War protesters fail integrity test (another must-read)
By Samuel G. Freedman
usatoday.com
During Thanksgiving weekend 1965, toward the end of one of the first major rallies against the Vietnam War, a student activist named Carl Oglesby addressed the Washington crowd. He did not simply criticize U.S. support of South Vietnam's military regime, but hailed its communist foes for mounting "as honest a revolution as you can find anywhere in history."
While such strident rhetoric was rare at that early stage of the anti-war movement, it grew common as American involvement deepened and the death toll grew. Liberals called for peace talks and free elections, most of them believing that in such a campaign communist leader Ho Chi Minh would win. Radicals marched with banners of Ho and his National Liberation Front. Jane Fonda famously visited Hanoi, becoming the lasting stereotype of the left's sympathy for North Vietnam.
Whatever history decides about the wisdom of having actively or tacitly endorsed communist rule over Vietnam, one must give that anti-war movement credit for candor. It never obscured, avoided or backed away from the inevitable consequence of the American withdrawal it sought. At times, it went as far as to say that a nationalist Marxist government was preferable to a corrupt claque of generals. At the least, it argued that the choice was not America's to make.
Not this time
The current movement against an American invasion of Iraq fails utterly to meet a similar test of honesty and integrity. From last month's mass marches in major cities worldwide to the e-mail campaign and television commercials from Hollywood stars to today's national student strike "for books, not bombs," the protesters address only half the issue.
They make many important and persuasive arguments against a unilateral American strike: that it might well provoke Saddam Hussein to supply terrorists with weapons of mass destruction; that it probably would incite him to attack Israel in hopes of igniting regional war; that it undoubtedly would cost tens if not hundreds of thousands of lives; that it would render the United Nations effectively impotent.
Yet you can believe all or much of that, as I do, and still feel that the peace movement is either deceitful or naive. It refuses to face up to the likely result of its own pacifism. Not invading Iraq would neuter the U.N. just as surely as American unilateralism would. Not invading Iraq would allow Saddam to build his arsenals. Not invading Iraq would leave him free to murder his own people, if not by poison-gassing them, then by mounting some suicidal campaign like his war against Iran, which killed hundreds of thousands on each side.
Where is peaceful alternative?
The peace movement has barely acknowledged those risks, much less presented a non-violent plan for addressing them. Yes, there are eloquent and sober anti-war voices that call for maintaining American troops near Iraq's borders to compel compliance with U.N. weapons inspectors. Yes, France and Germany have advanced the same argument in the U.N. Security Council debates.
But they all need to answer these questions: Do you remember the big news of Oct. 31, 1998? If you do, how are you going to stop a repeat of it?
Unremarkable, except ...
Halloween of 1998 was in most ways quite a forgettable day. The Holly Hunter movie Living Out Loud was limping through its opening weekend, the first stop on a quick trip to home-video ignominy. The top college football team, UCLA, had a mismatch against 1-6 Stanford. Candidates campaigned for the midterm elections three days hence; the big issue was the impending impeachment of Bill Clinton for incompetent philandering.
And, oh yes, that's right: Saddam declared Iraq would no longer cooperate with U.N. weapons inspectors, whom his diplomats branded "American spies and agents." While President Clinton fulminated about Iraq having "abused its final chance," the U.S. military response consisted of three days of bombing in December 1998, which changed nothing. And U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who had been assured months earlier of compliance by Baghdad, was left looking like a sucker in a Middle Eastern souk.
Time rolled by, and the world basically lost interest. By early 2001, commercial flights to Iraq had resumed. Cargo went uninspected. Iraq sold oil outside the strictures of the U.N. oil-for-food program, reaping funds for weapons development. France and Russia, with their large commercial interests in and vast debts from Iraq, pushed for even more relaxation of sanctions.
A year or two from now, we can expect pretty much the same thing, or worse, from an emboldened and embittered Saddam. I wonder where the peace marchers will be then? Where will those human shields now in Baghdad be then? Where will all of the Hollywood stars be then?
The long haul
The peace movement justifiably questions whether the Bush administration has any staying power for rebuilding a conquered and shattered Iraq. But what kind of staying power does the peace movement have for enforcing U.N. resolutions while Saddam wheels and deals for year after year after year? It has taken months of American mobilization in the Persian Gulf to persuade Iraq to destroy even a handful of missiles.
The principled men and women who opposed the Vietnam War took their stand and answered for all of its implications. Whether their judgment was correct or not, they never ducked responsibility.
Those protesters so rightly worried about the toll of war on Iraq, and so wrongly indifferent to the effect of assisting Saddam's defiance, remind me much more of what passed for a peace movement before World War II. The isolationists, the so-called America-firsters, couldn't care less what Adolf Hitler did and who Hitler killed, just as long as it was on the other side of the Atlantic.
Samuel G. Freedman is associate dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and author most recently of Jew vs. Jew: The Struggle for the Soul of American Jewry. He is a member of USA TODAY's board of contributors. |
