http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20021028&s=pollitt
column | Posted October 10, 2002 SUBJECT TO DEBATE by KATHA POLLITT
[clip] But then, the antiwar movement too has some tricky terrain to negotiate. In his LA Weekly column and in the Los Angeles Times Marc Cooper mounted a characteristically energetic double-barreled attack on the antiwar movement for lacking human sympathy for the victims of 9/11, not giving America credit for anything good, underplaying the badness of Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, continuing to bemoan the invasion of Afghanistan when it actually turned out pretty well, and letting itself be represented by former Attorney General Ramsey Clark, anti-imperialist hard-liner and co-chair of the International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic. I don't think the antiwar movement right now is as monolithic as Cooper makes out or as numerically insignificant either (see Liza Featherstone's rather more optimistic report in this issue). Iraq isn't Afghanistan redux. But in any case, it's hard to imagine the means by which the movement could purge itself of the people Cooper dislikes. Isn't it the nature of ad hoc coalitions that they bring together wildly disparate factions with different reasons for supporting the same limited goal? If Ralph Nader can bond with Phyllis Schlafly to fight Channel One, and Cooper himself could pen valentines to John McCain because this warlike reactionary's primary run struck him as a challenge to the two-party system (right--who's going around the country stumping for every Republican running? but I digress), surely there's room enough in the peace movement for all sorts of people who oppose invading Iraq for a broad, and contradictory, spectrum of reasons. Besides, those anti-imperialist hard-liners work like Trojans.
That said, the extremely unsympathetic nature of the enemy presents a potential problem for the antiwar movement. Who can regret that the Taliban is gone? Who will mourn Saddam Hussein? As for Al Qaeda, the day the left lets itself appear to be defending Muslim fundamentalists as challengers of American hegemony--albeit by slitting the throats of schoolgirls, murdering writers, arresting partygoers, stoning rape victims and crashing passenger planes into office towers full of ordinary working people--is the day American hegemony starts to look like a good idea."