In the days following Obama’s recent request to Congress to
“delay a vote” on authorizing his Syria attack many peace groups were sending
emails around declaring victory. In
many respects it was right for people to celebrate the fact that the House of
Representatives was going to resoundingly defeat Obama’s “red line” military
strategy. Even the vote in the Senate
was becoming more contested than anyone ever imagined possible. Here in Maine our Republican Sen. Susan
Collins, always a loyal supporter of the Pentagon and endless war, came out
against the Obama Syria plan. That
indicated something larger than normal was happening.
But the left must be fair before we quickly declare this as
our victory. The truth is that during
the Obama administration’s time in office, the peace movement across the US has
been a weak and fading shell of what it was prior to George W. Bush’s “shock
and awe” attack of Iraq in 2003. Since
Obama took office he has successfully demobilized the peace movement and other
progressive organizations, as legions of “liberals” who once declared
themselves peaceniks have taken their protest signs and their peace group
memberships back home and locked them up in a closet.
In recent months, as Obama’s rhetoric and CIA-directed war
against Syria escalated, these same liberals have been reluctant to emerge from
their self-imposed isolation. The
powerful Democratic Party front-group MoveOn was slow to jump into the Syria
issue, only deciding to poll their online members during the last two weeks. By that time it appeared that an Obama attack
on Syria was inevitable.
By the time MoveOn, and some other liberal organizations,
got into the Syria issue there had already been significant efforts underway by
some right-wing forces to organize against an attack. Amazingly we heard Republicans in Congress sounding very much
like left wing anti-war activists in their opposition to an attack. Right-wing radio “shock jocks” like Rush
Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Michael Savage were correctly opposing the attack for
reasons very similar to ours – it was illegal, dangerous, destabilizing, too
expensive, would be wrongly supporting terrorist groups like Al-Qaida and their
principle funders the Saudi Arabian “royalty”.
It is obvious that grassroots right-wing opposition to a
Syria attack was paying off in Congress.
Leading anti-war Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) was reporting that Republicans
were 10-1 opposed, while Democrats in the House of Representatives were 4-1 in
opposition.
Certainly, some of this opposition by Republicans was part
of their long-time anti-Obama strategy.
But it would be wrong to conclude that was the primary motivation for
their strong opposition. I saw enough
interviews of ordinary American citizens from conservative communities who were
saying, “We can’t afford these endless wars.
Our communities are falling apart.
We can’t keep doing this.” Their
conservative representatives in Congress were hearing these messages loud and
clear.
We should embrace those messages and those who spoke them –
no matter what political party they belong to.
We also have to give conservatives credit when they have in the past
harshly critiqued the traditional liberal base for not standing against wars
when Democrats are in power with the same ferocity as they have when guys like
Bush-Cheney ran the government.
So in my mind this initial victory has been a win for all
the American people. It’s not only a
victory for the left, or the peace movement, per se. We could not have slowed down Obama’s drive for a dangerous and
destabilizing attack on Syria without the solid support of the right wing
across the nation. We should be quick to acknowledge that.
I for one see this as something to build on. I would hope that people from the left and
right have learned important lessons from this current episode. Clearly it is in the interest of all the
people that we put a leash on the war appetite of the military industrial
complex. Hopefully all of us can better
understand that on foreign policy issues “we the people” must reign in the
corporate dominated military empire whose interests are not in alignment with
those of the general public.
Hopefully the nation develops more confidence in itself from
this remarkable display of people’s power. We are going to need each other as this
battle is far from over.
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