“If the American people heard these stories..."
There are important messages the American people need...
WE'VE WON THE BATTLE FOR PUBLIC OPINION -
HOW TO EMPOWER THE MAJORITY ALREADY AGAINST THE WAR
The focus of the anti-war movement now needs to change. We no longer need to focus primarily on convincing people the war is wrong - we have largely won that battle. Instead, we need to figure out a strategy of how to transform that majority who oppose the war, but are unsure what to do about it, and how to transform anti-war sentiment into anti-war action and power.
Part of that is education - we have to engage seriously in the debate over the "bring ALL the troops home NOW" demand, which many who oppose the war are still uneasy with. We should be clear that the demand is to announce the beginning of a full withdrawal immediately, that of course we understand that actually removing 140,000 troops takes time, that the key is the U.S. commitment to ending the occupation. We need to provide activists with the educational and informational resources they need to defend UFPJ's "Bring ALL the troops home NOW" position, make sure that the elements of an "Iraq 101" campaign are in place. We also need to broaden our own activists and others' familiarity with, and ability to articulate and defend, an exit strategy that starts with recognizing that the U.S. troops are the problem, not the solution, to violence in Iraq, and that calls for withdrawing all U.S. troops, closing the bases, and pulling out the "coalition" and mercenary troops, but then goes on to assert our internationalist humanitarian obligations to the people of Iraq - reparations, real reconstruction, etc. We should take head-on the "Pottery Barn" analogy - making clear that Iraq is not a cup, and the U.S. occupation is not a tube of crazy glue.
So how to we build and strengthen our movement when we are a majority of the American people? Even taking into consideration that part of the 2/3 or so anti-war majority hold various right-wing, racist, and other views that put them outside of our movement, we can truthfully claim to represent the majority of the American people. So we are in a qualitatively different period than February 15, 2003, when we brought half a million people to New York City. However big or small specific protests are, our movement as a whole is NOT smaller, but rather bigger, more grounded, more embedded in the very fabric of U.S. society than anything we've seen so far.
A useful comparison we can look at is the assessment Noam Chomsky did years ago of the anti-intervention movement against the contra wars in Central America during the 1980s. He recognized that while the Viet Nam-era movement was often far more visible, campuses were explosive, huge demonstrations took to the streets in Washington, in fact that movement was not as broad as the Central America movement whose origins were in mainstream churches and came to have a presence in far more mainstream organizations.
Our task is to figure out how to mainstream and realize our demand - Bring ALL the troops home NOW - to get to the next step beyond generalized anti-war sentiment. And we have to figure out ways of insuring that people - that vast majority of people who are more or less on our side - feel that they are accomplishing something, when the most important thing, transforming public opinion to an anti-war majority, has already been accomplished. We also must encourage people to join organizations, or to create new ones, to maintain levels of local, state, regional and national mobilization, and to strengthen the anti-war presence and voice in the media and elsewhere.
So we have to renew our focus on ending the occupation - providing a real exit strategy that people can use and articulate and defend, at least in broad general terms, in discussions with their congressional representatives, local city councils and other local officials, church and university leaders, etc. We have to define ending the occupation to mean bringing home all troops, closing the bases, saying no to expanding the war to Iran. We may want to escalate tactics (such as increasing the focus on CD) in certain circumstances, but most important is to escalate our demand - that we're done with calling for "oppose the war," and moving on to how to end it. We have to reflect the mainstream power we now represent - WE lead, demand that political officials follow.
We also need to be creative in responding to the reality of a disempowered congress and a frightened and largely supine Democratic party. That means, besides demanding that our representatives take seriously our existence as a huge anti-war majority (and working with some of the Progressive Caucus to realize that goal), looking to a renewed focus on local municipal, church and other institutional resolutions calling for bringing the troops home; media work with a focus on exit strategies and bringing the troops home now; reminding our anti-war majority of the constitutional threats inherent in how this war is being waged, and keeping up our links with the other issues emanating from the disastrous consequences of the Bush policies.
From Institute for Policy Studies
Communication and Tactics