Iraq War: Has it become a fine old conflict?

Jessica Mitford was quite a character. Probably beset known for her book on the funeral business, The American Way of Death (1963), she was a British aristocrat who spent many years in the American Communist Party. Her sister Unity Mitford was a good buddy of Adolf Hitler. Jessica's brother-in-law through her sister Diana was Sir Oswald Mosley, head of the British Union of Fascists. Ha! And you thought holiday dinners with your family get contentious! Jessica also wrote a memoir about her years in the Communist Party, called A Fine Old Conflict (1977). It's done with a light touch, which the title reflects. She said she sang the English version of the Internationale, which has a line, "'Tis the final conflict", and for years she thought that line was, "It's a fine old conflict."

I thought of that when I saw the TPM video linked below, showing the latest round of Iraq War triumphalism. We're more than half way done with the fifth year of this thing, with no end in sight. So it's acquired rhythms of its own that have become almost familiar. This is the end of the calendar year, so we hear various projections that the number of troops may be drawn down substantially next year. This has become almost as much an annual ritual as turkey for Thanksgiving.

The good news this time is that The Surge is succeeding. Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina claims it's "the most successful counterinsurgency operation in military history." (Graham sees stunning progress in Iraq by Bruce Smith AP/The State 11/26/07.

Of course, in CheneyWorld, these things have meanings that are not easily apparent to the rest of us. Success means violence is down, you see. So we have to keep lots of troops there to keep the success going. But when violence goes up, that's also good news and a sign of success, because that shows that The Terrorists are desperate, and we have to keep lots of troops there to keep the success going.

It reminds me a lot of a boss I had that was known for his fascinating but quirky stories. This is a slightly sanitized version of a story he told me to illustrate how you have to go about dealing with staff attorneys:

Always remember, if you ask an attorney, "Can I steal money?", he'll say, "Yes, go ahead and do it, and we'll find a way to get you off".

But if you ask an attorney, "Can I steal money from this particular account?", he'll say, "Yes, go ahead and do it, and we'll find a way to get you off".

So, you see? It's all in how you ask the question!

Come to think of it, working with him probably was good training to understand some of today's bizarro Republican talk. He had lots of other good sayings like, "I'm caught between a hard rock." And, "Don't burn your bridges before you build them."

It was four years ago in December that we had the stunning success of capturing Saddam Hussein-Hitler. Bush's poll ratings spiked, loyal war fans talked about what a great victory it was, and every day in every way things were getting better and better in Iraq. Remember when Holy Joe Lieberman solemnly scolded Howard Dean for suggesting that Saddam's capture wouldn't make any difference in the insurgency? What kind of mangy hippie was Dean to even think such a thing?

Trent "ah'm for the white man!" Lott just announced his retirement from the Senate on Monday. So it's only appropriate to recall the sober advice that historic statesman was giving on the Iraq War in October 2003 to The Hill:

Honestly, it's a little tougher than I thought it was going to be," Lott said. In a sign of frustration, he offered an unorthodox military solution: "If we have to, we just mow the whole place down, see what happens. You're dealing with insane suicide bombers who are killing our people, and we need to be very aggressive in taking them out."

That's the way real white men fight a war, you see. When "we just mow the whole place down", that shows them A-rab Muslim how much superior our white civilization and Christian religion is to their backward, violent habits and beliefs.

But outside the fog of white supremacy where Trent Lott's mind seems to dwell, even then there was an active antiwar movement, including soldiers and there families. Suzanne Goldenberg reported on the latter in Dissent on the home front: families of US soldiers in Iraq lead anti-war protests Guardian 10/25/03. Of course, Republicans war lovers like Ole Trent were insisting even then that they were the only ones "supporting the troops". but Rush Limbaugh hadn't yet announced that antiwar members of the service were "phony soldiers".

Those were the good old days, when the war was still young. Paul Krugman commented in a column of 10/28/03 A Willful Ignorance New York Times):

According to The New York Times, President Bush was genuinely surprised to learn from moderate Islamic leaders that they had become deeply distrustful of American intentions. The report on the "perception gap" suggests that the leader of the war on terror has no idea how badly that war — which must, ultimately, be a war for hearts and minds — is going.

Mr. Bush's ignorance may reflect his lack of curiosity: "The best way to get the news," he says, "is from objective sources. And the most objective sources I have are people on my staff." Two words: emperor, clothes.

Other things in Krugman's column bring back memories of the early days:

Yet that moral punctiliousness is curiously selective. Last year the Bush administration, in return for a military base in Uzbekistan, gave $500 million to a government that, according to the State Department, uses torture "as a routine investigation technique," and whose president has killed opponents with boiling water. The moral clarity police were notably quiet.

Why is aiding a brutal dictator O.K., while trying to understand why others don't trust us — and doing something to create that trust — isn't? Why won't the administration mollify Muslims by firing Lt. Gen. William Boykin, whose anti-Islamic remarks have created vast ill will, from his counterterrorism position? Why won't it give moderate Muslims a better argument against the radicals by opposing Ariel Sharon's settlement policy, when a majority of Israelis think that some settlements should be abandoned, and even Israeli military officers have become bitterly critical of Mr. Sharon?

Oh, those innocent times, when American involvement with torture was thought to mean giving money to dictators who do it.

And the Christian General Boykin? Who could forget him and his helpful reminder that we were gonna beat them there Muslims because our God is bigger than theirs.

Actually, on the torture things, people who had actually been paying attention knew that something was rotten in CheneyLand on that score even at this time in 2003, even though the Abu Ghuraib scandal didn't blow until 2004. Americans working closely with the Northern Alliance warlords in Afghanistan in 2001 had not necessarily shown a lot of concern for our allies massacring prisoners of war. The treatment of "American Taliban" John Walker Lindh was also not exactly by the book, as those who paid attention to the case realized. But the whole Guantanamo Gulag was already set up. And the "enemy combatant" category had been created to evade the laws of war. The Cheney-Bush administration had made it clear they didn't intend to follow the Geneva Convention in their grand War Against Terrorism.

There was also a torture case in which Lt. Col. Allen B. West faced court-martial and eventually pleaded out to a fine and early retirement in late 2003 for torturing an Iraqi prisoner. The reaction among the Freeper crowd was a grim reminder that there was a definite core of authoritarian support among the public for torture. A letter-writer to Stars and Stripes hit on some basic principles that apply in such cases, that would have saved the US a lot of trouble if characters like Dick Cheney and Rummy had applied them (West went too far by Walter Irwin Stars and Stripes European/Mideast editions 12/04/03):

When Lt. Col. West interrogated a person allegedly involved in planning an attack, took that person outside the detention facility, placed a gun next to his head and pulled the trigger twice, he crossed the line. Lt. Col. West himself became a terrorist. Lt. Col. West may have had inside information about a possible attack, but he should have left it to the experts to obtain that information and put his troops on higher alert.

Taken as a whole, the actions of Lt. Col. West were along the same lines as the war criminals of Japan, Germany and Italy in World War II. Some were arrested, tried, convicted and even executed for their actions. They were guilty of murder, torture, inhumane treatment of prisoners, and stepping outside the rules of war. Lt. Col. West stepped across the line. He admits it and seems proud of it.

If an interrogator put a gun next to a suspect’s head and asked questions, the suspect would say something, regardless of whether it was true or not, just to save his life. Lt. Col. West obtained some information. But how was he to know if it was truthful or not? (my emphasis)

The torture issue was out there. There were no lack of warning signs. But the Republican controlled Congress, which meant they were loyal lackeys of the White House. So they did nothing.

The CIA had referred the outing of Valerie Plame to the Justice Department. The Establishment press steadfastly tried to ignore the story, because a big part of the story was the shameful complicity of the mainstream press in that Karl Rove political hit job, which could have (and may actually have) cost lives. But it would turn out to be one of our most important windows into the cynical scam by which Cheney and Bush got up their war with Iraq.

Other problems were also there for those who made some effort to dig out the news. Mercenary firms were placing a lot of people in Iraq, with uncertain prospects for their effects. Bumbling on the part of Jerry Bremer's CPA (Coalition Provisional Authority) was already visible, though we had no idea of the level of political hackery, incompetence and corruption that was really going on. But tips of the iceberg were appearing. Serious deficiencies in the initial planning were no secret by then, having been documented by, among others, the Army itself in the Third Infantry Division (Mechanized) After Action: Operation IRAQI FREEDOM.

David Rieff described some of the problems already encountered in Blueprint for a Mess New York Times 11/02/03:

Historically, it is rare that a warm welcome is extended to an occupying military force for very long, unless, that is, the postwar goes very smoothly. And in Iraq, the postwar occupation has not gone smoothly.

I have made two trips to Iraq since the end of the war and interviewed dozens of sources in Iraq and in the United States who were involved in the planning and execution of the war and its aftermath. It is becoming painfully clear that the American plan (if it can even be dignified with the name) for dealing with postwar Iraq was flawed in its conception and ineptly carried out. At the very least, the bulk of the evidence suggests that what was probably bound to be a difficult aftermath to the war was made far more difficult by blinkered vision and overoptimistic assumptions on the part of the war's greatest partisans within the Bush administration. The lack of security and order on the ground in Iraq today is in large measure a result of decisions made and not made in Washington before the war started, and of the specific approaches toward coping with postwar Iraq undertaken by American civilian officials and military commanders in the immediate aftermath of the war.

Despite administration claims, it is simply not true that no one could have predicted the chaos that ensued after the fall of Saddam Hussein. In fact, many officials in the United States, both military and civilian, as well as many Iraqi exiles, predicted quite accurately the perilous state of things that exists in Iraq today. There was ample warning, both on the basis of the specifics of Iraq and the precedent of other postwar deployments -- in Panama, Kosovo and elsewhere -- that the situation in postwar Iraq was going to be difficult and might become unmanageable. What went wrong was not that no one could know or that no one spoke out. What went wrong is that the voices of Iraq experts, of the State Department almost in its entirety and, indeed, of important segments of the uniformed military were ignored. As much as the invasion of Iraq and the rout of Saddam Hussein and his army was a triumph of planning and implementation, the mess that is postwar Iraq is a failure of planning and implementation.

Things were seriously screwed up then, despite all the happy talk. And the notion of establishing a permanent American presence in Iraq or achieving some Second World War-style "unconditional surrender" in Iraq today is fantasy.

But the war goes. Are we going to be listening to Lindsey Graham making similar fool declarations in 2011? We will if the Republican Party has its way. Because they're clueless about how to bring this thing to a decent end, which has long since come to mean, "minimizing the disaster".

Here's the TPM video:



Tags: antiwar movement, antiwar protest, david rieff, iraq war, jessica mitford, paul krugman, lindsey graham, trent lott

State Dept. staff protesting against Iraq assignments

Juan Cole has taken up the cause of career diplomats who are objecting to involuntary assignment to Iraq.

Pat Lang and Philip Carter do not sympathize with the diplomats' protest. Lang argues that for the Foreign Service proper, "They are not members of the uniformed services, but nevertheless are actually something more than mere employees. Like soldiers they are sworn to their duty when commissioned."

Carter advises them to "suck it up folks". And he makes the point, "Rarely have we seen clearer evidence in support of the statement that 'America is not at war; only America's military is at war'." But Cole also has a valid practical point:

... [T]ypically embassies in war zones are shut down by the secretary of state and the president for precisely this reason. Foreign Service Officers are civilians. They are not combat personnel and cannot perform combat duties. Indeed, if they had any military aspect it would doom their entire mission and make them useless.

At the risk of sounding like a Mugmump on the issue, I think there is validity in both perspectives. The State Department civilians have valid objections to being sent to the Green Zone in Baghdad. But Foreign Service personnel do have an obligation to accept hazardous assignments when needed, and they do have the option to quit their jobs if they strongly object, though quitting can have a big financial impact on both current income and pensions.

That's why it makes sense to me to see this incident as a particular kind of antiwar dissent. People not only have perfectly sensible practical personal concerns about very hazardous duty in a war zone. They also have concerns about taking on such duty in a situation where they are unlikely to contribute much beneficial, and may even object to the very nature of their assignment. Cole argues that they are being sent there to serve as "a shadow colonial administration of Iraq, which is not their job".

So, when activists from the 60s are wringing their hands over the supposed lack of an antiwar movement, this is one more place to look for it.

Tags: antiwar movement, antiwar protest, iraq war, juan cole, patrick lang, phil carter

More tempations to headbanging

Headbanging in the Tollhaus, Passau, Germany

It's not only politicians that give me that old headbanging urge.

Several years ago, I took a course in Genesis taught by a professor who was also a rabbi. She illustrated some theological point with a humorous line, "The Jews are the people who can't take 'yes' for an answer."

I thought of that when I read this TomDispatch.com article by Tom Engelhardt, The Bureaucracy, the March, and the War: American Disengagement 10/28/07. Don't get me wrong. Engelhardt has been one of the best commentators on the Iraq War, and he has provided us access to a wealth of solid analysis from his guest commentators at TomDispatch.com. I normally agree with him on most issues, bless his heart. (To use that Deep South pre-criticism phrase.)

But this piece really is a case of someone not being able to take "yes" for an answer. Short version of Engelhardt's article: Sure, 70% or so of the American people are opposed to the Iraq War and want to get out as soon as possible; but where's the antiwar movement?

My short answer is, the antiwar movement is the 70% of the people that oppose the war.

Taking it in a bit more detail, Engelhardt recalls the demonstrations against the Vietnam War back in the day, and he thinks those were way cool. And the anti-Iraq War demonstrations of 2002-3 reminded him of that, and he's bummed that he's not seeing those mass demonstrations any more.

This is where I find Tom Hayden's perspective from his long experience in both electoral politics and popular protest to be particularly helpful. In his book Ending the War in Iraq (2007), he devotes a full chapter (58 pages) to looking at the real existing antiwar movement, which neither the Establishment press nor those looking at today's world through a haze of excessive '60s nostalgia seem to be able to recognize. The chapter is titled, "What Noble Cause? The Rise of the Antiwar Movement, 2001-2007".

Best of all, Hayden in his book rags repeatedly on John Mueller, the political scientist whose very flawed analysis of what generates opposition to wars in the United States is a staple of both those who want to debunk the power of antiwar movements and of air power zealots who use his findings to justify maximizing civilian casualties in a target country in order to supposedly minimize American military casualties.

Hayden does cite Mueller's article The Iraq Syndrome in Foreign Affairs Nov/Dec 2005 for its factual information on public opinion on the Iraq War. But he also makes clear that the "conservative" John Mueller is off the tracks in his notion of what a "movement" really is in the real world of politics. Hayden writes:

[T]he question is how, not whether, the peace movement participated in shaping antiwar opinion between 2003-07. The numbers of anti-Iraq War protesters in the streets - 100,000-500,000 at least eight times in five years, plus ten million globally on one occasion—are comparable to the numbers during the 1965-68 period of Vietnam. Mueller, [Mike] Davis, and others arbitrarily exclude electoral campaigns from their definition of movements; but if one considers the grassroots participation in the Dean, Kerry, Kucinich, Lamont, and other local campaigns, plus antiwar ballot initiatives in San Francisco, Chicago, and Vermont; and if one adds 165 city council resolutions passed against this war within a broader definition of "movement," then this has been a movement of historic proportions. (my emphasis in bold)

No one who is seriously concerned about how damaging the Iraq War is to the United States and the Middle East is likely to think that even a majority antiwar movement like we have today is going to be good enough until the US is out of that war. And we're are a long way from that point still. But it is important to recognize progress when it occurs, and the shift in public opinion against this war is real progress in more ways than one.

Amazingly, Engelhardt cites both Mueller's faulty theory about what drives American public opinion on war and Mueller's statement of why that theory is hosed, though neither Engelhardt nor Mueller seem to recognize it:

As John Mueller, an expert on public opinion and American wars, pointed out back in November 2005, Americans turned against the Iraq War in a pattern recognizable from the Vietnam era (as well as the Korean one) - initial, broad post-invasion support that eroded irreversibly as American casualties rose. "The only thing remarkable about the current war in Iraq," Mueller wrote, "is how precipitously American public support has dropped off. Casualty for casualty, support has declined far more quickly than it did during either the Korean War or the Vietnam War." He added, quite correctly, as it turned out: "And if history is any indication, there is little the Bush administration can do to reverse this decline." (my emphasis)

Mueller's argument is that American casualties and only American casualties make the US public turn against a war. The only reason he finds it "remarkable" that "support has declined far more quickly than it did during either the Korean War or the Vietnam War" is that he was proceeding from the false assumption that American casualties and only American casualties make the US public turn against a war.

I've commented on Mueller's detailed argument on this point in the post linked above, and also about how the polling data on the Second World War also don't fit his assumption.

Mueller was correct about support for the war not springing back. Mueller has a better handle on what drive public support for a war than Dick Cheney and George Bush seem to have. But talk about setting the bar low...

Hayden summarizes his argument about the nature of the real existing antiwar movement as follows:

...[W]hile the new post-'60s antiwar movement is given little credit as a factor in turning public opinion against the war, it is a powerful force. On eight occasions the movement has produced over 100,000 protesters in the streets, including three in which more than a half-million turned out to demonstrate. Public opinion has shifted against this conflict more rapidly than it did during the Vietnam War. At least 165 city councils and state legislatures have passed referendums against the war. Internet activism far surpasses the membership drives of antiwar groups in the '60s. The 2003-04 Howard Dean presidential campaign was in many ways similar to Eugene McCarthy's unsuccessful bid for the White House in 1967-68. And in November 2006, for the first time in U.S. history, American voters resolutely marched to the polls to reject an ongoing war.

Yet to many people, including activists, this war seems unstoppable and the opposition movement marginal or irrelevant. This is in part due to the media, but also to the Pentagon's strategy of lessening the direct impact of Iraq on the lives of most American citizens. There is no draft, we pay no direct taxes, the casualty rate of U.S. troops is one-fifteenth that of Vietnam. The perception of political impotence is also affected by anachronistic paradigms that contain romantic images of clashes in the streets of Chicago and the like. Bloggers against the war simply are not as dashing and photogenic as young men burning their draft cards in Central Park.

But this argument should be turned upside down: It is remarkable that the antiwar movement has become a catalyst of public opinion given all the resources expended on selling the Iraq War as cheap, easy, and non-intrusive in the lives of most Americans. It is a mistake to define the antiwar movement as narrowly confined to the streets, as political activism since the 1960s has opened up a space for working within a previously closed system. Bloggers and "netroots" have further developed this space, in a literal sense, through online activism.

It is necessary to write the antiwar movement into the history of this time. (my emphasis)

Shoot, I think us bloggers are pretty "dashing", but that's a topic for another day.

Tags: antiwar movement, antiwar protest, iraq war, john mueller, tom engelhardt, tom hayden

Street heat: nationwide antiwar actions this coming Saturday, Oct. 27

The United for Peace and Justice (UPJ) coalition is sponsoring antiwar events on Saturday, Oct. 27, including "regional demonstrations" in Boston, Chicago, Jonesborough, Los Angeles, New Orleans, New York, Orlando, Philadelphia, Salt Lake City, San Francisco and Seattle. They are calling it a National Mobilization to End the War in Iraq. Check out their Web site for more details. They plan other "solidarity events", as well.

This is a video by Robert Greenwald promoting the UPJ action:



Tom Hayden endorses the UPJ action in Neocons Surge Against Antiwar Movement Antiwar.com 10/22/07. Hayden is scheduled as a featured speaker in San Francisco. His article is particularly interesting in that he looks at the focused effort right now by the prowar crowd to demonize and marginalize groups and individuals prominently identified with opposition to the Iraq War.

Hayden is still a living horror to the culture war crowd. Not only was he a very visible national leader of the student movement in the 1960s. He was a defendant in the Chicago 8 show trial staged after the police riot in Chicago around the 1968 Democratic National Convention that became an iconic moment to the law-and-order conservatives. (Iconic and ironic, because the demonstrators that the culture war crowd loved to hate were protesting against the Democrats at that convention.) And if that weren't enough, he was married for years to (gasp, choke) Jane Fonda!!!

Since he also served as a California state legislator, he has an unusual breadth of experience in politics informed as well by a lifetime of research. So I find his perspective well worth paying attention to, even when I don't agree with him on particular points. He has a book out, Ending the War in Iraq (2007) that, among other things, discusses the role that the antiwar movement has played in shaping public opinion on the Iraq War.

I'll probably post more about his discussion on that point - especially since he agrees with me on the flawed analysis of political scientist John Mueller about antiwar sentiment in the US :):) - but he's particularly good in describing what he calls the "inside/outside" dynamic of public opinion on major issues. Even politicians who tend to opposed the war in Iraq still need continuous pressure from the base on those issues to get them to do the right thing. That's just how representative democracy functions.

That pressure is also called "street heat", though the term shouldn't be restricted to literal marches in the streets. It just means public pressure.

We've seen an excellent example of street heat at work just this week. Prowar partisans have been eagerly trying to discredit MoveOn.org because they dared to blaspheme against the sacred person of our Saviour-General David Petraeus. But this week, MoveOn announced that it would encourage grassroots pressure on Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to support Sen. Christopher Dodd's filibuster against the telecom immunity bill. Within hours, both had signed on for the filibuster.

The Dick Cheneys of the world haven't turned our entire government into a Potemkin democracy yet. And public opinion matters. Especially when it generates the right amount of street heat on politicians and elected officials.

For those who follow the sectarian politics around such things, International ANSWER and the "World Can't Wait" group are apparently encouraging parallel events, though they don't seem to be formal participants in the UPJ coalition. UPJ's Web site provides a list of its participating organizations.

Tags: antiwar movement, antiwar protest, iraq war, tom hayden

The Vietnam War and the "culture war" in Louisville KY (and for God's sake - or at least our own - can we stop "losing our innocence"?)

Windsor Ruins, Mississippi. No, its not in Kentucky - but it's very Southern and Lost Cause-y (Photo: Galen Parks Smith/Wikipedia Commons)

John Ernst and Yvonne Baldwin write in the February 2007 Journal of Southern History about "The not so silent minority: Louisville's antiwar movement, 1966-1975.". (Consumer advisory: this is one of my long posts for the weekend.)

They discuss the stay-forever position taken by the state's Republican Governor on the Vietnam War and how it connected with the Republican Party's emerging "Southern Strategy". I was particularly intrigued by his speculation on the influence of Lost Cause ideology about the Civil War on Southern men's thinking about war in general:

Louie B. Nunn, who in 1967 became Kentucky's first Republican governor in twenty years and who embodied America's "silent majority," the "decent, law-abiding, constructive citizens who form the heart and conscience of our nation." Nunn claimed to have given Richard M. Nixon the famous phrase that identified Nixon's political base and helped bring him victory in the 1968 presidential election. Nixon won that close contest, in part, because Americans like Nunn wanted an honorable end to the Vietnam War and the social turmoil the conflict caused at home.

Nunn, a World War II infantry veteran, viewed Vietnam through a martial, patriotic, southern lens. "Once we were in it," he asserted, "we had to finish it with honor." Nunn spoke for most Kentuckians and southerners, including Senators Herman E. Talmadge and Richard B. Russell of Georgia. Like Nunn, Russell stated that "national honor" was the issue and that America could "not shrink from defending it." This sense of honor permeated southern culture. Since the late nineteenth century, when the Lost Cause ideology began to glorify the Civil War record of both Union and Confederate soldiers, thus salving the sting of defeat for the South, fighting for America had been a means for southern men to assert their heritage and manhood. Not surprisingly, a Gallup poll in May 1967 revealed that southerners supported the Vietnam War in greater numbers than other Americans. Southerners accounted for almost one-third of the soldiers who fought in Vietnam and about 28 percent of the American soldiers who died there. At the height of the Vietnam War, four out of five American army generals hailed from the South, including the commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam from 1964 to 1968, South Carolinian William C. Westmoreland. Bardstown, Kentucky, produced one of the war's most famous officers, Lieutenant General Harold G. "Hal" Moore, coauthor of We Were Soldiers Once ... and Young. Kentucky lost more than one thousand young people in the conflict and, along with five other southern states, voted in 1968 for Nixon, whose political strategy of stressing "law and order" and patriotism ended the longtime "Democratic stronghold" in Dixie. (my emphasis)

It can scarcely be stressed enough that when you see a phrase like "social turmoil the conflict caused at home" in that context, that the Republican Southern Strategy viewpoint, and its California version that Ronald Reagan had employed in winning his governor's race the year before Nunn, merged the image of "Vietnam" (i.e., the Vietnam War), dirty [Cheney]ing pot-smoking hippies, and uppity rioting black people into one image of horror for frightened white suburbanites.

We shouldn't let this history of the Vietnam War and of Southern military service lead us to make unfounded assumptions about today. The last poll I saw that broke down opinions on the Iraq War by region showed as much opposition to the war in the South as in the rest of the country.

Looking at antiwar activists in the city of Louisville, Ernst and Baldwin write:

Louisville was home not only to [Boxing champion Muhammad] Ali, the nation's best-known dissident, but also to social justice proponents, civil rights advocates, and a growing peace community. Anne and Carl Braden, Dr. George Edwards, and Suzy Post, in particular, addressed the issues of race and class that Ali represented, and, through coalitions and networks that linked young radicals and middle-aged activists, they fashioned an antiwar movement in Louisville that adds depth to historians' understanding of the southern response to the Vietnam War. Middle aged, middle class, well educated, and white, like other southern activist leaders such as Tennessee minister Will Campbell, the dissenters in Louisville joined other teachers, clerics, homemakers, and lawyers to become a vocal minority in cities all across the South. In Atlanta, Austin, Chapel Hill, Columbia, El Paso, Houston, Knoxville, Little Rock, Memphis, Nashville, New Orleans, and Tallahassee, they provided counsel and often afforded a degree of protection from the legal system that the younger generation of soldiers and protesters could have received nowhere else. More than sympathizers and boosters, the older men and women often set the agenda for reform as they mentored and sheltered soldiers, draft evaders, peaceniks, and other young people who opposed the American presence in Vietnam. (my emphasis)

Reminding us of the "culture war" link the Republicans made, they write, "Governor Nunn pledged to rid the state of the Bradens, who directed the Southern Conference Education Fund (SCEF), an interracial civil rights organization."

"Rid the state of the Bradens". Wow!

The George Edwards mentioned there was a Christian minister who had been a conscientious objector in the Second World War. He actively counseled draft evaders, knowing that he was breaking the law in doing so. They quote Anne Braden describing him as "the most militant pacifist you ever saw".

Their article also reminds us that when Bush and his followers accuse war critics of betraying American by aiding the enemy, they stand in an ugly tradition from the Vietnam War and desegregation days:

Southern hostility toward war resisters frequently provoked confrontations. In Tallahassee, for example, conservative Florida State University fraternity brothers and "jocks" pelted activists with rocks and tossed them in the student union fountain. In Texas the Ku Klux Klan harassed a woman after the local newspaper revealed that her son-in-law was an exile in Canada. Her complaints about a break-in, shattered windows, slashed tires, and crank calls failed to alarm local police, who advised her to move since the local "organization" did not "take kindly to draft dodgers."

Brave defenders of the white race often showed their version of "patriotism" in such courageous ways. I wonder how many of those brave souls had volunteered to fight in the Vietnam War themselves? Threatening wimmin while safe at home in Texas is much more their style. Fine Christian white men, those guys.

They don't give a lot of details about the antiwar movement at Florida State University. But it's worth noticing that Florida State was not an "elite", Ivy League school. It was one of those state colleges that attracted a disproportionate number of working-class kids. And they had an active antiwar movement, active enough to catch the attention of the frat boys and and some jocks who were there enjoying their draft deferments, most of them having (like Dick Cheney) "other priorities" than going to war. But these brave patriots were able to muster the courage to gang up on some nonviolent demonstrators - they probably had to git likkered up first - and toss them into the campus fountain. Shoot, they takes nearly as much courage as fightin' them Vietcong in the jungle. That shore makes yuh proud to be an Amurcan, don't it?

Actually, despite "culture war" dogma, working class voters were more opposed to the Vietnam War than wealthy ones. And the campus antiwar movement was more active on more heavily working-class compuses like Kent State University than at the "elite" institutions.

In 1967 Austin antiwar leader George Vizard died of gunshot wounds in what police termed a grocery holdup. Texas peace organizations disagreed and called his death a "political murder." Three years later a coalition of Houston activists, including the John Brown Revolutionary League, the Houston Committee to End the War, Communications for Peace, and the University of Houston Student Mobilization Committee, accused the city's police of "protecting" Klan members who perpetrated bombings, shootings, and arson.

In those days, there was military conscription (the draft) in the US. And, unlike today, Canada's laws offered a measure of asylum to draft resisters. Antiwar activists used the opportunity:

Edwards, Post, and the Bradens risked criminal prosecution for operating a kind of Underground Railroad that assisted young Kentuckians as they sought to avoid military service in the jungles of Vietnam. Throughout the South, like-minded "conductors" did the same. Kevin Vrieze, a draft evader from Texas, found help from "Houston to Austin to Tulsa to St. Louis to Detroit, and finally to Windsor in Canada." Clerics, teachers, homemakers, and pacifists formed the core of the network. As Newsweek columnist Stewart Alsop noted, "the more middle-class and middle-aged the better," because such individuals did not draw the attention of federal and local authorities with the same regularity as did their younger, more radical counterparts.

Individuals and organizations throughout the South assisted, to varying degrees, dissident soldiers. For example, the Quaker House in Fayetteville, North Carolina, hosted weekly meetings for a Fort Bragg organization named GIs United Against the War in Vietnam. The Bradens went a step further. They had a printing press in the basement that soldiers used for an underground GI newspaper called FTA and subtitled Fun, Travel, Adventure, drawing from a military recruitment slogan. One of the first newspapers edited exclusively by GIs, "It was called FTA," noted Anne, and "What it really stood for was 'Fuck the Army." Despite nearly constant federal surveillance, the Bradens' home in the city's West End served as SCEF headquarters and became a "second home" for some of the soldiers from Fort Knox.

Ernst and Baldwin also describe other aspects of the antiwar movement that were also prominent in the South, like antiwar coffeehouses (decades before Starbucks!)and soldier's "underground" newspapers (the 1960s and 1970s equivalent of blogs). They write:

[A]n estimated three hundred GI underground newspapers appeared during the Vietnam era, but most lasted a year or less. Dissidents at Fort Knox and Fort Campbell, Kentucky, published at least half a dozen, including Flag-In-Action, Napalm, EM 16, In Formation, Spread Eagle, and People's Press. Perhaps the two most famous GI newspapers, both FTA and Fort Jackson's Short Times ran fairly regularly from 1968 through 1972...

Active-service GIs and veterans, including Vietnam veterans, were very much a part of the antiwar movement and became even more so as time went on.

The following is also an important point for those who argue - to my mind, in an astonishingly misguided way - that the antiwar movement of those days strengthened support for the war:

Like many of the GI coffeehouses, the one in Muldraugh proved extremely controversial, enjoyed a relatively brief life span, and thus on the surface could be judged a failure. Coffeehouses, however, served a significant purpose. They became way stations for young draftees and deserters on the Underground Railroad to Canada and fueled the growing GI movement by bringing civilian and military activists together.

It shouldn't be so hard to understand that the purpose of a protest movement is to protest. Ultimately, the goal is to produce constructive results. But as long as the protesters represent a minority, which the Vietnam War opponents did for much longer than the Iraq War critics had to face, a key part of their job is be a pain in the rear. And on the other end of the metaphor, to get in people's faces and make them think about what they are supporting.

Although what we remember as the activist women's movement of those days was a more widespread phenomenon of the 1970s than the 1960s, the antiwar movement was an important contributor to changing consciousness on sex-role issues and offered an opportunity and challenge to those who were interested in raising those issues. In the following passage, they remind us of the heavy hand of "respectability" and how that tyranny-of-the-majority social conformity affected the activists in various ways:

Like [famous pediatrician and antiwar activist Benjamin] Spock, Post believed in solidarity among the various groups that opposed the war even as they took on other social justice causes, and she faced the same challenges that he did in getting the antiwar organizations to work side by side with civil rights activists already radicalized by the struggle. Ironically, black war protesters encountered the same dilemma as they weighed coming out against Vietnam and thus possibly alienating their grassroots supporters. Both sets of dissidents risked antagonizing the government and being tarred with the brush of communism. Respectability was important, especially to middle-aged activists who recalled the spectacle of McCarthyism. They too risked losing everything if they went too far. Suzy Post enjoyed a certain level of respectability because of her socioeconomic status. "I came out of the great white Jewish middle class," Post noted. "My husband was a very successful trial lawyer so I could operate within that community with a kind of authority and legitimacy." Post described her work and the antiwar stance of her colleagues, including the Bradens and Edwards, in ethical terms. "It was a moral issue and it grew in the churches. Most of the people with whom I worked really didn't have a political perspective," she recalled, "they had a moral perspective." This absence of political perspective divided "traditional" antiwar women like Post from the younger generation of "radicals" who criticized the older women for their "false consciousness" and urged them to abandon the roles of mother and wife and demand instead to be treated equally by the government as citizens. (my emphasis)

This is part of why the whole discussion today about how Democrats need to show they respect religion seems so bizarre to me. Respect religion? "Putting God back in the public square"? Religious convictions and the moral considerations growing from them were a major part in the civil rights movement and the antiwar movement that contributed so much to shaping the Democratic Party of today. 95% of that talk about Democrats needing to emphasize religion is just rightwing white fundamentalists trying to claim God's sanction for militarism, neosegregationism and hostility to science. It's really amazing that such a brainless theme ever caught on as part of our political dialogue.

But the South was still emerging from the era of de facto segregation. And the social repression of dissident ideas still was taking its toll in notable ways. As Ernst and Baldwin write, "Martial patriotism, fear, and racism thinned the antiwar ranks in Dixie and prevented some who privately opposed the war from demonstrating publicly."

But there were demonstrations in the South, including in the "border state" of Kentucky. They describe the events of 1969 commemorating the one-year anniversary of Martin Luther King's assassination:

The King anniversary also sparked a demonstration in Louisville. To honor him and support the so-called Black Six (six African Americans who at the time faced trial over their alleged involvement in riots in Louisville in May 1968), about two hundred civil rights advocates, most of them blacks, started marching from Louisville's West End toward the county courthouse, the site of a scheduled memorial service. Coming from the other direction, down Broadway, 130 LPC demonstrators, primarily whites, marched to acknowledge King's antiwar contributions. The streets were full of people. According to Anne Braden, neither group had secured a permit to march, and neither was aware of the other's plans. "It was pure coincidence," Braden recalled, and no one had "enough sense on either side to call up and make some contacts." By chance, both groups hit Fourth and Broadway at the same moment and "overflowed" into the street. The police, probably fearing a recurrence of the May 1968 disorders, "quickly blocked the street to vehicles while the marchers clapped, sang and chanted their way" to the courthouse. At first, the blacks shouted, "Freedom, Freedom!" and the whites shouted, "Peace, Peace!" as they walked. Soon, however, they shouted both slogans in unison and raised a black flag. In a 1999 interview, Braden mused over what the movements could accomplish when they came together. "You took over Fourth Street," she asserted, "nobody could have stopped them, and nobody tried." Before the demonstration ended, Braden ran into George Edwards on the street. The two had at times disagreed over the Black Power movement because its supporters' advocacy of racial separation disturbed him. As their paths converged, Braden asked, "What do you think about that Black Power now? He just laughed," she recalled.

My own undergraduate alma mater, Millsaps College in Mississippi, even comes into their account:

Anne Braden's brainchild, the SSOC, a predominantly white group meant to complement SNCC, enjoyed some early success fighting for civil rights and other social justice causes, but it derailed on the Vietnam War. Organized in 1964 by delegates from fifteen southern colleges, the SSOC spread throughout the region and even reached into the Deep South. For example, in a Jackson, Mississippi, apartment, five SSOC activists calling themselves "The Army" produced an underground newspaper titled KUDZU and, with the help of Millsaps College students, distributed the publication at local high schools and at Mississippi State University. Headquartered in Nashville, just several hours from Louisville, the SSOC collaborated with the SCEF to set the agenda for the southern antiwar movement. The SCEF occasionally met in Nashville and lent cars to SSOC members, who in turn promoted the Louisville-based organization. The two groups worked together to create a new organization, the Southern Committee Against Repression (SCAR), and they initiated the Southern Movement News Service, a clearinghouse for coordinating the region's underground papers and movement newsletters. (my emphasis)

Ah, I can feel the old school spirit!

Now, this is a really strange twist. As weird as it seems now - and as weird as it should have seemed then - antiwar activists actually tried to use neo-Confederate symbolism to make their point. What influence people like those around today's neo-Confederate and isolationist LewRockwell.com group and Web site may have had in that, I don't know. I do recall Molly Ivins saying that she recalled that white supporters of the civil rights movement that she was around in Texas also looked by to Confederate heroes as some kind of model of honor. But that is weird. The best thing you can say about it is that it shows the absurd degree to which phony Lost Cause versions of history permeated the South. Ernst and Baldwin write:

The SSOC, backed by the SCEF and other groups, reached its peak in early 1969. Although an internal crisis soon splintered the group, it organized a four-day southern protest of the Nixon inauguration in Washington, D.C. The protesters chose a site near the White House at the statue of Union general William Tecumseh Sherman, whose scorched-earth tactics during the Civil War sought to break the South's spirit. The site symbolized "Yankee Imperialism and the colonial status of the South," claimed the young activists, who co-opted historical memory to allege that northern capitalists victimized southerners and Vietnamese alike.

The group's antiwar philosophy centered on "southern distinctiveness," which inspired some members and offended others. Some SSOC leaders admired the work of historian C. Vann Woodward and invited him to address the group. They also lionized southern progressives like Braden and began to emphasize white Confederates' "positive" traits of "bravery, loyalty, and devotion." "Not for slavery," they claimed, but for dedication to their families and homes. As one activist observed, "no revolution is gonna happen" without whites, and to recruit them the SSOC must examine "those very things that make Southerners what they are and build on them--using the symbols and peculiarities by which they have been taught to identify themselves." The Confederate flag reemerged as an important symbol, and rebel yells broke out at antiwar demonstrations where the SSOC "call[ed] for southerners to 'secede' from the war."

In June 1969 the southern identity issue imploded at a meeting near Edwards, Mississippi. SCEF representative Carl Braden attended, along with a number of SDS activists. Weakened by internal power struggles and eager to garner support in the South, SDS targeted SSOC members who rejected the Confederate symbolism, a move that, to the dismay of the Bradens, hastened the SSOC's self-destruction. (my emphasis)

Good grief! "Bravery, loyalty and devotion"?!? Couldn't these presumably mostly well-intentioned white activists have figured out that those alleged qualities were being exercised in support of slavery, white supremacy and treason? Well-intentioned or not - during that period it became routine to blame stuff in the movement you didn't like on police provocateurs, and that wasn't entirely paranoid - that business of opposing the war to defend the tradition of Suthun honuh handed down from the good ole white boys of the Confederacy, well, that was just whacked.

That's the Ron Paul school of war criticism.

When prowar fantasists today or airhead journalists start wondering why there's no huge demonstrations against the war, I always want to ask them why aren't we seeing mass demonstrations by those who support the war? Today's situation isn't entirely comparable in that regard to the Vietnam War days, because the Iraq War became unpopular among the majority years ago. If they're serious about reviving support for the Iraq War, the shrinking prowar minority should be demonstrating and getting in people's faces in the streets. But that would be more sacrifice than most war fans are willing to make in support of the Front Line Struggle Against The Terrorists on which they tell us the future of American civilization hangs.

But the prowar zealots had a bit of a time rounding up activists in Louisville in those days, too:

Some pro-war demonstrations occurred in Louisville. A rally in October 1967 produced a seemingly improbable combination: the Concerned Citizens Committee, the Total Effort for America Committee, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Committee for the Continuation of War for the Sake of Love and the Preservation of Peace. A year later the school board denied Edwards's request to speak at a meeting on behalf of the Louisville Peace Council. Edwards wanted to propose that peace advocates receive "equal time with military recruiters" in the high schools. Following the meeting, a parents' group, numbering about thirty, heckled Edwards while the press interviewed him. Some yelled "traitor," and many wore campaign paraphernalia promoting the 1968 presidential bid of George Wallace. In December 1969 a handful of individuals picketed outside the Atherton High School auditorium as Dr. Spock spoke. Their signs read "Free speech or treason?" "Dr. Spock--leader of loud-mouthed minority," and "Enter Hanoi Annex." Many of the city's residents, intensely anticommunist, held traditional southern values and strong religious convictions that supported the notion of duty and service to one's country, and as late as 1970, even if they were not willing to take to the streets to support the war, approximately two hundred parishioners walked out on an antiwar sermon at Fifth Street's Cathedral of the Assumption. (my emphasis)

I wonder how many of those 200 walkouts were white. About 200, I would guess. One might also wonder if any of them were bothered at all in that situation by the fact that Jesus was, uh, a pacifist. I'm guessing around zero on that one.

Perhaps the most incredible thing from today's perspective is that back then, there were Republicans - yes, actual members and officeholders of the Republican Party! - who were seriously critical of the Vietnam War. And not in the John Warner - oh, I'm going to wring my hands and mutter about my deep concern and always vote for the Cheney-Bush positions on any and all matters relating to the war - kind of way. No, I mean actual war critics:

The divergence of opinion over the war extended to politics and created some heated discussion among the state's leading Republicans. U.S. senator Thruston B. Morton, a native of the city, joined his influential counterpart, Senator John Sherman Cooper, early on in advocating American withdrawal from Vietnam, a position the former mayor of Louisville, U.S. representative William O. Cowger, severely criticized. Cowger accused Morton, a moderate Republican, of flip-flopping due to a growing "shift of public sentiment against the war." Analysts agreed, and Morton's 1967 turnaround became national news. Congressional colleagues considered the old national Republican Party chair (1959-1961) a "weathervane," a political professional, and a potential vice presidential candidate for the 1968 election. Gene Snyder, Louisville's other member of the House of Representatives, also became dovish, asserting in 1969 that America "ought to pack up and come home." (my emphasis)

Can you imagine, even imagine any Republican member of Congress other than the nativist, ultra-right, John Birch Society whacko-type Ron Paul saying something like that today? "We ought to just pack up and come home from Iraq?" Man, the times they have a-changed.

Now, I'm not making this up. Republican Senator John Sherman Cooper really was a leading critic of the Vietnam War. Even more exotic from today's viewpoint, he was part of a long-extinct species called "liberal Republicans". Yes, I know it sounds as mythical as a gryphon or a cyclops or something. But there is substantial evidence that sober-minded scholars credit than such creatures really did once exist. And, no, I'm not drunk or indulging in recreational drugs. Although I may have just had one too many cups of coffee.

At the end of their article, Ernst and Baldwin revisit the Lost Cause theme. I've been convinced for a while that this "never retreat, never surrender" notion about the Iraq War is related in some way to the Lost Cause dogma. I'm not sure if such a thing could ever be conclusively demonstrated. But here's their take on it:

With Vietnam, however, "history," in C. Vann Woodward's words, had "begun to catch up with Americans," and the war would not go away. As Woodward noted, the South's defeat in the Civil War created a unique southern experience, making the region emblematic of the entire nation as Vietnam stripped away the country's sense of innocence and "invincibility." Perhaps the entire nation came to grips with the idea of the Lost Cause and, as the U.S. sought national meaning and redemption, came to better understand why southerners, in an effort to exorcise their old demons, proudly sent more than their share to Southeast Asia. While Vietnam may have helped the nation understand the South's commitment to militarism, the conflict also stimulated the work of modern social justice activists like the Bradens, George Edwards, and Suzy Post. Though advocates of peace and progressive causes had always been a small minority in the South, this generation of activists was a vocal one, and a modern giant, Muhammad Ali, served as a symbol of its significance. (my emphasis)

I have to ask, though, how many times do Americans have to collectively lose our viriginity? Or, "lose our innocence", as the pundits like to put it. Weren't the Mexican War and the Civil War and Indian Wars enough times to lose our innocence? If not, there was the Spanish-American War which gave way to the godawful "small war" in the Phillipines. Then "we" lost our innocence again in the massive, mostly completely senseless slaughter that we know as the First World War. Then we lost our innocence again with the Vietnam War. Or was the Korean War the next loss of innocence? I lose track. Then there were the John and Bobby Kennedy assassinations and the King assassination that took away our national innocence yet again. By the time 9/11 came along, our innocence was ready to be lost again. Soon I'm sure we'll found out that our remarkably resilent innocence was sacrificed again in Iraq and then in Afghanistan.

I hate all these "national character" metaphors anyway. Individuals have characters. Nations make collective decision and do things.

Maybe "we" could collectively make a deal with the cosmos, or the karmic force, or whatever entity will deal with us over it. "We" agree to give up "our" innocence forever, never ever to have it back again. And in return, The Force will allow us to not ever have to spread our innocence to other lucky nations in the world by invading their countries and bombing, shooting and torturing them into being innocent like us.

Deal?

Tags: antiwar movement, antiwar protest, john ernst, lost cause, millsaps college, vietnam war, yvonne baldwin war, yvonne baldwin

Was the antiwar movement against the Vietnam War counterproductive?

Tom Hayden, post-1968

This is a view that even some careful researchers have rather amazingly come to accept. I've explained in a number of posts why I believe this view is seriously flawed.

For one thing, that view often seems to overlook the nature of protest itself. There's not nearly so much incentive to protest if most people already agree with you. The anti-Vietnam War protests were aimed at changing people minds. In other words, by their very nature many people would find the protest a pain in the rear. That not the same thing as saying that the protests were ineffective.

In his book The Year the Dream Died: Revisiting 1968 in America (1997), which I quoted in the last post, Jules Witcover interviewed Tom Hayden, who was one of the best-known figures in the 1960s antiwar movement and also a founder of the American Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). There was a German SDS, also called Students for a Democratic Society which in German happened to come out to the initials SDS also, but it and the American SDS were not part of the same group.

Witcover questioned Hayden as to whether "the excesses of the radicals of 1968, of whom he was a leader, fueled the rise of conservatism and the resurrection of the Republican party after the Goldwater debacle of 1964". Hayden rejected that argument "sharply". In his response, Hayden pointed to how strongly the image of what Digby calls DFH's, for "dirty [Cheney]ing hippies", continued to antimate the Republican Party in the late 1990s:

"Law and order meant the status quo at that time [1968] against the perceived threat of the blacks, the students, the women, the antiwar demonstrators," Hayden said. "You still see that today. It very much animates [Newt] Gingrich's consciousness when he talks about rescuing American civilization, or rescuing Western civilization. He's talking about rescuing his version of the status quo from what he perceives to be the Visigoths and barbarians at the gates, who are all these people from the sixties. (my emphasis)

People used to counsel African-Americans not to push too hard in the 1960s for their basic rights as citizens because they might provoke a "white backlash". Martin Luther King remarked at one point that it looked like to him that whites had been backlashing for quite a while already.

What Hayden points out there is accurate and important. The perennial Republican bogeyman of the DFH's is not just about white people with flower-power clothes demonstrating against the war. It's a mishmash of all sorts of "culture war" fears, not least of which is the image of black people being equal citizens. When Ronald Reagan in his 1966 campaign for California governor, before the Summer of Love in 1967 and before the various events of 1968, fired up his white audiences by telling him that hippies were people who "act like Tarzan, look like Jane, and smell like Cheetah", neither he nor his audiences were thinking only about pot-smoking white guys with shoulder-length hair.

In this case, other groups could have proposed a similar retort to Reagan and his culture-war fans as King posed. Should Vietnam veterans, religious activists and the others who opposed the Vietnam War have just shut the hell up the way Reagan and his supporters wanted them to? Who was being more sensible in 1966, the war critics who were pointed out problems? Or the cheerleaders who just swallowed those over-optimistic assessments of progress from the Johnson administration and the happy-talk generals?

Hayden points to the Vietnam War itself as a decisive factor in the political rebound of the Republicans. After all, it was the Democratic Johnson administration that had placed half a million US troops in Vietnam:

"But there's quite another way to look at it, a better way," he said. "The United States never should have been involved in the war in Vietnam. That's the root cause, because it created a sea of blood that created lasting emotions, feelings and resentments. It prevented the possible completion of the antipoverty effort and the urban agenda which led directly to the conditions for the black riots, the insurrections, further bloodshed and creation of a climate of law and order.

"If there's blame, and I'm only responding to those who want to blame the New Left, the root responsibility was the decision to continue escalating the war in Vietnam in 1963, 1964, 1965. ... If you want to place a date when it ill went wrong it was the Gulf of Tonkin decision in August 1964. That was it. So all the conservatives, the people who blame the New Left, are doing is focusing on a later set of events that brought about the beginning of a Republican ascendancy. ...

"If you go back four years earlier, if you want to get down to what really divided the country, what caused the reform-minded students to become revolutionaries, what caused a breakdown of trust, what caused the racial violence, it was the escalation of the war in Vietnam. ... If Johnson had acted on the recommendations of his advisers who wanted to emphasize the Great Society and deal with the unrest in the cities, [the riots] might not have happened." (my emphasis)

We should remember that urban riots in predominantly black ghettos in the cities were very much on people's minds in 1968. After Martin Luther King's assassination on April 4, 1968, riots broke out in over 100 cities.

Marvin Gettleman and his fellow editors wrote in their notes to Vietnam and America: A Documented History (1985):

The nationwide reaction to the murder of Dr. King in some ways rivaled the Tet Offensive, to which it bore similarities by no means purely coincidental. Between April 4 and April 11, 1968, rebellions broke out in 125 US cities and towns.

They go on to point out that Westmoreland had requested an additional 206,000 troops for Vietnam. Part of the military's thinking in that request, as Jeffrey Record has described, was to force Johnson to mobilize the reserves, which they believed would not only provide better troops than they were getting through the draft but would also bolster public support for the Vietnam War. Gettleman, et al, write:

The uprisings [urban riots] of early April realized [the] worst fears [of "worried decision-makers in the Pentagon and the White House"]. In that cataclysmic week, 55,000 troops had to be mobilized alongside tens of thousands of police. Television viewers around the world saw Washington itself defended by federal combat troops, while columns of smoke from burning buildings towered above the Capitol. On April 11 came the biggest call-up of the reserves during the Vietnam War.

Protests followed at many colleges and universities around the country, with events tending to link the issues of the King assassination, civil rights and the Vietnam War in the minds of both protesters and the public.

And there were violent protests occurring in other contexts, as well. In 1969, for instance, there were around 5,000 protest bombings in the United States, something rarely heard of these days. We should note that over 60% of those bombings were related in some way to labor conflicts.

My point in describing this context is not to justify riots or to romanticize the use of Molotov cocktails. It's to say that there were a lot more social conflicts going on than hippies smoking dope and the occasional antiwar demonstrators getting rowdy.

And to meaningfully understand the political dynamics of that period, it's necessary to ask, for instance, since the Vietnam War was being waged by a Democratic administration and the Presidential candidate (Nixon) elected in 1968 was a Republican who assured voters he had a secret plan to end the war, how does that translate into antiwar protests being counterproductive?

And if the public saw a Democratic administration calling out troops to quell rioting black people in 1968, why is it that "backlashing" Southern whites who supported the Vietnam War being waged by that same Democratic administration were repelled by that same administration?

The answers to those questions aren't simple, either. But they do suggest how lacking the simple-minded assumptions of the conventional wisdom about that period really are. Not to speak of the assumptions of Christian Right culture warriors.

Hayden's comments to Witcover about the violent radical group the Weather Underground, which was similar in ideology to the German Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF), but unlike the RAF did not use kidnappings or murder as part of their repertoire, are also notable.

Even before the disillusionment of 1968, Hayden said, the Students for a Democratic Society of which he had been a founder and intellectual voice "was cracking up. The first wave of radical reformers like myself had gone. ... A new, more disillusioned radicalism was sprouting, from 1965 to 1968, and in the wake of 1968 you had a further splintering into what became the Weather Underground, which had concluded that only by violent disruption [could change be achieved].

"This was not a completely mindless approach," he said. "The new leaders of SDS who became the Weather Underground were the younger brothers and sisters of the people who had started SDS in a rosier time. You know how you get into fights in a family. Well, they felt that our generation had failed. By that they meant reform had not occurred. In fact, more people were getting killed in Vietnam, and people trying to reform the system in Mississippi had been denied, and in Chicago had been beaten up with clubs. So they took the leap from that to the conclusion that the establishment didn't listen to reason, or morality or to marching feet or even to votes. The change would only come about if the establishment faced a continual low-grade, violent headache at home.

"And so you started to get these bombings of power lines, ROTC buildings. But never before, in many years, [except] maybe in labor strikes, had there been this much violent disruption in America. If you look at it amorally as a historian would, you'd have to say they had some effect. They may not have brought about reform and they certainly didn't bring about the good society or the blessed community. But they did add, just as they thought they would, to the burden of the establishment going on with the Vietnam War. It became clearer and clearer that if you went on with the Vietnam War, you were creating more and more of this chaos at home." (my emphasis)

Again, no simple answers. I would add that the electoral presence in American politics of any group that shared the ideology of the Weather Underground was pretty much precisely zero. What the effects of their violent activities - like successful symbolic bombings (i.e., symbolic in being non-lethal by design) - may have been, it's hard to say. I don't recall ever seeing any polls that attempted to measure that, but there probably were. As Hayden indicates, they did add some element of disruption to the political scene.

I suppose I should also add that I don't see Hayden's comments as in any way approving of the Weather Underground's particular approach, although that should be clear from the passage I quoted itself.

Now, in the fevered minds of Republican culture warriors, there is little or no distinction between Congressional war critics, underground Marxist-Leninist sects, scary rioting Negroes, and Sunni Salafist suicide bombers. And that strange identification of wildly disparate groups in their ideology and political imagery is a fact in itself that has to be taken into account.

It just shouldn't be confused with reality-based history.

Tags: antiwar movement, antiwar protest, tom hayden, vietnam war, weather underground

"Hippies" and the Tet Offensive in the Vietnam War

American soldiers in the Battle of Hamo Village during the Tet Offensive, 1968

It's become an article of faith among Republican propagandists, and even among many serious military and foreign policy theorists, that the Tet Offensive in Vietnam in early 1968 was a military victory for the United States. But it turned public opinion against the war, making the weak-kneed public insist on pulling the rug out from under Gen. William Westmoreland's invincible forces just as they were winning.

Another variation in this view holds that when Gen. Creighton Abrams took over Westmoreland's command, he implemented a successful clear-and-hold campaign that routed the Vietcong (National Liberation Front/NLF). And the Communists would never have won if those back-stabbing Democrats hadn't cut off additional funding to the South Vietnamese government in 1975.

This is the essence of the stab-in-the-back view of the Vietnam War. And we see a similar political myth already being constructed around the Iraq War, no matter how it actually ends.

Antiwar protesters in the heartland (Wichita KS) in 1967

It's a subject that I've returned to here again and again. Because it's important for more than one reason. In an historical sense, it's a question of getting an accurate understanding of what happened. It also is a key factor in looking at how public opinion in the United States responds to war situations. And it also says something about which strategies of communicating to the public about a war in progress may be more effective.

The period immediately after the Tet Offensive which began in January 1968 is one of the key periods, because that's when the political alignments shifted on the war in a decisive way. Although in popular memory, the war was rejected by the public at this time, that needs to be kept in context. There was a strong public reaction against the war after the Tet Offensive. But even then, the percentage of Americans rejecting the Vietnam War was not as high as those rejecting the Iraq War now. Whatever similarities exist between the two wars, the Iraq War has been clearly more unpopular and became unpopular faster.

In his book The Year the Dream Died: Revisiting 1968 in America (1997), Jules Witcover - who is good enough of a journalist it seems a shame to call him part of the Establishment press any more - wrote about a meeting on 02/27/1968 that included incoming Defense Secretary Clark Clifford, outgoing SecDef Robert McNamara and Secretary of State Dean Rusk.

On the same day, according to Clifford in his memoir, Counsel to the President, both Clifford and McNamara in another meeting with Dean Rusk reacted strongly to continued claims that the Tet Offensive had been an enemy defeat, and to pressures for a major increase in American forces in Vietnam. "Despite these optimistic reports," Clifford said, "the American people and world opinion believe we have suffered a major setback. How do we gain support for major programs if we have told people that things are going well? How do we avoid creating the feeling that we are pounding troops down a rathole? What is our purpose? What is achievable?" Clifford wrote that he then asked for a review of "our entire posture" in Vietnam, which Johnson soon ordered, under Clifford's direction.

At the same meeting, Clifford wrote, "as Rusk responded with a discussion of the need to intensify the bombing of North Vietnam, a remarkable event took place. Overcome with conflicting emotions, Bob McNamara's controlled exterior cracked. The goddamned Air Force, they're dropping more on North Vietnam than we dropped on Germany in the last year of World War II, and it's not doing anything!' he said. His voice faltered, and for a moment he had difficulty speaking between suppressed sobs. He looked at me: 'We simply have to end this thing. I just hope you can get hold of it. It is out of control.' We were all stunned, but, out of a shared pain and sense of embarrassment, we went on with the discussion as though nothing out of the ordinary had occurred. Everyone in the room understood what had happened: this proud, intelligent, and dedicated man was reaching the end of his strength on his last full day in office. He was leaving the Pentagon just in time." (my emphasis)(pp. 80-81)

Witcover also relates the reaction of New York Sen. Robert Kennedy, for whom the Tet Offensive was a decisive event persuading him to break more clearly with the Johnson administration's Vietnam War policies:

A tipoff to Kennedy's intentions came in a speech on the Senate floor on March 7. Fulbright had just made his demand that before LBJ sent 206,000 more Americans to Vietnam, the Senate should be consulted. Kennedy seconded the demand with a blistering attack. Every time there was a problem in Vietnam over the previous seven years, he said, "the answer has always been to escalate the conflict. It has always been to send more troops. And at the time we sent the larger number of troops, or increased the bombing, we have always stated that there would be light at the end of the tunnel, that victory is just ahead of us. The fact is that victory is not just ahead of us. It was not in 1961 or 1962, when I was one of those who predicted there was light at the end of the tunnel. There was not in 1963 or 1964 or 1965 or 1966 or 1967, and there is not now. ...

"Moreover, there is a question of our moral responsibility. Are we like the God of the Old Testament that we can decide, in Washington, D.C., what cities, what towns, what hamlets in Vietnam are going to be destroyed? ... Do we have that authority to kill tens and tens of thousands of people because we say we have a commitment to the South Vietnamese people? But have they been consulted, in Hue, in Ben Tre, or in the other towns that have been destroyed? Do we have the authority to put hundreds of thousands of people - in fact, millions of people - into refugee camps for their protection, or should these decisions be left to them?"

This time Kennedy did not shy away from criticizing Johnson. Citing corruption in the South Vietnamese military draft, he recalled that "when this was brought to the attention of the president, he replied that there was stealing in Beaumont, Texas. If there is stealing in Beaumont, Texas," Kennedy said, "it is not bringing about the death of American boys." (pp. 97-98)

Leaving aside Kennedy's somewhat shaky pre-Vatican II theology about "the God of the Old Testament", it strikes me that for all the hoo-ha we've had the last two and a half decades over "putting God back into the public square", as the highbrow Christian Right types like to put it, we rarely hear elected officials these days evoking a religious thought this bluntly in relation to war. Too bad. Maybe we need to get the side of the Christian God that hates war and killing back more prominently into the "public square".

The Tet Offensive did shape American opinions about the war. But it was not a matter that the civilians back home mistook an American military victory in that encounter - which in conventional terms it was. It was that the Tet Offensive jolted many people, from ordinary citizens who had doubts about the war to war critics in Congress to even President Johnson himself, into taking a new and more realistic look at the costs and benefits of the war.

It may sound particularly manly or tough-minded to old Republican white guys (and younger ones, too!) to act as though the only goal of a military action is the complete and total surrender of the enemy and the destruction of their government and the occupation of their territory by American troops. We did that in Iraq, and that's not really turning out that happily.

In the real world, everyone other than our more delirious hawks does make some calculation about costs and benefits in war. Undoubtedly, some of the costs and benefits of a war are no less real and important for being intangible. But it just doesn't make sense to pour huge amount of American lives and treasure and kill a lot of people on the Other Side (civilians and combatants) in a cause that is not significant and important to American security.

This is not a new concept. It was formulated by St. Augustine in his concept of the Just War, which remains the basis of the Catholic Christianity's view of war.

And that's what happened in 1968 for many people. There were two critical factors in the change in attitudes. One was that Gen. Westmoreland was requesting an escalation of another 200,000 or so troops in Vietnam and could offer the civilian decision-makers not realistic assurance that it would achieve the goal of preserving a non-Communist South Vietnam by defeating the NLF and the North Vietnamese. The costs of the war were going up. And the perceived benefits were shrinking.

The other thing was that both civilian and military leaders had been presenting an unrealistically optimistic view of the progress of the war. Or, less diplomatically, they had been lying to the public about it. Some of that was no doubt self-deception. Some of it was propaganda happy-talk. But once the Tet Offensive exposed it for being wildly exaggerated, the credibility of both civilian and military spokespeople on the war plummeted. And didn't really return, even with a new administration in 1969.

This is not to say that the antiwar movement didn't have an effect. On the contrary. It's just that the loss of credibility of official spokespeople, which the Tet Offensive accelerated but didn't exclusively cause, along with a new look by many people at costs and benefits of the war, gave a broader hearing to the antiwar movement.

Tags: antiwar movement, antiwar protest, vietnam war

Tom Engelhardt on the anti-Vietnam War movement

Tom Engelhardt this week in Americans in the Opinion Polls, Not in the Streets TomDispatch.com 03/25/07 addressed a question that Marigolds2 raised here at The Blue Voice earlier this month. That question being, with the Iraq War so unpopular, why aren't we seeing more obvious public protests? As Engelhardt phrases it:

And yet the translation of all this sentiment [today], of these conclusions, into visible action, despite inspirational moments, has generally been less than overwhelming. Yes, in the years since the invasion, there have been a few enormous marches; and yes, there are groups that protest regularly, even heroically; and yes, in cities and towns across the country, protesters have gone out weekly with their signs, sometimes to freezing mid-winter street corners, simply to make a point. Nonetheless, given the extremity of the Bush administration and its acts, it's hard not to wonder why, most of the time, the levels of mobilization have been so relatively weak.

He has some interesting thoughts on this issue, including the notion that people are judging that supporting antiwar organizations like MoveOn.org by contributions is an effective way of making their position known. I think that may be partially true.

But I especially want to call attention to a historical observation he makes that goes so far away from the conventional wisdom that even people reading or hearing it may just disregard it because it contradicts a familiar image:

In the Vietnam era, though few realize this, antiwar sentiment was strongest at the bottom, in the blue-collar world. As Vietnam scholar Chris Appy has pointed out, for instance, a Gallup poll in January 1971 "showed that the less formal education you had, the more likely you were to want the military out of [Vietnam]: 80% of Americans with grade school educations were in favor of a U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam; 75% of high school graduates agreed; only among college graduates did the figure drop to 60%." (my emphasis)

Yes, that's what it says. Working-class people, the proverbial "hard hats" in the media abbreviation of the Nixon days, were more opposed to the Vietnam War than were the kind of people who sent their kids to Ivy League schools. Actually, that fact was reflected on college campuses in that the state colleges and universities, who drew a much higher proportion of their students from less affluent families, generally had more active antiwar movements.

Today's Republican "culture warriors" can't afford to recognize this, of course, because they have such a fond image of privileged rich kids becoming dirty hippies and rudely protesting in their spoiled comfortable existence. It's a bizarre kind of "populism" when the OxyContin bloviators of the world can ridicule their opponents as being rich and lazy, all the while pushing policies that will disproportionately (and often exclusively) benefit the idle rich more than anyone else.

But then Engelhardt makes an argument that I've also seen Eric Alterman make, that the fewer the antiwar protests, the better:

Those of us who can use the tumultuous mobilizations of the Vietnam era as a point of comparison - there was even a group called The Mobe then - are certainly aware that this time around nothing comparable has happened. It's crossed my mind that there might even be a silver lining in the disappearance of those large, boisterous prewar crowds, in the fact that, generally speaking, the country seems, in protest terms, strangely demobilized. ...

What largely neutralized the full development of antiwar sentiment among the majority of Americans in [the Vietnam War] era was, I believe, the strength of anti-antiwar-movement sentiment, the visceral reaction of many working-class Americans against the crowds of protestors, against the look of that far wilder moment (and a media that invariably focused its cameras and attention on the wildest-looking of the demonstrators, especially those carrying the flags of the enemy and chanting, "Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, NLF is going to win"). That visceral dislike for antiwar sentiment, as expressed in the streets, was strongest at the bottom. In other words, in those years, angry feelings about the disastrous war in Vietnam were offset by angry feelings about the most visible of those demonstrating against it.

I think this is both a misreading of historical events and also a misunderstanding of how protests movements work. To start with, the whole idea of a protest is to bring pressure on someone (bosses, war-loving members of Congress, etc.)to do something different than what they are doing. People opposing a war in progress are going to start out as a minority among the public in any country. So part of the purpose of protests, especially early in the process, is to make people aware of the issue by making people aware of the issue and challenge their way of thinking about it.

But the argument that the antiwar protests on the whole were counter-productive seems really far-fetched to me. Yes, active protests polarize and to some extent energize people on the other side. But more and more people came to oppose the Vietnam War. When Congress got restrictions on the war enacted into law in 1973 with Democrats leading that effort, the Democrats increased their numbers in Congress substantially in the next elections in 1974, though obviously the Watergate scandal was a factor. After they passed further restrictions in 1975, the Democrats won the Presidency in 1976. In other words, public opinion moved in the direction of the protesters' view of the war.

Other factors also were present in the "culture war" reaction that focused in part on antiwar demonstrators. like years of civil rights demonstrations and urban riots, the latter of which occurred nationwide after the assassination of Martin Luther King. Rightwing politicians like Ronald Reagan encouraged their followers to see antiwar protesters in the same light as they saw black people whom they feared. All those things have to be taken into account in looking at how the general public viewed antiwar protesters.

Tom Engelhardt is certainly no conservative. But this particular argument that the anti-Vietnam War protesters created more support for the war (or at least made people not oppose it as fast, or as much, or something) reminds me for all the world like the "friendly" advice reformers of any kind always get: "I'm sympathetic to what you want. But if you workers/black folks/women/suffragettes/antislavery/and-so-one advocates go out protesting and stuff and actually stating your opinions in public, you'll alienate people. There'll be a backlash. You'll hurt your own cause."

If all reformers and would-be activists had taken this advice, we would have no labor unions and lots of child labor, no Social Security and lots more poor old people, no anti-discrimination laws protecting minorities but lots of female employees getting fired for becoming pregnant, very few African-Americans in the South voting but lots of whites-only toilets and water fountains.

In fact, if somebody isn't telling protesters they're causing a backlash, then they're probably not protesting about anything of much importance.

Engelhardt adds:

Interesting enough, according to John Mueller of Ohio State University, an expert on the subject, the loss of support the Bush administration has experienced for its Iraqi adventure has followed the same arc as in the Vietnam era (and the Korean War era as well); but, in the Iraqi case, support has eroded far more "precipitously," based on far fewer American casualties and, Mueller wrote back in late 2005, "there is little the Bush administration can do to reverse this decline."

On this he proved correct. If anything, the decline in support seems only to have intensified in recent months, leaping well ahead of equivalent figures for the Vietnam era. Only four years into the Iraqi catastrophe, polling figures match or exceed those for 1970 (perhaps seven years into the Vietnam conflict, depending on how you count) on questions like whether you favor the complete withdrawal of American forces. In 1970, for instance, 56% of Americans thought going into Vietnam had been a mistake, already way below figures for Iraq. In the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll, for example, a record 64% of Americans say the war was "not worth fighting."

He links to John Mueller's much-discussed article, The Iraq Syndrome Foreign Affairs Nov/Dec 2005. He opens that article with this observation:

American troops have been sent into harm's way many times since 1945, but in only three cases - Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq - have they been drawn into sustained ground combat and suffered more than 300 deaths in action. American public opinion became a key factor in all three wars, and in each one there has been a simple association: as casualties mount, support decreases. Broad enthusiasm at the outset invariably erodes.

The only thing remarkable about the current war in Iraq is how precipitously American public support has dropped off. Casualty for casualty, support has declined far more quickly than it did during either the Korean War or the Vietnam War. And if history is any indication, there is little the Bush administration can do to reverse this decline.

And he also argues:

This lower tolerance for casualties is largely due to the fact that the American public places far less value on the stakes in Iraq than it did on those in Korea and Vietnam. The main threats Iraq was thought to present to the United States when troops went in - weapons of mass destruction and support for international terrorism - have been, to say the least, discounted. With those justifications gone, the Iraq war is left as something of a humanitarian venture, and, as Francis Fukuyama has put it, a request to spend "several hundred billion dollars and several thousand American lives in order to bring democracy to ... Iraq" would "have been laughed out of court." Given the evaporation of the main reasons for going to war and the unexpectedly high level of American casualties, support for the war in Iraq is, if anything, higher than one might expect - a reflection of the fact that many people still connect the effort there to the "war" on terrorism, an enterprise that continues to enjoy huge support. In addition, the toppling of Saddam Hussein remains a singular accomplishment - something the American people had wanted since the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

Mueller has a particular need to explain how the Iraq War is supposedly different in how many casualties the US public is willing to support compared to the wars in Korea and Vietnam, because his argument is that opposition to those two earlier wars was driven by the number of casualties.

The notion that the American public is especially "casualty averse" is one that's widely accepted by the officer corps and the foreign policy specialists. But it's a highly questionable one. Because at one level of course normal people, i.e., not neocons or other varieties of Republican warmongers, don't like to see American soldiers getting killed and injured.

But when you start thinking about what made public support for the Second World War different from that in the Vietnam War or the Iraq War, increasing number of casualties could be a false correlation. For one thing, number of casualties is a mathematical quantity. The fact that the President lied like sin to get the war started isn't so easily quantifiable. But the easily quantifiable set of numbers fits into computer models much better.

This whole discussion reminds me of an argument I once had with an economist who was defending the brilliance of an econometic model that predicted the outcome of Presidential elections from economic conditions. I had two main arguments with the model. One was that it simply ignored the enormous amount of polling data with sound methodology in which people state how they voted and why they voted that way. The other was that in its retroactive predictions, it showed that the Vietnam War had absolutely nothing to do with the voting in Presidential election of 1968. Even the most superficial knowledge about that election should be enough to tell the problem with that.

Like I said, it was an economist I was arguing with. I had no chance of convincing him.

This is a topic that intrigues me, so I'm likely to revisit it.

Tags: antiwar movement, antiwar protest, iraq war, tom engelhardt, vietnam war