Why the Antiwar Movement Can't Budge the Dems to Leave Iraq

By David Sirota, Crown Publishing. Posted June 5, 2008.

The following is an adapted excerpt from David Sirota's new book, "The Uprising: An Unauthorized Tour of the Populist Revolt Scaring Wall Street and Washington" (Crown Publishing, 2008). It first appeared in In These Times.

The nationwide opposition to the Iraq War is based on a host of populist impulses. Some people hate it because they think lives are being sacrificed to pursue the oil industry's agenda. Some despise it because, without a military draft, the U.S. casualties -- 4,000-plus and counting -- are disproportionately working-class kids. Still others abhor the war because it drains scarce resources away from pressing priorities at home. And yet, despite this groundswell of antiwar sentiment, the campaign to stop the war is adrift and dysfunctional.

On the one side are groups like United for Peace and Justice, that head what progressive activist Matt Stoller has deemed "The Protest Industry" -- a clan "made up of those who decided that participation in the system was immoral" because they "have seen 'compromise' many times before and think they know where it leads."

At Protest Industry rallies against the war in Iraq, you will find no effort to hone a basic message. You will see a sea of signs demanding (1) the end to a war with Iran that hasn't happened, (2) the impeachment of President George W. Bush, (3) the arrest of Vice President Dick Cheney, (4) the elimination of the death penalty, or (5) the overthrow of the U.S. government by Maoists who reason that the "world can't wait to drive out the Bush regime."

These demonstrations are boisterous but ephemeral displays whose chaos and lack of message reinforce a self-defeating fringe image.

On the other side of the antiwar movement is a group of organizations and apparatchiks that have launched an operation called Americans Against Escalation in Iraq (AAEI) -- a coalition of mainly Washington, D.C.-based advocacy groups, pooling cash and staff for "a major, multimillion dollar national campaign to oppose the president's 'surge' proposal to escalate the war in Iraq," as its website says.

Within the uprising against the war in Iraq, AAEI and its allies are the "professional" side of the antiwar effort. Consider them The Players.

The Players imagine that the war will end not after a massive investment in long-term, on-the-ground local organizing against war, but by the short-term coordination of a few elite actors -- political consultants, donors, politicians and maybe one or two organization heads -- in front of a map of media markets and congressional districts.

The Players make their moves with campaign contributions, TV spots and PR campaigns -- the conventional weapons in a media war -- and they are playing their game in Washington for Washington. In contrast to the Protest Industry, they believe the only way to effect change is to play an inside game.

Hollywood for ugly people

Media coverage is currency in the nation's capital. There, celebrities are people like Washington Post columnist David Broder, MSNBC's Chris Matthews and Time magazine's Joe Klein -- people known to almost no one in the country at large.

Within the Beltway, however, they are influential celebrities because they appear on obscure chat shows, from C-SPAN's "Washington Journal" to Fox News' "Special Report" to MSNBC's "Hardball."

Our nation's capital has become Hollywood for ugly people.

Washington's self-absorbed fetishization of tiny-audience TV shows might be funny -- except that the Iraq War was largely started because of this closed-circuit media obsession.

In the march to war, neoconservatives, like The Weekly Standard's William Kristol, staked out beachheads on Fox News sets, while so-called liberal hawks, like The New Republic's former editor Peter Beinart, dug trenches in CNN studios. These pundits established support for the war as a criterion of political respectability and a mark of worthiness for media access.

Now, out in the real world, beyond the confines of the TV studios, it's all gone to shit -- all of it. The American public -- which was ambivalent about supporting the unilateral invasion -- is now firmly opposed to continuing the conflict.

Many of Washington's pro-war TV "celebrities" are trying to flee their previously televised warmongering. Klein of Time magazine, for instance, appeared on CNBC a month before the Iraq invasion to state, "War may well be the right decision at this point -- in fact, I think it probably is." By 2007, he claimed with a straight face, "I've been opposed to the Iraq War ever since 2002."

In light of this, The Players believe that by funneling money into organizations like AAEI, pulling PR stunts and putting attack ads on television against pro-war legislators in Congress, they can make this antiwar uprising successful without organizing millions of Americans into a cohesive long-term movement. They believe, in short, that if a war can be started because of Washington's obsession with television, it can be ended because of that same obsession.

Washington's rules

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David Sirota is a senior editor at In These Times and a bestselling author whose newest book, “The Uprising,” will be released in May 2008. He is a fellow at the Campaign for America’s Future and a board member of the Progressive States Network—both nonpartisan organizations. His blog is at http://www.credoaction.com/sirota.

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