The Best Way to Stop a War ...

Get the Soldiers to Refuse to Fight It

The Best Way to Stop a War

http://www.counterpunch.org/jacobs12222009.html

By RON JACOBS
December 22, 2009

I read today (December 22, 2009) that the last bunch of US Marines in
Iraq are scheduled to leave early next year. As everyone knows, this
means that more than 120,000 US troops will still be in Iraq after
that Marine unit's departure. In addition, there will be tens of
thousands of US-paid mercenaries, CIA operatives and other
personnel. No one knows when or if these people will leave that
country. It's hard to believe that the United States has been waging
some kind of war against that nation since 1991. Whether it was the
original attack on January 16, 1991 that ended in the slaughter on
the Highway of Death, the years of deadly sanctions or the renewal of
outright hostilities and occupation that began with the shock and awe
attacks in March 2003, the people of Iraq have felt the wrath of US
military power. This nineteen-year campaign has destroyed the
infrastructure of the Iraqi nation and much of the social fabric of
its people. What follows is a reflection on one of the earliest
protests against the war in 1990.

December 8, 1990 was a beautiful day in Olympia, WA. Once again,
people throughout the world were massing in large numbers to express
their opposition to what seemed to be an inevitable war in the
Persian Gulf. In Olympia, over five hundred people had gathered in
Sylvester Park. This was almost twice the number that had made it to
the October 20th demonstration.

As antiwar organizer and Army veteran Greg Bye wrote in his report
for the local left-wing monthly Works In Progress: "the rally and
march was spirited˜and well received [as] leaflets were taken by most
everyone who was offered one." Many of the speakers were familiar
faces by now, yet one of them-a young man I'll call Hugo-gave the
most powerful talk of the day. Hugo was one of those guys who still
believed that America was a good country. He had joined the Marines
because he wanted to and had served proudly. However, he couldn't
deal with a war that was so obviously about markets and profit. This
led him to decide that not only would he refuse to go should his
reserve unit be activated, he would also oppose the war as loudly as
he could. As time went on, it was apparent that he had an innate
ability to reach young (and older) folks who were nervous around the
more garishly outfitted and culturally extreme protesters and
organizers. In other words, he was best at reaching people from
middle America who liked being from middle America. The part of his
speech that sticks in my mind to this day went like this:

"I'm here today with a troubled heart. This morning one of my best
friends from Evergreen (college) left; not because he doesn't want to
be here; not because he is not intelligent enough to be here; not
because it's the holiday season and school's out so he can go home to
his family. He left because he serves in the reserves and George
Bush has decided his life is less valuable than words like oil. He
must leave the peace of home because George has decided to send our
armies overseas to make the world safe for feudal monarchy. Some
would claim that my friend must be a warmonger to enlist, so why
should the peace movement worry? But those of us who are his friends
know this is wrong. He must go because he does not have the money to
be in college without the GI Bill. Not having money for an education
should not be a death sentence in our society."

Hugo had hit it right on the head. Many folks in the antiwar
movement, whether they were anarchist or some kind of liberal
pacifist, assumed a moral superiority over those in the
military. This had been a problem during the Vietnam war as well,
yet most organizations overcame it. Without the military draft,
however, this arrogance had returned. Many folks who held this
opinion either did not understand the economic reality of a system
that forced working class young people to choose between a dead end
job and the military once they left high school, unless they somehow
lucked into a substantial scholarship for college. Those folks who
had developed a working class consciousness knew that this lack of
choice constituted what some on the Left termed an economic draft.

Having lived in a military environment the first eighteen years of my
life made it easy for me to sympathize with most service women and
men. Hell, my parents had hired GIs to babysit us when I was a
youngster on a small USAF station in Peshawar, Pakistan. When I was
in high school over in Germany I used to listen to rock concerts and
smoke hash with several GIs. After all, we were only two or three
years apart in age. This identification with their situation,
especially after working with antiwar servicemen and women in
Frankfurt am Main as a newsletter distributor for the local chapter
of Fuck The Army (FTA) and later as a friend of some of the members
of the Laurel, Maryland chapter of Vietnam Veterans Against the War
(VVAW), led me to quickly defend GIs whenever some movement person
started to call them baby killers or something similar. The best way
to stop a war is to get the soldiers to refuse to fight it.

On the other side of the coin, however, the yellow ribbon campaign to
support the troops (which was just in its infancy in December) was
difficult to swallow. If one was against the war, then it was
ridiculous to suggest that (s)he could support the troops' presence
in the Gulf since they were there to fight a war. As for the
government and the media behind the yellow ribbon phenomenon, their
call was pure hypocrisy. They cared less about the troops than
anyone, otherwise they would not have supported their going to the
Middle East in the first place.

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