Yes, It’s Still Okay To Be Anti-War

Despite the Enduring Pressure to Think Otherwise

On April 4th, 1967, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Junior delivered one of the most important, and most controversial speeches of his entire life. It was the speech with which he came out against the ongoing war in Vietnam. In Beyond Vietnam, King even went so far as to declare:

As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked, and rightly so, “What about Vietnam?” They asked if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.

In this same speech, Dr. King questioned the logic of forcing a new government on the Vietnamese people through violence. Would they accept it?Tragically, as we all know, Martin Luther King was assassinated exactly one year later. And it appears that in the intervening decades, the U.S. government has not embraced the message so courageously espoused by Dr. King in this speech, and echoed by all of those who shared his concerns in various anti-war movements then and ever since.

Thirty-five years later, in the spring of 2003, I was trudging through my freshman year in high school. And at the ripe age of 15, alongside my classmates, I sat at my desk and watched the first bombs fall on Baghdad. Our teacher postponed his planned German lesson and we all sat there, with our mouths half-open, as the sleepy city of Baghdad lit up with a profound spectacle of explosions; American bombs guided by the kind of precision only billions of dollars worth of very advanced killing technologies could provide. I wondered if there were people in those buildings. Did they know what was coming? Did they know why?

I felt the sanitation of CNN, working hard to clean this all up so nicely for us. Apart from the awful fireworks display we all bore witness to on our TV screens, we saw no blood, no bodies, no death. The commanders of the networks of television screens let just enough violence through to whet our dark, vicarious appetites, but not enough to appall us. Not enough to drive us to the streets. And yet I still knew something was fundamentally wrong. Why was this all-out war happening? Where was it going to go? Was this going to be another Vietnam? As it turned out, it was.

Then, on February 15th, 2003, when it became clear the Bush administration was in full-on invasion mode, history’s largest anti-war protests erupted around the world, and was met by very little media coverage. From the very first days of the war, muted dissent among the public swirled. Was this about oil? Was this about the interests of the military-industrial-complex? Was this about Bush Jr. avenging his father?

We never really found out, although the signs were there. The war marched on. And during the years that followed, the immense inertia of what could have been a long-sustained anti-war effort fizzled away.

Later on, the sinister details of this conflict emerged. We learned about Halliburton’s no-bid contracts, Paul Bremer’s failure to get anything right with the newly founded Provisional Coalition Authority, the $9 billion dollars that was whisked away (and likely stolen) by contractors tasked with rebuilding the country, private mercenaries killed hundreds of civilians indiscriminately, and an unwieldy bill picked up by the tax-payers that amounted to over $3 trillion. In short, the whole affair quickly became an intolerable shit-show; another stain placed indelibly upon the fabric of American integrity, without the people’s consent.

2019

By most accounts, the second war in Iraq was a terrible mistake. Fast forward to today, and it can be seen that the U.S. has gotten its self involved in similar regime-change operations in Syria, Libya, and Yemen, with talks about extending that list to include both Iran and Venezuela. John Bolton, one of the key players in planning that disastrous war, is now President Trump’s national security advisor. Yet the status quo politicians in both political parties have nothing to offer on the anti-war front. It appears that no one inside the mainstream media seems to have anything critical to say about America’s foreign policy, other than Tucker Carlson, of all people. Rachel Maddow, a paragon figure in liberal media, even used her platform recently to submit an absurd appeal to her viewers to forgive John Bolton for his destructive legacy and “just think of (him) as a human being”. Apparently two and two really does equal five these days, and it leaves all of us on the side of world peace scratching our heads.

Syria

If you’re an anti-interventionist and have doubts about military engagement in Syria, the reactionaries have developed a term for you. It’s called ‘Assad apologist’. It’s a clever device used to associate you with the condoning of chemical weapons attacks. Of imprisonment of dissidents, and of torture.

But the truth of anti-interventionism is a little more complicated than that. Few people are seriously arguing that Assad is not a morally reprehensible leader, or that he didn’t use chemical weapons. But the concern here is this: is it worth destabilizing and entire country and plunging it into decades of chaos, as was the case with Iraq and is looking to be the case in Libya? It’s a valid question, and we shouldn’t have our right to ask it stripped away from us.

One can easily watch how this tactic backfired on Megan McCain when she tried it against the Presidential Candidate Tulsi Gabbard during her appearance on The View.

Those of us who find ourselves opposing any efforts to intervene in a place like Syria are doing so with critical thinking in mind that goes beyond the surface-level. We’re asking themselves, if the U.S. strong-hands Assad out of power, who will fill that vacuum? Will there be more or less violence? Are we really trying to argue that it’s only okay for civilians to die at the hands of American missile strikes, but not via Assad’s chemical weapons? The reality is that none should die needlessly in Syria. None of the above is morally acceptable.

We know that American efforts to bolster the opposition in Syria has prolonged a raucous civil war, flooded the region with more weapons, some of which ended up in the hands of ISIS, cost the tax-payers $1 billion, and indirectly caused the deaths of thousands of Syrian civilians. We also know that this support began at least as early as 2012, which predates the first allegations of Assad’s regime using chemical weapons in December of that year. Therefore we have valid reasons to be critical of the reasoning behind this regime-change effort. Is it really about chemical weapons, or something else? Something, geopolitical? Or economic? We just don’t know, because there are few leaders in Washington who we can trust to be honest with the public on this issue.

One analyst has theorized that it has to do with Qatar and Turkey’s interest in developing a recently discovered oil field. According to this analysis, Qatar sought to install the Syrian chapter of the Muslim Brotherhood in power, to prevent the Saudis from supporting a more extreme group inspired by their Wahhabism ideology to take power there.

But what are the U.S.’s interests? Again, there is no clear answer. Perhaps it has to do with mitigating the threat against Israel posed Iranian and Lebanese forces operating in the area. Perhaps it doesn’t. But without any clear idea of what’s going on, this opens up space for another kind of voice to emerge: that of the anti-interventionist. The modern-day anti-war activist.

Libya

In 2011, the Secretary of State Hillary Clinton went on the record to declare that the Libyan head of state, Muammar Gaddafi “has to go”. Citing his brutal crackdown on what had been, at that time, a two-weeks long uprising against his 41-years in power, she called upon the international community to support any way possible to pressure him out of power. In building their case against Gaddafi, NATO leaders even went so far as to toss a claim out there that his forces were using rape as a tool of war, which was quickly debunked by Amnesty International.

There’s no doubt that some of Gaddafi’s tactics were reprehensible, however we have to wonder if the stated motivations of Mrs. Clinton and her NATO allies are completely honest. There’s plenty of despotic rulers around the globe who suppress dissent, yet we hear crickets from the State Department more often than not. Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe comes to mind. We can even see for ourselves, in declassified emails, that French President Nicholas Sarkozy was interested in getting involved in Libya in order to, among other tasks, prevent Gaddafi from using $7 billion worth of gold to create a Pan-African currency based on the Libyan gold-backed dinar, offer it to African Francophone Countries, and challenge the strength of the French franc (CFA).

We even know that the supposedly wholesome opposition forces in Libya were given weapons by Qatar and Egypt, and they even acted horribly enough to subject captured fighters to be summary execution on the battlefield. So is it really a morally viable option for the U.S. to be picking sides in these kinds of situations? What does Libya look like now?

In the aftermath of Gaddafi’s death, it was reported that black Libyans subsequently found themselves on the receiving end of racial persecution by the opposition forces in widespread ethnic cleansing efforts. Executions, torture, and open slave markets are thriving there. Crucially, this is exactly the kind of phenomena that anti-interventionists take into account when formulating their views on American foreign policy. Was it worth it? Despite the claims made against Gaddafi’s actions, is Libya better off now? And if not, will the interventionists show any accountability?

For more reading on the NATO’s involvement in Libya, Max Forte, a professor of anthropology at Concordia University has laid out his perspective brilliantly in the book, Slouching Towards Sirte: NATO’s War on Libya and Africa. He argues that the intervention there was never about human rights, but about increasing the projected military control of African affairs by Western powers, as a direct affront against the Pan-Africanist agendas pursued by leaders such as Gaddafi.

Going Nuclear

Beginning under the Obama administration, a new program is underway which seeks to modernize the entire nuclear weapons arsenal of the United States to the tune of a projected $1.7 trillion over a period of thirty years. Given what we know about the track-record of military development projects, budget overruns are very likely, which means we can safely assume the project will probably end up costing somewhere between $2 and $3 trillion.

There was no public debate over this; no national conversation. It just, happened. And it happened under the purview of our Nobel prize-winning President, who promised in 2009 to fulfill “America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons”.

The Cold War ended decades ago, and yet we still find ourselves in the middle of a nuclear arms race! This immensely expensive program is designed to upgrade a set of weapons that can’t even be used in the first place, lest they risk the destruction of all human life on Earth. Let that sink in for a moment. Where else could we be investing this money? Into Medicaid for all? Or addressing the student loan crisis? Or investing in renewable energy research? Or taking care of the homelessness crisis? No, instead, the national security apparatus has decided, without any public debate, to squander these funds in a terminally dangerous way.

Where is humanity truly going? And how can we change our course?

The Future

We all must admit to ourselves, that our country of citizenship is, in most cases, merely an accident of birth. No one chose the nation into which they were born. And no man or woman in the U.S. really has any interest in going to war against a man or woman in Russia, or Iran, or Somalia, or anywhere else for that matter. These conflicts are created by forces beyond our control, by very powerful people who view the world as a chess board and us as their pawns. And their messages is carried dutifully by a bought-and-sold corporate media machine.

I’m writing this to assure like-minded individuals that it’s still okay to be anti-war, despite the forces we must encounter every day in the world. It’s okay to have a heart, and a vision. It’s okay to strive everyday, working towards a world without war. It is possible to do so, in fact, it’s necessary. With the ever increasing destructiveness of our weapons, pushed forward with every advance in military technology, we have to advocate for peace.

We are not simple-minded, an accusation John Bolton threw out against Tucker Carlson on his show. We understand the profound importance of world peace and will not budge on the issue. Peace is a state of mind worth living.

We must revitalize the anti-war movement in America. And this requires thinking outside of the box. This requires taking a critical eye to what is showered down upon us from the corporate-owned media. We must take outsiders seriously, when they present a genuine voice for the voiceless, and are messengers of peace. We must pay attention to the news, and force the deciders in Washington to hear our concerns.

As Martin Luther King said in Beyond Vietnam:

Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest.

Perhaps a step forward could come in the form of political coalitions. When a presidential candidate like Ron Paul calls for an end to American interventionism, candidates from the other side of the aisle who share his view should be able to bridge the political divide and join him to form an allaince. There could be an anti-war coalition populated by such figures as Bernie Sanders, Rand Paul, Tulsi Gabbard, and Mike Gravel. Perhaps this kind of a coalition could gather some real, substantive public support. Because as it stands today, the status quo of both parties provides no real safe place for anti-interventionists to voice their concerns. And this, in my opinion, plays right into the hands of the perpetual war machine that the lives inside the American government. The DoD spends so much of the tax-payers money it may end up taking them decades to balance their books, if they even can.

What do you think we should do?