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Think of the U.S. military-industrial-congressional complex as a remarkably self-contained system. It's capable of funding itself at staggering levels, producing weaponry (however inefficient, ineffective, and anything but inexpensive) largely without oversight, and fighting wars (however disastrous) in a similar fashion all of this almost unnoticed in this country much of the time. Sadly enough, this has, in a sense, been the history of America in the twenty-first century.
Whether the public supported or rejected any of it and there's polling evidence of rejection finally settling in the very idea of this country endlessly warring abroad has mattered remarkably little here much of the time. Yes, there was that moment before the invasion of Iraq in 2003 when concerned citizens turned out to protest in remarkable numbers. But most of the time, America's wars (and the overwhelmingly expensive preparations for them) have gone on with the most minimal resistance.
And blame for that, at least in part, can certainly be placed on one key response to the disaster of the Vietnam War and the enormous antiwar movement of those years, which even made its way into the military itself: the ending in 1973 of the draft and the creation of an "all-volunteer" military. That had the effect of locking the troops, too, inside the self-propelled machine with which Washington has tried to make itself the true hyperpower of planet Earth at the point of a bayonet or perhaps, in this century, a drone.
In that context, consider it little short of a miracle as TomDispatch regular Nan Levinson, author of War Is Not a Game: The New Antiwar Soldiers and the Movement They Built, describes today that, while so many Americans ignored our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq along with the global war on terror more generally, a surprising number of American vets (and sometimes even active-duty soldiers) did try to protest or organize to stop those very wars. Did they succeed? Hardly. Still, it's something of a miracle, under the circumstances, that they even made the attempt. With that in mind, let Levinson, an expert on the subject, look back on these remarkable years of resistance, even if it was too minimal to be truly effective. Tom
The Antiwar Movement That Wasn't Enough
The Wars We Couldn't End
By Nan Levinson
When I urge my writing students to juice up their stories, I tell them about "disruptive technologies," inventions and concepts that end up irrevocably changing industries. Think: iPhones, personal computers, or to reach deep into history, steamships. It's the tech version of what we used to call a paradigm shift. (President Biden likes to refer to it as an inflection point.)
Certain events function that way, too. After they occur, it's impossible to go back to how things were: World War II for one generation, the Vietnam War for another, and 9/11 for a third. Tell me it isn't hard now to remember what it was like to catch a flight without schlepping down roped-off chutes like cattle to the slaughter, even if for most of the history of air travel, no one worried about underwear bombers or explosive baby formula. Of course, once upon a time, we weren't incessantly at war either.
However, for my students, the clumsily named Gen Z, the transformative event in their lives hasn't been a war at all no matter that their country has been enmeshed in one or more of them for all of their conscious lives. It's probably George Floyd's murder or the Covid pandemic or the double whammy of both, mixed in with a deadly brew of Trumpism. That alone strikes me as a paradigm shift.
It's not that they are uncaring. Those I know are ardent about fixing myriad wrongs in the world and prepared to work at it, too. And like many Americans, for a few weeks as August 2021 ended, they were alarmed by the heartbreaking consequences of their country's failed mission in Afghanistan and its betrayal of the people there. How could you not be heartbroken about people desperate to save their lives and livelihoods? And the girls" ah, the girls, the 37% of teenage girls who learned to read in those years, went to school with boys, saw their lives change, and probably will be denied all of that in the years to come.
In my more cynical moments, though, I note that it was the girls and women who were regularly trotted out by our government officials and generals insisting that U.S. troops must remain in Afghanistan until until what? Until, as it turned out, disaster struck. After all, what good American heart doesn't warm to educating the young and freeing girls from forced marriages (as opposed, of course, to killing civilians and causing chaos)?
Militarism is among the all-American problems the young activists I meet do sometimes bring up. It's just not very high on their list of issues to be faced. The reasons boil down to this: the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, interminable as they seemed, had little or no direct effect on most of my students or the lives they imagined having and that was reflected in their relative lack of attention to them, which tells us all too much about this country in the twenty-first century.
Spare Change
So here we are, 20 years after U.S. troops invaded Afghanistan and months since they hotfooted it out. That two-decade-long boots-on-the-ground (and planes in the air) episode has now officially been declared over and done with, if not exactly paid for. But was that an inflection point, as this country turned its military attention to China and Russia? Not so fast. I'm impatient with the conventional wisdom about our twenty-first-century wars and the reaction to them at home. Still, I do think it's important to try to figure out what has (or hasn't) been learned from them and what may have changed because of them.
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