At their best, peace movements in the past always went beyond critique to offer stories that described conflicts in genuinely new ways. At present, however, the U.S. peace movement has yet to find the alternative narrative it needs to talk about the Islamic State, which leaves it little more than a silent shadow on the American political scene.
Vietnam Redux
That's not to say that the peace movement is stuck story-less. One potentially effective narrative that might bring it back to life is sitting in plain view, right there in the peace activists' most common critique of the U.S. war against the Islamic State.
IS is not making war on the U.S., the critique explains, nor on Europe. Its sporadic attacks on those "infidel" lands aim primarily to radicalize Muslims living there in hopes of recruiting them. Indeed, all IS strategies are geared toward winning Muslims to its side and gaining more traction in predominantly Muslim lands. That's where the vast majority of IS-directed or inspired violence happens, all over what Muslims call dar al-Islam, "the home of Islam," from Nigeria to Syria to Indonesia.
The problem for the Islamic State: the vast majority of Muslims are just not buying its story. In fact, IS is making enemies as well as friends everywhere it goes. In other words, it is involved in a civil war within dar al-Islam.
Every step we take deeper into that civil war is a misstep that only makes us more vulnerable. The stronger our stand against the Islamic State, the more excuses and incentives we give it to try to attack us, and the easier it is for IS to recruit fighters to do the job. The best way to protect American lives is to transcend our fears and refuse to take sides in someone else's civil war.
That's the positive narrative waiting to be extracted from the peace movement's analysis. One big reason the movement has had such a paltry influence in these years: it's never spelled out this "Muslim civil war" narrative explicitly, even though it fits the facts so much better than either of the war stories on offer. It radically shifts our perception of the situation by denying the basic premise of the dominant narrative -- that IS is making war on America so we must make war in return. It points to a new policy of disengagement.
And it's a simple, powerful story for Americans because it's so familiar. It sends us back half a century and half a world away -- to Vietnam. At that time, my friend and (a bit later) I, too, embraced the narrative that Vietnam was indeed gripped by a civil war. That explanation would play a major role in boosting the success of the Sixties peace movement. Within a few years, many millions of Americans, citizens and soldiers alike, saw the conflict that way -- and not so many years after, all U.S. troops were gone from Vietnam.
The peace movement's story then was both simple and accurate. No, it said, we're not the good guys protecting one independent nation from invasion by another nation. Nor are we fighting an enemy intent on doing us harm. Boxing champion Muhammad Ali got it right when he said: "I ain't got no quarrel with the Viet Cong."
Intervening in Vietnam's civil war cost us more than 58,000 American lives and did untold damage to the vets who survived, not to speak of what it did to millions of Vietnamese. It showed us that, no matter how superior our technology, we could not swoop in and win someone else's civil war. Our intervention was bound to do more harm than good.
Fifty years later, we are repeating the same self-defeating mistake. Military action against the Islamic State is leading us into another Vietnam-like "quagmire," this time in Iraq, Syria, and elsewhere across the Greater Middle East. Once again, we have enmeshed ourselves in a complex civil war abroad with no strategy that can lead to victory. It was wrong then. It's wrong now.
To put it mildly, the U.S. has a less than stellar track record when it comes to intervening in other people's civil wars. We've also interfered quite selectively. In the last two decades, we stayed out of brutal conflicts in places like the Congo and Sri Lanka. So a decision not to intervene militarily in a foreign civil war should be familiar enough to Americans.
To become neutral is not to condone the grim brutality and reactionary values of the Islamic State. It's hardly likely that twenty-first-century peace activists will give the IS anything like the sympathy many Vietnam-era protesters offered the insurgents of that moment. In this case, becoming neutral merely means suggesting that it's not Washington's job to fight evil everywhere. Its job is to adopt the strategies most likely to keep Americans safe.
That's a view most Americans already hold to quite firmly. So the "Muslim civil war" story just might get a sympathetic hearing in the public arena.
The Bewildering Maze Of Muslim Civil War
Of course, the Islamic State is not involved in what we conventionally think of as a civil war, in which two sides fight for control of a single nation. Even inside Syria, the number of factions involved in the struggle, including the oppressive government of Bashar al-Assad and rebels of every stripe from al-Qaeda-linked to Saudi-linked to U.S.-linked ones, is bewildering. Since IS is fighting for control not just of Syria but of all dar al-Islam, many other movements, factions, and forces are involved in this Muslim civil war as well.
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