The antiwar movement and the 2004 Elections.

• Author: Bloom, Steve
• Position: Politics and Election

A massive and unprecedented antiwar movement grew up in this country between October 2002 and March 2003. This was in response first, to George Bush's war drive against Iraq, and then in protest against the war itself. In the wake of this experience, activists all over the country have begun to think about the 2004 elections. Is it possible to defeat Bush at the polls? The answer is that it might be. There are, however, more profound questions, such as: What would it accomplish if we give up building an independent movement in the streets in order to campaign for a Democratic presidential candidate? How different would that Democrat be from Bush? This is an important discussion. To take effective action opponents of the war and occupation in Iraq will need to look at some recent history, and think a little bit outside the box of politics as usual.

What is at stake?

In general, activists are not wrong when they identify something new and dangerous in the Bush administration's rhetoric about regime change and pre-emptive military strike. This policy amounts to a declaration that the US has the right to engage in naked imperial conquest whenever and wherever it likes. The new danger, however, does not reside in the program of regime change, pre-emptive military strike, or naked imperial conquest per se. These things have been around for a long time.

In the 1950s, US marines overthrew the democratically elected government of Guatemala. In the 1960s, the US invaded the Dominican Republic and overturned the results of an election there. In Vietnam, three different administrations in the White House engineered a series of regime changes, backed up by thousands of US troops, and still lost that war. In the 1980s, President Reagan ordered an invasion of the Caribbean island of Grenada. Then his predecessor, President Bush Sr. invaded Panama to overturn the Noriega government. These are just highlights, or we should probably say "lowlights," of recent US history.

What makes the Iraq case new and different is that Bush chose to declare his goal of regime change and pre-emptive strike more or less openly. This was done with a mere fig leaf (which few really believed) about weapons of mass destruction, rather than a manufactured pretext for intervention such as the Gulf of Tonkin incident in Vietnam--or taking advantage of a real incident--like the coup against the Maurice Bishop government in Grenada.

The ability of Bush to simply declare his war aims...