A New Solidarity

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

In nine days, tens of thousands of Americans will descend on Washington to call for the unilateral abandonment of Iraq’s first elected government. Some will lock arms with their fellow protesters and block the entrances of federal buildings, refusing to leave if asked by the police and going limp if they are dragged away. Most will march on Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House carrying placards and paper mache puppets mocking the president and his senior advisers.


Connected through the Internet, the organizers of the protests scheduled for September 24, have drawn up on-line forms asking volunteers if they wish to participate in “direct action,” or discreet acts of civil disobedience. Many of these organizations are also attempting to persuade parent-teacher associations to have their students refuse registering for the selective service. Some organizations, such as the D.C. Area Anti-War Network, have led sit-ins before military recruitment offices in shopping malls.


These are the tactics, if not the strategy, of nonviolent action, and they should not be underestimated. Strikes, demonstrations, coalitions, sit-ins, and marches – when applied strategically – have brought down governments, driven out occupying armies, and stopped wars. Syrian soldiers no longer occupy Lebanon because thousands of Lebanese patriots refused to leave their tents in Beirut. Viktor Yushchenko is the president of Ukraine because his supporters refused to leave their tents in Kiev. In both cases, not a shot was fired by the opposition.


The godfather of strategic nonviolent action, Gene Sharp, explained the efficacy of nonviolent action well in his 1972 treatise on the subject: “If the subjects deny the ruler’s right to rule and to command. They are withdrawing the general agreement, or group consent, which makes possible the existing government.” And the theories and best practices Mr. Sharp enumerated during the height of the Vietnam War have unleashed what Michael Ledeen has called a worldwide democratic revolution.


It’s this kind of people power, according to a study released last month by Freedom House, that has the best chance of toppling dictators. Fifty out of 67 government transitions analyzed in the study were the fruits of homegrown civic resistance movements. What’s more, in countries where the opposition eschewed violence, there was the best chance that democracies would emerge from the ashes of the fallen regime.


And yet, the anti-war movement in this context is counterrevolutionary. Its use of nonviolent tactics serves for all intents and purposes to roll back the advances made by Iraqis in self-determination. One of the anti-war movement’s chief grievances with the Iraq war for example is that America’s removal of its former client did not receive the approval of the United Nations, an institution that makes no distinction in sovereignty between free states and prison regimes. Iraq was scheduled to serve on the General Assembly’s non-proliferation committee prior to the intervention of March 2003. The protesters seek to stop a war they say was waged “on Iraq,” as if Saddam Hussein was no different than the Iraqis he tormented. By seeking to withdraw American troops now, without the consent of the elected government in Baghdad, they are trying to level the odds for the former regime and their jihadist allies to regain the country America liberated in 2003. And while they wrongly accuse the Bush administration of trying to gin up wars against Kim Jong Il and Ayatollah Khamenei, they are ambivalent on the question of whether these usurpers should rule over North Korea and Iran. Most troubling is that the anti-war movement has nothing to say about serious nonviolent opposition in Burma, Iran, Syria, or Zimbabwe. Where is the anti-war movement’s solidarity?


I asked this question of the national coordinator of United for Peace and Justice, Leslie Cagan. I wanted to know whether her organization, which has mastered the tactics of nonviolent action here, would be willing to pass on its advice and experience, even train, democracy movements over there. Her response was troubling. “I cannot answer this in a blanket way,” she said. “What the dynamics in a particular country are, differ from one place to another.” Ms. Cagan then went on to say, “Our primary focus is to change the focus of our government. We do this conscious that we are part of a global community.” Ms. Cagan allowed that if the circumstances were right, she could see the possibility that, “If there is a struggle for more democracy, and whatever democracy we share, we’d like to meet with these people, we would take that seriously, we would have to look at each situation though, to see if we could make a contribution.”


This is a dodge. If anyone ought to know about Iran’s democracy movement, you’d think it would the coordinator of a campaign whose demonstrators often tell passersby, “This is what democracy looks like.” More important, Ms. Cagan and her fellow travelers don’t seem to recognize that the success of real democracy movements in the Middle East would be the surest way to end the war they seek to surrender. Free Egyptians, Iranians, Iraqis, Saudis, and Syrians are the best defense against the murderous and nostalgic fantasies of Al Qaeda’s caliphists. That’s how to end the war. Winning.


The New York Sun

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