Two relatively minor events marked
the height of the campaign against the sanctions in Iraq in the 1990’s, a
disruption of a televised town hall meeting in Ohio held by members of the
Clinton administration and the disruption of a speech by UN ambassador Bill
Richardson at the University of Minnesota.
The actions sank the impending plans on the part of the Clinton
administration to increase the aerial assault on Iraq and possibly introduce
troops on the ground, but did little to challenge the sanctions themselves and
their destructive effects on Iraqi society.
Moreover, the small impact of the campaign disappeared with the election
of the Bush administration in 2000 and the transformation of the destructive
sanctions campaign into an even more destructive invasion of the country. The campaign had very little impact and
disappeared into the mists of time.
Unlike the protests around prisons or the anti-globalization campaigns
that arose around the same time, it has very little impact on either the
political imaginary of radical politics or much to do with the tactical or
strategic aims of the formations that define that politics.
However, it was my first sustained
entry into political activism, and has had a deep influence on my understanding
of politics in this country. In the
early 90’s, the Bush administration was driven out of office by the Clinton
administration, who promised a much more domestic focused national policy, and
the situation in Iraq had been largely forgotten by public institutions, but
the Clinton administration continued and in some cases even expanded the
sanctions on Iraq started just before the Iraq war. The sanctions covered anything with a
conceivable military use, and therefore covered many of the necessary equipment
needed to rebuild the war-torn country, and even affected items such as pencils
and materials needed to clean and purify water.
The results on the country were devastating, leading to the deaths of
hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. Those
deaths received only minor attention from the press and were of a concern of
only a small number of activists. Some
officials from the UN protested the effects of the sanctions, but there was no
opposition to the policies from Democratic politicians, even those who had
opposed the war in 1991 or those who opposed the later invasion.
Although
I would not want to dismiss the lessons in organizing that I learned from my
fellow activists in the Progressive Student Organization, I think that seeing
the collusion of the Democratic Party, even its left wing was the most
significant lesson I learned from the campaign.
Because the campaign was directed against the actions of a relatively
popular Democratic administration, it removed the illusions that the dominant
system could offer a way out of the situation.
Just as significantly, I entered the practices of activism not in
response to a state of emergency or a crisis of governance in the country, but
in response to the immense violence that the United States government was
capable of in ordinary times. The United
States government actively aided and abetted the death of hundreds of thousands
and virtually destroyed a generation of Iraqis as a matter of every day policy,
policy that was embraced by both parties and had no substantive official
opposition. It operated in full legality, and was not the product of a
subversion of either the constitution or ordinary forms of governance. It was an ordinary form of that
governance.
The
campaign itself lacked the enormous rallies that defined the two anti-war
movements that bookended it. The largest
rallies involved hundreds, rather than thousands and lot of the events were
small and often frigid affairs in front of the federal building. Most of the work was rather thankless and was
responded to by the larger public with indifference, contempt, and
occasionally, hostility. By the time we
disrupted the speech of Bill Richardson, the core of the activists involved in
the action had been to dozens of often small and ignored actions that preceded
it. Richardson represented a face of the
awful activities that we had protested and attempted to educate the public
about, and he had that anger directed at him in an hour-long event where he was
unable to say anything more than a few syllables. However, that brief triumphant moment was
unique in our work, which was hidden from public view. That work made me see the daily work of
activism in non-spectacular terms, building small campaigns that often had very
little in terms of immediate results or gratification, but were still
attempting to challenge important issues.
In
this sense, I feel that my experience in this campaign put me in a far better
position to understand the politics of the country than many of my counterparts
who entered activism through the 2003 anti-war movement, a movement that was dismantled
by the illusion that the Democratic Party was the answer. This is not too say that the campaign was not
without flaws. Using a somewhat dated
understanding of anti-imperialism, our organizations were far too reticent to acknowledge
the real flaws of the Iraqi regime. At the time, I was deeply critical of this
error, and it contributed to my participation in the huge and, retrospectively,
somewhat mistaken factional fight that undermined the PSO in the
mid-nineties. But looking back, I don’t
think that this error had any real substantive impact on the efficacy of the
campaign. Instead, we probably
accomplished all that we could have accomplished within those structural
limitations. Our ability to move beyond those limited accomplishments would
have required actions and events that were substantially outside of our
control.
It’s
also a forgotten moment that is worth remembering at this moment. We’re continually being told that the
oppressive and destructive actions of the Trump administration are truly
exceptional. It is challenging the constitutional limitations put upon it in a
variety of ways, and is actively allied to fascist elements in a way that our government
has not done for over a half a century. In many ways, I don’t disagree with that assessment,
but we also shouldn’t ignore the very unexceptional forms of violence that
occur within the very ordinary governance of this country, a country that is
desperately holding onto its position at the center of the capitalist world
system, a system built on systemic dispossession and the theft and exploitation
of labor. We shouldn’t allow the extraordinary actions of Trump to slip in the
kinds of erasure that we saw with the anti-war movement, and we shouldn’t
accept the current nostalgia for the immensely destructive Clinton
administration. (This essay doesn’t
touch on this, but in many ways this narrative of exceptionalism is also
challenged by the thread of white supremacy that defines our country’s history,
which structures that dispossessio, theft, and exploitation.)
