Protesting

Kingdaddy attended a protest commemorating the third anniversary of the start of the Iraq War, and wasn’t pleased:

The speakers displayed their tin ear for American politics in other ways. A Middle East expert blew several minutes dissecting the Bush Administration’s public statements on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A folk singer belted out a tune about how Americans like to blame “welfare immigrant mothers on drugs” for all their problems. After the mother of an army lieutenant killed in Iraq gave the rally touched the nerve that a majority of Americans are feeling about Iraq, a local public radio personality stopped the political and emotional momentum with a rambling discussion about the Bush Administration.

The organizers had an opportunity, and lost it. You don’t need a manifesto to explain why you should be against the current US strategy in Iraq. Instead, you need only listen to someone like the mother of Lt. Ken Ballard, who said what a growing number of Americans are feeling: we did not need to fight this war; we were lied to about the reasons for the invasion, which then kept changing; we were ill equipped for the insurgency; too many Americans and Iraqis are now dying, without the substantive progress that might justify their sacrifices; and in the end, we are not safer than we were the day before the 9/11 attacks.

I can’t say whether Kingdaddy’s experience at the protest was representative of other protests, although I can say that it resonates with MY experience at such events. Nevertheless, even though I agree with a lot of Kingdaddy’s account, my agreement leaves me feeling vaguely uncomfortable.

I suppose that my first problem is that these events usually attract committed, anti-war leftists, and I am far from a committed anti-war leftist. This is neither my fault nor theirs, but it still produces a disconnect. I’m not anti-war in a politically meaningful sense; I’ve supported every other major military intervention that the US has conducted in my lifetime, although I really haven’t taken the time to rethink Lebanon or Grenada since I was eight. Of course I’m going to be uncomfortable with a genuine condemnation of US “militarism”, US foreign policy, and (although rarely seen these days) the US military. I could never condone a withdrawal from Afghanistan, for example, and I still haven’t fully politically forgiven a friend of mine for superimposing a swastika over a NATO star at an anti-Kosovo War rally. To the extent that protests about the Iraq War almost always seem to extend beyond the Iraq War to a more general critique of US foreign policy, I’m left cold.

My second problem is that I’ve never understood the web of connections between a particular war and the other issues that animate the Left. I hate the word “moderate” when it’s applied to political beliefs, and I especially detest self-declared “moderates” and “centrists”, but I am, after all, kind of moderate. There are some issues, like trade, on which I’m much more likely to agree with those on the right than with those on the left. I think that recognizing Israel’s right to exist is a good thing, and I’m deeply suspicious of the motives of any number of foreign countries. Like Kingdaddy, I think that universal health care, the Iraq War, and vegetarianism really are separate and distinct issues, although this seems a minority of opinion at these kinds of rallies.

But I’m also uncomfortable, because I know that any political movement must bring together a whole set of different interest groups, and that those who feel most strongly are likely to make up the vanguard in any struggle. There are some incredibly bad arguments for NOT staying in Iraq, and for NOT invading Iraq in the first place, but it’s important not to pay so much attention to those that I forget that there are good arguments, as well. No demonstration for any cause, really, is going to look like middle America, even if it has the tacit support of the majority, and the energy that people spend on these things has to be honored in some way.

Then again, I can’t help feeling that some people are just idiots, and are wholly detrimental to the causes they support. I feel that way a lot about Gore Vidal, for example. I’ve been sitting on this Vidal interview in the Nation for a while because I just haven’t been sure how to approach it. This exchange here particularly grabbed me:

Q: If, indeed, this Administration is collapsing for lack of weight, what comes after it?

A: Martial law, that’s next. Bush is like a plane of glass. You can see all the worms turning around in his head at any moment. The first giveaway of what’s on his mind–or the junta’s mind.

Q: The junta being…?

A: Cheney, who runs everything, I suspect. And a few other serious operators. Anyway, I first noticed this was on their mind when Bush finally woke up to the fact that the hurricanes were not going to be good PR for him. And he starts to think friends of his are going to be running in ’08. So what’s the first thing he does? The first thing on the mind of a dictator? He gets the National Guard away from the governors. The Guard is under the governors, but Bush is always saying, Let’s turn it over to the military. This is what’s on their mind. Under military control.

Q: Are you predicting a coming military dictatorship? And that the American people would stand for that?

A: They’ll stand for anything. And they will stand for nothing.

Just what in the hell has to be wrong with you to think that George Bush is about to order a military junta? Anyone who has been awake over the past four years might have noticed that the uniformed military and the Republican Party are not the same entity, and indeed stand at odds on a number of important questions, not least the conduct of the Iraq War. For Vidal, though, there is no difference; Cheney is evil, the military is evil, and therefore their ends and means must be identical. As far as I’m concerned, this kind of analysis is worse than useless; it makes us look like idiots.

So my not terribly insightful conclusion to this overly long post is that moderate dissenters of the war need to express tolerance for the truly committed, but that this tolerance can’t be unlimited. There can be enemies on the left, but that the Reynolds/Hitchens trap of emphasizing only the worst arguments against the war or in favor of withdrawal is very dangerous.