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iraq veterans against the war
The Antiwar Movement That Could Not End a War
Many of the soldiers who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan came to recognize the failure of those military actions. But why didn't more Americans take up the campaign to end two such pointless wars?
Feb 07, 2022
When I urge my writing students to juice up their stories, I tell them about "disruptive technologies," inventions and concepts that end up irrevocably changing industries. Think: iPhones, personal computers, or to reach deep into history, steamships. It's the tech version of what we used to call a paradigm shift. (President Biden likes to refer to it as an inflection point.)
Certain events function that way, too. After they occur, it's impossible to go back to how things were: World War II for one generation, the Vietnam War for another, and 9/11 for a third. Tell me it isn't hard now to remember what it was like to catch a flight without schlepping down roped-off chutes like cattle to the slaughter, even if for most of the history of air travel, no one worried about underwear bombers or explosive baby formula. Of course, once upon a time, we weren't incessantly at war either.
However, for my students, the clumsily named Gen Z, the transformative event in their lives hasn't been a war at all -- no matter that their country has been enmeshed in one or more of them for all of their conscious lives. It's probably George Floyd's murder or the Covid pandemic or the double whammy of both, mixed in with a deadly brew of Trumpism. That alone strikes me as a paradigm shift.
It's not that they are uncaring. Those I know are ardent about fixing myriad wrongs in the world and prepared to work at it, too. And like many Americans, for a few weeks as August 2021 ended, they were alarmed by the heartbreaking consequences of their country's failed mission in Afghanistan and its betrayal of the people there. How could you not be heartbroken about people desperate to save their lives and livelihoods? And the girls... ah, the girls, the 37% of teenage girls who learned to read in those years, went to school with boys, saw their lives change, and probably will be denied all of that in the years to come.
In my more cynical moments, though, I note that it was the girls and women who were regularly trotted out by our government officials and generals insisting that U.S. troops must remain in Afghanistan until -- until what? Until, as it turned out, disaster struck. After all, what good American heart doesn't warm to educating the young and freeing girls from forced marriages (as opposed, of course, to killing civilians and causing chaos)?
Militarism is among the all-American problems the young activists I meet do sometimes bring up. It's just not very high on their list of issues to be faced. The reasons boil down to this: the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, interminable as they seemed, had little or no direct effect on most of my students or the lives they imagined having and that was reflected in their relative lack of attention to them, which tells us all too much about this country in the twenty-first century.
Spare Change
So here we are, 20 years after U.S. troops invaded Afghanistan and months since they hotfooted it out. That two-decade-long boots-on-the-ground (and planes in the air) episode has now officially been declared over and done with, if not exactly paid for. But was that an inflection point, as this country turned its military attention to China and Russia? Not so fast. I'm impatient with the conventional wisdom about our twenty-first-century wars and the reaction to them at home. Still, I do think it's important to try to figure out what has (or hasn't) been learned from them and what may have changed because of them.
In the changed column, alas, the answer seems to be: not enough. Once again, in the pandemic moment, our military is filling roles that would be left to civil society if it were adequately funded -- helping in hospitals and nursing homes, administering Covid-19 vaccinations and tests, teaching school and driving school buses -- because, as Willie Sutton answered when asked why he robbed banks, that's where the money is.
Apparently, it's so much money that even the Defense Department doesn't quite know how to spend it. Between 2008 and 2019, the Pentagon returned almost $128 billion in unspent funds from its staggeringly vast and still expanding budget. Admittedly, that's a smaller percentage of that budget than other departments turned back, but it started with so much more and, as a result, that Pentagon spare change accounted for nearly half of all "cancelled" government funds during that time.
Yet too little of those vast sums spent go to active-duty troops. A recent survey found that 29% of the families of junior-level, active-duty soldiers experienced food insecurity (that is, hunger) in the past year, a strong indicator of the economic precariousness of everyday military life, even here at home.
It didn't help that the U.S. military's wars only sporadically drew extended public attention. Of course, before 1979, when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, that country's name was shorthand for a place too obscure for most Americans even to find on a world map. And maybe that was still true in 2020, when, nearly two decades after the U.S invaded that nation, the American presence there got all of five minutes of coverage on the national evening newscasts of CBS, NBC, and ABC.
Years earlier, when the focus was more on Iraq than Afghanistan, I attended a meeting of the Smedley Butler Brigade of Veterans For Peace. I was writing a story for the Boston Globe, which made me an easy target for the veterans' anger. As a result, they badgered me to make our city's newspaper of record print a daily report of deaths in the war. I explained that, as a freelancer, I had even less influence than they did and, unsurprisingly, such an accounting never came to pass.
Years later, as the U.S. endeavor in Afghanistan wound down and the Globe and other mainstream outlets did actually publish calculations of the costs, I found myself wondering if all those credible, influential media sources would ever publish a reckoning of how many times in the past 20 years, when it might have made a difference, they had run cost analyses of the blinding arrogance that defined U.S. foreign and military policy in those decades. The impact of such accountings might have been vanishingly small anyway.
It's true, by the way, that Brown University's Costs of War Project did a formidable job of tackling that issue in those endless war years, but their accounts were, of course, anything but mainstream. Even today, in that mainstream, accurate counts are still hard to come by. The New York Times, which recently published a groundbreaking report on civilian deaths in the Middle East caused by U.S. airstrikes, was stymied by the Pentagon for years when trying to get the necessary documents for just such an accounting, while provincial authorities in Afghanistan often denied that civilian casualties had even occurred.
Presence and Power
In 2004, when Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) was just getting started, I was introduced to a small group of disillusioned but determined young vets, wonderfully full of themselves and intent on doing things their way. While they appreciated the earlier soldier-led antiwar efforts of the Vietnam War era, they wanted to do it all in a new fashion. "We're sort of reinventing the wheel," Eli Wright, a young medic, who had served in Iraq, told me, "But we're making it a much nicer wheel, I think." I was smitten.
At first, those newly minted anti-warriors thought the very novelty of their existence in war-on-terror America would be enough. So, they told and retold their stories to anyone who would listen: stories of misguided raids and policing actions for which they were ill-equipped and ill-trained; of soul-destroying cruelty they found themselves implicated in; and of their dawning awareness, even while they were in Iraq, that they could no longer be a party to any of it. Believe me, those veterans told powerful and moving stories, but it wasn't nearly enough.
In a piece about the power and pitfalls of storytelling, Jonathan Gottschall notes that, in the tales we tell, we tend to divide people into a tidy triad of heroes, victims, and villains. My longtime trope was that we -- by which I mean we Americans -- allowed those fighting our endless wars to be only heroes or victims -- the former to valorize, the latter to pity -- but nothing else. (Admittedly, sometimes civilian peace workers did see them as villains, but despite an inevitable jockeying for position, civilian and military antiwar groups generally recognized each other as comrades-against-arms.) IVAW insisted on adding activist to that dichotomy, as they attempted to change minds and history.
When you're trying to do that, or at least influence policy, your odds of success are greater if you have a clear, specific goal you can advocate and agitate for and build coalitions around. Then, when you achieve it, you can, of course, claim victory. IVAW's overriding aim was to bring the troops home immediately. That goal was finally (more or less) achieved, though at great cost and so much later than they had been demanding, making it anything but a resounding victory; nor did it, in the end, have much to do with those young veterans.
Their significance may lie elsewhere. Last August, in the midst of the chaotic U.S. pull-out from Afghanistan, I tuned in to a podcast about political and social activism just as Rashad Robinson, president of the racial justice organization, Color of Change, was making a distinction between presence ("retweets, shout-outs from the stage") and power ("the ability to change the rules").
It would be hard to come up with a better illustration of that difference than Camp Casey, the August 2005 encampment of antiwar military families, veterans, and their sympathizers. It was sprawled across a ditch in Crawford, Texas, a few miles down the road from the ranch of a vacationing President George W. Bush. Their protest made significant news for those five weeks, as media around the world featured heart-rending stories of mothers in mourning and veterans in tears, photos of an iconic white tent, and interviews with Cindy Sheehan whose son, Casey, had been killed in Iraq the year before. The media anointed her the Grieving-Mother-in-Chief and news reports sometimes even got the protesters' end-the-war, bring-the-troops-home message right.
Whizzing past in a motorcade on his way to a fundraiser, President Bush ignored them, and the war in Iraq continued for another five years with the deaths of about 2,700 more sons and daughters of grieving American mothers. But the next month, when somewhere between 100,000 and 300,000 Camp Casey participants, veterans, and their supporters gathered for an antiwar march through downtown Washington, D.C., the government was forced to acknowledge, perhaps for the first time, the existence of opposition to the war in Iraq. For context, the National Park Service estimated then that, of the approximately 3,000 permits it issued for demonstrations on the National Mall yearly, only about a dozen attracted more than 5,000 people.
Presence matters and in the few years following Camp Casey, when the antiwar veterans were at their most effective, they learned how to make themselves harder to ignore. They've since renamed their group About Face and reconceived its purpose and goals, but the perennial challenge to political activists is how to turn presence into power.
Why Didn't the Anti-War Movement Catch On?
In February 2003, as many as 10 million people took to the streets in 60 countries to protest the impending U.S. invasion of Iraq. But once that invasion happened, it was primarily the military-related groups, sometimes joined by other peace organizations, that kept the opposition alive. Why, though, couldn't they turn presence into power? Why didn't more Americans take up the campaign to end two such pointless wars? Why didn't we learn?
I make no claim to answering those questions in a definitive way. Nonetheless, here's my stab at it.
Let's start with the obvious: the repercussions of an all-volunteer military. Only a small proportion of Americans, self-selected and concentrated in certain parts of the country, have been directly involved in and affected by our twenty-first-century wars. Deployed over and over, they didn't circulate in civil society in the way the previous draft military had and, as warfare became increasingly mechanized and automated (or drone-ified), there have been ever fewer American casualties to remind everyone else in this country that we were indeed at war in Afghanistan and Iraq. For the troops, that distancing from battle also undoubtedly lessened an innate human resistance to killing and also objections to those wars within the military itself.
Next, stylish as it might be in this country to honor veterans of our wars (thank you for your service!), as Kelly Dougherty, IVAW's first executive director, complained, "We come home and everyone shakes our hands and calls us heroes, but no one wants to listen to us." Stories of bravery, horrific wounds, and even post-traumatic stress syndrome were acceptable. Analysis, insight, or testimony about what was actually going on in the war zones? Not so much.
Folk singer, labor organizer, and vet, "Utah" Phillips observed that having a long memory is the most radical idea in America. With items in the news cycle lasting for ever-shorter periods of time before being replaced, administrations becoming ever harder to embarrass, and a voting public getting accustomed to being lied to, even a short memory became a challenge.
The hollowing out of local news in these years only exacerbated the problem. Less local reporting meant fewer stories about people we might actually know or examples of how world events affect our daily lives. Pro-war PR, better funded and connected than any antiwar group could hope to be, filled the gap. Think soldiers striding onto ballfields at sports events to the teary surprise of families and self-congratulatory cheers from the stands. Between 2012 and 2015, the Pentagon paid pro sports teams some $6.8 million to regularly and repeatedly honor the military. Meanwhile, the mainstream media has made it ever harder for peace groups to gain traction by applying a double standard to protest or outsider politics, a reality sociologist Sarah Sobieraj has explored strikingly in her book Soundbitten.
The nature of political protest changed, too. As information was disseminated and shared more and more through social media -- activism by way of hashtag, tweet, and Instagram -- organizing turned ever more virtual and ever less communal. Finally, despite protestations about the United States being a peace-loving country, the military in these years has proven a rare bipartisan darling, while, historically speaking, violence has been bred into America's bones.
Maybe, however, the lack of active opposition to the endless wars wasn't a new normal, but something like the old normal. Sadly enough, conflicts don't simply end because people march against them. Even the far larger Vietnam antiwar movement was only one pressure point in winding down that conflict. War policy is directed by what happens on the ground and, to a lesser degree, at the ballot box. What an antiwar movement can do is help direct the public response, which may, fingers crossed, save the country from going to war someplace else and save another generation of soldiers from having to repeat the mistakes of the past 20 years.
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Risking Lives in Endless US Wars Is Morally Wrong and a Strategic Failure
Too often ignored is the far greater number of lives that are lost not on the battlefield but at home, not from the enemy’s guns but from our veterans’ own hands.
Nov 16, 2019
We just celebrated Veterans Day last week, paying tribute to the young men and women who have served our country. Across the country, families gathered at the gravesites of those who gave their lives. Veterans drank toasts to their fellow soldiers.
In football and basketball stadiums, crowds offered a moment of silence for the fallen. The rituals are heartfelt, but far from complete
Too often ignored is the far greater number of lives that are lost not on the battlefield but at home, not from the enemy's guns but from our veterans' own hands.
Now, in the sober aftermath of the celebration, there should be a reckoning.
On an average day, a staggering 20 veterans commit suicide. The deaths from suicide outnumber the losses on the battlefield in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The risk to veterans who served in combat holds true for all generations.
It doesn't matter if the war is popular or unpopular; the veterans celebrated or controversial. Even the Greatest Generation that fought in World War II suffers current suicide rates four times that of civilians.
In a stunning essay, Matthew Hoh, an Iraqi veteran who came close to suicide himself, tries to put this in perspective.
The famous Vietnam Memorial, he writes, "is a wall that contains 58,000 names. It would have to lengthened by some 2,000 feet to include the 100,000 to 200,000 plus Vietnam vets who are estimated to have been lost to suicide, while keeping space for those yet to come. VA data reveals that almost two Afghan and Iraq veterans die by suicide each day on average. That adds to an estimated 7,300 veterans who have killed themselves since just 2009, after coming home from Afghanistan and Iraq, a number greater than the 7,012 service members killed in those wars since 2001."
The military is aware of the depth of this horror and has dedicated a billion dollars in trying to solve it.
The New York Times reports that the Veterans Crisis Line (VCL) is incredibly active, staffed 24/7 at 800-273-8255. This service, only available since 2007, has helped stave off hundreds of thousands of potential suicides. More than 30 times a day, VCL responders call police, fire or EMS to intervene in a suicide situation.
Thirty times a day.
There are many explanations offered for why veterans -- and the families of veterans -- are at greater risk of suicide: the difficulty of readjusting to civilian society; the macho military culture that keeps soldiers from seeking help; the post-traumatic stress disorders that result from combat.
Hoh, wisely in my view, offers a broader explanation: that veterans suffer from a moral injury -- a shock to their own sense of themselves, their basic moral values from what they have done or have not done in combat: The killing of the enemy, the failure to save the life of a comrade, the mistaken shooting of the innocent.
Thou shalt not kill is a basic precept of all religions.
In war, the state gives soldiers the mandate to kill. The military has perfected ways of conditioning young men and women to be able to kill in combat.
Yet, Hoh argues, the conditioning does not prevent some from seeing themselves in the enemy, from feeling deeply the violation that comes from violence.
There is a lesson from this.
We should reject the easy assumption that the U.S. military should police the world, that we've perfected ways of fighting wars with drones and air power and with limited U.S. casualties from "boots on the ground."
The national security managers who too often have never served in the military should be far more constrained in sending our soldiers into combat.
War is hell. It is hell for those who fall in combat -- and for their families and friends suffering their loss. It is hell for those who survive it -- and for their families and friends dealing with their struggles on return.
Risking lives constantly in endless wars is a moral violation and strategic failure.
If we are truly to celebrate the service of our veterans, we should demand that war not be a routine part of American policy, but a last resort used rarely and only to defend our people when attacked.
The best tribute to our combat veterans would be to create fewer of them in the future.
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How Trump Can Unite the Left
As millions of Democrats, Greens, liberals, progressives, and lefties across America prepare to resist Trump, it's time to build greater unity and alliances among this vast rainbow of people, communities, and movements. With heightened attacks on immigrants, women, people of color, Muslims, the environment, workers' rights, and more, we simply cannot afford political isolation and fracturing.
Jan 27, 2017
As millions of Democrats, Greens, liberals, progressives, and lefties across America prepare to resist Trump, it's time to build greater unity and alliances among this vast rainbow of people, communities, and movements. With heightened attacks on immigrants, women, people of color, Muslims, the environment, workers' rights, and more, we simply cannot afford political isolation and fracturing.
Imagine a national strategic alliance around shared principles and priorities that could collectively mobilize tens of millions of people to support and defend human rights, economic justice, and environmental sustainability. Protests, petitions, and grassroots meet-ups are a great start, but they are not enough for the task at hand. Now more than ever, all those wanting an egalitarian, racially just, and sustainable society fueled by participatory democracy need to forge a broad united front.
"It's time to think big."
A new alliance would enable groups to retain their turf and integrity while joining forces on specific campaigns, such as the Standing Rock/Dakota Access Pipeline struggle and upcoming battles with Trump and the Republican Congress. Together, we could promote a bold progressive populist agenda while opposing rightwing and centrist policies from both major parties.
Think of the array of generally like-minded groups and initiatives across the country, which together count tens of millions of members or supporters: Our Revolution, Brand New Congress, Working Families Party, Progressive Democrats of America, Democracy for America, the Green Party, and many other regional, state, and local groups. These could unite on core goals and principles, agreeing to support each other's efforts and collaborate whenever possible.
It's time to think big. Let's push the Democratic Party in an unapologetically progressive direction and build up electorally independent alternatives. This is no time for fracturing. Progressives need a coherent strategy that remains independent of the corporate, centrist Democratic Party, and that can wield direct pressure and power. Participating groups will continue to have differences, some likely never resolved--but they can still work together whenever possible.
The left must also build a new media movement to reach mainstream America, including Trump's America, with accessible fact-driven journalism. One good start would be expanding on The Progressive magazine's Media Project with an initiative to reach readers in battleground states, through legacy and social media, with op-eds that inform people about the concrete human and environmental impacts of the Trump-Ryan agenda.
The right has been successful at building a media network to tilt voters its way; it's time for a major independent progressive media push, backed by real dollars, that can get out stories and op-eds beyond the leftwing echo chambers.
"The best alliances are going to come together around the biggest ideas for change," says Becky Bond, a top adviser and organizer on Bernie Sanders's campaign, and coauthor with Zack Exley of the new book Rules for Revolutionaries. "An alliance around a big agenda that embraces economic populism and racial justice could create a wave of victories in 2018."
Much of this alliance building may take shape first on state and local levels, and around specific individual campaigns. Bill Fletcher, former president of TransAfrica Forum and a longtime labor leader, advocates a "fifty-state strategy for progressives. We have to anticipate all kinds of attacks, including repression," he says. "We need to be thinking in each state, what is the road to power?"
Shannon Jackson, director of the Sanders-inspired Our Revolution, sees growing interest in progressive alliances:
The recent victories to defeat the Trans-Pacific Partnership and against the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock are ideal examples of what is possible when people come together. It is Our Revolution's responsibility to help strengthen the active collaboration and unification that is essential to these great successes.
Progressive alliances "will need to be organic so that we can create an environment where many different ideas are allowed to thrive," argues Brand New Congress co-founder and organizer Saikat Chakrabarti. "We need to bring the fight on multiple fronts at once. We need organizations that are focused on direct action, organizations that are focused on building local political power, organizations focused on building national political power, and organizations focused on creating a new media."
The Working Families Party and other national groups have helped to organize local emergency community meetings across the country (one drawing about 1,000 people), where people can connect and organize. Groups endorsing this effort include 350.org, the Center for Popular Democracy, the Courage Campaign, Iraq Veterans Against the War, Friends of the Earth, CODEPINK, and Public Citizen.
These grassroots meetings focus on "activities everyone can take locally to protect communities and defend democracy," the Working Families Party explained in response to my inquiry. "People are developing substantive plans for fighting back against Trump's cabinet and agency appointments, taking action around the Inauguration, protecting the status of sanctuary cities, and standing in solidarity with communities under attack, including immigrants and Muslim Americans."
At one of these meet-ups I attended recently in San Francisco, hundreds of people stayed late on a Friday evening discussing actions and strategies. Focus groups peeled off to discuss such topic areas as climate change, women's rights, media democracy, and electoral strategies. The commitment and energy were palpable.
But what felt missing, at least from this gathering, was a larger political movement strategy to connect people with existing groups--local, state, and national--rather than reinventing the wheel. Despite the impressive organizing and sense of urgency, there was little talk of bolstering larger alliances, or further stitching together the movement apparatus of the progressive left.
Of course any alliance, even a nonbinding one that doesn't intrude on turf or funds, presents challenges. Significant divides on the left, some intensified in this past election, cannot be shrugged off.
Greens and Democrats have longstanding tension and often enmity. The labor movement has many rifts, spanning union members' support for Sanders, Clinton, and Trump. Given the ongoing debate over who is to blame for Trump's election and what it means for Democrats and the left, it is clear that "we" will not all agree on a single path forward. Reformists, revolutionaries, liberals, and radicals have scuffled for centuries over how to address inequality, exploitation, and the consolidation of wealth and power.
Not everyone will join these new alliances, but the more who do, the better. As a longtime journalistic observer and participant in left-progressive movements, I believe the Trump moment--how it came about and the dangers it poses--highlights the need for broad, far-reaching rapprochement on the left. Groups and movements sharing progressive aims must figure out how to work together where they agree, even when they disagree on other things.
"This is no time to squabble among ourselves or work separately--and there's no time to lose."
There are at least partial models for this around the country. In California, the Richmond Progressive Alliance, made up of labor, housing, environmental and racial justice groups, has won many local victories; the Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada brings together dozens of institutions, including labor unions, the NAACP, Sierra Club, Planned Parenthood, and others. Numerous local, state, and regional coalitions are sprouting up--and a national alliance could bring yet greater power, resources, and profile to progressive causes and movements.
The potential for unity is heightened by Trump's prolific threats to so many communities and causes. The more people his policies offend, the bigger and stronger the resistance. For instance, Fletcher notes, there is concern in labor circles that the Trump Administration will try to undermine the Davis-Bacon Act, which requires prevailing wages be paid on publicly contracted jobs. This could potentially unite more conservative building trades unions with left-liberal unions.
Trump's attacks on workers and unions could play a lead role in his undoing. His first tweet-promoted "win" as President-elect, the Carrier plant jobs deal in Indiana, backfired when it was revealed that the deal would allow hundreds of jobs to go to Mexico while costing the state more than $7 million in corporate tax perks. Trump's subsequent tweet-lashing of Chuck Jones, president of United Steelworkers Local 1999, ignited bipartisan criticism that could begin to erode his working-class support. A blue-collar backlash could turn the tables against Trump, and progressive labor unions can help lay the groundwork for that.
Trump's cabinet picks and his emerging policy agenda are already uniting millions in outraged opposition. Groups and communities are holding emergency meetings and creating rapid response networks to defend people under attack. The challenge now is to weave this tapestry of resistance into a movement that can create legislative and electoral wins.
The protests and social media eruptions will be YUGE. We must harness this into a coherent and sustainable rebellion. A working-class backlash and a smart alliance among the diverse constituencies that make up the progressive majority in this country could lead to a big midterm repudiation of the Republicans at the polls, state-level victories, and the birth of a broad-based and effective progressive movement. This is no time to squabble among ourselves or work separately--and there's no time to lose. It's time for progressive unity.
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