AL LOWENSTEIN, where are you now that we need you?
Allard K. Lowenstein, as much as any other person, turned anti-Vietnam war
protest into a mainstream cause. Lowenstein, a longtime organizer who later served
in Congress, was murdered in 1980 by a mentally ill man who was obsessed with
the antiwar leader. During his shortened life, Lowenstein fought for civil rights,
liberty in South Africa, and above all an end to the Vietnam War.
Analogies between the impending Iraq war and the Vietnam War are slippery but
instructive. In the Vietnam case, war came first, and it took a decade for protest
to prevail. In the case of Iraq, if an ill-considered war is to be averted, effective
protest needs to be telescoped into a matter of weeks.
In Vietnam, protest slowly built on campuses and streets. With a few notable
early exceptions, elite dissent followed. Today, campuses and streets are relatively
quiet, but there has already been plenty of elite protest.
Former and current officials of the diplomatic corps, retired and active-duty
military officers, CIA officials, and academic experts express doubts about the
realism of the administration's war scenario and its larger risks. Indeed, the
most penetrating journalism on the subject, by James Fallows in The Atlantic and
by Nicholas Lemann in The New Yorker, reveal that it is defense hawks outside
the narrow Bush circle who offer some of the best-informed skepticism.
The congressional resolution authorizing President Bush to make war got 23
no votes in the Senate and 133 nays in the House. That's not enough to block war,
but it is a surprisingly large degree of dissent, given America's post-Sept. 11
psychology and the ability of a president to define a national-security crisis.
Popular support for war is surprisingly thin. Polls suggest that a slender
majority of Americans support the president, but the support evaporates when the
question is qualified to include nonsupport of America's allies or large numbers
of American battlefield deaths or even Iraqi civilian casualties. Public opinion,
as political scientist Benjamin Barber has observed, is eerily disengaged. Rather
than a passionate national debate, Bush confronts neither dissent nor consent.
If ever there were an impending war that cried out for a teach-in movement and
extended Senate hearings, it is this one.
Realities on the ground in the Middle East are complex, and the grand designs
of Bush's warmakers are simple bordering on simple-minded. The more that Americans
learn about this misadventure, the more doubts will grow. Reportedly, there have
already been teach-ins on some 200 campuses, but they have neither been widely
reported nor galvanized into a movement. Congress, disgracefully, held a few token
hearings and went home.
A mass Washington demonstration is planned for Saturday. But like the early
anti-Vietnam protests, this one is organized by radicals who will likely scare
off the mainstream. The keynote speaker will be Ramsey Clark, the onetime US attorney
general turned radical. Clark founded the International Action Center, a group
which defends, among others, Saddam Hussein and North Korea. It's one thing to
believe this is a dangerous, opportunistic, and ill-considered war. It's another
to consider America the font of most of the evils in the world. The former view
is held by countless well-informed people who wish America well. With some organizing
and education, it could become the majority view. That latter position is hopelessly
fringe.
I think of Al Lowenstein because in the mid-1960s it was radicals who were
the first wave of antiwar protest. Far more Americans, however, wanted to end
the war because it was so clearly ruining our own country. It was Lowenstein and
then-student leader Sam Brown who conceived the ''dump Johnson'' strategy in the
summer of 1967 - and amazed themselves and the country when Lyndon Johnson announced
less than a year later that he was standing down. Teach-ins, meanwhile, acquired
their own momentum. Lowenstein, Brown, and others, visiting scores of campuses,
went on to fashion a strategy of inquiries and protests that were not hate-America
affairs. By late 1969, many millions of clean-scrubbed Americans had attended
peaceful marches. They took protest away from the radicals, to the point where
most Americans eventually soured on the war, not as Marxists but as patriots.
America today is in a very patriotic mood, as it deserves to be after 9/11.
It is as patriots that we should oppose George W. Bush's disastrous war.
Robert Kuttner is co-editor of The American Prospect. His column appears
regularly in the Globe.
© Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company
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