The antiwar movement prepares to escalate

The day the war starts, organizers vow to shut down financial districts -- and even infiltrate a key U.S. Air Force base.

By Michelle Goldberg

Mar 14, 2003 | If bombs start falling on Iraq, peace activists say, expect insurgency at home.

Demonstrators are planning to shut down San Francisco's Financial District, to gather by the thousands in New York's Times Square and stage sit-ins in Washington, D.C. Others are ready to try to breach security at Vandenberg Air Force Base in Southern California, where many of the military targeting operations will be done for an Iraq bombing campaign. They're going not just to protest, but to interfere. "We have the possibility of disrupting operations that feed directly into the Iraq war in a limited but very real way," says Peter Lumsdaine, coordinator of the Military Globalization Project, the group that's organizing the Vandenberg action.

Until now, most of the big antiwar demonstrations, especially in the United States, have been peaceful, preplanned, law-abiding events. Permits have been secured, routes mapped, and stages set up. The next phase in the antiwar movement is likely to be far more spontaneous and chaotic. Frustrated by a government they say is ignoring their voice, galvanized by the imminence of war, activists are moving from protest to direct action. "My sense is that if the war breaks out, things will escalate," says L.A. Kauffman, a staff organizer with United for Peace and Justice, a major antiwar coalition. "You'll see a lot more street blockades and building blockades. You'll see the normal course of business disrupted by protests in a way that hasn't happened so far."

Already, activists are ramping up their tactics. On Friday, March 14, a loose network of people called Direct Action to Stop the War are going to try to shut down the Pacific Stock Exchange in downtown San Francisco, kicking off a campaign of civil disobedience that organizer Patrick Reinsborough says is meant "to show the Bush administration and their corporate backers that if they won't stop the war, a nonviolent grassroots uprising will physically unplug the war machine." Next Monday, a coalition called the Emergency Campaign to Reclaim Democracy And Stop the War Now is launching a week of civil disobedience in the Capitol that will include sit-ins in congressional offices; and there will be civil disobedience outside the U.S. mission to the United Nations in New York.

"People are saying, 'I've written letters, sent petitions, and made phone calls, and my representative isn't listening to me,'" says Celia Alario, a media liaison for United for Peace and Justice, one of the groups taking part in the D.C. campaign. "What am I going to do? I'm going to sit down and occupy their offices and demand that they take a stand against the war." Four activists from the campaign were arrested Thursday as they tried to enter the Capitol Building.

If war begins, activists say, such actions are likely to snowball. "Worldwide, there are going to be way more protests on the day after a war begins than there were on Feb. 15," says Kauffman, referring to the massive international protests that took place in hundreds of cities last month. "Part of what was so amazing and magical about Feb. 15 was that everywhere in the world, protests were peaceful except for Greece. That's not what's going to happen if the war begins, because people are going to be so angry. I think for days, many cities' business will be significantly disrupted. The tone is going to be much angrier."

That's just what Paul Berman fears. Berman, author of the recent book "Terror and Liberalism," is a veteran of the '60s peace movement and an opponent of the Bush administration, but he believes no good can come of war opponents rampaging through the streets. "This is just going to create a real crisis within the country," he says. "It's a completely destructive thing to do."

He's done it, and now believes that the days of rage he participated in during the '60s helped prolong the Vietnam War. "At the time I did some of that myself and thought it was doing good, but now it's apparent to me that all that stuff just fell into a trap laid by Richard Nixon," he says. "That kind of stuff allowed Nixon to win in 1968 and again in 1972, and a Democratic president would surely have withdrawn sooner. And so in effect, although it's painful to say so, I think that kind of stuff had the effect of prolonging the war. It played into Nixon's hands. There were famous scenes where Nixon specifically ordered that his entourage drive through streets where he knew he'd be attacked by demonstrators because he wanted the right scenes to appear on TV. He presented it to the public: You had to choose between Richard Nixon or some long-haired marijuana-smoking lunatic communist. Guess what. The public chose Nixon."

The larger problem with such protests isn't that they could help Bush, Berman argues, but that they could hurt Iraqis. Whether or not war is advisable, he says, once it has begun, the question becomes whether Bush will sell out the liberal aspirations of Iraqi reformers, installing a pliable military regime, rather than undertaking the costly job of helping Iraq build its civil society. The problem, he says, is that the debate about war has become so polarized: Just as supporters don't see an invasion's potential disasters, so war opponents can't conceive of anything positive emerging from it -- and thus won't fight to hold Bush to his promises of Middle Eastern democracy.

"There's a chance that there's going to be a good result, which would be the liberation of the Iraqi people, possibly with good effects for other people," Berman says. "This possible consequence depends very largely on what the United States does. If your feeling about Bush is, as mine is, that you don't trust him to make the right decisions, what you want to do is press the government to do the kinds of things that will lead towards [a democratic] result. Instead, there are a lot of people who are imagining that they can perhaps force the United States to withdraw its troops."

That's precisely the hope behind the most radical action of all those planned for the start of war, the plan to infiltrate Vandenberg Air Force Base.

Next Page: Vandenberg: "The WTO of global military terror"

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