Generals, it is said, are always fighting the last war. Facing a war that is neither World War II nor Vietnam, against an enemy neither Nazi nor Communist, Washington has sometimes sounded blustery and lost since Sept. 11.
The same is true of America's anti-war movement. The movement is a child of the Vietnam era and has viewed every subsequent conflict through that prism. To many liberals, meddling in the world's business was taboo because when America put its own interests first, other nations suffered.
Now, the left is summoned to show not just foreboding - for which the war in Afghanistan is certainly ripe - but originality. Just as the Bush administration has scrapped its reluctance to intervene abroad and declared its readiness for "nation building," American liberals need to re-examine their doctrines if they hope to influence events.
Peace activists need to grapple with the difficult questions of whether any war can be justified, or just, and what the practical alternatives are. Then they can decide whether they agree with U.S. military actions or not.
Whether the left will rise to the occasion is questionable.
Consider, first, the fights over the American flag, evident in the days after Sept. 11.
Get content from The Daily Lobo delivered to your inbox
Splits quickly developed between those on the left who felt the unfamiliar passion of patriotism and those who didn't. Feminist Katha Pollitt, a columnist for The Nation and a veteran of the movement against the Vietnam War, wrote that her teen-age daughter wanted to fly the flag, but Pollitt said no.
A veteran of the same movement, I felt otherwise. A few days after the World Trade Center massacre, my wife and I hung out a flag on our balcony in Greenwich Village. Our desire was visceral - to express solidarity with the dead, membership in a wounded nation, and affection for the community of rescue that affirmed life in the midst of death, springing up to dig through the nearby ashes and ruins.
In this spirit, I liked the sentiments of the New Jersey flag-factory owner who told ABC that he sold 27,000 flags in one day, but added this about the mood of his customers: "It's not like the Gulf War. That was, 'Get 'em, get 'em.' This is more solidarity. I'm very happy to see true patriotism. This is so much warmth."
The terrible paradox of the late'60s and early '70s was that as the war became less popular, so did the anti-war movement. Partly because of the movement's cavalier anti-Americanism, pro-war Republicans emerged triumphant. Ronald Reagan took over in 1981, and conservatives have wielded enormous power ever since.
Last month, then, I refused to surrender the flag.
On the left, division over the flag has now translated into division over the Afghanistan war.
Anti-war demonstrations rally numbers in the low thousands, or smaller. A few hundred people marching in traditionally anti-war Madison, Wis., cannot convincingly claim that they march in the name of democracy when they represent a tiny minority.
Even in the Bay Area - the American left's base and home of the sole Congress member to vote against war authorization - division is evident. The Berkeley City Council voted 5-4 to call for a halt in the war, but paper flags are pasted on the windows of many homes there. And even some left-wing journalists have criticized today's anti-war activists; Marc Cooper, in a recent opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times, called the first major peace rally "a self-caricature of an American left that has struggled unsuccessfully since the attacks to find its proper national voice and posture."
So why does much of the left look, in Cooper's words, "traumatized and dysfunctional?"
Because anti-war absolutists cannot leave behind the melodramatic imagination of noble white hats in the "Third World" at war with imperial black hats. They have a hard time seeing America as a wounded party and seeing totalitarian Islamist groups like Al-Qaida as world-class menaces.
These liberals are still stamped by the awfulness of the Vietnam War, along with ill-conceived American covert and semi-covert interventions in Iran, Guatemala, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Angola, El Salvador and Nicaragua. If American policy is - in their minds - forever motivated by nothing but imperial overreach, forever guilty of napalm and death squads, then all American wars must be opposed with an absolute "No."
One version of liberal dogma - at least a consistent one - is the pacifist's view that force must never be used. But the fundamentalist left does not oppose the use of force absolutely. Some go so far as to treat the slaughter of thousands at the World Trade Center as an event in the history of revolt by the oppressed against their oppressors. These hard-left supporters act as if Saudi Arabian and Egyptian fundamentalists were entitled, as victims of imperialism, to a touch of vengefulness. (But if injuries at American hands were the causes of revenge attacks on the United States, then Vietnamese or Guatemalan suicide bombers might have materialized.)
For others on the left, American interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo - on behalf of oppressed Muslims, and against "ethnic cleansing," concentration camps and massacres - marked a definitive end to the idea that all wars merited an absolute "No."
Many of these liberals were sufficiently ambivalent about war and American power that they were reluctant to feel patriotic after Sept. 11. But they do. The nation that was grievously wounded is theirs.
In the main, they consider a regime that denies schooling for girls and harbors mass murderers repulsive. They are convinced that patriotism, sanctioned by international law, imparts a right of self-defense. They do not believe that love of country binds them to hot pursuit of the White House's strategies or tactics. But in the fight at hand, they share the goal of a president whom they did not, to put it mildly, support.
Thus, many on the left - myself included - feel varying degrees of queasiness with this war, but still forswear anti-war rallies. When our friends argue that war is unnecessary, and that, instead, Osama bin Laden should be tried by a world court, we have trouble seeing this as a practical alternative. The principle of legal recourse in justice's name is attractive, but we can't imagine who is going to find, serve legal papers on, capture, bring to trial, and punish well-armed criminal conspirators who dwell in caves.
No one on the left thinks U.S. foreign policy is close to faultless. Many doubt the sanctions against Iraq are effective, let alone just. We worry that the war will turn more Muslims, ultimately, to terrorism; that bin Laden has laid a trap and the United States is marching into it. Many liberals fervently oppose the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories, and hope the United States will impose a just peace in the Middle East. But such opinions do not entail the conclusion that if millions of people hate America, they must automatically have good reason.
Like it or not, we live in a new world that we did not choose. Whatever flimsy new world order materialized at the end of the Cold War vaporized with the World Trade Center. We live now in a new world chaos, lacking maps or certitudes. To claim moral authority and political trustworthiness now, we liberals must break up our frozen, encrusted dogmas.
In the mid-1960s, one of the few orators of renown willing to oppose the Vietnam War was the longtime socialist Norman Thomas. Worried that the anti-war movement would squander its moral credit with self-destructive tactics, he said: "Don't burn the flag. Wash it." That is a mission worth fighting for.
by Todd Gitlin
Knight Ridder-Tribune Columnist
Todd Gitlin is a professor of culture, journalism and sociology at New York University. He is also the author of "The Sixties: The Twilight of Common Dreams." He wrote this article for the San Jose Mercury News.
