On January 13, 2015, I drove from our nation’s capital across its historic bridges to a cold parking lot at Fort Myer, Virginia, where I felt jarred at seeing the vast hillside of solemn gravestones honoring those Americans who had sacrificed everything in our nation’s wars, including 58,000 who perished in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. I had visited Arlington many times before, and I had been to Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall in Washington many times as well. Being there made me feel grounded in grief.

But I could not linger. I was here to talk to the Pentagon. With me was David Cortright, who had been an active-duty soldier in 1968–71 and who chose to oppose the Vietnam War and organize GIs. He was now the director of policy studies at Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and the author of the definitive history Soldiers in Revolt: GI Resistance During the Vietnam War. Cortright was our leader in initiating this attempt at honest dialogue with the Pentagon. His associate Terry Provance, an ordained minister with the United Church of Christ and a lifelong peace activist, cleared our way into the building. We were joined by John McAuliff, long affiliated with the Quaker-inspired American Friends Service Committee and now a leading figure in peace and reconciliation efforts between the United States, Vietnam, and Cuba, and by Margery Tabankin, who grew up in the Weequahic neighborhood on the white suburban border of the Newark ghetto where I, in 1964–67, knocked on poor people’s doors with the Newark Community Union Project, sponsored by Students for a Democratic Society. She had migrated to the Madison campus of the University of Wisconsin during a time of mass antiwar confrontations.

Also joining us that day was Heather Booth, a successful organizer and trainer of new organizers over the past 50 years. In the wings to report any newsworthy developments was Ira Arlook of Fenton Communications.

After walking through the doors of Fort Myer Communications Center Building 405, we were greeted by the Pentagon team, led by retired Col. Mark Franklin of the History and Legacy Branch at the Pentagon’s Vietnam Commemoration office. With him was Phil Waite, a communications specialist, and the affable former war correspondent Joseph Galloway, the kind of guy you could swap stories with all day. Galloway had spent many years reporting from Vietnam and had written the best-selling We Were Soldiers Once… and Young, co-authored with retired Lt. Gen. Harold Moore, about the 1965 battle in Ia Drang Valley. Now he was involved in a project to document the lives of Vietnam vets on tape. It was a massive undertaking, and the challenge was daunting. Of almost 9 million Vietnam-era veterans, he said, almost 2 million had already died, and the losses were accelerating as time passed. Tabankin immediately offered to help raise funds and open Hollywood doors to expedite Galloway’s project.

* * *

We started by telling our personal stories and expectations for the meeting. I shared a story more personal than political. Since everyone knew of my activities during the Vietnam War—my unauthorized trips to Hanoi to seek the release of American POWs, my marriage to Jane Fonda, my trials in Chicago for helping to organize protests at the 1968 Democratic National Convention—I simply said that all the stories of my efforts to end the war were true. I said my father, a World War II Marine, had disowned me for 16 years, cutting me off from my younger sister, all because of what he read in the papers about my adventures. My mother had virtually lived in hiding every time my name was in the news.

I described my experience when I was hauled into a New York induction center: All I recall seeing was a room full of confused, fearful, and naked 18-year-olds like me. I explained that torment and breakups had occurred in the families of soldiers, veterans, and political radicals alike. We were a generation divided by big lies and propaganda, although many had finally achieved reconciliation on personal levels. We wanted now to honor Vietnam veterans for their sacrifice and suffering, including the many thousands who had created an unprecedented GI peace movement and led the effort to end the war. We believed we must put a stop to false and sanitized history; real truth and sharing of stories were crucial to any authentic reconciliation. We had learned, almost accidentally, that the Pentagon was embarked on a congressionally mandated and funded effort to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the war’s escalation in 1965, when the first combat troops were sent to Vietnam. Already Franklin and his team had posted an “interactive timeline” on the Internet. It seemed, on its face, to be a den of denial, glossing over some events of the past and cherry-picking others to highlight. Under the guise of honoring veterans and their service, the timeline presented a distorted version of reality and seemed more an exercise in propaganda than an honest attempt to grapple with a complicated and disobliging historical record.

For example, the July 1, 1968, entry referred to the notorious Phoenix program only by its goal to “break Vietcong support in the countryside.” It didn’t mention that the program relied on systematic torture and assassination and that it was shut down after media exposure and congressional hearings.

The June 13, 1971, entry described the Pentagon Papers as a “leaked collection of government memos written by government officials that tell the story of U.S. policy.” The characterization was at best banal, and at worst neglected what was most significant about the whole affair, which ruptured government secrecy by exposing the deliberate and long-standing practice of the White House and the Pentagon to confuse and mislead the American people about the war. Nowhere did the timeline acknowledge that the Nixon administration failed in its attempt to convict Daniel Ellsberg and Anthony Russo, who had leaked the papers to The New York Times and The Washington Post, of espionage. The Pentagon Papers were important because they suggested that our critique of the war was right, or at least that those of us who had long opposed our deepening disaster in Indochina weren’t wrong. The government’s own documents proved it. There were also no entries in the timeline describing draft resistance, opposition among GIs, deserters to Canada and other countries, prayer vigils, moratoriums, letters written to Congress, civil disobedience, peace campaigns for Congress and the presidency, massive teach-ins, and so on.

We were mindful that former Republican senator and defense secretary Chuck Hagel had said at the Vietnam Memorial that Americans had a duty “to be honest in our telling of history. There is nothing to be gained by glossing over the darker portions of a war…that bitterly divided America.… We must learn from past mistakes, because that is how we avoid repeating past mistakes.” Secretary of State John Kerry, a Vietnam combat veteran who later came to prominence opposing the war, had also chosen the road to reconciliation, playing a key role with Senator John McCain, a former POW, in forging the historic mutual recognition between the United States and Vietnam in 1995. Kerry said in Hanoi on August 7, 2015, in a ceremony marking 20 years of normalized relations, “We have the ability to overcome great bitterness and to substitute trust for suspicion and replace enmity with respect.”

It was with such hopes that we had arranged to meet with Franklin and his colleagues at the Pentagon. Our first obligation was to history and its tangled truths, so Cortright was blunt when he said, “Your Vietnam narrative simply can’t stand up to public scrutiny.” Franklin said he was heartened that we, too, wanted to honor the sacrifice of the veterans. A sense of relief washed over the room. He invited us to collaborate on revising the website by the inclusion of Vietnam scholars we would help to select. Congress, however, had approved the project seven years before. The design was all but done.

In addition, we were told that ultimately there would be a “wall of faces of every lost soldier” and a display of every item left at the Vietnam Memorial (there were already 400,000). There would also be a revised version of the Pentagon’s timeline, and the peace movement’s efforts to end the war would be included. But how? Clearly, progressive members of Congress and veterans of the vast opposition to the war would have to race to achieve inclusion. We realized that our fight over memory had just begun. The scales were tipped, but we had experience with flipping stories, from the underground press’s coverage of the My Lai massacre to coverage of the Pentagon Papers. Experience showed how activism, combined with critical thinkers and news media funded by our donations or foundation grants, could put projects of historical reclamation and protest on a faster track. And now, with the advent of social media, we had a new edge, the potential power to dramatically and publicly expose the false stories that had circulated from the 1950s to the Obama presidency, and to cast into sharper relief the pivotal role that our protests had played.

In the time we had for back-and-forth, we learned that the music being considered to accompany the timeline might include both Barry Sadler’s “Ballad of the Green Berets” and Edwin Starr’s “War,” with commentary. But where, we wondered, was Country Joe and the Fish’s “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag,” or Pete Seeger’s “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” or John Fogerty’s “Fortunate Son,” or Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s “Ohio” and “Find the Cost of Freedom”?

The history of the antiwar movement needed to be portrayed, including the crucial role of Vietnam Veterans Against the War. There would need to be inclusion and funding for women’s experiences in the war as well.

* * *

We needed to reclaim our history on a grand scale. Many players—members of Congress, including Barbara Lee, Jim McGovern, and several others, as well as members of the clergy, foundations, liberal movements, and the new labor movement—would need to help plan this long campaign of historical reclamation. Storytellers, artists, actors, and musicians would need to be engaged in this effort. The more people were aroused, the more they might demand of Congress and the media, and the more the truth of history could be presented.

Some on the left would perhaps denounce the whole project—some already had. Some might want a memorial to anticolonial and anti-imperialist movements and an admission that Vietnam was never a “mistake” but a systemic genocidal program. And maybe such ideological positioning, brewed through bitterness and rage, is correct. Our movement, now as then, was divided, with splits among radicals, revolutionaries, sectarians, moderates, and militants, including legions of paid FBI informants and provocateurs sent by our government. Disparate groups triggered a huge movement, but the war was finally ended by Vietnam veterans, the civil-rights leadership, and a congressional bloc that woke up and took action. We should give credit and honor to the movement, however it splintered and burned out, because the broader struggle was a turning point in our history, notwithstanding all our mad, outrageous diversity. What we should honor and strive for today is an inclusive demonstration of the power of the peace movement.

There are liberal forces that may want to coopt us, and conservative forces that surely want to erase us from history altogether. There are wealthy donors and hawks who seek to use the example of Vietnam to escalate other wars and pursue endless campaigns of demonization against Islam to wipe out terrorism.

The Vietnam protest movement may never achieve the recognition already given other movements from the same era: civil rights, women’s rights, farmworkers’ rights, the environmental movement, and more recent struggles like the one for LGBTQ rights. Earlier struggles for workers’ rights in the 1930s were recognized, institutionalized, and legitimized in American politics in ways the peace movement never has been. Even Barack Obama, a brilliant wordsmith, distanced himself from the ’60s with sarcasm in his book The Audacity of Hope, writing: “Sometimes I felt as if I were watching the psychodrama of the Baby Boom generation—a tale rooted in old grudges and revenge plots hatched on a handful of college campuses long ago.” Obama does credit “the sixties generation” with success in the admission of minorities and women into full citizenship, but the antiwar movement, including the role of Julian Bond, Martin Luther King Jr., and Vietnam Veterans Against the War goes unmentioned. A movement that partly made Obama’s achievement possible is stricken from the record he writes.

Since there is today virtually no popular, well-funded, and permanent activist peace movement, our recognition of such powerful grassroots groups is fading away into legend, banished to the musty bookcases of the left. To be sure, groups like Peace Action, the Quakers, and the Institute for Policy Studies thrived during the nuclear-freeze campaign of the early 1980s and during the Iraq invasion and occupation, but their influence rapidly declined. Even so, peace groups have mounted feisty opposition, albeit on a much smaller scale than in the Vietnam era. To avoid the consequences of negative public opinion, Washington has launched secret drone wars as an alternative to deploying US troops, thereby lessening casualties. That demonstrates the power of the Vietnam memory and represents a major achievement for a peace movement 50 years after American soldiers fled Saigon. Political worries about drafting and deploying American troops is one of the peace movement’s most powerful and enduring legacies.

* * *

Even though the Vietnam War ended in a historic US failure, the hawks who supported it have gone on to enjoy comfortable roles in successive administrations. Few of the pro-war pundits, elites, and think-tankers have apologized or resigned since Vietnam. Instead, they have risen in the ranks of the national-security establishment while implementing further military follies based on many of the same assumptions that led to the Vietnam collapse. Meanwhile, the spectrum of “legitimate” opinion has tilted to military options while marginalizing anyone with proven experience in the Vietnam peace movement.

The trivializing of the peace movement’s history has distorted the public memory of Dr. King, who opposed the Vietnam War in a speech in August 1965, a few months after the first SDS march on Washington. His most important antiwar orations, delivered in April 1967 at the Riverside Church in New York and at a mass rally in Central Park, were met by angry editorials in The New York Times and The Washington Post. He was condemned by the Johnson White House, as well as by the leaders of labor and most civil-rights organizations. It was inappropriate, many claimed, for a “Negro spokesman” to stray into the territory of foreign policy. And though his antiwar message is included on the plaque at the King Memorial, he is generally remembered today as a civil-rights leader, not as a man who opposed the Vietnam War and was organizing a Poor People’s Campaign until his last breath. The myth persists that freedom can be expanded at home while repression is imposed and massive bombings escalated abroad. Few remember that shortly after King’s death, amid the police brutality and street battles at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, a mule train of civil-rights workers from King’s organization was there in silent tribute to what might have been. We were part of the cause he led, and he was part of us. History has shown that he was right, for the full realization of his justice agenda is still blocked by the permanent war economy and the national surveillance state.

One can only guess why so many elites want to forget the Vietnam peace movement by history cleansing, why public memories have atrophied, and why there are few memorials to peace. The steady denial of our impact, the persistent caricatures of who we really were, the constant questioning of our patriotism, the snide suggestions that we offered no alternative but surrender to the Communist threat, have cast a pall of illegitimacy over our memory and had a chilling effect on many journalists, peace dissenters, and the current generation of students. Of course, one reason for this forgetting is that the Vietnam War was lost—a historical fact that representatives of a self-proclaimed superpower can never acknowledge. Accepting defeat is simply not permissible.

It is more convenient to lay the blame on the peace movement, the liberal media, dovish politicians at home. For if the war rested on false assumptions, the deaths of 58,000 Americans and millions of Indochinese might reasonably be blamed on a whole generation of American policy-makers, intellectuals, and generals. Those at fault could never look the families of the dead in the eye. Imagine the grief and rage among those families. Resignations might be required. Instead, the antiwar movement has been ignored or scapegoated, while those truly at fault have enjoyed decades of immunity.

Since the Vietnam War’s makers cannot accept responsibility or acknowledge the full truth, those who opposed the war are needed more than ever, to prevent the dimming of memory and to keep history from repeating. We must write our own history, tell our own story, and teach our lessons of Vietnam. We need to understand better why we did what we did and what it meant, not only for those of us who helped to make this history, but also to tease out for the generations to come what lessons might be learned from the legacy that these great upheavals left us. Of one lesson, I have no doubt: Peace and justice movements can make a difference.

It is true that our movement was deeply fragmented. The antiwar movement reproduced many of the racial, class, gender, and cultural divides of the society from which we came. On top of those differences there crept the infection of sectarian power struggles that still afflicts social movements in general. Informants and provocateurs from COINTELPRO (the notorious FBI counterintelligence program) did their best to spread the poisons of distrust, division, and violence.

It is not too late to recover and begin again. This is already happening in the reconciliation process between the Vietnamese and our country. But we must not forget that for the Vietnamese, the war is not fully over. The soil of Vietnam is contaminated with Agent Orange. Unexploded ordnance still covers the landscape. Those deformed by our defoliants will transmit their disabilities to their children for generations. Each generation of Americans has a responsibility to help mitigate this permanent damage. And yet, by the tens of thousands, American veterans and their families are touring old battlefields, shaking hands and sharing tea with their old enemies. The sentiments of resolution are palpable. So are the feelings experienced by visitors to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington.

The disaster that began in Vietnam still spirals on as a conflict between empire and democracy. The cycle of war continues its familiar path. Truth, it is said, is war’s first casualty. Memory is its second.

“He who laughs
Has not yet heard
The terrible tidings.”

That was the dark prophecy of the radical German playwright Bertolt Brecht, a former Santa Monica resident, written in the shadows of the Holocaust.

Today, in the 15th year of the Long War, an anxious America needs a peace-and-diplomacy platform from the Democratic Party convention but also, more importantly, a new, more effective peace movement. That’s a challenging order, given public anxiety over the war on terrorism and the need for a peace-and-justice alternative. Polls show a consistent majority in opposition to another ground war, with its attendant US casualties and budget deficits. On the other hand, Americans strongly support military intervention if it will defeat ISIS without spiraling into another futile war.

Given that public skepticism toward intervention, there are nearly 200 House seats and 20 in the Senate that can be pressured from the grassroots toward peace and diplomacy. They should call for:

• resistance to Trump, and those he represents, who back the expanded use of torture;
• closing of Guantánamo in the final days of Obama’s presidency;
• preserving the US-Iran nuclear agreement and the rapprochement with Cuba from the forces hoping to revive conflict;
• naming climate change as a national security threat and fighting the lobbyists for denial and greater drilling;
• and, in the general election debates, mobilizing against Trump’s Strangelovian fantasies of deploying nuclear weapons in South Korea and Japan.

In the campaign—and, if Hillary Clinton wins, during her presidency—Senator Bernie Sanders’s legions should be outspoken against regime change and demand that a new peace-and-diplomacy bloc be forged in Congress.

The threat of nuclear brinkmanship and war can stir the anger and questioning of a new peace movement, as happened in 2003 before the Iraq War. Later, as it became clear the war was unwinnable and unaffordable, this new peace movement mounted political pressure, with demonstrations in the hundreds of thousands on more than ten occasions. Led by Representative Maxine Waters and a growing number of congressional dissidents, this movement became the backbone of popular resistance, from the streets to congressional suites.

That movement helped propel Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential primaries, as Hillary Clinton well remembers. The organizers demanded that goals and timetables be set for American withdrawal, forcing the return home of 90 percent of US troops—until the resurgence of Sunni-Shia sectarianism helped the rise of ISIS and forced the United States down the path of drone warfare, redeployment of Special Forces, and even some ground troops. Another escalation is the present danger. Until the balance either on the ground or in American politics shifts again, we could sink into a new Dark Age.

The real choices now are between a limited and secretive US war against terrorism, which at least preserves most of the New Deal legacy of Social Security, community colleges, and public schools, on the one hand, and expanded funding of Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare, including a revived public option. The fight to save the planet from fossil fuels will lead to a final showdown with Big Oil and the denying, lying fundamentalists. The Republicans are gnashing their teeth to destroy those vital social programs during their march to war. The war-presidency model of Franklin Roosevelt could be the best-case scenario for a renewed peace struggle in the midst of new opportunities for labor, environmentalists, and communities of color.

Someone like Representative Barbara Lee will revive a peace-and-diplomacy caucus in the Democratic Party, either as a new leverage point or an extension of the existing Congressional Progressive Caucus. Along with President Obama and Senator Sanders, Lee is pushing hard for a new Authorization to Use Military Force against ISIS, with important incentives for diplomacy and fixed limits on US ground troops. Only the exhaustion of sectarian parties representing Saudi Arabia and Iran will lay the conditions for a stable peace in Syria. As the major powers and their proxies continue bleeding, peace advocates should keep urging a political settlement, including a possible partition.

The absence of a peace presence in the Democratic Party and in the streets is the vacuum that needs filling. The left needs to fight on defense until November, while at the same time debating and deciding how to break through this paralysis.

If Trump continues to falter, the Republicans may break from their insane fundamentalism, if only to save their prospects in November and after. If the GOP crumbles, new options may be floated on immigration reform, government spending, climate denial, and so on. But the prospects for ending the Long War will remain dim. Preserving the US-Iran nuclear agreement, the US-Cuba rapprochement, and support for the Cuban-sponsored peace agreement in Colombia—including an end to the Drug War—are the red lines progressives must draw. The fight against neoliberalism at home meshes with the fight against liberal interventionism abroad.

A Democratic triumph in November will elicit a rush of relief and new energy looking forward. If Trump is defeated and Democrats win eight or 10 Senate seats, the challenge of building a new Democratic left, inside and outside the party, could lead to a new era of optimism—and a more liberal Supreme Court for the next decade or longer. We would see renewed hopes for rebuilding a progressive bloc within a liberal party, as well as new single-issue movements with access to power such as we’ve never seen before. As Sanders says prophetically, “the struggle continues,” forward to a social-democratic party with an egalitarian foundation built on the extraordinary scale of Bernie’s presidential campaign. An opening toward a center-left political spectrum will open space for many possibilities.

I am committed to building a united front against Donald Trump, and working with both Democratic and independent voters toward the best possible ticket and platform for the Democratic Party in November. But sounding out supporters of both Sanders and Hillary Clinton, I’m worried that terrible friction is brewing between the two Democratic camps left in this primary.

Democrats all have to unite to win the White House and Supreme Court this year, building bridges without permanent bruising or the confusion of divide-and-conquer.

The state of the race is in flux. Respect and support for Bernie are rising, though Hillary maintains a 212-delegate edge. As of April 3, The New York Times assessed that Bernie will need “landslide” victories in the battles ahead. He’s certain to win more than the 16 states where he has already prevailed. Most of those states have been similar to Wisconsin, where 88 percent of the population is white, an enduring issue for the Sanders campaign. But of the major primaries that are coming up, several might be fruitful territory for Bernie. In New York, Hillary will need to tack towards Bernie on fair-trade issues or face losses in the Rust Belt regions of northern and western New York. Here in California, Bernie trails Hillary by six points, with 7 percent of the electorate undecided. And my sense is that California is winnable for Bernie. Lose or win, Bernie represents the most impressive independent campaign in American history, with the final chapters and legacy yet to be written.

I was an early supporter of Bernie, one of those who thought he could push Hillary to the left, legitimize democratic socialist measures, and leave an indelible mark on our frozen political culture. More deeply, I believed he was the best possible messenger in the wake of Democratic Party shortcomings. As I have argued for years, the liberal failure to create jobs in my Rust Belt heartland, Michigan, for three decades, destroyed hundreds of thousands of lives. Even after the activist explosion against free trade at the Battle of Seattle in 1999, standards of living remained stagnant. It was clear that the next generation would live lesser lives than our parents had. The tuition for a four-year public-university education almost doubled in cost between 2000 and 2015, while student debt rose to 1.2 trillion dollars in 2015. Racial disparities rose with police violence and mass incarceration rates. Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin fell to Republican governors, and Congress returned to GOP control.

Like the WTO protests in 1999, Occupy Wall Street “changed the conversation” in America, as the tepid mainstream media phrased it. But we didn’t need a conversation, we needed a change, and soon, in order to save a whole generation.

When Occupy sputtered out, Bernie’s campaign was destined to fill the void. Since winter, the two campaigns have become more visceral, even bitter, fulfilling my fear of a damaging split that could result in lower turnout among Democratic and independent voters this fall, assuming the presidential vote is close. It has become so fractious among Democrats and independents that I began to think that only Trump or Cruz could save us from ourselves. Support for Trump is dropping off now because of his slobbering racism and misogyny, while Cruz represents an even more pompous version of the same. At its core, their appeal is to working-class voters hammered out of their jobs and drawn to economic nationalism, combined with angry resentment of all the social progress achieved from the ’60s until now.

Little is predictable about this election. However, some facts still linger. Without Bernie landslides, Hillary will keep her delegate edge despite Bernie’s overall achievement. If Bernie wins New York and California, each by 1 percent, he still falls short.

Bernie’s army will keep climbing every barricade possible. In his ideal scenario, victories in the final primaries should lead the Democratic superdelegates to shift loyalty from Hillary. Nonetheless, Bernie has received endorsements from only seven House members and none from his current Senate colleagues. No matter how much they agree with Bernie on the issues, no matter what doubts they hold about the Clintons, those running for election or reelection are unlikely to see themselves as benefiting from having a democratic socialist/independent at the top of the ticket.

Hillary is, well, Hillary. I remember seeing her on Yale’s green in 1969, wearing a black armband for peace while a kind of Armageddon shaped up during the Panther 21 trial and Cambodia invasion. Even then, she stood for working within the system rather than taking to the barricades. Similarly, in Chicago 1968, she observed the confrontations at a distance. If she had some sort of revolution in mind, it was evolutionary, step-by-step. In her earlier Wellesley commencement speech, she stated that the “prevailing, acquisitive, and competitive corporate life is not the way of life for us. We’re searching for more immediate, ecstatic, and penetrating modes of living.” But from there it was a determined decades-long uphill climb through those same institutions that had disenchanted the young Hillary.

There are two Hillary Clintons. First, the early feminist, champion of children’s rights, and chair of the Children’s Defense Fund; and second, the Hillary who has grown more hawkish and prone to seeking “win-win” solutions with corporate America. When she seems to tack back towards her roots, it is usually in response to Bernie and new social movements. She hasn’t changed as much as the Democratic Party has, responding to new and resurgent movements demanding Wall Street reform, police and prison reform, immigrant rights and a $15-an-hour minimum wage, fair trade, action on climate change, LGBT rights, and more.

The peace movements from Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan, too, are a living legacy that fuels the public majority against sending ground troops into the fiery jaws of war another time. Bernie voted for the war in Afghanistan, but correctly faults Hillary for her hawkish impulse towards regime change. We are likely to live under a what amounts to a war presidency until either a new catastrophe or new movement leads to an alternative to the “Long War” on terrorism.

The populist clarity of Bernie’s proposals can be problematic, even for some of his supporters. For example, to simply reject Obamacare in the belief that “political revolution” will lead to a single-payer solution is simplistic. The path to a Canadian-type system or Medicare for All has fallen short in California and Vermont, and will require Republican defeats this year and in 2018, followed by a presidential showdown in 2020. Meanwhile, Obamacare and the Medicaid expansion are helping 20 million Americans now, mainly youth and people of color, which is a huge improvement that no thoughtful radical can dismiss as merely “reformist.” My friends at National Nurses United are to be congratulated for spending millions supporting Bernie and tirelessly rolling their buses through so many states thus far, but I don’t see a rollout of a Plan B, which requires at least two presidential terms and three more congressional elections. Bernie’s position reinforces the voter impression that his idealism will be blocked in practice. Hillary and Obama’s approach, following on her children’s-health-insurance law, is much easier for voters to understand and support.

* * *

Fracking will be a salient issue in both New York and California, where it has motivated and mobilized thousands of grassroots activists. The anti-fracking movement achieved a historic moratorium on fracking in New York State, where local governments had considerable leverage in a home-rule system. Big names in the entertainment business lent their prestige to the nascent movement, too. Next, the New York model headed to California, amid fracktivists’ confidence that Governor Jerry Brown would either ban the practice or adopt a New York–style ban. I enlisted in the anti-fracking campaign, spending many hours over these three years advocating inside and outside the Brown administration. The movement hasn’t succeeded in California yet, but we’re still committed.

The arguments among environmentalists are the deepest and most frustrating of any I’ve seen for 40 years—but they’re important to understand. Along the way, there have been historic achievements. Our environmental-justice movement, with the leadership of state Senator Kevin De León, wrote into law a requirement that 25 percent of billions in California’s cap-and-trade dollars would go to benefit disadvantaged communities, such as the Central Valley and South Central LA, many of which are predominantly of color. Nearly $300 million began pouring into such communities on a yearly basis. California is spending $120 billion over four years on clean energy, the largest such investment in the country. We also passed the first divestment-from-coal bill in history. Under Brown’s leadership, California created a Global Green Bloc of states and regions, from Canada to China to Europe and Latin America, building a zero-emissions or low-emissions economic powerhouse. A 2014 report found that there are 200,000 clean-energy jobs in the state, surpassing jobs in the fossil-fuels industry.

But the fracking debate continues to leave permanent scars. Despite the governor’s historically high approval ratings, the fracktivists take every media opportunity to thrash him personally. They rack up names on online petitions, but so far have failed to gain political traction. Their apocalyptic view has only worsened. In addition to personally attacking Brown, whose approval rating is 56 percent, they have brutally attacked NRDC and “establishment” environmentalists for not achieving a moratorium in California. Their tactics build their online membership, but turn off or confuse more mainstream Californians.

The Democratic primary may deepen this antagonism and result in defections among Hillary supporters. Hillary wants limits on fracking: a ban where individual states have blocked it, like in New York; safeguards against children’s and family exposures; a ban where releases of methane or contamination of ground water are proven; and full disclosure of the chemicals used in the process. Bernie’s position is that he’s simply against all fracking.

But Hillary’s position goes beyond what virtually any state has done. The New York Times writes that she “has pledged to end subsidies to the fossil fuel industry to pay for her ambitious climate plan” and intends to install 500 million solar collectors in four years. If and when Obama’s Clean Power Plan is upheld in the federal courts, now a likelihood after Justice Scalia’s death, that will bring a even greater change.

Meanwhile, Bernie’s total fracking ban leaves the question of how to do so unaddressed. His energy platform is comprehensive, but he offers no strategy to implement the Paris Summit in the short term. Instead, Bernie will call his own summit of experts in the first hundred days he is president. There is no recognition of the overwhelming wall of opposition from the Republican Congress, which can only be broken on state-by-state organizing. The climate clock is ticking towards doomsday. Where are we moving next, beyond waiting for the overthrow of Citizens United?

For some, like myself (who suffered a serious stroke while investigating fracking sumps in San Joaquin County last year), the question couldn’t be more urgent. I am fully supporting state Senator Ricardo Lara’s legislation setting firm timelines for the phasing out of asthma and cancer-causing emissions of black carbon, methane, and f-gases as an emergency health measure. The bill includes three key deadlines—40 percent methane reductions, 40 percent of hydrofluorocarbon gases, and 50 percent cuts in black-carbon emissions—all by 2030. Emissions of invisible particulate matter are an immediate threat to the lives and safety of millions of California workers, children, and residents of inner and rural towns. The Lara bill is an issue both candidates could immediately unite immediately around.

* * *

My second worry about Bernie’s candidacy is that he has not really faced an all-out Republican-financed media assault in this entire campaign. If he’s the nominee, that will be merciless. And my third concern: Bernie is leading an incredible movement and sowing seeds for the future, but lacks a concrete plan for turning his legacy into a permanent progressive force. We don’t know what will happen to the army of supporters he has assembled, but we already know the pattern of many similar projects—which end up going into decline or divisions.

Voting on June 7 is a personal responsibility for myself and other Californians, just as it is for my friends and colleagues in New York on April 19. What is to be done in this agonizing situation? I still believe a united front against the Republicans is the best and most necessary strategy. But I can’t vote for a united front on June 7.

I intend to vote for Hillary Clinton in the California primary for one fundamental reason. It has to do with race. My life since 1960 has been committed to the causes of African Americans, the Chicano movement, the labor movement, and freedom struggles in Vietnam, Cuba and Latin America. In the environmental movement I start from the premise of environmental justice for the poor and communities of color. My wife is a descendant of the Oglala Sioux, and my whole family is inter-racial.

What would cause me to turn my back on all those people who have shaped who I am? That would be a transgression on my personal code. I have been on too many freedom rides, too many marches, too many jail cells, and far too many gravesites to breach that trust. And I have been so tied to the women’s movement that I cannot imagine scoffing at the chance to vote for a woman president. When I understood that the overwhelming consensus from those communities was for Hillary—for instance the Congressional Black Caucus and Sacramento’s Latino caucus—that was the decisive factor for me. I am gratified with Bernie’s increasing support from these communities of color, though it has appeared to be too little and too late. Bernie’s campaign has had all the money in the world to invest in inner city organizing, starting 18 months ago. He chose to invest resources instead in white-majority regions at the expense of the Deep South and urban North.

Bernie comes from a place that is familiar to me, the New York culture of democratic socialism. From the Port Huron Statement forward, I have believed in the democratic public control of resources and protecting the rights of labor. My intellectual hero is C. Wright Mills, a Marxist who broke with what he condemned as the stale “labor metaphysic” of the communist and socialist parties, embracing instead an international New Left led by young middle-class students around the world. Mills was fresh, honest, and always searching. The 1962 Port Huron Statement declared that we needed liberals for their relevance in achieving reforms, and socialists for their deeper critique of underlying systems. We did not declare ourselves for socialism but for a massive expansion of the New Deal, combined with an attack on the Cold War arms race. We called for a basic realignment of the Democratic Party through the force of social movements, but not through a third party. We even went “part of the way with LBJ” in the face of the 1964 Goldwater threat. From there the Democrats divided over race and Vietnam, eventually leading to Nixon. Even in the ’80s and ’9os, our campaign for “economic democracy” chose not to identify as a socialist movement. With the coming of the 2008 Wall Street crash and Bernie’s campaign, our political culture has changed profoundly in its tolerance of socialist ideas. But is it enough after this truly divisive primary season?

I wish our primary could focus more on ending wars and ending regime change too, issues where Bernie is more dovish and Hillary still harbors an inner hawk. Both Bernie and Hillary call for “destroying” ISIS, whatever that might mean—but it certainly means we are moving into yet another “war presidency.” At least there is strong bipartisan opposition to the open-ended deployment of troops on the ground. But Hillary’s penchant for intervention and regime change can only be thwarted by enough progressive Democrats in Congress and massive protests in the streets and online. Neither candidate so far is calling for the creation of a new peace movement, but that’s the only way to check the drift into another war.

So here we are, at the end of one generation on the left and the rise of another. Both camps in the party will need each other in November—more than either side needs to emerge triumphant in the primary. We still need the organizing of a united front of equals to prevail against the Republicans. It will take a thorough process of conflict resolution to get there, not a unilateral power wielding by the usual operatives. It’s up to all of us.

The Republicans are implacable in doing anything to stop Obama. That is the unfortunate starting point for any discussion of the Supreme Court opening. They see Armageddon for the 40-year conservative dominance of the Court. It’s not an opening based on the death of one justice; it’s also the death of an era and the coming of a multicultural, multiracial, and multilingual America where the entrenched white power structure is losing command and control. It’s an America where naval ships are named after John Lewis, and that America cannot be abided by one-third of our voters, mostly living in the former Confederacy and the Western Frontier. The mounting violence in the country is due to the unnecessary perception that the whole white race is doomed. (Hey, we are 38 percent of the Obama vote nationwide, so get a life!)

Obama may or may not share my assumption. His strength is his ability to think and act across lines, in symbolism and action. So he may perceive a cracking point this fall if the old-school Republicans see their demise ahead. First, they have denied the legitimacy of Obama’s even offering a nominee. Next, worried about public perception, they may agree to hold a hearing, as advised by a strict construction of the Constitution. But they may play out a phony hearing as a trap for Obama, which will lead to gridlock in yet another branch of government. Finally, they will try framing the November election as a referendum on Obama, who’s beaten them twice. Ultimately, this is leading to trouble in the land.

Recall that the US Homeland Security Agency issued a report in 2009 warning that white racist militias and hate groups were a threat to Barack Obama, using the example of the torrent of hate letters to the White House. And what did the Republicans do? Complained until the report was sanitized.

Many of us know the pattern from long years of repetition. When I was elected to the Legislature in 1982 after a bruising fight, the Republicans soon prepared motions to eliminate my because of trips I’d taken to North Vietnam. Polling showed 80 percent support for me in my district. Even POWs came out supporting me. It didn’t matter. The Republican hate mail led to their defeat in the Assembly vote. They turned their lists into a fund-raising machine. They never quit until their deaths.

I introduced an Assembly resolution condemning right-wing terrorists for killing abortion doctors and trying to blow up clinics, and calling on the attorney general and law enforcement to “take all steps necessary” to protect both lives and clinics. The resolution, SCR 7, in 1995, passed without a single “no” vote. Later, I learned the reason for Republican avoidance. First, we had a far-right conspiracy theorist on the floor in the person of Senator Don Rogers. Second, another Republican senator told me that they couldn’t afford to vote for the resolution because they had so many militia supporters in their Republican coalitions.

However, in everyday work and socializing, Republicans were absolutely civil. Then I thought it was two-faced of them. Looking back, I guess they were trying to play by the formal rules, and some of them always needed my vote, even after trying to expel me. In baseball jargon, it was just business.

The Republican Party is the same today, filled with deeply conservative ideological fanatics steeped in Hayek, Rand supply-side economics, and “originalism.” I learned they really hate being described as “racist,” although that’s what allegiance to the original documents means, not to mention exclusion of Native Americans, women, renters, etc.

The debate over replacing Antonin Scalia brings us closer to the brink than we may ever have been. I trust the president to make a carefully vetted and fully responsible choice of his nominee. Based on Joe Biden’s comments this week, the choice will be reasonable and not provocative. Most legal experts will recognize that he’s done his duty. From there it’s all about who wins the November election, and the court drama will be central to the outcome.

I hope progressives will not play the Republicans’ game by competing over how liberal the choice should be. That only feeds into the Republican and mainstream-media narratives about two deadlocked “extremes.” The nominee should be a super-qualified public servant with unquestioned character, intelligence, experience, flexibility of mind, and skill in negotiating to accommodate the four remaining conservatives now in shock. If there are hearings at all, the nominee should come out highly regarded by a majority of the public and the legal commentators. Any misstep whatsoever should be avoided absolutely.

We have on our side certain key arguments. First, the president proposes and the Senate consents, not from an initial refusal to consider the Obama nominee. Second, the hearings have to be thorough and substantive, not controlled by a Republican refusal to engage. Third, the American voters are opposed to deeper gridlock in another branch of government. Fourth, the issues framed in the hearings should indicate a common ground rather than endless partisan warfare. Finally, it would strain the country to the maximum to lack a ninth judge for an unprecedented period of one year. The Republicans are talking about one-party rule, a coup against the president for an entire year, contravening our current system—holding it up, frankly—because of their insistence on hegemony.

Anything might change in this baffling year, but greater Democratic unity might result from the epic court fight. Bernie and Hillary have every right to keep their differences alive during the primaries, but it would be counterproductive for their debate to spill over to Obama’s choice and strategy. Of course, they will confide their recommendations to the president behind closed doors, but the argument for a united front against the Republicans is only strengthened by the Republican threat and stealth arsenal of dirty tricks.

We are living in a time of miracles and wonder
Don’t cry baby, don’t cry
It was a dry wind and it swept across the desert and it curled into the circle of birth
and the dead sand falling on the children and the mothers and the fathers
— Paul Simon

Our world is being shaken by protest, resistance, and repression that we have not experienced since 1968 or 1936, or the late 19th century. It is too much for any of us to assimilate at once, so I recommend that everyone set aside their pre-existing assumptions, and for starters, read every story in The New York Times everyday, or I might say read between the lines. Facebook and Twitter are not enough. I have read the daily Times for 50 years, from the days when it promoted the Vietnam War to its disclosure of the Pentagon Papers in 1971, from its catering to climate deniers to its virtual war against them in recent years. If you have time, read Bill McKibben and Naomi Klein, but start your day by carefully reading through the Times.

This is the new generation’s moment in history.

We are entering a tumbling vortex. We are entering the pre-post-Obama era with the president having about 400 days left in office. We are entering the pre-post-Jerry Brown era, with a new governor’s election already underway. Pope Francis, at the height of his power, is 79 years old. In Latin American many oligarchs and generals are passing from their pedestals as we enter the pre-post-Castro era with President Raul Castro departing in 2018.

We must calculate how best to lock in and build on the achievements of our movements over the last decade, including the historic decision by Shell to end its Arctic drilling. We cannot afford any loss to the gas-guzzling Republicans or servile, faltering Democrats, as happened when Reagan took office after Jimmy Carter and installed a right-wing fundamentalist, James Watt, as secretary of the interior, or when the Republican party drove Al Gore out of office on the fifth Supreme Court vote by Sandra Day O’Connor. It’s good to see more boldness and more unity among Senate Democrats these days, including Senator Maria Cantwell up in Washington state. Senate seats can be won in 2016 if we avoid repeating the debacle of division that happened in Colorado last time.

My heart is with Bernie Sanders at this point, and especially with the growth of a progressive bloc of Democrats led by the Elizabeth Warren, Sherrod Brown and Bill de Blasio. I can say that Joe Biden’s team is certainly planning to run. I worry about Hillary’s chances.

In California, the next governor and state senate must follow the positive historic precedents set by Jerry Brown and Senator Kevin de León on carbon reductions and environmental justice. In California the oil companies remain extremely powerful by funding opportunistic candidates claiming to create jobs—in Kern County where there already are 62,000 immigrant workers, where poverty and pollution and cancer and birth defects continue to be the legacy of exploitation.

I suffered a stroke on May 22 after tramping around the dark pits of fracking wastewater for two days in the suffocating wastelands of Kern County.

The rise of Kevin McCarthy from Bakersfield as Speaker is good news for the oil companies, but McCarthy’s district is one-third Latino, and high-tech industries are spreading there. No one should expect good news on climate out of McCarthy, but we shall see.

Let me now offer praise to Pope Francis, who takes his name from the hero of the environment, St. Francis of Assisi. Laudato Si’, mi Signore. Let us praise Brother Sun and Sister Moon!

Look, I have been critical of most Vatican doctrines on every issue going back to Vietnam. I was raised a Catholic during the fifties time of Cold War anti-communism when the Vietnam War lobby was led by American Catholics. I have painfully studied the 1486 Malleus Malifacarum, the Catholic Inquisition document explaining how to torture and burn thousands of women and plain heretics as demons. I have never approved of the canonization of Father Junipero Serra who colonized our native people. I believe his recent canonization was coupled with the canonization of the Archbishop of El Salvador, Oscar Romero, who was assassinated in broad daylight on his own Cathedral steps by religious fascists. The same forces murdered six nuns and priests in a Catholic chapel and churchyard in December 1980. I have visited both those sites of disgraceful murder.

Despite all this, I was inspired in 1960 by Pope John 23rd’s encyclical, Pacem in Terris, which led directly to the first nuclear-arms treaty between our government and the Soviet Union. That was achieved because of Women’s Strike for Peace and countless mothers who fought the lethal effects of Strontium 90 radiation on mothers, children, unborn children, and other living things.

I was profoundly awakened in 1968, the year of worldwide rebellions, by the Declaration of Latin America’s bishops who endorsed the doctrine of liberation theology with its preferential option for the poor. At the time, many of us were leaving universities to organize poor people in ghettos, barrios, and Appalachia. Priests and catechists were creating base communities of peasants, campesinos, and indigenous people everywhere in Latin America, translating the story of Jesus versus the Roman Empire into their very own languages for the first time. Now they were opposing the New Empire of conquest, massacres, and torture. Our Pope Francis was part of that continental storm, along with bishops riding burros into the “peripheries” of poor communities outside the glitzy world of overdevelopment.

Pope Francis has issued a historic encyclical, Laudato Si’, Mi Signore! I urge you not to read this on your handheld devices, but sit down, read and discuss it, especially among our more secular and skeptical friends. Disagree with whatever you may choose but remember its central message about the Urgency of Now.

The central message is that the road to removing greenhouse gases is the same as the path to social justice and development.

Those who study this message carefully should include wealthy environmental donors, and foundations. They are indispensible to the change, but need a change themselves. The Rockefeller Foundation has taken the lead in supporting environmental justice, climate activism, and divestment. From our humble beginnings 40 years ago, no one can doubt that we are gaining critical mass.

Amazing things have happened in California solar, renewables, and energy efficiency, where we lead the country and much of the world. The environmental justice movement here has been on the cutting edge. Signs of local progress are everywhere. Slashing emissions is vital to the health of our children, the elderly, and working people. We need to move forward with installing solar rooftop collectors as well as solar mirrors in the desert. Dodger Stadium and LAX need to step up. Capturing runoff from storms by using cisterns should be integral to neighborhood planning. Better pay, better working conditions, and apprenticeship programs are a must for community development. Greening our cities with projects like the billion-dollar LA River Restoration Project, a real restoration with minimum displacement of working-class families or gentrification can be a great leap forward.

The key is legislation carried by Senator De León and signed by Governor Brown that makes it a requirement of state policy that any emission reductions must carry co-equal benefits for disadvantaged communities. That means half the $2 or $3 billion in annual cap-and-trade revenues. California is spending $120 billion during four years on investments in the clean-energy economy. We are creating hundreds of thousands of jobs in clean energy, saving billions for consumers, and leading the country in meeting the United Nations emissions standards.

Governor Brown has taken the lead in encouraging a powerful Green Bloc of 24 states, including the Pacific Rim, the Midwest, the East Coast, and New England, plus British Columbia, Quebec, and there’s Germany and above all, several Chinese provinces representing billions of people. Governor Brown deserves credit for engaging and collaborating with Chinese leaders and scientists before the recent agreement between the United States and China at the UN.

With the pope, President Obama, and Xi Jinping, with Jerry Brown’s green bloc of regions, with the scientific communities present, this summit with turn out to be different from Copenhagen or Rio. It will require continued pressure and protests at the grassroots of all these regions to keep moving forward.

I am not sure that the oil companies have noticed, but they are winning a pyrrhic victory for polluters. Few have noticed these provisions of California law, among them:

– Meeting air-quality standards means complying with deadlines for smog and ozone pollution, essentially stopping burning fossil fuels in Southern California and the Central Valley.

– The law requires the steady supplanting of gasoline as the predominant transportation fuel in California. The law says that a principal goal is to improve the environment through energy efficiency, renewable energy, and “widespread transportation electrification.” The investor-owned utilities are primed to invest billions in this “market transformation.”

We have in law the most aggressive renewable-energy standards in the world, and a set of rules that ensure the new energy will also produce jobs, clean air, and economic benefits to communities in our state.

Don’t obsess about how little time we have to avert disastrous climate catastrophes, including drought, wildfires, floods, and war. They will happen. But remember that I’ve had a clock ticking towards midnight over the nuclear age for 50 years.

Think instead about unifying our ranks to every sector, in all the peripheries, from scientists at Stanford to engineers and industrial workers and those in our fields and inner cities. Remember the lyric of my wife, Barbara’s song, “Push that Rock”: Like Sisyphus, we have to keep pushing that rock from the bottom of the hill, “because in end the pushing makes us stronger.”

Editor’s note: The following article is excerpted from the book Listen, Yankee! Why Cuba Matters, which was published this spring by Seven Stories Press. Hayden, a key figure in the American New Left, says the book is “my quest to understand the long history of the sixties generation through the prism of the Cuban Revolution and the American response.” Greg Grandin, a history professor at NYU, calls Listen, Yankee! “a memoir and a meditation, a thoughtful reflection on the inter-American struggles of activists, intellectuals, and politicians for a more just world.”

Until the Obama administration, the United States government never heeded the advice of many rational voices over the years who argued for coexistence with Cuba, choosing instead to hear those strident advocates who sought to embargo, isolate, and ultimately overthrow the Cuban Revolution. Republicans have been most explicit in their demands for a rollback, while many liberal Democrats have explored normalization (John Kennedy), turned away from the prospect (Lyndon Johnson), proposed a path to recognition and reversed themselves (Jimmy Carter), or canceled the prospect after a confrontation (Clinton), failing in the end to achieve that goal for five decades.

One explanation after another fell away with the passage of time. Since the Soviet Union has dissolved, Cuba cannot be its pawn. Since guerrilla wars have subsided in Latin America, Cuba cannot be accused of fomenting them. Since our government has diplomatic relations and trade with one-party states like China, there is no reason why Cuba should be treated differently. If it’s about compensation for our casinos, oil and sugar companies, and Cuban families expropriated in 1960, Cuba, which has negotiated settlements with other countries, says it is willing to negotiate. If it’s about political prisoners, Cuba has released many or most of them. If it’s about atheism, the Vatican has good relations with Havana. The search for reasons for the impasse could have gone on endlessly, but thankfully it has ended without a new death. Fidel told two advisers to President Carter, Robert Pastor and Peter Tarnoff, on one of their visits to the island during the Carter presidency: “Your policy is to wait for me to die, and I don’t intend to cooperate.” Indeed, Fidel outlasted the embargo, defying all predictions to the contrary.

There is another explanation for how long it has taken, which requires returning to the exhortation in sociologist C. Wright Mills’s 1960 book, Listen, Yankee. The title reflects the complaint that Cubans could not receive a fair hearing as long as US officials assumed superiority in the relationship, with the right to bend Cuba to America’s will—that US leaders’ historic failure to listen to the voices of the original Cuban revolutionaries was at the heart of a tragic misunderstanding. But wasn’t that the basic cry of the Cubans and other small countries from the beginning? When Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, told historians in a 2014 book that “the whole business of Castro seemed to be a piddling affair,” he was reflecting a longstanding superiority complex.

Shifting immigrant tides were fundamental to the encouragement of normalization. Many excellent studies, including those by Susan Eva Eckstein (The Immigrant Divide: How Cuban Americans Changed the US and Their Homeland, 2009), Louis Pérez Jr. (On Becoming Cuban: Identity, Nationality, and Culture, 1999), and Ruth Behar (editor of Bridges to Cuba, 1995), point to the same conclusion, that recent generations of Cuban immigrants to America, like most other immigrants, come for economic reasons, not to join an army led by Batista’s ghost. While the first generation was overwhelmingly white, later groups tended to be brown or black. While the first generation proclaimed “We shall return” as conquerors, like Gen. Douglas MacArthur in the Pacific, the new generations expect to return often and freely. In 2013 alone, nearly 600,000 Americans traveled there, most of them Cuban-Americans. As Eckstein’s summary puts it, “The New Cubans have done more to change Cuba through their cross-border bonding and income sharing than the rich, powerful exiles who used their clout to make the wall across the Straits as impermeable as possible.” She adds that the new ties with the diaspora also have “the unintended effect of undermining the state socialist economy, the socialist system of stratification, socialist precepts, and the socialist normative and socialist order.”

The younger Cubans in Florida are Obama voters. He won Florida in 2008 with only 35 percent of the Cuban vote, though taking a majority of young Cuban-Americans, and won again in 2012 with 49 percent of the overall Cuban-American vote. They were far from isolated. In CNN and Gallup polls, a robust 64 percent of Americans opposed economic sanctions against Cuba as early as 2009, Obama’s first year in office. Those majorities prevailed through the December 17 policy changes.

After more than fifty years of pressure that would have caused virtually any other one-party state to fall, Cuba still stands. After fifty years of failed “democracy promotion,” another perspective is needed.

A forgotten reason for the Cuban government’s lingering resilience is that Cuba actually progressed in many areas over the course of the past fifty years in its overall quality of life and economic achievements, despite the embargo. It is no paradise, but how many countries would have stabilized and improved at all after a revolution, an invasion, constant covert attacks, an economic embargo, and the fall of its most powerful ally? As a November 2012 Congressional Research Service report noted, Cuba’s real GDP growth went from 5.8 percent (2004) to 11.2 percent (2005), 12.1 percent (2006), and 7.3 percent (2007), and then cratered to 1.4 percent in 2009 partly due to the Wall Street economic crisis before crawling back toward 3 percent in 2013. More important, for decades Cuba has ranked among the countries in the High Human Development category defined by the United Nations, for its achievements in healthcare, literacy, and education. At over seventy-nine years, Cuba’s life expectancy is competitive with or slightly above that of the United States. It has one of the highest numbers of doctors per capita of any country in the world. Its classical ballet is known everywhere. Cuba was fifty-ninth out of 186 countries in the UN development index in 2012, higher than nearly every Latin American and Caribbean nation. Though Cuba lies in a deadly hurricane corridor, its disaster preparedness is unmatched. Cuban athletes have collected 196 gold, silver, and bronze medals at the Olympics since the revolution, as opposed to only twelve before 1959. These achievements go far toward explaining why the Cuban system, for all its flaws, retains a core legitimacy in the eyes of most Cubans.

The future of Latin America is far from settled. But obviously, if Cuba intends to bond and integrate with Latin America, there is no possibility of its exporting the current single-party model of the Cuban Communist Party. The Cuban Revolution will have to accept the fruits of its long advocacy of an independent region of the Americas, which for now includes a democratic electoral path enabling the advancement of social equality; regulated economies including corporations, cooperatives and worker-run enterprises; and regional integration in defense, diplomacy, and development. That’s not communism, nor does it mean capitulation to Wall Street and the unregulated market. It means a permanent process in which there is room to struggle for an economy and politics under popular control.

Having already shaken the world and altered politics in favor of the dispossessed, the Cuban people are beginning a new chapter in what the Cuban revolutionary and poet José Martí called the vast and beautiful space of “our America.”

Editor’s Note: The following is the text of a speech delivered to the Vietnam Peace Commemoration on May 1. 

Who will tell our story when we are gone? So much was never remembered, and now the time is rapidly passing.

We need to resist the military occupation of our minds. Once-discredited falsehoods are being resurrected again. As one example, the recent acclaimed film Last Days of Vietnam depicts the Vietnam War as one of aggression from the North with a green dagger of invasion pointed to the South. That was the claim of the State Department's "white paper," which we debunked in 1965.  

As other examples, the Pentagon's website trivializes the Pentagon Papers and revives the Phoenix assassination program, shut down in 1971, as misunderstood by the media. The United States was winning the war in the South, many still claim, when Congress and the peace movement pulled the plug. They cannot face the families of 58,000 Americans who died in a needless war, nor the invisible millions left dead in Indochina. Blaming the peace movement is the expedient escape from their responsibility. Or the war is said, with shrugs, to have been one big mistake with no one to blame at all.

The official history thus becomes a hecatomb burying our story of the war.

This is our last battle, our legacy to the next generation. We may all be gone by the fiftieth commemoration of the fall of Saigon ten years from now. The war makers could win on the battlefield of memory what they lost on the battlefields of war. We must not let that happen.

We need everyone in the peace movement to write their stories down in journals so that the story of the peace movement can be preserved as a living archive. That's how the stories of past social movements were recorded.  

We need a new generation of historians to tell the story of the peace movement as a truly historic revolt which helped end the war, terminated the forced draft, toppled two American presidents, might have elected a president were it not for assassinations and shook our country to its foundations until the madness was ended.

Our peace movement had power and we need to summon that power again. We need to protest the continuing exclusion of our viewpoints from the forums of the powerful. We must be present at memorials ahead, from the first draft resistance to the first peace campaigns, from the GI revolts to the March on the Pentagon, from the killings at the Chicano Moratorium to Kent State and Jackson State, from the release of the Pentagon Papers to the fall of Richard Nixon.

We need a faithful commitment to remove the unexploded bombs and mines from Vietnam and fund the mission of preventing Agent Orange from dooming future generations to birth defects and disabilities.

We need to call out and ask for the resignations of those who have never apologized.

The disaster that began in Vietnam still continues as an ongoing conflict between empire and democracy. The cycle of war continues its familiar path, with memory its first casualty. The demonization of enemies. The fabricated pretexts. The casualties covered up. The costs hidden off budget. The lights always at the end of tunnels.

We need to assert ourselves in history again.

We sit in conference at the NY Presbyterian Church in Washington DC on May 1-2. Then we hold a solemn march of rededication, arriving at 5 pm May 2 at the Martin Luther King memorial. We will reclaim Dr. King as a peace and justice leader from those who tried to quiet him when he spoke against the war. We will remind people that a mule train from the Poor People's Campaign carried Dr. King's memory through the streets of Chicago in August 1968, just months after he was murdered. We will thank him at the Memorial on May 2 and pledge to defend his legacy.

]]>https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/who-will-tell-story-peace-movement/https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/why-us-cuba-deal-really-victory-cuban-revolution/Tom Hayden,Tom Hayden,Tom Hayden,Tom Hayden,Tom Hayden,Tom Hayden,Tom Hayden,Tom HaydenDec 17, 2014

No one in the mainstream media will acknowledge it, but the normalization of American relations with Havana, symbolized by release of prisoners today, is a huge success for the Cuban Revolution.

The hostile US policy, euphemistically known as “regime change,” has been thwarted. The Cuban Communist Party is confidently in power. The Castros have navigated through all the challenges of the years. In Latin America and the United Nations, Cuba is accepted, and the United States is isolated.

It is quite legitimate for American progressives to criticize various flaws and failures of the Cuban Revolution. But the media and the right are overflowing with such commentary. Only the left can recall, narrate and applaud the long resistance of tiny Cuba to the northern Goliath.

For those actually supportive of participatory democracy in Cuba, as opposed to those who support regime change by secret programs, the way to greater openness on the island lies in a relaxation of the external threat.

Despite the US embargo and relentless US subversion, Cuba remains in the upper tier of the United Nations Human Development Index because of its educational and healthcare achievements. Cuba even leads the international community in the dispatch of medical workers to fight Ebola. Cuba is celebrated globally because of its military contribution to the defeat of colonialism and apartheid in Angola and southern Africa. Now a new generation of Cuban leaders who fought in Angola is coming to power in the Havana and its diplomatic corps. For example, Rodolfo Reyes Rodríguez, Cuba’s representative to the United Nations, today walks on an artificial limb as a result of his combat in Angola.

When few thought it possible, Cuba has achieved the return of all five prisoners held for spying on right-wing Cubans who trained at Florida bases and flew harassment missions through Cuban air space. The last three to be released served hard time in American prisons, and are being welcomed as triumphant heroes on the streets of Havana. Three of the Cuban Five served in Angola as well.

Tens of thousands of Americans, from the veterans of the cane-cutting Venceremos Brigades to the steady flow of tourists insisting on their right to travel, deserve credit for steady years of educational and solidarity work and for pushing a hardy congressional bloc towards normalization.

President Obama has kept his word, despite relentless skepticism from both the left and the mainstream media. He is confounding the mainstream assumption that the Cuban right has a permanent lock on American foreign policy, especially after the Republican sweep in the November elections.

In this case, Obama’s extreme emphasis on diplomatic secrecy worked to his advantage. For over a year, leaders in both countries have conducted regular private debates and consultations, which resulted in the detailed normalization plan released in both capitals today. No one was more important on the American congressional team than Senator Patrick Leahy. Their tight discipline held until the final moment.

It is known that the private US-Cuba conversations about Alan Gross and the Cuban Five were the most difficult. The United States has never acknowledged that Gross was a de facto spy of a certain type, having traveled five times to Havana to secretly distribute advanced communications technology to persons in Havana’s small Jewish community before he was arrested in 2009. Also problematic for American officials immersed in decades of Cold War thinking was the task of wrapping their minds around the idea that the Cuban Five were political prisoners and not terrorist threats.

Finally, when both sides had achieved an internal consensus, the project was derailed by the furious Republican-led blowback against Obama’s trade of five Taliban captives for captured American soldier Bowe Bergdahl in May 2014. Then the November elections interfered with, and threatened to indefinitely delay, the beginning of normalization. Chanukah was the last date for an announcement before the installation of the new US Congress.

Because of the anti-Cuban slant of mainstream thinking, the media will make much of the anger of the Cuban right exemplified by Senator Marco Rubio. But while it’s too early to know, it’s hard to imagine his presidential ambitions being enhanced by arguing in 2016 that Obama should have tried to overthrow the Castros. Senator Bob Menendez has been a leading Democrat trying to block the Obama initiative from his chairing position on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Most Democrats will be delighted to see Menendez, who represents Cuban exiles in Union City, diminished in the Senate.

Going forward, the United States will remove Cuba from the “state terrorism” listing, which will ease the possibility of funding from the international financial system. For American citizens, permission to travel to Cuba will be significantly widened. Business and trade possibilities will increase. Starting with the 2015 Summit of the Americas in Panama, the American and Cuban delegations will sit at the same table. The so-called interest sections will be upgraded to formal embassies. The embargo is going to be hollowed out from within, with American tourist and investment dollars permitted to flow. With or without congressional action to lift the 1996 Helms-Burton act, the embargo is being dissolved. More than 400,000 Cuban-Americans traveled to Cuba last year alone.

And here’s a prediction: if the president has his wish, the Obama family will be seen on the streets of Havana before his term is up.

Editor’s Note: “Two Old Guys Talking” is the introduction to Tom Hayden’s forthcoming book, Listen, Yankee!, Why Cuba Matters, to be published next year by Seven Stories Press. The piece was finalized last month. The “two old guys” are the author, now 75, who first visited Cuba in 1968, and Ricardo Alarcon, now 77, former president of the Cuban National Assembly, foreign minister, and UN representative.

This essay is adapted from Tom Hayden’s foreword to The Essential Mario Savio: Speeches and Writings That Changed America, edited by Robert Cohen and published this past September by the University of California Press.

It is a worthy time to study and treasure the eloquent speeches of Mario Savio—“freedom’s orator,” as the historian Robert Cohen rightly calls him.

I didn’t know Mario well, mainly because of our separate geographic orbits, but our paths were intertwined. As a student editor from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, I hitchhiked to Berkeley in the summer of 1960, where I stayed in an apartment belonging to activists from Slate, the campus political party that was demanding a voice for students stifled by university paternalism. Slate activists were among those who had been hosed down on the rotunda steps of San Francisco’s City Hall after protesting the House Committee on Un-American Activities that spring. The FBI opened a file on me simply for writing an editorial in The Michigan Daily supporting the student critics. I remember interviewing the aptly named Alex Sherriffs, the aggressive University of California vice chancellor who wanted to shut down the tiny Bancroft strip where I was first leafleted by that friendly student who found me a place to stay. In a memo at the time, Sherriffs called the Slate activists “office seekers and publicity hounds…misfits, malcontents and other politically oriented individuals who do not conform to the normal political activity in the university community.” My kind of people.

This was the dawn of the 1960s. A countercommunity was forming, and the simple idea of student rights was infectious. The Slate leaders pushed me to create a similar campus political party in Ann Arbor, which I helped to do that fall; known as Voice, it became the first chapter of the national SDS (Students for a Democratic Society).

Our strategy in SDS was to excite students nationally through the model of students putting their lives on the line down South. It worked. In late 1961, I was a Freedom Rider in Georgia and was beaten and expelled from McComb, Mississippi, while writing a pamphlet about a voting-rights campaign. By spring semester in 1964, Berkeley activists—Mario among them—were copying the Southern sit-ins against Jim Crow lunch counters with their own sit-in against racist hiring at San Francisco’s Sheraton Palace Hotel. That experience propelled Mario to volunteer in the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer Project in McComb, where he was also subjected to the radicalizing violence I had experienced in 1961.

The links kept being forged. In June 1962, the first SDS convention, in Port Huron, Michigan, adopted a lengthy statement calling for students to forge a participatory democracy based on the direct-action model of SNCC (the black-led Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) and the radical notion that students could be “agents of social change” and universities the laboratories of reform. That abstract Port Huron vision was realized when the Free Speech Movement (FSM) burst into history in 1964. Mario himself spoke favorably of participatory democracy, and activists like Jackie Goldberg carried the Port Huron Statement in their backpacks.

I lived in Berkeley later (1968–70), during the post-FSM years, when the rhetoric was more revolutionary. The campus was often choked by tear gas, student strikes were frequent, and armed Black Panthers sold Mao’s Little Red Book on the Sproul steps. The early utopian moment was clouded by internal strife, and the community was anything but blessed. During the People’s Park march of 1969, I witnessed sheriff’s deputies coldly kill one bystander and blind another with buckshot while they sat on a rooftop overlooking Telegraph Avenue. This lethal moment came just four and a half years after the FSM’s rise, and one year before the murders at Kent State and Jackson State. The Berkeley free-speech area was looking like a war zone. The idealistic movement that first gave Mario his magical voice—after having grown up with a stuttering shyness—now left him stranded and alone amid its fragmentation and demise.

* * *

Looking back, I have wondered: were we merely pawns in a larger game? That’s the troubling conclusion of Subversives, a 2012 book by former Daily Californian reporter Seth Rosenfeld, based on FBI documents that were finally divulged by federal court order many years after the events in question (some of which were published in the San Francisco Chronicle in 2002). Altogether, the files came to over 200,000 pages, including thousands from an FBI secret counterintelligence program, COINTELPRO.

Thanks to Rosenfeld’s dogged Freedom of Information Act demands, we know that the FSM was targeted by FBI and CIA operations intended to improve the political fortunes of Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon, both of whom rose to political power on promises to crush Berkeley radicalism. Mario was demonized as a virtual Fidel Castro, with the Berkeley hills as his Sierra Maestra. Here is J. Edgar Hoover from a 1966 memo: “Agitators on other campuses take their lead from activities which occur at Berkeley. If agitational activity at Berkeley can be effectively curtailed, this could set up a chain reaction which will result in the curtailment of such activities on other campuses throughout the United States.”

This was a full decade before Congress held its explosive inquiry, known as the Church Committee hearings (after the committee’s chair, Senator Frank Church), which uncovered widespread and illegal spying and disruption against domestic protest in the United States. Nothing revealed in those hearings could fully match what happened in Berkeley in the 1960s. Hoover’s FBI, along with UC Regent Edwin Pauley and former CIA director John McCone, plotted to uncover alleged “Reds” on the Berkeley faculty; remove the university president, Clark Kerr; conspire with Reagan, a onetime informant; and alter the course of American history. All these deeds, of course, were far beyond the bureau’s legal mandate. The FBI could get away with its crimes because of the climate of opinion in those Cold War times.

Led by Hoover, the political elite looked at “campus unrest” through a Cold War lens, completely missing the rise of millions of idealistic young people with their demands for relevance, justice, equal treatment, peace and a voice in the decisions affecting their lives. If this was only a Cold War misunderstanding, perhaps the dreadful mistake could be forgiven. But there was another agenda that began at Berkeley as well: after being elected California governor in 1966 to “clean up” Berkeley, Reagan quickly imposed tuition for the first time in the history of the university. The conservative attack on “permissive” UC officials and “communist” professors shielding the “spoiled brats” was also an assault on the liberal tradition of public-sector institutions. The current era of privatization and neoliberalism was born in Berkeley as a countermovement to the ’60s.

We have not recovered, but America’s progressives have survived to fight back. It took three decades, but UC Chancellor Chang-Lin Tien wrote in 1996 that Mario was “a gifted leader whose passionate conviction and eloquence inspired a generation of students across America. His name is forever linked with one of our nation’s most cherished freedoms—the right to freedom of expression. We are proud that he was part of the community at the University of California.” The Sproul steps were renamed for Mario, too. This year, in memory of the fiftieth anniversary of the FSM, the university is distributing 8,000 copies of former Berkeley graduate student Robby Cohen’s comprehensive Savio biography, Freedom’s Orator, as suggested reading for students and faculty. The FSM is being acknowledged as a leading example of America’s own democracy movement.

It is difficult not to be cynical about this latter-day praise. Many of Mario’s worst fears have come to pass—for example, in the skyrocketing tuition and room-and-board, now reaching $35,000 per year for in-state students and more than $50,000 for nonresidents. In recent years, UC police have pepper-sprayed student tuition protesters and shut down tents meant for Occupy Wall Street protests (the tents were deemed to have no protection under freedom-of-expression rulings). Perhaps the United States needs to brandish the FSM’s heritage in the new Cold War competition with China and its rigid system of thought control.

But I think American history provides a different lesson: again and again, the persecuted radicals of one era are venerated as prophets and saints in another. Consider Tom Paine, whose rhetoric ignited the American Revolution, but who was castigated as a scoundrel by the Revolution’s elite and buried without honor by a small handful of friends. John Adams denounced Paine as “a mongrel between pig and puppy, begotten by a wild boar on a bitch wolf.”

* * *

I sometimes saw Mario after his media stardom had declined, after he spent a period in a psychiatric hospital coping with post-traumatic stress disorder (which afflicted movement veterans, not simply GIs), and after UC rejected his application to resume his studies. When I saw him last, it seemed to me he was in a fitting phase of a noble life. Mario was teaching at Sonoma State University, focused mainly on remedial work with students of color, in a program called the Intensive Learning Experience. Immigrants were being scapegoated for the state’s woes. It was the early 1990s, and California was cutting its higher-education budgets while building one of the world’s largest prison systems. Mario joined those fights, for what was free speech if universities were unaffordable and inaccessible to working people?

Many are unaware that Mario was returning to his roots among those young students at Sonoma. During 1963, the year before the San Francisco hotel sit-ins, Mario spent a summer immersed in a Catholic antipoverty project in central Mexico. There, he naturally applied the basic techniques of community organizing, even before his training by the Mississippi summer project. Listening to villagers recount their needs, Mario and his student band began the construction of a community laundry where the poor could wash their clothes during Mexico’s dry season.

That summer experience planted in Mario a lifelong connection to the Third World, from Mexican peasants to Mississippi sharecroppers, to his resistance to the US military interventions in Central America. The circle was closed in his organizing against California’s anti-immigrant initiative, Proposition 187. When the burden of confronting anti-immigrant hysteria was falling mainly on Latinos in border states like California and Arizona, Mario was one of those few on the white radical left standing with them. He wanted to rearrange America’s vision, from a nation caught up in an East-West Cold War framework to one centered in the Americas, from South to North. Mario realized clearly very early on what only a few—Cuba’s José Martí, The Nation’s Carey McWilliams and today’s Juan González of Pacifica—had realized: that our ultimate destiny lies here in “Our America.” Mario was a prophet of our permanent destiny in the Americas.

What does it mean to declare that he was “freedom’s orator”? His philosophical and mathematical training prepared him to communicate in plain but lucid language, rich with references to past great thinkers. His podium, however, was on the top of a police car or from the Sproul steps. Mario did not deliver “the Word” from a mountaintop, or dictate official dogma for listening devotees to memorize, go forth and spread. He was given the gift of speech—that is, he stopped stuttering—by the movement community. In return, he gave them the gift of being heard, of thinking aloud, for the first time. Amid the pandemonium of awakening all around him, Mario could sift the good arguments from the bad, engage the crowd in dialogue, and crystallize whatever consensus was needed at the moment. It’s almost unfortunate that his most famous speech—calling on the students to place their bodies on the gears and stop the machine—was more like a call to battle than the usual Socratic speeches he gave almost daily at mass meetings. Oratory implies a solo performance; a speech by Mario was an exercise in reasoning out loud, essentially unrehearsed, yet perfectly clear in the end. It was a participatory oratory that left the listeners better informed and empowered. In later times, with the movement gone, many of his speeches and articles were sharply reasoned and on the cutting edge, but lacked the exciting vitality that comes when many minds are in motion at once.

* * *

Mario was an original thinker, not a stylist. He attacked the premises of the Cold War before others did. He went on to challenge the neoconservative assumptions about the “end of history” after the Cold War was over. Perhaps his most interesting and still-relevant speculations were about Marxism and liberation theology, leading him to identify with what he called “secularized liberation theology.” How did he arrive there? First, Mario and the New Left could not abide the traditional liberalism of many in the Democratic Party. Liberalism had reached a compromise with corporate capitalism that delivered a welfare state, but within the context of a Cold War corporate state dominated by distant elites. Liberals, at least as we knew them, were late to join the civil-rights movement, had rejected the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in 1964, opposed the Cuban Revolution and supported the Vietnam War.

That seemed to leave only varieties of Marxism, an important tradition without deep roots in the American past. Mario acknowledged that Marxism was essential to being politically literate, yet he hesitated to embrace it philosophically. His reasoning was that “Marxism, even at its most poetic, is a kind of economism.” The thesis of Marxism, he believed, was that the very workings of the capitalist system led to mass immiseration, which in turn led to an oppositional consciousness.

But capitalism, spurred by the New Deal and the threat of socialism, developed a white-collar middle class represented by the likes of Mario and myself. As the opening sentence of the Port Huron Statement declared: “We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.” This was hardly The Communist Manifesto. Shortly thereafter, the FSM began issuing its grievances against the “multiversity,” in which students were treated like IBM punch cards. These were not narrow, privileged middle-class sentiments alone, since the movements were aligned with struggles for voting rights, farmworker rights and “the other America” brought to light by Michael Harrington in his groundbreaking 1962 book. But we wanted something more than the New Deal. We also realized that any immiseration of workers under capitalism could drive them far to the right.

Whereas the Marxist model produced an inherent sense that history was on our side, Mario instead argued that “we have to be prepared on the basis of our moral insight to struggle even if we do not know that we are going to win.” He believed the antidote lay in having spiritual values, and was therefore inspired by the rise of liberation theology in Latin America. His skeptical nature, however, required a “secularized liberation theology.” It is only my conjecture that the strains of Catholic and Greek philosophy in his intellectual upbringing perhaps led him to an alternative to the dialectic, a deep belief that we all might dwell in a spiritual realm of truth and beauty.

For whatever mix of reasons, during the immigrant-rights struggles in the 1990s, Mario pointed out that the Catholic Church was in the forefront, and noted that there “is probably no other institution in the United States in which there is a heavier representation of righteously working-class people than in…that church. We ought to be talking to them as well as to one another.”

One can only imagine what Mario would have thought of the rise of Pope Francis, who seems to be the left wing of the world in 2014. As important as the pope’s moral denunciations of capitalism are, even more interesting is when he said, “If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?” In those few simple words, Pope Francis was subverting the whole doctrine of an infallible center. Marxism had long since experienced the same loss of doctrinal infallibility, opening a chapter of history that Mario would have delighted in.

Equally, he would have delighted in the emergence of the Dreamers movement on UC campuses and in communities across the country—young immigrants born in the United States of undocumented parents, acting in the spirit of the militant civil-rights movement, demanding their constitutional rights and willing to face deportation.

He would also have delighted in the Occupy movement as a harbinger of the next wave of economic populism. He would salute those who fight against soaring tuition and debt. He would have reveled in a dialogue with these new young American rebels. He would have exchanged reading lists with them. He would have happily joined their ranks.

He has been missed. Thanks to the Free Speech Movement’s fiftieth anniversary, however, Mario’s challenging words can be felt among us once again, sermons and parables for an unpredictable dawn.

Only once in a while does a book come along that sheds new light on the 1960s. Karen Paget’s forthcoming Patriotic Betrayal (Yale University Press) is just such a work, telling the inside story of how the Central Intelligence Agency corrupted the natural and democratic growth of students’ rights movement by infiltrating the National Student Association (NSA) and directing it to its Cold War ends.

The story begins in the 1950s, which may leave some to wonder if it’s not a stale and useless tale by now. It’s relevant today, however, because of the cancerous growth of Big Brother surveillance and the proliferation of clandestine operations branded in the name of “democracy promotion,” from Cuba to the Ukraine. The pervasive rise of secret money in campaigns, moreover, makes it impossible to know whether operatives of our intelligence agencies have any role in harassing radicals or steering social movements, or whether such roles have been passed to private foundations. Democracy is increasingly in the dark. Any light from history can serve as high-beams to illuminate the future.

My personal involvement in this story begins in the late 1950s, when I was a student editor at The Michigan Daily, the University of Michigan’s student paper. In those fallow years, I was a developing idealist who did not know that the CIA had begun recruiting students for its secret war against the Soviet Union. In 1960, I hitchhiked to the University of California, Berkeley, to write about the new student movement there. In the Bay Area, students protesting the House Un-American Activities Committee were beaten, hosed and washed down the steps of City Hall. They were developing the first campus political party at Berkeley, known as SLATE. They were fighting for the right of student governments to take stands on “off-campus” issues like racial segregation everywhere from San Francisco’s downtown hotels to Mississippi. They were in the process of becoming the Free Speech Movement and the Vietnam Day Committee of 1964 and 1965.

I spent an exhilarating summer staying in an apartment full of Berkeley radicals. One of the many visitors I met was Donald Hoffman, who represented the National Student Association, which included members of student government and Daily editors that met every summer. He was a bit older than me, a friendly liberal fellow who wanted to make sure that Berkeley students came to that summer’s national convention. He also was a CIA agent, and remained so for many decades.

The editor of the Daily before me, Peter Eckstein, was enlisted by the CIA to direct its recruiting operations, which targeted student activists in Europe who had been attracted to Soviet-sponsored youth festivals. Peter was preceded by another Daily editor, Harry Lunn, who became a lifetime CIA operative in many postings around the world.

In 1962, curious about these youth festivals and eager to see the world, I interviewed as a possible participant in an American (anti-communist) delegation to the Soviet-sponsored Helsinki Youth Festival in Finland, one of several of the era. Their purpose was to confront the communist delegates with a counter-narrative about American democracy and firmly oppose any rapprochement or coexistence between capitalism and communism. Neutralism in the Cold War was considered as being “soft” on Communism.

In the end, I didn’t attend. But I will never forget the smart, attractive woman who interviewed me. A graduate of Smith College, her name was Gloria Steinem. This was one year before she worked at the Playboy Club in New York City and six years before she wrote “A Bunny’s Tale” in Show magazine and described herself as an “active feminist” in 1969.

The CIA’s Harry Lunn, according to Patriotic Betrayal, encouraged Steinem to become “the public face of the Independent Service for Information,” an anti-communist delegation controlled and funded by the CIA, on the Vienna Youth Festival; by early 1959, it had been renamed the Independent Research Service. She was “one of the few women in the NSA-CIA club,” Paget writes, noting that “Steinem, who knowingly cooperated with the CIA, is sensitive today about her work with the Agency.”

Steinem recruited about one hundred Americans into a delegation to confront the 17,000 youth at the 1959 Vienna Youth Festival under the banners of Marxism and national liberation. Her bloc employed dirty tricks to disrupt the proceedings, including distributing anti-communist propaganda to fill a shortage of toilet paper and invading discussion groups to attack communist dogma. Pleased with her work in Vienna, the CIA sent Steinem to lead a similar delegation to Helsinki in 1962, where the CIA courted African students with American jazz and, according to Paget, left “memorable images of Steinem parting the beaded curtains to enter the nightclub as if she was Mata Hari.”

Another figure I met at the turn of the 1960s was Allard Lowenstein, who had attended every NSA conference since the group’s inception and had obscure but real connections to State Department and CIA powers behind the scenes. Lowenstein courageously helped smuggle black South Africans into the West, was an adviser to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee during Mississippi Summer in 1964, led the national “Dump Johnson” campaign in 1967 and 1968, was elected to Congress in 1968, and eventually was murdered in 1980 by a disturbed protégé, Dennis Sweeney, who claimed that Lowenstein had planted a communication device in his teeth.

Personally, I never made it into a CIA front group, though I tried hard enough. I was “unwitting,” in spook-speak. “Witting” was what the agency called people in the know. They first tested and recruited them into high positions in the student world, then administered a surprise security oath before telling them they were part of the CIA.

Under the guise of the NSA, the CIA recruited me to write a pamphlet on the student civil-rights movement (“Revolution in Mississippi,” 1961) for global distribution. They rejected the pamphlet without saying why, leaving it to be published by Students for a Democratic Society. They also rejected me for an International Student Research Seminar in Philadelphia, which I learned was a vetting ground for future agents. In response, I organized a campaign at the NSA convention that summer against the “secret elite” whom I accused of running the convention. Out of that split came my decision to work full-time for SDS as a field secretary and later president. To this day, I don’t know if the Port Huron Statement would have been written if I had been co-opted into an NSA front.

Finally, the inner contradictions became so great that an NSA insider leaked the CIA story to Ramparts magazine in 1967, causing a huge scandal and the disintegration of the NSA into a shell of its former self.

So that’s the personal history. Paget, the author of Patriotic Betrayal and now a recognized Bay Area political scientist and writer, went through those same activist years as a witting participant in the NSA along with her husband, Michael Enwall. Her husband lost an NSA election by one vote in 1965, sparking a growing suspicion about where power lay. She has spent years perusing documents and interviewing former NSA leaders to reveal a story that many insider may not wish to be told.

In recent e-mail correspondence, I asked her to clear up a long-time mystery among historians and activists: whether Allard Lowenstein was a CIA agent. “The evidence is overwhelming,” she wrote, that Lowenstein was “not the prime mover or instigator of the CIA relationship.” Nor does she believe he signed a security oath under the CIA’s recruitment program, which was known as Covert Action 5. But Paget’s research led her to conclude that Lowenstein “knew but wasn’t witting”—that is, was aware of the CIA funding but was an independent player, sometimes a thorn in the Agency’s side.

Two other conclusions about Lowenstein can be drawn from Paget’s research. Like Steinem, he was a hardline cold warrior who wanted to build an aggressive liberal, anti-communist movement against the Soviets. That meant supporting the Cold War instead of coexistence strategies then promoted by Sweden’s Olof Palme, a student leader who became the country’s long-time neutralist prime minister before his murder in 1986. Second, Lowenstein went out of his way to block the Ramparts story from being published, joining a 1967 meeting of CIA and NSA officials considering how to manage the story if it was leaked. Lowenstein argued that the Ramparts story would leave “blood on [their] hands” and “many people would be killed” if it was confirmed. Paget writes that “[t]oday none of the NSA officers who were present can explain Lowenstein’s involvement.” Lowenstein, she says, also went to the White House, where he was asked by Walt Rostow, Lyndon B. Johnson’s national security adviser, to draft a reply to the Ramparts story if it came out.

* * *

One conclusion from this history is that the CIA’s illegal infiltration of domestic political groups began long before 9/11 and the present “War on Terrorism.” It has been a rogue agency for a very long time, masking its agenda by claiming that domestic spying is justified as part of its global duties. Just as the control of NSA was justified for “foreign policy” reasons, so has its wiretapping and spying on domestic sources been justified on the grounds of monitoring international terrorism.

Second, the CIA-NSA revelations created a permanent climate of paranoia among progressives who would never know again who might be “witting.” After the many CIA scandals of the 1970s, both political parties created partisan institutes to channel millions of taxpayer dollars to NGOs in countries struggling with democracy issues. The differences are blurred between the CIA and the US Agency for International Development, which spends an annual $20 million on covert “democracy promotion” in Cuba alone. Similar programs are aimed at Russia, Venezuela, and various “color” revolutions in the former Eastern Europe. The United States cannot credibly claim a clean foreign policy, and fuels a global opposition to its double standards.

The real-world consequences of these manipulations of student politics are still with us. Here are three examples from Paget’s history:

Supporting Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Saddam Hussein was a CIA operative whom the American spy agency deployed in 1959 to kill the ruler of Iraq, Abdul Karim Kassem. When that assassination attempt failed, Saddam entered a CIA protection program in Egypt until his Baath Party, also supported by the CIA, seized power in 1963. At least 5,000 Iraqis, most of them student activists, were executed immediately by the Baathist regime. And so our Iraq War began.

In those years, the NSA’s secret elite encouraged the NSA Congress to celebrate the Ba’athist coups in Iraq and Syria. The Cold War rationale for ousting Kassem was that he tolerated communists in his governing coalition. (The same rationale was given for the 1954 coups in Iran and Guatemala.) Kassem was executed by a firing squad. Many of the student victims of the new repression were members of the General Union of Iraqi Students. The NSA staff, according to Paget, “turned in hundreds of reports that contained assessments of foreign students” to the CIA, which were fed to the new regime’s security apparatus. It’s “a fact that today haunts many of them,” she says. In Iran, similar lists of human targets were prepared; “the witting NSA staff did not seem to understand the danger posed to Iranian students by their constant reporting on them.”

Subverting Cuba. After briefly supporting the Cuban revolution in the 1950s, the NSA the CIA secretly decided to counter Fidel Castro’s appeal to Latin American students. Months after the failed 1961 invasion at the Bay of Pigs, the NSA leadership and the conservative Young Americans for Freedom both invited Cuban exiles to woo the delegates to the anti-communist side at the 1961 Congress. Both Cuban exile speakers were on the CIA’s payroll. The “preferred” exile was Juan Manuel Salvat, a former student leader who had broken with the Revolution, was imprisoned, fled to Miami and returned in the Bay of Pigs invasion. The same Salvat went on to pioneer the “Mongoose” hit-and-run attacks on Cuba, including an attempt to blow up a Havana hotel where Fidel had a meeting. By 1962, the US policy of “no more Cubas” in the hemisphere had fostered a wave of right-wing dictatorships and a defection of Latin American student unions to the leftist International Union of Students.

Arresting Nelson Mandela. The CIA arranged for the arrest and lifetime sentence of Nelson Mandela in 1962. The same NSA helped organize the South African student opposition to Mandela’s African National Congress (ANC), known as the National Union of Southern African Students (NUSAS). The US’s objection was that the ANC youth had affiliated themselves with the Soviet-sponsored student movements and South Africa’s Communist Party. The NSA funded NUSAS starting in the late 1950s with grants from a CIA-related foundation.

In today’s world of official religious fanaticism, corruption and repression, it should be easy for the United States to improve and project our democracy as an alternative. Instead, the CIA is spying on our allies, secret military operations take place in multiple nations, and “democracy” is all to often seeded by agents of the Drug Enforcement Administration, the CIA, or the NSA. As many reports reveal, the CIA continues to cultivate “assets” in the mainstream media, and meets with top editors to to discourage or delay the publication of controversial news. The lesson of Paget’s book is that there is a deeper housekeeping that needs to be done at every level before the United States can offer democracy as a formula. It may be impossible.

Editor’s Note: Tom Hayden is speaking on September 17 at Angell Hall, the site of the first Vietnam teach-in in 1965, on the lessons of Vietnam for Iraq. Excerpts of the speech are here, the full text is at the Democracy Journal online.

I am joining many peace groups around America in expressing opposition to the escalation of the Iraq War into a quagmire that is likely to be costly in lives, tax dollars and our tarnished reputation.

Ann Arbor is the place, along with Berkeley, where the young American peace movement demanded a teach-in, an end to campus business as usual, an end to intellectual conformity and congressional hearings as we confronted the growing horror of the Vietnam War.

There are many parallels between the wars of our youth and the latest one unfolding. Once again, we need to suspend the monotony of our everyday lives and ask the questions that need to be asked. We cannot trust “the best and brightest” to have the answers any more than students trusted their pedigreed elders fifty years ago.

We need congressional hearings, full debate and a vote on authorization of this unilateral war. In 1964, the Gulf of Tonkin “incident” was contrived and exploited to stampede our country into a hasty and irresponsible authorization. Onlyc two members of Congress had the good sense then to vote “no” on the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, which permitted an open-ended bloodletting for more than a decade before the Congress finally helped put an end to it.

I would hope that the present Congress learns from the past to check and balance the war “fever” gripping Washington as described this week by The New York Times. I would hope that the Obama administration rereads history and thinks again before excluding the Congress and the American public from a war by executive fiat. Only a congressional debate will give legitimacy to the very real questions—and consideration of alternatives—that many Americans deserve to have addressed about this crisis. Whatever the outcome of a congressional vote, the dissent deserves to be aired, the hawks must be held accountable and the questioning must begin. No threat justifies the exclusion of Congress from its constitutional role, nor the American people from a voice in a decision that will take American lives and resources.

The Obama administration needs to take its case to the United Nations as well, since war is being planned against Syria, a sovereign state, and because diplomacy, beginning now, will be the only way this conflict will end.

During Vietnam, we were told that the “faceless Vietcong enemy” was disemboweling innocent villagers, slaughtering Catholics, kidnapping children and imposing a dictatorship through aggression against South Vietnam. What we were not told was that our government was intervening in a civil war that had been set in motion by the French colonialists who we replaced in trying to “save” South Vietnam. We were fighting against a communist-led army, yes, but one who represented national independence to most of the Vietnamese people.

We were told it would be an affordable war, that our great country could pay for both “guns and butter.” that it would be short in duration too. It bankrupted the US Treasury and lasted at least fifteen years.

We were told, and still are told, that counterinsurgency would be the answer, that rounding up the villagers in “strategic hamlets” to isolate the guerrillas, then a targeted killing campaign against those guerrillas, would bring stability to South Vietnam at last. The infamous “tiger cages” and Con Son island were the precursors of Abu Ghraib and the dungeons in Iraq where eventually ISIS was born. Our own generals like David Petraeus wrongly interpreted the lessons of Vietnam to propose a renewal of Vietnam’s failed CIA “Phoenix Program” and tried in vain to apply to Iraq in 2007.

We were told we were fighting for democracy, but in fact thousands of Americans were drafted against their will, families on all sides were deceived by one administration after another, secret bombings were carried out against Cambodia and Laos, secret CIA counterterrorism operations targeted alleged terrorists, and the repression came home in countless FBI campaigns to spy on, inform on, harass, indict and demonize the anti-war opposition, from Dr. Spock to Dan Ellsberg, from the Catholic resistance led by the Berrigans to the Chicago Eight defendants. The Watergate conspiracy was properly described as a cancer on our democratic system, and two presidents were driven from office as a result of that war. Democracy was saved by the anti-war movement, including many soldiers in our armed forces, and by political leaders who found the courage to stand up.

Because our leaders didn’t listen, or listened too late, the end came in Vietnam as a total catastrophe, the implosion of the South Vietnamese government and its armed forces, and the literal expulsion of American diplomats from the rooftop of our embassy.

It may seem implausible, but who is to say these events won’t repeat in some ways again?

Our government even now is spending millions on a multi-year memorial campaign to teach “the lessons” of Vietnam in our schools, while excluding the voices of the Vietnam generation dissenters who were right, and while failing in its ability to accept that Vietnam war a mistake. Some of us are meeting now to demand a say in how the Vietnam era is taught—just as we must demand a say in how to understand and approach Iraq. If a mistake is repeated over and over, the result will be the same. We must demand of our Secretary of State John Kerry, a Vietnam war hero who threw some of his ribbons away and became a leader of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, that he reflect on the very question he asked the Senate forty long years ago: Who will be the last to die for a mistake?

It is a question as real today as before. Tonight we must begin again, announcing a demand for debate, diplomacy and democracy.

Hillary Clinton’s flapping of her hawkish wings only intensifies the pressure on President Barack Obama to escalate US military involvement in the sectarian wars of Iraq and Syria. Domestic political considerations already are a major factor in forcing Obama to “do something” to save the Yazidis, avert “another Benghazi” and double down in the undeclared Long War against Islamic fundamentalism.

Clinton certainly was correct in arguing that Obama’s statement “don’t do stupid stuff” is not an organizing principle of US foreign policy. Instead of offering a new foreign policy, based for example on democracy, economic development and renewable energy, however, Clinton lapsed into the very Cold War thinking she once questioned in the sixties. America’s long war on jihadi terrorism should be modeled on the earlier Cold War against communism, Clinton said. We made “mistakes,” supported many “nasty guys,” did “some things we’re not proud of,” but the Cold War ended in American triumph with “the defeat of the Soviet Union and the collapse of communism.”

Ignoring the new cold wars with Russia and China, Clinton’s nostalgic vision is sure to be widely accepted among Americans, including many Democrats. She ignores, or may not even be familiar with, the actual Long War doctrine quietly promulgated during the past eight years by national security gurus like David Kilcullen, the top counterinsurgency adviser to Gen. David Petraeus in Iraq. Put simply, the Long War theorists have projected an eighty-year military conflict with militant Islam over an “arc of crisis” spanning multiple Muslim countries. Starting with 9/11, the Long War would continue through twenty presidential terms. In Kilcullen’s thesis, Iraq is only a “small war” within a larger one. Since a war of such duration could never be declared officially, the 2002 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) stands as its feeble underlying justification.

Obama has made cautious attempts to separate himself from the Long War doctrine and even seeks to narrow or revisit the AUMF. But Obama has never named and or criticized the doctrine, presumably for fear of being accused of going soft in the “War on Terrorism.” Obama’s true foreign policy leaning is revealed in his repeated desire to “do some nation building here at home,” which many hawks view as a retreat from America’s imperial role. They prefer, in Clinton’s words, the posture of “aggressively, belligerently putting yourself forward” rather than being “down on yourself.”

While expanding US drone attacks, intervening in Libya and Yemen, and now escalating again in Iraq, Obama has emphasized another foreign policy direction that is disturbing to hawks. Obama repeatedly argues that “there is no military solution” to the very wars he has engaged in, or tried to disengage from. That rational observation apparently is too “radical” for a government with the largest military in the world.

Clinton thinks the better approach is a little more muscular intervention—arming the Syrian rebels, for example—combined with some “soft power” on the ground. Thus far she hasn’t had to address the issue faced by President John Kennedy, that a little escalation is like the first drink to an alcoholic who inevitably wants another. Nor has she addressed the failures of “soft power” from the Phoenix Program in South Vietnam to the counterinsurgency projects in Afghanistan. Does anyone even remember Gen. McChrystal wowing the press with his promise to drop a “government in a box” into Helmand Province after clearing the place of Taliban fighters?

Few progressive intellectuals and writers have framed the current crisis as the Long War in motion, for reasons that are unclear. One of the few is Andrew Bacevich, a Boston University professor, Vietnam veteran and father of a fallen US soldier in Iraq (see Bacevich, ed., The Long War, 2007). When a doctrine isn’t publicly proclaimed, like the Cold War in Winston Churchill’s 1946 Fulton, Missouri, speech, its implementation can be carried out quietly without public debate.

On the American left, the framing of Iraq and Afghanistan has been largely about oil, nationalism versus imperialism and often the role of the neoconservatives and the Israel Lobby. But in the absence of a Long War understanding, the underlying struggle is impossible to frame. Perhaps the pacifist heritage of the peace movement precludes a deep study of military strategy and tactics.

But the Long War doctrine must be challenged just as forcefully as when a few dissenting Americans challenged the Cold War in the sixties when it was our dominant paradigm. Once the chilling fear of being considered “soft” is set aside, the similar weaknesses in the two doctrines become apparent. First, the concepts of the “enemy” are overly monolithic. The naming of a unified conspiratorial communist menace simply ignored the rival nationalisms and culture of the Soviet Union, China, Vietnam and Arab nationalists from Egypt’s Nasser to Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. Second, when you cut off an insurgent organization by military means, the insurgency tends simply to multiply. US secret operations now are deeply involved in combating at least a dozen jihadist groups that have proliferated since the killing of Osama bin Ladin in 2012. Third, when you are threatened by the political agenda of an Islamic movement—for example, by the prospect of nationalized oil fields—closing their political options only channels the struggle back to the battlefield.

Defeating a projected “international jihadist conspiracy” isn’t possible when that enemy doesn’t exist except on websites. But in pursuing such a phantom enemy, US policies can conjure the demons into existence just long enough for the Long War doctrine to be justified. There was no Al Qaeda in Iraq, for example, until after the US invasion of 2003. The effect of that occupation, in the words of the Naval War College expert Ahmed Hashim, was a traumatizing “identity disenfranchisement” among the Sunnis who previously dominated the Iraqi army, professional and business sectors. The 2003 insurgency arose from that disenfranchisement in Anbar Province and soon spread nationwide, even attracting Shiites who were Iraqi nationalists. Al Qaeda was formed later, and ISIS after that.

Lawrence of Arabia described the process in 1921 when he led Arab insurgents against the Ottoman Empire. The insurgency, he wrote, was powered by “an influence, an idea, a thing intangible, invulnerable, without front or back, driving about like gas. [Conventional a]rmies were like plants, immobile, firm-rooted, nourished through long stems to the head. We might be like a vapour, blowing where we listed.” Years later, Saddam Hussein compared the 2003 resistance to “rust devouring steel.” Neocon thinker Ken Adelman, on the other hand, said it would be a “cakewalk,” and Gen. John Keane admitted later that “we didn’t see it coming.”

Clinton, leaders of both parties and even Obama today claim that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein was worth it. It’s difficult politically for peace advocates to argue otherwise, although the case for deterring instead of overthrowing Saddam remains trenchant. But even Obama, in his interview with Thomas Friedman, traces the beginning of the current crisis to the abrupt dismantling of Saddam’s national armed forces, plunging hundreds of thousands of Sunni males into unemployment compounded by identity disenfranchisement. Some of those Iraqis, and many of their sons, are fighting today alongside ISIS in Iraq. Many were lured into an alliance with the US military for a “surge” against the predecessor of ISIS, Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, in 2007. Their differences then were as plain as now: the Iraqi insurgents were nationalists combatting a Shiite regime backed by the United States, while Al Qaeda in Iraq—like ISIS now—was a more extremist movement imposing brutal Sharia law and fighting to establish a utopian caliphate of Sunnis across borders.

We’ll never know, but Clinton could be right that the United States should have armed the Syrian Sunni rebels against the Assad regime in Damascus. She doesn’t have to spell out the possible consequences. Obama glosses over that question by describing the Syrian rebels as only a disorganized, ineffective array of doctors, pharmacists, farmers “and so forth” who could never beat an Assad backed by Russia, Iran and Hezbollah. Obama certainly was right in believing that US weapons would fall into the hands of Syrian jihadi extremists, which Clinton ignores in her account. In his detached observation, Obama indicates an astute grasp of the perils of military escalation:

“What we have [now] is a disaffected Sunni minority in the case of Iraq, a majority in the case of Syria, stretching essentially from Baghdad to Damascus…. Unless we give them a formula that speaks to the aspirations of that population, we are inevitably going to have problems.… ISIS is) filling a vacuum, and the question for us has to be not simply how we counteract them militarily but how we are going to speak to a Sunni majority in that area.”

Clinton and the hawks would fill that “vacuum” with war on behalf of the Assad regime.

But what Obama doesn’t acknowledge is that the United States might have done far more in support of the Sunnis, instead of tolerating or backing two allies of Iran—Assad and al-Malik—both of whom treated the Sunnis with brutal force and without any hope of peaceful political progress. As for Syria, Obama often criticized the Assad regime, it is true, but hardly with the kind of pressure the United States has brought to bear on Cuba for fifty years. Assad was seen as a lesser evil who was impossible to defeat because of his geopolitical support. But in the case of Iraq, the United States was involved directly with the empowerment of al-Maliki and his repressive Shiite colleagues during two American administrations. Why exactly the Bush and Obama teams accepted al-Maliki is beyond comprehension at this point in history. It might simply have been that al-Maliki was “our guy,” or that US “experts” believed that a fair power-sharing process was gradually underway after a shaky start. Instead, al-Maliki built up his sectarian special forces, army and police, and implemented brutal ethnic cleansing against the Sunnis. By the end of 2006, Baghdad was cleansed of its 40 percent Sunni population, the remaining Sunni enclaves “withering into abandoned ghettos, starved of government services.”(1) With the awareness of American advisers, Shiite authorities began operating as many as ten secret prisons, rounding up Sunnis, and according to a State Department memo, engaging in “threats intimidation, beatings and suspension by the arms and legs, as well as the reported use of electrical drills and cords and the application of electric shocks.”(2)

The repression and exclusion never ended, al-Maliki guessing that the United States would never pull the plug. He even arrested and threatened Sunni political figures in Baghdad, including the country’s vice-president, who fled to Kurdistan.

The United States stood by as the crisis unfolded. As ISIS began to gain ground in Syria, it formed a vast rear base that protected the Sunnis of Iraq who fled over the border, led by the former detainee Abu Bakar al-Baghdadi, who would become the self-proclaimed commander and emir of the growing Islamic Caliphate. ISIS, having secured a vast stronghold in southeastern Syria, soon took their offensive into northern Iraq, supplying cash, weapons and experienced fighters to the anti-Shiite insurrection that continued in the Sunni provinces of Anbar, Nineveh, Diyala and Salaheddin. The Caliphate al-Baghdadi is presently implementing has no space for Shiites or “infidels” or “takfiris” who must either be converted or exterminated. Women are returned to the Middle Ages. An armed theocracy replaces the failed nation-state.

Several years too late, the understating Obama now says that the US-backed Shiite regime in Baghdad “squandered an opportunity” to share power with Sunnis and Kurds. The fact is that US policy enabled al-Maliki to do so, and now is reaping the Sunni whirlwind.

At stake are the fortunes of peace activism in the United States. The McCain Republicans and the Clinton Democrats are pushing Obama farther by the day towards the military solutions which he says are not the answer. The humanitarian plight of the Yazidi tribes is both genuine and a pretext for intervention. The confrontation around Erbil might become “another Benghazi” as well as a threat to Western oil interests. Doing nothing is not an option for Obama, while doing something is a slippery slope, as Phyllis Bennis and others point out.

This is how America will drift back into the dead end of the Cold War paradigm. No wonder William Kristol of the neocon tribe is happily congratulating Hillary Clinton. The neocons are back in the saddle with her as their temporary horse, only a few years after their discrediting and fall.

There are few options ahead for Obama. The removal of al-Maliki is a heavy lift but only the beginning. The Humpty-Dumpty regime in Baghdad cannot be restored by lifting a few restrictions on the Sunnis. Iraq’s Sunnis, now in revolt, will have to be respected as having independent rights in a federated Iraq, including their own security force, a proper share of oil revenues and budgets, and a veto power within a new tripartite governing arrangement. That’s what it will take to persuade them to place nationalist interests over those of a borderless jihad. The US military did this once before, in 2007, by paying the Anbar tribes to fight alongside the American forces against Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. Then those same Sunnis were abandoned to al-Maliki’s brutal policies of exclusion.

For another model, the US could look to Northern Ireland, where a thirty-year war was channeled into a cold peace instead of a cold war. The key was the empowerment of the 45 percent Irish Catholic nationalist minority in a transitional arrangement that includes mutual veto powers with their Loyalist Protestant adversaries. Hillary Clinton might try to remember her husband’s role in that process, which she extols as the greatest foreign policy achievement of the Clinton era.

Half-measures will not suffice. It may be too late. If so, the Sunnis of Iraq and Syria will remain loosely united within ISIS as its fighters move south. Obama may be forced to escalate, even knowing that there is no way at present to fill the political vacuum in which ISIS arose. ISIS may assault Baghdad, widening a sectarian civil war or even the collapse and dismemberment of the Iraqi state. Whatever scenario occurs, Obama will be the subject of unrelenting attack. “Who lost Iraq?” will be the battle cry of American politics.

After the often-forgotten debacle in Vietnam there came a moment when most Americans drew the lesson that there should be “no more Vietnams,” without ever defining an alternative to that Cold War. It took many years before the first Iraq War (1990–91) allowed the first President Bush to declare that he had “defeated the Vietnam Syndrome,” as if too many Americans were infected with an anti-war fever.

Now the danger to the neocons and hawks is that too many Americans again are “fatigued” by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, another medical metaphor for peace sentiment. That sentiment, so vital in restraining military aggression, can fade away if Americans adopt the Clinton model of the Long War, which Dexter Filkins calls “the forever war.” If ISIS rips apart Baghdad, Obama’s circle might face impotence or impeachment.

It is shocking that both Obama and the Congress are on vacation during this new military crisis. The likelihood of the current US bombing during this congressional break was predicted by Representative Jim McGovern, the main architect of a War Powers resolution that passed by 370 House votes just one week before the August recess. What the House and Senate do after their break ends in September could be either a green light or an important barrier to escalation. One hundred and eighty Republicans voted for the measure, reflecting the strength of the Ron Paul libertarians.

Even if Congress checks the US military escalation, that will not address the underlying disenfranchisement of the Sunnis of Iraq and Syria. There Obama’s choice will be to escalate his “limited” counteroffensive using US weapons, advisers and Special Forces, or sending a definitive signal that the United States is not interested in intervening in sectarian wars that we can neither win nor afford.

It may be enough to argue that the American public has “no appetite” for another war, but that sentiment may well turn into anger at Obama (and Bush) if Iraq is dismembered. Therefore, Democrats need to offer a better narrative than Clinton’s recycling of the Cold War. If she wants an “alternative story,” as she says in the Goldberg interview, it should include these chapter headings:

—Repeatedly telling the American people that the Long War is an actual doctrine promoting eighty years of unending war, with neither public consent or congressional approval, is the place to begin, starting with debating the AUMF.

—Fighting secret wars without real congressional oversight is another.

—Cutting off taxpayer assistance and American blood to undemocratic sectarian dictatorships is yet another.

—Accepting instead of stifling Arab nationalism, whether in Egypt or Palestine, is the only alternative to violence.

—Starting a real revolution towards renewable energy instead of defending Persian Gulf oil is the final alternative.

The peace, justice and climate change movements should unite where possible around such an alternative vision.

In the term used by historian Stephen Cohen, these are the “lost alternatives” in American policy that only a serious social movement can rescue.

The Cold War is perhaps not even remembered by this generation of Americans, beyond dim and distorted traces. Yes, the power alignments in the world have shifted, for example, by the rise of the BRICS and their opposition to Western finance capital. And yes, the rise of China offsets the demise of the old Soviet Union. The Vatican is no longer battling “godless communism.” Communism itself is a spent force.

But no new global paradigm has come to dominance and, in that vacuum, the old Cold War premises arise to fill the chatter-boxes of our media and cultural mentality.

Ukraine is the anvil on which the new Cold War thinking is heating up.

It’s impossible to understand the roots of the current Ukraine crisis over the downed airliner without understanding the past, but the past is remembered as cliché on all sides. We can agree, however, that the “new” Cold War began when Western strategists sought to expand their sphere of influence all the way eastward across the Ukraine to Russia’s border. That push, which seemed like the spoils of Cold War victory to the Western triumphalists, ignored two salient realities. First, eastern Ukraine was inhabited by millions of people who identified with Russia’s language, culture and political orientation. Second, since it was believed that the Soviet Union was “defeated”, the assumption was that Russia lacked the will and capacity to fight back. Though both assumptions were proven wrong on the battlefield in Georgia in 2008, the machinery of the West never stopped churning and expanding.

Eventually, Russia took back Crimea by force, in an offensive that was entirely predictable but seemed to shock the Western mind. Ukraine was broken along historic ethnic lines. For a brief moment, it appeared that a power-sharing arrangement might be negotiated. There was no reason that Putin would send Russian troops to war over the eastern Ukraine if peaceful coexistence was achievable. Putin accepted the ascension of a new pro-Western elected president in Kiev and called for a cease-fire and political settlement. But as often happens in proxy wars, the proxies drove the dynamics. Ukraine’s army marched east, claiming a sovereignty that the Russian-speakers refused to accept. Putin’s allies—the so-called “pro-Russian separatists”—refused to surrender and complained loudly that the Russians weren’t giving them enough support.

In the Western narrative, these Russian-speakers weren’t really Ukrainian at all, or they were Russians in disguise, or pawns of Moscow. That designation humiliated and angered them. In the Western PR offensive, the Russians trained them, advised them and perhaps even directed them to shoot down the airliner. And, of course, those alleged Russian agents were carrying out the orders of the Kremlin. Putin is hardly wrong when he says the catastrophe would not have happened if his calls for a cease-fire were heeded. Instead, a ten-day cease-fire was terminated by Kiev on June 10, surely with US support. No one has asked whether the US government lobbied with Kiev to extend the cease-fire instead of pressing their offensive eastward. The New York Times reported that “Ukraine’s President, Petro O. Poroshenko, let the latest cease-fire lapse and ordered his military to resume efforts to crush the insurrection by force.” If he had extended the cease-fire instead, the plane would not have been shot down.

It is insane for anyone to believe that Putin would want to shoot down a plane carrying over 200 hundred Europeans at a time when the European Union was debating whether to join the United States in imposing harsh sanctions on Moscow. What makes more sense is that no one in an official capacity anywhere wants to take the blame for an unplanned moral, political and diplomatic catastrophe. If Putin bears responsibility for the chain of escalation, so does Kiev and the West. In the meantime, the West will continue freezing its Cold War position and Ukraine’s armed forces will take their war towards the Russian border unless higher authorities restrain them. No one has asked if Western forces are advising or embedded with the Ukrainian military. Either way, the Kiev fighters can advance all they desire, but they cannot pacify the east or predict Russia’s next move. If they march into a trap, will the US feel obligated to dig them out?

The inevitable tightening of Western sanctions will push Russia to exploit the economic contradictions between the United States and European nations like Germany, and make Moscow increase its links with the BRICS countries, especially the Chinese powerhouse. As a sign of Russia’s trajectory, just before the airliner shootdown, Putin visited Latin America, where he promptly forgave 90 percent of Cuba’s $32 billion massive debt to the Russians, ending a two-decade dispute. Then Putin toured six countries and sat down to dinner with four Latin American presidents. The irony barely was noticed. The purpose of the 1960 US policy towards Cuba was to separate the island from the Soviet sphere of interest. Now it is the United States which is increasingly isolated diplomatically in its “backyard” while Cuba is secure in a new Latin America with Russian support. If Cold War thinking prevails, the Obama administration will continue funding illegal “democracy programs” aimed at subverting the Cuban state. That could persuade some in the Cuban leadership to resist normalization with the States, continuing a Cold War standoff of many decades.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the planet, America’s heralded new “pivot” to China is stalled in deep contradictions. Lacking any alternative to the Cold War model, the US is dangerously close to fighting two.

The question for progressives is how to construct a compelling alternative to the Cold War model as much of the world slides towards a new Dark Age of class struggle, climate crisis and religious fundamentalism appearing on many continents.

Northampton, Massachusetts—Senator Bernie Sanders is inching closer to deciding to run for president as a Democrat in 2016.

When Sanders appeared in Northampton to celebrate the tenth anniversary of Progressive Democrats of America, and to honor the legacy of the group’s late co-founder and national director, Tim Carpenter, “Run, Bernie, Run” sentiment ran high. Carpenter’s last act was to collect 11,000 petitions urging Sanders to run as a Democrat. And nothing Sanders said discouraged the consensus.

Thus a memorial service became an organizational birth, just as Carpenter himself envisioned.

Nothing is decided until it is officially decided, of course, and pressures from the Democratic establishment are building quickly against the independent Vermont senator. Few if any Democratic elected officials are likely to endorse Sanders for fear of retribution from the formidable Hillary Clinton forces. Women’s groups, African-Americans, Latinos and Asians, Hollywood liberals and the organized labor are coalescing into a united front for Clinton too, and are sharply opposed to a potentially divisive primary fight with Sanders.

But just as 2016 will be Clinton’s moment as a longtime feminist, it could also be Sanders’ moment as the only candidate challenging what he calls the “oligarchic force” with their vast powers over the economy, campaign finance and suicidal exploitation of fossil fuels. Sanders’ warning that democracy is threatened by the oligarchs resonates profoundly with millions of Americans looking for answers and for heroes. On the economic issues, it is predictable that a majority of rank-and-file Democratic voters prefer Sanders’ message on the economic crisis to the neoliberal formulas long supported by the Clintons. Those populist issues are not the only motivators in an election, but create a pre-existing base for a credible challenger, just as the Iraq War and Democratic silence propelled Vermont Governor Howard Dean to national influence in 2004.

For the moment, Sanders is on a nationwide speaking-and-listening tour in which he delivers a long, detailed and educational stump lecture on the stranglehold of the oligarchy, adding a menu of general solutions: infrastructure spending, expansion of healthcare and education programs, repeal of the Citizens United and McCutcheon decisions, protecting civil liberties against a Big Brother surveillance state, and a rapid energy transition away from greenhouse gas emissions. Without detailing his foreign policy views, Sanders reminded the PDA audience of his opposition to the Patriot Act and the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

The Clinton forces currently dismiss the Sanders’ challenge, relying on an early monopoly of endorsements and money to project an aura of inevitability. But her advisers have reason to worry if she has to face Sanders in twenty to thirty debates where he will have a populist advantage with the voters judging them. In the Clinton style, she may hug the center with an eye on the fall general election, which could cause a dampening of ardor among the Democratic base. Assuming she wins the nomination, a lingering “Bernie factor” in states like Ohio could tip the November balance. The Karl Rove Republicans basically depend on fissures among Democratic constituencies to eke out victories for their unpopular Republican candidates.

Sanders for his part has no interest in being seen as a spoiler who handed the election to the Republicans. He is registered as an independent (socialist) but caucuses with the Senate Democrats. If he runs as a Democrat, he will have to find a way to acknowledge Clinton as far better than any Republican candidate, while at the same time articulating a sharply different populist message. He could borrow Jackson’s ’80s strategic refrain that it “takes two wings to fly,” meaning that the Democrats are stronger if their progressive wing is strengthened against the Wall Street wing of the party. That increased progressive strength already is demonstrated in the electoral victories of Elizabeth Warren in Massachusetts and Bill de Blasio in New York City. California’s Jerry Brown has shown that it is possible to balance a budget, raise taxes on the ultra-rich, spend more on education equity, support immigrant rights fight global warming and win big. (Brown has endorsed Clinton, but is capable of running himself if an opportunity should happen to arise).

One way for Clinton to marginalize Sanders or even push him out of the race would be to move closer to Sanders’ populist positions. Could the Clintons, who are famous (or infamous) for marginalizing the party’s left and realigning it with Big Money (NAFTA, deregulation, Robert Rubin, Larry Summers), actually swing back to the left in 2016? They may think that they don’t need to, because Clinton’s economic policies only need a bit of “refreshing,” and because a Hillary candidacy will turn into a referendum on women’s rights just as 2008 became a referendum on racism. They may be right if the Republicans cannot leash their mad-dog chauvinists. But if the nominee is Jeb Bush? The campaign then would seem to many Americans one over over dynastic succession, in which case the economic issues—and the “Bernie factor”—could become decisive.

The Clintons already are on the image-makeover path, showcasing their endorsement of de Blasio (a former Clinton lieutenant), supporting a minimum wage increase and offering a positive gloss on their time in the White House. Would that approach sell in a debate with Sanders, or would she be hammered for tokenism and flip-flopping? In the background, her support of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, drone and recent hawkish positions on Libya and Syria, lurk as sharks in the water she will have to navigate. Those issues can’t be dismissed like Benghazi, and they are issues which deeply matter to Democratic voters.

Clinton emissaries of course could negotiate behind-the-scenes, starting now, with Sanders for major platform planks on the economy, climate change and campaign finance reform, even suggesting the vice-presidency to someone like Ohio’s Sherrod Brown, Virginia’s Tim Kaine or even Senator Elizabeth Warren, all enticing offers to Sanders’ wing of the party. But that would require an unusual recognition by the Clintons that the Democrats really do have a progressive wing that only grows more frustrated and stronger as the economy stagnates, emissions rise, wars loom ahead and right-wing fundamentalism becomes more toxic. In turn, such a tacit agreement would require a humility from Sanders that might begin to fade as he puts on the body armor of a challenger. A progressive third force (consisting of mainstream Democrats, the progressive base, populist insurgents and even libertarians) could take root as the best governing coalition possible in America. Can Clinton and Sanders imagine instigating a force larger than themselves in 2016?

It’s a deep question. But without the growing whispers and rumors of a Sanders campaign, the question would not even be under consideration. The progressive agenda would recede as a possibility as maneuvering towards the center takes over the political stage. It is more likely that the issues will be sorted out the old-fashioned way, by the sweat and tears of one more fateful election. For now at least, Sanders has given progressives a leverage and a platform, a potent combination.

Until last week, New Jersey Democratic Senator Robert Menendez, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was relatively untouchable among Democrats, while holding virtual veto power over US Cuba policy and being a military hawk on US policies towards Syria, Iran and Venezuela.

Not any more.

Now Menendez’s grip is weakened by revelations that his very close friend Miami opthalmologist Saloman Melgen topped the country in Medicare fraud, and funneled $700,000 in campaign contributions through a Democratic Super PAC, nearly all of which were channeled right back to the Menendez re-election campaign in 2012. Melgen ripped off $21 million in Medicare reimbursements that year alone by over-prescribing a medication for vision loss among seniors.

A key question is whether Senate leader Harry Reid, whose close former aides run the Majority PAC for Senate Democrats, will aggressively investigate ethics violations, diminish Menendez’s Senate standing, or risk his party‘s association with the scandal by circling the wagons.

Federal investigations, including two raids on Dr. Melgen’s clinics, already have revealed that Menendez interceded with Medicare officials on his friend’s behalf in 2009 and 2011. Menendez is still under scrutiny by the Obama Justice Department. Menendez acknowledges traveling several times on Melgen’s private jet and staying at the eye doctor’s posh estate in the Dominican Republic. Menendez was forced to reimburse $58,500 for the costs of those trips when the information was disclosed in 2010.

The important back story in the Menendez-Melger case is that US Cuba policy is at stake.

The Cuban-American Menendez is a fierce lifetime opponent of any easing of tensions with Havana. As a top fundraiser and the Democratic chairman of the key foreign relations committee, Menendez is an obstacle to Obama and Senate liberals on a range of national security policies. He favors regime change through military or covert means in Syria, Iran, Venezuela and, of course, Cuba. He has the power to set bills, hold hearings and approve or deny administration nominations. Menendez is becoming Obama’s chief domestic obstacle in normalizing relations with Cuba. Even on an administration priority like immigration reform, Menendez (and Senator Marco Rubio) have pledged their votes only on the condition that their hardline position on Cuba is heeded.

Now that Menendez’s grip on power is weakened, the only question is by how much.

Only a few years ago Menendez, chairing the Senate Democrats’ campaign committee, raised hell when one of the party’s biggest fundraisers, Hollywood’s Andy Spahn, tried raising funds for candidates who supported a new Cuba policy. Spahn, who travels often to Cuba with American politicians and Hollywood producers like Steven Spielberg, was demonized by Menendez and shut down. But Spahn today remains as one of Obama’s top fundraisers, and actively supports lifting the embargo.

This year an even sharper split erupted in the Senate between Menendez and Senator Patrick Leahy who is making a top priority of achieving a new Cuban policy. Leahy, who engages in steady, behind-the-scenes dialogue with Cuban officials, obtained sixty-six Senate signatures on a December 2013 letter to Obama calling on the president to “act expeditiously to take whatever steps are in the national interest” to obtain the release of American citizen Alan Gross. Gross is a contractor for the US Agency for International Development serving a fifteen-year sentence in Cuba for covertly smuggling high-tech communications equipment into the island. A rival letter sent by Menendez and Rubio calling for Gross’ “immediate and unconditional release” garnered only fourteen votes, an embarrassing setback for Menendez. In the opaque culture of Washington, the Leahy letter was interpreted as political cover for Obama to negotiate diplomatically for Gross’ release, whereas the Menendez letter was a dud.

The Leahy-Menendez feud has deepened further with recent revelations that the AID has operated a secret Twitter program to stir protests in Cuba. Leahy denounces the project as “dumb, dumb, dumb,” while Menendez defends it vigorously.

National Democrats interested in Cuba commonly claim their hands are tied on Cuba because of Menendez’s role. Under the 1997 Helms-Burton legislation, President Bill Clinton delegated to Congress the final say over recognizing Cuba and lifting the embargo, providing the most powerful tool in Menendez’s arsenal until now. For that reason, Obama has pursued gradual progress with Cuba through executive action—like lifting license requirements for travel by Cuban-Americans, which has resulted in a flow of about 500,000 Cuban Americans per year. Obama also is conducting business-like talks with the Cuban regime on immigration, drug enforcement and other state-to-state matters. Obama shook hands with President Raúl Castro at the funeral of Nelson Mandela, angering the Cuban right.

Any ebbing of Menendez’s role will help Obama to take further steps towards normalization. For example, the State Department is considering lifting its designation of Cuba as a “terrorist state.” Such a move would make it much easier for the Cuban government to engage with private banks and firms who now worry about breaching US anti-terrorism laws. While lifting the terrorist label is within the administration’s power, the decision can be challenged by two-thirds of the Senate. With a weakened Menendez, the Senate might go along with Obama and John Kerry.

The surfacing of the Medicare scandal, Melgen’s donations to Menendez and the links between that money and the Senate’s Majority PAC now increase the pressure on Senator Reid and Democrats to distance themselves from Menendez. For Democratic insiders, managing the scandal is a dicey matter, because losing the Senate in November will turn Cuba policy over to the exiles’ latest favorite son, Senator Marco Rubio.

If Democrats are uncomfortable about a nasty fight with one of their own, who will step up? Menendez is not up for election this November. Republicans who agree with his right-wing foreign policies may like him where he is. Where are New Jersey Democrats? For many years the liberal focus against the Cuban right has centered on Miami, not so much on the enclave of right-wing Cubans in Union City. The recent liberal obsession about New Jersey has been about Republican governor Chris Christie, not Democratic senator Menendez. The uproar over Christie, while fully justifiable, is easier politically than Democrats taking on a leader of their own party. But while causing traffic jams on an interstate bridge is an outrage, how does it compare with a lone senator flouting his own president, fomenting US military interventions and sabotaging a possible bridge to Cuba? Time will tell.

Editor’s Note: This story has been corrected to reflect the fact that Senator Menendez is Cuban-American, not Cuban-born.

Editor's Note: This article originally appeared at TomHayden.com. It is republished with the author's permission. 

While the first Cold War was fought against communism, a successor Cold War is steadily unfolding against democratic electoral outcomes unfavorable to America's perceived interests. Russian President Vladimir Putin's illegal occupation of Crimea has for now revived raging Western memories of Joseph Stalin's top-down incorporation of the former Eastern Europe. Lost in the new anti-Russian narrative, however, is the growing US pattern of ignoring democratic electoral outcomes where they are inconvenient, in the name of "promoting democracy." Ultimately this process of "democracy through intervention" reinforces bureaucratic authoritarian trends in both East and West. The thrust of this US foreign policy mirrors conservatives’ efforts at home to limit and divide the ascending multicultural American political majority. 

It should be remembered that Al Gore's election by a half-million vote majority in 2000, and his apparent win in Florida that year, did not prevent Republican mobs, Republican apparatchiks and Republican judges from forcing the Bush Era upon America. Many of those same forces are willing to do whatever is necessary abroad to thwart democratic electoral outcomes not to their liking.  

Provoking the Russian Bear

The first casualty of the Ukraine crisis is the amputated memory that Viktor Yanukovych was the recognized, democratically elected president of the Ukraine before he was ousted by a mass movement, including pro-fascist militias, based in the western Ukraine who demanded an alliance with their friends in Europe and NATO. The accusation that Yanukovych was corrupt and unpredictable was not a constitutional reason for his ouster or for American intervention in a potential civil war. The released tapes of phone calls between the US ambassador in Kiev and the State Department’s Victoria Nuland proved America’s direct involvement. Nuland is married to the neo-con intellectual Robert Kagan, one of the promoters of the triumphal "new American Century" thesis after the first Cold War. Nuland was plotting to "midwife" a new anti-Russian regime in the Ukraine by ousting the country's president. When Putin proposed to defuse the crisis through a tripartite arrangement, he was rejected out of hand. For a full-throated example of America's new Cold War intention, one can read the battle cry of Senator John McCain:

The United States must look beyond Mr. Putin. His regime may appear imposing, but it is rotting inside. His Russia is not a great power on par with America. It is a gas station run by a corrupt, autocratic regime. And eventually, Russians will come for Mr. Putin in the same way and for the same reasons that Ukrainians came for Viktor F. Yanukovych.

This new Cold War is not all about communism taking over the world. It is more about returning to 19th century balance of power interests, borrowing the phrase John Kerry has used against Putin. It is about dividing up the spoils of the first Cold War among the triumphal capitalist democracies, as if Russia is defeated and short-lived. Pushing Western capitalism and NATO towards the habitat of the Russian bear was sure to touch off the current escalation, and worse may come. On both sides, the projection of a frightening external enemy becomes a tool for curbing domestic democratic dissent. Richard Holbrooke years ago declared that the Ukraine was part of "our core zone of security." Under that kind of thinking, the thaw in the Cold War inevitably would turn back to ice. George Kennan, the diplomatic architect of containment, wrote in 1951 as the First Cold War was hardening, "let us not hover nervously over the people who come after, applying litmus paper daily to their political complexions to find out whether they answer to our concept or 'democratic'..." Citing Kennan fifty years later, Russian history Stephen F. Cohen argues that Russia can advance towards democracy "only when its relations with the outside world, particularly the United States, are improving, not worsening. In increasingly cold war circumstances, its ruling circles…will never risk 'letting go'. That is why Gorbachev's anti-Cold War and pro-democracy policies were inseparable."

The Revival of the "Sino-Soviet Threat"

Only last year the Obama administration's strategic thinkers were saying the First Cold War was over and urging a "pivot" towards China. The pivot itself, however, contained poisoning strains of the first Cold War's brinksmanship, especially in the American assertion of naval access to the South China Sea, the defense of Japan and South Korea against China, and escalation of cyber-warfare. Whatever the justifications given, it was absolutely predictable that these policies would appear as military encirclement to the Chinese. As with Russia, armed US forces were poking into China's ancient habitat. The ill-named "pivot" was more than a basketball move; it was a choice of military competition. 

The pivot would hardly promote greater democracy in China, a stated US concern. That objective could be promoted by an executive order banning US federal procurement of products made in Chinese sweatshops, but that would upset the Apple cart of the Trans Pacific Partnership, which corporate American wants as an economic complement to the new policy of military containment. A campaign against iPhones and iPads made for Apple and FoxConn by Chinese slave labor might arouse Chinese wrath but it would not be an escalation of the military stakes.

While China and Russia disagree over the legitimacy of intervention in Crimea, there is no doubt that America's new Cold War policy has driven those estranged countries into a strategic alliance against the US. Once bitterly divided but now sharing a fear of encirclement by the West, Russia and China are collaborating on energy and weapons policies, and seek to formalize a multi-polar balance of global power against America and the West. Their combined authoritarianism will only grow as dissidents in both countries are accused of being Americans pawns.

Egypt and the End of Islamic Democracy

When Obama recognized the electoral victory of Egypt's Islamic Brotherhood in 2011-12, it was a historic opening permitting a peaceful political alternative to violent jihad for millions of Islamic believers. An underground organization, which suffered decades of torture and banishment, had achieved the option of a democratic path to power. It was natural and inevitable that the Brotherhood would carry scars of bitterness and paranoia from its years in exile. Nothing that President Mohammad Morsi did as president justified the violent coup by Egypt's generals in 2013. That coup was fervently desired by Israel and Saudi Arabia, whose pressures made Obama succumb.

At first Obama appeared to recognize that the generals' action was an illegal coup, which would require the suspension of $1.5 billion in annual US assistance. But, given the slant of elite opinion, the political basis for Obama defending the democratic election of an "authoritarian" was a thin one. The Israelis and Saudis waged a furious lobbying campaign against Obama and on behalf of the coup. In the end, John Kerry pronounced that the generals were following an acceptable road map to constitutional democracy, and there the debate ended. In one of Kerry's more garbled sentences, the secretary of state said, "I think it’s important for all of us, until proven otherwise, to accept that this is the track Egypt is on and to work to help it to be able to achieve that.” One angry representative of Human Rights Watch, no defender of autocrats, concluded that the generals' coup set Egypt back about 100 years. 

The coup also reinforced the jihadist and Al Qaeda narrative that democracy is a hoax. In practical terms, it also worsened the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in which Morsi had become a mediator on behalf of Hamas. Where Morsi had permitted the smuggling tunnels between Egypt and Gaza to continue, the new dictators shut them down, closed the border, and declared Hamas to be a terrorist organization. While crippling Hamas, the new policies also have given rise to more radical jihadist attacks on Israel and a new insurgency in the Sinai desert. Israeli national security experts now say they need Hamas as a stabilizing force even if it is, "the best of bad options." Needless to say, no "democratic spring" has been planted as a result of these policies. 

Venezuela and the New Domino Theory

The original Cold War was premised on a baseless "domino theory"—that any communist victory anywhere would cause the toppling of neighboring states. The new Cold War doctrine is that democratically elected nationalist or socialist leaders are new dominos threatening the fall of a US-controlled order. In the first Cold War, Cuba was the Soviet domino whose “fall” justified the dispatch of CIA and special forces across Latin America and the propping up of oligarchs, military dictators and regimes that employed death squads. These policies resulted in thousands of deaths and mass suffering, but in the end failed to prevent the collapse of dictatorial regimes through free and democratic elections across Latin America. Far from being defeated or isolated, the Cuban government eventually was recognized by every country in Central and Latin America.

Despite these Cold War policies being irrational, Venezuela became the New Domino. Ironically, the Venezuelan revolution started in the same year as the fall of the Soviet Union, 1989, with the mass uprising known as the Caracazao against the increase in consumer prices dictated by the post-Cold War doctrine of neo-liberal economics. Those events, which left thousands dead or wounded, led to an abortive coup attempt in 1992 by Army major Hugo Chavez just as the Clinton administration was emerging amidst post-Soviet triumphalism. Clinton was so intent on implementing his post-Cold War "free trade" policies in Latin America that he might have missed the significance of Chavez's democratic election in 1998.

That election was a turning point in the history of Latin America's recent revolutionaries, because it opened an electoral path to power where previous efforts had resulted in coups and assassinations. Until then, the Cuban Revolution's path of armed revolution and centralized economic development led by a one-party state was the leading model for wresting independence from Yankee imperialism. Previous electoral winners like Chile's Salvador Allende had been targeted for economic destabilization by the Nixon administration and military destruction by the country's right-wing generals. When Allende's defense minister Orlando Letelier and his aide Ronnie Moffett were murdered in 1976 in a Washington DC car bombing, then CIA-director George H.W. Bush issued a false statement blaming a Marxist plot. The murders actually were carried out by CIA-trained Cuban exiles as part of a continent-wide program known as Operation Condor. The Augusto Pinochet dictatorship carried out mass killings, opened the country to foreign investment and remained in power until the Jimmy Carter era, when a genuine Chilean democracy movement succeeded in winning a plebiscite on democracy. The Carter administration, holding aloft its banner of human rights and while defending against global attacks on American credibility, accepted the Chilean outcome to its credit. The American policy of non-intervention was crucial and marked a step back from the Monroe Doctrine.

Hugo Chavez, a protégé and close ally of Fidel Castro, took up his platform of "21st Century Socialism" and became the winner of eighteen out of nineteen elections until his death in 2013. Nearly all observers, like those at the Carter Center, pronounced those elections to be fair and legitimate. Interestingly, the one election lost by Chavez would have vastly expanded his executive powers, showing that Venezuela's voters could impose checks and balances when they chose. 

But the United States was never comfortable with Venezuela's new democracy, and some elements were openly hostile. During the Bush administration, they played a covert role in the 2002 coup by discontented military officers and business leaders. When Obama became president, he cheerfully shook hands and bantered with Chavez and his then-aide, Nicholas Maduro, at a Summit of the Americas meeting. Unfortunately, Obama’s dinosaur adviser, Jeffrey Davidow, disparaged this brief rapprochement at the Trinidad summit.

In the brief post-Cold War "unipolar moment," as the elites headily described it, there was no way the United States was going to embrace "twenty-first century socialism" even if was achieved at the ballot box. After all was said and done, Chavez maintained proper relations with oil giants like Chevron; but he wanted to share subsidized oil and natural gas with customers from Cuba to the Andes and even to freezing cities in the northeastern US. His social programs, which were wildly popular with the poor, were nothing more than a serious version of the Peace Corps' original vision of promoting literacy, medical care and community development to those in need.

The spread of those ideals were a threat to certain privileged interests in Venezuela and the United States. The passionate embrace of these ideals by people of color, the indigenous and the long-suffering wretched of Latin America, was an even greater threat.  

The basic American concept of democracy could have included space for the election of independent social democrats or radical populists. But that was rarely if ever part of the American consensus on democracy, not since the beginning. The Federalist Papers warned against the danger of "a majority faction" composed of the vast multitude of colonists who couldn't vote, not to mention the native people. Each step along the path to an enlarged democracy—the Reconstruction amendments, women's suffrage, the right of workers to organize and bargain collectively, the voting rights act, court decisions on gerrymandering and reapportionment, the status of migrant workers—was hard-fought, bitterly contested and never fully accepted. Today's Republicans are feverishly trying to diminish the voting potential of millions of Americans who constitute that same "majority faction." To use Mitt Romney's derogatory term, why would those conservative Americans support the empowerment of all those "takers" on the state payroll in Venezuela? 

Twenty-first century socialism by the ballot box is unacceptable. Perhaps in the twenty-second century.

The problem for the US elites was how to block the Chavez project without officially opposing democratic elections. One possibility was to suggest that "free markets" inherently were part of the "open society" underlying "free elections." This was an ideological premise smuggled into the doctrine of neo-liberalism. Under the banner of "free trade", the neo-liberals tried arguing against any government "intrusions" on the market such as state ownership, collective bargaining, food safety regulations, consumer or environmental protections. They achieved significant bipartisan success for this doctrine even though in theory is could it lead back to the free trade premise of slavery. The neo-liberal doctrine became challenged publicly and formidably after Latin America's progressive elections of the Nineties and the Seattle uprising—which led to such policies becoming more and more secretive, arranged behind closed doors, circumventing Congress, as in the case of the NAFTAs, CAFTAs, the pending Trans Pacific Partnership and the rest of the spawn of the World Trade Organization.

Another critique of Chavez became popular with the media and foreign policy elite, one which would discredit his version of democracy by majority rule while leaving intact another notion of a proper, liberty and property-protecting democracy. Free elections were acceptable, in this view, but if they advanced authoritarian outcomes they were not considered free and democratic. Falling back on old racial stereotypes, Chavez was pictured as an authoritarian personality, a Latin American caudillo, or strongman, who was mesmerizing an illiterate horde of sheep-like Venezuelans into bestowing dictatorial powers on him through the ballot box. This "dictatorship through democracy" had to be stopped before it spread across the continent. 

Think tanks and foreign policy magazines began propagating two new qualifications on the democratic definition: first, that populism itself was dangerously undemocratic because it was based on machine patronage to working class and poor constituencies; and second, that Latin America should be divided between a "good left" and a "bad left," the difference being the state's role in the market economy. On the "good left" were countries that paid their debts under the mandates of the international financial institutions, or IFIs, and who opened their markets and resources to the big multi-nationals, even if that meant cutting government subsidies and social programs on a continent where the majority are poor. The "bad left" consisted of the countries where democratic elections had resulted in a positive state role in economic development, public investments in medical care and education, and an aggressive government bargaining stance towards foreign investors and the IFIs. The "bad left" was irredeemable even if its actual policies were reformist Keynesian programs like those of the American New Deal. In fact, the underlying premise of neo-liberal doctrine was to end the New Deal tradition at home and abroad, through cuts in Social Security, right to work laws, and more. Furthermore, the "good left" was at its best if it took pro-American positions in forums like the United Nations. The "bad left" was sinister if it opposed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and entered into trade and commercial agreements with the Russians or Chinese. 

The "bad leftist" Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega fought a war against the United States, was elected Nicaragua's president in 1986, then defeated in 1990, and returned to power in the 2007 and 2011 elections. Still in power, Ortega is a close ally of Venezuela and Cuba and poster-boy of the "bad left." 

"Bad leftists" can be liberation theologians. Haiti's Fr. Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the first democratically elected Haitian president, was ousted in 2004 after being twice elected. America's black community and civil rights activists pressured Bill Clinton to force Aristide's return after a 1991 coup by the Haitian oligarchs. Aristide inaugurated sweeping health care and education programs while disbanding the police of the former dictatorship. The US insisted that he accept IMF reforms and abandon any further "class rhetoric." Under Bush, he was seized from the presidential palace and, with American involvement, flown to exile in South Africa. In 2011, Obama urged South Africa to prevent Aristide's return to Haiti because he represented a "threat" to Haiti's electoral process. Though he was the most popular leader in the country, American officials and media made efforts to demonize him as having links to drug rings and street gangs. Haiti remains a basket case under a kind of international receivership. 

Indigenous leader Evo Morales was elected Bolivia's president in 2005 against a neo-liberal candidate strongly supported by the United States. Bolivia was the first "domino" after Venezuela. 

Rafael Correa was elected president of Ecuador in 2006, fought the international banks over his country's debt, and closed a strategic US military base. He has been elected three times as a 21st century socialist. With Bolivia and Nicaragua, Ecuador under Correa would join the Venezuelan-inspired Bolivarian Alliance of the Americas (ALBA) in 2009. Correa also became a leader of the Venezuelan-inspired diplomatic bloc known as the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR). He has given asylum to Wikileaks founder Julian Assange and spoken supportively of whistleblower Edward Snowden. Correa survived a possible assassination attempt by police in an attempted coup in 2010. Another domino falling to the "bad left" after Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua. 

Manuel Zelaya was elected president of Honduras, a longtime US military base, in 2006, promptly joined ALBA, proposed a grass-roots constituent assembly, and was overthrown in a military coup in 2009. Obama at first described the event as a "coup," then withdrew the label, and left Zelaya in exile as his right-wing enemies took power with US recognition. Zelaya, his wife Xiomara, and their followers have been blasted in Honduras as pawns of Venezuela.   

Nestor Kirchner was elected president of Argentina on a populist platform against one of Clinton's neo-liberal allies, Carlos Menem, in 2003. Kirchner died in office and was succeeded by his wife Cristina, who has been elected twice. Along with Brazil and Uruguay, Argentina has accepted Venezuela in the Southern Cone bloc known as MERCOSUR, which President Maduro currently chairs. President Kirchner recently sponsored a mass rally in support of Nicholas Maduro in Argentina. Similar solidarity events were held in Uruguay, where the democratically elected president Jose "Pepe" Mujica, a former guerrilla leader, has been president since 2010. He has adopted an ethic of voluntary poverty, operates from his longtime home rather than the presidential palace, and is another ally of Venezuela. 

In 2008, the liberation theology priest Fr. Fernando Lugo was elected Paraguay's first president after decades of repression and dictatorship. Lugo initiated the country's first land-reform movement in years, and was impeached by his Senate in 2012. His removal from power was condemned as a coup by Mercosur's leadership. The US was silent on the power grab.

Last week Salvador Sanchez Ceren, a former Salvadoran guerrilla commandante, was elected by the closest of margins in a campaign against the right-wing ARENA party, which ran television ads warning against "another Venezuela." ARENA so far has refused to accept El Salvador's election results, suggesting that their version of "another Venezuela" might be street battles to destabilize the country's fragile government. Because of significant grass-roots pressure from a longtime solidarity movement, the US remained neutral in the Salvadoran election.

This briefest of overviews should make clear that Venezuela is deeply embedded in the Latin American region as a whole, not only as an oil supplier but as a key diplomatic and political architect of continental integration and independence. Virtually all of the regions' governments are democratic in character, all enjoy full diplomatic relations with Venezuela, and all are jealously protective of their independent status. Even the tiny islands of the Caribbean have formed a Petrocaribe alliance with their Venezuelan neighbors.

There is no "good left" versus "bad left" division in Latin America as constructed by US strategists and journalists. Twenty-first century socialism is democratic, diverse, inclusive of many differences, and accepts market economics as a reality, but is united on the need for democratic self-determination without US intervention.

The paradox is that resurrected Cold War thinking sees an opportunity to destroy all the dominos, including Cuba, by destabilizing and wrecking Venezuela. Suddenly, the Cuban right-wing exiles in the US, in collaboration with the US government, are building strong congressional and media support for imposing an escalating spiral of sanctions on Venezuela. If they are successful, they believe that all the dominos of the "bad left" will fall, or perhaps fall into line, due to lack of Venezuelan oil, and that the regional effort at institutional integration, led in part by Venezuela, and following the dreams of Bolivar and Martí, will be set back before it can be consolidated. Twenty-first century socialism will be upended, they think, as the US regains its dominance. Cuba, the original inspiration and base for Marti's vision of "Our America", will be crippled by the loss of Venezuelan oil, face an internal uprising and be returned to the US orbit.  

Of course much is left out of this fanciful neo-con scenario. It is more faith-based than fact based. The tendency of the Latin American region to become more unified in the face of outside aggression is ignored. The provision of oil and energy resources from Russia and China, in case of a Venezuelan supply crisis, isn't factored in. The potential revolutionary chaos that would ensue from the toppling of the Venezuela government—or the fall of any of the "dominos"—seems to be accepted as necessary to the "shock and awe" economic doctrine of Milton Friedman's Chicago School.  

The matter of electoral democracy has to be discredited in discussions of Venezuela for this scheme to work. In neo-liberal—and now, apparently, in Congressional—thinking, it doesn't matter that Chavez was elected repeatedly, or that his successor, Nicholas Maduro, was elected president by 52 percent, or that Maduro's coalition swept last December's municipal elections by more than 10 percent.

In the new twisted definition of democracy, those Bolivarian elections only proved that Latin American democracy is not reliable. The dangerous dominoes must fall before the new-type "democracy promoters" with their secret foreign funding and advice. 

That's what we've come to in the new Cold War. 

And here's the important connection for the American people. The same mentality that promotes secret schemes aimed at regime change abroad will be applied at home.

How many million Americans personally believe that Obama, like Hugo Chavez, is an ape that should be caged? Ten percent? Thirty percent? That's enough for violence aimed at our elected leader.

How many million Americans personally believe that people of color, homeless people, Spanish-language speakers, immigrants from Central America, poor people, high-school dropouts or prison inmates really deserve an equal right to vote and participate in our democracy? My guess is that a majority of Americans share those reservations about voting equality.

Finally, how many have given up and simply accept the infection of One Percent money flowing to lobbyists, consultants, spin doctors and cover-up artists whose careers are devoted to blur the fundamental meaning of truth? And decisively, how many favor limitations on voting rights—the end of weekend voting, ID requirements for all voters, reducing polling places to induce long lines in bad November weather, etc.—if that's what it takes to keep a conservative white minority in power? Half of the states apparently.

After centuries of struggling to build our imperfect but precious democracy, Americans are in danger of losing it, abroad and at home. Now that the “majority faction” has proved its ability to succeed, democracy itself is threatened with shrinkage and subversion. What goes around comes around.

The return of William Bratton as New York’s top cop raises questions about how far reform of stop-and-frisk laws will go. Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio has extolled the incoming chief for implementing “constitutional” stop-and-frisk policies during his Los Angeles tenure.

Stop right there and frisk Bratton’s Los Angeles record. It’s not what you might think.

The LAPD’s current inspector general, Alex Bustamante, is combing incomplete data from the LA Bratton era, 2002–09, but certain facts are clear. Violent crime declined in LA during those seven years. Bratton achieved his stated goal of “freeing” the LAPD from a federally imposed consent decree. Public opinion toward the LAPD rose to favorable levels in the African-American and Latino communities. But the numbers on “stops” (LA terminology for stop-and-frisk) point towards racial profiling and a possible ticking time bomb.

First, a comparison. Bratton personally commissioned a 2009 Harvard study of the LAPD that showed an escalation of stops—of both pedestrians and motorists—from 587,200 in 2002 to 875,204 in 2008, equally or surpassing the stop-and-frisk numbers in New York, where the policy was ruled unconstitutional and was a central issue in de Blasio’s campaign. Well over 70 percent of 2008 LAPD stops in inner-city precincts were of African-American and Latinos, a ration similar to New York’s.

There was a “steep increase” in arrests for minor crimes, known as Part Two (loitering DUI, disorderly conduct), in keeping with the Bratton philosophy of “broken windows” policing, while arrests for serious (Part One) crimes such as homicide and rapes declined to only 15 percent of total arrests from 2003–07. Broken communities, not broken windows, are the real socio-economic crisis in LA, and Bratton’s approach simply served to perpetuate the divide. The priorities set by Bratton were untouched by police reform because of they were considered “police management decisions to use arrest powers more aggressively for less serious crimes.”

The Harvard report found a 17 percent increase from 2006–08 in the use of non-lethal force (stun guns, bean bags, etc.) in the predominately black Central Bureau. “A troubling pattern in the use of (non-lethal) force,” the report concludes, “is that African Americans, and to a lesser extent Hispanics, are subjects of the use of force out of proportion to their share of involuntary contacts with the LAPD.”

Only 1.6 percent of 2,368 citizen complaints of officer “discourtesy” were upheld. There was a total rejection of 1,200 racial profiling complaints during 2002–08.

Bratton was out of Los Angeles one-third of the time in certain years, when he was often in Washington, London and, of course, New York. The NY City Council will have a significant role to play in monitoring the Bratton policies, a power that was delegated to federal monitors in the case of Los Angeles.

De Blasio might find Bratton’s finesse at avoiding consent decrees useful as the mayor grapples with the issues ahead. What other reason there might be for the choice of Bratton is unknown, but Bratton remains a high-profile, internationally—known, celebrity-befriending figure with great ambitions.

Bratton’s departure from LA left a lingering question about conflicts of interest that deserve renewed scrutiny. He worked in 2001 as a paid consultant under Michael Cherkasky of New York–based Kroll Inc., who had just been appointed as the federal monitor over the department. Bratton became chief in October 2002. That meant that the monitor was monitoring his former consultant. While Bratton labored to have the consent decree lifted, he continued some sort of relationship with Cherkasky, since four months after the federal decree was ordered lifted, Cherkasky hired Bratton for a lucrative job at Altegrity Inc., which Bratton had created only one month before. Leaving the LAPD with the consent decree lifted, Bratton next rose into the sphere of global security counseling, where transparency tends to be non-existent. The Los Angeles Times’s Tim Rutten’s comment on Bratton is worth considering as he arrives to reform New York policing:

In other words, the monitor gave the court advice that helped cement Bratton’s reputation as the country’s leading police chief, then just weeks later the two enter into a lucrative business arrangement built on that very reputation.

Many in the LA civil liberties community, from the ACLU’s Ramona Ripston to civil rights lawyer Connie Rice, supported Bratton during his stay, perhaps in comparison to Los Angeles’s long history of abusive policing. No doubt those endorsements carried weight with de Blasio’s incoming team. But the cooptation of his critics also eroded a once-aggressive civil rights community in Los Angeles, one which forced the city into federal receivership and reform. That too is a legacy for New Yorkers to monitor carefully as Bratton tries to make stop-and-frisk “constitutional.”

Candidate de Blasio promised to end a “stop-and-frisk era.” But Mychal Denzel Smith says the mayor-elect’s pick for police commissioner undermines that goal.

There is an opportunity for President Barack Obama to begin rolling back our Cuba sanctions policy by finding a bank willing to do business with Cuba so that hundreds of thousands of Cubans can spend the holidays with their families. The main reason the Cuban Interests Section in Washington, DC, cannot process visas and passports is because no bank is willing to handle the financial transactions. The reason the banks are afraid is the US sanctions policy and Cuba’s listing on the global terrorism list. So the irrational US policy has come full circle: Obama’s policy of expanding and normalizing purposeful travel to Cuba is prevented by Obama’s embargo policies. It’s an opportunity to begin lifting the embargo, but chances are the administration is too timid, for now, to fully undo its own senseless policy.

Notice, however, the tantalizing convergence between Cuban and American rhetoric on the main issue. Secretary of State John Kerry has said:

Each year, hundreds of thousands of Americans visit Havana, and hundreds of millions of dollars in trade and remittances flow from the United States to Cuba. We are committed to this human interchange, and in the United States we believe that our people are actually our best ambassadors. They are ambassadors of our ideals, of our values, of our beliefs.

Ricardo Alarcón, former foreign minister and retired president of the National Assembly said, in relation:

In terms of changing Cuban society, the most effective ambassadors are the Cubans coming back, somebody living on the corner bringing gadgets from Miami. When they are in their dining rooms they probably are not pretending to mislead. They will say work is harder in the US. They can bring some different element here, maybe in fashion or music. So you will get a mutual influence. I don’t really see a problem with that. They have been coming back for years. So? It’s a two-way influence. For Cubans, they get a broader view of Miami, and it challenges the mentality of those Cuban-Americans who think everyone from Cuba is a terrorist. What free travel permits is a better understanding of Cuba’s realities and some benefits for the visitors, like cheaper medicines for example. For decades we have had millions of tourists from Western Europe and Canada, and they haven’t changed the country, they just come to enjoy life and relax.

President Obama said November 8, “We have to update our policies. Keep in mind that when Castro came to power, I was just born.”

Ricardo Alarcón continued:

Now we have Esteban Lazo as head of our National Assembly. He was a boy, a sugar cane cutter, in the Batista period. A little boy then; now he’s in his sixties. The misperception is that the Cuban system has been the same from the very first day; that the people who attacked Moncada are still around. Yes, a few are, but they are octogenarians. When Raul said he was getting out in five years, nobody here said, well, that’s the end.

Alarcón said emphatically, “The main goal of immigrants is to come and go. The discussion is over.”

This irreversible process already has destroyed the argument of right-wing Cuban politicians, including Senator Marco Rubio and Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, that no one should travel to Cuba, nor spend money in Cuba, because they would be subsidizing a dictatorship. Even many of Cuba’s US-supported dissidents have concluded that the blockade no longer makes sense.

If the “Cuban exiles” community is itself a dying band of octogenarians, what beyond inertia is propping up the US policy? Alarcón predicts that, “The day you don’t have a Castro, they will get into trouble because of their Helms-Burton law,” which prohibits US diplomatic recognition without the disappearance of the Castro regime and installation of a market economy:

In a few years the Cuban government will be led by other persons with other last names. But I don’t think the [passing of the Castros] will create an immediate process towards normalization. The reasons and forces behind the current policy are strong than that.

But, Alarcón observes, “If the anti-Castro people can go back and forth, it’s the end of the political exile movement.”

A new report says the US and Canada are failing asylum seekers. Jessica Weisberg breaks it down.

President Obama talks to bipartisan Congressional leaders at the White House while discussing a military response to Syria. Reuters/Larry Downing
 
The resolution in favor of American intervention in Syria conceals an agenda for escalation far beyond, as a statement by Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chair Robert Menendez described it, a “narrow” and “focused” US response to the chemical weapons attack on August 21. The American public and Congress are being fooled into a broader effort that looks a lot like war and regime change.
 
Maybe it’s the price the president paid for Senator John McCain’s vote. But McCain’s amendment, which says, “It is the policy of the United States to change the momentum on the battlefield in Syria as to create favorable conditions for a negotiated settlement,” suggests escalation will not be far behind airstrikes.

The measure authorizes: two or three months of sustained bombing and missile strikes, aimed at decisively damaging Assad’s military bases and infrastructure; increasing the capabilities of the insurgent forces—somehow without strengthening Al Qaeda—and profoundly weakening Assad’s capacity to continue in power. The prohibition of boots on the ground, so important to Congress, does not cover CIA boots on the ground, nor the boots of American advisers and trainers just over the Syrian border.

Kerry even alluded to where this might go, when in his official Senate testimony he said that the authorization should not rule out “boots on the ground.” Kerry told the committee that he believed US troops might have to be used if chaos ensues or militant rebel elements threaten to take control of chemical weapons stockpiles. In other words, “boots on the ground” are stage of escalation not necessary at the present—but which might be necessary as a consequence of the chain of events the United States now is fomenting. Under sharp questioning, Kerry backtracked, saying, “Let’s shut that door now as tight as we can,” then adding that it was only a hypothetical question and that there would be no boots on the ground “with respect to the civil war.”

The parallel with Iraq is crystal clear. That earlier war was based on false information about “weapons of mass destruction” in the terrifying hands of Saddam Hussein. In an interview, Iraq war architect Paul Wolfowitz said that the nonexistent weapons were the best argument for mobilizing public opinion and a reluctant Congress. In this war, there seems to be no question that a sarin-type gas attack killed over 1,000 people, although a UN investigation is incomplete and there are questions about who exactly ordered the attack. That major difference aside, the eerie parallel with Iraq is that the chemical weapons attack is a pretext for expanding the American war in Syria on a much broader basis than is acknowledged.

The American public deserves a full explanation for what we are expected to support.

Perhaps regime change is a good idea. But then why not make the argument openly? There can be only one very familiar reason: that if the American people and Congress heard what the war-makers have in store, there would be little chance of approving the marching orders. If public currently opposes the missile strikes, imagine the reaction toward an even wider war. The authorization would be dead on arrival.

No one knows what the outcome in Congress will be. But it’s hard to imagine Democrats embracing McCain’s version of Obama’s bill, when it’s already difficult for them to support the president’s narrower original goal. And it’s equally hard to see House Republicans supporting John McCain over Senators Rand Paul and Marco Rubio, who voted no in the Senate committee. The combination of Obama and McCain together could be far too much for the Tea Party to swallow.

The first casualty in politics and war, it turns out, is the truth. Before too many days pass, the true scale of the proposed escalation should be revealed and debated. That’s what the war-makers, in their haste, may fear the most.

Could Obama go to war without Congress’s approval? Zoë Carpenter reports.

Inmates are housed in three-tier bunks, in what was once a multi-purpose recreation room, at the Deuel Vocational Institute in Tracy, Calif. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli, File)
 
As the hunger strike against solitary confinement in California prisons enters a critical sixth week, Governor Jerry Brown is preparing to force-feed scores of inmates rather than meet any of their demands for improved conditions. Since the governor declared “the California prison crisis is over” last January, the crisis has only deepened, with the hunger strikers nearing the door of death.

There is no sign that governor will relent. He has ignored a proposal floated last week in the Los Angeles Times to begin meeting elementary demands, from one phone call a week, to better food, to family visits in exchange for the hunger strike ending. His advisers assure him with “100 percent” certainty that medical intervention will prevent any organ failure or death.

“He’s not the Jerry Brown I used to know,” says one leading judicial officer who watches the current drama closely.

So what options do the hunger strikers have now? With the governor taking a fundamentalist line, only a fast-track restoration of checks and balances by the courts and legislature, propelled by public questioning, might yield a breakthrough.

• The first track to a solution is the legal one. A federal judge upheld a class action suit by ten hunger strikers, most of them in solitary confinement for two decades, that they have been subject to unconstitutional cruel and unusual punishment and denial of a meaningful process to challenge their indefinite confinement. But Governor Brown has adopted a defiant stance towards court monitoring, and the case will not be resolved before it is too late for the fasting inmates.

• The second track is a possible emergency hearing by state legislators worried about a massive state prison system on which they spend billions but which is beyond their control. The hearing could give voice to the inmates demands, send a message to Brown, and draw the crisis into the light of public debate. It might convince the isolated inmates to live to fight in another forum. It would take an immediate signal from the legislature, which has yet to make a decision.

• The third track is the mobilization of public questioning and protest. While the public has no love for prison gangs, there is increased questioning of the costs of the governor’s continual quarrels with the courts. The fact that the conservative US Supreme Court has repeatedly found Brown guilty of cruel and unusual punishment sets many Californians to wondering. Voters already have rejected prison bonds and supported a softening of California’s three-strikes law.

In addition to the courts, Brown is under fire from the United Nations Rapporteur on Torture, Juan Mendez, who condemned California on August 23 for its solitary confinement policies. Severe and prolonged solitary confinement “amounts to torture,” the Rapporteur noted. Mendez also criticized Brown for considering forced-feeding against the will of the hunger strikers.

That’s why the Brown administration has engineered a public relations drive against the hunger strike. Brown’s top prison official, Jeffrey Beard, takes the position that the strike is run by “terrorists” bent on controlling the statewide system and even the communities from which inmates come. Prison bureaucrats have erected a virtual iron curtain making it very difficult for mainstream reporters, civil liberties lawyers or prisoner families to gain access to information. At the moment, for example, they are dispersing dozens of strikers to unknown and segregated locations across the sprawling statewide system. Families have no idea where their sons are being held.

Given the state’s information stranglehold, it is useful to review and circulate the May 9 court ruling against Brown by federal judge Claudia Wilken, a must-read to understand how the governor could so systematically violate the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments.

Wilken’s ruling was in response to a September 10, 2012, class action suit brought by ten hunger strikers, initiated by Todd Ashker and Danny Traxell. Five of the plaintiffs have been in solitary confinement for twenty or more years in Pelican Bay.

For what imaginable reason? Not because of the crimes for which they were convicted originally but for allegations that they are “identified” with gangs in prison. That identity, determined exclusively by prison officials, is based on such criteria as the word of informants, the possession of “gang-affiliated art,” suspicious tattoos, even written materials. The gang identification process—or, in prison terminology, “validation”—doesn’t require the evidence of actual criminal behavior. The designation leads to indefinite solitary confinement unless the inmate “debriefs”—that is, reveals everything he knows about gang members and their activity throughout the prison.

That leads to the Fourteenth Amendment complaint recognized by Judge Wilken. Inmates have virtually no due process mechanisms to defend themselves against “validation,” and being coerced to inform on other inmates results in contaminated “evidence” and puts inmates and their families at mortal risk.

At the time of the lawsuit, the only remedies available for Pelican Bay inmates were opportunities to debrief held every six months, and reviews of gang status every six years, conducted by the prison hierarchy itself.

Those mechanisms were rejected by Judge Wilken as insufficient to provide due process to the inmates.The judge used comparisons with an Ohio supermax penititentiary which she found provides far greater independent review.

Seeking to delay the judge’s ruling, the Brown administration scrambled last October to offer a two-year pilot program to deal with the gang validation issues, which seemed timed to block the inmates’s case. But according to Judge Wilkens the pilot program’s remedies were less than those existing in comparable institutions, in particular Ohio’s supermax prison which includes more layers of appeal. On So on May 9, Judge Wilken rejected Brown’s pilot program as too little, too late, a limited two-year proposal aimed at fixing a problem which she said has been permanent for decades.

The relief sought by the Pelican Bay inmates is “alleviation of their conditions of confinement,” meaningful mechanisms of redress from assignment to isolation, reviews for inmates serving six months in the “Segregated Housing Units” [SHUs], and release from solitary for any inmate having spent ten years there. Supplementing their core demands is an agenda of some forty proposals for family visits, phone calls, better food, access to educational programs and the like, all within the accepted court definitions of “basic needs” required for anyone incarcerated.

Brown’s public relations offensive seems designed to avoid public attention to the core constitutional issues at stake, and even imply that the federal courts are soft on criminals. Brown, far from meeting the tradition of California leadership on vital national issues, has become a voice from the nation’s receding obsession with one-sided law-and-order. Even US Attorney General Eric Holder now is declaring that too many have been locked up for too long in the nation’s gulag.

With the Roberts Court condemning cruel and unusual punishment and Eric Holder condemning mass incarceration, Governor Jerry Brown has become a voice from the past on constitutional issues. Only the rapid restoration of checks and balances in California can save the hunger strikers now.

Support the Pelican Bay hunger strikers.

The United States doesn’t classify the Egyptian military’s overthrow of the Morsi regime as a “coup” since that would suspend $1.3 billion in aid to country’s armed forces. Honduras in 2009 was a similar case, where President Obama’s initial description of the military coup was retracted so that aid could continue flowing to the newly installed rump government there. A similar Orwellian logic led our security hawks to scorn the several democratic elections of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela as “illegitimate” while obscuring the American role in the attempted coup of 2002. In Haiti, the 2000 election of Jean-Bertrande Aristide was denounced as “illegitimate,” while the 2004 coup, in which Aristide says he was “kidnapped” by the United States, was described as a necessary transition in official speak. Under the Helms-Burton law, normalization of relations with Cuba depends on the removal of the Castros and the Communist Party and guarantees of a market economy before there can be legitimate elections. Before this latest round, Washington instigated infamous coups against the democratically elected governments of Guatemala and Iran in the 1950s.

That’s why our US officials—and the voices of the mainstream media—are so tongue-twisted in describing Egypt. A coup is never a coup until the powerful name it so.

One must conclude either that Washington knew all about the planned coup in Cairo (unlikely), or that our “best and brightest” intelligence experts knew almost nothing in spite of that $1.3 billion arrangement with Egypt’s military.

So what? some are asking. Weren’t Morsi and the Brotherhood a clique of undemocratic thugs? And shouldn’t Americans join the celebrations we see on CNN? Doesn’t the fact that millions are seen rejoicing in Morsi’s fall mean that this was a popular uprising and not a coup?

Let’s untangle the web.

First, certainly the Muslim Brotherhood has authoritarian tendencies and an ambition to use power for itself. These arise from successfully surviving as an underground during many decades of torture, imprisonment, infiltration and banning by the US-supported Mubarak dictatorship. It is associated with religious fundamentalism as well. Such clandestine movements often fail in the attempted transition to more open and democratic settings, or fragment and split apart. Having been banned for years, they see their aspiration for recognition as all-important. But legitimacy is precisely what their defeated foes refuse to grant. For a parallel example, consider how many white right-wing Americans refuse to accept Barack Obama’s legitimacy as our elected president. The same is true in Egypt for foes of Morsi and the Brotherhood. The resulting standoff is toxic to systems which rely on mutual recognition and coexistence; in the analysis of the International Study Group it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy:

The more the opposition obstructs and calls for Morsi’s ouster, the more it validates the Islamists’ conviction [that] it will never recognize their right to govern; the more the Brotherhood charges ahead, the more it confirms the others’ belief of its monopolistic designs over power. Even if leaders back away from the brink, this could quickly get out of hand…” [February 4, 2013]

In this context, two sets of facts are of utmost importance. First, the Brotherhood won the democratic parliamentary elections of 2011–12; Morsi won the presidential election of June 2012 and the December 2012 referendum on the new constitution. These real victories might be qualified as being less than strong mandates but more than legitimate by accepted standards of democracy. Morsi, for example, won the presidency by only 51 percent. The turnout for approving the new constitution was only 32 percent, with 56 percent of Cairo residents voting against, though the measure passed 64 percent to 36 percent. Those are signs of a country impossibly divided, even broken, but they are legitimate electoral outcomes. There is really no basis for recognizing the new regime or the process by which the generals have seized power, except by a convoluted fudging of these facts. For example, the 2013 appropriations bill requires that, as a basis of military and economic funding, the United States “shall certify that the Government of Egypt 1) has completed the transition to civilian government, including holding free and fair elections; and 2) if is implementing policies to protect freedom of expression, association or religion, and due process of law.” The conditions can be waived by the White House only “in the national security interests of the United States” and with a detailed justification to Congress. That may be why Senator Patrick Leahy is temporarily suspending action on the appropriations measure.

Second, it is claimed by the anti-Brotherhood forces that Morsi turned dictatorial last November 22 when declaring himself temporarily immune from judicial review. That act triggered formation of the new National Salvation Front led by several former presidential candidates. Morsi’s dilemma was that he faced absolute opposition from the Mubarak-era judiciary, and so circumvented their obduracy to push the constitutional measure as a voter referendum. From his point of view, Morsi had no choice. From the opposition view, he became the new Mubarak. The heart of the dispute was the Brotherhood’s quest for a more Islamic form of governance against the opposition’s implacable opposition to the Brotherhood’s having any legitimacy. But if Morsi was wrong in sending the constitution to a popular vote, his maneuver was ratified by a democratic vote. On the other hand, the new “tamarod” (rebellion) movement, which claims to have collected 20 million petitions, had no constitutional basis whatever for petitioning the Supreme Constitutional Court for a presidential recall (Congressional Research Service report, June 27). It doesn’t seem to matter now that this entirely novel proposal has been bypassed by the generals who, in turn, are scrambling to justify their deeds.

It is almost certain that US funding will keep flowing to the generals and whatever “technocratic government” they install. Without the funding, Egypt will collapse. Only with the funding does the United States have leverage. The lobbyists for the beneficiaries (among them, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York) will make certain that the spigots are kept open.

The levels of US funding are based on formulas agreed upon as part of the 1979 Camp David Agreement. In general, they favor Israel by a 3:2 ratio despite the vast difference in size of the two countries. Egypt ranks fifth in US foreign assistance behind Israel, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq. Since 2009, Egypt has received approximately $250 million yearly in “economic” assistance compared to $1.3 billion yearly for its military. The economic assistance has been cut by more than half the amount that was allocated during the Mubarak years, despite the evidence that the Egyptian economy today is a basket case (malnutrition and poverty rising, crime spiking, a stagnant GDP of 2.2 percent last year). The United States and Western powers are seeking an IMF austerity program that would cut subsidies for food and gas, steps that might cause a total implosion. Foreign exchange reserves are nearing rock-bottom. As a matter of fact, they were projected to run out in June.

For the moment, the mainstream media and many progressives might be celebrating the exuberant street protests as evidence of “second chance” for democracy in Egypt. Certainly Egyptian liberals, revolutionaries, Facebook bloggers, womens’ rights groups and others have reason to feel heady, even ecstatic, at the experience of accomplishing another revolution from below so quickly. But sooner rather than later, the headaches will return. The country is paralyzed by division: the Islamists split between Brotherhood and Salafists; the secular liberals, students, women and intellectuals representing only 20 percent of the population; the self-interested, US-financed army a force serving its own interests. If Morsi couldn’t create a new center, the reason might not have been because he was paranoid or heavy-handed but because there is for now no viable center as Egypt emerges from decades of dictatorship. If no one can rule and power-sharing is impossible, what then? Another Syria or Algeria, countries going through long civil wars?

Since American (and Israeli) policy for decades has been to maintain a cold peace on the Egyptian front, what now? Morsi and the Brotherhood were always more than the Israelis and the neo-conservatives wanted to accept. But from a rational perspective of national interests, Morsi was an independent and constructive force. Morsi was a mediator between Israel and Hamas in the cease-fire agreement of 2012. He also tried to mediate indirect Israel-Hamas discussions after the cease-fire, and the talks among the Palestinian factions aimed at closing the gap between Fatah and Hamas. Two-thirds of Israelis in late 2012 said Morsi had a positive impact on diminishing Gaza violence. In the long run, however, the rise of Morsi and the Brotherhood—along with the Arab Spring—have implied a new center of gravity in the Middle East, one more favorable to Palestinian interests and the brokering of a statehood agreement.

The few Americans—some of them in high places—who believe that deepening chaos in the Arab world is somehow good for the Israelis, and therefore good for the United States, tend also to indulge in visions of Armageddon and the Apocalypse. They may be quietly rejoicing now, but the future they fantasize is one of perpetual war with its inevitable blowback. Their less-religious brethren in the national security state have a parallel preference for maintaining sectarian divisions, or sometimes sectarian dictatorships, against the perceived threat of nationalist unity anywhere in the Third World. They are pleased, on the whole, that their bloody Mubarak era has passed without giving rise to a unified nationalist Egyptian state standing up in the midst of the seething Arab world, one that would make the Arab oil monarchies tremble on their thrones and even force the Israelis to face a formidable new ally for the Palestinians at the tables of negotiation.

The gates of Hell are swinging loose.

By a 305-121 margin, the House of Representatives voted Thursday to transfer US combat operations to the Afghan government by the end of 2013. The amendment to the 2014 National Defense Authorization Act also expresses the sense of the Congress that the President must seek Congressional approval for any post-2014 by no later than June 1, 2104. All US forces are currently scheduled to depart by December 31, 2014.   

Politically, the development means that the Obama administration effectively lacks any congressional authorization for a permanent military occupation of Afghanistan, more than a decade since the broad green light was passed by Congress after 9/11. “Today is the first time in 12 years of war that a majority of the House of Representatives has voted to end the war in Afghanistan,” said Stephen Miles of the Win Without War coalition. 

Leadership on measure came from Representatives Jim McGovern (D-MA), Walter Jones (R-NC), Barbara Lee (D-CA), Adam Smith (D-WA) and John Garamendi (D-CA). Similar language was contained in a 2012 bill by Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR), which passed on a 62-33 vote. Significantly, the proposal endorses “robust negotiations” toward a diplomatic settlement. Overall, the proposal offers bipartisan political cover for the Obama administration to speed up troop withdrawals and talks with the Taliban and other insurgencies. 

The administration has reduced its troop commitment from 105,000 to 68,000 since last year, a level that Pentagon commanders are advocating remain steady until late into 2014. All American ground troops are scheduled to depart by December 31, 2014, with NATO troops following the same schedule. Afghanistan’s presidential election is planned for late 2014 as well.

Diplomacy has been stuck for over one year since the Obama administration halted a deal in which captured US soldier Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl would be released by the Taliban in exchange for several Taliban leaders held in Guantanamo. Congressional Republicans have opposed the deal in the past. 

As in the late stages of the Iraq War, Pentagon officials are pushing for a “post-war” occupation force of up to 15,000 Americans. President Obama has signaled his interest, as has President Hamid Karzai, but discussions remain inconclusive. In Iraq, time simply ran out and President Obama pulled all troops according to his proposed deadline. Iraq remains deeply divided and unstable, its government allied with Iran and its Sunni minority supporting resistance both in Iraq and Syria. 

Afghanistan is far more unstable than Iraq. Karzai’s government in Kabul is like Humpty-Dumpty, an inbred crony-capitalism culture chronically lacking a majority base. The resumption of civil war is a continuing possibility. How a sharply reduced US JSOC presence, including Night Raiders and drones, could succeed where over 100,000 American forces—200,000 including NATO—failed to exterminate the insurgency is unknown. 

Only a negotiated settlement might stabilize things, including full withdrawal of American troops and bases combined with assurances from Afghanistan, Pakistan and regional powers that Afghanistan will not be permitted to contain sanctuaries for Al Qaeda or jihadists bent on attacking Western targets. A power-sharing consortium, backed by regional powers, might be arranged after Karzai’s departure. Some in the national security establishment have suggested that the country devolve along ethnic-geographic lines into a de facto state of partition.

People cluster around a wounded student on Kent State University campus on May 4, 1970. (AP Photo.)
 
Earlier this month, Kent State commemorated the forty-third anniversary of the National Guard killing of four students and the wounding of nine others on May 4, 1970, by opening an official Visitors Center. It was a significant milestone for activists—some already dead, the rest gone gray—determined to uncover the truth and honor the memory of those who died in an antiwar protest on that fateful day.

The random character of those deaths, and those at Jackson State two weeks later, drove home the message to millions of students that spring that they too might become victims of an escalating war at home. The Crosby, Stills and Nash song, “Four Dead in Ohio,” became a universal dirge.

Questions still remain, and this year’s formal events raised more, thanks to filmmaker Oliver Stone, the keynote speaker.

Activists leading the long inquest demand that the Obama Justice Department take a new look at recently discovered cassettes from 1970 which, under modern forensic technology, may clarify at last whether orders to fire at the students were given to the guardsmen, or whether the shooters reacted spontaneously to provocation by students.

In an emotional speech to over 800 from the local community, Oliver Stone went further. Stone revived an old theory—long discredited by state and federal investigators—that an informant doubling as a sniper that day instigated the chain of events. Stone’s theory was quickly denounced as a “red herring” by Alan Canfora, who was shot in 1970 and who continues to be among the most respected researchers on the events. Stone’s theory, Canfora says, diverts attention from the explanation that researchers are closing in on—that orders to kill were given—and revives the “sniper” excuse given to justify the killing spree that day.

* * *

The forty-three consecutive years of overnight vigils, demonstrations, conferences and memorials at Kent State are the longest such campaign in the history of the antiwar movement. Tom Grace, an activist shot that day and now a college professor in New York estimates that 65,000 people have trekked over the years to the off-the-highway location. The numbers are sure to increase with the opening of the Center.

While monuments proliferate for many social movements, and while President Obama memorably mentioned Seneca Falls, Selma and Stonewall in his second inaugural address, national recognition of what happened at Kent State has evolved only with painful gradualism. Obama spoke at Kent last September 26 before 6,600 cheering students and came away with 2,000 new voter registrations. He won Kent in November by over 80 percent. That mattered in Ohio’s tight election, won by Obama by less that two percentage points. Next to Ohio’s African-American voters, Obama’s strongest Democratic supporters are concentrated in the Kent area of northeastern Ohio. Among the leading longtime Democrats in the Kent area has been Alan Canfora and the activist network still seeking answers to what happened on May 4, 1970.

Obama said not a word about the Kent State legacy in his September 26 campaign speech. Was this an omission of forgetfulness, or a calculated avoidance of reviving controversies that still lurk among some Ohio voters with Guard connections? What might it take for Obama to include Kent State in a future litany of sites made historic by social movements?

* * *

In the early Seventies, Kent State officials tried and failed to limit the annual commemorations to just every five years. Then came a 1979 confrontation and hundreds of arrests when the University actually tried to bulldoze the hallowed site to build a gym. It took until 1998 to stop cars from driving over the four spots on the campus parking lot where Allison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, Sandra Scheuer and William Schroeder were killed by bullets.

Eventually, however, KSU began to co-exist and even cooperate with the mission of the May 4 activists. KSU faculty launched ongoing educational efforts to archive what happened. The university is the nation’s leader in promoting courses on nonviolence and democracy, peace studies and conflict resolution classes were established. All sixteen deans from every campus pitched in $667,000 of the one million dollar cost of the new Center. Determined lobbying resulted in the site being placed on the National Registry of Historical Sites in 2010. Then came $330,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities. After six years of debate and planning, the Visitors Center finally was opened. Much of the history is chronicled in a book edited by KSU professors Laura Davis and Carol Barbato, Democratic Narratives, History, and Memory, published last year by KSU Press.

The new Center is a spacious, sunlit, airy, two-room facility on the ground floor of Taylor Hall, overlooking the graceful green slopes of the old Commons; the slopes form a natural amphitheater in the heart of campus where the 1970 confrontation occurred. The design succeeds in turning what appears to be a pretty but standard college green into an outdoor museum with minimalist signage describing the events of May 4. The bowl’s rim is ringed by 58,220 yellow flowers representing the American deaths in Vietnam, the underlying cause of the May 4 protests. Just to the side of the green is the black parking lot with four marked spaces where the victims died. Flowers, candles and messages written in chalk create a tender aura over the stark pavement. The deliberate randomness of the shootings is brought home by the distances the bullets traveled—between 260 and 390 feet for the fatalities, as far away as 750 feet for a wounding. If this was a targeted killing the target was any student protestor. The day before the shootings, Governor James Rhodes called them “the worst type of people in America,” “brownshirts” who should be “eradicated.” Richard Nixon said they were “bums.”

Rhodes was trailing by eight percent in the final days of a Republican primary when he visited Kent State on May 3, ordered the Guard on campus and excoriated the student radicals. According to top Nixon aide H.R. Haldeman’s archival notes, the President instructed his hardline political consultant, Murray Chotiner, to make sure that “Rhodes esp. ride this.”

Nixon had invaded Cambodia four days earlier, on April 30, and his own world was about to blow up from blowback. (On May 1, at Yale, I read aloud a call for a national student strike drafted by activists from around the country.) Four million students protested or went on strike that month, and semesters came thudding to their end. In those same days, Nixon approved the “Huston Plan,” drawn up by his aide Tom Charles Huston, for a coordinated FBI-CIA crackdown on campus activism through extra-judicial methods (the plan was officially dropped, though implemented in its parts). As Haldeman would write in his memoir, The Ends of Power (1978), the Kent State shootings began “Nixon’s downhill slide toward Watergate” and the administration’s destruction. Congress immediately reacted by finally trying to cut funding for the war. Within weeks, Nixon signed a bill lowering the voting age to 18. By then he was already retreating from his “incursion” into Cambodia, though the war itself would only end in Watergate.

The events at Kent State would morph into a continuing battle over the control of narrative, always the final stage of social movements. In the beginning Nixon framed his Cambodia action as saving America from becoming a “pitiful helpless giant” surrounded by the mobs burning books and blowing up campuses at home (comparisons he literally used). California’s governor Ronald Reagan was taking the same warlike stance, declaring days before the Cambodian invasion that “if the students want a bloodbath, let’s get it over with. No more appeasement.”

That narrative was strengthened in James Michener’s quick bestseller on Kent, where he blamed the disastrous breakdown on an SDS “conspiracy.” The Nixon White House later congratulated Michener. Even one critic of the murders, Phillip Caputo, author of Thirteen Seconds (2005), blamed the Kent students for throwing a “collective, destructive tantrum” and therefore sharing blame for their own deaths. On the other hand, Nixon’s own commission, chaired by Pennsylvania Governor William Scranton, found the shootings to be “indiscriminate…unnecessary, unwarranted and inexcusable.”

* * *

These polarized views, as well as the actual chain of events, have been debated ever since. Consequently, the Center’s very mandates are in potential conflict: to balance the need for a true accounting with its other stated purpose of reconciliation or healing. If the two clash, what happens to the truth?

Over the decades the core demand of the activists and families of the dead and wounded has been to get to the truth of why shots were fired and whether the commanders gave orders. State officials and the surviving guardsmen have denied all liability, at first casting blame on unnamed “snipers” (a claim Ohio and federal authorities withdrew), then on provocation by rock-throwing, epithet-shouting students, and then finally on a pure over-reaction by paranoid guardsmen, thus turning the 13-second shooting “spree” into another one of history’s “regrettable” tragedies. The evidence from eyewitnesses, photos and films and numerous investigations has shredded those official claims, but still fallen short of an irrefutable alternative—until recently. In 2007, an old cassette tape from May 4, 1970, was retrieved at a Yale University archive by the dogged Alan Canfora, who now is the director of the Akron Law Library. He turned the cassette over to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and its stunning revelations were printed both there and in The New York Times.

The cassette buttresses the long-held belief of many that there was an order to fire given the guardsmen that day. To many ears, the words “right here,” “get set,” “point” and “fire” are heard from a commanding officer. (Later, a top commander was quoted as saying that “an order came down,” without saying from where the order came.)

But the Visitors’ Center didn’t quite concur with Canfora, or wasn’t able to obtain a consensus from the various experts it consulted. In the end, the Center produced a powerful short documentary that includes the distinct command “Point!” and is followed immediately by 13 seconds in which 67 shots are heard being fired. The Center is unwilling to play for its audience the other sounds on the tape, which is where the matter stands, more conclusive than before but technically still inconclusive.

The Center’s leaders, including Carol Barbato and Laura Davis, told me they felt no pressure to dilute their presentation, which is now being seen by visitors multiple times per day. Canfora and Tom Grace, who has advised the Center, believe the institution is sincere but perhaps excessively cautious, leaving open the key question of whether there was command responsibility or just a spontaneous over-reaction. In the historic footage, a company of guardsmen march in formation a few yards up the hill safely away from a small contingent of jeering and milling students, then wheel, take aim and fire directly at the crowd who are approximately one hundred yards in front of them. Canfora is certain that the truth will out eventually, and the full order-to-fire acknowledged.

To that purpose, Canfora and his May 4 Center have retained a top audio expert with advanced equipment to verify whether the shouted commands can be heard beyond dispute.

* * *

As noted earlier, there could be a new problem in the nagging battle over memory, this one introduced by Oliver Stone. A Vietnam veteran and a Republican until the 1980s and now the film-maker of Showtime’s The Untold History of the United States, Stone spoke emotionally to an intense Kent audience last Saturday, as if he was previewing a new chapter of his widely-circulating film and book (which now only mentions Kent in one sentence). Stone noted what several others have before, that there was an FBI informant named Terry Norman present on May 4, snapping photos of the scene on Blanket Hill. Activists like Canfora, Grace and many others knew Norman to be a campus police spy attempting to infiltrate local campus meetings, from which he was frequently tossed out. They learned from later discovery that Norman was concealing a revolver in a shoulder strap that day, and that he waived the weapon in the air as a group of angry students accosted him soon after the massacre. They knew as well that some believed Norman had even fired his weapon, though there were never any witnesses. The Terry Norman tale was dismissed by Canfora, as well as from the Center’s narrative of the events.

But Stone took up the claim that the old cassette also included the sound of four other gunshots fired approximately seventy seconds before the Guard began shooting. The allegation about those four gunshots had been dismissed by multiple authorities, including the Obama Justice Department in its review last year.

Stone asserted his new four-gunshot theory, claiming that there is “no reason to doubt” that secret agencies routinely employ informants and saboteurs to undermine protest movements, and therefore Terry Norman was one such “shady provocateur.” Norman, according to Stone, fired the four pistol shots in a “botched” attempt to simulate sniper fire, which would have provoked the Guard to shoot while blaming the radical activists.

Stone’s account is supported by a tiny handful of those involved, but they happen to include Laurel Krause, the younger sister of Allison Krause, and her mother, Doris, who are entitled to a certain moral authority in the inquest over history. Laurel, who lives in Mendocino, was not invited to speak at this year’s memorial events. She was there, however, wearing a black tee shirt in front of the stage. She told me that everything and everyone—the Visitors Center, the Kent May 4 Center, Alan Canfora—were part of a massive cover-up of the evidence of four gunshots before the Guard fired. In her view, later amplified in Stone’s speech, there indeed was sniper fire before the Guard began shooting, which, if true, erases the narrative that the Guard killings were an unprovoked attack on innocent young people. Everything that activists like Canfora and Grace, as well as the Visitors’ Center more careful account, would be turned upside down if Stone is correct.

But “it’s a red herring,” insists Canfora. “Oliver will regret his words” in the time ahead, he said, predicting that more evidence will unfold. Canfora said, “The claim that there were four earlier shots by Terry Norman revives the old claim that the Guard fired because they were coming under sniper fire.” Tom Grace adds that he and Canfora “were both in the same general vicinity in the minutes immediately preceding and neither of us, nor any other witnesses of whom I am aware, heard low-velocity shots before the National Guard salvo.” While Grace says he cannot claim with absolute certainty that there were no other shots fired, “I know of nobody there that day that recalls hearing any.”

In light of this dispute, Stone may want to review the evidence once again and decide whether to insert himself into the long debate over Kent State at this important moment with his theory of a botched sniper. It wouldn’t be the first time that sniper theories have influenced Stone’s—and America’s—reading of history, from the JFK assassination to the present. Whether his thesis can be proven or not, Stone has the resources, reach and chutzpah to cast doubt on the long struggle for closure of the Kent State investigation, projecting instead a legendary tale that might never be refuted.

As the tenth anniversary of the war in Iraq approached, we asked veteran antiwar activist Tom Hayden, CODE PINK’s Jodie Evans, foreign policy blogger Robert Dreyfuss and activist-writer Nathan Schneider to reflect the legacy of the invasion and the destruction, and disillusionment, that followed. Their responses follow.

The Dove Is Never Free
Tom Hayden, a Nation editorial board member, is a long-time antiwar activist.

Oh the wars they will be fought again
The holy dove
She will be caught again
Bought and sold and bought again
The dove is never free.
      —Leonard Cohen, “Anthem”

Remember how bad things were. Al Gore won the vote but the thieves won the 2000 election. After the terror of 9/11, the peace forces hadn’t been so marginal since the 1950s.

Just in case, the Iraq War itself was designed to avoid provoking the public. No draft would mean no protest. Iraq would cost a bargain price $200 million, with no tax hike. There would be few American casualties to disturb the television watchers, just like the earlier air war in the Balkans. A cakewalk, they called it.

Then in February 2003, millions around the world declared a new generation of winter soldiers on freezing streets. The New York Times pronounced public opinion a second superpower.

During the next five years there were eleven national protests surpassing 100,000 in number, some well over 500,000. Individuals found their boldness and made a difference, among them: Cindy Sheehan, Michael Moore, Robert Greenwald, Bradley Manning, Howard Dean and the individual security guard who released the Abu Ghraib photos. One hundred and fifty city governments passed antiwar resolutions. For the first time, the AFL-CIO opposed a war. An American majority soon told Gallup that Iraq was a mistake. MoveOn.org raised tens of millions for antiwar candidates. Voters dumped the House Republican majority in 2006, with the issue of Iraq decisive.

In October 2007, old New Leftists like Marilyn Katz and Carl Davidson finally found a respectable speaker for their Chicago peace rally: state Senator Barack Obama. Months later, Obama won all-white Iowa on his pledge to oppose the Iraq War. He was the first president elected on platform of withdrawing our troops during a war.

In those brief five years, a peace movement arose mysteriously from the margins, spread to the mainstream and drove a stake through neo-conservative dreams of domination. A Shi’a regime came to power in a sovereign Iraq, and Iran was the geopolitical victor. Of course, the Empire didn’t fall, the “War on Terrorism” didn’t abate, neoliberalism proceeded, global warming worsened. In the title of David Kilcullen’s book on counterinsurgency, Iraq was only a “small war” in the course of a longer one.

But it is important to note the impact of the peace movement as a formidable stumbling block and complicating factor for future imperial plans. It’s a tragedy that the peace movement could not be consolidated after Iraq into a version of the NAACP, NOW or the AFL-CIO. The millions raised by Move.ong were not reinvested in a lasting peace constituency. There was no Soros endowment. The political consultants turned a blind eye to the existence of the obvious peace bloc that was critical to winning. To this day, the peace movement is an unrecognized constituent force in the country. Its voice is utterly excluded from the inner circles of national security discussions.

Until this imbalance is corrected, the spectrum of “legitimate” opinion always will tilt toward the military option. And like the legend of Sisyphus, peace advocates always will start at the bottom of the hill.

Long wars require a long peace movement.

We Can’t Afford the Same Mistake Again
Jodie Evans is co-founder of CODEPINK: Women for Peace.

Over ten years ago, we founded CODEPINK in response to the fear-mongering color-coded terrorist alerts that helped scare Congress into an invasion and occupation of an innocent country, Iraq. What I thought I was fighting to stop was so much less shocking than what actually happened. After Bush said it was time for Shock and Awe, the maid in our hotel in Baghdad buried her head in my chest, looked up to the sky and asked, “How do I protect my children?” Even then, with my heart breaking, I couldn’t have imagined what lay ahead.

Could we have imagined more than 5 million Iraqi displaced and possibly a million dead? Could we Americans have imagined the erasure of civil liberties, the deaths of so many young soldiers and over 100,000 horrific casualties? Or the excruciating effects of PTSD or the devastation of rapes in the military and the Military Sexual Trauma suffered by so many women? Could we have imagined that more American soldiers would commit suicide than die in the line of duty? I had argued to members of the Senate and Congress in 2002 that the numbers Rumsfeld was arguing, both in terms of how few months and how little money the war would require, were lies. But could I have imagined the occupation would reach the proportions it has both in time and money? No.

Could I have imagined that we would continue to find new ways to incite anger and violence against the United States with such insane creations as drones? And that no one who lied and manipulated us into war would be held responsible? Or those like Bradley Manning who exposed the torture and abuse would be in jail while those who violated laws and lives would remain free, and arrogantly so?

No, I couldn’t have imagined all that or the trillions of dollars thrown into the incinerator of war instead of spent on schools, healthcare and the needs of our communities.

But what is beyond understanding is that after all that we have suffered the last ten years, we are on the brink of doing it all over again. Senators Jeff Sessions (R-AL) and Chuck Schumer (D-NY) are busy trying to scare the American people with stories of weapons of mass destruction in Iran, stories just like the ones that led us into Iraq, even though there is no proof that Iran is enriching uranium to weapons-grade, and top military officials believe war with Iran would make Iraq look like a cakewalk. Now the Senate is moving forward with a resolution that provides a backdoor to war with Iran, S.Res.65, which calls for the United States to offer military support for pre-emptive Israeli strikes on Iran. This resolution would allow us to slip into war without any public debate.

Have we not felt the price? Is no one paying attention? When do we say stop?

Call your senator and say, No more! We can’t afford to make the same mistake again.

This Compulsion to Prevent Something
Nathan Schneider is the author of Thank You, Anarchy: Notes from the Occupy Apocalypse, forthcoming in 2013 from University of California Press. He is an editor of Waging Nonviolence and Killing the Buddha.

Liz was shivering from the cold. A few hundred of us had walked out of classes to gather around the student center on March 20, 2003, and she was one of the main speakers at the top of the steps, the one I knew best. We were both freshmen at Brown. We were friends. Footage taken for a never-completed documentary reminds me that, over long sleeves, she wore a black T-shirt with the words, in white, we can stop the war and that famous picture of a lone man standing before a column of tanks at Tiananmen Square. “This,” she cried out to the crowd, in reference to the rally itself, “is our only weapon against the weapons!”

It amazed me to see her up there—that she, after just a few months on campus, was one of the leaders of our local opposition to what seemed to be the stupidest idea in history: the invasion of Iraq that began the night before. When she talks now about the role she played, there’s an open wound, not least because that time still casts a shadow over her and the web-search results that come up with her name.

Being new to campus was actually what set her up to be an organizer. The previous fall, Liz had been going to every political meeting she could in search of a group to join. Meanwhile, the Bush administration’s choreography toward war was progressing, and by the time the need became obvious for a coalition on campus to oppose the prospect of an invasion, she knew people in a lot of the major groups but had particular allegiance to none. Along with another freshman named Emma and some seniors, she threw herself into Students Against War in Iraq, or SAWI (pronounced “say why”). Through the winter, campus groups from the Democrats to the Latin dance troupe came on board. Even the lonely conservative columnist for the newspaper wrote tightly reasoned rebuttals to the arguments for war.

Liz and some of the others leading SAWI, she remembers, were “flailing and searching for catharsis because we were dealing with our own wounds.” She’d lived through the suicides of friends in each of the previous two years. “I had this compulsion to prevent something from happening again that I had experienced—these wasteful deaths.”

By March 20, though, the bombs had started to fall, and there was no turning back. The first casualty of war on campus was the shared, palpable belief that protest—including the largest mobilization in world history on February 15—could make a dent in the neocons’ juggernaut. The second casualty was the unity among students that Liz had helped to amass against the war; once American boots were on the ground and charging toward Baghdad, former doves were afraid to be caught on the wrong side of history.

“There were so many disappointing, confusing conversations that happened after that conservative muscle had been flexed,” she says.

Through college, Liz stuck with the antiwar coalition, but she also turned her attention to other sites of imperial hubris. She studied abroad in South Africa. Upon returning she published, in 2005, an essay in a student magazine arguing that US troops should leave Iraq immediately, that no one had a right to bring democracy to Iraq but Iraqis. This was a time when saying so was a lot less comfortable than it was before the war or is today, because it meant sympathizing with enemy insurgents. Her essay’s boldest words shot across the right-wing radio circuit and blogosphere, exposing Liz to a nightmare of murder and rape threats and an unsuccessful campaign to have her expelled.

She is now pursuing doctoral research about political power in very different contexts. “I don’t operate in the world of super-radical activism the way I did then,” she explains, “though I do struggle with the same questions.” The vitriol against her from 2005 still litters the Internet, and it continues to cause her problems, both personally and professionally. This fallout has been an ongoing reminder of a period ten years ago that now feels remote.

“The fleeting sense that urgent, collective action could make change was lost in the experience of the war,” she says. It taught us, I hope wrongly, about what horrors we simply have to accept.

The Crime of the Century
Robert Dreyfuss is a foreign policy blogger at TheNation.com.

Ten years later, the invasion of Iraq is still the Crime of the Century.

Even as the last of the hanging chads was still fluttering to the floor and the Supreme Court ratified the outcome in Bush v. Gore, the smell of an attack on Iraq was in the air, many months before 9/11. George W. Bush, with what might charitably be called a limited understanding of Iraq—best expressed in his plaintive, though unsubstantiated lament that Saddam Hussein “tried to kill my daddy”—cobbled together a retreaded cabinet of hawks, led by Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who’d failed to topple Saddam in 1991. It was a job unfinished, and to the Cheney-Rumsfeld team Saddam’s ability to survive a decade of brutal economic sanctions was a stunning rebuke, a huge middle finger erected at the center of the Middle East. Revenge was in the air. Back then, I remember telling friends that it was obvious that Bush would go to war against Iraq. As we learned later, in the very first meeting of Bush’s National Security Council, in January 2001, the very first subject was: Iraq.

As 2001 wore on, and especially after 9/11, the roar of the coming invasion of Iraq in 2003 sounded ever louder, like an onrushing freight train. The calm, studied professional foreign policy priesthood that people the US government bureaucracy, at the State Department, at the Pentagon, at the CIA, pressed their collective palms tightly to their ears. They were deep, deep in denial—and, for some of them, even as the first bombs and cruise missiles pummeled Baghdad on March 19, 2003, they went into bureaucratic shock: This is impossible! This can’t be happening!

But Bush hadn’t been bluffing.

In early March, I interviewed Danielle Pletka, the neoconservative who served then, and now, as the vice president for defense and foreign policy at the American Enterprise Institute, whose regular Black Coffee briefings on Iraq—orchestrated by Richard Perle et al.—served as a showcase for Ahmed Chalabi and the likes of Douglas Feith. When I told Pletka that an incredulous bureaucracy, including State, DOD and CIA, were almost unanimously opposed to war with Iraq, she played her trump card. We, she said, have the president on our side. And so she did.

A curious, Catch-22 paradox was at the heart of why the United States so badly bungled the invasion and occupation: Anyone who knew anything about Iraq—Middle East experts, diplomats who’d served there, Arabist intelligence officers—were against the war. As a result, they were excluded from planning and managing it by a Bush team that insisted on groupthink. So, who was left to run the war? Why, precisely a bunch of know-nothings. As Chas Freeman once told me, “We didn’t invade Iraq. We invaded the Iraq of our dreams.”

But it wasn’t a dream. It was a nightmare. An entire nation, of perhaps 25 million souls, blown to smithereens. Hundreds of thousands killed. More hundreds of thousands wounded, crippled, mangled, maimed. Millions of children orphaned or psychologically traumatized. A modern nation’s economy nearly obliterated. Iraq’s army, police and governing institutions not just decapitated, but destroyed. A society in which one-third of Iraqis intermarried among sect and ethnic group cleaved into bitter, hate-filled tribes. Ethnic (and sectarian) cleansing. Civil war. And for what? Against a country whose leader had no nuclear weapons, no chemical and biological agents and had never attacked the United States, had no connection at all with 9/11, did not sponsor international terrorism and considered Al Qaeda to be a mortal enemy.

America, of course, will debate Iraq well into the future: Good idea? Bad idea? War crime? And: Did the surge work? But countless Iraqis won’t be debating it, because they’re dead. Perhaps around the time academic historians, puffing on their pipes, come to a conclusion about Iraq—say, a generation from now—Iraq will have just begun to recover.

President Obama prepares to board Air Force 1. (AP Photo)

Civil libertarians, human rights advocates and peace advocates should insist on a renewed congressional assertion of its power under the Constitution, Article 1, Section 8, to take part in declaring war. Among the many reasons for this reassertion is that social movements typically have greater influence over elected congressional representatives than over the more remote and secretive executive branch.

Historically, American presidents have “encroached on Congress’s war making responsibilities, leaving the legislative branch increasingly irrelevent,” according to an analysis by Bennett Ramberg, a former State Department analyst in the first Bush administration.

Recent hearings by the Senate Intelligence Committee on CIA director John Brennan’s authority and the House Judiciary Committee into drones are at least momentary signs that Congress may be ready to reclaim some of its powers. Statements by President Obama literally asking Congress to write “new legal architecture” to “rein in” his presidency and those of his successors, are clear indications that the growth of an Imperial Presidency may be limited. The bipartisan vote of nearly 300 House members against the administration’s launching of the six-month 2011 Libyan war is the most concrete example of legislative unease.

As Congress considers its options, it is crucial that the public be included in a rightful role. The public sends its sons and daughters to risk their lives in war, pays the taxes that fund those wars and accepts the burden of debt, the paring back of social programs and restrictions on civil liberties in the name of war. The public has a right to know, obtained through public debate and public elections, the rationale, the costs and the predicted outcomes of any military venture. James Madison, cited by Ramberg, gave the reason centuries ago: “Those who are to conduct a war cannot in the nature of things be proper or safe judges, whether a war ought to be commenced, continued or concluded.”

Section 4(b) of the War Powers Resolution mandates that “the President shall provide such other information as the Congress may request in the fulfillment of its constitutional responsibilities with respect to committing the Nation to war and to the use of United States Armed Forces abroad.” Yet only insistent congressional pressure has forced the Obama administration to disclose some of its internal legal memoranda concerning drones, apparently in exchange for senate approval of Brennan’s nomination. It continues to resist the spirit of Section 4(b).

Hopefully, the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) will take up the reform of war-making powers as a major priority. Already, one of the CPC’s co-chairs, Representative Keith Ellison, has expressed the need to reform and reverse the administration’s secret drone war. In the Senate, strong leadership on transparency has come from Senator Ron Wyden. Libertarian Republican senator Rand Paul is demanding to know whether the White House will unleash drone strikes on American citizens. Longtime activist groups like Code Pink suddenly are finding themselves in the center of a national conversation.

Three senators who voted for Brennan’s confirmation—Wyden, Mark Udall and Susan Collins—also issued a call on March 5 “to bring the American people into this debate and for Congress to consider ways to ensure that the president’s sweeping authorities are subject to appropriate limitations, oversight and safeguards.”

By most accounts, this fuss over the Imperial Rresidency wasn’t supposed to be happening. The drone wars were supposed to be cheap for the taxpayer, erase American military casualties and hammer the terrorists into peace negotiations. The assassination of Osama bin Ladin was supposed to be the turning point. But even with the wars being low-intensity and low-visibility, the “secrets” have remained in the public eye, especially the drone war.

From a peace movement perspective, pressure from anywhere for any steps that will complicate and eventually choke off the unfettered use of drones will be an improvement over the status quo. For some, like Ramberg, a reform of the 1973 War Powers Act is overdue. That resolution, which passed during an uproar against the Nixon presidency, actually conceded war-making power to the president for a two-month period before requiring congressional authorization. The original 1973 Senate version of the war-powers bill, before it was watered down, required congressional authorization except in the case of armed attack on the US or the necessity of immediate citizen evacuation. No president has ever signed the war powers legislation, on the grounds that it encroaches on the executive branch, although most presidents have voluntarily abided by its requirements.

Ramberg lists the US military actions undertaken after the War Powers Resolution “with minimal or no congressional consultation,” as: Mayaguez (1975), Iran hostage rescue action (1980), El Salvador (1981), Lebanon (1982), Grenada (1983), Libya (1986), Panama (1989), Iraq (May 1991, 1993), Somalia (1993) Bosnia (1993-95), Haiti (1993, 2004) and Kosovo (1999), leaving out Sudan (1998) and the dubious authorizations for Iraq and Afghanistan.

The immediate issue ripe for attention is the drone policy, conducted especially in Pakistan by the CIA in utter secrecy, but also spreading through Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Mali.

Drone attacks clearly are acts of war as defined by the War Powers Resolution, although the WPR was written mainly to contain the deployment of American ground forces. The drone war rests more squarely on the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), the underlying legal rationale for the “global war on terrorism.”

The challenge of reform, as opposed to emergency tinkering, will require prolonged efforts to amend and clarify both the WPR and AUMF. Allowing any president a sixty-day period before seeking congressional authorization, as the WPR does, makes no sense in drone warfare. Instead, the president should be required to seek congressional permission if he wishes to target a clearly definable “enemy,” and be required to issue public guidelines, including necessary disclosure, governing the use of force he contemplates. That means:

First, Congress should establish a special inspector general, like the SIGUR created for Iraq and Afghanistan, to define, monitor and determine civilian casualties (“collateral damage”) from drone strikes. Currently that information is collected by the CIA, which has a conflict of interest, not to mention a curtain of secrecy.

Second, Congress will need to draft guidelines sharply narrowing—or even banning—the use of “signature strikes,” which permit drone attacks against targets profiled according to identity, such as young males of military age (which could be civilians, participants in a wedding or funeral, etc.).

Third, Congress or the courts will have to restore the open-ended concept of “imminent threat” to its traditional meaning, as an immediate operational threat aimed at American citizens, US territory or facilities. Under the elastic formulation employed by Brennan and others, the simple fact of ill-defined jihadists holding meetings anywhere on the planet is an “imminent threat” justifying military action. And according to the CIA interpretation, the threat is a “continuous” one, carrying over from war to war. But if every “potential” threat is defined as “imminent,” and all the threats are continuous, the CIA, Special Forces and American military will be spread thin indeed from the jungles of the Philippines to the ghettos of Britain.

The 2001 AUMF was written to justify the unofficial military doctrine of the “long war,” developed by counterinsurgency advisers to General David Petraeus and the State Department, like David Kilcullen, who project a conflict of fifty- to eighty-years’ duration against ill-defined Muslim fundamentalists. The designated targets of the AUMF are “Al Qaeda” and “associated” terrorist groups. That overly broad definition authorizes a global war in the shadows against forces whose actual links to Al Qaeda are difficult to discern and who may or may not be threats against the United States. If targeted by the United States, however, the likelihood of their becoming threats will only increase.

A recent example in a long list of these targets is Mokhtar Belmokhtar, the 40-year-old Algerian who may or may not have been killed last week in Chad. Belmokhtar allegedly carried out the January attack on an Algerian gas plant in which thirty-seven foreign hostages died. He did so in retaliation against France’s military intervention in its former colony of Mali, and against Algeria’s siding with Western counterterrorism policies. Otherwise, Belmokhtar was nicknamed the “Marlboro Man” because of his decades-long involvement in smuggling cigarettes. Ten years ago he led one faction of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, before breaking away to form his own force in the Sahel.

The question is whether the 2001 AUMF was written to cover a regional warlord like the “Marlboro Man” whose history is “smuggling, kidnapping and fighting for decades in the Sahel,” or whether it is being used as a blanket authorization for official kill lists and CIA drone assassins everywhere.

Finally, Congress should commission an independent body to evaluate whether the war on terrorism, including the drone attacks, has made Americans “safer.” The rise of the drones—as well as cyber-warfare—has a lulling effect on public opinion since American group operations are ending and casualties are down. But the 9/11 attacks took place unexpectedly as a result of burning grievances in the Muslim world. The official metrics of safety (e.g., how many jihadist “leaders” have been killed, whether insurgent attacks are up or down) ignore the incendiary hatred and desire for revenge building in Muslim communities suffering from remote drone attacks. A few empirical studies have shown a direct correlation between the rise of suicide bombers and US/Western occupation of Muslim lands, but the mass illusion of safety from terrorism tends to persist. A national conversation, including the forgotten ways in which we are made less safe by the war on terrorism, is sorely needed.

In perspective, the effort to prevent the restoration of an Imperial Presidency is long and politically difficult, something like reversing the mass incarceration policies and police buildups that followed the neoconservatives’ “war on gangs” campaign of the early 1990s, which the Clinton administration adopted. Many liberals in general, and Democrats in particular, cringe at being labeled “soft on crime” (or “soft on terrorism”). Some on the left, on the other hand, seem to think that the threat of terrorism is manufactured. However, if another attack should occur against the United States, the danger that a second Patriot Act will pass is real. Current US policies inadvertently provoke that possibility, with the drone strikes the equivalent of attacking a hornet’s nest. Therefore, the open window for “reining in” the president’s executive powers could close at any time. Hearings to reform of the 2001 AUMF and the 1973 WPR could not be more urgent.

How sincere was Republican support for Rand Paul’s filibuster of the Brennan appointment? Read Rick Perlstein’s take.

A US Predator drone. (US Airforce)
 
The peace movement, human rights and civil liberties groups, congressional progressives and even officials in the Obama administration can work on diverse pathways to prevent the consolidation of another Imperial Presidency.

The decade of the “Global War on Terror,” launched under President George W. Bush, and the “Long War Doctrine,” embraced by many in the Pentagon, have caused the undemocratic dynamic leading to the Imperial Presidency, which consists of rising scaffold of secrecy surrounding drone attacks, counterterrorism, detention, torture, CIA armies and cyber-warfare. As the national security leviathan grows, Congress, the mainstream media and public opinion have been marginalized.

When similar crises boiled up during the Nixon era, Congress responded with the Watergate investigations and then the 1973 passage of the War Powers Resolution, which required that US military operations be reported to Congress and limited to sixty to ninety days unless explicitly authorized by the legislative branch. Next came the first serious congressional hearings into CIA and FBI secret operations and domestic spying. Of particular interest was evidence of assassinations of foreign leaders carried out on executive orders. Those hearings by the Church committee in the Senate and Pike committee in the House resulted in the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which was to be a watchdog protecting the Constitution against abuse. Another result was an executive ban on assassinations of foreign leaders, an order issued by President Ford and later clarified by President Reagan in 1981. Another was the 1978 creation of the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court mandated to issue warrants for domestic spying.

Three decades later, similar threats to democracy and constitutional process have come full circle in the period since September 11, 2001. The Senate watchdog committee, which held hearings last week, failed to prevent the emergence of torture, renditions, secret prison, assassinations and military operations in which special units acted as judge, jury and executioner. President Obama ran for president in 2007–08 opposed to many of these abuses; when elected, he carried out his pledge to end the US war in Iraq but was unable to close Guantánamo as promised, and has perpetuated secret operations and, increasingly, drone strikes in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, resulting in hundreds, perhaps thousands, of civilian casualties.

The ice officially broke last week when the Senate Intelligence Committee opened the first serious public discussion over the drone strikes and executive secrecy in a decade. The clash was provoked because of the president’s nomination of John Brennan as CIA director, which the committee is expected to endorse this week. The hearing revealed that even members of the Intelligence Committee itself “are in the dark” about many details of the agency’s programs.

But the significant public controversy represents an opening for reform once again. In fact, the president himself has been calling for unspecified constitutional safeguards over the very policies launched unilaterally, asking Congress to “rein in” the presidency. At the Senate hearing, Senator Diane Feinstein (D-CA), the chairperson, and Senator Angus King (I-ME) proposed a secret court to apparently approve future assassinations based on evidence provided by the White House. The new mechanism is to be modeled on the FISA court, which has turned down only about 1 percent of tens of thousands of wiretap requests.

The peace movement has been sidelined in these debates, partly because few in Congress have offered an alternative vision to rally the public around. That may change rapidly.

Perhaps the critics cannot be unified, but can pursue separate challenges against the official doctrine. Some of the elements of an alternative:

1. Immediately oppose the nomination of John Brennan and place Brennan’s promises on the record. There are differences about whether a “no” vote is effective or justified. An argument is being floated that Brennan, as an experienced insider, is best qualified to turn the agency around from within. The most credible advocate for Brennan is perhaps United Nations Rapporteur Ben Emmerich, who is conducting a critical investigation of civilian killings from the drone strikes. But if Obama and Brennan want reform, that cause can only be helped by “no” votes from key senators. Or senators casting reluctant “aye” votes can explain publicly the terms and conditions of their vote, and not leave secret any agreements reached behind closed doors.

The plain case against Brennan is that he refused to describe torture as torture when asked by the committee, relying instead on Bush-era definitions of the term. He has been the lead coordinator of the White House “kill list.” Though he received fifty e-mails about the waterboarding of Abu Zubadayah in 2002, Brennan told the committee he was on the CIA’s management team or aware of any details torture techniques at the time. His testimony was so confused that at one point he called for optimizing both transparency and secrecy.

2. Opposing Feinstein’s proposal for a drone court. The Feinstein proposal would co-opt the judiciary into secret and one-sided procedures where due process would be scrapped and independent legal experts excluded.

3. Demanding disclosure of still-classified documents, which are sought by the Intelligence Committee and mainstream outlets such as The New York Times. These include thirty pages allegedly linking Anwar al-Awlaki to military operations, now provided the senators but not their staff or the media.

4. Demanding leniency or the release of whistleblowers such as Bradley Manning, Julian Assange and former CIA officer John Kiriakou, scheduled to begin thirty months in prison later this month for passing the name of a CIA officer to a reporter (who never published it). Kiriakou spoke out against waterboarding in 2007, and is expected to enter prison at just the time Brennan takes over the CIA.

5. More aggressive disclosure by the mainstream media. For example, it was only this month that The New York Times reported what it had long known, that Anwar al-Awlaki was killed by a drone launched by a new secret US base in Saudi Arabia.

6. The Pentagon versus the CIA. Human Rights Watch is among those who believe drone strikes and targeted killings should be under the Pentagon’s control, not the far more secretive CIA. The independent 9/11 Commission made the same recommendation in 2004.

7. Most importantly, Congress must consider revisions of the 1973 War Powers Resolution and the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF).

The War Powers Resolution—passed during the waning Nixon era to prevent another open-ended war authorization like the Tonkin Gulf Resolution of 1964—which was rushed forward by a near majority of Congress, has failed to prevent the spread of secret wars in the past decade. To their credit, over 200 House members including John Boehner, Dennis Kucinich and John Conyers Jr., tried to implement similar requirements against the administration over the 2011 Libya war, where US drones were being used. But the resolution was written for an era of ground wars (“sustained fighting”), not for the emerging era of drone or cyber-warfare. It could be updated, including new provisions for public disclosure and new forms of warfare.

The Obama administration still clings to the AUMF, which passed in 2001, during a national state of panic following 9/11, with only a single objection, from Representative Barbara Lee (D-CA). The original authorization was for a war against Al Qaeda, the Taliban and “associated forces” declared to be an imminent threat to the United States. The war was launched against targets in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and then shifted to an invasion of Iraq where there was no evidence of an Al Qaeda presence at the time. It could be said that the Iraq invasion actually brought Al Qaeda to Iraq. From there the war has spread through Yemen, Somalia, Mali, the Philippines, Indonesia and, some would argue, underground cells in Europe. The administration asserts that Al Qaeda has been decimated along the way, yet also claims that Al Qaeda still is a virulent threat to the United States. Defense intellectuals like David Kilcullen say this Long War is against Islamic jihadism, not simply Al Qaeda, and may require fifty to eighty years of continuous battle, or a period spanning twenty presidential and forty congressional terms.

As a corollary of Long War thinking, Brennan and others argue that the war with Al Qaeda remains “continuous,” and justifies a new concept of “imminent threat,” also defined as continuous. Since “Al Qaeda” and its “associated forces” seem to be everywhere and anywhere, both defeated and resurgent, splintered and coherent, the traditional legal definition of a “threat of immanent attack” is being replaced unilaterally by Brennan’s elastic definition of an “imminent threat” as long as “Al Qaeda” exists somewhere on the planet. In this dark vision, all the insurgents from Timbuktu to Baluchistan are planning attacks on the United States, when in fact most of them are engaged in civil and tribal wars where the United States has intervened.

Brennan’s doctrine, as declared in a September 16, 2011 speech, is worth careful exploration:

Over time, an increasing number of our international counterterrorism partners [NB, not judicial authorities] have begun to recognize that the traditional [NB, legal] conception of what constitutes an “imminent” attack should be broadened in light of the modern-day capabilities, techniques and technological innovations of terrorist organizations.

The elasticity of Brennan’s definitions extends also to “signature strikes” against presumed “enemies” as well, defined as any group of individuals engaged in a suspicious “pattern of activity,” like the 2007 executions of Reuters correspondents and civilians on the ground in a series of air-to-ground attacks by a team of US Apache helicopters, revealed by WikiLeaks in 2010.

A memorandum published by the official Congressional Research Service on May 4, 2012, by Jennifer Elsea, lays out the issues Congress needs to confront. Elsea writes, “…the Administration takes the position that targeted killings of foreign militants are not restricted to situations in which the target is planning, engaging in, or threatening an imminent armed attack against the United States.”

According to Elsea, these attacks can occur outside an “active battlefield,” and may be done in violation of another nation’s sovereignty.

Like the Cold War that preceded it, the Long War doctrine lumps multiple insurgencies and states into a monolithic enemy for purposes of mobilizing national anxiety and a permanent authorization for secret war. The Long War exacerbates the budgetary deficit, drains revenues from the domestic discretionary budget, diminishes the constitutional powers of Congress, covers up secret operations gone wrong and erodes the public’s right to information and a voice in setting America’s priorities.

It is time to undertake a review and overhaul of the nation’s security policies since 9/11, or accept a state of secrecy as a long shadow over democracy’s future.

This post originally appeared at TomHayden.com. For more on the United States’s extra-judicial military action, get Jeremy Scahill’s take on the Brennan interrogation that wasn’t.

(AP Photo/Matt York)
 
Last Tuesday was momentous in my UCLA class on democracy and social movements. While President Obama was announcing his immigration reform agenda, we were studying the case of the Dreamers, the student movement for immigrant rights that won historic recognition from Obama in June 2012. Lecturing yesterday were Professor Kent Wong, director of UCLA’s labor studies center, and Betsy Estudillo, an undocumented graduate student now studying ways to sustain the morale of the movement while also organizing car-wash workers.  

Both recognized the achievement of the historic day, and both worried about the outcome of the political compromises being considered in Washington. But the Dreamers’ “darkest hour,” Wong recalled, was the failure of the federal DREAM Act to pass the US Senate in 2010, which caused the Dreamers to redouble their civil disobedience until Obama’s executive order last year. And Estudillo reminded the students that so-called experts had predicted that recent campaigns to organize janitors and homecare workers “were never gonna happen, until they did.”

The Dreamers movement emerged from an underground subculture of students and young people who were born in the US to parents who came here without documents. America is the only place they know as home, but they existed in the shadows here, clandestinely, in fear of deportation, unable to seek scholarships, to drive, to work legally or to vote. Starting a decade ago, they began to find and help each other in coming out from the shadows, and began pushing for legal alternatives to miserable lifetimes in limbo.

The Dreamers remind me of the Freedom Riders fifty years ago who, deciding they wouldn’t settle for life under Jim Crow, risked jail and racist violence until the Kennedy administration was won to their side, and a political party realignment began. The Dreamers have petitioned, engaged in civil disobedience, lobbied for legislation at state and federal levels, and refused to accept defeats along the way. They even were sitting-in at Obama’s campaign offices last June when the president issued his “deferred action” order effectively protecting their status.

The Kennedy brothers in earlier times sympathized with those like John Lewis, Diane Nash, Charles McDew and others who were defying segregation. But the Kennedys also were uncomfortable with the Freedom Riders and sit-in movement because their actions threatened to upset the unholy alliance of Northern liberals and Southern segregationists on which the power of the Democratic Party rested.

Because of the unrelenting pressure of young people, however, the Kennedys moved forward with desegregation and voting rights, granting new protections and powers to 20 million Southern blacks. Politically, the outcome was the rise of Goldwater’s all-white Republican coalition and a realigned Democratic Party that saw the appearance of Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Andrew Young, Jesse Jackson and many more.

Now it may be the Dreamers’ turn to realign American politics by empowering 2 million of their own number and perhaps 11 or 12 million in the underground gulag. Places like Arizona today are like Mississippi and the Black Belt of yesteryear, where anti-immigrant forces are fighting ferocious rearguard battles against the tide of immigrant workers and voters. Echoes of nineteenth-century wars and persecution against Mexicans, native tribes and Asian immigrant laborers can be heard in the present as well.

Obama was an early supporter of the DREAM Act, which was defeated by a US Senate filibuster after achieving fifty-four affirmative votes in 2010. The dream might have died there, but the emboldened students never gave up. The emotion of that day was palpable, as reported in The Washington Post:

The galleries were crowded with more than 60 young people who had traveled to Washington, many for the first time, to push for the measure’s passage. Many of them clasped hands in the air with those next to them as the roll call proceeded; some were wearing full graduation caps and gowns; some bounced their legs nervously as the vote proceeded. When the final tally was announced, the chamber was mostly silent; a few wiped their eyes.

That same year, twenty-one Dreamers had been arrested in the US Senate chamber, the climax of a long direct action campaign that included hunger strikes, an LA-to-DC caravan, a march on foot from Florida to the nation’s capital, “Dream summer” training workshops modeled after the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer project and much more. They became an intimate community of shared experiences. There were terrible losses, such as the deaths of Tam Tran and Cinthya Felix, two UCLA undocumented students, killed by a drunk driver in May 2010. There were persistent deportation threats too, each of which was rebuffed by massive phone-calling campaigns from a national network the students themselves had created. And there were victories along the way, including the California Dream Act, authored by LA’s Senator Gilbert Cedillo, which made undocumented students eligible for public financial aid—an aid program just now being implemented.

The radical change in consciousness—from shadow to light—is vividly depicted in the cover photographs of two books published by the UCLA labor center in 2008 and 2012. In the first, a UCLA undocumented student leader, Matias Ramos, appears as a black silhouette in front of a campus building; in the second, a nineteen-year student, Diana Yael Martinez, openly shows herself in blue graduation garments while being arrested by capitol police in 2010.

Like Kennedy before him, Obama faced a political quandary as the 2012 election approached. While undocumented immigrants were unpopular with a section of the Democratic base, they were demonized by the Tea Party Republicans and their presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, with his call for “self-deportation.” In displaying his toughness on law-and-order issues, Obama had deported a record number of immigrants in his first term. He had failed to deliver, or fight vigorously in the eyes of his supporters, on the campaign promise of immigration reform. Appointing Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court was not enough. So the president decided last June to circumvent the congressional roadblock and use his executive powers to implement the DREAM Act provisions on his own. The response was electrifying in emerging immigrant communities, and Obama won several states by securing over 70 percent of the Latino and Asian-American votes.

Though yesterday was a triumphal one for the Dreamers, no one in my classroom was celebrating the content of the new bipartisan immigrant rights proposal floated in Washington, nor predicting the outcome of the political wrangling ahead. Any “solution” requiring congressional approval will be loaded with favors to Republicans and law enforcement. More drones on the border are expected in addition to the six already overhead. Funding for “border security” will be beefed up, even though Kent Wong points out that the vast majority of undocumented people came to America legally and overstayed their visas. The nebulous “path to citizenship” may be long indeed and strewn with bureaucratic obstacles. Estudillo argued the “path” should take no longer than five years, based on a hasty consultation with activist leaders in Orange County over the weekend.

Tangled in the mix will be a proposal to codify Obama’s executive order giving citizenship to the 2 million eligible Dreamers, their fate tied up in the larger package.

“It’s been twenty-seven full years since the last immigration reform,” Kent Wong reminded us, “twenty-seven years for 11 or 12 million people living as a permanent marginalized underclass.” Wong predicts a complicated struggle in Washington, but is inspired by the success of the students so far. If the high-stakes political battle goes nowhere, he hopes that permanent protections for the Dreamers are salvaged. Estudillo expects a compromise too, but relies on her knowledge that the Dreamers have an inherent power to sign off on the final version—or not.

Obama has the initial advantage after his November triumph, but the Republicans still have the House of Representatives. If the GOP plays to its anti-immigrant base, they face the danger of being doomed in national elections. Their alternative is to pivot to a more immigrant-friendly image promoted by politicians like Jeb Bush and Mario Rubio. A third option could be a Republican implosion into internal civil war, an outcome some Democrats may prefer.

On the Democratic side, organized labor has evolved a long way from an anti-immigrant past, as has the NAACP. Both were in Nevada for Obama’s speech yesterday, and will strongly support the final Obama legislative package. Some environmental groups will have to revise their racially charged view that more immigrants will spoil the environment. Instead, a new joining of the environmental and immigrant-rights movements—around environmental justice for all, for example—could help solidify a progressive political majority.

TAKE ACTION: Halt the Deportation of Parents

The Council on Foreign Relations issued a report this week calling for fundamental reforms in US drone policies, surfacing sharp differences in official circles in response to widespread questioning and protest. Micah Zenko writes in the Council Special Report that the Pentagon and CIA use the term “bug splat” in referring to their civilian collateral damage methodology. The acronym MALE is employed to describe “medium altitude long-endurance” drone technologies of the future.

More substantively, the CFR report recommends:

That the Obama administration’s targeted-killings policy be limited to individuals with a “direct operational” role in terrorist plots against the US;

Ending the so-called “signature strikes” against individuals or groups who the White House says, “bear the characteristics of Qaeda or Taliban leaders on the run,” and which define all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants;

Far greater transparency and accountability in the definitions of civilian casualties, including aggressive congressional oversight.

The report concludes that of 3,000 killed in drone attacks so far, “the vast majority were neither al Qaeda nor Taliban leaders,” a major difference from the low-to-zero civilian casualty estimates by the Obama administration, including newly-recommended CIA chief John Brennan.

Significantly, Congressional progressive leader Keith Ellison published an op-ed calling for Congressional hearings in the Washington Post.

Congress is sharply criticized in the CFR report for its failure over the past ten years to hold a single public hearing on any aspect of the so-called non-battlefield targeted killings. Staffs of the foreign affairs committees “have little understanding of how drone strikes are conducted within the countries for which they are responsible for exercising oversight.” Judiciary committees are “repeatedly denied access to the June 2010 Office of Legal Counsel memorandum that presented the analysis of the legal basis” for the drone killing of US citizen Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen in September 2011.

A citizen call for congressional hearings could trigger a response as the new legislative session gets underway in Washington next month. President Obama himself, in an October interview with Jon Stewart, called on Congress to offer “new legal architecture” in order to “rein in” the growing powers of the executive branch in the drone age. The CFR report is likely to shape the terms of the debate ahead.

The report credits protests by human rights, peace advocates and journalists for causing a “major risk” of operational restrictions on drones, and draws parallels with the widespread questioning that undermined the Bush-era torture policies and warrantless wiretapping.

“The current trajectory of US drone strike policies is unsustainable,” the report flatly concludes. Public pressure combined with international condemnation will cause the decline of the program unless there is both reform and confidence-building measures. The report warns that US policies are setting off a dangerous drone arms race. “Without reform from within, drones risk becoming an unregulated, unaccountable vehicle for states to deploy lethal force with impunity.”

Public opinion surveys show a declining support for the drone policy from 83 percent to 62 percent just between February and June 2012, the period when President Obama initiated his “conversation” about the policy. Local protests have risen against drones as the Afghanistan war has been “winding down.” A colorful, large-scale protest against drones is expected to occur during the Obama inauguration.

The peace protesters have an institutional ally in the relative absence of support from Congress – the powerful lobby for counter-insurgency, which opposes drone strikes as counter-productive without advisers and troops on the ground to win over “hearts and mind.” One member of the advisory committee on the CFR report was Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who embodied the counterinsurgency program in Afghanistan until forced into retirement. In an interview last week, McChrystal cautioned that drones create widespread hatred on “a visceral level.” The Long War Journal representing the counter-insurgency advocates, and the New American Foundation, representing national security “centrists,” have been in the forefront of questioning the efficacy of administration’s policies for this reason.

According to the New America Foundation, US drone strikes on Pakistan have fallen from 122 in 2010, the peak year of Obama's troop "surge" in Afghanistan, to 43 in 2012.

As 2013 begins, the return of an Imperial Presidency is a definite specter over the Obama administration. Not only is the drones policy under challenge, but the rules of Special-ops killings and detention, the launching of cyber-war, and the return of the CIA to the business of running cover armies are examples of militarism without checks and balances. The CFR report says, but cannot confirm, for example, that the CIA directs a paramilitary force of 3,000 Pashtun mercenaries on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. Congressional oversight is failing, according to the report, and the War Powers Act of 1973 is simply obsolete for the era of modern warfare with its waning emphasis on ground troops. As even the president has acknowledged, “I think creating a legal structure, processes, with oversight checks on how we use unmanned weapons is going to be a challenge for me and for my successors for some time to come.” Coupled with his comment to Stewart, that is as close as possible to an admission by a president that his government is operating outside the constitutional structure.

It is hard to expect serious reform from the same administrative elites who have depended on the War on Terror’s enabling framework for a decade. Obama may lead us towards a “conversation” but solutions will have to come from Congress at the insistence of the public and media. That is how the War Powers Act became law in 1973, at the insistence of Congress, the media and the peace movement. No president, from Nixon to Obama, has ever accepted its constitutionality, though sometimes abiding by its requirements – because they believe the law infringes on the power of the presidential office to make war. That is why the public and Congress will be required to reform the current policies, or the future will become far more secret than the past.

President Obama plans to remove all but 6,000 to 9,000 US troops from Afghanistan by 2014, ending the American combat role, saving tens of billions of dollars and leaving an unpopular, incompetent and corrupt Karzai regime needing a diplomatic fix to avert collapse into civil war.

Although not officially announced, the numbers have been reported in recent days. The Los Angeles Times predicts 6,000–9,000, while the New York Times reports “under 10,000.” Troop cuts in that range will mean a 90–95 percent reduction from 109,000, the highest US level reported in 2010. It would require a 60,000 reduction between now and late 2014. The pace of the withdrawal has not been announced but is expected any day.

The numbers are well below those requested by the Pentagon, which range from 15,000 troops and upward. Opposition to Obama’s reductions is expected from neo-conservative and military advocates as well as congressional hawks. Obama has gained political cover, however, from the recent sixty-two Senate votes cast for “accelerated” withdrawal and a similar message in a letter from ninety-four House members. The recent New York Times editorial finally endorsing a one-year withdrawal also provides critical support from within the mainstream political and national security establishments.

Obama’s decision, and the stand taken by congressional peace advocates, is consistent with his campaign pledge to begin steady American withdrawals after a two-year surge of 33,000 troops. The surge was a concession to generals like Stanley McChrystal and David Petraeus, and to cabinet hawks including Hillary Clinton and Robert Gates, who fought for withdrawals to be based on “conditions” rather than timelines. In Bob Woodward’s account, Obama’s Wars, the president is quoted as saying, “I’m not an advocate of the timetable, but it will come from the Hill,” by Democrats in Congress. In fact, the White House quietly supported language advocating an accelerated timetable for “swift withdrawal” and a “significant and sizable reduction no later than July 2011” in the Democratic National Committee resolution of February 24, 2011. The resolution was sponsored by Representatives Barbara Lee and Mike Honda, and longtime Democratic leaders Donna Brazile and Alice Germond.

The critical resolution reflected the demands of local peace networks and rank-and-file Democrats across the country. Behind closed doors, Obama told Senator Lindsay Graham, “I can’t let this be a war without end, and I can’t lose the whole Democratic Party. And people at home don’t want to hear we’re going to be there another for another ten years.”

As the recent reports show, the new Obama plan already “has sparked internal criticism at the Pentagon” which argues for a “sizable military presence” to be deployed in southern and eastern Afghanistan, according to the LA Times. Obama’s troop reductions are likely to spur even sharper cuts in NATO forces. The Afghan army, according to Pentagon sources, will face “enormous difficulties” as the American troops leave. There were 2,500 insurgent attacks every month this year from April to September, higher levels than in 2009, according to a recent Pentagon report to Congress.

Whatever decision Obama makes will be the subject of ongoing talks between Washington, Kabul and NATO powers. Bagram air base, along with smaller bases around Kabul, will be the defensive hub for any residual US force. The most controversial US mission, though smaller in scope, will be counterterrorism. Embassy protection and training Afghan troops will also be included. Virtually none of the Afghan army’s twenty-three brigades can operate on their own, suggesting that Western air support will be authorized as well.

In the end, the discussion of a smaller residual force might be undone altogether by Afghan insistence on stripping immunity from American personnel violating Afghan laws and procedures. A similar scenario occurred during the endgame in Iraq. One American official told the LA Times that “one of the things that Obama and Karzai have always agreed on is the need for a reduced force presence. I could see them both wanting zero, but at the end of the day I don’t think that will happen.”

Nothing will change the shifting balance of forces as Karzai’s army and regime are left on their own amidst corruption and insurgency. The danger of renewed civil war will increase unless diplomacy creates a power-sharing arrangement on the ground. Republicans so far have blocked Obama’s efforts to release several Taliban detainees from Guantánamo in exchange for an American POW, Bowe Bergdahl, captured by Afghan insurgents in 2009. A larger diplomatic settlement will require controversial contacts with Iran, China, Russia and Pakistan, all states with proxy interests in divided Afghanistan. If all efforts fail and Afghanistan implodes into civil war, Obama will have to count on American domestic exhaustion with the decade-long war to protect him against military claims that he “lost” Afghanistan.

Feminist groups which originally supported the war will have to lobby successfully to ensure the meager gains of Afghan women are preserved in an enforceable aid and assistance package.

In summary: it’s official: America’s longest war is ending soon. The peace movement, which built a necessary groundwork of opposition, is ten years older.

What are some next steps for the peace movement?

First, unlike the Cold War era, the peace forces have won most of the all-important battle for public opinion. It’s possible that a window will open, however briefly, for the peace forces to link with labor, civil rights and environmental coalitions in an effort to put some definition and muscle into Obama’s repeated promise to “do some nation-building here at home.”

This shift to domestic priorities will be very difficult. The United States is an empire with 800 military bases, a growing interest in deterring China, a role in hot battlefields such as Yemen and Mali, risky brinksmanship with Iran, dangerous ties to Israel’s hawks, and an unknown number of CIA operations around the planet. If expensive US ground wars are no longer affordable or winnable, there will be momentum towards drone wars, cyber wars, black operations, and an edifice of greater secrecy over our institutions. The military budget, despite its gargantuan size, will be difficult to assail politically. Peace doves will have to become fiscal hawks in attacking wasteful military spending.

A top priority will be reversing, and trying to end, the escalating use of drones. Public opinion, unfortunately, is favorable toward killing hundreds of alleged foreign terrorists in faraway lands, assuming the alternative is putting American troops in harm’s way at an extraordinary cost to taxpayers. The growing protests against drones, coupled with Robert Greenwald’s Brave New Foundation’s educational documentary, if combined with civil liberties and human rights groups’ complaints over detentions and “kill lists”, will gradually build a climate of dissent from current policy.

The most important challenge will be to revise the 1973 War Powers Act to require public disclosure and Congressional approval of drone attacks, cyber-wars, and secret operations by the CIA in places like Libya. President Obama, as a constitutional lawyer, can hardly wish to be remembered as rebuilding the Imperial Presidency, but that is the path he is on. Perhaps aware of the peril, Obama has taken the unusual step of appealing to the public and Congress to “rein in” his exceptional powers with “new legal architecture” in the coming year. That invitation should be taken up at once by civil liberties and peace communities with interests to protect.

One possible scenario might be to de-escalate and phase out the drone attacks on Pakistan’s tribal areas as part of a diplomatic settlement in Afghanistan. It’s highly doubtful after a decade of war that the Taliban will be driven to the table by drones, and no serious diplomat should expect them to acquiesce. But a permanent suspension of drone attacks is a necessary ingredient of any peace settlement with Afghanistan and Pakistan, as Obama well knows.

If that occurs, a parallel process of drafting and debating new Congressional policies to “rein in” the imperial presidency could gain traction.

Finally, peace advocates will have to keep challenging the paradigm of the “war on terrorism” with its underlying rationale and legislative authorization that sustains the secretive Long War. There is no single path to an alternative narrative, any more than there is a single effective approach to slowing the domestic “wars” on gangs and inner-city youth that have resulted in mass incarceration. The neoconservatives and the domestic right wing play on racial fears to mount their militarized approaches to both domestic and foreign policy. Peace and civil rights critics might gain traction, however, when their constitutional and moral arguments are reinforced by the expensive failures of the Long War abroad and mass incarceration at home.

There is a connection between the Long Wars and domestic inequality that peace advocates also might offer to civil rights and labor reformers. It is that corporate and financial globalization result in an exploding gap between the rich and the underclass. The model offered by neoconservative theorists is a failed one. Even as we militarize our relationship to Pakistan, we privatize the sweatshop conditions that draw investment away from US labor markets. By a similar process, the “deindustrialization” of American cities in the 1980s led to increased joblessness and despair among inner city youth, with expensive and unconstitutional policing and imprisonment as false solutions. A global living wage is needed for the world, one built on the experience of winning living wage ordinances in American cities.

Finally, the experience of the peace movement offers a message to environmentalists: that the continuous Long War over oil, gas, minerals and other resources is a direct obstacle to a new priority on developing conservation and renewable resources. Ending the Long War is a precondition to transitioning to an energy-efficient future.

New coalitions are likely to form as “nation building at home” challenges the Long War as the agenda of the coming four years.

(AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth, File)
 
The tangled path to ending US drone strikes will be mapped through diplomacy, courtroom challenges, activist protests and pressure on the mainstream media to challenge official secrecy.
 
On the diplomatic-political front, a de facto agreement between the US and Pakistan over Afghanistan could end the drone strikes concentrated on Taliban sanctuaries in North Waziristan. Since the US is withdrawing ground troops from Afghanistan and cannot afford to invade Pakistan, unmanned aerial vehicles are currently the weapons of last resort. Their attacks, however, have failed to defeat the insurgents and continue to inflame Muslim opinion in Pakistan and elsewhere, steadily provoking an eventual security threat to the United States.

Until November’s election, Republicans (and Democratic hawks) campaigned furiously against any sign of US government “talks with the Taliban,” effectively squashing the diplomatic alternative or driving the process into complete secrecy. The impasse also prevented the release of US Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl, held as a Taliban prisoner in Pakistan since June 2009. The secret talks had considered a swap of Bergdahl for five Taliban leaders held in Guantanamo Bay.

But the secret contacts led to a post-election agreement—now directly involving Pakistan—to transfer more than a dozen Afghan Taliban figures to Afghanistan’s High Peace Council, the negotiating entity that represents Kabul in the fragile peace process. Expecting release is Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the former Taliban military commander whose capture by American and Pakistani forces in 2010 was blamed for the earlier derailment of the process. Others already released include an assistant to Taliban leader Mullah Omar, as well as former Taliban ministers of justice, communications and military commanders.

The Taliban releases were announced on November 17 in Kabul by Salahuddin Rabbani, son of the former Peace Council leader, Burhanuddin Rabbani, who was assassinated in 2011.

The clock is ticking loudly on the scheduled US troop withdrawals, forcing all parties to choose a power-sharing ceasefire arrangement or risk a renewed civil war by 2015. The current Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, is scheduled for replacement in new elections in late 2014, the same date that US ground operations end. Drone policies will also be taken up in the US-Afghanistan status of forces agreement talks, which began in mid-November and are scheduled to conclude in May.

Pakistan is unlikely to agree to a diplomatic initiative unless it includes a termination of the drone strikes. And if the Taliban are integrated into a power-sharing arrangement in Afghanistan, the US will lack any further rationale for its drone and predator attacks.

Courtroom Challenges

In his October 18 interview with Jon Stewart, President Obama issued a stunning invitation to Congress to “rein in” his administration, and future administrations, before another Imperial Presidency becomes his legacy. Obama suggested that Congress supply him with new “legal architecture” to harness the new nature of warfare to principles of democracy and accountability. A revision of the 1973 War Powers Act would be a starting point.

The US drone policy toward Pakistan is setting off “alarms” among key State Department lawyers, including Harold Koh (Wall Street Journal, September 26). Similar alarms over the Libya intervention led White House lawyers to classify their internal memos as top-secret.

In the case of the drones, both The New York Times and the ACLU have filed Freedom of Information Act requests, so far in vain.

Pakistan publicly opposes the drone attacks on their country, has closed the CIA’s secret drone base in their territory and is considering a legal challenge at the United Nations. The most popular leader in Pakistan, Imran Khan, is campaigning for the presidency on a platform opposing the drone strikes.

The Obama administration has created a “council of counsels” to define the legal parameters of the program. While claiming firm legal ground, their rationale is precarious, and worsening with time. The overall rationale, the US lawyers claim, rests on the War on Terrorism authorization permitting the military pursuit of Al Qaeda, its “affiliates” and states that harbor them. The question most worrying administration officials is whether it can unleash lethal force against the “consent” of a sovereign country, in this case Pakistan.

To prove Pakistan’s “consent” to the drone strikes is increasingly difficult. Years ago there existed a dual-approval system, but during the past four years the United States increasingly acted alone. The CIA sent faxes every month to Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) outlining the areas where the US drones would be deployed. The ISI sent back faxes acknowledging receipt of the information, nothing more. That ISI fax, combined with the lack of Pakistan’s military interference with the drone strikes, was considered a sufficient legal authorization by the United States, though never tested in a court.

All that changed after the US assassination of Osama bin Laden in May 2011, after which the ISI never again acknowledged any US drone notifications. The silence was “unnerving” to US officials like Koh. They not only lacked any evidence of Pakistani approval, but the thin paper approvals they had been relying on were no longer being sent, ending any semblance of Pakistan’s approval. The price of killing bin Laden was lethal to the drones program.

Last August in Washington, DC, American officials quietly raised the possibility of a “drone drawdown” with the leadership of the ISI. The offer lacked detail, but remains on the table. During the past year of secret on-and-off diplomacy, US drone strikes on Pakistan have declined to four per month as opposed to ten per month in 2011.

Activist Protests

As the ground wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were winding down, many peace activists turned to the drone program as a target of moral outrage and civil disobedience. While most of the actions have been local, Code Pink has provided coordination, a supply of literature and organized a productive trip to Pakistan, hosted by Pakistani peace forces, including a candid exchange with the US counsel in Islamabad.

While a majority of Americans still approve of drone weaponry, nearly 70 percent have tired of the Afghanistan War and even larger numbers tell pollsters that the war cannot be won, creating a potential for dissent to rise.

Congressional silence on the drone program remains shocking in comparison to the near-majorities of representatives who voted to oppose the thousands of US troops deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. Outgoing Representative Dennis Kucinich chaired the only serious “hearing” on the drone program just this month. Even with Kucinich gone, someone in Congress will inevitably fill the vacuum.

Excessive state secrecy, when it concerns appalling and illegal military actions, has a way of eventually provoking powerful public condemnations from citizens grown increasingly suspicious of government bureaucracies.

Why else would administration officials be “unnerved” by the public implications of their own program? Why would President Obama, after first inviting a “conversation” about the previously secret policy last year, then go so far as to invite the Congress to rein him in? They may have an intuitive sense that the program is vulnerable. As the Times’s Scott Shane has said, “It’s impossible to keep the strikes themselves secret, but you’ve never had a public debate by Congress on it.” That immunity is ending.

Role of the Mainstream Media

As New York Times Public Editor Margaret Sullivan wrote on October 14, while important reporting on the drones has been done, still the Times “has not been without fault.” According to Sullivan, “the Times has not aggressively challenged the administration’s description of those killed as ‘militants’—itself an undefined term. And it has been criticized for giving administration officials the cover of anonymity when they suggest that critics of drones are terrorist sympathizers.”

The turning point might have been in June 2011 when a top US counterterrorism official, John Brennan, claimed that the drones over Pakistan were inflicting zero collateral deaths. The mainstream media wouldn’t buy it, and the questioning began to deepen, including questions from within the national security establishment itself. Sullivan issued this call:

“With its vast talent and resources, The Times has a responsibility to lead the way in covering this topic as aggressively and as forcefully as possible, and to keep pushing for transparency so that Americans can understand just what their government is doing.”

Los Angeles—Less than a week after the presidential election, a fired-up crowd of climate activists cheered Bill McKibben and the “Do the Math” roadshow at their UCLA stop. “Do the Math” is on a three-week caravan traveling by biodiesel-powered bus, with a stop in Washington, DC, to challenge the president to take quick action on the environment.

The twenty-one-city tour promises to be a model for progressives committed to aggressively pushing Obama and Congress even before Obama’s second term formally begins in January.

One hundred chanting, marching students attended the UCLA event from the Claremont Colleges, fifty miles away, to announce their campaign to seek a campus divestment from the “rogue” fossil fuel industry. Already this week Seattle’s mayor instructed his finance team to investigate how to divest city funds, and Maine’s Unity College announced its plan to divest.

350.org, the sponsoring organization for “Do the Math,” is calling on colleges, religious institutions and public pension funds to make no new investments in fossil fuels, “wind down” current investments in five years. Divestment would lead fossil fuel providers to begin to curtail lobbying activities in Washington, DC, and prepare to transition to a future as “energy companies.” The strategy is partly modeled on the global campaign of divestment from South Africa, although the analogy is incomplete. South Africans were carrying out a liberation war that could not be defeated, with powerful African-American and clergy constituencies in America. Legislators like Maxine Waters and Willie Brown carried divestment bills for seven years before being signed in California, tipping the balance against apartheid. Despite its efforts, 350 is not inclusive of black or Latino constituencies although is message is one of environmental justice. The UCLA event was overwhelmingly white on a campus where a majority of undergraduates are non-white.  

How to explain 350’s scale? Just as a pointless war can spark a massive peace movement, the corporate-governmental attack on the sources of life itself causes an instinctive human response on behalf of the earth. The scale and energy of this movement goes far beyond the considerable organizational power of the well-funded and well-staffed national environmental groups. It rests on the collective legacy of many previous upsurges going back as far the millions who gathered at the first Earth Day, the vast anti-nuclear power movement and the Nuclear Freeze effort. It has something to do with the 51-year-old McKibben’s flexible, improvisational, gentle and grounded style of leadership. A longtime resident of Vermont, a graduate of Harvard and a lyrical nature writer, his personal authenticity contains echoes of Henry David Thoreau. He seems to know that he is a prophetic instrument of an emerging force much greater than himself.

The 350.org plan to attack the fossil fuel companies fully complements the peace movement’s demand to end the Long War on Terrorism, which is also an energy resource war. 350.org, however, is a single-issue movement lacking a platform on wars and military spending. Rapid progress towards renewables, however, will solidify public support for avoiding energy wars in the Persian Gulf.

The renewable resource that 350.org taps into is one of human protest energy rarely seen in recent years. In late 2010, for example, 350.org coordinated nearly 8,000 actions, most of them colorful and symbolic, across 188 countries. 

The 350.org approach borrows in part from the “anti-globalization” and rainforest action movements’ focus over two decades on attacking corporate power directly, although this time at its core power rather than the reputation of its brand. Naomi Klein is a key supporter, and is featured in one of several videos employed in the caravan’s multi-media presentation. 

“If they are trying to take away our planet,” McKibben argues, “we simply have to try to take away their profits.” As he has in many writings, McKibben relies on environmental science to make an apocalyptic case. In order to keep rising climate heat below 2 degrees Celsius, he says, only 565 more gigatons of carbon dioxide emissions can be allowed; but the fossil fuel industry already has 2,795 gigatons of CO₂ in its reserves. Therefore, he concludes the very “business model” of giants like Chevron, Exxon Mobil and BP must be changed before they overheat the planet by implementing their conventional model.

If the “do the math” argument is too speculative for some, the 350 argument is bolstered powerfully by the rash of catastrophic weather events ranging from droughts to superstorms now slamming the continent with increasing force and regularity. Superstorm Sandy put Michael Bloomberg into Obama’s column, and New York governor Andrew Cuomo has vociferously attacked the climate-deniers. With California and New York becoming major supporters of energy efficiency and green infrastructure, any Obama energy or climate initiatives will begin with stronger support than four years ago. Even Obama’s former regulatory chief, Cass Sunstein, is writing about the economic benefits of environmental regulations compared to the status quo. Sunstein says the cost of the East Coast hurricane will be $50 billion and will reduce US economic growth by one-half percent.

On the XL Pipeline project, Obama soon may face another round of civil disobedience like that which caused him to delay the approvals process last year. Van Jones, formerly Obama’s “green jobs” representative, who now endorses 350, says the pipeline was a “done deal” until the protesters circled the White House. Obama now faces competing pressures from two core constituencies on the pipeline, from building trades and environmentalists. A likely rerouting of the pipeline around the Nebraska Sand Hills and most of the Ogallala Aquifer could mitigate objections from Nebraskans, but the dangers of disastrous spills, escalating costs and polluting emissions will remain. Attempts by Transcanada to open an alternative route through British Colombia face enormous First Nation and environmental opposition. Hanging over the controversy is the chilling judgment of NASA’s leading climate scientist, James Hansen, that it’s “game over” for the climate if the pipeline is completed.

Obama’s options seem to be: first, continuing to defer a final decision while monitoring the costs, risks and levels of opposition; second, meet with the 350.org protesters to hear their concerns directly; or make a dramatic counter-offer involving conservation, renewables and global leadership over the next four years, to be announced in his second Inaugural Address in January.

While the environmental caravan demanding renewable resources rolls towards Washington, Obama and top US officials are scheduled to visit Cambodia, Thailand, Myanmar and Australia to shore up the American military presence in the navigation routes carrying oil and resources from Asia to the Persian Gulf. The so-called US geostrategic “pivot” towards Asia inevitably begins a new cold war with China over fossil fuels. Game over? Perhaps it’s sudden death overtime. As Al Gore described the terrible dilemma in Earth in The Balance (1992): “At this stage, the maximum that is politically feasible still falls short of the minimum that is truly effective.”

Now’s the time to read Naomi Klein on whether Superstorm Sandy will push us to realign our relationship with the natural world: Superstorm Sandy: A People’s Shock?

The Democratic Party leadership, and political historians in general, do not look kindly on losers. Having been successful for most of their lives, but having fallen short of the presidency, leaves the losers in a permanent purgatory of derision, like B-movie actors. It is depressing for them, and a loss of valuable lessons for the rest of us, except of course for the most American of lessons: Win! As Leo Durocher said, “Show me a good loser, and I’ll show you an idiot.”

The Democrats and historians threw George McGovern under the bus. Now it is time for his resurrection, in a search for history’s lessons.

It was a time unlike now, a time that may not come again. The New Left, which had a massive and militant base, remained unpopular with mainstream public opinion. As Seth Rosenfeld’s extraordinary new history reveals, both Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan would benefit from revulsion at “filthy” Berkeley radicals to become future presidents. At the same time, the tide of sentiment was turning, and even some leaders of the establishment were rethinking Vietnam and its corrosive effects on American politics.

It was a time when leaders and activists from the emerging social movements often were on close terms with Democratic politicians who were considering presidential runs. Many of us lobbied Congress to end funding for Vietnam, traversed the halls of Congress and campaign trails freely and were visitors to the homes of leading candidates and members of Congress.

The Democratic Party appeared to be farther to the left than any time before or since, but in an extremely divided society. The most serious contradictions were between organized labor and the “peaceniks,” feminists and the rainbow of the counterculture. The AFL-CIO was very much in the invisible hands of the CIA in its cold war foreign policy, and thus unable to embrace a shift from Vietnam to domestic priorities. But at the same time the AFL-CIO was losing its powerful grip on the machinery of the Democratic Party to the younger forces of the peace movement, the feminist movement, the emerging Earth Day environmentalists, the students and groups within organized labor like the farmworkers.

Enter George McGovern, who came from the Great Plains populist, farmer-labor tradition whose needs could not be met in the ascendancy of cold war spending. (Hubert Humphrey shared the same tradition, but had followed temptation into the military madness of Lyndon Johnson’s faltering administration.) McGovern’s way was paved by the 1967–68 campaigns of Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy, which ended with the Democratic Party not only defeated by Nixon but in a state of crisis and division.

Coming out of the 1968 disaster, McGovern somehow became chair of a commission in charge of rewriting the fundamental rules of the party. Though defined later as a wooly-headed liberal dreamer, McGovern was shrewd enough, and mainstream enough, to carry out an internal rules revolution that would make his nomination possible in 1972. The 1968 crackup also allowed huge numbers of pragmatic movement activists, like the young McCarthy campaigners, Rev. Jesse Jackson and other emerging black leaders, the UFW, Gloria Steinem and the National Organization for Women, Bill Clinton, David Mixner and countless unnamed others.

Those rules required that virtually half the delegates be women and that nominations be settled primarily by state-by-state voting, opening space for activists to have an internal impact on the party. The AFL-CIO was opposed. Every since, the party establishment has tended to whittle away at the potential role of the grassroots that McGovern made possible.

Then in 1971, McGovern, along with Oregon Senator Mark Hatfield, introduced an amendment that would advance the peace movement, put Nixon on the defense and contribute to the actual collapse of Congressional support for the war in the next few years. It also would be the platform of his presidential campaign, a direct result of the rising power of the peace movement at the time. Though failing that year, the proposal helped unravel the Imperial Presidency and assert the power of Congress—and the public—over decisions of war and peace.

But McGovern faced a perilous journey inside and outside his well-planned, well-exercised journey towards the presidency. On the inside, Nixon was secretly and illegally conspiring against the democratic process and the Democracy Party itself. Relying on his experience during McCarthyism when he was vice president, Nixon launched the strategy of destruction that ended in Watergate. Fortunately, Nixon misread the times, believing that the fifties could be replayed in the sixties. On the outside, Nixon and Kissinger rained death from the skies and invaded Cambodia as Nixon staged the gradual withdrawal of US troops, apparently believing he could “wind down” the peace movement but not the war. He was wrong. The peace movement surged between 1970 and 1972, broadening the potential base for a McGovern candidacy.

Between the media’s hesitancy and Nixon’s frantic efforts to cover up Watergate, the scandal did not burst into public attention until after the November 1972 election. Nixon manipulated Kissinger to manipulate public opinion that October with the hint that “peace is at hand.” It is forgotten, or quietly ignored, that McGovern had an enormous impact on the final ending of the Vietnam War.

According to historian Robert Dallek, the paranoid Nixon had “premonitions of being ousted” if his Watergate secrets came out before the election (Nixon and Kissinger, Partners in Power). At the time, 48 percent of Americans in a Gallup Survey knew “nothing” about the scandal, while 81 percent favored a candidate committed to ending the war.

With Watergate hidden, “Vietnam was the one issue Nixon saw jeopardizing his election,” Dallek writes. He was “afraid of an October surprise engineered by McGovern and Hanoi that could cost him the election,” based on the possibility that Hanoi would invite McGovern to Vietnam and turn over a substantial number of American POWs “indicating that the Democrat would be better able to reach a settlement.” A settlement before the election, Nixon noted to Henry Kissinger, would be “a great confirmation of McG’s campaign for peace” and would contain “a high risk of severely damaging the US domestic scene.” In the end, Nixon had Kissinger offer the “peace is at hand” statement to kill any surge for McGovern, moved to prevent any settlement before the election, and at the same time planned the B-52 bombing of Hanoi during Christmas.

That fall, Jane Fonda, along with others, and myself were engaged in a 100-city campaign to end the war and defeat Nixon. Hundreds of thousands of people became involved and local coalitions were built everywhere, but especially in seven “swing” states. That movement became a force in backing the congressional termination of the war two years later. In our analysis, the peace movement had forced Nixon into his illegal Watergate strategy, and Watergate had created the opportunity to end the war at last. The strategy was right. At least we knew that McGovern’s campaign would keep the issue of Vietnam alive domestically and force the US toward withdrawal. How little we knew. Fearing our effectiveness drove Nixon deeper into hiding, not toward the exits. But it was all we could do.

Why did McGovern lose so overwhelmingly, plunging us into the disastrous Nixon presidency? There are those who drew the misleading lesson that the “McGovern Democrats” were too far to the left, too “softon defense” to ever win the presidency. That lesson took root in Democratic politics and has lasted to this day. McGovern’s own campaign manager, Gary Hart, swiftly developed a “smart on defense” strategy to immunize himself during his later presidential run. The Clintons were scarred by the experience as well, distancing themselves from the man who had pulled Bill Clinton into his first presidential campaign. Even today, President Obama positions himself as a hawkish centrist far removed from the ghost of George McGovern. To this day, the Democrats have never recognized a peace caucus in the way they have accommodated every other issue-based interest group important to the party’s success. The result is a dangerous imbalance in the mainstream political spectrum of forces, marginalizing the voices of peace within the system and disenfranchising the peace movement as an outcast grouping.

The true history of 1972 is more complicated and may never be unraveled. McGovern made a disastrous mistake in choosing Senator Tom Eagleton as his running mate without knowing of his long treatment for mental illness. I remember sitting on a Venice living room floor with Jane when we heard the news, and immediately feeling the deflation of all our buoyancy, the sense that McGovern was doomed. As long as Watergate was concealed, Nixon would have won the 1972 election anyway, but by a more competitive margin, and even been forced into a more rapid peace settlement.

A deeper reason for the setback was the antagonism rippling through the left-of-center forces themselves. The AFL-CIO simply hated the triumphant McGovernites, picked up their marbles and backed Nixon to the hilt. While this was partly about petulance, it was also about power, the threat of a rising peace movement lapping against the closed citadel of the national security establishment. Even Jimmy Carter, then the governor of Georgia, was leading a campaign to stop McGovern.

Within the ranks of the movements there was more polarization. Leaders like John Lewis and Julian Bond had left SNCC, and the vacuum was being filled by either Black Panthers or street gangs like the Crips and Bloods, all while Jesse Jackson was replacing Mayor Richard Daley as an elected delegate to McGovern’s Democratic convention. Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman were visiting the convention floor while crazed “Zippies” accused them of selling out, while sinister Nixon operatives and columnists like Robert Novak spread a false rumor that McGovern advocated legalizing marijuana. SDS was subdividing into Marxist-Leninist factions who were largely AWOL from the massive peace movement being led by liberal McCarthy supporters like Sam Brown. Rennie Davis, the premier anti-war organizer of the era, had become a follower of a 14-year-old guru in India. Vietnam Veterans Against the War was being set up on conspiracy changes. In other words, Nixon’s “plumbers” and the COINTEL program were at high tide. (This was anarchism of the right overwhelming anarchism of the left; for several years, I was accused of “burning buses” in Miami, when I was never there.)

The destabilization program, partly spontaneous and partly planned, worked in the end. The cold war establishment was protected from McGovernism, or so they thought. In fact, George McGovern was a premature figure, an usher to history’s course. Nixon fell, as did Saigon, by 1975. The American troops came home. Tens of thousands of American war resisters in Canada were given amnesty by Jimmy Carter. Abortion was legalized the year after McGovern’s defeat. Eleven states decriminalized marijuana in the seventies. The immense human suffering was largely forgotten as the conservatives turned their attention to defeating the “Vietnam Syndrome”, cultural disease they attributed to the sixties and McGovern.

McGovern was the prophet who paid the price. He was a minister’s son who knew the Devil, a World War II hero who remembered Hiroshima and Dresden, a populist reformer who mistrusted Wall Street, and a kindly gentleman who welcomed the chaos of the sixties into his life, then watched so many of his “kids” abandon him to become the New Men and Women of Power in posts that his movement had made possible. Keeping any bitterness to himself, he lived on to oppose the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and to call upon the Democratic Party to live up to its best traditions.

Even today the crippling purge of McGovernism from the mainstream political culture goes on. Millions have suffered as a result of the mass myopia left from the purge of McGovern’s peace perspective from what C. Wright Mills called the “crackpot realism” passing for establishment discourse. Who will take up McGovern’s prophetic role now? And if no one does, how long will it be before false peace becomes a consuming hell? At that point, we should know that we have been warned. At the height of the Vietnam crisis, I remember standing by McGovern as he explained to a Washington gathering, in that sincere Plains voice, “If you stir up the hornet’s next, you better be ready to be stung by the bees.”

George McGovern for The Nation:

Questions for Mr. Bush | April 4, 2002
The Reason Why | April 3, 2003
Patriotism Is Nonpartisan | March 24, 2005 Gene McCarthy | December 15, 2005
The Legacy of Four Women with Rep. Jim McGovern | December 21, 2005
An Impartial Interrogation of George W. Bush | January 17, 2007

The Nation Profile:

McGovern: The Man, the Press, the Machine, the Odds by Arthur I. Blaustein and Peter T. Sussman | October 16, 1972

Russell Means in 1974. (AP Photo/Jim Mone, File)
 
Russell Means, who died on Tuesday, kept a place here in Santa Monica in recent years, with his wife, Pearl. Once my wife Barbara and I took our son Liam for a visit to meet this man we described as having fought a real war against the government. Still in good health a couple of years ago, Russell took great interest in our 10-year-old, as he did in all kids trying to understand the actual history of our country.

Russell was a strong, imposing figure. It wasn’t only his braided hair or the beads around his neck; his clear eyes gazed as if it was 1873. He had Liam’s attention. When they shook hands, Russell told Liam that his grip needed to be firmer, he should stand up straight, and that he always should look the other person straight in the eye. Our son will not forget the quiet authority this man quietly commanded.

Russell had that effect on people, the presence of a nineteenth-century warrior still alive as a force in the here and now. He touched millions.

I therefore was quite shocked to see Russell with Pearl in a local restaurant a few months later, gaunt and frail from cancer. I didn’t quite recognize him. He told me the diagnosis was terminal, and that he was living on tribal remedies and prayer. His face should have been on Mr. Rushmore. The great law of mortality would prevail where the Great White Father had failed, and Russell soon would enter the spirit world. He knew his time on earth was ending, eating eggs in an Ocean Park cafe.

My wife, a descendant of the Oglala Nation, and our son, were blessed to know him even briefly. My old friends Bill Zimmerman and Larry Levin were touched enough to fly a plane with supplies into Wounded Knee when the fight was on. Governor Jerry Brown was courageous enough to harbor Russell in California when South Dakota wanted him extradited. Tim Carpenter, now of PDA, was inspired enough in 1971 to march across the United States on the latter-day Trail of Tears. Russell, the imprisoned Leonard Peltier and the American Indian Movement led many to try repealing the past. “No More Broken Treaties” was the slogan of the Indochina Peace Campaign at the time of the Paris Peace Agreement, a reminder of the 371 solemn pacts violated by the US government during the earlier Indian Wars. One of the most momentous violations was that of the 1868 Treaty of Laramie guaranteeing Sioux Nation ownership of the Black Hills, now the center of a vast corporate energy domain. That violation aroused a new generation of native American warriors.

The fundamental difference between a truthful, radical interpretation of US history and a merely progressive or liberal one is how deeply one understands that our permanent original sin, even preceding slavery, was a genocide against native people that underlay the the later growth of democratic rights. That truth is what is “buried at Wounded Knee”, what Russell Means’ war for recognition was all about, and why he will be long remembered by my son.

Until we in America finally accept and redeem the moral debasement of a Conquest that still underlies the achievement of democracy, our blindness will lead us into one war after another against indigenous tribes and clans in places like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Iran, Asia, Africa and Latin America, all stemming from a denial of our own blood-stained origins.

Russell was a reminder that the wars against indigenous people, and the conquest of their resources, are far from over, and that we cannot be fully human until remorse with our eyes wide open allows the possibility of reconciliation.

“He’s made history. Now he has to think about legacy.” This analysis of Barack Obama came during a recent conversation I had with Representative Bennie Thompson, who joined the civil rights movement in Mississippi back in a time when no one was talking about a black president.
 
Was Obama’s victory perhaps the high point of his historic contribution, opening the doors of diversity to others? For Thompson and millions of others, the answer is no. Independent progressive movements will be needed to compel Obama to act. Progressive achievements may occur where the demands of movements converge with Obama’s need for a legacy.

The need to expand democracy is essential in its own right, but also for Obama’s re-election and legacy. California has just adopted same-day registration, for example, while right-wing politicians seek to suppress the vote and hollow out the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Beyond protecting the franchise, the main target for progressive reform is the Citizens United decision, with Obama encouraging a constitutional amendment to reverse it. What progressives can do is organize state by state against Citizens United, delegitimize the authority of a partisan Republican Supreme Court, push the president for two progressive appointees, and educate a new generation of Thurgood Marshalls to attack the undemocratic notions that money is speech and corporations are people.

A re-elected Obama will plunge immediately into a maelstrom of debate on deficit reduction and taxes. If he wins, the voter mandate will be to raise taxes on the rich and preserve Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. If Obama and the Democrats don’t find ways to defend that mandate, the possibility of leaving a positive legacy will be damaged at the beginning of the second term, perhaps even stillborn. Obama can also rely on a voter mandate to embrace the Stiglitz-Reich-Krugman school of economic thinking and support a “Robin Hood” tax on Wall Street transactions (as he once did before being smothered by his economic advisers).

From day one, Obama will need to use the bully pulpit and his executive powers if he wants a legacy of restoring progress toward reversing global warming. Given Beltway realities, progress is likely to be driven at the state and community levels in places like California, with supportive rhetoric and regulatory blessings from Obama.

Before November or shortly after, Obama’s legacy may be shaped by an Israeli attack on Iran, drawing America into regional war. Fifty-nine percent of Americans oppose joining Israel in going to war with Iran, and 70 percent oppose a unilateral US attack. Obama should rely on that mandate to navigate away from the brink and toward UN recognition of a Palestinian state.

Obama will have to pull back 68,000 American troops from Afghanistan by 2014 or break a fundamental pledge. And if he doesn’t want a legacy of restoring Richard Nixon’s imperial presidency (and provoking Muslim rage by his drone attacks), the former constitutional lawyer will have to engage in a serious revision of the 1973 War Powers Act. He also needs to embrace an FDR “good neighbor” policy toward Latin America—including Cuba—or face diplomatic isolation from our nearest neighbors.

Finally, Obama needs to resume the quest begun in his Columbia student days to freeze and reverse the nuclear arms race, the greatest threat to humanity alongside global warming. The United States has 5,113 nuclear warheads, which will cost $352 billion to maintain and “upgrade” over the next ten years. Obama’s opening to Russia, which Romney opposes, is merely an initial step in the process. Public opinion, inert since the 1980s nuclear freeze movement, will have to be reawakened, partly with his leadership.

A movement perspective always differs from a governing one, and in the best of times the two interact productively. Most progressives I meet believe the challenge is clear: get Obama’s back through November, then get in his face. But legacy might be the critical factor in focusing the president’s agenda in a second term.

Other Replies to Deepak Bhargava’s “Why Obama?”

Dorian T. Warren: “Go for the Jugular”
Frances Fox Piven and Lorraine C. Minnite: “Movements Need Politicians—and Vice Versa”
Saket Soni: “We Need More than a New President”
Bill Fletcher Jr.: “Defeat the Reactionary White Elite”
Ai-Jen Poo: “A Politics of Love”
Robert L. Borosage: “Re-elect Obama—But Reject His Austerity”
Ilyse Hogue: “Time to Rewire”

And this web-only article:
Michael Brune: “For the Climate, Obama Needs Another Four Years”

Despite the official US military withdrawal last December, American special forces "recently" returned to Iraq on a counter-terrorism mission, according to an American general in charge of weapons sales there. The mission was reported by the New York Times, in the fifteenth paragraph of a story about deepening sectarian divides.

The irony is that the US is protecting a pro-Iran Shiite regime in Baghdad against a Sunni-based insurgency while at the same time supporting a Sunni-led movement against the Iran-backed dictatorship in Syria. The Sunni rebellions are occurring in the vast Sunni region between northwestern Iraq and southern Syria where borders are porous.

During the Iraq War, many Iraqi insurgents from Anbar and Diyala provinces took sanctuary in Sunni areas of Syria. Now they are turning their weapons on two targets, the al-Malaki government in Baghdad and the Assad regime in Damascus.

The US is caught in the contradictions of proxy wars, favoring Iran’s ally in Iraq while trying to displace Iran’s proxy in Syria.

The lethal complication of the US Iraq policy is a military withdrawal that was propelled by political pressure from public opinion in the US even as the war could not be won on the battlefield. Military "redeployment", as the scenario is described, is a general’s nightmare. In the case of Vietnam, a "decent interval" was supposedly arranged by the Nixon administration to create the appearance of an orderly American withdrawal. During the same "interval", Nixon massively escalated his bombing campaign to no avail. Two years after the 1973 Paris peace accords, Saigon collapsed.

It is unlikely that the Maliki regime will fall to Sunni insurgents in Iraq, if only because the Sunni population is approximately twenty percent of the population. However, the return of US Special Forces is not likely to restore Iraqi stability, and they may become trapped in crossfire as the sectarian tensions deepen. The real lesson may be for Afghanistan, where another unwinnable, unaffordable war in support of an unpopular regime is stumbling towards 2014.

The Mexican-led Caravan for Peace with Justice and Dignity passes through Fort Benning, Atlanta and Louisville this weekend before heading north to Chicago and finally east towards its September destination, Washington, DC, the seat of power for the War on Drugs that has claimed at least 60,000 lives south of the border since 2006.

This is a far different peace movement than the ones American officials and media are used to seeing. For the first time in memory, a caravan of Mexicans have crossed the border north to demand that the US government take responsibility for its major part in the mayhem, which escalated to a ground war with US advisers after a disputed 2006 election that installed Felipe Calderón as president, with the eager backing of the Bush White House. The killing of two American CIA agents in Mexico this week again revealed the spreading and secretive presence of US advisers, drones and counterterrorism units south of the border.

Also for the first time, the core of the movement is composed of Mexican victims of violence who are calling for the end of the militarized approach to drugs policy—in contrast to the common way the issue has been exploited to demand even greater law-and-order and suppression. Mexico’s people (and most Latin Americans) have had enough of tougher law-and-order (mano dura) crackdowns, police buildups, impunity for the powerful, corrupt judiciaries, dictatorships and torture chambers, as the caravan’s poet-leader Javier Sicilia explains in the exclusive interview below.

Also unique is the path the caravan will take though many of America’s most impoverished communities along the US-Mexican border, across the historic Black Belt and northward on the immigrant trail to cities like Chicago. These are the under-reported communities where incarceration and homicide rates are highest, amidst an underground economy of the underclass.

“This is putting the basic ingredients in place and planting the seeds for a unique transnational justice movement,” says the leader of one of the country’s largest immigrant rights organizations, Oscar Chacon, of the National Alliance of Latin American and Caribbean Communities.

Roberto Lovato of Presente.org, the largest Latino online advocacy group in the United States, agrees that the new binational movement is unique. But it also reminds him of the traumatic experiences of Central American victims during the civil wars of the seventies and ’80s. “As a Salvadoran, I have heard this before. Now it’s no longer the so-called war on communism but the war on drugs. There are women on this caravan because their husband’s heads were severed, a man who lost his wife and three daughters in a kidnapping by the Mexican military, people whose children are disappeared.”

“It was one thing to have wars in Central America,” Lovato notes, “and another for the war to be right here on the border. It’s one thing for a small Salvadoran population agitating for justice in their country, a whole ’nother thing to have these vast numbers of Mexicans on both sides of the border up in protest.” Lovato, who is 52, confesses that sleeping on church basement floors is getting to be too rough and says he’s just now learning “that women snore too.” But he wouldn’t miss the caravan for anything. “It’s pretty magnificent to those of us who know a movement when we see one. We’ve been waiting a long time for this awakening.”

Along the route, Lovato has seen Mexican refugees from the war beginning to form exile groups and petition for asylum in the United States, not unlike the Salvadorans a generation ago. Some already are submitting asylum applications in the face of persecutions in Mexico. One such newly formed group in El Paso alone, he says, already has eighty active members.

Most of the deaths in the Drug War, begun during the Bush era in 2006, are now on Obama’s watch from 2008 to 2012. Yet it’s often difficult for Americans, even sympathetic ones, to see the patterns of violence as a repeat of the Central American civil wars. Many Americans think of the 60,000 dead not as innocent victims but as somehow complicit in the drug culture. This perception is deceiving, as the cross-section of caravan witnesses dramatically reveals.

As one example, during my interviews with caravaners in Texas, I kept getting distracted by a face-painted young man clad in an all-green outfit including feathers and a cap. He looked like Peter Pan, and I took him to be some kind of countercultural artist belonging to one of the drug legalization groups supporting the caravan—not an ideal public relations image. Finally he forced me to focus on him and introduced himself as Arturo Malvido Conway, whose brother Rafael was shot and killed in 1997 in Mexico City, drowning in his own blood after two failed hospital surgeries. Arturo was dressed in forest green, he told me, not because it was the color of marijuana leaves but because his dead brother so loved nature, and his death “cut the tree of life in our whole family forever.” The costume was Arturo’s form of witness. I felt ashamed and thanked him for representing the severed branch of his family.

Also in Austin, I interviewed Susan Duncan, an old acquaintance from the Indochina Peace Campaign and other solidarity movements beginning with the Cuban Venceremos Brigades in the early ‘70s. Now living in Santa Fe and teaching in a community program, she eagerly supported the caravan’s stay, along with her daughter who is following in her movement footsteps. Javier Sicilia had spoken to religious congregations two days before in Santa Fe, both to traditional liberal parishioners and also about 150 immigrants who work in the town’s hotels, restaurants and homes as housecleaners. As in every city along the route, there was “great local media” in New Mexico, Susan said. If there was anything missing, she said, there wasn’t a flyer suggesting concrete next steps for local people to take. But she called Sicilia “our Gandhi” and told a story about the very personal, if imperceptible, progress being made along the way.

Susan thought she knew the immigrant women in her class quite well. But at the “encuentro” (meeting) to listen to victims’ stories in a local Catholic church, “one woman I know suddenly stood up and said ‘yes, my family too.’ ” Her relative was decapitated in Juarez in January. The woman had never said this to anyone before.

This is a very unique movement whose core consists of silenced and traumatized sufferers who have experienced unspeakable things, felt shamed and turned inward to a suffocating silence. But with each passing week, more are finding the power to speak out. When they speak, they shake. When they shake, the listener invariably shakes too. When the silence breaks, the caravan may have succeeded in its most fundamental task.

Asked what people of good will can do, Sicilia often answers simply, “Don’t leave us alone.”

He warns that “if we don’t all become aware of our collective responsibility, and we as Mexicans do not retake our state which is full of criminals, we will soon live in hell for many, many decades. The War on Drugs started here in America, and we want Americans to take their share of responsibility and help end it. As citizens of world, all of us can stop the war by forcing our states to change to a public health policy, to control the trafficking of these arms of destruction, to end the money laundering and use the savings from the legalization of drugs to compensate the victims and recreate the social fabric.”

* * *

Author’s note: This interview with Javier Sicilia was conducted on August 25 in an Austin church sanctuary after a long day’s rally.

Tom Hayden: Why did you once write a novel about John the Baptist, the wild-haired preacher who prepared the way for Christ and was beheaded by the Empire?

Javier Sicilia: John was a man of the border, who can see what’s coming but also belongs to a previous world. I’m still interested in his figure. The book was published in the ’90s.

John was a witness to the presence of Christ but he is never called, and he never follows him. He is a bridge on a border, a man on the threshold, at the entryway. He comes from the old Hebrew world of tradition. He opens the Old World up and re-imagines things in a new way. What’s coming is the only alternative that humans have, which is the revelation of faith in God and Love which has been hidden. John is signaling love as the new way.

The Old World was made up of different conflicting groups, the establishment, the Pharisees, the priests, the lawyers, the adaptable moderates, and below there were the Zealots who were the violent warriors against the empire. The novel has a character Simon, who’s an assassin. John is saying it’s not about war. It’s about the poor person from Bethlehem. John changes the script and it becomes about Jesus and love.

They imprison John because of the whim of a woman, a wife of Herod [who] asks for his head on a platter. In the end, John doesn’t have that luminosity, that pure humanity, and so John begins to doubt if the new world is actually real. He’s decapitated in the end, and all he can see on the other side is his friend, Jesus, the importance of love.

This reflects my spiritual experience. I am like John, a man also of the border, not rooted in institutions, not in ideologies, but a man of spiritual experiences who moves in a spiritual mode at that border.

Were you influenced by liberation theology?

I passed through liberation theology. Prior to entering the university I lived in the belts of misery around Mexico City with Jesuits who were working with liberation theology. I learned a lot, and wanted then to be Jesuit. But I wasn’t in a state of mind to be a novitiate. I distanced myself because it became too ideological and sociological. They use the instruments of Marxism to read things sociologically. There’s a line of messianism in their mission and in Marxism too.

I come from Gandhism. Since I was very small, my mother talked to me about Gandhi. Whenever they had a discussion about him she would take me. She gave me the biography of Gandhi written by Louis Fischer. I’ve never been in India, but I spent time with a Catholic disciple of Gandhi, Guiseppe Lanza del Vasto, an Italian who was a poet as well. I found him through a Mexican poet who is the ambassador to the Philippines, Tomas Calvillo, who’s been an adviser.

Is it right to say then that at the core of this movement is the experience of suffering of people at the border between an old world of violence and the new world they struggle toward, where more suffering and decapitations lie ahead?

Yes, and this is also why indigenous movements have joined up with us. We are the victims of violence and also of an economic and political system that has failed. War is part of this economic system, a means of enforcing exploitation and taking away humanity. The movement restores a human face to the victims.

This war is evidence that the people who govern us have stopped their own vocation of peace and instead put themselves into the service of capital and the lords of death, the ones who have maximized their profits at the death of women and young people. The only ones who benefit benefits are the criminals, the corrupt bureaucracy, the bankers who launder money protected by the state, and those who invest in prisons, the army, the police, industries of violence and horror.

Often the grievances of victims have become the platform of right-wing politicians who more armed force, more incarceration, more demonizing. Why is this movement taking a new and different view?

Because we already have seen mano dura policies fail, we saw torture in Argentina, we saw dictatorships in Chile and across Central America, and now we are living through it in our country. Gang members are only a product of the system. The state is corrupted, the state has bowed down before capital, and so the system itself generates gang warfare.

The presence of all of us—from the US, Latin America, Central America—all of us are evidence of the unity it will take to make peace.

This War against Drugs is one of the most absurd in the history of the world. It has taken more lives, caused more misery, more destruction of democracy, far more than the consumption of drugs has done. It is the opening the doors to hell.

How are you feeling physically so far? It’s 95 degrees today.

All of us are tired. Most of us sleep on floors. In San Antonio, a general man listened to the testimonies, and like grace from the heavens he gave all of us a place to stay.

How is it going so far, and what have you learned about the US on this caravan?

I can’t answer. It’s something new. We don’t measure success by results. Each day has had its achievements, and these make peace present. There are people we have met here who are very generous, and have a very profound spirituality. But I also understand that the average American is very self-referential and doesn’t know, or want to know, about the others. It’s difficult for the average American to understand their responsibility and that of their government in doing harm to other people. I run into lot of people who say the problems are Mexican, and they are right in one way, but the other side of the story is here in the US. The War on Drugs was invented by the Americans, the weapons that feed the war legally and illegally come from here, and this is what the people in US have to address.

I like the local people we have met—I like them a lot. They love this country despite the treatment, they are better off here than in Mexico, but they also love Mexico and preserve part of that culture. It could be a beautiful culture. Not only here but in Mexico, the caravan gives some kind of value, protection, returns a sense of their dignity allowing them to speak. We make the face of pain visible.

If you could talk to President Obama, what would you say?

He needs to stop this war, stop being foolish, creating horror and hurting democracy—he needs to know that. Presidents should have hearts, but too often they don’t. It has to be personal. He perhaps should think about his daughters.

When governments fail, the only thing left is citizen diplomacy.

I am a poet, I move by intuition. I can try to speak of the pure essence of the issue, that’s all. We don’t plan. When will I stop? I have been living every day, day to day, since the death of my son. The important thing now is to get to Washington.

Julian Assange in Geneva. REUTERS.
 
The British made a “huge mistake” in threatening to extract Julian Assange from Ecuador’s London embassy after the Latin American country granted political asylum to the WikiLeaks foundaer yesterday, says international human rights lawyer Michael Ratner. “They overstepped, looked like bullies, and made it into a big-power versus small-power conflict,” said Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, in an interview with The Nation today. Ratner is a consultant to Assange’s legal team and recently spent a week in Ecuador for discussions of the case.

The diplomatic standoff will have to be settled through negotiations or by the International Court of Justice at The Hague, Ratner said. “In my memory, no state has ever invaded another country’s embassy to seize someone who has been granted asylum,” he said, adding that there would be no logic in returning an individual to a power seeking to charge him for political reasons.

Since Assange entered the Ecuadorian embassy seven weeks ago, Ecuadorian diplomats have sought the assurance through private talks with the British and Swedes that Assange will be protected from extradition to the United States, where he could face charges under the US Espionage Act. Such guarantees were refused, according to Ecuador’s foreign minister, Ricardo Patiño, who said in Quito that the British made an “explicit threat” to “assault our embassy” to take Assange. “We are not a British colony,” Patiño added.

British Foreign Secretary William Hague said yesterday that his government will not permit safe passage for Assange, setting the stage for what may be a prolonged showdown.

The United States has been silent on whether it plans to indict Assange and ultimately seek his extradition. Important lawmakers, like Senator Diane Feinstein, a chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, have called for Assange’s indictment in recent weeks. But faced with strong objections from civil liberties and human rights advocates, the White House may prefer to avoid direct confrontation, leaving Assange entangled in disputes with the UK and Sweden over embarrassing charges of sexual misconduct in Sweden.

Any policy of isolating Assange may have failed now, as the conflict becomes one in which Ecuador—and a newly independent Latin America—stand off against the US and UK. Ecuador’s president Rafael Correa represents the wave of new nationalist leaders on the continent who have challenged the traditional US dominance over trade, security and regional decision-making. Correa joined the Venezuelan-founded Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas in June 2009, and closed the US military base in Ecuador in September 2009. His government fined Chevron for $8.6 billion for damages to the Amazon rainforest, in a case which Correa called “the most important in the history of the country.” He survived a coup attempt in 2010.

It is very unlikely that Correa would make his asylum decision without consulting other governments in Latin America. An aggressive reaction by the British, carrying echoes of the colonial past, is likely to solidify Latin American ranks behind Quito, making Assange another irritant in relations with the United States.

Earlier this year, many Central and Latin American leaders rebuked the Obama administration for its drug war policies and vowed not to participate in another Organization of American States meeting that excluded Cuba. Shortly after, President Obama acted to remove his Latin American policy chief, Dan Restrepo, according to a source with close ties to the Obama administration. Now the Assange affair threatens more turmoil between the United States and the region.

A new peace movement to end the US-sponsored drug war begins with buses rolling and feet marching from the Tijuana–San Diego border on August 12 through twenty-five US cities to Washington, DC, in September.

Named the Caravan for Peace, the trek is intended to put human faces and names on the estimated 60,000 dead, 10,000 disappeared and 160,000 displaced people in Mexico since 2006, when the US Drug Enforcement Agency, Pentagon and the CIA supported the escalation of the Mexican armed forces.

The caravan, which has staged mass marches across Mexico since 2011, is led by well-known Catholic poet Javier Sicilia, 56, whose son Juan Francisco, then 24, was killed in crossfire in Cuernavaca in March 2011. After his son’s death, Sicilia, vowing not to write poetry any longer, formed a Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity (MPJD) and penned an anguished grito, or cry, titled “Estamos Hasta La Madre!” The English equivalent might be “Fed Up!,” but the Spanish slang also means that the authorities “insulted our mother protector, they’ve committed a sacrilege,” Sicilia says.

About seventy Mexican activists, many of whom are are relatives of victims, and about thirty Americans will accompany Sicilia on the caravan along the US-Mexico border, north from New Orleans through Mississippi and Alabama, to Chicago, Cleveland, New York City, Baltimore and Washington, DC. The US-based Global Exchange is charged with coordination and logistics. More than 100 US immigrant rights and peace groups are actively involved, including the Drug Policy Alliance, the NAACP, the Washington Office on Latin America, the Center for International Policy’s Americas Program, the Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, the National Latino Congreso, Presente.org and Veterans for Peace. Fifty grassroots groups are involved from California alone.

The caravan may force a response from President Obama, who at the Summit of the Americans this past April stated “it is entirely legitimate to have a conversation about whether the laws in place are ones that are doing more harm than good in certain places.” At this point, the caravan has not reached a decision on whether to seek a meeting with the White House, according to caravan spokesman Daniel Robelo of the Drug Policy Alliance. But it will hold briefings on Capitol Hill and intends to reach out to administration officials, Robelo says.

After the caravan massed 100,000 in Mexico City’s Zócalo (main plaza) last spring, Sicilia took part in direct dialogue with Mexican president Felipe Calderón last June in historic Chapúltepec Castle. On a large table before the president lay photos of Mexicans slain in the conflict, often depicting them as smiling, hopeful human beings before the horror that claimed their lives. Sicilia said “The powers that be were trying to tell us that all those who were dying were just criminals, just cockroaches. We had to change the mindset, and put names to the victims for a change.”

The response to Sicilia’s call was spontaneous and widespread. Overnight he became a revered figure in Mexico. Soon he was one of the protesters featured in Time magazine’s 2011 “Person of the Year” issue.

Assuming favorable local and national coverage as the caravan crosses the United States, Sicilia’s voice will soon be heard by millions of Americans.

And an unusual voice it is. Authentic: the voice of a grieving father. Nonpolitical: “I had never thought of starting a movement or being a spokesman for anything.” Religious: he is a theologian trained in liberation theology, and believes “the life of the soul can be powerful too.”

Sicilia’s movement has not pleased everyone on the Mexican left. Though a man of the left, Sicilia did not support Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the presidential candidate of the Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD). In the view of some, his strategy of dialogue only made Calderón and conservative political parties seem more reasonable. In a Time interview, Sicilia denounced left-wing groups in Juárez for trying to “highjack the movement” by insisting that Calderón withdraw all Mexican troops from the streets. Sicilia’s intuition was that immediate and total withdrawal of the army was an unrealistic demand that would weaken public support. “It threatened to drain the force of the movement,” he said. “It showed me that a protest can’t be overly ideological if it’s going to be successful.”

An eyewitness journalist I spoke to, however, said the Juárez dispute also concerned the centralizing of too much decision-making power in Sicilia alone. The journalist acknowledged that many differences exist about the role, if any, of troops on the streets.

Perhaps the main achievement of Sicilia’s campaign so far is a change in narrative about the drug war taking place across Mexico. For years the central narrative has been about escalating prohibition and repression through a “mano dura” (“strong hand”) policy by the state and security forces. Victims’ voices have been enlisted to promote revenge. Questioners were marginalized as soft on crime and drugs.

While many are still enraged about traffickers and assassins, the rising narrative is about the failure of the drug war itself—including Mexican institutions like corrupt courts, law enforcement and elected bodies—and a thoroughgoing “cluelessness” that Sicilia sees among Mexico’s governing elites.

Elites in the US also will be threatened by parts of the platform the MPJD is carrying north. The document was cobbled together over a mid-June weekend with input from the Center for International Policy’s Americas Program, the Drug Policy Alliance, Washington Office Online America and Witness for Peace, among others. The platform attempts to re-balance the drug policy debate from the two poles of Prohibition and Legalization towards a dialogue about alternative policies to militarization. It calls for:

• “suspension of US assistance to Mexico’s armed forces,” and a shift from the war focus to human security and development;

• effective policies to halt arms smuggling in border regions, especially Texas and Arizona;

• an increased federal crackdown on money-laundering;

• protections of immigrants who have been “displaced by violence who are fleeing to the US seeking save haven and a better life.”

The DPA’s Daniel Robelo says the main purpose of the caravan is to “make Mexico’s national emergency tangible in the US” and create a binational platform to affect public opinion. Laura Carlsen, of the Americas Program in Mexico City, who worked on the platform’s security issues, says that the caravan “has this very sort of moral purpose more than political right now. It’s outrageous that our governments continue with a strategy that is demonstrably ineffective and costly in terms of death and destruction of families. By hearing the stories of Mexican victims alongside families of US youth incarcerated for simple possession and lives lost to the violence and corruption of the illegal drug trade, citizens can get a real picture of how deeply wrong prohibition and the drug war are and begin to look at realistic and humane alternatives.”

If the caravan’s call to “end the violence” diminishes public support for the militarized approach, it could force an open dialogue about alternatives like drug legalization, until very recently considered a fatal third rail.

Sicilia and the caravan have been careful not to call explicitly for legalization, because their starting point is the suffering caused by the failed drug war. In addition, they acknowledge that the alternatives are complex. They have an informal consensus, though not a demand, on somehow regulating marijuana more safely, and promoting research and analysis on approaches other drugs like cocaine and methamphetamine – humanizing, so to speak, instead of militarizing, the problem.

The caravan arrives at a turning point in the hemispheric drug policy debate. Obama’s endorsement of a new “conversation” was forced by unprecedented criticism of US drug war policies by the presidents of Guatemala, Colombia, Costa Rica, Argentina, Brazil and Ecuador at a regional summit in February. Belize has followed suit, and Uruguay’s president José Mujica on June 20 proposed that his country become the first to legalize marijuana under state management.

A recent front-page New York Times account titled “South America Sees Drug Path to Legalization” mocked Mr. Mujica as “famously rebellious,” a “former guerrilla who drives a 1981 Volkswagen beetle.” Mujica, the Times seemed to chuckle, would turn Uruguay into the world’s first “marijuana republic.”

But the regional upheaval against the drug war paradigm is real, and Obama knows it. The US government’s increasing isolation from Latin America will require more than “a conversation,” but it could usefully begin with one. The drug war status quo is collapsing. More than ever, voices of protest are backed by the power of hemispheric leaders too numerous to ignore.

Barack Obama was the first president elected on a platform of withdrawing American troops from an ongoing war. Now, though political pundits and the reporters rarely mention it, Obama’s re-election depends on winning back the peace vote in November. This week the wars will will received a brief “cameo” role, according to the Los Angeles Times, because Mitt Romney is taking his campaign to London, Israel and Poland. The Hollywood analogy is apt: it’s as if the trillion-dollar wars can be cut and pasted from a choreographed script.

Based on what little is known, a Romney presidency would return America to the Bush-era foreign and military policies. Romney’s key advisers include the neoconservatives who championed the Iraq War, resumed hostilities with Russia and at least rhetorical support for an Israeli strike against Iran. The hawks in the Republican wings include John Bolton, Randy Scheunemann and, in the background, the deep-pocketed Sheldon Adelson. Obama’s campaign team has tried for weeks to frame Romney as too willing to go to war, an argument, according to the New York Times, “that could be damaging if it manages to stick, since Americans have grown war-weary after a decade of combat.”

While the election will turn on economic conditions, those have been defined through too narrow a lens. It is dishonest to compartmentalize the economy without totaling the trillions in unfunded war spending that has ballooned the deficit. The same arguments Obama uses against Romney on Bush-era Republican economics—that he promises a return to failed policies—can be made about Romney’s foreign policy; that his administration will recycle the failed policies of the neocons. Obama can link the wars to his economic crisis by noting that taxpayers will save $150 billion per year by winding down two quagmires (the combined direct costs of Iraq and Afghanistan since FY 2008 is in the range of $760 billion). He can accuse the deficit hawks of hypocrisy due to their profligate spending on unfunded wars.

One reason for the disappearance of the wars from the presidential contest so far is the general lack of Beltway recognition of the peace movement as an interest group, especially as one that might sway an election. This is astonishing, since Obama owed his primary victories over Hillary Clinton largely to his stance on Iraq, and the Democrats won the House and Senate in 2006, according to the Gallup poll, because 61 percent of voters named Iraq as their top priority. Not that centrist Democrats took up the issue; it was as if when peace breaks out it should be treated as an allergy (or “syndrome”). More recently, grassroots networks have fortified Representative Barbara Lee and Representative Jim McGovern, who annually produce 100–200 House votes against Afghan funding or softer resolutions demanding accelerated withdrawals. Representative John Conyers, retiring Representative Dennis Kucinich and former Senator. Russ Feingold have relied on grassroots activism as well.

The peace constituency is a discernible voting bloc defined by its pattern of behavior in 2006 and 2008. Its attitude this year could be an invisible margin of difference in battleground states. Certainly Colorado, Florida, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin have thousands of voters yet to be mobilized in the name of peace. If millions of dollars are spent routinely on trying to increase Democratic turnout among blacks, Latinos or union members, it is curious why no such attention is paid to getting out the peace vote.

Of course, the peace movement is less an organized lobby than a fractious network of local networks, responding to ups and downs of crises, yet it remains capable of coming together as a discernible bloc in critical elections. It has no lavish offices or insider-lobbyists. MoveOn tried with mixed results to serve that role, before moving on to other issues. Peace activists often are reduced to being used as grassroots volunteers asked to make phone calls or write letters on behalf of legislation they never had a hand in writing. In Washington terms, they are not “at the table.” Nor are they recognized as a caucus in the Democratic Party. It is no wonder so many feel disrespected.

Sensing they have no voice, many peace voters are fed up with Obama, the Democratic party and politics in general. They do not volunteer, are not energized and may not even vote. These voters tend to be white and isolated from the currents of loyalty to Obama that run deep in the African-American community. As detached independents, they lack the material interest in electoral outcomes that draws groups like organized labor into electoral battles. These voters—potentially non-voters—go so far as to complain that Obama and Romney are essentially identical, that Democrats and Republicans are Tweedledee and Tweedledum, even that Obama has been worse than George Bush. They dismiss as an illusion any overarching economic debate between Obama and Romney over corporate power and Wall Street. They implicitly believe that Democratic voters (seniors, blacks, Latinos, women, labor, environmentalists, LGBT activists, etc.) are mistaken in perceiving that the Obama-Romney difference matters.

There are no “fringes” in a 50-50 election. Consultants on both sides claim that the November result will depend on turnout. Again and again, 1 or 2 percent margins are the difference between winning and losing. Elections are settled by fringes, at least as often as the more-targeted undecided.

Democrats generally try to win elections, while the Republican Party, because it represents a fading demographic minority, is forced to steal them. The Republicans steal them primarily with money, but also with voter suppression and disenfranchisement laws that reduce turnout among the young, students and racial minorities. The Republicans are hoping to dampen or prevent turnout among anti-war voters just enough to squeeze themselves back into power.

To win the election, Obama’s challenge is to ignore many—not all—of the traditional Democratic establishment insiders and reach out to the peace vote.

To do so credibly, Obama will need to recognize that he himself has muddied (and bloodied) his message through his escalation of drone warfare, his secret counterterrorism programs and his embrace of the growing secrecy of state power. He cannot win the peace vote on a message of ending one war while escalating others, nor by promising transparency and then restoring the CIA to its 1950s role of secret wars and coups.

Obama needs to “pivot” toward a peace platform while not appearing to flip-flop. In response, peace networks will have to awaken to a clear awareness of what is at stake.

§ He already stresses that he is ending two quagmires at a savings of trillions of dollars, which will be invested in jobs and domestic priorities; he needs to accelerate Afghanistan troop withdrawals and diplomacy before November election, to send a message that 2014 is a real deadline; and he needs to clarify that Afghanistan is not intended to become a sanctuary for counterterrorism and US bases in the region;

§ Obama needs to declare that he is ending the Long War, a counterinsurgency doctrine going back to the tiger cages in Vietnam that assumes fifty to eighty years of continuous combat against Islamic fundamentalism;

§ On these issues, he needs to demand whether Romney agrees, forcing Romney to answer whether he intends to bring back the Bush-Cheney-neoconservative policies once again.

Those are the easy steps, positions Obama already has taken, and which more or less fulfill his pledges to wind down Iraq and Afghanistan. But events move on, and his pledges on Iraq and Afghanistan are not enough. The hard part is that Obama will need to carefully acknowledge that his own counterterrorism policies, while killing leaders and disrupting networks, have also spread insurgent cells to other countries, angered many millions of Muslims and led to a new era of warfare symbolized by drones, cyber-sabotage and revival of CIA clandestine wars. Obama understandably will seek to defend his policies, but—and here is the pivot—he needs to promise a review and overhaul of the 1973 War Powers Act, which Congress passed to check the imperial power of the Nixon presidency. The WPA is about the past; it does not encompass any definitions or provisions for transparency and accountability in the new era of warfare that has begun.

Obama also can revive hope by progressing towards nuclear disarmament, a cause that goes back to his university years, against Romney’s stark defense of expanded nuclear options.

Obama also will have avert a war over Iran while arguing that Romney—a close friend and former business partner of Netanyahu—would be more likely to support one for political gain.

Obama should reiterate his promise of a “conversation” about the failed war on drugs that has left 60,000 dead in Mexico and threatens to become a covert war over many continents.

Under increasing Republican pressure over national security leaks, Obama should avoid or resist any indictment or extradition proceedings against Julian Assange. Such a move would alienate a large number of peace advocates, civil libertarians, liberals and even journalists who well remember the Pentagon Papers trial, which ended in a mistrial and helped bring down Richard Nixon.

Will these messages bring back the peace vote? Not on the scale of 2008—or even 2006, when the Republican hawks were dumped at the polls. Will Obama make any of this wish list part of his platform? At this point, it seems doubtful beyond his current pledge to end the two quagmires. But what if that’s not enough to bring back the peace vote? Nothing happens on its own without pressure from below. His evolving positions supporting the Dream Act students, marriage equality and gays in the military shows that the president can adapt. If the same coalition that fought for “healthcare, not warfare” during the past two years makes its presence known as early as the Democratic convention platform hearings and everywhere on the ground in battleground states, and if Romney is framed as a recycled Republican hawk, anything is possible.

The authorities were boasting that all flights were on time as I landed at Mexico City’s international airport on June 26 to cover the country’s national election. Terminal 2 bustled with travelers; the duty-free shops gleamed with jewelry and alcohol, and the food courts were in full service mode. Only twenty-four hours earlier, however, travelers were crawling on the same terminal floor during a shootout that killed three federal police. The shooters escaped in broad daylight. The dead officers were not shot by narcotraffickers but by other police who apparently were working for the narcos. It turned out that AeroMexico stewardesses were helping export cocaine on flights to Spain. Bienvenidos to the Mexican labyrinth, where nothing is transparent, including elections.

As I write this account, the election winner has not been certified. Serious irregularities in voting are being challenged. Over half of all ballots are being recounted by federal officials. Yet it is certain that the conservative party (Partido Accion Nacional) was massively rejected after a decade of rule. It also seems certain that the winner is Enrique Peña Nieto of the traditional PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institutional), commonly criticized as the “dinosaurs” in Mexico’s political culture. Peña Nieto’s mandate, however, rests on a mediocre 38 percent showing. Manuel López Obrador, twice the candidate of the left-populist PRD (Partido Revoiutionario Democratica) won 32 percent in an election he says was fraudulent.

Assuming the outcome is sustained, the election proved that dinosaurs are not extinct in Mexico’s politics. The PRI, which governed Mexico from the revolution until 2000, is a patronage-based coalition with support from traditional sectors. The new president, Peña Nieto is the most mediagenic of dinosaurs, and married to Angélica Rivera, a glamorous soap opera star on Televisa, the media giant that covered the story as a Mexican Camelot. The decisive vote margin was achieved by a cosmetic makeover of the dinosaur, to rephrase Sarah Palin’s 2008 rhetoric about lipstick on pigs.

This was far more than a personality contest, however. As the New York Times clearly noted a week before the election, the outcome would be a voter mandate to end the drug war that has claimed over 60,000 lives since the outgoing president, Felipe Calderón, sent the state’s armed forces against his own people in 2007. The dilemma for the US and Mexican military establishments was how to continue, even intensify, their drug war in spite of public rejection. Could they circumvent public opinion and continue business-as-usual? The handsome, smiling Peña Nieto was their man. His image was that of a modern man from the fashion covers, not an oligarch in shades. López Obrador had to be stopped at all costs. In 2006, his opposition to NAFTA provoked American and Mexican corporations to spend millions on scary television ads describing him as another Castro, Chávez and Lula rolled into one. They barely defeated him, by less than 1 percent, in an election process in which the vote count was terminated arbitrarily with thousands of ballots uncounted. In response, López Obrador’s followers protested, shutting down access to Mexico City for several weeks.

This time, López Obrador went to great lengths to erase the image of a Mexican Chávez. He and the PRD made a radiant sunflower the image of their campaign, and he promised a new violence-reduction policy based on “abrazos, no balazos.” The English-language media translated “abrazos” to mean “hugs,” as if López Obrador was reinventing himself an elderly flower child. But López Obrador said on many occasions he was calling for economic aid from the United States instead of attack helicopters. He remained a dire threat to both NAFTA and the drug war, at least in the eyes of the corporate and military elites.

Complicating matters further, the Mexican Right also was soured on the drug war that they had so much to do with launching. For example, the former PAN president, Vicente Fox, who governed from 2000 to 2006, denounced the drug war as useless and a fraud only weeks before the July 1 election. This meant that any consensus in support of continuing the drug war was shredded even before the election. So how to overcome the democratic result and soldier on? It was clear before the election that US officials had a secret agreement with Peña Nieto to continue the military policy, though attempting to lessen civilian casualties. Three weeks before the election, one confident United States official told the New York Times that, from backroom discussions, “what we basically get is that [Peña Nieto] fully appreciates and understands that when/if he wins, he is going to keep working with us.“ It was a classic assertion of continued US dominance over the political process in Mexico, exercised from the shadows. Peña Nieto demonstrated his subservience by quiet trips to Washington, where he reassured Congressional leaders there would be no deals or truces with the cartels.

The escalation was confirmed further when Peña Nieto, on the eve of the election, made an extraordinary announcement that he would appoint a retired foreign military leader, Colombia’s Gen. Oscar Naranjo, as top adviser to Mexico’s drug war approach. Gen. Naranjo is famous for implementing Colombia’s military strategy of killing leaders of the Medellín and Cali cocaine cartels in a dirty war that involved ultra-right paramilitaries along with US ground troops, advisers and special forces. The appointment of Naranjo confirmed the 2010 prediction of former US drug czar Robert Bonner that Mexico would be the next Colombia, the scene of the next war against the cartels (which in many cases had shifted their operations out of Colombia to Mexico and Central America). Writing in Foreign Affairs, Bonner warned that otherwise Mexico would become an intolerably dangerous narco-state on the US border. Bonner also wrote blithely that Mexico’s “increase in the number of drug-related homicides, although unfortunate, is a sign of progress.”

Sure enough, two days after the election, Peña Nieto published a New York Times op-ed that vaguely promising to “re-examine” the drug war, but specifically promised to create a 40,000-member “gendarmerie” like Colombia’s and expand Mexico’s federal police by at least 35,000 officers. Unnamed “analysts” predicted a “surge” like that in Iraq in 2007, then led by Gen. David Petraeus, now CIA director.

The public can expect sensational headlines if Mexico captures or kills one or more “kingpins” in the new phase, on the model of killing Pablo Escobar in Colombia or Osama bin Laden in his Pakistan hideaway. While the kingpin strategy reaps media and political benefits, it is far from clear that stability or democratic reforms are the results. The kingpin strategy typically results in even greater violence as new actors do battle in a brutal turf competition. While homicides in Colombia did fall by a slender 2 percent last year, there was a 25 percent jump in the number of kidnapping and massacre victims, and the defense minister was forced to resign. The killing of Colombian labor and human rights leaders continues, and according to Massachusetts Representative Jim McGovern, there is a “consolidation of paramilitary and criminal networks in many parts of the country.”

If he intends to continue the drug war without a democratic mandate, Peña Nieto will have to face down powerful and newly energized opposition at home, where there is increased resistance not only to the violence but also the neoliberal economic policies that leave millions of unemployed young people ripe for cartel recruitment. This year brought increased public anger against the Mexican media duopoly of Televisa and Azteca. First, there are the one-third of Mexican voters who supported López Obrador, denied Peña Nieto a majority in parliament and maintained their popular majority in Mexico City. These are loyal voters who know that politics matters. As a result of PRD leadership, Mexico City is a viable municipality within what many believe is a failed state. Mexico City has a great public university, cultural treasures, a working transit system, subsidized healthcare, abortion services and permits same-sex marriage. There is no public threat from the cartels, the airport shootout being an exception to the norm.

The PRD, which broke from the PRI more than a decade ago, believes with significant evidence that it has been robbed of the presidency twice since 1988, first, when its presidential candidate Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas was denied by egregious computer-driven fraud, and second, when López Obrador lost by 0.58 percent in 2006. Otherwise, Mexico would have joined the new populist left that took power through elections in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Uruguay, Honduras and Paraguay (the latter two countries, along with Haiti, have suffered coups since the progressive victories). Instead of moving left, Mexico moved towards neoliberalism, resulting in greater inequality, unemployment, poverty and dependency on El Norte.

Besides the thriving PRD base, Peña Nieto faces additional challenges from a new student movement composed of tomorrow’s likely leaders, known as #YoSoy132 (#IAm132). The hashtag comes from an incident during the presidential campaign when many students disrupted a speech by Peña Nieto, reminding him of the brutal repression he inflicted in 2006 as governor of Mexico State, against hundreds of people in the town of San Salvador Atenco. In response to the protest, Peña Nieto and the PRI accused the students of being agitators paid by the PRD and AMLO. In rage, 131 students quickly posted a YouTube video showing their official student ID cards and denied they were paid by anyone. Thousands more then adopted the hashtag #YoSoy132, and began a succession of marches and vigils up through election day. 

In this spring protest, the students turned their wrath against the Mexican media monopolies as well, and even forced a publicly televised debate with two of the presidential candidates. Peña Nieto refused to participate, and the debate went forward, a direct result of the student’s action. The students also had some effect on the electoral outcome, since most of them voted for López Obrador while staying independent and beyond the limits of campaign politics. I met several of them in Mexico City, and they left the clear impression that their new spirit will not fade away. They engaged in animated debates over whether their demands for political and media reform went far enough, with several telling me they aspired to be more like the Dream Act students in the US who risked deportation to force Barack Obama to recognize their demands.

In 1968, hundreds of similar students protesting in the center of Mexico City were shot, killed or “disappeared” by the security forces, their bodies taken away and their stories covered up. That era of state repression led to guerrilla insurgencies in several parts of Mexico, including the Zapatista uprising in 1994, which was led in part by former students who immersed themselves within indigenous communities in Chiapas state. The new generation of #YoSoy132 shares the legacy of 1968, but it completely different in basic ways. Instead of facing a military dictatorship posing as a democracy, they see themselves living under a de facto media dictatorship that defines a delusional reality for a majority of Mexicans. Instead of bullets aimed at their backs, they face media images targeting their minds. Instead of the face of fascism, they have a televised celebrity presidency. It’s therefore logical that the new insurgency is based on Facebook and Twitter, de facto guerrilla tools for breaking a media monopoly.

The other immediate challenge to Peña Nieto is from the rapid and spontaneous rise of a new peace movement against the drug war led by the poet Javier Sicilia, whose son Juanelo was killed on March 28, 2011, sparking a surprising outpouring of support for ending the violence. This May 23, five weeks before the election, Sicilia came to a rally at Estela de Luz (the Pillar of Light), to speak in solidarity with thousands of the Mexican students. Sicilia told the #YoSoy132 rally that “I would want to see my son here. I can’t see him, but I see him in the thousands of youth here.” He went on to say “we are at a historical breaking point, a crisis of the world’s civilization” and, he envisioned “coming through the cracks in the state and crumbling economy to build something new.” Sicilia’s poetic cry, under Mexico’s own Pillar of Light, seemed to echo Leonard Cohen’s lyrical vision of change in Anthem, that “there’s a crack/ a crack in everything/ that’s how the light gets in.”

Sicilia is planning to lead a caravan of Mexican families victimized by the drug war, and their US supporters, through the United States, beginning in Los Angeles August 17, and marching all the way to the White House.

There is another question that remains obscure in Mexico’s new political situation, that of whether Subcommandante Marcos and the Zapatistas will be heard from again. In 2001, after a nationwide mobilization similar to the 1963 March on Washington, Mexico’s political establishment rejected the 1996 San Andreas Accords, which would have provided rights and autonomy to Mexico’s indigenous. Thus excluded, Marcos and the Zapatistas eventually launched The Other Campaign (La Otra Campaña) in 2006, campaigning against the PAN, the PRI and PRD and even López Obrador, who may have lost the election as a result of Zapatista abstentions. The Zapatistas remained entirely silent during this year’s election period, not an unusual habit for them, but one giving rise to wild rumors, ranging from Marcos’ having “health problems” to one claim I heard, from a longtime supporter, that the Subcommandante had been displaced in an internal struggle. Since the conditions of Mexico’s indigenous and small farmers will be perpetuated by Peña Nieto’s neoliberal policies, renewed insurgencies are always a threat to the elite.

It is noteworthy that a serious peace movement has not brought much public attention to the drug war until the recent efforts spearheaded recently by Sicilia. There was a movement known as “No Mas Sangre” before Sicilia, but Sicilia catalyzed a larger movement and services for victims.

In the United States, the work to legitimize medical marijuana, pushed by such groups as the Soros-supported Drug Policy Alliance, have made gains in several states, only to be opposed by the Obama administration and domestic drug warriors. Such campaigns, however, tended to aim at ending the grossest irrationalities of the domestic prohibition on pot, not the greater horrors of the militarized drug war. In past decades, however, tens of thousands of Americans, including members of Congress, protested the dirty wars in Central America where secret operatives smuggled weapons and money to paramilitaries coordinated out of the CIA. But the political threat of being marginalized as “soft on narcotraffickers” has stifled the potential of protest until now (just as liberals rarely have opposed the drug wars at home for fear of being depicted as “soft on gangs”).

Before a new peace movement against the drug war can take root, at least two illusions have to be pierced. The first is that it’s largely a Mexican affair, with the United States playing only an inexpensive advisory role. This narrative plays on the unspoken racial assumption that Mexicans are inherently savage, a variation of the imperial theme that dark-skinned people care little about individual life. As one example among many, a very good article by William Finnegan in the New Yorker describes the violent Mexican cartels penetrating the placid world of the Guadalajara International Book Fair, “a civilized place where life goes on unmarked by the violence that disfigures large parts of Mexico.” On May 9, Finnegan writes, this dream world was disrupted by the sight of eighteen headless and dismembered bodies left on the road by a popular restaurant. The ruthless narco-terrorists known as Los Zetas were blamed. The victims were innocent citizens and students, not unsavory terrorists. The Zetas were planning even more beheadings and massacres.

Finnegan neglects to mention that Los Zetas are rogue special forces units trained largely by the United States. In what must be more than an oversight, Finnegan describes them as “deserters from the Mexican military’s elite special forces, recruited in the late nineteen-nineties as bodyguards and enforcers for the leader of the then formidable Gulf cartel.” In fact, the Zetas—originally known as the Grupo Aeromovil de Fuerzes Especiales, “went through an intensive, six-month counterinsurgency and urban warfare training course from American, French and Israeli specialists,” according to crime reporter Jerry Langton, whose sources include the US Embassy in Mexico, the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI.

The second distortion in public understanding is that the 60,000 dead Mexicans were all involved in the drug trade, and therefore deserved to die. In short, good riddance. But as El Universal noted in an October 2010 headline, the killings are at least as much a case of “social cleansing” (limpieza social) than a drug war between combatants. Outgoing Mexican president Felipe Calderón often proclaimed that 90 percent of the dead were mere criminals, but fewer than 5 percent of the homicides have ever been investigated. Based on newspaper accounts from Juárez, an epicenter of the violence, Molly Molloy and Charles Bowden concluded in their book El Sicario that “the overwhelming majority of the victims are ordinary people, small business proprietors who refused to pay extortion demands, mechanics, bus drivers, a woman selling burritos from a cart on the street, a clown juggling at an intersection, boys selling news papers, gum and perhaps nickel bags of cocaine or heroin on a street corner…”

To be clear, this is a war in which American forces are directly, if discreetly, engaged and where civilians are a huge proportion of the casualties. Immediately after Calderón launched his military offensive in December of 2006, President Bush initiated the $1.7 billion Plan Mexico, modeled on the earlier Plan Colombia, with the major emphasis on Bell and Black Hawk helicopters, military transport planes, gamma ray and X-ray scanners, telecommunications software, sniffing dogs and all the rest. Ginger Thompson, one of the best New York Times reporters on the region, has written recently of the US military’s “expanding its role. Sending new CIA operatives and retired military personnel…[and] considering private security contractors” to Mexico, in an effort that she says has shown few results. For the first time, she writes, the CIA and US military personnel are working side by side to plan operations, which are “devised to get around Mexican laws that prohibit foreign military and police from operating on its soil.” The Obama administration is sending aerial drones deep into Mexican territory to track the traffickers and coordinate de facto counterterrorism efforts. One US official at the Northern Command says, “the military is trying to take what it did in Afghanistan and do the same in Mexico.” This isn’t hyperbole; the US ambassador to Mexico is Earl Anthony Wayne, who was America’s deputy ambassador in Kabul from 2009 through 2011.

Despite the US administration’s rationale that violence must be prevented from “spilling over the border,” the Mexican cartels already operate in more than 200 American cities. On American television one can watch heavily camouflaged, heavily armed US forces hunting down young Mexican immigrants in the redwood “jungles” of Northern California. These hard-working immigrants have not only slipped into US cities but those of British Columbia as well, where several thousand new Mexican indocumentados, including Zeta operatives, are carving roles in the multibillion-dollar harvest and distribution of “BC Bud.” Up to 90 percent of 30,000 illegal firearms seized in Mexico—in 2008 alone—were bought with cartel money and smuggled south from Arizona and Texas, according to an ATF official. To complete the vicious circle, the New York Times reported last December 4 that “so far there are few signs that laundering the money has disrupted the cartel’s operations and little evidence that Mexican drug traffickers are feeling any serious pain.” In 2010, the DEA seized $1 billion in drug cash assets, and Mexico took an additional $26 million, out of an estimated flow of $17–39 billion.

Meanwhile, President Obama, in a 2010 atmosphere of political hysteria, spent $600 million to deploy an additional 1,500 border agents and surveillance drones to supplement some 18,000 American troops defending a multibillion-dollar wall against apparently very slippery Mexicans.

All these realities seem like scenes taken directly out of the popular—and darkly prophetic—Showtime series Weeds, starring Mary-Louise Parker as a widower who sells marijuana to make a living, commutes through underground tunnels from San Diego to Mexico, falls in love and has a baby with a Mexican narco-mayor, is pressured to become a DEA informant and is chased through North America by Mexican Sicarios. (Weeds is a favored alternative to the mainstream news around my house.)

It is more than forty years since the 1971 US Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse recommended decriminalization of marijuana and Richard Nixon chose to start the “war on drugs” instead. Nixon’s first budget for this war, $100 million, has grown thirty-fold, to over $15 billion, adjusted for inflation, with little sign of reduced imports or consumption. This, not Afghanistan, would be America’s longest war, if it was recognized or admitted. Over these four decades, according to the AP, Americans have spent $49 billion to secure our borders, $33 billion on “Just Say No” advertisements, and $450 billion on federal prisoners where half the inmates are drug offenders. The total cost has been $1 trillion and our national drug czar, Gil Kerlikowske, conceded in 2010 that “it has not been successful.”

Can America just say no to the drug war addiction?

The answer is far from clear, though the drug war’s failures are manifest. Political cowardice combined with pressure from drug war interest groups will sustain it for a time. But the pressures from south of the border, symbolized by Mexico’s voter mandate, may be decisive in finally forcing the madness to end. Last year the Global Commission on Drug Policy issued a report demanding alternatives, including responsible plans for legalization. The commission included former presidents of Mexico, Colombia and Brazil, Kofi Annan, George Schultz, Paul Volcker and other world leaders. Jimmy Carter joined with Jesse Jackson in publishing an op-ed calling for the US government to adopt the commission’s recommendations. Moises Naim, the editor of Foreign Policy, wrote that “2012 will go down in history as the year when the pillars of Washington’s drug policy began to erode.”

A critical moment was the US-sponsored Summit of the Americas in Cartegena, Colombia, best-known in this country as the place where Obama’s secret service agents went on a spree with prostitutes and alcohol. (It is still unknown whether drugs were involved.) Allies of the United States, including the presidents of Colombia, Costa Rica and Guatemala, vocally opposed the US policy and demanded steps towards legalization, or at least decriminalization, of marijuana. Both Obama and Vice President Joe Biden flatly rejected legalization, but, for the first time, welcomed the discussion itself as legitimate. The two American leaders attempted to cover themselves politically by boasting, in Biden’s words, that “the reason it warrants a discussion is, on examination you realize there are more problems with legalization than with non-legalization.”

It was a classic high point in the history of official doublespeak. Obama and Biden hid the fact that they had been forced into the discussion by Latin American leaders (even Calderón, then still Mexico’s president, called for “market alternatives” to the drug war). More importantly, declaring the acceptability of discussing legalization lifted an irrational prohibition of many decades—not a prohibition on drug use but on the very discussion of the subject in respectable company.

One must assume that Obama and Biden knew what they were doing by their coordinated remarks. While continuing to support the drug war they were inviting the public opposition into mainstream dialogue, what Naim meant by the pillars’ beginning to erode.

A conversation may be the ideal place to begin. Just as the US anti-war movement has discovered that the slogan “Out Now” is not sufficient to convince the undecided public or policy makers to end a foreign war, calls to simply legalize drugs fail to answer important questions and cause the continued marginalization of opponents. The process of defining an alternative needs research, debate and consensus on questions such as:

whether to form an official bi-national commission to hold hearings on a plan to demilitarize and medicalize the current war;

whether to begin the new regulatory regime with marijuana, and next consider cocaine and methamphetamines, the main three narcotics in the Mexico-US traffic;

whether to limit the drugs to certified medical use at first;

whether substitutes like methodone are feasible for other drugs;

how to legalize and rationalize production and distribution in the face of certain cartel opposition;

whether tax revenues should be reinvested in treatment and advertising the dangers of drug addiction;

whether sales to minors should be criminalized;

whether pro-drug advertising should be banned;

whether campaign contributions from the legalized drug industry should be banned.

In considering whether and how to lift the prohibition on drugs, any new policies should be far more effective than those of the 1930s policies which ended the prohibitions on alcohol only to enact new laws and regulations that promoted alcoholism. Any drug policy reversal would have to be linked, in policy and politics, to reductions in mass incarceration and greater investments in treatment and education. Free-market advocates of legalization (the right to become an addict) will have to compromise and coexist with advocates of regulation and government social programs. Law enforcement will have to be persuaded that the present “war” is a failure based on cost-benefit analysis, and that safer alternatives exist. Insurmountable obstacles? If so, the costs and suffering will mount. But building a peace movement against the Vietnam War seemed insurmountable at first too.

The White House tantalizingly hinted at its future intentions in the magazine GQ only this week. “According to ongoing discussions with Obama aides and associates, if the president wins a second term, he plans to tackle another American war that has so far been successful only in perpetuating more misery: the four decades of the drug war.… from his days as a state senator in Illinois, Obama has considered the drug war to be a failure.” Apparently this was one leak the White House positively approved.

Whether Obama is re-elected or not, the Mexican election provides new momentum to end the drug war. But it cannot be ended without a significant shift in American public opinion and priorities. Mexico and Central America have carried nearly all the burden so far. Dismantling the institutions of the drug war will take cross-border solidarity between social movements, political leaders, clergy, public health professionals, journalists and elements of the establishment who simply have had enough.

In what might escalate into a major setback for the US government, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has taken refuge in the Ecuadoran embassy in London and is seeking political asylum in that Latin American country. 

Relations between the United States and most Latin American countries—and many others around the world—are sure to be aggravated if the White House reacts negatively or tries to block an Ecuadoran asylum decision. It seems inconceivable that Ecuador will simply turn Assange over to US or UK authorities, setting the stage for a showdown with global repercussions. President Rafael Correa is a progressive and populist economist who already has expelled a US military base from his country, survived an attempted coup and capture by right-wing military plotters and expelled an American ambassador in 2011 based on WikiLeaks revelations. Last year an Ecuadoran court fined Chevron $8.6 billion for damage to the Amazon basin, a decision that Correa called “the most important in the history of the country.” Correa also violated the tenets of US-imposed neoliberal policies by endorsing Venezuela and Bolivia in refusing debt repayments to the International Monetary Fund in 2008. 

In a preview of things to come, Correa and Assange participated in a televised question-and-answer session last month on the Russia-sponsored network RT. Moscow has been a strong supporter of Assange, with Vladimir Putin nominating the WikiLeaks founder for a Nobel prize. 

US-aligned NGOs like Freedom House are attacking the Ecuadoran government for its attempts to contain private media corporations hostile to Correa’s politics and domestic economic agenda. Correa generally is aligned with the left bloc of Latin American countries, although he enjoys positive diplomatic relations across most of the continent. In an example of the mainstream media distortion of all things Latin American, Reuters recently described Correa as a critic of US “imperialism” in quotation marks. Nevertheless, the US has leverage in Ecuador as the country’s largest trading partner, but with China and Latin American partners rising.

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker holds his first cabinet meeting at the state Capitol Wednesday, June 6, 2012, in Madison, after Walker beat Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett in a recall election. (AP Photo/Andy Manis)
 
The triumph of Scott Walker and the Tea Party Republicans in Wisconsin is heartbreaking for the many thousands who devoted over a year of their lives to one of the most inspired social movements of the current century.

Electoral campaigns are governed by deadlines and voting results, unlike social movements, which can ebb and flow for decades. The pain of a stunning defeat inevitably takes a psychic toll on its participants, similar in ways to a seven-game World Series. It takes time to recover, and some never will.

But politics never stops. If Democrat John Lehman holds onto his narrow lead over Republican Van Wanggarrd for a state Senate seat, Wisconsin Democrats will wrest majority control of that chamber from the Republicans, setting the stage for another showdown this November, when sixteen of thirty-three senators will face election. The legislature ordinarily is out of session during the summer, possibly limiting the ability of the new Democratic majority to foil Walker’s triumphal agenda.

But the big picture is disastrous for Democrats and progressives. Walker beat Democrat Tom Barrett solidly, 53 percent to 46 percent, in a campaign fueled by unprecedented levels of corporate money. The Tea Party, which became relatively isolated during the Republican presidential campaign, is back in the saddle. Its triumph in Wisconsin will embolden advocates of slashing social programs and deregulating the economy to become even more adamant during the coming national budget debates.

President Obama may benefit politically in the short term if the Tea Party overplays its hand in the immediate budget and presidential debates. But Obama disillusioned many Democrats in Wisconsin by his tepid support for the recall and the foolish White House argument that “he had a full plate and did not have time to come.” Obama still holds a slender lead over Romney in most battleground states.

What explains the defeat in Wisconsin?

From the beginning there was a utopian expectation among many progressives that the recall effort was such a righteous cause that it was destined to succeed. One leader of the utopian faction was The Nation’s brilliant narrator John Nichols, who is described by his wife, Mary Bottari, as one of the most idealistic bearers of good tidings in progressive America. MSNBC pundits Ed Schultz and Rachel Maddow were swept up in the drama as well and expected the election to be so close that returns would take all night. Michael Moore wrote that the sight of the Capitol Rotunda packed with protesters “would bring tears to your eyes,” and that he was witnessing Corporate America’s “come-to-Jesus moment” in Wisconsin. Despite all the hope, the devil won big.

The uprising in Wisconsin was indeed an inspiring social movement in its tenacity, scale, cross-section of activists, range of tactics and permanent duration in spite of freezing snows. Wisconsin seemed to be the place where progressive Americans finally were drawing the line against anti-labor legislation, budget cuts, Tea Party extremism and plutocrats like the Koch brothers.

But at least one year ago there were internal labor polls showing the recall would be very difficult to win. There was no way, however, that a labor leader was going to stand in front of the social movement with a yellow flashing light. Instead, to its credit, labor chose to support the fight in the hope that sheer will power, or mistakes made by Walker, would overcome the odds.

Now the mic checks have to be put on hold long enough for a reality check.

The recall was a concrete test of whether reactionary or progressive populism (the traditions of Joseph McCarthy or Robert La Follette) would prevail in a state where the vote is 85 percent white. White men voted 55–58 percent for Walker, compared to the 54 percent of all women and the 94 percent of African-Americans who voted against him. In those stark numbers is a message that lots of white people are opposed to their taxes going to African-Americans or the poor, especially in a deep recession where they have no confidence in the government.

Neither were the majority of Wisconsin voters moved to replace a governor they had just elected in 2010 with a Democratic candidate they had rejected in that race. These were the same voters that rejected a respected progressive senator, Russ Feingold, for a little-known pro–Tea Party Republican in that same year, 2010.

It is possible, however, that the gloom will lift if Walker and the Tea Party go too far. An analogy might be Richard Nixon’s triumphant presidential victory in 1972 after the progressive left, feminists and peace advocates had taken over the Democratic Party through the primaries, which allowed citizen participation for the first time. McGovern was crushed, in part because his running mate, Thomas Eagleton, was removed from the ticket after it was revealed that he had undergone shock treatments for a mental illness. That wasn’t the primary reason for McGovern’s huge defeat, though it broke his momentum for months. The key to Nixon’s success was the refusal of the mainstream media to pay attention to the unfolding Watergate crisis until after the November election. Here’s the similarity with Walker’s situation today; the Wisconsin governor is being investigated by prosecutors on serious charges of ethics violations. Now that the election is over, the question of possible criminal charges may gain greater public attention. As Nixon fell from triumph to disgrace, the same destiny might await Walker. It’s too early to know.

A more profound unknown is how organized labor, with their numbers declining, will respond to the Wisconsin defeat. It is a true institutional crisis for labor and the Democrats, the greatest since the conflicts of the 1960s. The combination of Citizens United, a pro-corporate Supreme Court and the Tea Party grip on Congress and many statehouses means that the crucial base of the Democratic Party’s campaign funding—organized labor—is facing extinction, with no comparable alternative in sight.

At the risk of offending liberal-left critics of Obama, he often is to the “left” of the Democratic Party establishment on most of these issues. True, he danced with the Republicans in the opening round of the budget debates. But he wants the Bush-era tax cuts to expire on incomes over $250,000—against the opposition of Wall Street’s Senator Chuck Schumer and many Senate Democrats. He wanted some sort of “public option” on healthcare—over the objections of Senator Max Baucus. He once expressed interested in the Robin Hood Tax, but was undercut by his own economic team. He sought to regulate derivatives—but Congressman Barney Frank told him the votes weren’t there. And now Bill Clinton, Ed Rendell, Deval Partick and Cory Booker, among other Democratic leaders, are openly deriding the Obama campaign’s attacks on Mitt Romney’s record at Bain Capital. It’s hard to recall such backstabbing of an incumbent president by leaders of his own party during a re-election fight.

Since the Clinton era, the Democratic Party has joined the Republicans in seeking Wall Street donations. Wall Street is the top investor in the Romney campaign and its allied Super PACs. And Wall Street is the “single largest source of cash for the national Democratic Party’s various campaign committee,” well ahead of entertainment and real estate developer donors, notes Thomas Edsall in the New York Times. Given these polluted streams of campaign money, Obama is “cautious” in his criticisms of Wall Street, while Romney is an “outspoken proponent of the industry’s agenda,” Edsall concludes.

Given these toxic trends, it is entirely possible that by November, Tea Party–driven Republicans will control the White House, Supreme Court and both houses of Congress, pushing the States towards a 1929-style crisis. Or Obama will be re-elected to govern alone in a sea of conservative followers of Ayn Rand and Democratic lifers too timid to fight.

The outcome in Wisconsin only makes that scenario more likely.

With a Western withdrawal from Afghanistan “irreversible” according to NATO, the Pentagon and CIA’s focus is increasingly concentrated on Yemen, where diplomatic or political solutions are impossible anytime soon.

From the US perspective, Yemen is the center of gravity in their battle to subdue Al Qaeda-linked jihadist cells that plan to attack the US. There is a kernel of truth to the claim. For example, the so-called “underwear bomber,” Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, began his December 2009 mission in Yemen. Printer cartridges equipped with bombs were sent in 2010 from Yemen. And the US-born Yemeni cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, killed by a CIA drone last September, actively counseled many jihadists there.

But the long-term futility of US counterterrorism operations in Yemen was underscored on May 21 when a suicide bombing killed hundreds in Sana, the 2,500 year old capital, “stunning the country’s beleaguered government and delivering a stark setback to the American counterterrorism campaign,” according to the New York Times.   

The bombing was in retaliation for the escalation of US military intervention, including at least twenty US Special Forces advisers assisting an offensive in southern Yemen. US forces were driven out of Yemen last year when a popular movement toppled the long-time dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh, only to return in recent weeks. At least eighteen US drone strikes have been reported just since March.

Under the guise of a secret war against Al Qaeda, the US continues to intervene in an ongoing ethnic civil war in Yemen, a conflict that cannot possibly be “won” by a foreign military power. While professing no other aim but counterterrorism, the US funds and advises a shaky new Sunni regime that is pitted militarily against northern Shiite tribes and southern secessionists. (See Jeremy Scahill, “The Dangerous US Game in Yemen”)

According to the Congressional Research Service, Al Qaeda is launching “a wide scale domestic insurgency” and transforming itself from an Al Qaeda affiliate to a “more Taliban-like movement as well,” known as Ansar al Sharia. One of the leaders of Ansar al Sharia is Tariq al Zahab, brother of the widow of the slain Anwar al-Awlaki.

In the wake of the civil war, 150,000 people have become refugees from a single southern province, Abyan, since May 2011, according to the United Nations. This sectarian civil war threatens to reverberate across regional boundaries because Saudi Arabia worries that the insurrection on its southern flank will spread to include minority Shiite tribes in the eastern provinces of their royal kingdom.

The taxpayer cost of the Yemen war is almost as secret as the US military role. For FY 2013, the White House is asking for $72.6 million in State Department funding. But there are at least seventeen separate aid channels for Yemen involving multiple federal agencies. Total US foreign aid to Yemen from FY 2009-2011 averaged $185.3 million a year.

As for military appropriations, the Pentagon’s “train and assist” budget is the main source of overt assistance to Yemen. Under President Bush, Yemen received $30.3 million from Section 1206 of the National Defense Authorization Act. In the past two fiscal years Yemen obtained $221.8 million in 1206 money. Yemen, as of FY 2010, became the world’s largest recipient of 1206 funds, ahead of second-place Pakistan. These sums do not include US funds for special operations or drone strikes.

Yemen will become another billion-dollar war this year, measured in direct funding. The country has a population of 24 million, less than that of California.

Obama is trying to prevent the inexorable slide into another quagmire requiring direct military intervention. Last year he admonished a Pentagon general for describing the military role in Yemen as a “campaign” and insisted the US is not at war. At the recent NATO meeting, the president said “there’s no doubt that in a country that is still poor, that is still unstable, it is attracting a lot of folks that previously might have been in” Pakistan’s tribal areas. It was an astonishing remark: in the long war thus far, the US has caused the birth of Al Qaeda in Iraq, helped them take root in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union, pushed them from Afghanistan to Pakistan and now to Yemen (not to mention multiple cells in other countries). There is little intellectual or political capacity to understand that counterterrorism only relocates and inspires new terrorism.

Congress has done nothing so far to constrain the runaway escalation in Yemen, suggesting that Congress only reacts to American casualties and headlines. During the popular upheaval against the US-backed Saleh regime in 2010-2011, most US aid for training had to be frozen. When it resumed, the Congress instructed that the funds be used only for counterterrorism operations against Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula “and its affiliates”—a meaningless proviso. One January 2010 report by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee concluded “the ROYG [Republic of Yemen government] was likely diverting US counter-terrorism assistance for use in the war against the Houthis, and that temptation will persist.”

In summary, no one really knows if the Pentagon and CIA can suppress both terrorism and civil war while the National Security Council promotes a three-step “Yemen Strategic Plan” of crushing Al Qaeda, investing in economic aid and a global effort at stabilization.  

It’s doubtful whether the Long War can continue without US ground troops, but that’s the only alternative that can be imagined in the national security mindset. RAND historian Seth Jones, like many defense intellectuals, emphasizes that we are in a “Long War” that “will be measured in decades.”

Such dim and narrow views mean there’s no light at the end of the tunnel, which is why we are going down the rabbit hole in Yemen.

“It’s all there in Tolstoy”, Len told me as he lay dying last April. Stricken in the winter, lying now in a hospice in the Village, this would be his final spring. He was alert, watching news of the Arab Spring, but was entering a deeper state where his friends could not go. When I asked if he was finding a spiritual meaning, he said he was reading War and Peace, adding “it’s all there.” I didn’t get the page number in Tolstoy, and never saw him again.
 
Now, more than a year later, I was able to open War and Peace to the pages I believe Len was reading. [Modern Library ed., pp. 911-12]. These excerpts are to be shared with you all.
 
“Prince Andrev did not only know that he would die, but felt indeed that he was dying; that he was already half-dead. He experienced a sense of aloofness from everything earthly, and a strange and joyous lightness in his being. Neither impatient, nor troubled, he lay awaiting what was before him…The menacing, the eternal, the unknown, and remote, the presence of which he had never ceased to feel during the whole course of his life, was now close to him, and – from that strange lightness of being, that he experienced, almost comprehensible and palpable…
 
In the past he had dreaded the end. Twice he had experienced that terribly agonizing feeling of the dread of death, of the end, and now he ceased to understand it…The first time [after being wounded in war] that he knew death was facing him…he had come to himself after his wound, and instantly, as though set free from the cramping bondage of life, there had sprung up in his soul that flower of love, eternal, free, not dependent on this life, he had no more fear, and no more thought of death…
 
As he fell asleep, he was still thinking of what he had been thinking about all the time – of life and of death. And most of death. He felt he was closer to it. “Love? What is love?”, he thought. “Love hinders death. Love is life. All,, all that I understand, I understand only because I love. All is, all exists only because I love. All is bound up in love alone. Love is God, and dying means for me a particle of love, to go back to the universal and eternal source of love.” These thoughts seems to him comforting. But they were only thoughts. Something was wanting in them; there was something one-sided and personal. Something intellectual: they were not self-evident. And there was uneasiness, too, and obscurity. He fell asleep.
 
“He dreamed he was lying in the very room in which he was lying in reality, but that he was not ill, but quite well. Many people of various sorts, indifferent people of no importance, were present. He was talking and disputing with them about some trivial matter. They seemed to be preparing to set off somewhere. Prince Andrew had a dim feeling that all this was of no consequence, and that he had other matters of graver moment to think of, but still he went on uttering empty witticisms of some sort that that surpised them. By degrees all these people began to disappear, and the one thing left was the question of closing the door. He got up and went towards the door to close it and bolt it. Everything  depended on whether he were on time to shut it or not. He was going, he was hurrying, but his legs would not move, and he knew that he would not have time to shut the door, but still he was straining every painful effort to do so. And an agonizing terror came upon him. And that terror was the fear of death; behind the door stood It. But while he is clumsily and helplessly struggling towards the door, that something awful is already pressing against the other side of it, and forcing the door open. Something not human – death – is forcing the door open and he must hold it to. He clutches at the door with a last straining effort – to shut it is impossible, at least to hold it – but his efforts are feeble and awkward; and under the pressure of that awful thing, the door opens and shuts again.
 
“Once more IT was pressing on the door from without. His last, supernatural efforts are in vain, and both leaves of the door are noiselessly opened. IT comes in, and it is DEATH. And Prince Andrew died.
 
“But at the instant in his dream when he died, Prince Andrev recollected that he was asleep; and at the instant when he was dying, he made an effort and waked up.
 
“’Yes, that was death. I died and I waked up. Yes, death is an awakening’”, flashed with sudden light into his soul, and the veil that had till then hidden the unknown was lifted before his spiritual vision. He felt, as it were, set free from some force that held him in bondage, and was aware of that strange lightness of being  that had never left him since…
 
“With his awakening from sleep that day there began an awakening from life. And in relation to the duration of life it seemed to him not more prolonged than the awakening from sleep in relation to the duration of a dream. There was nothing violent or terrible in this relatively slow awakening…
 
“Natasha and Princess Marya wept too now. But they did not weep for their personal sorrow; they wept from the emotion and awe that filled their souls before the simple and solemn mystery of death that had been accomplished before their eyes.”
 

Torie Osborn’s campaign for a West Los Angeles assembly seat (50th District) is stirring excitement and mobilizing grassroots volunteers like nothing else so far this year in dreary California, where budget deficits keep deepening and politics decays despite a Democratic governor and legislative majority.

Osborn, a leader of the LGBT community since the AIDS epidemic, the former executive of the nonprofit Liberty Hill Foundation, which supports community-based organizing across Los Angeles, has motivated a solid core of young volunteers, appeared at eighty house parties, raised over $750,000 from 2,200 campaign contributors (many who gave $100 or less) and won eleven endorsements from local Democratic clubs across a district including Santa Monica, West Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Pacific Palisades and Malibu. Recently, inspired by her experience in the 2008 Obama campaign, Osborn has been organizing boot camps where young activists become trained organizers.

(Full disclosure: I represented the district from 1982 through 2000 and support Osborn. I was asked by The Nation to provide this commentary.)

Mike Bonin, chief of staff for LA councilman Bill Rosendahl, calls Osborn “the full Hillel,” someone who is driven by the rabbi’s three questions: If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I only for myself, who am I? If not now, when? “Some people are inspired by a good workout or a sunset,” Bonin says, “but Torie seems to get a twinkle in her eye when she sees someone new growing into their own power.”

One would think this is Osborn’s moment. Almost twenty years ago, she led an embattled LGBT delegation in a White House meeting with Bill Clinton. Today, after decades of political struggle, Barack Obama supports same-sex marriage. With her record of turning apparently lost causes into mainstream successes, Osborn has a rare credibility when she now declares she will find a way to achieve progressive taxation and single-payer healthcare in a state mired in stalemate and dysfunction.

But Osborn is battling more than just her chief opponent, Assembly member Betsy Butler. She’s up against the Sacramento-based machine of Democratic Speaker John Perez, a progressive former labor organizer. Perez, who is gay himself, backs Butler, still serving her first Assembly term, who has moved into Osborn’s district from a seat that was reapportioned since Butler’s election in 2010. There is little overlap—estimated at less than 2 percent of voters—between Butler’s old seat, which stretched from Marina del Rey to the South Bay, and the district where she is running against Osborn. For Butler to call herself an incumbent confuses the difference between holding an office somewhere and actually representing voters in a specific district. Butler moved into the 50th District from her over twenty-year residency in Marina del Ray, mistakenly and briefly opened a campaign office outside the borders of the new district, and is now campaigning for “re-election” among voters she hasn’t represented—with the Speaker’s full resources behind her.

The open primary is on June 5, and the top two candidates will face off in November. By that time, well over $2 million may be spent on the race, money that could have been spend against Republicans.

A third Democratic candidate, the hard-working mayor of Santa Monica, Richard Bloom, trails far behind Butler and Osborn in fundraising. While Republicans are less than one-fifth the vote and are unlikely to land their candidate, Brad Torgan, on the general election ballot, they can play a role in November by targeting their votes to whichever Democrat they prefer as the lesser evil. As an example, Butler can court the Republican vote in November by brandishing the endorsement of the landlord’s association, which hurts her in the June primary.

The reason for all this expensive Democratic waste is the Speaker’s Machiavellian belief that an Assembly Speaker always must protect an incumbent member—even when a new incumbent is switching districts. That this law is less than absolute, however, is shown in Osborn’s endorsements from two former Assembly speakers: Representative Karen Bass, who shares Osborn’s experience in community-based organizing, and LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who once employed Osborn to promote public-private partnerships.

(I personally experienced a similar situation twenty years ago when then-Speaker Willie Brown “disappeared” my Assembly district in a reapportionment. Brown redistributed portions of my seat to loyal incumbents, since I was an independent and they were loyal to Brown’s machine. I won the primary anyway, but by a 1 percent margin.)

The Sacramento speaker’s powers are many and little known to the apathetic public, which is why Butler may have a chance. These powers include demanding big money from contributors who need his favor, influencing members of his caucus to support his candidate preferences and pressuring progressive groups like labor and environmentalists whose crucial legislative proposals often depend on his nod. He can manipulate the appointed state party delegates into endorsing his favored candidates. On occasion, he will “Speaker-ize” a bill or budget measure, which means he expects his members and allies to fall into line or face the consequences.

Speaker Perez did not reply to questions forwarded through his office, although a top representative granted a two-hour off-the-record discussion.

The Speaker is also known to deploy scores of legislative staff, willing or not, to hit the phones after-hours, pound on voters’ doors and flood a local district with fliers proclaiming that his candidates are the “Democratic choice” (or the environmental choice, or the firefighters choice, or lesbian choice, etc). Cut off from independent information on Sacramento inside baseball, the majority of Democratic voters are deeply influenced by these endorsements.

Former Assemblymember Jackie Goldberg, now an Osborn backer, happens to support these speaker’s powers as the only glue that holds an unruly caucus together. But, she says, progressive groups and legislators “are not gonna cross the speaker” on these issues. Goldberg, who endorsed Butler in 2010 in her old district, now sees the contest as between a “real game-changer” (Osborn) and a “good vote” but one loyal to the Speaker (Butler).

“Butler is running to represent Sacramento in this district, while Torie is running to represent this district in Sacramento,” says Mike Bonin, a Council staffer in LA. The Osborn campaign has real volunteers while Butler only enlists “voluntoids,” he dryly adds.

California voter approval of the Democratic-controlled legislature slinks along between 9 and 20 percent in recent Los Angeles Times and Field polls, ominous numbers for someone running as an insider incumbent. Despite Democratic majorities in both houses and control of all statewide offices, the Democratic Party seems chronically unable to deliver the minimum that voters want from their government: results. College tuitions keep rising, and college doors keep closing. School funding keeps declining. Wetlands and redwoods keep disappearing. Billions spent on mass transit do not reduce congestion and air pollution. To a disillusioned majority, all the Sacramento fights appear to be about slowing the rate of California’s decline.

The situation is ripe for rejuvenation. But the Speaker so far is disinclined to retreat from his expensive intervention in the Osborn-Butler primary, where he sides with the political status quo against a new arrival.

The Speaker might reread Shakespeare or historian Barbara Tuchman, both of whom chronicled how unbending political ego can bring down the powerful. Seen as tragedy, the Democratic establishment is attacking the very kind of candidate who might revive voter belief in their party.

Osborn is not just another progressive candidate. As she jokes, she’s “a lesbian with an MBA”—and more. After years of fighting for LGBT rights and other causes, she threw her energy into the 2008 Obama campaign because of her belief in the necessity of organizing broader coalitions. At the time, the LGBT community was in a losing and confusing battle over Proposition 8, which overturned the legalization of same-sex marriages in the state. In the midst of that battle, Osborn helped to obtain Obama’s endorsement of the “no on 8” position, which would have boosted support for the LGBT stance among African-American and Latino voters. After the campaign against Prop 8 went down to bitter defeat, Osborn was critical of what she called the “insularity” of the LGBT leadership who ran the campaign and failed to use Obama’s statement. She has some scars as a result.

Butler’s political career, until 2010, consisted of professional fundraising, the modern way many young activists work their way up the ladder. Butler was the top fundraiser for the California trial lawyer’s association, known by political insiders as an “anchor tenant” of the state Democratic Party. During December 2008, the trial lawyers helped fund a $14,000 retreat for legislators in California’s wine country to internally discuss the Sacramento budget stalemate. Such insider retreats are considered in the Sacramento world to be important lubricants in bringing interest groups together, but they are the stuff that angers and alienates many voters.

To her credit, Butler did pass legislation last year to ban a dangerous hormone-disrupter (BPA) from baby bottles and plastic sippy cuts, a victory long sought by the California League of Conservation Voters, for whom Butler once raised funds. But then Butler filled district mailboxes with thousands of plastic baby-bottles, manufactured in cheap-labor Mexico, to trumpet her achievement. The stunt backfired with many voters, and Butler’s phone banking crews were instructed to tell callers to give the empty bottles to mothers or charities.

Butler’s plastic bottle mailing was the brainchild of her consultant, Richie Ross, a legendary Sacramento consultant known for his anything-goes, negative-campaign tactics. Ross is a longtime consultant for the United Farm Workers, who now back Butler for sponsoring a bill allowing workers to sue negligent employers who violate state regulations against heat prostration. The cause is a worthy one and might succeed. But the Sacramento-based culture of liberal favors and fundraising cannot mask the sharp decline of unionized farm workers in the fields since Ross began as a UFW volunteer decades ago. Only a revival of a progressive organizing culture can accomplish that.

While Butler exposes her liberal side today, she was a vocal cheerleader for the military-industrial companies as a representative for the 53rd District. Voters on the Westside won’t be hearing of her recent Assembly resolution extolling Lockheed-Martin’s F-35 at a capitol-lawn cockpit demonstration this spring. The F-35 is widely known as the most overpriced Pentagon boondoggle in recent memory.

But perhaps most interesting is Butler’s claim of successfully working “across the aisle” with Republicans, as proven in the passage of SB 161, a new law that allows trained volunteers, in the absence of registered nurses, to administer the anti-seizure medication Diastat to school children with epilepsy. The Republican bill was fiercely opposed by organized labor, including nurses and teachers. Butler says she provided the “key vote” enabling the bill to pass out of the education committee, although the recorded vote there was 6-3. Then, however, Butler chose not to vote when the bill came to the floor for final passage. When I asked her why, Butler said she voted to move it out of committee so there could be a “fuller discussion.” She gave no reason for not voting, except to respond that “it’s done all the time, didn’t you do it when you were here?” (I couldn’t recall if I did.)

When I probed Butler to explain her differences with Osborn, she stressed that “we have to make hard decisions up here,” and immediately dropped the comment that “I don’t know how Torie would vote” on issues like the Diastat bill. “The teachers and nurses have given her a lot of money,” Butler hinted, suggesting that Osborn would have caved to those liberal interest groups concerned about amateur applications of epilepsy medication. Or on the other hand, Butler could claim that her committee vote was a mere courtesy and her non-vote on the floor might soften or erase the memory of labor lobbyists. In what Jerry Brown calls the “pretzel palace” of Sacramento, who really knows?

“I am not an outsider,” Butler vehemently insisted to me. “I don’t feel like an outsider.” Then I asked her the basic question at the heart of the matter:

“Have you told the Speaker you will vote against him where your conscience and constituency demand it, even when he insists that he needs your vote?”

Butler carefully word-picked her way to finally answer that while there are times when she will vote differently from the speaker, “my priorities are greatly aligned with his and the speaker pro tem of the Senate.” Asked to provide an example where she might break from the Sacramento machine, she answered, “it’s hard to say how I will vote in any situation, I will have to get back to you and let you know.”

Let’s hope the voters in California’s 50th get a chance to press Butler on the matter before they vote.

An estimated 500 lives have been saved since March in a peace process launched by imprisoned Salvadoran gang members and the country’s Catholic church. The incarcerated members of Mara Salvatrucha and the 18th Street gang are urgently asking that voices of civil society speak on behalf of the process and their protection. 

A Los Angeles press conference is planned for May 28, at which Catholic church authorities are expected to announce a peace-keeping committee and ask that the fragile truce be given a chance to proceed where all other efforts have failed. The principal outsider mediator in El Salvador is Raul Mijango, a former FMLN commandante and member of the post-war legislature. Mijango was a key participant in the talks which ended the civil war involving the United States in 1992. 

Homies Unidos, an LA-based gang peace project serving Central American immigrant youth, has been asked for assistance in long-distance messages from the imprisoned Salvadorans. 

The irony is that Alex Sanchez, co-founder of Homies Unidos in Los Angeles and a former MS member, is prohibited from offering mediation while he is awaiting trial since an arrest in 2009. Federal bail guidelines prohibit Sanchez from talking with MS members except in the offices of his LA-based defense lawyer, Amy Jacks. By a peculiar exemption, Sanchez apparently is able to hear from 18th Street members, however. 

Sanchez is a pioneer of so-called gang intervention programs, in which former gang members participate in mediating gang truces, and develop services and exit strategies for gang members who want to end the violence and transition to more positive lives. The FBI and law enforcement, including the Los Angeles police and sheriffs’ departments, have been suspicious historically that gang intervention work is a “front” for ongoing criminal activities. Instead, the FBI, LAPD, and Salvadoran police have chosen suppression, criminal indictments, and permanent incarceration approaches. 

Those hardline policies have changed somewhat at the LAPD in recent years, and the present Salvadoran crisis raises the policy question of whether individuals like Sanchez should be permitted to apply their unique interventionist skills to preserve the peace. 

Reached in LA, Sanchez said he was happy to receive news of the truce by phone from El Salvador, “because when the phone rang I was expecting a fire or something.” The most recent of several fires in Central American prisons killed 361 in Honduras in February. Hostile police, prison overcrowding, frayed electrical wires and flammable blankets have been factors in several prison fires claiming several hundred lives in recent years. 

“It’s 2012, the time of epiphany”, an excited Sanchez declared. “Public opinion down there right now is wait-and-see,” because previous truces have evaporated and paramilitary death squads are widespread. “But if this truce goes a bit longer, people will push the government to do whatever it takes to make it happen,” Sanchez predicted. 

According to Mijango and Salvadoran media accounts, homicide rates in El Salvador fell from 14 per day to five, starting in March. Over a fifty-day period that would mean 450 individuals not killed. The Guardian reported April 15 that on Saturday, April 14, no one was murdered in El Salvador for the first time in nearly three years. The homicide rate in El Salvador in 2010 was 66 per 100,000, over triple that of Mexico.

Politicians and law enforcement are backed by public majorities in maintaining their hardline enforcement policies (known as mano dura in Central America). But those policies have come under criticism in recent months by a peace movement led by poet Javier Sicilia in Mexico, and the right-wing president of Guatemala, among many others. 

In response to the current process, Salvadoran authorities have offered modest concessions, like allowing gang leaders into the general prison population and permitting family visitations. 

To Sanchez, the key is genuine repentence among gang members combined with specific measures towards rehabilitation, addiction and mental health treatment, and internal agreements reached by the gang members with assistance from mediators. Sanchez says they need “protocols” to lessen and terminate violence, including dispute mechanisms and an ombudsperson. He points to a recent Salvadoran gang decree that schools become safe zones as one example. Other specific measures might include medical treatment for homies with HIV, orthopedic shoes for overweight diabetics, and seeds for planting vegetable gardens in the prisons. “Their main concern,”Sanchez says, “is that the homies outside need to have their needs addressed because they are the ones sustaining the truce.”

Salvadorans and reform advocates are calling on Los Angeles experts and authorities to weigh in, since LA is the longtime vortex of immigrants, war refugees and deportations, both from and to Central America. In fact, the notorious Salvadoran gang culture was formed in Los Angeles, not in El Salvador, among exiled children of the civil war, las frutas de la guerra.

LA City police and gang intervention officials are known to have links with the FBI and Salvadoran police and immigration authorities. Other local experts have funds to advise the US AID, which could fund programs for rehabilitation. Programs like Fr. Gregory Boyle’s Homeboy Industries are closely watched as models by El Salvadorans. Advocates like Harry Belafonte, Danny Glover and the poet Luis Rodriguez, himself a former gang-banger, have followed the Salvadoran situation supportively for years. 

The next Salvadoran presidential election is scheduled for early 2014. The FMLN is supporting the truce while others watch and hope.

President Obama’s dramatic speech from Afghanistan should be parsed as a careful election-year orchestration of his plan to “wind down” the war. It is no accident that the speech came during the first-year commemoration of the killing of Osama bin Laden, the event providing Obama the rationale for ending American combat while placing hawks and political rivals on the defensive.

For reasons historians will have to explore, George Bush dropped the pursuit of bin Laden, providing Obama with a chance that few top Democrats are given: to prove himself “tougher” on terrorism than his critics. Obama took the risk. The question now is whether the rewards he reaps will be for real peace or a disastrous quagmire.

Between now and November, the narrative of killing the Al Qaeda leader will be politicized and repeated in the mainstream media and Obama campaign films and speeches that many will find inappropriate. Obama himself may have kept his pride in check last year when he said “we don’t need to spike the football” and “we don’t trot out this stuff as trophies” (speaking of photos of bin Laden’s body). Then Obama’s top aide David Axelrod seemed to test the boastful political line, “Ask Osama bin Laden,” when answering a question about Obama’s toughness. Since then, the bin Laden assassination is increasingly about spiking the football, leading CNN’s Jack Cafferty to accuse Obama of being “hypocrite-in-chief” and allowing the Republicans to grab the opportunity to change the subject.

Obama spoke to multiple and conflicting audiences from Afghanistan. Primarily, of course, his speech was to America’s voters and families, especially those upset by the suffering of their loved ones or the dark suspicion that the war has been for naught. But Obama also intended to frame the Chicago summit for NATO members and the world media, and include a peace incentive for the Taliban and Pakistan, while still assuring the Afghan allies and the military that he’s committed to the long run. These contradictions are impossible to smooth over. But there were signals worth heeding.

For the first time, Obama acknowledged and embraced the “direct discussions” going on with the Taliban towards a “negotiated peace.” That statement may seem mild enough to peace activists who remember the long years of talks that dragged on during Vietnam. For a commander-in-chief, however, talking with the perpetrators (or avid abettors) of the 9/11 attacks is potentially volatile in the extreme. Obama needs to defuse any potential backlash from the talks going bad.

Obama’s stated conditions for talking with the Taliban were (1) their breaking with Al Qaeda, which means a credible agreement to prevent safe havens in Afghanistan, a condition the Taliban can accept; (2) that they abide by Afghan “laws,” as distinct from the more rigid Afghan constitution; and (3) a protection of Afghanistan’s sovereignty, which is different from the country’s present form of governance, is closed to the Taliban. None of these starting points are insuperable obstructions to progress, not even Obama’s more general call for human rights for “men and women.” Agreeing to repudiate “violence” is far easier than surrendering weapons, as the Northern Ireland experience proved.

On his side, Obama offered a “clear timeline to wind down the war,” a nod towards the Taliban’s longstanding demand for an explicit timetable for withdrawal. Obama’s generals and all Republicans abhor “timelines,” especially during political campaigns.

Obama spoke directly to public opinion when he refused to leave “immediately,” on the grounds that Afghanistan will need an "opportunity to stabilize,” an observation the vast majority of Americans will accept, at least for a time, if US troop withdrawals are proceeding on course and casualties are down. And if Afghanistan fails to take the “opportunity to stabilize,” then it will have had its “decent interval.”

Finally, Obama spoke of the need for “global consensus,” including Pakistan as an “equal partner” with legitimate “interests” in Afghanistan. The euphemism “global” masks whatever agreements being sought with non-NATO powers like Russia, China, India and, directly or indirectly, Iran.

Obama significantly noted that there are no agreements yet concerning specific American troop levels to be left beyond 2014, or levels of Western funding for those troops. Afghanistan’s president Karzai has been shopping for $2–4 billion in annual subsidies for at least a decade, figures that will test NATO’s resolve during a deepening recession. These issues are left open to serious debate in Congress and Western governments, unless a surprise settlement is jammed through the NATO summit. The recently heralded US agreements to “share” control of night raids with the Afghan security forces and turn over imprisoned detainees to the Afghans involve so many unresolved ambiguities that Obama chose not to trumpet them as measures of progress. The ultra-sensitive matter of permanent US bases, opposed by a Congressional majority, was finessed by a White House spokesman as a matter of keeping “access to, and use of, Afghan facilities” down the road, but without permanent bases. Past 2014, Obama committed himself to two “narrow security missions,” training and counterterrorism. With Iraq as a template, it remains to be seen how those play out.

Drones were not mentioned, but Obama is feeling pressure to deflate a concern that will not go away. An agreement involving Pakistan as an equal partner suggests that drones, which are hated in Pakistan, could be shelved or suspended as part of a settlement process.

In summary, the final deal, if any, is still a work in progress, on the fast track to a fix in Chicago.

Public opinion, in the US, NATO, Afghanistan and Pakistan, is already a decisive factor in shaping the speed and character of this endgame. But public opinion is shaped not by television news so much as the processes of everyday life, where anti-war activism can sometimes channel massive impatience with war and recession into a popular tide towards peace. If peace activists simply keep mounting local support for Barbara Lee’s legislation to cut funding and her Congressional letter to Obama, they are speeding the tide.

Don’t Trust Anyone Under 60

Mill Valley, Calif.
 
Tom Hayden’s superb “Participatory Democracy: From Port Huron to Occupy Wall Street” [April 16] was an invaluable history of the progressive movement in America since the 1960s, a cautionary message to current activists and an inspiring call for renewed coalition activism. It should be reprinted as a handbook for every person who believes in working for a more just America.
 
One paragraph struck me as especially poignant. Hayden writes, “The early SDS certainly identified with the Wobblies, the anarchists who organized the 1912 Bread and Roses strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts; the Haymarket Square martyrs; the historic wildcat strikes across the Western mining country.” I wonder how many of the young people demonstrating at Zuccotti Park and across the country, wedded to Twitter and Facebook, are as aware of the history of past protests as the founders of Students for a Democratic Society. I suspect most are not, and I am grateful to Hayden for reminding us of that history.
 
RACHELLE MARSHALL

Columbus, Ohio

Thank you so much for Tom Hayden’s article. I was in high school and college in the ’60s. I had never heard of the Port Huron Statement, nor had I understood the connections among the many events, those I knew about and those I didn’t. Thank you for a history lesson so crucial to understanding our past—and creating our future.

LINDA SLEFFEL

Palm Harbor, Fla.

Tom Hayden’s perspective was excellent. As a former Milwaukee SDS chair and, before that, a student at San Francisco State College, I have a little different perspective. Hayden argues that there was no counterculture before Port Huron, but I was part of the Beat Generation, starting in 1959 in San Francisco and New York. The Beat generation, Beat poets, and the Bread and Wine Mission in North Beach, San Francisco, and at Washington Square in New York had a profound influence on me, as they did on Bob Dylan. It was my experiences as a Beat that led me to work at Highlander Folk School, with SNCC and to be part of the CORE Action Institute in Miami in 1960. It was then I started reading The Nation, with particular interest in articles by Howard Zinn. He became my mentor, as he was for Hayden. Camus and David Riesman, whom Hayden writes about, were my intellectual heroes, but I was reading them almost three years before Port Huron.

TOM ROSE

Oakland, Calif.

I’ve always considered Tom Hayden a true O.G. He has kept his vision and principles over the decades. He’s always been engaged in the global arena of struggle (Vietnam, Mexico, Ireland), and here (from Newark to LA, from gangs to state legislators). He’s managed to adapt to new landscapes and new perspectives without giving up or compromising a lifelong commitment to activism.

So, I was a bit surprised to see how much slack he was willing to give the Democratic Party and the Kennedy and Reuther brothers. He suggests, against overwhelming evidence, that Kennedy was dismantling our neocolonial war machine and that Walter Reuther and his people were the natural allies for progressive anti-racist and anti-imperial students. The Kennedys and the Reuthers were implicated fully and wittingly in C. Wright Mills’s The Power Elite and to think otherwise is looking at the past through rose-tinted lenses.

LOUIS SEGAL

Hayden Replies

Culver City, Calif.

I am deeply grateful for The Nation’s commitment to publish my long reflection on the Port Huron Statement. A longer version will appear in September in Participatory Democracy, along with twelve pieces by others who were at Port Huron.

I’m afraid Louis Segal sees through his own filters what I wrote about JFK and the Reuther brothers. I did not say Kennedy was “dismantling the neocolonial war machine,” only that he refused to send US combat troops to South Vietnam and was openly critical of the cold war before his murder. The Reuthers were in fact the “natural allies” of SDS, SNCC and the UFW but too supportive of Lyndon Johnson to break from the cold war and Vietnam before it was too late.

TOM HAYDEN

Poor Kids—Nobody’s Children

New York City

Linda Darling-Hammond’s powerful “Redlining Our Schools: Why Is Congress Writing Off Poor Children?”
 [Jan. 30] does a great job of debunking Congress’s efforts to “improve” No Child Left Behind (its main program for educating poor children), and showing how the proposed changes would only increase the “momentum toward increasing inequality” set in motion in the Reagan era.

However, I differ with her take on what we should do. There is a vision for reform taking shape that can reawaken faith in public education. Its basic concepts are that many children need support and services beyond what schools can provide and that an ethic of shared responsibility and mobilization of students, families and broader community resources must become important components of the education reform agenda.

Communities and school systems are increasingly seeing the need to shift to this community-focused approach, and the work of the Coalition for Community Schools and the Children’s Aid Society is showing that this approach is not only feasible but will make life much better for schools.

But it is a difficult shift to make, since school systems have enjoyed a near-monopoly on funding and attention, and the community-focused approach requires challenging changes in relationships, leadership and deeply entrenched habits and assumptions.

To shift to this much more promising approach requires leadership from the broader community. But too few people know about it. Readers can learn more at communityschools.org. In addition, a human rights perspective on the community-focused approach, although couched mostly as a sharp critique of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s school reform agenda, can be found at icope.org.

DAVID SEELEY

They Didn’t Start the Fire

Hamden, Conn.

Two April 9 letters addressed the erroneous statement that Brecht wrote The Life of Galileo while living in “Nazi Germany.” But one of the diligent historians muddied the waters with his claim that Hitler “was sworn in as chancellor in March 1933.” Hitler was appointed chancellor January 30, 1933. The other letter boldly asserts that “Hitler’s Brownshirts set fire to the Reichstag.” So it has been claimed, but most historians now accept that the fire was set by the hapless Dutch arsonist Marinus van der Lubbe.

PHILIP W. BENNETT

In this image made from video, a police officer uses pepper spray as he walks down a line of Occupy demonstrators sitting on the ground at the University of California, Davis on Friday, Nov. 18, 2011. (AP Photo/Thomas K. Fowler)
 
In the most comprehensive official report on police tactics towards campus anti-tuition hike protests since the Occupy movement broke out last year, a University of California investigation concludes, “The pepper spraying incident that took place on November 18, 2011, should and could have been prevented.”

The police action was code-named Operation Eco-Friendly. The report delves deeply into the irrationality of administrative conduct, which resulted in the pepper spraying of UC Davis students on that day, and also paints one of the first portraits of the good-natured nonviolent idealism among the new wave of student protestors.

The report was issued in the name of Dr. Cruz Reynoso of the Davis campus, a former member of the California Supreme Court who lost his position during the anti-crime, anti-government hysteria that swept California in 1986, a precursor of the Neo-Con and Tea Party counter-movements. The 190-page review was shaped by Dean Chris Edley of UC Berkeley’s Law School.

At a time of growing student concern about the militarization of university campuses in the face of rising tuition and declining employment opportunities, the Reynoso report offers a chance to rethink the worsening crisis of higher education and emphasizes positive nonviolent alternatives to batons, pepper spray and incarceration.

The continuing impulse toward campus militarization, however, is contained in a proposal by the security consulting firm Kroll Inc., led by William Bratton, for a centralized system-wide police chief. Under current policing regulations, students who nonviolently link arms are defined as “actively resisting” and subject to arrest, coercive removal, and pepper-spraying.

The Reynoso report concurs with the student and faculty protestors’ assertion that there was no legal basis for taking down tents and hauling students away. Ironically, the UCD officer most visibly involved in the student pepper spraying, John Pike, repeatedly asked whether the procedure was legal. According to Kroll, “Members of the Leadership Team referred to a UC Davis policy against overnight camping on University property in emails, but no legal basis for campus police removing tents was stated.”  Camping is prohibited by an administrative rule, making enforcement by the police “legally suspect.” California law makes it a misdemeanor to “lodge” in any “structure” without the permission of the owner, but the reports concludes that “it is not clear that the arrestees were, in fact, connected to any of the tents or had in fact ‘lodged’ on University property.” At present, the Yolo County district attorney has declined to charge any of the arrested students.

As an example of the hysteria which led to the police assault, UC Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi offered this “reasoning”: “We were worried at the time about [nonaffiliates] because the issues from Oakland were in the news and the use of drugs and sex and other things, and you know here we have very young students…”

The administration and police saw everything through the prism of previous and more radical confrontations in Oakland and Berkeley, and were obsessed with an unfounded belief that Davis students were led by “outsiders.” The reports found no evidence of outside agitators, though it noted that local clergy were present as observers and one of the arrested students was a 2009 UC Davis graduate.

The use of pepper spray will remain a contentious issue since UC president Mark Yudof testified in Sacramento on December 14, in response to evidence provided by this writer, that the University would fund an independent study of the health impacts of pepper spray, which the state has failed to do since pepper spray was deregulated in the 1990s through efforts by current congressmembers Dan Lungren and Jackie Speier. Since then, pepper spray has been globalized as a weapon of choice by police and security forces against demonstrators.

UC regulations permit the use of MK-4 pepper spray for “crowd dispersal.” The chemical weapon deployed against the Davis students was the higher-pressure MK-9, which is not authorized by the University and for which officers are not trained. MK-9 is manufactured by Defense Technology. As a sign of the chemical arms race, a UC police official told Kroll, “I’m the department trainer for chemical agents and part of that training is a review of our use of force policy in where [sic] this tool fits in that policy." Another officer said, “we’re still in the process… of working out what kind of training we need to do, ‘cause it’s essentially the same as the little pepper spray can, it’s just in [a] lot higher volume form. So we’re still working out the kinks in that.”

The campaign for an independent health assessment of pepper spray will continue.

The report is filled with evidence that the University, with its combination of tuition hikes, removal of tents and coercive police tactics, is unwittingly radicalizing a generation filled with principled, non-violent, rational, good-natured and loving undergraduates. The process is very similar to the early 1960s, when students in the South wore proper suits and dresses into brutal beatings and gassings as police looked on or even joined the clubbings. Students at Berkeley were stunned to learn that campus officials would refuse student organizations the right to take stands on “off-campus” issues such as segregation at Bay Area hotels. Then as now, stupidity ruled the centers of higher learning. The official hostility to small things (the right to tables then, or tents now), the official paranoia about “outside radicals”, and the inevitable use of force or expulsions did more to harden, alienate and radicalize a generation than reading the Red Book could possibly have accomplished.

Here are some descriptions of the Davis students in their time of testing before the arrests and pepper spray:

According to [one UC observer], the activists ‘went back and forth’ about what to do next. At approximately 4:45 p.m., the activists used consensus-style decision-making to reach the decision to continue to occupy Mrak Hall after it closed at 5:00 p.m., and to ‘use bike locks and chains to lock the building doors open.’.… the logic they used was that we are afraid the police are going to come to the building, lock the doors shut, to trap us into the building, and then come in and arrest us…so they arrived at the conclusion that we need to lock the doors open. And they kept those doors open all night long. I was with them in the building from 3:00 p.m. to 6 a.m. Wednesday morning. And it got cold in there.

The report continues:

Leading up to 5:00 p.m., there was a lot of discussion about ‘what are we going to do when the police show up?’… The students ‘were having a lot of…peer to peer education about what to do if you’re arrested, what your rights are, what to say, who to call.’ They were discussing, ‘Are we going to link arms? Are we going to huddle?…What’s going to be our strategy? And that theme of what to do when the police get here, that was a conversation that they had throughout the week.

A vice-chancellor who stayed with the students in Mrak Hall until 1:30 am called them:

‘my children’ and said that in the morning they were ‘very polite, they were gathering their stuff, you know being sure they weren’t getting in the way of doorways and what have you.

When the police arrived on November 17, the activists mic-checked them with an invitation to dialogue “in our method of speech, in our home.” Then, according to video, the following words were exchanged:

POLICE: You understand that by doing this, you are violating university policy, right?

STUDENTS: In that case, the university policy is defying our constitutional rights.

POLICE: You understand that you are subject to arrest.

STUDENTS: We are not subject to arrest for our right to peaceably assemble. What’s our crime?

POLICE: [holding yellow flyer] Has anybody read this thing?

STUDENTS: Officer, what is the crime that we are committing right now? Is this an order to disperse?

POLICE: Not at this time.

STUDENTS: [cheering]

POLICE: What I am trying to do here is let everybody know that they are in violation of university policy. Does everyone understand that?

STUDENTS: No. We were told that we are actually in compliance with the university policy right now.

POLICE: Well, you understand that the University policy is that camping is not allowed on university property.

STUDENTS: How do you define camping?

POLICE: Erecting tents and staying here.

STUDENTS: We are using this space for organizing.

POLICE: OK.

STUDENTS: According to this piece of paper, under article 5 of section 2, it says ‘use of university property for OVERNIGHT camping.

When the pepper spraying began moments later, the police would testify that they felt surrounded by a threatening mob. The UC task force found no evidence for this fear, pointing out that the officers strolled back and forth through the student lines. Three bursts of pepper spray were released. The students were chanting “no, no”, “keep it nonviolent”, and “you use weapons, we use our voice.” One student proposed an amendment to the student demand for “cops off the Quad,” saying, “I think we should ask politely, because demands only inspire fear,” the very emotion which was enveloping the heavily armored police. Then the students announced: “We are willing to give you a brief moment of peace, so you may take your weapons and our [arrested] friends and go. Please do not return. You can go, we will not follow you.”

Will anything be learned from this fiasco? Certainly a healthy system-wide conversation is underway. But the students are correct in thinking that more tuition hikes are on the way, that the politicians are paralyzed, and that the University is being privatized. A key structural problem is that the UC Regents are dominated by a Republican majority and a bipartisan Wall Street mentality. Fifty years after the Free Speech Movement, student voices remain throttled by the allowance of only one non-voting student representative on the twenty-six-member board. Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom is a good vote for students, but offers no plan for democratic restructuring. Governor Jerry Brown and the legislature’s majority Democrats could shift the balance among the Regents, but haven’t so far. Brown has actually convinced himself that the only way to save the University (he attended at something like $100 tuition) is to keep making it unaffordable to middle-class families and most people of color. Someone could run for statewide office on a state-of-emergency platform of making college education free or affordable to all. The right candidate could win more than 1 million votes and reshape the California political climate, just as Occupy Wall Street has brought a new focus to economic inequality. But there is no sign of such a campaign on the horizon, perhaps because no big contributions can be extracted from the students.

Unless meaningful action is taken immediately against relentless tuition hikes and the warnings of the Reynoso report, the university will continue disappearing down the path of policing to protect its privatizing. And a new radical generation will arise from the brutal thwarting of their innocent dreams. Count on it. Because the young cannot for long endure the suffocating of their future.

This is the fiftieth anniversary year of the Port Huron Statement, the founding declaration of Students for a Democratic Society, issued as a “living document” in 1962. The SDS call for a participatory democracy echoes today in student-led democracy movements around the world, even appearing as the first principle of the Occupy Wall Street September 17 declaration.

As a signpost of the early 1960s, the Port Huron Statement (PHS) is worth treasuring for its idealism and for the spark it ignited in many an imagination. The Port Huron call for a life and politics built on moral values as opposed to expedient politics; its condemnation of the cold war, echoed in today’s questioning of the “war on terror”; its grounding in social movements against racism and poverty; its first-ever identification of students as agents of social change; and its call to extend participatory democracy to the economic, community and foreign policy spheres—these themes constitute much of today’s progressive sensibility.

The same spirit of popular participation that inspired OWS drove the electoral successes of Latin American nations emerging from dictatorships in the 1990s. It appeared among the demands of young people in Tunisia, Egypt and other Middle Eastern countries in the Arab Spring of 2011. Spontaneous democratic demonstrations erupted in Russia late last year, organized on Facebook by young people seeking honest elections. The PHS was even prophetic in condemning the

1 percent, who in 1962 owned more than 80 percent of all personal shares of stock. It may be sobering for today’s Wall Street critics to read in the PHS original draft that despite the radical reforms of the 1930s, the share of wealth held by the 1 percent in 1960 had remained constant since the 1920s.

On the other hand, there are sources of hope now that we couldn’t imagine in 1962. The technological revolution of the Internet and social media is propelling a global revival of participatory democracy. Facebook and Twitter are credited with a key role in movements from Cairo to the volunteer campaign for Barack Obama. For the next generations, perhaps the most important issue for participatory democracy will be ownership and control of the means of producing and distributing information. These issues were prefigured in the PHS in the briefest of complaints about computerized problem-solving and in the outcry two years later from Berkeley students in the Free Speech Movement, who felt they were being processed like IBM punch cards. The PHS criticized the profit motive behind automation while noting that the new technology, if democratically controlled, could eliminate much drudgery at work, open more leisure time and make education “a continuing process for all people.”

According to Kirkpatrick Sale’s SDS, published in 1970 and still the most comprehensive history of the organization, the PHS “may have been the most widely distributed document of the American left in the sixties,” with 60,000 copies printed and sold for 25 cents each between 1962 and 1966. Sale made two observations about the Statement:

First, the PHS contained “a power and excitement rare to any document, rarer still in the documents of this time, with a dignity in its language, persuasiveness in its arguments, catholicity in its scope, and quiet skill in its presentation…a summary of beliefs for much of the student generation as a whole, then and for several years to come.”

Second, “it was set firmly in mainstream politics, seeking the reform of mainstream institutions rather than their abolition, and it had no comprehension of the dynamics of capitalism, of imperialism, of class conflict, certainly no conception of revolution. But none of that mattered.” More recently, historian Michael Kazin wrote that the Statement “is the most ambitious, the most specific, and the most eloquent manifesto in the history of the American Left.”

1963 SDS National Council Meeting (C. Clark Kissinger)

Who We Were, What We Said

I wrote the first notes for the Port Huron Statement in December 1961, when I was briefly in an Albany, Georgia, jail cell after a Freedom Ride to fight segregation in the South. The high school and college students engaged in direct action there changed my life. I had never met young people willing to take a risk—perhaps the ultimate risk—for a cause they believed in. Quite simply, I wanted to live like them. Those feelings, and the inspiration they gave me, might explain the utopian urgency of the Statement’s final sentence: “If we appear to seek the unattainable, as it has been said, then let it be known that we do so to avoid the unimaginable.” (I have no recollection of where this exhortation originated.)

Even today I find it hard to explain the “power and excitement,” the “dignity” and the “persuasiveness” of this document, which sprawls over 124 pages in book form. Though I was already a student editor and a budding pamphleteer, I remember myself, just 22, as a kind of vessel for channeling a larger spirit that was just in the air—blowin’ in the wind—and coursing through the lives of my friends.

The Port Huron attendees insisted that it begin with an emphasis on “we,” to be followed immediately by a section on values. And so we described ourselves as a new generation “raised in modest comfort, looking uncomfortably at the world we inherit.” This was an uncertain trumpet compared with, say, the triumphal tones of The Communist Manifesto. Why did it resonate with so many activists?

In fact, a few sons and daughters of former Communist Party members were present, but their previous family dogmas and loyalties lay shattered by the crushing of the democratic Hungarian revolution in 1956 and the revelations about the Stalinist gulag by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. There were also children of New Deal democratic socialists now experiencing liberal middle-class lives, and there were plenty of mainstream idealistic student leaders, graduate sociology students, a few pacifists and a number of the spiritually inspired.

Though they were not at Port Huron, there were other philosophical searchers at the time who practiced participatory democracy. Bob Moses, perhaps the single greatest influence on the early SDS and SNCC (the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), could be described as a Socratic existentialist. The Free Speech Movement’s Mario Savio described himself as a non-Marxist radical shaped by secular liberation theology who was “an avid supporter of participatory democracy.” We were all influenced by Ella Baker, an elder adviser to SNCC with a long experience of NAACP organizing in the South. Ms. Baker, as everyone referred to her, was critical of the top-down methods of black preachers and organizations, including her friend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. She argued that SNCC should remain autonomous and not become a youth branch of the older organizations. She spoke of and personified participatory democracy.

SNCC played a direct role in shaping my values, as it did with many SDS founders. SNCC’s early organizing method was based on listening to local people and taking action on behalf of their demands. Listening and speaking in clear vernacular English was crucial. Books were treasured, but where you stood, with whom and against what risks was even more important, because if the people you were organizing couldn’t understand your theories, you had to adjust. This led to a language and a form of thinking cleansed of ideological infection, with an emphasis on trying to say what people were already thinking but hadn’t put into words.

The right to vote was no intellectual matter, as it was for many on the left who felt it was based on illusions about where real power lay. Again and again, SNCC organizers heard rural black people emphasize how much they wanted that right. Typically they would say, “I fought in World War II; I fought in Korea; and all I want before I die is the right to vote.” (Many decades before, the 22-year-old Emma Goldman learned from a similar experience, after an early lecture in which she had scornfully dismissed the eight-hour day as a stupid token demand. When a worker in her audience replied that he couldn’t wait for the overthrow of capitalism but that he also needed two hours less work “to feel human, to read a book or take a walk in daylight,” the experience gave Goldman the consciousness of a great organizer.)

The Values section of the PHS reflected our eclectic, existential, sometimes apocalyptic, take on life. “We have no sure formulas, no closed theories.” We would accept no hand-me-down ideologies. “A first task of any social movement is to convince people that the search for orienting theories and the creation of human values is complex but worthwhile.” We agreed with French existentialist novelist Albert Camus, who argued that a previous generation of revolutionaries had sometimes rationalized horrific slaughters in the name of future utopias like “land reform.” Still, we wanted to argue, carefully, for a restoration of the utopian spirit amid the deadening compromises all around us. We wrote that “we are imbued with urgency, yet the message of our society is that there is no viable alternative to the present” (the same phrase later employed by Margaret Thatcher). Our diagnosis of the prevailing apathy was that deep anxieties had fostered “a developed indifference” about public life but also a yearning to believe in something better. “It is to this latter yearning, at once the spark and engine of change, that we direct our present appeal.”

We even thrashed out basic views of human nature day after day, not the usual subject of political platforms. We asserted a belief that “men [are] infinitely precious and possessed of unfulfilled capacities for reason, freedom and love.” (Use of the term “men” was unquestioned; Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique was one year away.) This formulation followed long discussions in which we repudiated doctrines of pessimism about the fallen human condition, as well as the liberal humanist belief in human “perfectibility.” It may have been influenced also by the Vatican II reforms then sweeping the Catholic Church. The formulation about “unrealized potential” was the premise for believing that human beings were capable of participating in the decisions affecting their lives, a sharp difference from the dominant view that an irrational mass society could be managed only by experts, or the too hopeful Enlightenment view of Tom Paine that our world could be created anew.

***

What Participatory Democracy Meant

Much was omitted because in 1962 awakenings just around the corner were not anticipated. Many of us read Doris Lessing and Simone de Beauvoir, but the first women’s consciousness-raising groups were two years in the future and would be provoked in part by our own chauvinism. American combat in Vietnam was unseen over the horizon, though the PHS opposed US support for the “free world’s” dictators, including South Vietnam’s Ngo Dinh Diem. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was published just two months after Port Huron, but all the Statement observed about the environment was that “uncontrolled exploitation governs the sapping of the earth’s physical resources.” There was no counterculture, no drug culture, no hippies—all that was to come. The folk music revival was at its peak; the Beatles were just ahead. The Statement would need major updating, but its passionate democratic core was of permanent value.

What did we mean by participatory democracy? Obviously the concept arose from our common desire to participate in making our own destiny, and in response to the severe limitations of an undemocratic system that we saw as representing an oligarchy. At its most basic, it meant the right to vote, as Henry David Thoreau once wrote, “not with a mere strip of paper but with one’s whole life.” It meant simplicity in registration and voting, unfettered from the dominance of wealth, property requirements, literacy tests and poll taxes. It meant exercising the right to popular initiatives, referendums and recalls, as achieved by Progressives in the early twentieth century. And it meant widening participation to include the economic sphere (workplace democracy and consumer watchdogs), neighborhood assemblies and family life itself, where women and children were subordinates. It meant a greater role for citizens in the ultimate questions of war and peace, then considered the secret realm of experts.

Participatory democracy was a psychologically liberating antidote to the paralysis of the apathetic “lonely crowd” depicted by David Riesman et al. in the 1950 sociological study by that title. The kind of democracy we were proposing was more than a blueprint for structural rearrangements. It was a way of empowering the individual as autonomous but interdependent with other individuals, and the community as a civic society. Without this empowerment on both levels, the PHS warned, we were living in “a democracy without publics,” in the phrase of C. Wright Mills, the rebel sociologist who was one of our intellectual heroes.

The Statement’s economic program was an extension of the New Deal and a call for deeper participatory democratic reform. Proposals for a government-led poverty program and “medical care…as a lifetime human right” anticipated the Medicare legislation that came in 1965, and the PHS’s concept of a government-led anti-poverty program foreshadowed the Office of Economic Opportunity, a project envisioned by John F. Kennedy and adopted by Lyndon Johnson.

But the Statement also called for economic democracy, as distinct from the New Deal’s more bureaucratic approach: the major resources and means of production should be “open to democratic participation and subject to democratic regulation.” There was a danger of “bureaucratic coagulation” and too much emphasis in Kennedy’s New Frontier on “problems are easiest for computers to solve.” There should be experiments in decentralization, we said, devolving the power of “monster cities” to local communities seeded with more developmental incentives. Returning to the Statement’s moral focus, since a human being’s economic experience has “crucial influence on habits, perceptions and individual ethics,” we insisted that there be incentives beyond money or survival, ones that are “educative, not stultifying; creative, not mechanical; self-directed, not manipulated; encouraging independence, a respect for others, a sense of dignity, and a willingness to accept social responsibility.”

Not that Marxism was irrelevant to the Port Huron gathering. Most of the participants were shaped and informed in part by Marxist traditions. But the convention was never intended as a revival ceremony for Marxism. The document at one point mentioned a need to bring together “liberals and socialists, the former for their relevance and the latter for their sense of thoroughgoing reforms in the system.” Even those at Port Huron who were children of the Old Left had concluded that moral values and democracy were more important than any ideological renovation of Marxism, Leninism, Trotskyism, Maoism or anarchism. It seemed we agreed that we were something new: a movement, perhaps an embryonic blessed community. When those from an earlier tradition pointed out, sometimes vehemently, that we were not only not new but descendants of the left, the New Left became our hybrid brand. No one had complained when that label was suggested in 1960 by C. Wright Mills, in his open “Letter to the New Left.”

***

Breaking the Political Stalemate

According to Michael Kazin and others, the role of the American left has been to make lasting cultural and normative contributions while never actually coming to power. We were dreamers too, but dreamers who had a plan for achieving political influence and power.

The Kennedy administration was in a crossfire between two opposing forces: the civil rights movement versus the dinosaurs of the Dixiecrat South, on which the party depended for its national majority. By risking their lives daily in sit-ins and voter drives, SNCC and rural black people would soon crumble the foundation of Dixiecrat power.

The Port Huron Statement articulated a strategy of “political realignment,” in which the goal was to end the “organized stalemate” in Washington and open the possibility of a more progressive party. Realignment was embraced by King, Bayard Rustin and Michael Harrington, and was the implicit agenda of the vast March on Washington for Jobs and Justice in August 1963. Soon Northern students were streaming south for the Mississippi Summer Project, in 1964, whose aim was to unseat the state’s white Democratic delegation and replace it with a democratically chosen slate, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, at the convention that year in Atlantic City. By 1965 the Voting Rights Act was passed, establishing federal oversight of Deep South voting patterns.

The energy of some SNCC and SDS organizers also overflowed into the nascent farmworkers’ organizing efforts in the Southwest at around the same time. The PHS condemned the disenfranchisement of migrant workers while also citing them as a potential base for rebirth of a “broader and more forceful unionism.” In 1964 the government’s hated bracero program was forced to its end. Political realignment was advanced that same year when the Supreme Court decreed that voter representation must be based on population rather than the land holdings of growers. By 1966 the United Farm Workers was bringing new energy to the labor movement; that same year, Congress moved to include minimum-wage protections for farmworkers, who had been excluded for the previous twenty-eight years under the Fair Labor Standards Act. The UFW’s four-year global consumer boycott of grapes was a channel of participatory democracy that attracted thousands of new activists.

One link between these events was the leadership of United Auto Workers president Walter Reuther; his brother Victor; and a top UAW officer, Mildred Jeffrey, the mother of a key SDS founder at Port Huron, Sharon Jeffrey. The Reuthers helped fund and support the early SDS as well as the UFW and the Southern voter registration campaigns and marches.

The overall strategy of realignment envisioned participatory democracy directly connected to a new social movement, one capable of forging a new governing majority on a national scale, with young people as shock troops building a “bridge to political power” composed of liberal Democrats, peace groups, organized labor and the civil rights movement. For the first time, students were thinking of themselves as “agents of social change.” The buoyancy of this strategy, perhaps carried on the innocence of the young, was a momentous break from the culture of the left in those times, which was dispirited by McCarthyism, bogged down in poisonous factional disputes and weighted with the ideological language and baggage of a Marxism that remained foreign to most Americans.

***

Assassination and Vietnam Destroy the Great Society

The Port Huron vision of winning seemed entirely possible to those who debated the strategy and set forth earnestly to carry it out. But even the “best and brightest” among the young radicals were thwarted by our inability to predict the future.

First, there was the assassination of John Kennedy, which devastated any rational basis for strategy. The assassination of a president simply wasn’t factored into any models we took seriously about reform or revolution. Whether or not the Kennedy killing was part of a larger conspiracy, as many still believe, a mood of paranoia took root in the New Left, in which it seemed that any notions of peaceful democratic transfers of power were illusory. It may be wishful thinking, but I believe the evidence is that Kennedy would not have sent 100,000 ground troops to Vietnam, as his successor did (after promising not to). For most of us, Kennedy, as well as other national leaders assassinated that decade, including JFK’s brother Robert, King and even Malcolm X, had been central figures in the transformation we hoped to see. The power of the independent movement came first, but it was also necessary to pressure the president to follow, to recognize and legitimize and legalize the victory and pursue a transition to a more participatory and egalitarian democracy.

The Port Huron Statement correctly predicted that if nuclear war with the Soviet Union could be prevented, there still would be an ongoing “international civil war” between proxies of the United States and Soviet Union. Cuba was one such focal point, and Vietnam became another. The Vietnam War diverted public attention and drained resources from the budding War on Poverty. I was one of many hundreds who moved into inner-city neighborhoods to engage in community organizing against poverty, establishing groups that took over local boards in Newark, New Jersey. But Vietnam wrecked all that, plunging our young movement into five years of draft and war resistance, and provoking an escalated militancy against the warmakers. The Vietnam escalation was accompanied by hundreds of uprisings in black communities, with the cost in lives still uncounted and billions of dollars wasted. Any possibility, however remote or delusional, of our being the left wing of Johnson’s Great Society was rendered impossible and was rejected in disgust.

The consequences for realignment were far different from our predictions. As a result of the civil rights movement, there came a generation of white liberal politicians like Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Al Gore, along with a huge complement of black elected officials from the South, from local sheriffs to Congressmen like John Lewis (a SNCC member) and Jim Clyburn (vice chair under Charles McDew of the South Carolina State student movement in 1960). The climate of officially sponsored terrorism ebbed in the South, and leaders like the Rev. Jesse Jackson would eventually run impressive presidential campaigns where none had been possible in the previous century. Barack Obama, born in 1961, the year the Freedom Rides began, very much owes his election to the voting rights reforms that brought about this realignment. As Attorney General Eric Holder said at SNCC’s fiftieth reunion in 2010, “there is a direct line from that lunch counter to the Oval Office and to the…Department of Justice where the attorney general sits.”

On the other hand, as Richard Flacks, a principal author of the PHS, has noted, we underestimated another realignment: the flight of white Southern voters from the Democratic Party, predicted by Johnson and encouraged by Nixon’s 1968 “Southern strategy.” This resulted in two backlash victories by Republicans (Nixon, Reagan) and the transformation of the white South from solid Democratic to solid Republican. The civil war between so-called red and blue continues to this day, with the red lines eerily drawn around the Old Confederacy and much of the West where the Indian wars were fought.

I believe the Port Huron vision of a progressive alliance would have succeeded in bringing a new governing majority to power in 1964, with a likelihood of avoiding the Vietnam War, were it not for the murder of Kennedy and Johnson’s subsequent escalation of it. This argument may be criticized as purely hypothetical, but it tries to capture the immensity of our dream and how close it seemed to our grasp. It is also a measure of the depths of despair we fell to in the years to come, a despair that lingers today among those who experienced both the beautiful struggle and the bitter fruit.

There was a third obstacle to the PHS dream, besides the assassinations and the Vietnam War. For want of another term, it was the system itself, or the powerful paradigm we defied but could not defeat. By “system” I mean the intersecting (though not coordinated) hierarchies of banks, corporations, the military, media and religion, dominant then as now (though there are far more women and people of color at the upper levels today). This was the “power elite” described by Mills. His concept of power was broader than that of an economic ruling class. It was an establishment far more flexible, even liberal, that had presided over the growth of the white middle class in the 1950s.

By “paradigm” I mean an understanding of power as cultural hegemony or dominance, a thought system in which there seems to be no alternative. The oppressive paradigm the PHS tried to discredit was the cold war between two blocs engaged in nuclear brinkmanship. We were the first generation in history to grow up with the Bomb, to learn to hide under desks or in bomb shelters, to be exposed to the mad logic of “mutual assured destruction” and the cynical realpolitik of “free world” and Soviet blocs controlling alliances of servile authoritarians. We went through a near-death experience during the Cuban missile crisis. And we knew the grim math: the trillions spent on weapons were dollars that could have been invested in economic development, healthcare and education. President Eisenhower had a name for this system—the military-industrial complex—and we noted that he dared name it only as he was leaving office. This paradigm at first froze us in fear. The legacy of McCarthyism, if continued in the 1960s, would mean that all our work, from the sit-ins to the Freedom Rides to the Port Huron Statement, would be marginalized as taking the wrong side in the cold war.

The Statement therefore included a twenty-page attack on this cold war mentality, half devoted to a proposal for phased nuclear disarmament, half to a welcoming attitude toward anti-colonial revolutions. Our proposal was to de-escalate the bipolar nuclear confrontation. We differed with most of the left-liberalism of the time by suggesting that our own government was partly to blame for the cold war, and by denying that the Soviet Union sought to take over the world by force. There was a growing peace movement, which many in our ranks eagerly joined. Despite, or perhaps because of, the nuclear near-miss over Cuba in 1962, President Kennedy became an important critic of the cold war before his assassination. It appeared that the SDS demand for new priorities was being recognized when Kennedy initiated and signed a partial nuclear test ban treaty with the Soviet Union in October 1963.

***

SDS, the CIA and the Power Elite

As the killing of JFK and the Vietnam escalation were burying the original hopes of SDS, a new radical resistance was taking root, and with it new ideological searching. The second generation of SDS, and the movement generally, was learning hard lessons from experiences not available to us in 1960–62. Black people who played by the rules would see those rules changed when power was threatened. Leaders were assassinated if they moved in a progressive direction. Politicians lied about taking us to war. Vietnam seemed to prove that militarism and imperialism were central to American society, whether liberals or conservatives were in power.

And finally, the power elite ruled beyond, or behind, elected officials. To take one example among many, official disclosures in 1984 revealed that John McCone, Kennedy’s CIA director, head of the Atomic Energy Commission and Bechtel executive, conspired with the FBI in a “psychological warfare campaign” against the Free Speech Movement and to elect Ronald Reagan governor of California. Rampant conspiracy theories seemed to negate the prospects of popular movements and peaceful transitions through elections. But even if the paranoia went too far, as it usually did, there were still grounds for believing that manipulators were behind the curtain.

In 1961 at a National Student Association convention I found a yellow pad with a chart identifying SDS in a box on the left, Young Americans for Freedom on the right and an entity named Control Group in the center-top. Six years later Ramparts magazine revealed that the secretive Control Group included CIA agents whose work was to promote a pro–cold war global student movement. The CIA also ran covert operations through the AFL-CIO’s international affairs department. Tom Kahn, special assistant to AFL-CIO president George Meany and later director of the federation’s foreign operations, was the very person at the League for Industrial Democracy who in 1961 tried to fire Al Haber and me, locking us out of SDS headquarters in New York because he believed the PHS was soft on the Soviets.

The CIA’s role in the AFL-CIO and foreign policy came to light as the byproduct of hearings into tax-exempt foundations by Representative Wright Patman in September 1964, confirming our worst suspicions. AFL-CIO staff were also involved in the US invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965 and in controlling Saigon’s labor federation, protecting the flow of US military supplies into South Vietnam’s ports during the war.

The importance of this sojourn into left-wing history is that SDS and SNCC (and King, among others) were unaware of the company we were keeping. The unmovable obstacle to the coalition we hoped to build with organized labor was the secret pro–cold war element within liberalism, directly and indirectly tied to the CIA, which was fiercely opposed to our break from cold war thinking. On the one hand, the UAW’s Reuther brothers helped fund and provide conference quarters at Port Huron; supported the March on Washington and the early UFW organizing effort; and were frustrated by Meany’s archconservative views. On the other hand, the right-wing AFL-CIO foreign affairs department carried on the anti-communist crusade with its covert operations. The Reuther wing was tied to Johnson’s leadership and unwilling to break from Meany. There was no way, in other words, that the New Left could have joined organized labor in 1964–65 around the Port Huron foreign policy vision, because the AFL-CIO was shackled to the CIA without our knowledge. The Reuthers were the great hope, but they were loath to break from Johnson over the Mississippi delegation battle in Atlantic City and over Vietnam. When the UAW finally broke from Meany and demanded a cease-fire in Vietnam, SDS and SNCC were too radicalized and factionalized for it to matter anymore. Death, our old nemesis, also intervened. On May 9, 1970, one week after the National Guard killed four protesting students at Kent State, and after Walter Reuther demanded an immediate withdrawal from Vietnam, he and five others were killed in a charter-jet crash.

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Marxism Replaces Participatory Democracy

While the Port Huron Statement was criticized by an older generation as too far left, an opposite attack came from the mid-1960s generation. In 1966 new SDS leaders rejected the PHS as “too reformist.” It was certainly true; the PHS did envision reforms—substantive rather than token, rapid though not overnight—and revolution was seen more as an undefined aspiration or long-term hope. Radical reform depended on independent social movements in combination with awakened progressives within political institutions rather than any revolutionary conquest of state and corporate power. The new generation claimed that this strategy was based on delusional liberal hopes.

Why was it so necessary for SDS leaders to reject Port Huron as “reformist”? The main reasons were external—the escalation of the Vietnam War and the draft by the liberal Democrats—but there was an internal dynamic as well. The new SDS leaders, in search of an ideology, turned steadily to Marxism, then to Marxism-Leninism and Maoism.

This was a stunning turn for a “new” left, because it implied a broad rejection of many of the new social movements as basically “reformist” too, since none of them were led by Marxists and none (except the Black Panthers) favored vanguard parties. The implication was that no genuine explanatory framework existed for a radical US social movement outside Marxism, a thesis that ignored or downplayed deep historical currents of populism, pacifism, religious reform and slave rebellions in American history. Most of the thinkers who inspired the early SDS—Mills, John Dewey, Camus, Lessing, James Baldwin—were shelved in search of an ideology that only Marxism seemed to offer.

Soon the open, participatory structure of the early SDS was being penetrated and disrupted by the Progressive Labor Party, a tightly disciplined, highly secretive organization dedicated to recruiting SDS members in support of a communist revolution on the inspiration of China and Albania. It proved impossible to dislodge from the organization, and pushed all internal discussions in a poisonous sectarian direction.

Beginning in 1968, the Weatherman (later the Weather Underground) faction surfaced as new “communist revolutionaries,” inspired by the revolutions in Vietnam and Cuba, and the Black Panthers at home. Instead of the Port Huron concept of a majority progressive coalition, they favored forming clandestine cells behind enemy lines, a formulation that regarded the white American majority as hopelessly racist and privileged. Their ideological heroes included Lin Piao, a leader of the Chinese Revolution, along with Che Guevara and the young French intellectual Regis Debray, with his foco theory that small bands of armed guerrillas could set off popular revolutions and their vision of a “tri-continental” alternative to the “revisionist” Soviet Union. For an American hero, the Weathermen turned to John Brown, who led a suicidal uprising against slavery. That uprising was vindicated to the Weathermen (and many African-Americans) by the vast swelling of support for John Brown during and after his martyrdom. Perhaps it would take a vanguard of martyrs to incite an American revolution, or so the thinking went.

These were compelling notions to many SDS radicals desperate to stop the Vietnam War and disillusioned with liberalism’s default. But by 1969 less than eight years after its founding, the factional wrangling killed SDS.

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The Movements Rise Again, With SDS Underground

I am not describing these post–Port Huron Marxist tendencies as mad delusions, as many have. That brief generation tried to make sense of the terrible and traumatizing events of the time. Nor was their deep paranoia unjustified. In late 1967 Johnson screamed at his top advisers, “I’m not going to let the communists take this government, and they’re doing it right now!” Fifteen hundred Army intelligence officers, dressed as civilians, conducted surveillance on 100,000 Americans. Two thousand full-time FBI agents were deployed, with massive use of informants and counterintelligence programs. J. Edgar Hoover’s orders to “neutralize” protest leaders are well documented. Scores of young people were killed or wounded, well beyond the widely remembered shootings at Kent State and Black Panther offices. One victim of an assassination attempt in 1969 was Richard Flacks, a key participant at Port Huron. He was targeted politically by Hoover and the Chicago police “red squad” before being attacked in his office with a claw hammer by someone who was never apprehended. SDS was banned on many campuses. Police or troops occupied at least 127 campuses, and 1,000 students were expelled in the spring of 1968 (which, as Kirkpatrick Sale notes, made them instantly draftable). Softer counterinsurgency techniques included the screening-out of the “protest prone” by admissions officers and the use of psychological counseling to “treat” alienated students. Making the paranoia all the more justified was the palpable sense among many of us that we had been abandoned by our parents; a 1969 Gallup survey indicated that 82 percent of Americans wanted student demonstrators expelled. If that was true, what was the point of depending on mainstream public opinion?

But the heightened militancy became disconnected from a comprehensible narrative that the wider public might have understood. In abandoning the Port Huron vision and strategy as times worsened, SDS was offering a fringe analysis at best, and was no longer able to invest leadership and organizing resources in the vast swelling of campus and public protest.

Indeed, the greatest outpouring of youth, student, GI, liberal, feminist and environmentalist sentiment—of perhaps any previous era in American history—occurred after SDS had closed its doors. It included the November 1969 Moratorium against the war, up to that point the largest peace march in American history; Earth Day 1970, for which

20 million turned out; and the May 1970 student demonstrations against the invasion of Cambodia, in which 4.3 million took part at half the colleges in the country.

Less than two years later, the Democratic Party was taken over by progressive forces, and the old insiders like Chicago Mayor Richard Daley and George Meany were suddenly outsiders. This was much too rapid and radical for most voters, as the 1972 presidential election results showed, but the PHS prophecy of realignment had proven to be more feasible than anyone had imagined.

The ’60s movements stumbled to an end largely because we’d won the major reforms that were demanded: the 1964 and 1965 civil and voting rights laws, the end of the draft and the Vietnam War, passage of the War Powers Resolution and the Freedom of Information Act, Nixon’s environmental laws, amnesty for war resisters, two presidents forced from office, the 18-year-old vote, union recognition of public employees and farmworkers, disability rights, the decline of censorship, the emergence of gays and lesbians from a shadow existence… Perhaps never in US history had so many changes occurred in so short a time, all driven by the vibrancy of participatory democracy.

Those who warned us of the system’s unbendable durability, like Howard Zinn, a mentor I dearly loved, seemed at times to undervalue these achievements while celebrating the very movements that made them possible. For Zinn, the reforms at best were reluctant concessions “aimed at quieting the popular uprisings, not making fundamental changes.” But were all those reforms meaningless? Or were they democratic improvements, as I would argue? As if to prove Zinn’s thesis, the global cold war quickly morphed into the rise of neoliberal globalization, the militarized war on narcoterrorism and, by 2001, the “global war on terror.” The old threat of international communist conspiracies was replaced by alleged new threats from the narcoterrorists and global jihadists. The secrecy of the state expanded even in times of peace. And in response, new movements arose across the planet against war, sweatshops, hunger and environmental destruction. The elite of the World Economic Forum, flying into Davos on corporate jets, were challenged by the World Social Forum, in which thousands of campesinos, indigenous people, workers, students and artists made their way to Porto Alegre, Brazil. Porto Alegre showcased a model of “participatory budgeting,” in which local citizens are directly involved in decisions to allocate public funds for neighborhood needs.

Starting in the 1980s, pro-democracy movements flourished across Latin and Central America in the wake of guerrilla campaigns. After these democratic transitions came the uprisings across the Arab world. Where the uprisings were repelled or derailed, the only unifying forward path still seemed to be through and toward participatory democracy. In 2009 came a movement echoing the 1961 Freedom Rides: undocumented students taking the risk of deportation while demanding passage of the DREAM Act. Last year’s revolt against Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, which continues to this day, was another show of participatory democracy in action.

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Participatory Democracy and Occupy Wall Street

Finally came Occupy Wall Street. I don’t know whether history begins anew or just repeats its sputtering cycles again and again. What is clear enough is that the Occupy movement began without pundit predictions, without funding, without organization, with only determined people in tents, countless Davids taking on the smug Goliath in spontaneous planetary resistance. While Occupy could not and would not agree on making detailed demands, it did agree, as noted earlier, on “direct and transparent participatory democracy” as its first principle.

There is endless speculation these days about the future of Occupy Wall Street. Since I was pleasantly surprised by its birth, I am not one to predict its growth. I prefer to wait and see. Across the Western world, the smoldering division is becoming one between unelected wealthy and foreign private investors and the participatory democracies of civic societies with their faltering elected governments.

Of course, there are differences between the Port Huron Statement and the Occupy Wall Street manifesto, but they should not be overstated. One of the major differences has to do with anarchism, or “direct democracy,” which plays a major role in the thinking, structure and practice of many Occupy activists. The early SDS certainly identified with the Wobblies, the anarchists who organized the 1912 Bread and Roses strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts; the Haymarket Square martyrs; and the historic wildcat strikes across the Western mining country. We sang of Joe Hill; knew all about “Big Bill” Haywood, Emma Goldman and Mother Jones; and lamented the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti. But we believed that social movements should insist on the democratic reform of state and corporation, not expect their overthrow or implosion. We carefully avoided adopting any of the previous ideologies of the left, including anarchism, in our search for something new. Ours was a democratic populist heritage, in which, we naïvely believed, many factions could bloom but none could choke our growth.

Once again today, there are questions about whether reform is legitimate or enough. Strict anarchist theory suggests that any reforms only legitimize and strengthen structures that should be toppled or dissolved. But the early SDS saw no alternative to winning reforms from the state and corporate sectors. We were fully aware of the dangers of being co-opted into the system, the managed cooling of street heat, the predictable countermovements that would rise up. Even a philosophical anarchist (or “libertarian socialist”) like Noam Chomsky has written in favor of radical reform:

There is a state sector that does awful things, but it also happens to do some good things. As a result of centuries of extensive popular struggle, there is a minimal welfare system that provides support for poor mothers and children. That’s under attack in an effort to minimize the state. Well, anarchists can’t seem to understand that they are to support that…. Minimizing the state means strengthening the private sectors. It narrows the domain within which public influence can be expressed.

I don’t mean to say that all Occupiers oppose reform. But there is a broad suspicion of seeking reforms that require alliances with top-down organizations, especially with progressive elected officials. The same dilemmas arose in the ’60s in the relationships between SNCC and the national civil rights leadership, and between SDS and the liberal Democrats we blamed for starting the Vietnam War. In retrospect, however, it’s impossible to reach a majority, much less the 99 percent, while rejecting coalition politics. Nevertheless, some Occupy theorists seem to believe they can do so. For example, Micah White, a brilliant editor at Adbusters, writes that “an insurrectionary challenge to the capitalist state” will be mounted by “culture-jammers” who create “fluid, immersive, evocative meta-gaming experiences that are playfully thrilling and [that] as a natural result of their gameplay” a social revolution will arise as “pure manifestation of an anonymous will of a dispersed, networked collective.” It is as if the pure insurrectionary act, memorialized as performance art, is more important than the construction of any alliances, or any consequences that flow from it.

There is something new, however: an engine of decentralized democratic power available to Adbusters, Occupy, Facebook and WikiLeaks that was not available at Port Huron. When I first saw a computer in 1964 it was the size of a room, and the professor who predicted microprocessors seemed nuts. We have come a long way from the Free Speech Movement’s outrage at IBM cards, to the exploding vista of instant information and interaction that has played a critical role, from the Zapatista uprising and the Battle of Seattle to the recent eruptions of interactive, live-streaming, participatory democracy all over the world.

There is a utopian belief that downloading and freeing information, especially secret information, will bring about a decentralized revolution—anonymously, one might say. The download replaces the overthrow in the imagination of some in this new movement. The invention of open-source technology may be the single greatest pathway to participatory democracy in our lifetimes, not only in coordinating social movements but in making democratic decision-making possible without passing through representatives or gatekeepers. But like it or not, organizing the reform of existing institutions is also needed, if only to protect the open source or the whistleblowers. The vast constituency of Occupy surely knows that a participatory future cannot be protected without engaging in some sort of politics in the present.

A useful model was implicit in the Port Huron Statement, one transmitted from our parents’ generation, the last until now to weather Wall Street scandal, foreclosures, bankruptcies and unemployment (without any safety net). Our parents wanted a New Deal and Franklin Roosevelt to meet their basic needs, just as black people in Mississippi wanted the vote and Kennedy, and workers wanted the eight-hour day in Emma Goldman’s time. After waiting several years for Wall Street to self-correct, the people of the 1930s began demanding what became the Wagner Act, Social Security, the Works Progress Administration, the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Federal Writers Project, which made life better for generations to come.

These reforms came about, as Zinn would rightly warn, as pragmatic institutional responses or concessions meant largely to restore order. But the New Deal itself was driven by a chaotic, eclectic, sectarian, combative, fanatic and passionate energy, and included anarchists, communists, musicians, muralists, liberals, progressives, prairie populists, industrial union organizers and, yes, reformers, from Al Smith to Upton Sinclair to Eleanor Roosevelt. What became the New Deal was pushed from below by insurrectionary strikes in Seattle, factory occupations in Flint, and writings and art from government-subsidized poets and intellectuals who interviewed the poor, the migrants and the unemployed, and who created great works like “This Land Is Your Land” and The Grapes of Wrath. It was a splendid bedlam of participatory democracy, which led neither to socialism nor fascism but to Keynesian economics and a vision of the state as an instrument that can sometimes be bent to the popular will and public interest. After twenty years of celebration, we decided in 1962 that those New Deal reforms were stagnating and insufficient, and that it was time to begin again.

We are not as badly off as Americans were in the 1930s, of course, if only because of the safety net reforms that were achieved in that earlier dangerous time. Globally, however, the unfettered appetites of capitalism have created an intolerable human condition. It is time for a participatory New Deal, to bring the banks and corporations under the regulations and reforms they have escaped through runaway globalization. This year marks the first presidential campaign in our lifetime when the gluttony of Wall Street, the failures of capitalism, the evils of big money in politics and a discussion of fundamental reform will be front and center in election debates. No doubt the crisis that gave rise to Occupy will not be fixed by an election, but that’s beside the point. Elections produce popular mandates, and mandates spur popular activism. It’s time to organize a progressive majority, and the vision and strategy of Port Huron is worth considering as a guide.