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I've never suggested this in any of these little introductions I've been writing for 19 years now, but it might make sense to read TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon's piece first today and think of this as my afterword. As it happens, she writes movingly about Barbara Lee as the Cassandra of our time. Alone among members of Congress in the days after the 9/11 attacks, Lee grasped what the future held and voted against the initial congressional Authorization for the Use of Military Force. She couldn't, of course, have been more on target in her fears about what it would mean to let the Bush administration do its damnedest on this planet of ours. (And of course, in true Cassandra-style, no one who mattered paid the slightest attention to her.)
Gordon's piece left me thinking that, from the beginning, when it came to this country's disastrous forever wars that Lee was intuitively trying to stop, this website proved impressively on target, too, not because any of us had Cassandra's gift of future sight but because the grim path ahead was (or should have been) so obvious. Take Chalmers Johnson, writing as January 2003 began, months before the Bush administration's March invasion of Iraq ("Mission accomplished!"), about what was going to happen what had, in fact, been fated to happen since the first moments after the 9/11 attacks. As he put it, then, "Ever since the first American war against Iraq, the 'Gulf War' of 1991, the people in the White House and the Pentagon who planned and executed it have wanted to go back and finish what they started."
Or for that matter consider what I wrote in December 2002 about the future of the war in Afghanistan, already a year old, when I brought up a classic Vietnam-era image: "The word to watch for in the American press is 'quagmire.' When you see that and Afghanistan appearing in the same articles, you'll know we know we're in trouble." In fact, that word never really appeared, but Afghanistan did indeed become a classic all-American quagmire for as we all now know 20 years.
And I could repeat such passages from TomDispatch authors, year after year from then on. Yet, however on-the-mark this website may have been, sadly it was never mainstream, never influential enough. Had it, like Barbara Lee, been attended to, perhaps there might have been no "forever" in our forever wars. But no such luck. Cassandras can, I suppose, take pride in what they've seen of the future, but to tell you the truth, being one is, in the end, a remarkably depressing occupation.
With that in mind, if you've insisted on dealing with this as an introduction, not an afterword, then, whatever you do, don't miss Rebecca Gordon's piece. Tom
Seeing the Future
When No One Believes You
For decades, I kept a poster on my wall that I'd saved from the year I turned 16. In its upper left-hand corner was a black-and-white photo of a white man in a grey suit. Before him spread a cobblestone plaza. All you could see were the man and the stones. Its caption read, "He stood up alone and something happened."
It was 1968. "He" was Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy. As that campaign slogan suggested, his strong second-place showing in the Maine primary was proof that opposition to the Vietnam War had finally become a viable platform for a Democratic candidate for president. I volunteered in McCarthy's campaign office that year. My memory of my duties is now vague, but they mainly involved alphabetizing and filing index cards containing information about the senator's supporters. (Remember, this was the age before there was a computer in every pocket, let alone social media and micro-targeting.)
Running against the Vietnam War, McCarthy was challenging then-President Lyndon Johnson in the Democratic primaries. After McCarthy had a strong second-place showing in Maine, New York Senator Robert F. Kennedy entered the race, too, running against the very war his brother, President John F. Kennedy, had bequeathed to Johnson when he was assassinated. Soon, Johnson would withdraw from the campaign, announcing in a televised national address that he wouldn't run for another term.
With his good looks and family name, Bobby Kennedy appeared to have a real chance for the nomination when, on June 5, 1968, during a campaign event in Los Angeles, he, like his brother, was assassinated. That left the war's opponents without a viable candidate for the nomination. Outside the Democratic Party convention in Chicago that August, tens of thousands of angry, mostly young Americans demonstrated their frustration with the war and the party's refusal to take a stand against it. In what was generally recognized as a police riot, the Chicago PD beat protesters and journalists bloody on national TV, as participants chanted, "The whole world is watching." And indeed, it was.
In the end, the nomination went to Johnson's vice president and war supporter Hubert Humphrey, who would face Republican hawk Richard Nixon that November. The war's opponents watched in frustration as the two major parties closed ranks, cementing their post-World-War-II bipartisan agreement to use military power to enforce U.S. global dominance.
Cassandra Foresees the Future
Of course, the McCarthy campaign's slogan was wrong on two counts. He didn't stand up alone. Millions of us around the world were then working to end the war in Vietnam. Sadly, nothing conclusive happened as a result of his campaign. Nixon went on to win the 1968 general election and the Vietnam War dragged on to an ignominious U.S. defeat seven years later.
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