This weekend, in the largest demonstration of its kind, approximately half a million protestors flooded the streets of Florence, Italy, in protest of war in Iraq. According to the Guardian of Nov. 11, the protestors were "singing communist anthems and 1970s peace songs." The Washington Post of Nov. 9 said that, "the march was heavy on shrill whistles, communist hymns, red flags and portraits of Ernesto "Che' Guevara." Is the only alternative to the Bush Administration's adventurism and wanton threats of war voiced by the ideologues who brought the world Gulags and the Cultural Revolution?
In the United States, one would expect the anti-war movement to be different -- more moderate and less radical. After all, European communists still hold parliamentary seats and leftist ideology has much more support in Europe than it ever did in America. Unfortunately, the Oct. 6 protest in New York's Central Park was organized by the International Action Center (IAC).
Who are the IAC? The name might be ambiguous, but its message is not. According to an October 16 Salon.com article by Michelle Goldberg, IAC's western region co-director, Richard Becker, writes, "no one in the world ... has a worse human rights record than the United States." Furthermore, the IAC advocates a "workers movement here in the heartland of imperialism." That's right -- the people leading the charge against war in Iraq are communists who think America is worse than Iraq.
Obviously, this is great news for the hyperventilating hawks of the right, who point to the IAC and Act Now to Stop War and End Racism (A.N.S.W.E.R.), a similar group, as the sum of the anti-war movement. If the hawks were right, a small fringe of radical activists who have shunned gainful employment for full-time protest against anything and everything wholesome and patriotic are the only people in America against the war in Iraq.
The hawks are wrong.
According to a recent CBS News/New York Times poll, 25 percent of Americans are against war with Iraq, 64 percent are in favor and 11 percent are undecided. Are 25 percent of Americans communists who hate their country and would like to see a proletarian revolution? Obviously, the answer is no. However, the public face of the anti-war movement are the dreadlocked white kids who spend their weekends traveling from public plaza to public plaza annoying the public with loud and incomprehensible leftist puppet shows.
If this wasn't bad enough for the anti-war movement, the leftists of A.N.S.W.E.R. and IAC tie their opposition to war in Iraq to fringe positions on other issues. At a recent anti-war rally in Washington, D.C., there were placards attacking Israel's right to exist and advocating the release of convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal, whose case has about as much to do with Iraq as does the debate between "less filling" and "tastes great."
The problem with the loonies leading the anti-war movement is the fact that there are plenty of reasonable arguments against war with Iraq. It doesn't take much to punch a hole in the Administration's argument that a defeated Iraq would become democratic and would lead to democratic revolutions all around the region. It also stands to reason that we put our regional allies, such as Israel, at risk by forcing a war. Even the Administration knows that its arguments are weak; President Bush had to lie about the existence of an International Atomic Energy Agency report alleging that Iraq was six months from developing nuclear weapons. When the Washington Post's Dana Milbank exposed the lie, very few newspapers picked up the story, possibly because the right had used the actions of the loonie left to advance the argument that an attack on Bush could only come from unpatriotic agitators.
Just like the Vietnam-era anti-war movement, the percentage of the population against war in Iraq will rise as the lies, exaggerations and far-fetched scenarios used to justify war are exposed. Unfortunately, this will take much longer because A.N.S.W.E.R. and IAC have linked opposition to war in Iraq with opposition to capitalism and Israel.
Are the anti-war puppeteers and chanters entirely to blame for this? Not entirely. They are activists, a moniker they would not deserve if they were not active. Still, they represent a tiny minority of the quarter of America that opposes war with Iraq. The mainstream opinion leaders who oppose war have been cowed by Bush's popularity and the aura of inevitability his administration has created around the war. For the same reason the Democrats lost control of the Senate, the anti-war centrists lost because they were too afraid to speak up.
If there is ever to be any successful opposition to the Bush Administration's foreign policy, it can only be achieved by moderates who shout loud enough to be heard over the din of the communists, anti-IMFers, self-loathing third-worldists and terrorist apologists who soil the reputation of the moderate left.
Charles Donefer can be reached at cdonefer@jhunewsletter.com
