Iraq’s dictator had counted on using the U.S. peace movement as one of his weapons, in much the same manner the North Vietnamese had used it 20 years before. As Steven V. Roberts described it in U.S. News and World Report:
For too many of us now wading through middle age, Vietnam etched an indelible pattern on our identity, fragmenting our families and poisoning our patriotism. One friend wrote a book called “The making of an Un-American;” another had such a ferocious argument with her parents that she stormed out of a restaurant —the other patrons cheered. The Vietnam experience seemed to teach too often that leaders lie, generals blunder and ideals crack under the weight of disappointment.
It was an attitude that was deeply rooted in August 1990, that was rather slowly starting to unravel by January, and was mostly gone by the end of March. It was an interesting process to watch.
Opposition to war—all war—is “politically correct,” a phrase covering a range of fashionably left, “approved” attitudes, one of the buzzword concepts current in the early 90s. So is distrust of the government. A caller to CSPAN from Columbia, Maryland, explained her attitude: “I believe that there are many people in the United States, myself included, that do not just readily go along with the rhetoric put out by those in control...” They instead presuppose they are being lied to, and if necessary will employ convoluted logic to “prove” it is so. Protesters at an anti-war rally on February 17th carried signs summing it up: “Be Patriotic: Challenge Government.”
The American antiwar movement is made up of two distinct wings united in a common cause. The first is composed of those, often strongly ideological in their rhetoric, who have a cause to push, be it civil rights, the ecology, or even a private philosophy. Included in their ranks are the crank political parties, like the Socialist Workers and the Lyndon LaRouche movement. The second is more vague, often in fact incomprehensible, guided by the general idea that everybody should be nice. This group contains a lot of blown-out leftovers from the late ‘60s.
The “mainstream” antiwar movement is made up of an amalgam of groups from the left and the fringe right, with a leavening of more or less trendy show-biz people: SANE/Freeze, the National Organization for Women, Palestinians and their sympathizers following the lead of the PLO, the Liberty Lobby and the Lyndon LaRouche organizations, environmentalists, and gay rights and AIDS advocates. Each of these pushes its own agenda of special interests and the special interests were glaring enough for the public to dismiss them almost out of hand.
Juan Williams wrote in the Washington Post, concerning the first branch, of which Jessie Jackson was a vocal member:
Saying ‘We support the troops...’ is now a pro forma gesture from the war’s critics. It is intended as a preemptive strike to eliminate any suggestion that they are undercutting the young men and women who are putting their lives on the line for this country. It is also meant to distinguish current antiwar protests from the left’s opposition to the Vietnam War, which included antipathy toward the Americans fighting that war.
Williams goes on to poke holes in one of the more fallacious statements made by race-conscious antiwar-mongers: that black soldiers, making up 22 percent of the U.S. force in the Gulf versus only 14 percent of the age-eligible population of the country, are in the armed forces because they have no other choices in life; they enlisted for the paycheck and now are shocked to find that they might have to fight a war.
This argument is more revealing about the thought processes of those making up the antiwar movement than about the actuality of black soldiers, airmen, sailors, and Marines:
a.) It is impossible to be in any American armed service for longer than 24 hours without realizing that its ultimate purpose is to protect the country by force of arms—that means by fighting a war, if necessary. It is next to impossible to enlist without noticing;
b.) Those who join for the paycheck only are quickly weeded out. There are easier ways to make money, for instance by digging ditches or hauling garbage. American troops work hard for their money.
Black leaders were particularly guilty of such statements. There was a higher percentage of black opposition to the war than white, though the majority did support the war policy. But that did not stop the Rev. Joseph Lowery, president of the SCLC, from criticizing the war because many blacks were there, “drafted by the board of economic injustice.”
Those “drafted” didn’t seem to fit the description that was being given of them. Those black troops we saw on television seemed much like their white comrades—hard-working, surprisingly competent, ready to get the job done and get out. Some were scared and others were raring to get at the Bad Guys.
Some blacks did come from nasty neighborhoods—we heard periodically about men coming back from the war and being killed by their neighbors; one poor man was done in by his wife. The same can be said of many whites and Hispanics. The armed forces do, in fact, provide an evironment of opportunity which provides as close to an even start for everyone as can be found in American society. But that is an internal characteristic of four organizations which exist to defend the country by force of arms, not their primary reason for existence. To imply that black men and women were there only for the benefits is to impugn their motives.
There are other arguments of special interest as well as that of race. Professor McGuire Gibson, for example, stated that this is “the dumbest war we’ve fought in a long time. It’s a tragic mistake, and it’s going to cost us for years to come in the Arab world.” Professor Gibson’s opposition to the war is perhaps understandable. He is the professor of Mesopotamian archaeology at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, and U.S. aircraft had just inadvertently damaged the National Museum in Baghdad, 100 yards from the main TV station, 300 yards from the main railway station, and two blocks from the intown airport.
Robert Muller, executive director of the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation, exhibited what sounded like pure sour grapes when he complained that “the sacrifice and suffering” of Vietnam had been “obliterated” in the Gulf War and that the United States had succumbed to “blind, flag-waving, frenzied allegiance to the imperial presidency.”
A subgrouping of those with a cause to push are the deserters. There were a few in the war, making their way around the talk show circuits. There were a lot during in Vietnam, people who fled to Canada, Sweden, other places, and were forgiven after the war. This one was different. Each day we were seeing competent young men and women doing their duty, overcoming their fears and not dwelling on them. These weren’t draftees, but volunteers, who had taken the money to do the job, whether they were regulars or reserves.
Yolanda Huet-Vaughn, an Army medical corps reservist, was one of the Gulf deserters. She deserted from Fort Leonard Wood, rather than go to Saudi Arabia. She stated that she would rather go to jail than serve in a war she didn’t support; she called it “immoral, inhumane and unconstitutional.” Those who were already there, support for the war or no support, simply made her seem shallow and cowardly.
40 troops from the Louisiana National Guard had gone AWOL from Fort Hood, Texas, complaining that the food was inadequate and that they didn’t get enough rest breaks. The footage we had seen of the men who were on the ground in Saudi, taking their rest breaks as they came, killed any sympathy we may have felt for them.
Meanwhile, there is the other wing of the Movement, as it’s called. As the Washington Post’s Style section described one bunch of them:
An aging group of hippies and veteran peace junkies, ranging from 78-year-old grandmothers with arthritis to Hare Krishnas and long-haired, bandanna-wearing middle-aged antiwar activists, returned [to Amman] from Baghdad... Iraqi authorities removed them from [their] border camp some 300 miles from Baghdad... a few days before a planned armored land thrust into Saudi Arabia... This diverse group of eccentrics and idealists, many of whom 20 years ago helped change the course of history in a movement to end American involvement in a foreign war, now seems like a sad relic from a different era. They were powerless to make a dent, even in newspaper headlines.
The two keys to that description are “Vietnam” and “headlines.” The headlines are essential: without them aging groups of hippies and peace junkies can do whatever they please and the world will ignore them. The awareness of the action, rather than the action itself, is the point, and the world had either become bored with the sight of bandanna-wearers or discounted their opinions. Or both.
The central key is, again, “Vietnam.” As generals are so often accused of preparing to fight the last war, so the peace movement was prepared to protest it. Writing of the January 15th protests in The Nation, Barbara Ehrenreich said, on moving from one demonstration to another, “At the UN, though, I start having Vietnam [era] flashbacks.”
A couple days later, after the start of the bombing, she joined a march—she apparently has nothing to do with her time but join marches—jointly sponsored by the Coalition to Stop U.S. Intervention in the Middle East and the National Campaign for Peace in the Middle East:
We start marching down Seventh Avenue, feeling half like prisoners, escorted by the police, and half as if we owned the streets... At about 20th Street a gray-haired man in a windbreaker is yelling obscenities at the march, but most people wave and give us the peace sign. It’s been a long time since I’ve made the V-sign, but it feels just right for now, and lighter to carry than a fist [the NOW salute].
In the first days of the air war we saw signs outside the White House saying “This is Worse than Vietnam!” Since the war was self-evidently not worse, the statements, and those making them, were again discounted. Some of us were left instead with visions of aging ex-hippies rushing madly about the house, shouting, “Wake up, Strawberry, quick! The Sixties are back and I can’t find my grannie glasses!”
Absurd? Patrick Ercolano, a Baltimore Evening Sun staffer wrote a piece that appeared January 31st, in which he smirked,
Have you noticed that more guys seem to be letting their hair get longer than usual? Since the war began?... [W]ith a new war and a new anti-war movement, those of us near the rear of the home front can still do one small thing to register our opposition to all the violence and waste.
Like, wow, man. Profound.
The two groups, the ideologues and the leftovers, run together, of course, with the former providing the guidance and the latter providing the foot soldiers. A Washington Post survey of people who attended the January 26th rally showed that about a third were veterans, like Ehrenreich, of the Vietnam-era peace movements. They were mostly Democrats, and 80 percent described themselves as either “liberal” or “very liberal.” More than half of those attending were pacifists who opposed not just American involvement in the Gulf, but all war. They struck at least some of the rest of us as people who were determined to protest something, anything.
“But almost as quickly as it had gained momentum,” the Washington Post wrote sadly, “the anti-war movement faltered. By the time President Bush ordered a cease-fire... it had almost lost its voice.” The country’s lack of stomach for war and its casualties “instead had emerged as an appetite for victory.”
Frivolty may have had something to do with it, too. One of the signs from the 26th said that the best way to destroy Iraq was to send over some S&L directors. Perhaps true, hardly likely. One chant demanded, “George Bush! Saddam Hussein! Go to your rooms!” A Wall Street Journal-NBC poll found that only 11 percent of those who responded had gained respect for antiwar protesters, as opposed to 60 percent who said they had lost respect for them.
Saddam Hussein may have helped a little, too. Even had the casualties been higher, the Iraqi dictator was enough of a thug to make those who opposed the war seem his defenders, to make many, like Richard Cohen, the Washington Post columnist, who oppose war as a matter of principle, accept the necessity of it, however reluctantly.
Is the peace movement dead as a result of shooting itself in the foot over the Gulf War? The adversarial spirit of the radical left is firmly entrenched; a certain number of people will continue protesting because that is what they do. But “the movement” is retrenching, reduced to sniping at the motives of the war, finding newfound sympathy for the Kurds and mourning the thieves of Mutlaa. “Although our constituency will no doubt be smaller than it was at the height of the nuclear freeze movement,” writes Michael T. Klare, associate professor of Peace and World Security Studies at Hampshire College, in The Nation, “it must be a knowledgeable and thoughtful constituency, capable of addressing the difficult issues of the post-gulf war era.” Klare goes on to suggest four areas where his agenda can be pushed:
1. “Reduce global militarization” (protest arms exports)
2. “Achieve reconciliation in the Middle East” (call for Palestinian statehood, disarmament of Israel and Arab states, and “sensitize” Americans to the “terrible punishment wreaked on Iraqi civilians.”)
3. “Rescue the home front” (take money from the defense budget and put it into domestic programs)
4. “Put nuclear arms control back on track... It is essential that the peace movement reactivate antinuclear sentiment in this country and campaign for key arms-control measures.”