Antiwar leftists fail to get it right
Minneapolis Star Tribune 4/19/03 Nick Busse
The Iraqi people have been caught in a crossfire -- not only between
U.S. troops and Fedayeen Saddam -- but also between the Bush
administration and a generation of disaffected youth looking to stick
it to "the Man."
Ty Moore, spokesman for the Socialist Alternative, said at a student
rally at the University of Minnesota the day after the bombing of
Baghdad began, "Our starting point has to be zero trust in the Bush
administration."
"We should have a visceral reaction to anything George Bush says,"
said University of Minnesota Prof. August Nimtz, hammering home the
depth of his contempt by adding -- without supporting evidence --
"Right now there is a special unit bringing chemical weapons into Iraq
[to frame Saddam Hussein]. I'm sure of it."
And Jess Sundin of the Anti-War Committee said, "Saddam Hussein hasn't
killed a single person! George Bush and the U.N. killed millions!"
During the Vietnam War, hawks were the apologists; now it's the doves.
The standard justification for the Vietnam War went something like, "I
know it's bad that all those people are being killed, but we have to
stop the Commies!"
Today, ask any group of antiwar activists why they protest the war and
you'll hear, "I know Saddam is murdering his people, but we have to
stop the American imperialists!"
Ask those same protesters to explain American imperialism and you'll
get a laundry list of grievances -- from Nike's exploitation of
sweatshop labor in Central America and Asia to the Clinton
administration's bombing of a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan to
George W. Bush's "stealing" the 2000 presidential election -- the list
is endless.
Oh, they'll bring up the U.N. sanctions, of course. Every war protest
has served up at least one heart-rending speech about the economic
sanctions and the plight of the Iraqi people. But ask a group of
protesters who [Deputy Defense Secretary] Paul Wolfowitz or [Cheney
Chief of Staff] Lewis Libby are and watch their eyes glaze over.
Today's activists are ignorant of neoconservative policies and their
origins because they are too busy bashing America, capitalism and
President Bush to engage in any kind of intelligent dialogue about
what's going on in this country. Have they ever stopped to consider
that the liberation of Iraq also means an end to the sanctions?
Today's demonstrators endlessly compare themselves to the '60s
antiwar/civil rights activists. That movement was driven by a core of
intellectuals who were well-read and knowledgeable in the causes they
pursued. The hippies merely swelled their numbers at demonstrations.
Today it's the other way around: The hippies themselves run the show
now, having decided that reading half of an Alexander Berkman essay
off some anarcho-syndicalist Web site makes them experts.
For me, the defining moment came when a group of Iraqi dissidents
showed up at the March 24 antiwar rally at the Northrop Mall to share
stories of repression under Saddam's regime. The protesters were so
intoxicated by their own rebelliousness that they actually had the
nerve to tell the Iraqis that their opinions didn't matter.
At that same rally, I got into an argument with a teenager who stopped
halfway through our conversation to pull a bandana over his face so
that any FBI agents who might be in the crowd couldn't photograph him.
"Are these people nuts?" I wondered?
I suspect that in the near future, some graduate student somewhere
will write a brilliant doctoral dissertation on the
antiglobalization/antiwar movement as a mass social phenomenon. It is
clear from the images of Iraqis celebrating their liberation that
whatever this movement was about, it was not about helping the Iraqi
people.
I have no illusions that my government's primary motivation in
invading Iraq was the liberation of its people. But that liberation
will indeed be the first and clearest consequence of the war -- a fact
that radicals of the 1960s would've recognized, but today's activists
blatantly choose to ignore.
In pursuit of its own vendetta against the world, my generation sold
out the Iraqi people. Now, when we go to protest the moronic
escalation of the drug war in Colombia, why should anyone listen to
us? The reputation of protest as a vehicle for social change has been
seriously damaged, as we will see in the years to come. The radical
left has just had its Vietnam.
Nick Busse, Prior Lake, is a student at the University of Minnesota.
