Successes of the antiwar movement? (Re: [lbo-talk] Re: WBAI's ambitions

[Bradford DeLong]

>They started with two-thirds of the public polling as opposed to going to
>war without UN approval.  That's a strong place to start and they lost 40%
>of the population initially opposed to unilateral war to now supporting
>Bush's war.
>
>So what's the achievement? Tactical successes such as a few big rallies?
>Rallies are means, not achievements.  Why should we praise tactics that
>coincided with AN INCREASE in support for uniltateral war?  The February
>global rallies seemed to make a small untick in opposition but it was pretty
>ephemeral.
>
>The idea that the left will inevitably lose just gives license to this kind
>of justification for failed tactics and a refusal to do analysis on how to
>win.  I do political work to win, not because I think it's some kind of
>moral witness to inevitable failure.  So failure is failure.  In the 2000
>election, I criticized both Nader's and Gore's failures and neither excused
>the others, since the end result was Bush's Presidency.  I'll amen
>criticisms of union campaigns when there are alternative tactics that were
>ignored that could have been more successful.
>
>And from the beginning, I argued the antiwar movement was concentrating too
>much on rallies and not enough on outreach to the uncommitted.  And it was
>precisely that middle 40% of the population that was lost during the public
>debate over the last few months.

It doesn't seem to me that the loss of the middle 40% is due to any 
of the failures of the antiwar movement. It seems to me that the loss 
of the middle 40% is due to three things:

--First, the success of the Bush Administration in blurring the 
distinction between "Saddam Hussein supports terrorism" (large 
payments to families of people who blow up Israelis in shopping 
centers) and "Saddam Hussein is allied with Al Qaeda and is a threat 
to the United States." Once that distinction is lost--once the 
distinction between the U.S.'s war on Al Qaeda and its ilk and 
Israel's war against those in the Arab world who want to see the 
country driven into the sea and a lot of dead Jews disappears--a lot 
more people are going to be in favor of overthrowing Saddam Hussein 
(and Bashar Assad, and the House of Saud, and the Theocrats of 
Tehran: this is a very dangerous road we are starting down--one in 
which forces that want to destroy Israel are automatically seen as 
Osama bin Laden's comrades-in-arms).

--Second, the success of the Bush Administration in portraying U.N. 
opposition as due to Jacques Chirac's intransigence--that Chirac is 
simply uninterested in any form of effective containment of Saddam 
Hussein no matter what, and his ability to block U.N. action means 
that the U.N. cannot be taken seriously here.

--Third, the fact that the neocons turned out to be closer to being 
correct about the social bases of Saddam Hussein than they had any 
right to be. I expected nationalism plus anti-imperialism plus Arab 
unity to give Saddam Hussein considerable forces in this war. But 
they didn't. There were some Fedayeen Saddam willing to fight--but 
they were untrained, early-era Brownshirt types who had watched too 
many Rambo movies and rushed tanks armed only with rifles. There were 
some Republican Guards willing to die in place--but many fewer than 
even observers like Kenneth Pollack thought.

The first and second of these seem to me to be failures at the level 
of the media, not at the level of the antiwar movement, which I think 
did a fairly good job of mobilizing people in support of the antiwar 
case. So I wouldn't blame the antiwar movement at all, given the 
context in which it was operating.

Brad DeLong