Global Policy Forum

By Todd Gitlin*

Two reputable polls last month found more than 50 percent of Americans saying that the Iraq war wasn't worthwhile. By a narrow margin, more Americans agree than disagree with the statement that Bush deliberately misled the country into Iraq in his prime claim: weapons of mass destruction. The 50 percent who now believe that Bush deceived them contrasts with 31 percent who thought so less than two years ago, according to Gallup. The worth-it numbers have been sliding downward, on the whole, for more than a year. You'd think, then, that an anti-war movement that mustered millions of American marchers before March 2003, when the war started, would be revving up again.

It isn't. Recent rallies have been local and, for the most part, small. Anti-war groups are modest in their plans. The mood is often as mournful as it is militant. The deep truth about this time of perplexity is that the groups reflect their base. Whatever their leaders may want, they read the temperature of those who would have to follow—and they read it accurately.

One reason is, no doubt, the crushing results of November. The chance to depose George W. Bush was lost. Demoralization followed. After years in the shadows, activists want to win. Then too, the sense of urgency is weak. Americans in Iraq are giving up life, limb and mind handfuls at a time, not hundreds.

But I sense a deeper uncertainty that stems from disgruntlement with all the ready positions. In truth, the base is full of ambivalence—and for good reason. Not only does it not know what to do, it doesn't know what it wants. Proposals generate only more questions. Less bloodshed and more rebuilding, yes, but how? If withdrawal, at what cost? If a timetable for withdrawal, or withdrawal in some indefinite future, what becomes of Iraqis? If withdrawal only in behalf of other international troops, who could notionally stem the continuing bloodshed in Iraq? Then again, if no withdrawal at all, doesn't the occupation entail continuing bloodshed not only of Iraqis but also Americans? A whiplash of emotions pulls antiwarriors in several directions at once—which means no direction, really. In truth, a movement of the ambivalent is a churning sea of concern, even anguish, but it is no movement.

This ambivalence is, to date, compelling. Most who rallied against Bush's war in February 2003 feel vindicated today, for all their awareness that Saddam Hussein's deposing was a blessing for Iraq, never mind all the harsh conditions that prevail there. But opposing a war that hasn't started—a war to which there are compelling alternatives—is different from feeling certain what to do for a sequel. Moral clarity turns to murk.

So many of those who marched are perplexed pragmatists now. They ask themselves: If American troops left tomorrow, would less bloodshed result, or more? Would the government that has begun to take shape since the January 30 elections better withstand Ba'athist attacks without a backup of American troops? If this regime fell, then what? Having done the wrong thing by going into Iraq in the first place, do Americans do right, now, by leaving? Even if the war was wrong in the first place, is continuing occupation wrong in the second? Have we not incurred responsibilities to actual Iraqis? What does it mean to be anti-war when the main war on the ground pits Ba'athists and Islamists on the one hand against other Iraqis on the other?

Those who opposed the war don't agree on the answers. In this, their mood is quite unlike the mood of those who marched against the Vietnam war 35 or 40 years ago. Then, all factions of the anti-war movement agreed that Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Cong led a legitimate nationalist movement and that their victory was, like or not, inevitable. They agreed that the Saigon government was a fraud of dubious provenance lacking any real prospects. They might disagree in assessing what would follow an American departure, or even whether that was worth thinking about at all, but they harmonized in believing that the destruction wrought by the Americans in Vietnam was the most imposing fact on the ground.

So even most of those who couldn't bring themselves to favor unequivocal withdrawal from Vietnam in 1965 were drawn to that position by 1969 or 1970. They were, in their way, pragmatists, too. They were clear-eyed about the overwhelming realities: American body bags piling higher by the month, into the tens of thousands; the vastly greater Vietnamese casualties mounting still faster; negotiations dragging on in a cowardly effort to stave off the inevitable; the war dragging Cambodia into its wake; not to mention the manifold and sickening corrosions of American life that followed from an unfathomable commitment to a steadily uglier—and unwinnable—war. If Communist Vietnam, left to its own devices, would be a dictatorship—and there were differences about this—the movement could agree that such a denouement was preferable to a war killing northern and southern Vietnamese in the millions.

In other words, history doesn't repeat. Just as Ho Chi Minh wasn't Hitler, Saddam Hussein and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi aren't Ho Chi Minh. And at least as long as the awfulness of continuing war comes home to Americans in ones, twos and threes at a time, the meaning of "anti-war" fuzzes up, and a fuzzed-up spirit is not likely to drive many into the streets.

About the Author: Todd Gitlin teaches journalism and sociology at Columbia University and is the author of many books, including Letters to a Young Activist. He was an organizer of the first major national demonstration against the Vietnam war, in 1965.