27 Sep. - 3 Oct. 2001
Issue No.553
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 27 Sep. - 3 Oct. 2001 Issue No.553 |
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Smothered by the flag
Can a small, but real, anti-war voice make its way to the mainstream? Nyier Abdou finds the spirit of protest alive and kicking in the US
The Bush administration has announced repeatedly that the country has entered into war. America didn't choose this, officials note; it was forced on an unsuspecting populace with a carefully planned and ruthlessly executed provocation on 11 September. To Americans, this is the beginning. But to many, this war -- the "war against terror" -- has been going on for decades.
Violence breeds violence: Anti-war demonstrators in the US
As one New Yorker told me sadly, "No one smiles anymore." The war mentality has taken hold, even as many people slowly ease back into their daily routines. The sun still shines, the schools still run, the dog still needs to be walked. But the flutter of flags, the strains of patriotic songs -- "America the Beautiful," "God Bless America," "This Land is Your Land" -- tell another story.
On 14 September the US Congress moved swiftly and with resounding concord to enable the president with broad war powers -- a resolution that puts all the US armed forces at President Bush's disposal. The joint resolution authorises Bush to use "all necessary and appropriate" military force against the "nations, organisations or persons he determines planned, authorised, committed or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on Sept. 11, 2001, or harbored such organisations or persons."
The number of people killed or still missing as a result of the strikes approached 7,000 this week. The attacks -- the deadliest on US soil since the Civil War -- have had a "traumatising effect" on the public, notes William Hartung of the New York-based World Policy Institute. "I think that many of the people with reservations about Bush's 'war on terrorism' are afraid to speak out at the moment, for fear of being branded 'unpatriotic'," he told Al-Ahram Weekly. Hartung points to a critical lack of debate, both in the media and in Congress, as having a numbing effect on American sensibilities, a point echoed by Stephen Zunes, chair of the Peace and Justice Studies Programme at University of San Francisco, told noted. "The Bush administration keeps saying the United States was targeted because our country stands for freedom and democracy, ignoring the fact that US policy in the Middle East has never promoted freedom and democracy," Zunes told the Weekly.
The American public can be fuzzy on the history of US military debacles, generally maintaining that the US acts to the best of its abilities in the best interests of all parties involved. As Thomas Fleming, president of the Rockford Institute and editor of the conservative Chronicles magazine, wryly noted, "The history of Afghanistan is only known through a Kipling story, made into a movie -- and even in that case, people do not realise that the story is set in Afghanistan."
But many a mighty power have puffed themselves up and been deflated by Afghanistan -- not the kind of place that can be bombed from the air with any fair amount of certainty. "The truth is that Americans do not study foreign languages, history, or culture. They put their confidence in mass marketing and believe that McDonalds and Coca Cola and Levi's will take over the world without firing a shot," Fleming told the Weekly. "Our leaders have said repeatedly that both the hijackers of 11 September and [Bin Laden] himself were motivated by envy of our way of life. This is a pathetic joke. A fabulously wealthy and educated man spends most of the money he inherited and earned on a holy war, and we think he envies middle-class Americans? Professional men with wives and children are willing to commit murder and suicide because they want the freedom to buy frozen food and watch CNN?"
On 20 September, Bush addressed Congress, and most of the nation, with a speech widely accepted to be the first defining moment of his presidency. With steely reserve Bush reinforced the notion that the country was at war. Though he conceded that this enemy was like none the US has faced before, he did not offer a radical departure in the methods he intended to use to fight it: military might.
Past military campaigns, notably the follow-up Iraqi campaign known as Desert Fox, in December 1998, and the bombing of Serbia in March of 1999, were met with little enthusiasm. Images of destruction and civilian suffering, though by no means widespread, were enough to turn the stomachs of a number of people for whom these wars felt far away and only tenuously relevant to their lives.
After Bush's speech to Congress, a Washington Post-ABC News poll showed that 91 per cent of Americans were behind Bush and feel that he has handled the crisis admirably. But Bush and his team know full well the fickleness of American public opinion. Anticipating a weakness of resolve, Bush warned that this war could get ugly -- and that this ugliness would be there for all of us to see. We must not forget our anger, he cautioned.
Thomas Greene, who heads the Washington bureau of the UK-based publication The Register, insists that most ordinary Americans reject the notion of war. Their moods, however, are swung easily by mainstream journalists "addicted to access -- to mere quotes," who he describes as willing to whitewash the existence of anti-war sentiment in order to cosy up to top officials and defence organisations that "have budgets to maintain." After the initial shock begins to fade, Greene told the Weekly, "we can expect even more people to advocate dealing with [this] as a criminal matter rather than an 'act of war'."
The World Policy Institute's Hartung also expects anti-war sentiment to take root and grow. "My gut feeling is that the sparks of opposition that I have witnessed will grow, and that within a matter of months there will be a sizeable peace movement which the mainstream media will not be able to ignore, and which Bush will have to take into account in proceeding in his 'war on terrorism'."
Sam Husseini, of the Institute for Public Accuracy (IPA), told the Weekly that he feels the US administration is not prepared for a "democratic" discussion of its foreign policy. Husseini suggested that much of America's indifference to foreign affairs comes from a paucity of information in the mainstream media. "If the American public knew what the US was up to in the Middle East, they wouldn't allow it." When the public focuses on foreign policy for any extended period of time, Husseini said, "there is opposition. It is building in the US -- there have been gatherings in most US cities on this already."
But calls for prudence in a nation swept by patriotic fever have been shouted down as nothing less than mutiny. The war powers resolution was passed without dissent in the Senate (98-0) and of the 421 votes cast in the House, only one representative, California's Barbara Lee, dared to vote against it. In the days after the vote, Lee's offices were so swamped with thousands of calls, letters and e-mails -- most of them angry, many outright militant -- that she was assigned Capitol Police escorts.
California is also home to the University of California at Berkeley, traditionally a wellspring of political dissent and a flashpoint for the launching of large-scale student protests. On Thursday, 20 September, some 2,000 anti-war protesters demonstrated for peace -- an act duplicated on some 146 campuses in 36 states across the nation, although protesters at other colleges and universities numbered in the low hundreds, not thousands. Counter-protests sprung up alongside the peace demonstrations, as students who are barely old enough to remember the Gulf War dove into the debate about US military might. In defiance of the common belief that New York is united in its thirst for retaliation, some 1,000 people marched to New York's Times Square on Saturday to protest military action. Thousands were apparently demonstrating in Portland, Oregon.
Despite an active minority, most Americans don't have politics coursing through their veins. Asked whether he thought that there is a growing sense of anti-war sentiment that has yet to be given a coherent voice, the Rockford Institute's Fleming replied: "Ordinary people are, by definition, ordinary. They are neither heroic nor ideologically committed." He suggested that demonstrations, though evident, still pulled together the usual activists and radicals who "not so much hate war, as they despise the United States."
Robert Jensen, a professor of journalism at the University of Texas in Austin and a member of the No War Collective, a group of activists, writers and academics, notes that though polls indicate a majority of Americans want a war, he believes that people are getting a distorted picture of what is at stake. Drawing a parallel to anti-Vietnam war demonstrations in 1967, Jensen told the Weekly that "there is a significant segment of the population that isn't afraid to examine foreign policy and advocate a sea of change."
Rahul Mahajan, who serves on the National Board of Peace Action, suggests that ordinary Americans are coming together in "spontaneous demonstrations of resistance" as they recognise a shared vulnerability with people living in troubled nations. But this is not the picture one gets from stories of increased anti-Arab and anti-Islamic sentiments, racial attacks, and strapping youths declaring that they would fight for their country. "The task for the anti-war movement is clear," Mahajan told the Weekly. "To break through the 'War is our only option' framework that the Bush administration has been pushing."
One lesson to take away from events of the past weeks is that a "new kind of war" still depends on a very old arsenal of rhetoric. While the course of 21st-century-style war is yet unknown, the history of protest remains unbroken and strong.
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