Peace Movement

I attended an anti-war rally last month at my alma mater, Stanford University, where I had frequently protested American foreign policies two decades earlier. As one student after another took to the microphones to implore the country to "stop the bombing" and "end aggression against the Afghan people," my heart sank. This and other protests suggest that activists across the country have failed to understand that everything changed September 11, including the mission of peace.

The U.S. peace movement once understood that peace is not simply the absence of war. Abolitionists in the 19th century joined the Union army's campaign to smash the institution of slavery. The Abraham Lincoln Brigade traveled Spain in the 1930s to challenge the tyranny of Gen. Francisco Franco. After Pearl Harbor was attacked, leftists like Paul Robeson wrote poignantly in the Nation to urge all seekers of social justice to fight fascism. And during the 1970s and 1980s, progressives like myself defended the right of resistance movements, from the African National Congress to the Sandinistas, to use force to prevent massive human rights violations.

Today, the peace movement condemns force in any form, even if the purpose is to prevent the future deaths of innocents from terrorism. It holds rallies condemning "indiscriminate" U.S. bombing, rather than picket the embassies of rogue governments support terrorism on our soil. It prefers waving banners that piously proclaim "No More Innocent Victims," even as new cases of innocents being contaminated with potentially lethal anthrax spores are uncovered every day. It criticizes U.S. officials for using the term "war," while ignoring years of speeches in which Osama bin Laden has declared war on us.

Conservative commentators ridicule the peaceniks for naive pacifism, but the more fundamental problem -- and it has to be admitted-- is a deep distrust of all that is American. During my tenure as director of the progressive think tank, the Institute for Policy Studies, I once debated the former director, Bob Borosage, on whether the United States should intervene in Bosnia to stop genocide there. My position was that in an ever more interdependent planet, Americans have an obligation to stop gross abuses wherever they occur, and that the best way of doing so was to build a multinational capacity for humanitarian interventions.

Borosage's position, which the majority of my colleagues seemed to embrace, was that the United States should stay out. Pacifism had nothing to do with it.

His concern, instead, was the familiar isolationist argument that Americans should attend to urgent problems at home. Plus, even if intervention on the cheap were possible, the United States simply could not be trusted to use force responsibly. What seemed to be an overly cynical view in the mid-1990s now seems downright suicidal. If the United States is too untrustworthy to use force, then there is no evil on the planet it ever is entitled to repel -- even if the evil is perpetrated on our own homeland. I respectfully dissent.

If a sneak attack killing 5,000 Americans is not enough to justify U.S. use of force, what is? Would it take 100,000 deaths from a crude nuclear device? A million deaths from smallpox? I ask my fellow progressives whether there is any point where we are justified in fighting back. If you really believe in "no more innocent victims," then every effort must be made to disrupt, weaken and destroy terrorist networks. If you really believe in "justice, not vengeance," every effort must be taken to find, try and arrest every terrorist on the planet -- including the judicious use of force.

The movement insists we should treat the September 11 attacks as the crime of the century, not an act of war. But a justice framework has no bearing on our right to respond with force.

Imagine Mohammed Atta, one of the World Trade Center suicide-pilots, managing to parachute out of plane just prior to impact and absconding to a safe house in Brooklyn. Police discover his whereabouts, surround the building and present a warrant for his arrest. The door opens a crack and a gun barrel emerges, along with a warning that if the police storm the building, they will be killed. Can there be any doubt that in the criminal context that the police would be justified in using force to enforce their warrant and arrest Atta?

This is a fair analogy to what has happened internationally. President Bush presented the Taliban with as close to a warrant as is possible in the current international context -- not only enough proof to justify an indictment of bin Laden and his associates but also an actual indictment from a New York court. And the Taliban essentially told the United States to get lost.

The primary choice facing U.S. policymakers is not, as the peace movement claims, justice versus vengeance. Force is not the antithesis of justice -- the failure to prosecute murderers is. And when perpetrators of violence resist arrest, lawful force is an essential tool for justice.

The peace movement further claims that even if force is warranted, "indiscriminate bombing" isn't. But what about discriminate bombing? Is it more moral to mount a siege, village by village, with ground forces than to bomb fighter jets, runways and command centers? Is it preferable to smoke out the Taliban with a cruel, indiscriminate embargo like we've imposed on Iraq for the past decade? Is it better to act slowly and erratically, as we did in the former Yugoslavia, while tens of thousands die from starvation, exposure and disease?

It's often said that generals make the mistake of fighting the last war, but this time it's peace activists. This is not Vietnam, where the United States is defending a petty dictator against a popular resistance movement 10, 000 miles from home. This is an effort to thwart thousands of well trained and financed warriors who have sworn to kill every American man, woman and child.

A peace movement worthy of its name still would advocate the right combination of minimal force and other policies to achieve justice. It would point out that the need to use modest force does not automatically justify increases in an already colossus military budget or encroachments on civil liberties. With a commitment to minimize civilian casualties in Afghanistan, it would seek to modify, not end, the U.S. bombing strategy to avoid attacks on roads, bridges and urban areas.

It would press to reform the U.S. foreign policy to be more even-handed in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, to democratize our favorite sheikdoms, and to spend more fighting poverty throughout the region. And it would try to convince Americans that it's worth surrendering a little sovereignty to strengthen the international institutions needed to control flows of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons materials.

But a peace movement that cannot rise above platitudes like "no more war" or "no more bombing" will never have the credibility to influence anybody on anything. The U.S. peace movement should learn from its German counterparts, the Greens, whose "Realos" faction helped the party mature into a serious position of national leadership. If Joschka Fischer, the Green foreign minister, can stand up for America's right to protect its innocents, why can't the U.S. peace movement?

Standing away from the stage at the Stanford rally was a well dressed, shy young woman carrying an American flag and holding a placard saying "We Must Defend Ourselves." I approached to ask about her views, and she explained that she was a liberal Democrat who couldn't remain silent in the face of so many careless proclamations from campus protesters. "As someone who has been a peace activist all my life," I said to her, "I want to tell you something that might be surprising: Thank you."

Michael H. Shuman, author of "Going Local: Creating Self-Reliant Communities in a Global Age (Routledge, 2000), directed the Institute for Policy Studies from 1992 to 1998.