History will record that the first missiles of the gulf war were not Navy Tomahawks fired at Iraq but snowballs hurled at a military recruiting station in Cambridge, Mass., by a crowd of demonstrators marching from Harvard Square to Boston City Hall last Tuesday. The antiwar movement, nearly somnolent all through the military buildup in Saudi Arabia, gathered force in the days leading up to the Jan. 15 deadline and, once fighting actually began, erupted with a passion not seen in this country for nearly 20 years. Daniel Ellsberg, a veteran campaigner against the United States military since quitting the government in 1969, was arrested along with Dick Gregory in a small protest outside the White House–Ellsberg’s 54th arrest. “On the day of the deadline,” he said, “I felt the only respectable place to be was in jail because I was so ashamed of my country.” Two days later San Francisco police arrested nearly 1,000 protesters after a raucous spree that disrupted traffic all over the city–more than were arrested on any one day during the Vietnam protests. If America’s military leaders, determined not to repeat the mistakes of Vietnam, compressed a decade of escalation into a few days–well, America’s antiwar leaders showed they had learned a few things from history as well.
There were no signs that opposition to the war posed a serious political threat to the administration. A “Newsweek” Poll taken after the first wave of attacks showed nearly a 5-to-1 margin of support for military action. Throughout the country, the news of war fostered a rare sense of community and a mood of somber reflection. Americans flocked to Red Cross centers to donate blood for troops in the gulf. They filled churches for prayer services and gathered anxiously before television screens, united in the sense that the business of daily life could, for once, wait. Psychologists were reminded of how trauma can bring a fractious family together.
Though the antiwar activists defied popular sentiment, they were not just rebellious kids. Compared with the Vietnam protests, which at the outset were overwhelmingly the work of students, opposition to the gulf war enlists a much broader constituency. Its leaders are veterans of the various peace movements–Vietnam, Central America, nuclear disarmament–many of them now middle-aged and middle class. The heads of nine big unions, including the United Auto Workers and the Communications Workers of America, signed an antiwar advertisement in the week before hostilities began. Families of servicemen and -women play a much bigger role now than they did in the ’60s. So do churches. And so do minority members, who support the military effort by a far slimmer margin than whites (55 percent vs. 82 percent, according to the “Newsweek” Poll). Even mainstream Republican figures like John Connally and H. Ross Perot have expressed opposition to a gulf war in recent weeks. The protesters are “people who don’t have a reason to be radicalized or estranged from their society,” observes William Chafe, chairman of the history department at Duke University. “They just see the war as stupid.”
Consequently, the gulf-war protests start off with a legitimacy that it took years for other movements to win. Protest as such is no longer regarded as unpatriotic by most Americans, and the rhetoric this time around is not as offensive. Vietnam-era protests often were directed at the soldiers themselves, revealing an ugly streak of elitism at best; this year’s demonstrators see the GIs as victims. “You won’t see protesters spitting on soldiers as they come off the plane,” predicted Greg Sommers, director of the Fayetteville, N.C., branch of Quaker House, a pacifist organization. At least some of the opponents to the war in Vietnam actively sought a communist victory, but there is no comparable constituency for Saddam Hussein. “No one is going to carry the Iraqi flag,” says Todd Gitlin, a ’60s radical who is now a professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. “It’s not hate-America time.”
But some protesters are conspicuously more radical than others. An early split developed between the two main umbrella groups over whether or not to oppose Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. One, the National Campaign for Peace in the Middle East, which represents mostly mainstream antiwar groups such as SANE/Freeze, denounced the invasion and supported the United Nations sanctions against Iraq. But the National Coalition to Stop U.S. Intervention in the Middle East, founded in part by Gregory (who is fasting until the troops come home) and former attorney general Ramsey Clark, refused to denounce the invasion and opposed sanctions. Its membership includes chapters of the radical AIDS group ACT UP and the Palestine Solidarity Committee. Originally the two groups scheduled separate marches on Washington–the Coalition last Saturday, the National Campaign for this coming–but after the bombing began they set aside their differences and jointly endorsed both protests. An estimated 25,000 demonstrators–a diverse lot from all regions of the country–descended on Washington last weekend.
The unifying principle of the protests is the same one Jane Fonda (who has not been heard from in this conflict) enunciated back in the ’60s: that a political fight on the other side of the world isn’t worth a lot of American lives. Even some of the chants are familiar, “mutatis mutandis”: “Hell, no, we won’t go, we won’t kill for Texaco!” But the protests embrace a baffling array of causes and grievances. An Atlanta rally that attracted 1,000 protesters included members of the Georgia chapter of NOW (“we consider Saudi Arabia and Kuwait gender-apartheid,” explained president Clara Bostic) and bicycle clubs who consider it pointless to go to war over something as unnecessary as oil. “The money, energy and personnel going into the war is money, energy and personnel not going into health care,” said Amanda Udis-Kessler, who marched in the Boston protest. But that issue can cut both ways: one heckler told a San Francisco protestor that the demonstration was taking food from babies’ mouths by costing the city huge sums in police overtime.
The most poignant arguments were those made on behalf of the families of the troops in the gulf. The Military Families Support Network, which claims more than 5,000 members nationwide, is protesting the Pentagon’s decision to suspend the traditional military honors for the coffins of soldiers killed in action–presumably so as not to call undue television attention to casualties. But many of the protesters make the more sweeping claim that it is unfair to soldiers to make them fight. Ending the draft was supposed to end this particular form of oppression, but as far as the protesters are concerned, it’s only made things worse. During the Vietnam War everyone knew what it meant to be drafted. But now, antiwar activists say, the Army lures impressionable teenagers with promises of job training and upward mobility, while burying in the fine print the danger of dying in combat. “The people who are over there,” says Greg Garland, a Los Angeles minister and head of the Westside Ecumenical Conference, “even though they volunteered, there’s a sense that they didn’t volunteer to go to war.”
The old arguments never die; neither do the songs, even if the people who first sang them have. (Sean Lennon’s updated version of his father’s “Give Peace a Chance” has emerged as the unofficial anthem of the gulf-war protests.) But history is not just repeating itself; the doubts this time came even before the body bags started arriving back in the States. Once they do, dissent can only grow, predicts Art Blair, a Korea and Vietnam veteran, deputy director of the Mosher Institute for Defense Studies at Texas A&M. “People,” says Blair, “are more deeply aware that war is the most horrible thing man can do to man.”
Should people opposing the military action continue to protest actively or should they stop protests? 38% Protest 57% Stop
Should the government continue to permit protests or should they be banned? 66% Permit 23% Ban
For this “Newsweek” Poll, The Gallup Organization interviewed a national sample of 752 adults by telephone Jan. 17-18. The margin of error is plus or minus 4 percentage points. Some “Don’t Know” and other responses not shown. The “Newsweek” Poll copyright 1991 by Newsweek, Inc.
