Old hands stoke anti-war effort

Oct. 17 - Just as seasoned military strategists will direct U.S. forces in the event of an attack on Iraq, battle-tested veterans of the anti-war movement — many of whom earned their stripes during the Vietnam War — are taking leading roles in the campaign aimed at heading off hostilities. “Many people who don’t consider themselves part of the anti-war movement are opposed to this,” said Ted Lewis, a 44-year-old who attended peace rallies with his activist parents decades ago and now works for the San Francisco-based organization Global Exchange. “The challenge is translating those numbers into real political power.”

THE OLD HANDS are participating at every level of the budding effort to avert a military conflict with Iraq, circulating petitions, bombarding newspapers and lawmakers with letters, email and faxes, organizing demonstrations and forming new coalitions.

And some who attained the status of counterculture celebrities are helping build enthusiasm for the current campaign, as was the case when Ron Kovic, the paralyzed Vietnam veteran and anti-war activist whose story was the basis for the movie “Born on the Fourth of July,” appeared at an Oct. 6 rally outside the Federal Building in Los Angeles.

The involvement of the peace movement veterans is for many a natural extension of a lifetime of involvement in liberal causes.

“I’ve always been an activist,” said Nancy Rising, 68, of Kirkland, Wash., who in recent years has taken to the streets to protest the policies of the World Trade Organization and the Persian Gulf War. “My brother started dragging me around door-belling when I was 4.”

Some observers say that the noticeable presence of the elders also indicates a dearth of anti-war sentiment on college campuses, attributable in part to the absence of a military draft.

‘THEIR FUTURE ... IS BEING RUINED’

But Roger Lippman, 54, a former Students for a Democratic Society leader in Seattle, said that while that view might have been valid until recently, it is no longer accurate.

“There are certainly a lot of veterans of the anti-war movement who have a lot of valuable experience,” said Lippman, who spent time in a federal penitentiary in the late 1960s for his role in planning anti-war protests in Seattle. “But there is a large number of young people who are very committed, who feel that this is their future that is being ruined by (President) Bush.”

And Rising said the estimated 3,000 people who turned out for a candlelight vigil and march last week in Seattle clearly demonstrated that the current movement is not confined to 50- and 60-somethings trying to recapture the fading glory of the Vietnam-era protests.

“There were little kids and young parents, and students and the elderly and middle-aged,” she said. “Yes, the ‘usual suspects’ were there, but I also saw a huge number of people that I’d never seen before.”

Still, activists acknowledge that the atmosphere today is very different than it was when the Vietnam War protests were beginning to build momentum.

Renny Christopher, in a 1995 photo taken at the Veterans Building in Santa Cruz, Calif.

“The anti-war movement in the ’60s … grew out of the (Students for a Democratic Society), which grew out of civil rights,” said Renny Christopher, author of “Vietnam War/The American War” and a professor at California State University Channel Islands in Southern California. “We don’t have a lot of organized social movements going on now … and (the anti-war effort) has to be organized almost from scratch.”

LITTLE ATTENTION FROM MEDIA

The media, which was instrumental in galvanizing opposition to the war in Vietnam, also has contributed to the perception that there is little opposition to a war with Iraq by largely ignoring the anti-war movement, the activists say. They note that recent demonstrations in cities like Denver, Los Angeles, New York City, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington, D.C., many of which drew thousands of protesters, as well as much larger demonstrations overseas received scant attention in the U.S. media, the activists say.

“The media covered the Vietnam protests because the demonstrators were getting their heads busted open and shot by the National Guard,” said Christopher. “… I think the media like to cover violence and if there’s no violence at a peaceful protest, there’s no story.”

Ted Lewis, director of Global Exchange's human rights program

Lewis, the director of Global Exchange’s human rights program, said the public also is unlikely to get the full story of the conflict if the United States does attack Iraq. The reason, he said, is that Pentagon’s strategy of relying on surgical air strikes to soften up an enemy serves the dual purpose of preventing TV networks and newspapers from showing the graphic battlefield images that helped fuel opposition to the Vietnam War.

“When you’re living in a sanitized media bubble, it’s easier not to have to psychologically engage with the issue,” he said. “If you don’t know someone that’s involved (in the fighting), it’s an abstraction.”

Despite such impediments, Mike Yarrow, a 62-year-old organizer for the interfaith Fellowship of Resistance in Seattle, said that the process of ramping up to oppose a war with Iraq has been far more rapid than he anticipated.

“I’ve been astounded by the incredibly swift mobilization of various groups,” he said, describing how 24 disparate organizations quickly joined the newly organized (Puget) Sound Non-violent Opponents of War (SNOW) coalition. “There are churches that have taken 300 (anti-war) yard signs and then called back for more and we’ve got people calling our office every day. That’s much farther along than in the early days of the Vietnam War resistance.”

Lewis, also sees encouraging signs that Americans who harbor “quiet doubts” about President Bush’s threat to use force, if necessary, to disarm Saddam Hussein are privately voicing their concerns.

SENSE OF MOMENTUM

“They aren’t taking it to the streets yet, but they’re taking it to the phone, to the fax and to the email,” he said, adding that some members of Congress reported communications from constituents ran as high as 100-to-1 against going to war with Iraq before recent votes on a resolution authorizing the use of military force.

“No one thought we were going to see 133 (House) members voting against the resolution,” he said. “We thought it was going to be a stampede, but there was a tremendous outpouring from the grass roots.”

Mike Yarrow, organizer for the Fellowship of Reconciliation

While many activists share the sense that their effort to prevent a military conflict is gaining momentum, Yarrow, the Seattle organizer, said that the prevailing mood of those involved in the campaign could hardly be described as upbeat.

“People are heartsick … when they contemplate what this could lead to, both for the Iraqi people and for the young Americans,” he said.

Nor is there any feeling of nostalgia for those whose service to the cause dates back to the heady days of the protests against the Vietnam War, said Lewis.

“In my list of life priorities,” he said, “this is the last thing I want to be doing.”