a new strategy in Iraq. Once that consensus happens, there will be a falling off of opposition as people decide to give them a chance, but it will not be what the public wants.” 

The anti-war vote was a landslide, says Davidson, “Now the question is what do we do with it.”

Ricky Baldwin is a long-time community organizer and writer. His articles have appeared in Z Magazine , Dollars & Sense , Labor Notes , In These Times and elsewhere.