"The People," Missing in Action in America's Wars
On February 15, 2003, an almost unimaginable 13-plus years ago, I took part in a court-banned antiwar march in New York City. The police, it turned out, couldn't stop us (though they could, in various ways, pen us in). Depending on whether you believed the police or the demonstration's organizers, I was one of either 100,000 or 400,000 people who clogged the streets of the Big Apple that day, one of literally millions of protesters (no one knows just how many) who turned out across the planet in an unprecedented effort
On February 15, 2003, an almost unimaginable 13-plus years ago, I took part in a court-banned antiwar march in New York City. The police, it turned out, couldn't stop us (though they could, in various ways, pen us in). Depending on whether you believed the police or the demonstration's organizers, I was one of either 100,000 or 400,000 people who clogged the streets of the Big Apple that day, one of literally millions of protesters (no one knows just how many) who turned out across the planet in an unprecedented effort to stop George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and the rest of that crew from launching their deeply desired invasion of Iraq.
I wrote about the experience the next day and, looking back, it's clear that I was, in a sense, quite realistic about what the largest prewar demonstrations in history could (or couldn't) do to stop that invasion from happening. I was a good deal less realistic about what the future might hold (though I was in good company on that). Here's a little of what I wrote the next day:
"Excuse my enthusiasm -- but it must have felt similarly in Rome, London, Sydney, Berlin, Madrid, and on and on. As with our crowd, the largest I've ever experienced and I was at two marches on the Pentagon in the 1960s, every reporter or commentator I've read has noted the unexpected range of people by age, race, occupation, and political conviction who turned out globally.
"I'm not a total fool. I know -- as I've long been writing in these dispatches -- that this administration is hell-bent for a war. The build-up in the Gulf during these days of demonstrations has been unceasing. I still expect that war to come, and soon. Nonetheless, I find myself amazed by the variegated mass of humanity that turned out yesterday. It felt wonderful. A mass truly, but each part of it, each individually made sign and human gesture of it, spoke to its deeply spontaneous nature. That is the statement of the moment. The world has actually spoken and largely in words of its own. It has issued a warning to our leaders, which, given the history of 'the people' and the countless demonstrations of the people's many (sometimes frightening) powers from 1776 on, is to be ignored at the administration's peril."
Imagine, now, that you could transport yourself back 13-plus years and tell that Tom Engelhardt and the rest of the protesters in those vast global crowds not just that Iraq would be invaded, not just that it would be disastrously garrisoned and occupied for eight years by the U.S. military and the civilian authorities of the Bush administration, not just that out of the invasion and occupation would come the most brutal (and successful) jihadist group imaginable to date, and not just that the U.S. was, unbelievably enough, again in Iraq, fighting yet another war there, but that, all this time later, "the people" were nowhere to be found. They had, with rare exceptions, been MIA since not so long after that invasion in the spring of 2003.
"The world," it seems, instead of speaking truth to power again and again, packed up its signs and went home, while fruitless, destructive American wars rolled on and on. Peter Van Buren, who that long ago February was a diplomat at the U.S. embassy in Tokyo, generally cleaving to the State Department mantra of being policy neutral and opinion-free, would some six years later be sent to two forward operating bases in Iraq, and would prove one of those exceptions to the rule. He returned from his Iraqi experience and wrote a book, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, exposing the fraudulence of the State Department's war effort, and he's never stopped speaking up since. Today, in "Poof! It's Forgotten," he looks back on the strange repetitiveness of our never-ending Iraq wars in which the same "lessons" are always there to be absorbed, but no one in Washington ever seems to learn, while the people, who might have given their government a lesson its officials couldn't ignore, slumber on.
An Urgent Message From Our Co-Founder
Dear Common Dreams reader, It’s been nearly 30 years since I co-founded Common Dreams with my late wife, Lina Newhouser. We had the radical notion that journalism should serve the public good, not corporate profits. It was clear to us from the outset what it would take to build such a project. No paid advertisements. No corporate sponsors. No millionaire publisher telling us what to think or do. Many people said we wouldn't last a year, but we proved those doubters wrong. Together with a tremendous team of journalists and dedicated staff, we built an independent media outlet free from the constraints of profits and corporate control. Our mission has always been simple: To inform. To inspire. To ignite change for the common good. Building Common Dreams was not easy. Our survival was never guaranteed. When you take on the most powerful forces—Wall Street greed, fossil fuel industry destruction, Big Tech lobbyists, and uber-rich oligarchs who have spent billions upon billions rigging the economy and democracy in their favor—the only bulwark you have is supporters who believe in your work. But here’s the urgent message from me today. It's never been this bad out there. And it's never been this hard to keep us going. At the very moment Common Dreams is most needed, the threats we face are intensifying. We need your support now more than ever. We don't accept corporate advertising and never will. We don't have a paywall because we don't think people should be blocked from critical news based on their ability to pay. Everything we do is funded by the donations of readers like you. When everyone does the little they can afford, we are strong. But if that support retreats or dries up, so do we. Will you donate now to make sure Common Dreams not only survives but thrives? —Craig Brown, Co-founder |
The above piece, published here with permission, first appeared at Tom Engelhardt's substack page, where you can find more of his writing.
Engelhardt, was editor-in-chief of TomDispatch.com for over 24 years, is the author of numerous books, including: "A Nation Unmade by War" (2018, Dispatch Books), "Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World" (2014, with an introduction by Glenn Greenwald), "Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050"(co-authored with Nick Turse), "The United States of Fear" (2011), "The American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's" (2010), and "The End of Victory Culture: a History of the Cold War and Beyond" (2007).
On February 15, 2003, an almost unimaginable 13-plus years ago, I took part in a court-banned antiwar march in New York City. The police, it turned out, couldn't stop us (though they could, in various ways, pen us in). Depending on whether you believed the police or the demonstration's organizers, I was one of either 100,000 or 400,000 people who clogged the streets of the Big Apple that day, one of literally millions of protesters (no one knows just how many) who turned out across the planet in an unprecedented effort to stop George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and the rest of that crew from launching their deeply desired invasion of Iraq.
I wrote about the experience the next day and, looking back, it's clear that I was, in a sense, quite realistic about what the largest prewar demonstrations in history could (or couldn't) do to stop that invasion from happening. I was a good deal less realistic about what the future might hold (though I was in good company on that). Here's a little of what I wrote the next day:
"Excuse my enthusiasm -- but it must have felt similarly in Rome, London, Sydney, Berlin, Madrid, and on and on. As with our crowd, the largest I've ever experienced and I was at two marches on the Pentagon in the 1960s, every reporter or commentator I've read has noted the unexpected range of people by age, race, occupation, and political conviction who turned out globally.
"I'm not a total fool. I know -- as I've long been writing in these dispatches -- that this administration is hell-bent for a war. The build-up in the Gulf during these days of demonstrations has been unceasing. I still expect that war to come, and soon. Nonetheless, I find myself amazed by the variegated mass of humanity that turned out yesterday. It felt wonderful. A mass truly, but each part of it, each individually made sign and human gesture of it, spoke to its deeply spontaneous nature. That is the statement of the moment. The world has actually spoken and largely in words of its own. It has issued a warning to our leaders, which, given the history of 'the people' and the countless demonstrations of the people's many (sometimes frightening) powers from 1776 on, is to be ignored at the administration's peril."
Imagine, now, that you could transport yourself back 13-plus years and tell that Tom Engelhardt and the rest of the protesters in those vast global crowds not just that Iraq would be invaded, not just that it would be disastrously garrisoned and occupied for eight years by the U.S. military and the civilian authorities of the Bush administration, not just that out of the invasion and occupation would come the most brutal (and successful) jihadist group imaginable to date, and not just that the U.S. was, unbelievably enough, again in Iraq, fighting yet another war there, but that, all this time later, "the people" were nowhere to be found. They had, with rare exceptions, been MIA since not so long after that invasion in the spring of 2003.
"The world," it seems, instead of speaking truth to power again and again, packed up its signs and went home, while fruitless, destructive American wars rolled on and on. Peter Van Buren, who that long ago February was a diplomat at the U.S. embassy in Tokyo, generally cleaving to the State Department mantra of being policy neutral and opinion-free, would some six years later be sent to two forward operating bases in Iraq, and would prove one of those exceptions to the rule. He returned from his Iraqi experience and wrote a book, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, exposing the fraudulence of the State Department's war effort, and he's never stopped speaking up since. Today, in "Poof! It's Forgotten," he looks back on the strange repetitiveness of our never-ending Iraq wars in which the same "lessons" are always there to be absorbed, but no one in Washington ever seems to learn, while the people, who might have given their government a lesson its officials couldn't ignore, slumber on.
The above piece, published here with permission, first appeared at Tom Engelhardt's substack page, where you can find more of his writing.
Engelhardt, was editor-in-chief of TomDispatch.com for over 24 years, is the author of numerous books, including: "A Nation Unmade by War" (2018, Dispatch Books), "Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World" (2014, with an introduction by Glenn Greenwald), "Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050"(co-authored with Nick Turse), "The United States of Fear" (2011), "The American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's" (2010), and "The End of Victory Culture: a History of the Cold War and Beyond" (2007).
On February 15, 2003, an almost unimaginable 13-plus years ago, I took part in a court-banned antiwar march in New York City. The police, it turned out, couldn't stop us (though they could, in various ways, pen us in). Depending on whether you believed the police or the demonstration's organizers, I was one of either 100,000 or 400,000 people who clogged the streets of the Big Apple that day, one of literally millions of protesters (no one knows just how many) who turned out across the planet in an unprecedented effort to stop George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and the rest of that crew from launching their deeply desired invasion of Iraq.
I wrote about the experience the next day and, looking back, it's clear that I was, in a sense, quite realistic about what the largest prewar demonstrations in history could (or couldn't) do to stop that invasion from happening. I was a good deal less realistic about what the future might hold (though I was in good company on that). Here's a little of what I wrote the next day:
"Excuse my enthusiasm -- but it must have felt similarly in Rome, London, Sydney, Berlin, Madrid, and on and on. As with our crowd, the largest I've ever experienced and I was at two marches on the Pentagon in the 1960s, every reporter or commentator I've read has noted the unexpected range of people by age, race, occupation, and political conviction who turned out globally.
"I'm not a total fool. I know -- as I've long been writing in these dispatches -- that this administration is hell-bent for a war. The build-up in the Gulf during these days of demonstrations has been unceasing. I still expect that war to come, and soon. Nonetheless, I find myself amazed by the variegated mass of humanity that turned out yesterday. It felt wonderful. A mass truly, but each part of it, each individually made sign and human gesture of it, spoke to its deeply spontaneous nature. That is the statement of the moment. The world has actually spoken and largely in words of its own. It has issued a warning to our leaders, which, given the history of 'the people' and the countless demonstrations of the people's many (sometimes frightening) powers from 1776 on, is to be ignored at the administration's peril."
Imagine, now, that you could transport yourself back 13-plus years and tell that Tom Engelhardt and the rest of the protesters in those vast global crowds not just that Iraq would be invaded, not just that it would be disastrously garrisoned and occupied for eight years by the U.S. military and the civilian authorities of the Bush administration, not just that out of the invasion and occupation would come the most brutal (and successful) jihadist group imaginable to date, and not just that the U.S. was, unbelievably enough, again in Iraq, fighting yet another war there, but that, all this time later, "the people" were nowhere to be found. They had, with rare exceptions, been MIA since not so long after that invasion in the spring of 2003.
"The world," it seems, instead of speaking truth to power again and again, packed up its signs and went home, while fruitless, destructive American wars rolled on and on. Peter Van Buren, who that long ago February was a diplomat at the U.S. embassy in Tokyo, generally cleaving to the State Department mantra of being policy neutral and opinion-free, would some six years later be sent to two forward operating bases in Iraq, and would prove one of those exceptions to the rule. He returned from his Iraqi experience and wrote a book, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, exposing the fraudulence of the State Department's war effort, and he's never stopped speaking up since. Today, in "Poof! It's Forgotten," he looks back on the strange repetitiveness of our never-ending Iraq wars in which the same "lessons" are always there to be absorbed, but no one in Washington ever seems to learn, while the people, who might have given their government a lesson its officials couldn't ignore, slumber on.