Hawks for Withdrawal (Page 3)

The peace movement should take some credit for this. And the peace movement should keep the pressure on the pillars of the war policy, lest public opinion backslide into divisions or despair. The peace movement should also be planning now to make it virtually impossible for presidential candidates to campaign successfully in 2008 without committing to a speedy withdrawal from Iraq.

But there are understandable limits to what the peace movement can accomplish in the short run, aside from forcefully expressing the majority's desire that the United States withdraw. What are those limits? The peace movement cannot force the US government to "withdraw now," unless of course the insurgents suddenly overrun the Green Zone. The peace movement cannot force the United States out of the Middle East, though it can help pressure our government to reverse the Israeli occupation, which our tax dollars subsidize. But with the public climate soured over Iraq, the peace movement can mobilize opinion against military intervention in places like Venezuela.

Movements generally have power against the system when they apply pressure to the focal point of its weakness, in this case the dramatic waste of lives and taxes spent on an unwinnable war conducted undemocratically. The strong popular demand to set a withdrawal timetable is becoming impossible for the elites to avoid. When and if withdrawal is announced, the peace movement may face serious shrinkage and internal confusion. The phase of negotiation tends to wear movements down. The Paris peace talks of the Vietnam era took some seven years. The Israeli-Palestinian negotiating process appears eternal. An exception worth examining has been the peace process in Northern Ireland.

Besides remaining a formidable factor for politicians facing close elections and military recruiters chasing down high school students, the peace movement has a historic role to play every day in shaping the public understanding of the lessons of Iraq. The lessons of this war will "prepare the battlefield," to borrow a Pentagon term, for future wars and political campaigns. It will determine whether the current peace movement will be limited to a single important issue or be an embryo of a broader progressive movement.

This is the sharpest potential difference between the peace movement and the centrists. Both can and should collaborate on military withdrawal. But the peace movement wants to prevent future wars, reverse the nuclear weapons momentum, end domestic spying, divert resources to domestic priorities and, just for starters, put an end to the pattern of "armed privatization."

These are issues the centrists and most politicians will not touch unless they are confronted with a future climate of opinion in which real answers are demanded. Moderates wish the war to end so that the "real" war against terrorism can be prosecuted more effectively. Progressives should be making the case that the Iraq War is far from a misguided adventure but rather the result of pursuing an anti-terrorism approach that divides the world into camps of good and evil, just as Vietnam was the logical outcome of cold war assumptions about a monolithic Communist conspiracy.

The national security establishment already fears this legacy of Iraq. A December 2005 Foreign Affairs article fretted about an emergent "Iraq Syndrome" that parallels the "Vietnam Syndrome" of previous decades. Based apparently on a disease-control model, the "Iraq Syndrome" will make Americans skeptical that having the largest defense budget is "broadly beneficial." Other Vietnam-era themes critical of empire have re-entered through the window of the Bush era; among them, opposition to an imperial presidency or any notion of policing the world.

If the Vietnam era left any "syndrome" behind, it was a healthy irreverence toward power, which shows up today in antiwar marches and parents' opposition to military recruiting. The first President Bush prematurely believed that the "Vietnam Syndrome" was defeated in the Persian Gulf War, but it only remained dormant until the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Whether a Republican or Democrat finally withdraws American troops from Iraq, it is crucial that public opinion remain angry and critical of the deceptions that resulted in so many needless deaths. That is the final victory, which only the peace movement can achieve by drawing more Americans into questioning the nature of what Robert Lifton calls "the superpower syndrome."

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