Liza on the antiwar movement
The Nation - February 19, 2007 http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070219/featherstone
Surge for Peace Liza Featherstone
What, realistically, can the antiwar movement accomplish right now?
Tom Andrews, a former Congressman from Maine and national director of
the Win Without War coalition, answers the question without
hesitation: “We can stop this war.”
For the first time since the Iraq War began, activists are
optimistic–and getting serious about the political process. With
Bush proposing an escalation and a Democratic Congress that owes its
new majority, at least in part, to antiwar sentiment, everyone agrees
that there has never been a better opportunity to end this tragic
policy. Fresh from January 27’s successful demonstration in
Washington, the peace movement is now focusing all of its organizing
energies on–and dedicating serious resources to–the people who
truly have the power to stop the war: members of Congress.
At this writing, numerous resolutions are floating around the Hill,
800 peace activists working with United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ)
are meeting with more than 270 Congressional representatives and
MoveOn.org has called a Virtual March, in which constituents will
flood Capitol Hill with 1 million calls against the war on February
1. MoveOn, Win Without War, the Service Employees International Union
and other groups have launched Americans Against Escalation in Iraq,
an $8 million- $10 million campaign that will organize constituents
in twenty to twenty-five states to pressure fence-sitting
legislators. The effort, explains Tom Matzzie, MoveOn.org Political
Action’s Washington director, is “very intense, modeled a lot on a
presidential campaign.” In another of this war’s firsts, active
members of the military have joined the fight. Says Jonathan Hutto,
founder of the active-duty troops’ group Appeal for Redress, which
advocates a political rather than a military resolution of the Iraq
War, politicians “don’t usually hear from us. Soldiers are trained to
be grunts. But now is the time.”
The battle for public opinion on the Iraq War is over–not so much
because of the antiwar movement’s work but because the situation in
Iraq has proved so disastrous. Many mainstream journalists, pundits
and politicians now speak against the war as eloquently and
convincingly as peace activists do. Only 17 percent of the American
people agree with Bush’s current escalation plan. The challenge is to
translate that power into a change in policy. Until now, the antiwar
forces have had fewer than five full-time Washington lobbyists. But
much of the antiwar movement now agrees that there is no
contradiction, or conflict, between chanting in the streets and
lobbying in the halls of Congress. An impressive showing of
demonstrators in DC (UFPJ says half a million) along with the
thousands of smaller local protests over the past few weeks bolsters
the lobbying effort, showing that peace activists are an impassioned
constituency, while protests would be meaningless without additional
pressure on politicians.
Success, however, is not assured. A tentative majority in Congress
opposes the Bush policy, but there’s a world of difference between
supporting a nonbinding resolution and blocking appropriations.
That’s why the effort to persuade Congress will require such a
massive grassroots campaign. “If we had to vote right now on
defunding the war,” MoveOn’s Matzzie said recently, “we would lose.
We have to be very strategic and smart.” He sighs. “I have nightmares
about the gap between what we need to do and what we are doing. I
lose sleep over this.”
There are some within the peace movement who believe that
Congressional Democrats will never agree to stop funding the war.
They may be right. (As demonstrators assembled in Washington, Senator
Hillary Clinton, in Iowa, dismissed the call to cut off funding as a
“soundbite.”) Given the Democrats’ trepidation about appearing to cut
off support for the troops, some antiwar strategists argue that the
movement should shift the focus of its lobbying from defunding the
war to funding a real plan for withdrawal.
It’s worth thinking, too, about the broader mission of an antiwar
movement. Author and blogger Rahul Mahajan, of UFPJ’s steering
committee (speaking for himself, not the organization), worries that
unlike in the Vietnam era, today’s peace movement has had little
success in getting Americans to rethink the role of the United States
in the world. He’s right. The talking point among some Democrats is
that while the United States has been so generous, those damned
Iraqis have screwed up the war. That way of thinking isn’t going help
us avoid further misadventures in imperial arrogance. It’s hardly
reassuring to hear Iraq War opponents like Democratic presidential
hopeful John Edwards say that for Iran, “we must keep all options on
the table.” Stopping the war in Iraq is important, but to truly make
the world a safer place, we need to change the conversation.