G
Gandalf Grey
Guest
American Disengagement: The Bureaucracy, the March, and the War
By Tom Engelhardt
Created Oct 29 2007 - 9:04am
- from TomDispatch [1]
As I was heading out into a dark, drippingly wet, appropriately dispiriting
New York City day, on my way to the "Fall Out Against the War" [2] march --
one of 11 [3] regional antiwar demonstrations held this Saturday -- I was
thinking: then and now, Vietnam and Iraq. Since the Bush administration had
Vietnam on the brain [4] while planning to take down Saddam Hussein's regime
for the home team, it's hardly surprising that, from the moment its invasion
was launched in March 2003, the Vietnam analogy has been on the American
brain [5] -- and, even domestically, there's something to be said for it.
As John Mueller [6], an expert on public opinion and American wars, pointed
out back in November 2005, Americans turned against the Iraq War in a
pattern recognizable from the Vietnam era (as well as the Korean one) --
initial, broad post-invasion support that eroded irreversibly as American
casualties rose. "The only thing remarkable about the current war in Iraq,"
Mueller wrote, "is how precipitously American public support has dropped
off. Casualty for casualty, support has declined far more quickly than it
did during either the Korean War or the Vietnam War." He added, quite
correctly, as it turned out: "And if history is any indication, there is
little the Bush administration can do to reverse this decline."
Where the Vietnam analogy distinctly breaks down, however, is in the
streets. In the Vietnam era, the demonstrations started small and built
slowly over the years toward the massive -- in Washington, in cities around
the country, and then on campuses nationwide. In those years, as anger,
anxiety, and outrage mounted, militancy rose, and yet the range of antiwar
demonstrators grew to include groups as diverse as "businessmen against the
war" and large numbers of ever more vociferous Vietnam vets, often just back
from the war itself. Almost exactly the opposite pattern -- the vets
aside -- has occured with Iraq. The prewar demonstrations were monstrous,
instantaneously gigantic, at home and abroad. Millions of people grasped
just where we were going in late 2002 and early 2003, and grasped as well
that the Bush dream of an American-occupied Iraq would lead to disaster and
death galore. The New York Times [7], usually notoriously unimpressed with
demonstrations, referred to the massed demonstrators then as the second
"superpower" on a previously one superpower planet. And it did look, as the
Times headline went, as if there were "a new power in the streets."
But here was the strange thing, as the "lone superpower" faltered, as the
Bush administration and the Pentagon came to look ever less super, ever less
victorious, ever less powerful, so did that other superpower. Discouragement
of a special sort seemed to set in -- initially perhaps that the invasion
had not been stopped and that, in Washington, no one in a tone-deaf
administration even seemed to be listening. Still, through the first years
of the war, on occasion, hundreds of thousands of demonstrators could be
gathered in one spot to march massively, even cheerfully; these were crowds
filled with "first timers" [8] (who were proud to tell you so); and,
increasingly, with the families of soldiers stationed in Iraq (or
Afghanistan), or of soldiers who had died there, and even, sometimes, with
some of the soldiers themselves, as well as contingents of vets from the
Vietnam era, now older, greyer, but still vociferously antiwar.
However, over the years, unlike in the Vietnam era, the demonstrations
shrank, and somehow the anxiety, the anger -- though it remained suspended
somewhere in the American ether -- stopped manifesting itself so publicly,
even as the war went on and on. Or put another way, perhaps the anger went
deeper and turned inward, like a scouring agent. Perhaps it went all the way
into what was left of an American belief system, into despair about the
unresponsiveness of the government -- with paralyzing effect. As another
potentially more disastrous war with Iran edges into sight, the response has
been limited largely to what might be called the professional demonstrators.
The surge of hope, of visual creativity, of spontaneous interaction, of the
urge to turn out, that arose in those prewar demonstrations now seemed so
long gone, replaced by a far more powerful sense that nothing anyone could
do mattered in the least.
When it comes to the Vietnam analogy domestically, the question that still
hangs in the air is whether, as in the latter years of the Vietnam era, the
soldiers, in Iraq (and Afghanistan) as well as here at home, will take
matters into their own hands; whether, as with Vietnam, in the end Iraq (and
Iran) will be left to the vets of this war and their families and friends --
or to no one at all.
The Consensus Gap
Here's the strange thing: As we all know, the Washington Consensus --
Democrats as well as Republicans, in Congress as in the Oval Office -- has
been settling ever deeper into the Iraqi imperial project. As a town,
official Washington, it seems, has come to terms with a post-surge
occupation strategy that will give new meaning to what, in the days after
the 2003 invasion, quickly came to be known as the Q-word (for the
Vietnam-era "quagmire"). The President has made it all too clear that he
will fight his war in Iraq to the last second of his administration -- and,
if he has anything to say about it (as indeed he might), well beyond. In
their "classified campaign strategy for the country," our ambassador in
Baghdad, Ryan Crocker, and the President's surge commander, Gen. David
Petraeus, are reportedly [9] already planning their war-fighting and
occupation policy through the summer of 2009, and so into the next
presidency. The three leading Democratic candidates for president, Hillary
Clinton, Barack Obama, and John Edwards, have refused to guarantee that
American troops will even be totally out of Iraq by 2013 [10], the end of a
first term in office -- as essentially has every Republican candidate except
Ron Paul, the libertarian congressman from Texas. In fact, in Washington,
the ongoing war is now such a given that it's hardly being discussed at the
moment (as the one in Afghanistan has never been). The focus has instead
shifted to the next possible administration monstrosity -- a possible air
assault on Iran that would essentially guarantee [11] a global recession or
depression.
Meanwhile, the American people -- having formed their own Iraq Study Group
[12] as early as 2005 -- have moved in another direction entirely. On this,
the opinion polls [13] have been, and remain (as Mueller suggested they
would), unanimous. When Americans are asked how the President is handling
the war in Iraq, disapproval figures run 67% to 26% in the most recent CBS
News poll; 68% to 30% in the ABC News/Washington Post poll; and, according
to CNN's pollsters, opposition to the war itself runs at a 65% to 34% clip.
As for "staying" some course in Iraq to 2013 or beyond, that CBS News poll,
typically, has 45% of Americans wanting all troops out in "less than a year"
and 72% in "one to two years" -- in other words, not by the end of, but the
beginning of, the next presidential term in office. (The ABC News/Washington
Post poll indicates, among other things, that, by 55% to 40%, Americans feel
the Democrats in Congress have not gone "far enough in opposing the war in
Iraq"; and that they want Congress to rein in the administration's soaring,
off-the-books war financing requests.)
In other words, the Washington elite are settling ever deeper, ever less
responsively, into the Big Muddy, while the American Consensus has come down
quite decisively elsewhere. For all intents and purposes, it seems that most
Americans are acting as if some policy page had already been turned, as if
Iraq was so been-there, done-that. Perhaps many are also assuming that the
present administration is beyond unreachable and that any successor will be
certain to fix the problem; or, alternately, that nothing the public can do
in relation to the Washington Consensus, including voting, matters one whit;
or some helpless, hopeless combination of the two and who knows what else.
As I sat in that rumbling subway car on my way to the march in lower
Manhattan, I kept wondering who, between the Iraq-forever-and-a-day crowd
and the been-there/done-that folks might think it worth the bother to turn
out at an antiwar rally on such a lousy day. And it was then that a brief
encounter from the summer came to mind.
I'm now 63 years old and increasingly feel as if my 1950s childhood came out
of another universe. Sometime in August, I ran into a "kid" -- maybe in his
early thirties -- employed by a consulting firm to do what once would have
been the work of a federal government employee. He gamely tried to explain
the sinews of his privatized world to me. As he spoke, I began to wonder
whether he was interested in working in the federal government, not just as
a consultant to it. To ask the question, I began explaining how I had grown
up dreaming about being part of the government -- the State Department,
actually. It seemed to me then like an honorable, if not downright glorious,
destiny to represent your country to others. It was a feeling that left me
deep into the 1960s when I had, in fact, already been accepted into the
United States Information Agency (from which I would have, a good deal less
gloriously, propagandized for my country). It was only then that anger over
the Vietnam War swept me elsewhere.
I told the young consultant that, when young, I had dreamed of doing my
"civic duty" and his eyes promptly widened in visible disbelief. He rolled
that phrase around for a moment, then said (all dialogue recreated from my
faulty memory): "Civic duty? No one in my world thinks about it that way any
more." He paused and added, hesitantly, "But I might actually like to be in
the bureaucracy for a while."
That was my moment to widen my eyes. What I once thought of as "the
government" had, in the space of mere decades, become "the bureaucracy,"
even to someone who would consider joining it -- and, the worst of it was, I
knew he was right. This was one genuine accomplishment of a
quarter-century-plus of the Republican "revolution" (and the Clinton
interregnum). All those presidential candidates, running as small-government
outsiders ready to bring Washington big spenders to heel, had, on coming to
power, only fed that government mercilessly, throwing untold numbers of tax
dollars at the Pentagon and the military-industrial complex, ensuring that
they would become ever more bloated, powerful, and labyrinthine, ever more
focused on their own well-being, and ever less civic; ensuring that the
government as a whole would be ever more "bureaucratic," ever less "ept,"
and -- always -- ever more oppressive, with ever more police-state-like
powers.
All that had been strangled in the process -- made smaller, if you will --
was the federal government's ability to deliver actual services to the
population that paid for it. All that was made smaller in the world beyond
Washington was whatever residual faith existed that this was "your"
government, that it actually represented you in any way. As the state's
bureaucratic, military, and policing powers bloated, so, too, did the
electoral process -- and lost as well was the belief that your vote could
determine anything much at all.
Looking back, this was, in a sense, what 9/11 really meant in America. The
one thing that a government, which had long reinforced its own powers,
should have been able to deliver was intelligence and protection. So it
wasn't, I suspect, just those towers that crumbled on that day. What also
crumbled was a residual faith in "we, the people." This was actually what
the Bush administration played on when it urged Americans not to mobilize
for its Global War on Terror, but simply to go about their business, to --
as the President famously put it [14] 16 days after 9/11 -- "get down to
Disney World in Florida. Take your families and enjoy life, the way we want
it to be enjoyed." In a sense, Bush and his top officials were just doing
what came naturally -- further sidelining the American people so they could
fight their private wars in peace (so to speak).
The "bureaucracy" had strangled the very idea of the "civic." Who would even
think about entering such a world today as a "civic duty," rather than as a
career move; or imagine Washington as "our" government; or that anyone
inside the famed Beltway, or near the K-Street hive of lobbyists, or in
Congress or the Oval Office would give a damn about you? This is why, at a
deeper level, the Washington Consensus today has next to nothing to do with
the American one.
American Disengagement
When people look back on the Vietnam era, few comment on how connected the
size and vigor of demonstrations were to a conception of government in
Washington as responsible to the American people. Even the youthful radicals
of the time, in their outrage, still generally believed that Washington was
not living up to some ideal they had absorbed in their younger years.
Whatever they were denouncing, the founders of Students for a Democratic
Society (SDS) in their Port Huron Statement, for instance, spoke without
irony or discomfort of "[f]reedom and equality for each individual,
government of, by, and for the people -- these American values we found
good, principles by which we could live as men."
Though they may not have known it, they were still believers, after a
fashion. By and large, the demonstrators of that moment not only believed
that Washington should listen, but when, for instance, they chanted angrily,
"Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?", that President Lyndon
Baines Johnson would be listening. (And, in fact, he was. He called it "that
horrible song.") Which young people today would believe that in their gut?
Who would believe such a thing of "the bureaucracy"?
Don't forget, demonstrating is another kind of civic duty -- but perhaps a
waning one. I was struck this weekend that, even among people I know, many
of whom had demonstrated in the Vietnam era and had turned out again in the
early years of this war, next to none were on the streets this Saturday.
Most were simply going about their business with other, better things to do.
The fact is: Attending a march like Saturday's is still, for me, something
like an ingrained civic habit, like.... gulp.... voting, which I can't
imagine not doing -- even when it has little meaning to me -- or keeping
informed by reading a newspaper daily in print (something that, it seems,
just about no one under 25 does any more). These are the habits of a
lifetime and they don't disappear quickly. But when they're gone, or if they
don't make it to the next generation intact, it's hard, if not impossible,
to get them back.
If you need another point of comparison, consider TV comic Stephen Colbert's
joke (or is it?) race [15] for the presidency in his home state of South
Carolina (or the fact that, in a Rasmussen Report telephone poll, he
garnered 13% support in the Republican field just days after announcing his
run). Again, I'm old enough to remember the last time something like this
happened. Sometime in the late 1950s -- the details escape me -- a few fans
of the cartoon strip Pogo [16] decided to launch a "Pogo for President"
campaign in election season. (Mind you, that strip, about a talking opossum
and his pals in Okefenokee Swamp, was a classic with a critical, political
edge. Who could forget the moment when Howland Owl and the turtle, Churchy
LaFemme, decided to enter the nuclear age by creating uranium from a
combination of a Yew tree and a geranium.) In the strip, Pogo did indeed run
for president and its creator, Walt Kelly, used that hook to promote
perfectly real voter-registration campaigns. But -- as I remember it -- he
was horrified by the real-life campaign for his character and insisted that
it be stopped. You didn't, after all, make a mockery of American democracy
that way. It just wasn't funny.
No longer. Now, the "character" is launched onto the field of electoral play
by the creator himself, who also happens to be promoting a book in need of
publicity; and Colbert's ploy is hailed as a kind of transcendent reality,
not simply a mockery of it, even on that most mainstream of Sunday yak
shows, Tim Russert's Meet the Press. Of course, the joke -- and it's a grim
one indeed -- is on what's left of American democracy, which, as Colbert
obviously means to prove, is the real mockery of our moment.
Perhaps we all have to hope that, when he's done with the election, he'll
turn his attention to demonstrations in a world increasingly uncongenial to
"civic duty" of any sort. It seems that we've entered a time in which even
demonstrating can be outsourced [17], privatized, left to the pros, or
simply dismissed (like so much else) as hopeless, a waste of time. So I was
heading toward this demonstration, wondering not why more people wouldn't be
there, but why anyone would be.
Penned in on the Streets
And here's how it felt [18]:
"From the moment I looked across the aisle in the subway and saw the woman
with the upside-down, hand-painted sign -- an anguished face, blood, and 'no
war' on it -- and she noted my sign, also resting against my knees but
modestly turned away from view, and gave me the thumbs up sign, I knew
things would be okay. As my wife, a friend, and I exited the subway at the
50th Street station on the west side of New York, I noted three college-age
women bent over a subway bench magic-marking in messages on their blank sign
boards, a signal that we were heading for some special do-it-yourself
event."
Oops! Sorry, that was my description of the first moments of a massive
antiwar march -- half a million or more people took part -- in New York City
on February 15, 2003, just over a month before the invasion of Iraq was
launched.
On my subway car Saturday, there were no obvious demonstrators carrying
signs; no eager faces or hands ready to give a thumbs-up sign; no one who
even looked like he or she was heading for a demonstration. (Of course, I
had no handmade sign and didn't look that way either.)
A signature aspect of this era's antiwar demonstrations, from the first
prewar giants on, has been the spontaneous, personal signage [19], often a
literal sea of waving individual expressions of indignation, sardonic humor,
hope, despair, absurdity, you name it.
On Saturday, most of the signs were printed and clearly organizationally
inspired; not all, however, as the shots by Tam Turse [20], the young
photojournalist who accompanied me, eloquently indicate.
As for the police, well, here's how it felt with them:
"They still had us more or less confined to the sidewalk and a bit of the
street on one side of the avenue, and cars were still crawling by. But
already demonstrators were moving the orange police cones quickly set up for
this unexpected crowd on an unexpectedly occupied avenue ever farther out
into the traffic. Soon, to relieve pressure, the police opened a side street
and with a great cheer our section of the rolling non-march burst through up
to Second [Avenue] where we found ourselves in an even greater mass of
humanity, heading north on our own avenue without a single car, truck, or
bus."
Uh-oh, my mistake again! That, too, was the February 15, 2003 demo [21].
This time, I came out of the subway at 23rd Street and was promptly accosted
by a confused young German woman, postcards clutched in one hand. She
pointed at two blue mailboxes on the corner and asked, in charmingly
accented English, how you put the cards in. "Oh," I said, "let me show you."
And I promptly pulled on each mailbox handle, only to find them locked. The
police had undoubtedly done this as an anti-terror measure. The woman was
relieved, she told me, that she wasn't "mad." No, I assured her, it was the
world that was mad, not her.
The rest of the march was, in essence, a police event, the demonstrators
penned in by moveable metal barricades, "guarded" often by more police
personnel than on-lookers. From the moment we began to march in the rain,
the police presence was overwhelming, starting with a well-marked NYPD "Sky
Watch" tower, a mobile tower [22] that can be raised anywhere in which
police observers can spy on you from behind a Darth Vader-style darkened
window. In fact, we marchers were penned in by the police as we headed south
for Foley Square, cut off, for instance, from the large cross street at 14th
by a row [23] of dismounted police using their motorcycles as a barricade.
Police vehicles and police on foot moved slowly in front of the
demonstration as well as behind it. Police even marched in the demonstration
(though not as demonstrators). Essentially, it was, as all rallies and
demonstrations now seem to be in our growing Homeland Security state-let
[24], a police march.
Led by a sizeable contingent of soldiers, vets [25], and military families,
there were perhaps 10,000 marchers [26] -- a rare occasion when my own rough
estimate fit the normal police undercount -- on a dreary, rainy day, which
is no small thing. Each of them left his or her life for a few hours to take
a walk (or, in the case of one elderly lady [27], to be wheeled, encased in
plastic, or for two "grannies for peace" to be peddled in a volunteer
pedicab [28]) in mild discomfort, to chant, to call out, even in a few
creative cases, to display feelings on individual placards [29] or
constructions [30] or in group tableaux [31]. Each of them, for his or her
own reason, was civic, even global. Add up all the people who did this in 11
cities [32] nationwide, and the numbers aren't unimpressive. But with
unending war, as well as perpetual death and destruction on the Bush
administration menu, with the horizon darkened by the possibility of a
strike against Iran, and a population which has turned its back on most of
the above, it was, nonetheless, clearly underwhelming.
Meanwhile, in Iraq [33] on Saturday, according to news reports, it was just
an ordinary day, the usual harvest of decomposing corpses, deadly roadside
blasts, assassinations, kidnappings, U.S. raids, and, bizarrely, the
breakfast poisoning of 100 Iraqi soldiers. One American death [34] was
announced on Saturday. We don't yet know who the soldier was, only that he
died "when he sustained small arms fire while conducting operations in Salah
ad Din [Province]." He could, of course, have come from New York City, but
the odds [35] are that he came from a small town somewhere in the American
hinterlands, from perhaps Latta [36], South Carolina or Lone Pine [37],
California.
He might, or might not, have ever visited Disney World. He might have joined
the overstretched U.S. armed forces for the increasingly massive bonuses the
military is now offering to bind the poor and futureless close in a war that
has been rejected by the American people; or perhaps he simply signed on
with some of that residual sense of civic duty that's fast fleeing the land;
or, possibly, both of the above. Perhaps, if he hadn't died, he would, like
12 former captains who recently wrote "The Real Iraq We Knew" for the
Washington Post [38] op-ed page and called our "best option. to leave Iraq
immediately," have returned to speak out against the war. Who knows.
Already, for 3,839 Americans in Iraq and 451 Americans in Afghanistan, we
will never have a way of knowing.
Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com, is the
co-founder of the American Empire Project [39]. His book, The End of Victory
Culture [40] (University of Massachusetts Press), has just been thoroughly
updated in a newly issued edition that deals with victory culture's
crash-and-burn sequel in Iraq.
Tam Turse is a photojournalist [41] working in New York City. Her photos of
the demonstration discussed in this piece can be viewed by clicking here
[42].
Copyright 2007 Tom Engelhardt
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Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107
"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson
By Tom Engelhardt
Created Oct 29 2007 - 9:04am
- from TomDispatch [1]
As I was heading out into a dark, drippingly wet, appropriately dispiriting
New York City day, on my way to the "Fall Out Against the War" [2] march --
one of 11 [3] regional antiwar demonstrations held this Saturday -- I was
thinking: then and now, Vietnam and Iraq. Since the Bush administration had
Vietnam on the brain [4] while planning to take down Saddam Hussein's regime
for the home team, it's hardly surprising that, from the moment its invasion
was launched in March 2003, the Vietnam analogy has been on the American
brain [5] -- and, even domestically, there's something to be said for it.
As John Mueller [6], an expert on public opinion and American wars, pointed
out back in November 2005, Americans turned against the Iraq War in a
pattern recognizable from the Vietnam era (as well as the Korean one) --
initial, broad post-invasion support that eroded irreversibly as American
casualties rose. "The only thing remarkable about the current war in Iraq,"
Mueller wrote, "is how precipitously American public support has dropped
off. Casualty for casualty, support has declined far more quickly than it
did during either the Korean War or the Vietnam War." He added, quite
correctly, as it turned out: "And if history is any indication, there is
little the Bush administration can do to reverse this decline."
Where the Vietnam analogy distinctly breaks down, however, is in the
streets. In the Vietnam era, the demonstrations started small and built
slowly over the years toward the massive -- in Washington, in cities around
the country, and then on campuses nationwide. In those years, as anger,
anxiety, and outrage mounted, militancy rose, and yet the range of antiwar
demonstrators grew to include groups as diverse as "businessmen against the
war" and large numbers of ever more vociferous Vietnam vets, often just back
from the war itself. Almost exactly the opposite pattern -- the vets
aside -- has occured with Iraq. The prewar demonstrations were monstrous,
instantaneously gigantic, at home and abroad. Millions of people grasped
just where we were going in late 2002 and early 2003, and grasped as well
that the Bush dream of an American-occupied Iraq would lead to disaster and
death galore. The New York Times [7], usually notoriously unimpressed with
demonstrations, referred to the massed demonstrators then as the second
"superpower" on a previously one superpower planet. And it did look, as the
Times headline went, as if there were "a new power in the streets."
But here was the strange thing, as the "lone superpower" faltered, as the
Bush administration and the Pentagon came to look ever less super, ever less
victorious, ever less powerful, so did that other superpower. Discouragement
of a special sort seemed to set in -- initially perhaps that the invasion
had not been stopped and that, in Washington, no one in a tone-deaf
administration even seemed to be listening. Still, through the first years
of the war, on occasion, hundreds of thousands of demonstrators could be
gathered in one spot to march massively, even cheerfully; these were crowds
filled with "first timers" [8] (who were proud to tell you so); and,
increasingly, with the families of soldiers stationed in Iraq (or
Afghanistan), or of soldiers who had died there, and even, sometimes, with
some of the soldiers themselves, as well as contingents of vets from the
Vietnam era, now older, greyer, but still vociferously antiwar.
However, over the years, unlike in the Vietnam era, the demonstrations
shrank, and somehow the anxiety, the anger -- though it remained suspended
somewhere in the American ether -- stopped manifesting itself so publicly,
even as the war went on and on. Or put another way, perhaps the anger went
deeper and turned inward, like a scouring agent. Perhaps it went all the way
into what was left of an American belief system, into despair about the
unresponsiveness of the government -- with paralyzing effect. As another
potentially more disastrous war with Iran edges into sight, the response has
been limited largely to what might be called the professional demonstrators.
The surge of hope, of visual creativity, of spontaneous interaction, of the
urge to turn out, that arose in those prewar demonstrations now seemed so
long gone, replaced by a far more powerful sense that nothing anyone could
do mattered in the least.
When it comes to the Vietnam analogy domestically, the question that still
hangs in the air is whether, as in the latter years of the Vietnam era, the
soldiers, in Iraq (and Afghanistan) as well as here at home, will take
matters into their own hands; whether, as with Vietnam, in the end Iraq (and
Iran) will be left to the vets of this war and their families and friends --
or to no one at all.
The Consensus Gap
Here's the strange thing: As we all know, the Washington Consensus --
Democrats as well as Republicans, in Congress as in the Oval Office -- has
been settling ever deeper into the Iraqi imperial project. As a town,
official Washington, it seems, has come to terms with a post-surge
occupation strategy that will give new meaning to what, in the days after
the 2003 invasion, quickly came to be known as the Q-word (for the
Vietnam-era "quagmire"). The President has made it all too clear that he
will fight his war in Iraq to the last second of his administration -- and,
if he has anything to say about it (as indeed he might), well beyond. In
their "classified campaign strategy for the country," our ambassador in
Baghdad, Ryan Crocker, and the President's surge commander, Gen. David
Petraeus, are reportedly [9] already planning their war-fighting and
occupation policy through the summer of 2009, and so into the next
presidency. The three leading Democratic candidates for president, Hillary
Clinton, Barack Obama, and John Edwards, have refused to guarantee that
American troops will even be totally out of Iraq by 2013 [10], the end of a
first term in office -- as essentially has every Republican candidate except
Ron Paul, the libertarian congressman from Texas. In fact, in Washington,
the ongoing war is now such a given that it's hardly being discussed at the
moment (as the one in Afghanistan has never been). The focus has instead
shifted to the next possible administration monstrosity -- a possible air
assault on Iran that would essentially guarantee [11] a global recession or
depression.
Meanwhile, the American people -- having formed their own Iraq Study Group
[12] as early as 2005 -- have moved in another direction entirely. On this,
the opinion polls [13] have been, and remain (as Mueller suggested they
would), unanimous. When Americans are asked how the President is handling
the war in Iraq, disapproval figures run 67% to 26% in the most recent CBS
News poll; 68% to 30% in the ABC News/Washington Post poll; and, according
to CNN's pollsters, opposition to the war itself runs at a 65% to 34% clip.
As for "staying" some course in Iraq to 2013 or beyond, that CBS News poll,
typically, has 45% of Americans wanting all troops out in "less than a year"
and 72% in "one to two years" -- in other words, not by the end of, but the
beginning of, the next presidential term in office. (The ABC News/Washington
Post poll indicates, among other things, that, by 55% to 40%, Americans feel
the Democrats in Congress have not gone "far enough in opposing the war in
Iraq"; and that they want Congress to rein in the administration's soaring,
off-the-books war financing requests.)
In other words, the Washington elite are settling ever deeper, ever less
responsively, into the Big Muddy, while the American Consensus has come down
quite decisively elsewhere. For all intents and purposes, it seems that most
Americans are acting as if some policy page had already been turned, as if
Iraq was so been-there, done-that. Perhaps many are also assuming that the
present administration is beyond unreachable and that any successor will be
certain to fix the problem; or, alternately, that nothing the public can do
in relation to the Washington Consensus, including voting, matters one whit;
or some helpless, hopeless combination of the two and who knows what else.
As I sat in that rumbling subway car on my way to the march in lower
Manhattan, I kept wondering who, between the Iraq-forever-and-a-day crowd
and the been-there/done-that folks might think it worth the bother to turn
out at an antiwar rally on such a lousy day. And it was then that a brief
encounter from the summer came to mind.
I'm now 63 years old and increasingly feel as if my 1950s childhood came out
of another universe. Sometime in August, I ran into a "kid" -- maybe in his
early thirties -- employed by a consulting firm to do what once would have
been the work of a federal government employee. He gamely tried to explain
the sinews of his privatized world to me. As he spoke, I began to wonder
whether he was interested in working in the federal government, not just as
a consultant to it. To ask the question, I began explaining how I had grown
up dreaming about being part of the government -- the State Department,
actually. It seemed to me then like an honorable, if not downright glorious,
destiny to represent your country to others. It was a feeling that left me
deep into the 1960s when I had, in fact, already been accepted into the
United States Information Agency (from which I would have, a good deal less
gloriously, propagandized for my country). It was only then that anger over
the Vietnam War swept me elsewhere.
I told the young consultant that, when young, I had dreamed of doing my
"civic duty" and his eyes promptly widened in visible disbelief. He rolled
that phrase around for a moment, then said (all dialogue recreated from my
faulty memory): "Civic duty? No one in my world thinks about it that way any
more." He paused and added, hesitantly, "But I might actually like to be in
the bureaucracy for a while."
That was my moment to widen my eyes. What I once thought of as "the
government" had, in the space of mere decades, become "the bureaucracy,"
even to someone who would consider joining it -- and, the worst of it was, I
knew he was right. This was one genuine accomplishment of a
quarter-century-plus of the Republican "revolution" (and the Clinton
interregnum). All those presidential candidates, running as small-government
outsiders ready to bring Washington big spenders to heel, had, on coming to
power, only fed that government mercilessly, throwing untold numbers of tax
dollars at the Pentagon and the military-industrial complex, ensuring that
they would become ever more bloated, powerful, and labyrinthine, ever more
focused on their own well-being, and ever less civic; ensuring that the
government as a whole would be ever more "bureaucratic," ever less "ept,"
and -- always -- ever more oppressive, with ever more police-state-like
powers.
All that had been strangled in the process -- made smaller, if you will --
was the federal government's ability to deliver actual services to the
population that paid for it. All that was made smaller in the world beyond
Washington was whatever residual faith existed that this was "your"
government, that it actually represented you in any way. As the state's
bureaucratic, military, and policing powers bloated, so, too, did the
electoral process -- and lost as well was the belief that your vote could
determine anything much at all.
Looking back, this was, in a sense, what 9/11 really meant in America. The
one thing that a government, which had long reinforced its own powers,
should have been able to deliver was intelligence and protection. So it
wasn't, I suspect, just those towers that crumbled on that day. What also
crumbled was a residual faith in "we, the people." This was actually what
the Bush administration played on when it urged Americans not to mobilize
for its Global War on Terror, but simply to go about their business, to --
as the President famously put it [14] 16 days after 9/11 -- "get down to
Disney World in Florida. Take your families and enjoy life, the way we want
it to be enjoyed." In a sense, Bush and his top officials were just doing
what came naturally -- further sidelining the American people so they could
fight their private wars in peace (so to speak).
The "bureaucracy" had strangled the very idea of the "civic." Who would even
think about entering such a world today as a "civic duty," rather than as a
career move; or imagine Washington as "our" government; or that anyone
inside the famed Beltway, or near the K-Street hive of lobbyists, or in
Congress or the Oval Office would give a damn about you? This is why, at a
deeper level, the Washington Consensus today has next to nothing to do with
the American one.
American Disengagement
When people look back on the Vietnam era, few comment on how connected the
size and vigor of demonstrations were to a conception of government in
Washington as responsible to the American people. Even the youthful radicals
of the time, in their outrage, still generally believed that Washington was
not living up to some ideal they had absorbed in their younger years.
Whatever they were denouncing, the founders of Students for a Democratic
Society (SDS) in their Port Huron Statement, for instance, spoke without
irony or discomfort of "[f]reedom and equality for each individual,
government of, by, and for the people -- these American values we found
good, principles by which we could live as men."
Though they may not have known it, they were still believers, after a
fashion. By and large, the demonstrators of that moment not only believed
that Washington should listen, but when, for instance, they chanted angrily,
"Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?", that President Lyndon
Baines Johnson would be listening. (And, in fact, he was. He called it "that
horrible song.") Which young people today would believe that in their gut?
Who would believe such a thing of "the bureaucracy"?
Don't forget, demonstrating is another kind of civic duty -- but perhaps a
waning one. I was struck this weekend that, even among people I know, many
of whom had demonstrated in the Vietnam era and had turned out again in the
early years of this war, next to none were on the streets this Saturday.
Most were simply going about their business with other, better things to do.
The fact is: Attending a march like Saturday's is still, for me, something
like an ingrained civic habit, like.... gulp.... voting, which I can't
imagine not doing -- even when it has little meaning to me -- or keeping
informed by reading a newspaper daily in print (something that, it seems,
just about no one under 25 does any more). These are the habits of a
lifetime and they don't disappear quickly. But when they're gone, or if they
don't make it to the next generation intact, it's hard, if not impossible,
to get them back.
If you need another point of comparison, consider TV comic Stephen Colbert's
joke (or is it?) race [15] for the presidency in his home state of South
Carolina (or the fact that, in a Rasmussen Report telephone poll, he
garnered 13% support in the Republican field just days after announcing his
run). Again, I'm old enough to remember the last time something like this
happened. Sometime in the late 1950s -- the details escape me -- a few fans
of the cartoon strip Pogo [16] decided to launch a "Pogo for President"
campaign in election season. (Mind you, that strip, about a talking opossum
and his pals in Okefenokee Swamp, was a classic with a critical, political
edge. Who could forget the moment when Howland Owl and the turtle, Churchy
LaFemme, decided to enter the nuclear age by creating uranium from a
combination of a Yew tree and a geranium.) In the strip, Pogo did indeed run
for president and its creator, Walt Kelly, used that hook to promote
perfectly real voter-registration campaigns. But -- as I remember it -- he
was horrified by the real-life campaign for his character and insisted that
it be stopped. You didn't, after all, make a mockery of American democracy
that way. It just wasn't funny.
No longer. Now, the "character" is launched onto the field of electoral play
by the creator himself, who also happens to be promoting a book in need of
publicity; and Colbert's ploy is hailed as a kind of transcendent reality,
not simply a mockery of it, even on that most mainstream of Sunday yak
shows, Tim Russert's Meet the Press. Of course, the joke -- and it's a grim
one indeed -- is on what's left of American democracy, which, as Colbert
obviously means to prove, is the real mockery of our moment.
Perhaps we all have to hope that, when he's done with the election, he'll
turn his attention to demonstrations in a world increasingly uncongenial to
"civic duty" of any sort. It seems that we've entered a time in which even
demonstrating can be outsourced [17], privatized, left to the pros, or
simply dismissed (like so much else) as hopeless, a waste of time. So I was
heading toward this demonstration, wondering not why more people wouldn't be
there, but why anyone would be.
Penned in on the Streets
And here's how it felt [18]:
"From the moment I looked across the aisle in the subway and saw the woman
with the upside-down, hand-painted sign -- an anguished face, blood, and 'no
war' on it -- and she noted my sign, also resting against my knees but
modestly turned away from view, and gave me the thumbs up sign, I knew
things would be okay. As my wife, a friend, and I exited the subway at the
50th Street station on the west side of New York, I noted three college-age
women bent over a subway bench magic-marking in messages on their blank sign
boards, a signal that we were heading for some special do-it-yourself
event."
Oops! Sorry, that was my description of the first moments of a massive
antiwar march -- half a million or more people took part -- in New York City
on February 15, 2003, just over a month before the invasion of Iraq was
launched.
On my subway car Saturday, there were no obvious demonstrators carrying
signs; no eager faces or hands ready to give a thumbs-up sign; no one who
even looked like he or she was heading for a demonstration. (Of course, I
had no handmade sign and didn't look that way either.)
A signature aspect of this era's antiwar demonstrations, from the first
prewar giants on, has been the spontaneous, personal signage [19], often a
literal sea of waving individual expressions of indignation, sardonic humor,
hope, despair, absurdity, you name it.
On Saturday, most of the signs were printed and clearly organizationally
inspired; not all, however, as the shots by Tam Turse [20], the young
photojournalist who accompanied me, eloquently indicate.
As for the police, well, here's how it felt with them:
"They still had us more or less confined to the sidewalk and a bit of the
street on one side of the avenue, and cars were still crawling by. But
already demonstrators were moving the orange police cones quickly set up for
this unexpected crowd on an unexpectedly occupied avenue ever farther out
into the traffic. Soon, to relieve pressure, the police opened a side street
and with a great cheer our section of the rolling non-march burst through up
to Second [Avenue] where we found ourselves in an even greater mass of
humanity, heading north on our own avenue without a single car, truck, or
bus."
Uh-oh, my mistake again! That, too, was the February 15, 2003 demo [21].
This time, I came out of the subway at 23rd Street and was promptly accosted
by a confused young German woman, postcards clutched in one hand. She
pointed at two blue mailboxes on the corner and asked, in charmingly
accented English, how you put the cards in. "Oh," I said, "let me show you."
And I promptly pulled on each mailbox handle, only to find them locked. The
police had undoubtedly done this as an anti-terror measure. The woman was
relieved, she told me, that she wasn't "mad." No, I assured her, it was the
world that was mad, not her.
The rest of the march was, in essence, a police event, the demonstrators
penned in by moveable metal barricades, "guarded" often by more police
personnel than on-lookers. From the moment we began to march in the rain,
the police presence was overwhelming, starting with a well-marked NYPD "Sky
Watch" tower, a mobile tower [22] that can be raised anywhere in which
police observers can spy on you from behind a Darth Vader-style darkened
window. In fact, we marchers were penned in by the police as we headed south
for Foley Square, cut off, for instance, from the large cross street at 14th
by a row [23] of dismounted police using their motorcycles as a barricade.
Police vehicles and police on foot moved slowly in front of the
demonstration as well as behind it. Police even marched in the demonstration
(though not as demonstrators). Essentially, it was, as all rallies and
demonstrations now seem to be in our growing Homeland Security state-let
[24], a police march.
Led by a sizeable contingent of soldiers, vets [25], and military families,
there were perhaps 10,000 marchers [26] -- a rare occasion when my own rough
estimate fit the normal police undercount -- on a dreary, rainy day, which
is no small thing. Each of them left his or her life for a few hours to take
a walk (or, in the case of one elderly lady [27], to be wheeled, encased in
plastic, or for two "grannies for peace" to be peddled in a volunteer
pedicab [28]) in mild discomfort, to chant, to call out, even in a few
creative cases, to display feelings on individual placards [29] or
constructions [30] or in group tableaux [31]. Each of them, for his or her
own reason, was civic, even global. Add up all the people who did this in 11
cities [32] nationwide, and the numbers aren't unimpressive. But with
unending war, as well as perpetual death and destruction on the Bush
administration menu, with the horizon darkened by the possibility of a
strike against Iran, and a population which has turned its back on most of
the above, it was, nonetheless, clearly underwhelming.
Meanwhile, in Iraq [33] on Saturday, according to news reports, it was just
an ordinary day, the usual harvest of decomposing corpses, deadly roadside
blasts, assassinations, kidnappings, U.S. raids, and, bizarrely, the
breakfast poisoning of 100 Iraqi soldiers. One American death [34] was
announced on Saturday. We don't yet know who the soldier was, only that he
died "when he sustained small arms fire while conducting operations in Salah
ad Din [Province]." He could, of course, have come from New York City, but
the odds [35] are that he came from a small town somewhere in the American
hinterlands, from perhaps Latta [36], South Carolina or Lone Pine [37],
California.
He might, or might not, have ever visited Disney World. He might have joined
the overstretched U.S. armed forces for the increasingly massive bonuses the
military is now offering to bind the poor and futureless close in a war that
has been rejected by the American people; or perhaps he simply signed on
with some of that residual sense of civic duty that's fast fleeing the land;
or, possibly, both of the above. Perhaps, if he hadn't died, he would, like
12 former captains who recently wrote "The Real Iraq We Knew" for the
Washington Post [38] op-ed page and called our "best option. to leave Iraq
immediately," have returned to speak out against the war. Who knows.
Already, for 3,839 Americans in Iraq and 451 Americans in Afghanistan, we
will never have a way of knowing.
Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com, is the
co-founder of the American Empire Project [39]. His book, The End of Victory
Culture [40] (University of Massachusetts Press), has just been thoroughly
updated in a newly issued edition that deals with victory culture's
crash-and-burn sequel in Iraq.
Tam Turse is a photojournalist [41] working in New York City. Her photos of
the demonstration discussed in this piece can be viewed by clicking here
[42].
Copyright 2007 Tom Engelhardt
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"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson