Jamie O, Political Crack, War in Iraq

From Vietnam To Iraq To Gaza, The Beat Goes On

I will begin this post by stating upfront, all I am trying to do here is put things into context, and get people who are hyperfocused on the college protests to think a bit about what history teaches us about these moments. There is enough venom going around, and at this moment we need to be respectful to each other as much as possible, especially Democrats given the stakes of the upcoming election (please, no accusations of supporting genocide). But here goes…

During the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020, whenever I saw people online tsk-tsk the protests as “not helping the cause,” I instantly thought of this:

I heard the echoes of history. Just like in the 1960s, “but the violence,” was often the refrain, but the protests were mostly non-violent. In many cases, protests that turned violent became that way due to police instigation. Oh, that’s just some silly lefty claim, you might say. Nope. And often MLK was invoked as a criticism of the protests, something that is highly ironic given his statements about such views.

Here we are, once again, in a situation where we have an occurrence where a segment of the population is horrified by cruelty or injustice, and a larger segment of the population is telling them to shut up. I have a strong feeling that like other instances of protest where people at the time were enraged and deeply committed to telling them how horrible their protests were, eventually the protests will be seen as just and perhaps, even celebrated (even at Columbia University, the epicenter of the current protests). We have been down this road before.

Because this is over military action, Israel’s slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza (not to mention thuggish actions by civilians against Palestinians elsewhere), I will shift from civil rights to Vietnam and Iraq for my comparison to the current moment. During Vietnam, the war protests were extremely unpopular with the general population. In November 1969, a CBS News poll found that three-quarters of the population did not approve of the protests and six in 10 believed they harmed the peace process.

This is probably starting to sound familiar, given the public distaste over the current protests against Gaza. Something I am finding alarming is the near absence of condemnation for both the right-wing attack on Gaza protestors at UCLA (outside of the Los Angeles Times) and the disgusting specter of a white college student making money noises and actions at a black woman at Ole Miss. In fact, a sitting member of Congress referred to one of the most disgusting displays of open racism in modern times as “taking care of business.”

Now, I bring these incidents up in relation to the Vietnam protests because the violence against current protestors, including actions carried out by police like slamming middle-aged women to the ground and discharging a firearm inside a building and trying to cover it up, could very well escalate to something tragic. We know this because on May 4, 1970, the National Guard killed four student protestors. You may have heard a song written about that horrible day.

Would such an incident shake up people’s views that police should crack down on Gaza protestors? Probably not, because it certainly did not in 1970. Immediately after, a Gallup poll found that 58% blamed the students, 11% blamed the Guard, and 31% had no opinion. In his book 67 Shots: Kent State and the End of American Innocence, Howard Means talked to people who recalled coming home from college to parents who told them that their dead fellow students got what they deserved, and some even were disowned by their parents for being against the war. And yet today, Kent State is viewed as a tragic overreaction by the National Guard, and memorials are held for the fallen protestors, an outcome that would have brought howls of derision at the very idea of it in 1970.

I will also add that the reason for the protests, the Vietnam War, is viewed as one of America’s great foreign policy failings, despite the Joe Scarboroughs of the day telling the students they didn’t know what they were talking about. And speaking of great foreign policy failings, that leads me to Iraq.

Similar to right now, I felt like a large portion of my fellow Americans were losing their minds in the months after 9/11. Support for attacking Iraq was 73% in the days prior to Bush’s State of the Union speech that focused on the invasion, a mere 16% were opposed. Those of us who were opposed were treated like pariahs, I would get a lot of OH I GUESS YOU DON’T CARE ABOUT THE DEAD PEOPLE IN THE TOWERS and LOVE TERRORISTS MUCH? type of responses to any even small statement I would make about how invading Iraq seemed like a bad idea. Two years after the 9/11 attacks, 69% of Americans believed Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the attack, while 78% believed he had WMDs. Protestors were treated as terror supporters and infamously, Bush’s then press secretary Ari Fleischer said “all Americans need to watch what they say, watch what they do.”

Eventually, these delusions could not hold up to reality, and more and more Americans came around to the reality that the war in Iraq was a massive mistake.

This is what the Iraq protestors, who were attacked and called terrorist supporters, were saying all along. By rejecting the protestors as pro-terrorism and/or misinformed, and listening to a president lying about the situation in Iraq, Americans accepted all sorts of horrors. Not the least of which was we became a nation that tortures, and strongly supported it. I don’t think we ever recovered from that.

So, here we are today. I will say, while there are many similarities, the Gaza mess truly is a different situation. A complicating factor is the country many of us are protesting is Israel, and criticism of Israel invites accusations of antisemitism. We should always take antisemitism seriously, but when those accusations are driven by the party of Marjorie Taylor-Greene and non-stop references to a wealthy Jewish man’s influence on liberal causes (see any number of posts made by conservatives about protestors paid by George Soros), well, we should all be very careful. I strongly agree with Greg Sargent here:

We seem to be focusing right now on everything but what Israel’s far-right government is doing.  For example, there is a maddening debate over what to call Israeli actions. It matters less that we call the deaths of tens of thousands (including 13,000+ children) and statements by high-level Israeli leaders who refuse to continue to slaughter Gazans even to find the hostages. It matters more that people are dying. I have even noticed pushback on the use of the term “famine,” despite Cindy McCain (yes, that Cindy McCain) saying there is one happening right now. We did this stuff with whether it was okay to call Trump a fascist, and I would not be shocked if someone on the Hit MSNBC Marriage Comedy Morning Joe says in reply to McCain, “My dear lady, you simply cannot call it famine unless it occurs in the Famine region of France, otherwise it is merely sparkling starvation.” Perhaps we should just all agree to call it horrible.

People are dying in terrible ways, a far-right authoritarian is carrying out the attacks, and there are no indications that Israel has any end game in mind (which worked out great for us in Iraq, right?). Not to mention, he has so far shown America nothing but contempt even with our supplying him with the arms to slaughter civilians. These are not the words of a true ally.

Perhaps, one day, people who condemn the protests will look back and acknowledge that the reason for the protests was a correct one. Like what happened with civil rights. And Vietnam. And South African apartheid. And disability rights. And Iraq. And Black Lives Matter (not quite yet but I remain hopeful on this). I will close by saying one final thing: Support for the instant police crackdowns of even peaceful Gaza protests is chilling, and don’t think for one moment that this wouldn’t be done against say abortion protestors marching against a President Trump abortion ban. We are setting a bad precedent here.

The last word goes to Chris Hayes, who last week in this excellent segment made a compelling case that the reason why so many hate protests, an American right, is that it is much easier than addressing what the protestors are upset about.

2 thoughts on “From Vietnam To Iraq To Gaza, The Beat Goes On”

    1. Corrected, and thank you for pointing that out. And of course, apologies to Mississippi State.

      Reply

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