The Anti-War Movement and Straw Men

Thanks for writing in, Richardson. [see comment related to the post "Hey, I'm Anti-War But Pro-Troops"] I think this is a good chance to clarify what I said, and I'm glad we can have this conversation.

I'll just delve right into it.

I think that you completely mischaracterize those against the war, and you're actually being the "revisionist." I'm not trying to get into a policy wonk debate with you as to what Iraq actually did or didn't have at particular times, but merely counter your assertion that there wasn't a strong belief within the anti-war community that 1) there wasn't enough evidence that there were any WMD to start a war, and 2) that the Bush administration had done an a complete 180 on assertions of Iraq's WMD capabilities from before and after 9/11.

One of the things I clearly, clearly remember as being the basis for the anti-war movement that grew up well before the war even got started was the complete about-face the pundits in the Bush administration did on the subject of WMD. And a Google search on "WMD before 9/11" pulled up a whole slew of references to that, most of which I remember reading well before the war started, and were part of the basis for my views:

"In just seven short months, beginning as early as February 2001, Bush administration officials said Iraq went from being a threat only to its own people to posing an imminent threat to the world. Indeed, in a Feb. 12, 2001 interview with the Fox News Channel Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said: "Iraq is probably not a nuclear threat at the present time." [source]

From a regular CIA report on the WMD issue, which showed about what the US thought about Saddam's nuclear ambitions, which was "pursuing" but without "direct evidence." Yeah, we've known that since the late 1980's:

However, intelligence reports released by the CIA and more than 100 interviews top officials in the Bush administration, such as Secretary of State Colin Powell, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, gave to various Senate and Congressional committees and media outlets prior to 9-11 show that the U.S. never believed Saddam Hussein to be an imminent threat other than to his own people. Moreover, the CIA reported in February 2001 that Iraq was "probably" pursuing chemical and biological weapons programs but that it had no direct evidence that Iraq actually had actually obtained such weapons.

"We do not have any direct evidence that Iraq has used the period since (Operation) Desert Fox to reconstitute its WMD programs, although given its past behavior, this type of activity must be regarded as likely," CIA director Tenet said in an agency report to Congress on Feb 7, 2001. [source]

And straight from the CIA report itself:

We do not have any direct evidence that Iraq has used the period since Desert Fox to reconstitute its WMD programs, although given its past behavior, this type of activity must be regarded as likely. We assess that since the suspension of UN inspections in December of 1998, Baghdad has had the capability to reinitiate both its CW and BW programs within a few weeks to months. Without an inspection monitoring program, however, it is more difficult to determine if Iraq has done so. [source]

Direct from Colin Powell's conversation with the German Foreign Minister on February 22, 2001, in full context and not choice quote mode:

Well, we're looking at every option in all parts of our policy: the UN part of our policy which requires Iraq to give up these weapons of mass destruction, and of course we have our own policies with respect to Iraq where we believe a change of regime would be in the best interest of all concerned.

The fact of the matter is that both baskets, the UN basket and what we and other allies have been doing in the region, have succeeded in containing Saddam Hussein and his ambitions. His forces are about one-third their original size. They don't really possess the capability to attack their neighbors the way they did ten years ago.

The danger he presents to the world is that he does pursue weapons of mass destruction, against the agreements that he entered into. So we will be talking with our friends in the region -- that's the purpose of my trip this weekend -- and we are reviewing with the Pentagon and all other parts of the US Government the full range of options available to us. And we will be announcing our decisions in due course.

Containment has been a successful policy, and I think we should make sure that we continue it until such time as Saddam Hussein comes into compliance with the agreements he made at the end of the war. But we have to find ways to do it to not hurt the Iraqi people. We are not after the Iraqi people. We don't want to hurt the Iraqi people. But we don't want Saddam Hussein and his efforts to hurt the people of the region or to threaten the people of the region. And that's what it's all about. [source]

And if you don't believe just this random smattering of documents, hear Condi and Colin saying it on camera:

Come on, man. I saw all this being widely reported well before the war started. The left may have been a lot of things, with a whole bunch of different interests riding in the same boat (just like "the right"), but to say that the belief that the administration had done an about-face hadn't been there, or that these facts hadn't received ample coverage in the mainstream press – that's pretty revisionist.

I clearly remember that being on the lips of everyone attending an anti-war rally as far away as here in Korea, as well as what people were talking about on the Internet, in email networks, and other leftie web sites, that being summed up in, "How the heck does Iraq go from being the same nominal threat it's always been to WMD country #1?"

Put even simpler, the thought was that Iraq ain't so saint, but there's no evidence that it's any more of a real threat than it's ever been. So why we invading now?

And your assertion:

Actually, the reason most people were against the invasion of Iraq is that they believed our troops would be decimated by WMD. The notion that Iraq had WMD, after all, was “...one almost universally accepted in Washington and widely credited by diplomats all around the world.” (NYT, A Pause for Hindsight, July 16, 2004).

Either the NYT has a seriously flawed memory of what was going down in 2002-2003 (can't get at that report), or you do.

Not a single protester, non-profit, or any materials I'd ever seen passed around any of those anti-war protests expressed anything like an actual fear that our troops would fall under the gun of horrible WMD's. To say that all these people feared this and later turned around and changed their stories to make themselves look better is just utterly false.

I am connected to a whole lotta anti-war people, from Berkeley to NYC to here, and nobody I ever met nor heard of had anything but the belief that there would be no WMD's found; in fact, if there were, we knew we'd be totally "faced" and the hawks proven "right" – even though still, the fact would have remained that the Bush adminstration had been calling it differently from before. If there had been WMD's we knew that fact would go down the "memory hole" and that would be that.

But there were no WMD's found. The anti-war people has been essentially vindicated, but you don't see the hawks saying that they were essentially wrong. Instead, you have this shift to us having "liberated the Iraqi people." But that wasn't our goal, was it? If it had been, then we should have invaded long before 9/11, right?

Put in the words of the Hollywood film Three Kings, a work of historical fiction made well before either 9/11 or the war in Iraq, Mark Wahlberg's character is being interrogated by an Iraqi soldier (who had been, in the film, trained by American military advisors), and he makes the point within the rubric of fiction that people should have been making in fact:

"Lots of people in trouble around this world, my man. You don't fight no fahking war for them." [source]

And no one I knew was concerned much that the war with the Iraqi regular army would be the real problem. In fact, from the very beginning, I was telling people here in Korea that my main concern wasn't the initial invasion itself, but whether the United States had the commitment or the resources to stay in the country, develop it, and support it, along the lines of the Marshall Plan after WWII.

I clearly, clearly remember everyone in the anti-war side talking about "Marshall Plan" and about the United States' economic and military resolve to stay there for the long haul.

Nobody I ever talked to nor heard of on the left was shaking in their boots over the Republican Guard "fighting to the last man." You must have been channeling fears from before the FIRST Gulf War, when I heard people expressing that concern, which turned out to not be the case, which is one of the reasons people weren't as concerned the second time around.

And another popular discourse I clearly remember from the time was conversations about "the blood of American soldiers being shed for oil." People were saying that all the time. All the time, dude. So the discourse was – and is – completely different from Vietnam, as a lot of the emotional argument (even in Fahrenheit 9/11, which suffers more from Michael Moore's sudden cult of personality than factual errors) behind this is that American lives are being shed for a war that is, at the base of it, unnecessary.

So, as per your request to "see references where Rice and other administration officials said that" there was no evidence of WMD, I've given you references and even VIDEO of Rice and other officials saying it.

And I've known about it since WHEN they originally said it, as have many in the anti-war movement.

Did you even see Fahrenheit 9/11? I mean, how could you at not least seen them? Surely, you have, and just forgot.

And by the way, as far back as 1990, when I took a class on "Nuclear Weapons Technology and Policy," I remember being surprised to read in the appendix of one of our textbooks that technically, Iraq had technically received enough fissile material (don't remember if it was uranium-235 or plutonium-239) for one, possibly two bombs, but that little fact went down the memory hole (the book was written in the late 1990's and I wish for the life of me I had the title handy) when the first Gulf War actually started, because it wasn't convenient to remember, as we weren't there for "regime change" but because we were "rescuing Kuwait."

Come on. The actual fact of whether Iraq had WMD is something the US government has been spinning according to convenience since before 1990, and to think that either you or I has access to the real fact of WMD having been there is kind of a stretch. And in the end, the fact of it being there or not doesn't matter as much as the fact that the Bush administration was saying one thing just before 9/11 and quite another after.

And yes, "the vast majority of the rest of the world" was against the war, even if, as was the case in England, its governments weren't. I believe it a reasonable claim to make that the populations of most of the countries in the world did not support this war.

And to use your own cynical final sentence:

"A lot more to quibble about, but I don’t see the use."

Especially when you seem so emotionally and ideologically biased to see the anti-war movement in the way that is most convenient to you, that you completely distort what I firmly believe to be its basic tenets as well as the actual views of people on the street.

What marked it as unusual and especially powerful was the fact that it wasn't just Berkeley kids with Birkenstocks or radicals with the American flag made of swastikas instead of stars who attended these things – in fact, they were the few freaks who made it embarrassing for us.

Bill O'Reilly and Fox News – which it sounds like you watch a lot of, since you have such distorted view of the largely long, speech-fiiled, and boring anti-war marches and demonstrations – picked and chose the freaks that make everyone look bad, and the right loves to remember those guys.

These people were by far, far, far more typical of those attending these protests, as well as the news reports that accompanied them, in hometown newspapers all across America. Here's a typical report:

But the people I stood with shoulder-to-shoulder with on the streets of Seoul, or my friends and organizer contacts stood with in NYC or San Francisco, were also middle-class families with minivans, dental plans, and soccer games they were missing. It wasn't a bunch of strident college kids spitting on soldiers – for each one of those images you might have seen someone pick up on the news, there were 100 people who just chanted along, made small talk while marching, and went to get latte at Starbucks after it was over.

They weren't spitting in the face GI's, burning the American flag, or signing petitions in support of Al Quaeda.

And to characterize a movement that was remarkable in its being so large and full of relatively ho-hum Americans just like you and me – that's the real "revisionism" and factual distortion.

One of the most common (and boring) signs.

I put to you – did you actually attend any of the demonstrations going on near you, of which there would have been one unless you were doing fieldwork in Zaire or something? I saw a few weirdos and people I didn't like, but the vast majority were remarkably unremarkable, well-behaved, and polite.

In fact, typical of the imagery used in the protests was an unaltered American flag, or one torn by bombing, or covered in oil, none of which I think would fit even an arch-conservative's definition of disrespectful, but rather, is something that obviously points out the blood America is shedding.

Yeah, there were signs making fun of Bush, calling for his impeachment, or even pointing to his shady connections to the Bin Laden family by showing him literally in bed with him. It may piss you off, but it's legitimate, considering the fact that this is an anti-war protest, in which the "comedy" is being used to make a political point.

And I was mostly covering the ones that morphed from anti-American protests in response to the two middle school girls' deaths, which I believed to be an overboard, politically-crafted and media manipulated cause celebré for the leftie groups here in Korea (which, as a dyed-in-the-wool leftie, I myself still have a serious distaste for, and find myself appearing pretty "right" in comparison with them).

The sign reads: [across top] "Bin Laden says 'sorry,' too." [In speech bubbles] "Sorry ~ made a mistake." [across bottom] "Punish the murderous American military!" [picture is mine]

I saw some offensive signs carried by some Koreans, some which even took sides with Bin Laden, or made fun of the twin towers falling – which personally incensed me as much as I'm sure it would have any American who, despite our differences, remember the horror of that day, about which there is little debate on either side, no matter what theories or political points were made afterwards to explain or make sense of it – but those signs disappeared by the time the movement had gone from domestic Korean anti-Americanism to a general and inclusive anti-war movement.

I would love to say that the majority of those protesters were rabid, violent, American flag-burning radicals, but they weren't; they were mostly middle-class families with kids, holding candles. The people organizing the protests, in the Korean case, were all sorts, from reasonable to veritably crazy people, but most of the people in these mass rallies were actually saying "excuse me" and "sorry" as they bumped into me, the foreign photographer. Scenes like the one below were the norm for the biggest rallies in December and January.

Candlelight vigil in Kwangwhamun. [photograph mine]

And when it shifted into anti-war protests round about March, the foreign lefties came out and the rallies got really big, and hence, much more mainstream and vanilla. Even in notoriously "anti-American" South Korea, the rallies were so calm and preachily boring, I started to find it hard to sit through all of them.

And finally, I don't know of a single person who spit, cursed, or did anything untoward to a person in uniform, nor would they dream of it, since one of the things these protests were about was "no more blood for oil" – and yes, they meant American blood this time around, too.

I wonder if you forced yourself to sit through a rally or three, if only to be able to get to know those whom you seem to dislike so much. It would make your claims stronger. And even if you did, I wonder if you were focusing on the rabid PETA representative equating eating meat with the Holocaust (hey, PETA, still love your spirit, though!), instead of the chubby, middle-aged woman who was probably standing right next to you, or the couple with their two kids right behind you.

If you're gonna go disagree with the anti-war movement, that's cool. But don't try to misrepresent us with these straw man figures and issues, because I don't remember "the vast majority" of us having either been or subscribed to them.