Anti-war groups oppose Obama on Syria By: Alexander Burns September 4, 2013 12:07 PM EDT
Barack Obama has a problem on the left.
As the White House seeks to marshal bipartisan support for military intervention in Syria, leading members of the coalition of anti-war groups that advocated for pullback from Iraq and Afghanistan have finally weighed in against the president.
On Wednesday, two prominent liberal advocacy groups announced their opposition to striking Syria: VoteVets.org, the combat veterans-oriented organization that spent more than $3 million during the 2012 campaign; and MoveOn.org, the grass-roots group that helped lead opposition to invading Iraq in the first place.
A day earlier, the Win Without War Coalition — another prominent force in rallying opposition to the Iraq War — also released a lengthy statement weighing in against Syria intervention.
The Democratic Party leadership remains squarely behind Obama in his call for limited military action against the regime of President Bashar Assad, who is alleged to have used sarin gas against civilians on multiple occasions. Republican House Speaker John Boehner and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor have also endorsed the use of force.
But already-anxious proponents of intervention could have a bigger headache to deal with thanks to dissension within Obama’s own party.
Anna Galland, executive director of MoveOn.org civic action, said that a vote of the organization’s membership that wrapped up Wednesday morning found nearly three quarters “opposing the use of force.”
“The reports of chemical weapons that we’re hearing are horrific, but our members don’t believe that military action is the solution,” Galland told POLITICO. “MoveOn and our 8 million members are going to be making sure our congressional membership hears our voices.”
(PHOTOS: International response to Syria<http://href.li/?http://www.politico.com/gallery/2013/08/international-response-to-syria/001266-017927.html> )
Galland said that would involve both phone calls to members of Congress and a “national day of action” on Monday, Sept. 9.
VoteVets.org founder Jon Soltz announced his organization’s stance in a Huffington Post op-ed, writing that “any military action without a decisive end” could entangle the United States in a long conflict with Assad or a messy process of rebuilding a “post-Assad Syria.”
“I fully understand that President Obama has painted himself into a political corner, but VoteVets.org cannot support this rush to conflict,” Soltz wrote. “At this point, if we want to help without committing the United States to another war, humanitarian assistance to bolster a moderate opposition still represents our best course of action in Syria.”
The opposition of Soltz’s group is perhaps a bit more surprising than MoveOn’s position: while MoveOn routinely positions itself to the left of the official Democratic Party, VoteVets has often won praise from party strategists for its supportive role backing Democrats in congressional elections.
Activists on the left have been slow to mobilize against action in Syria, due partly to what several Democrats characterized as the moral complexity of a situation involving the regime’s alleged use of chemical weapons against civilians. Rather than reflexively coming out against attacking Syria, several liberal groups first urged Obama to consult Congress before taking action.
What’s more, several activists expressed reservations about digging in for a very public fight against a Democratic president who has led a drawdown from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — the two conflicts that several of these liberal groups were organized to oppose in the first place.
Win Without War coalitions director Stephen Miles called the Syria debate a “challenging one” for the leading anti-war groups of the past decade. Among some affiliate groups, he said, the presence of chemical weapons in Syria created “a very strong sense that there was a need to respond.”
“Obviously, this is not the situation that you had in 2002, where you have a primarily progressive Democratic base and a Republican president, and you have a natural antagonism about it,” Miles said. “That said, these are kinds of issues where progressives have demonstrated some willingness to speak out against the president when they’ve felt he was wrong.”
The statement issued Tuesday by Win Without War reflected some of that ambivalence: It called Assad’s alleged use of chemical weapons “abhorrent,” but urged a “political solution” to the conflict in Syria.
A question hovering over all the liberal opposition to Syria intervention is how much sway these groups even have in the political world of 2013. Up to this point, the White House has been more focused on ensuring bipartisan backing for the proposed strikes on Syria, rather than on calming frustration on the left flank of the Democratic coalition.
And Obama predicted in a Wednesday news conference, during a trip to Sweden, that Congress would ultimately approve the use of force in Syria, declaring that “America and Congress’s credibility is on the line.”
It has been nearly half a decade since Democrats and liberal activists were primarily focused on activism around foreign policy and national security. Since Obama took office in 2009, leaders on both the left and right have been more engaged on issues related to the economy, health care and the size of government, than on questions of war and peace.
The influence of groups such as MoveOn and Win Without War has not been seriously tested in that time. Among elected Democrats, some of the most vocal foes of the war in Iraq, especially — such as House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi — have already endorsed an authorization for the use of military force in Syria.
Galland acknowledged that opposition to the Syria action hadn’t built to Iraq-level proportions, and said there was no reason to expect it would have done so by this point.
“We are, what, a week, two weeks, into reports of chemical weapons?” Galland said. “It’s comparing apples and oranges to think about what built up over literally months and months and months of discussion, versus a week.”
-- Robert Naiman Policy Director Just Foreign Policy www.justforeignpolicy.org naiman at justforeignpolicy.org