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To Build the Anti-War Movement of the Future, We Must Learn From the Past

What history can teach us about where the anti-imperalist left should go now.

An anti–Iraq War demonstration in New York City on February 15. 2003.

During a phone call on a warm day in August 2002, the two of us came to an unmistakable conclusion: This bastard is going to take us into war with Iraq!

The “bastard,” of course, was then President George W. Bush, who was in the midst of an aggressive propaganda campaign about the alleged danger posed by Saddam Hussein’s weapons program.

As we all know now—and many of us knew then—that program did not actually exist. The real threat to the world was sitting in the White House, not in Baghdad. And the two of us knew we had to do something about it. So, along with many other allies, we got to work, helping to form United for Peace & Justice, the largest of the coalitions that mobilized against US aggression in Iraq.

It is with this background that we offer several thoughts in response to, or, better put, inspired by Eric Blanc’s excellent recent essay on the relative lack of a movement against the war in Iran—and the compelling need to build one. To be clear: This period is very different from the early 2000s, above all because we face a genuinely fascistic MAGA movement that makes the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld group look like amateurs. But the question still remains: Both Donald Trump and the Iran War are deeply unpopular, so why has no mass movement emerged to fight this conflict?

Before discussing the strengths and failures of the last major anti-war movement, we need to step back and look at US history. What that history shows is that the inability to build and sustain an anti-war movement or mass presence is directly linked to the absence of what one might call an anti-imperial/pro-democratic foreign policy on the part of progressive movements. As a result, those who adhere to the notion of a need for peace and justice find ourselves in a Groundhog Day scenario on a regular basis, trying our best to ignite or reignite a mass movement against US aggression each time that aggression raises its ugly head.

The United States has a long history of anti-war movements, and many of them have followed a similar pattern:

They tend to be short-lived, particularly if most Americans don’t seem to feel the impact of the war in their own lives.

They immediately conflict with and are often overwhelmed by pro-imperial/allegedly patriotic sentiment.

They are focused on a particular crisis rather than the imperial system

Time and space do not permit an examination of each of these points, but we would note a few.

Anti-war movements are not instrumentally initiated or connected by only one political or social force, and people who share an opposition to war don’t always do so for the same reasons. There were those, for instance, who opposed the Spanish-American War and the US war against the Philippines because they did not want to see additional people of color becoming US citizens. Other people recognized the criminality of these wars and saw in them a contradiction with the formal and stated objectives of the United States.

This lack of agreement can hamper the sustainability of an anti-war movement. Once Spain was defeated, followed 11 years later by the defeat of the Philippine resistance, the wind vanished from the sails. There was no anti-imperialist consensus that could keep the forces engaged over a longer period of time. The colonized peoples of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Guam, and Cuba became old news, and the power of Manifest Destiny appeared, to many, to justify the aggression and annexation carried out by Presidents McKinley, Roosevelt, and Taft.

Other movements had to contend with the harsh power of the federal government. There was significant opposition to US participation in World War I, including from the Socialist Party and the Industrial Workers of the World. Yet, taking advantage of the sinking of the Lusitania and revelations of the so-called Zimmerman Telegram, President Wilson successfully utilized jingoism and patriotism, along with active state repression, to crush anti-war opposition leading up to and following the US entrance into the war.

Opposition to US intervention in the Caribbean and Central America in the 1920s was courageous but largely short-lived. More concerted resistance could be found in the Black-led opposition to Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935,........

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