Hawkish Right-Wingers Hurting Teachers, and Your Kids

By Stephen Zunes, AlterNet. Posted May 13, 2009.

Despite a new presidential administration and an expanded Democratic majority in Congress, teachers and their unions are under unprecedented assault through budget cuts and so-called reform efforts geared toward giving corporations increased access to, and management responsibilities for, public schools.

Unfortunately, as a result of years of support for a right-wing U.S. foreign policy, the once-powerful teachers union -- the American Federation of Teachers -- has so damaged its credibility and alienated its membership that its position has been seriously weakened.

Albert Shanker, who served as the union's influential president for nearly a quarter-century until his death in 1997, was an outspoken supporter of the Vietnam War and U.S. military intervention in Central America, as well as a booster of President Reagan's dangerous escalation of the nuclear arms race and dramatically increased military spending.

He was a board member of the Committee for a Democratic Majority, a coalition of hawkish Democrats founded by Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson, D- Wa., and Professor Jeanne Kirkpatrick, who later served in the Reagan administration.

Although outspoken in its criticism of Communist regimes and leftist governments -- even to the point of supporting right-wing terrorists attacking Nicaragua -- the AFT under Shanker was reticent to criticize autocratic allies of the United States.

Shanker was also virtually the only prominent trade unionist to join the Committee on the Present Danger, the influential right-wing group that accused President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger of engaging in "unilateral disarmament."

Shanker and his colleagues claimed that Soviet Russia was somehow getting stronger than the United States and its allies and that the Soviets posed "a clear and present danger" to America's national security when, in reality, the Soviet Union was actually falling way behind the West in its strategic capabilities, and its whole decrepit system was collapsing.

Following his death in 1997, Shanker protégé Edward McElroy took over the AFT presidency, where he and AFT Secretary-Treasurer Nat LaCour served as AFL-CIO vice presidents. Although much of the national labor federation has moved to the left since the 1970s, McElroy and LaCour stood out for their unrepentant right-wing agenda, serving as the only members of the AFL-CIO executive council to support the George W. Bush doctrine of preventative war.

Support for the Iraq War

In January 2003, anti-war activists were scrambling to prevent a U.S. invasion of Iraq by challenging the Bush administration's ludicrous claims about Iraq having reconstituted its chemical- and biological-weapons capabilities, offensive delivery system and nuclear weapons program.

In an apparent effort to discredit such efforts and give credibility to the Bush administration's fearmongering, the AFT leadership went on record claiming that Iraq posed "a unique threat to the peace and stability of the Middle East" and the national security interests of the United States.

This decision to parrot the Bush administration's alarmist and unsubstantiated rhetoric regarding Iraq's alleged military capabilities came in the face of substantial evidence to the contrary presented by U.N. arms inspectors, independent arms control specialists, investigative journalists, academic journals and analyses by independent research institutes that cast serious doubts upon such allegations.

However, the AFT leadership in Washington apparently believed it knew more than arms-control experts on the ground in Iraq, insisting that, in order to avoid war, "there can be no equivocation. The Iraqi regime must disarm."

Given that the Iraqi regime had already disarmed as required years earlier and were already allowing unfettered inspections inside Iraq, this demand by the AFT leadership appears to have been simply an excuse to back a U.S. takeover of that oil-rich country.

In light of public-opinion polls indicating that the only reason a majority of Americans would support a U.S. invasion of Iraq was if they believed that Iraq constituted a threat to the national security of the United States, the decision of the leadership of one of the most powerful labor unions in the country -- particularly one representing hundreds of thousands of primary, secondary and university teachers -- to go on record making such false claims contributed significantly to the political climate that made possible the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

To this day, the AFT leadership has never apologized for misleading its members and the American public about Iraq's WMDs or the alleged Iraqi threat.

See more stories tagged with: war, labor, union, hawks

Stephen Zunes is a professor of politics, chairman of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of San Francisco and serves as a senior policy analyst for Foreign Policy in Focus.

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