Reflections on an Anniversary

"Everything
feels obscene," a friend said seven years ago, when we carpet-bombed
Baghdad, launching the invasion. It still does, but in a dull, chronic,
"used to it" way - outrage mixed, these last few years, with "hope,"
smearing the war effort with a thick, national ambivalence.

Is it still
going on? Well, yeah, with a grinding pointlessness that's not worth
talking about or even debating anymore. The smorgasbord of
justifications has been permanently shut down: the 9/11 tie-in, the WMD,
"another Munich," democracy for the Middle East. No one's hawking
Freedom Fries anymore. The war in Iraq simply continues because a war in
motion, especially when it's not really a war, when there isn't an
enemy with whom to negotiate, is incapable of just, you know, stopping.
When we don't really have a mission, completing it is difficult indeed.

So I find
myself witnessing the seven-year anniversary in a state of private
grief, chewing bitterly on the limits of politics. Whatever slow,
cautious change President Obama believes in at the deepest level of his
political soul, he can only attempt to conjure it out of politics as
usual.

I fear that
what the future requires isn't to be found there, and that shaking our
fists and demanding change - peace - from it, or from politicians caught
up in it, by, for instance, marching and protesting on the
anniversaries of bad wars, will not bring about the changes I hope to
see in my lifetime. I say this not to devalue protest or the antiwar
movement, which over the course of the last hundred years has grown into
a permanent cultural presence.

Indeed,
seven years ago, when millions of people around the world took to the
streets in protest of the Iraq invasion, Dr. Robert Muller, former
assistant secretary general of the United Nations and founder of the
United Nations University for Peace in Costa Rica, called the phenomenon
"the other superpower."

"Never
before in the history of the world," he said, "has there been a global,
visible, public, viable, open dialogue and conversation about the very
legitimacy of war."

For a
vibrant moment I believed that a tide of outrage, a global tsunami of
compassion, could check an empire and shut down a war. If enough people
made their voices heard, we could dig down past the fear and moral
relativism that turns love of country into hatred of a designated enemy -
that is to say, patriotism - and uproot war itself.

Seven years
into the Iraq fiasco, eight and a half years since the war on terror
(what I call the war to promote terror) began with the invasion of
Afghanistan, I see things with a little more clarity. While we have a
few impressive accomplishments on the negative side of the ledger -
chasing the Republicans and neocons from power, challenging and
censuring torture - little in fact has changed.

The wars
continue and the debate over them, as refereed by the mainstream media,
is as narrow and shallow as ever. The defense budget is still the
overstuffed goose of the military-industrial complex. And, domestically,
crime and punishment thrive, feeding the prison-industrial complex. The
United States is the outsize world leader in both areas.

And the
withdrawal of the GOP and the fear-mongering right from political
dominance is, of course, only temporary. We're one good terror attack
away from their triumphant return to the center of American politics,
weapons at the ready, a list of enemies in hand. The war culture springs
eternal, no matter its grotesque failures of yesterday.

No wonder,
as Clare Bayard and Sarah Lazare pointed out on Common
Dreams last week ("Time for Rebirth: The U.S. Antiwar Movement is
Grieving, Dreaming, Growing"), "The sheer numbers of antiwar
demonstrators, which just a month before the invasion of Iraq
coordinated the biggest street protests in the history of the world,
have dropped precipitously each year as we hit this awful anniversary."

Was Muller's
"other superpower" an illusion? Has it been defeated by burnout and
despair? Is the marriage of the military-industrial-media complex to the
evangelical Christian right too momentous and entrenched a force ever
to displace? This is a fighting force, lavishly financed, disciplined by
fear, unencumbered by rationality, oblivious to the negative
consequences of its actions, and prepared to go to any length, it seems,
to maintain and further its power.

Disarming
and redirecting this force, which draws from the patriarchal certainty
that shaped the great civilizations of the past (Rome "made a wasteland
and called it peace"), is more than the ad hoc mobilization against a
war can possibly accomplish. This is the task of many lifetimes, but we
must remember that such enormous successes as the invention of
democracy, the spread of ecological awareness and the triumph of the
civil rights movement are significant milestones already achieved.

The other
superpower, the citizens of a world in constant transformation, ever
striving to build a more just and far-reaching peace, is alive, radiant,
and quietly creating the future with countless initiatives to calm the
heart of violence. The anniversary of this reckless war pierces me, but I
stand committed to the creation of a world where the next one is not an
option.