[Mb-civic] Peace Is Not On-Message

Mon Aug 2 15:30:32 PDT 2004

Peace Is Not On-Message

By Jonathan Schell, The Nation and TomDispatch.com
 Posted on July 31, 2004, Printed on August 2, 2004
 http://www.alternet.org/story/19424/

"During the Vietnam War, many young men, including the current President,
the Vice President and me, could have gone to Vietnam and didn't. John Kerry
came from a privileged background. He could have avoided going, too. But
instead he said, 'Send me.'

"When they sent those Swift Boats up the river in Vietnam... John Kerry
said, 'Send me.'

"And then when America needed to extricate itself from that misbegotten and
disastrous war, Kerry donned his uniform once again, and said, 'Send me';
and he led veterans to an encampment on the Washington Mall, where, in
defiance of the Nixon Justice Department, they conducted the most stirring
and effective of the protests, that forced an end to the war.

"And then, on my watch, when it was time to heal the wounds of war and
normalize relations with Vietnam...John Kerry said, 'Send me.'"

So spoke President Clinton at the Democratic Convention  except that he did
not deliver the third paragraph about Kerry's protest; I made that up. The
speech cries out for the inclusion of Kerry's glorious moment of antiwar
leadership; and its absence is as palpable as one of those erasures from
photographs of high Soviet officials after Stalin had sent them to the
gulag. Clinton's message was plain.

Military courage in war is honored; civil courage in opposing a disastrous
war is not honored. Even thirty years later, it cannot be mentioned by a
former President who himself opposed the Vietnam War. The political rule, as
Clinton once put it in one of the few pithy things he has ever said, "We
[Democrats] have got to be strong.... When people feel uncertain, they'd
rather have somebody who's strong and wrong than somebody who's weak and
right."

And now the United States is engaged in a war fully as wrong as the one in
Vietnam. The boiling core of American politics today is the war in Iraq and
all its horrors: the continuing air strikes on populated cities; the dogs
loosed by American guards on naked, bound Iraqi prisoners; the kidnappings
and the beheadings; the American casualties nearing a thousand; the 10,000
or more Iraqi casualties; the occupation hidden behind the mask of an
entirely fictitious Iraqi "sovereignty"; the growing scrapheap of
discredited justifications for the war. But little of that is mentioned
these days by the Democrats. The great majority of Democratic voters,
according to polls, ardently oppose the war, yet by embracing the candidacy
of John Kerry, who voted for the Congressional resolution authorizing the
war and now wants to increase the number of American troops in Iraq, the
party has made what appears to be a tactical decision to hide its faith.

The strong and wrong position won out in the Democratic Party when its
voters chose Kerry over Howard Dean in the Iowa caucuses and the New
Hampshire primary. An antiwar party rallied around a prowar candidate. The
result has been one of the most peculiar political atmospheres within a
party in recent memory. The Democrats are united but have concealed the
cause that unites them. The party champions free speech that it does not
practice. As a Dennis Kucinich delegate at the convention said to Amy
Goodman on Democracy Now!, "Peace" is "off-message." A haze of vagueness and
generality hangs over party pronouncements. In his convention speech,
President Carter, who is on record opposing the war, spoke against
"pre-emptive war" but did not specify which pre-emptive war he had in mind.
Al Gore, who has been wonderfully eloquent in his opposition to the war, was
tame for the occasion. "Regardless of your opinion at the beginning of this
war," he said, "isn't it now abundantly obvious that the way this war has
been managed by the Administration has gotten us into very serious trouble?"

What of the antiwar sentiment that is still in truth at the heart of most
Democrats' anger? It has been displaced downward and outward, into the
outlying precincts of American politics. The political class as a whole has
proved incapable of taking responsibility for the future of the nation, and
the education of the American public has been left to those without hope of
office. Like a balloon that squeezed at the top expands at the base,
opposition to the war increases the farther you get from John Kerry. Carter
and Gore can express a little more of it. Howard Dean, who infused the party
with its now-muffled antiwar passion, can express more still. Representative
Kucinich, a full-throated peace candidate, has endorsed Kerry and has kind
words to say about him but holds fast to his antiwar position. On the
Internet, Tomdispatch.com, AlterNet.org, commondreams.org, antiwar.com,
MoveOn.org and many others are buzzing and bubbling with honest and inspired
reporting and commentary. Michael Moore is packing audiences into 2,000
theaters to see Fahrenheit 9/11.

It's not too early to worry about the dangers posed by the Democrats'
strategy. In the first place, they have staked their future and the
country's on a political calculation, but it may be wrong. By suffocating
their own passion, they may lose the energy that has brought them this far.
They have confronted Bush's policy of denial with a politics of avoidance.
Bush is adamant in error; they are feeble in dedication to truth. If strong
and wrong is really the winning formula, Bush may be the public's choice.

In the second place, if Kerry does win, he will inherit the war wedded to a
potentially disastrous strategy. If he tries to change course, Republicans 
and hawkish Democrats (Senator Joe Lieberman has just joined in a revival of
the Committee on the Present Danger)  will not fail to remind him of his
commitment to stay the course, and renew the charge of flip-flopping. But
the course, as retired Gen. Anthony Zinni has commented, may take the
country over Niagara Falls. Then Kerry may wish that he and his admirers at
this year's convention had thought to place a higher value on his service to
his country when he opposed the Vietnam War.

This article will appear in the latest issue of The Nation magazine.