Updated Tuesday, February 25 at 1:27 PM
Was I That Stupid?
by Gerald Posner
This past weekend, millions turned out in cities
worldwide for antiwar protests – the largest since the
Vietnam war – by groups opposed to US military action
against Iraq. Tens of thousands in the United States
recently braved frigid east coast weather and almost
half-a-million people marched through Florence and
Paris in what was promoted as one in a series in many
Europe-wide anti-war rallies.
Many of my fellow Democrats have been gushing about
the hordes that have taken to the streets, basking in
nostalgia about the street demonstrations over Vietnam
that were a factor in changing government policy in
Southeast Asia. But the enthusiasm that the protests
kindled in some seemed strange, as all they did for me
was bring back shameful
memories of my own political naiveté thirty years ago.
In 1972 I was a freshman at UC Berkeley, then proud to
boast it had the only city council in America that
refused to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance.
Carrying around baby-doctor Benjamin Spock’s leftist
manifesto on Vietnam, I quickly became an activist
during the next two years in immense antiwar protests
that seemed almost daily occurrences
at Berkeley. As a political science major I thought I
had all the answers. The North Vietnamese were merely
freedom fighters trying to liberate their country from
the shackles of western imperialism. The US
war was unjust and being waged against innocents. And
Governor Ronald Reagan, who kept badmouthing us and
sending in the tough Alameda sheriff’s department to
disburse the crowds, was somewhere right of Attila the
Hun.
Three decades later I have no pride in the memory of
those protests. Rather, I wonder how it was possible
to be so mistaken about real politics and world
events. My political gullibility is an embarrassment.
The so-called peace movement had completely deluded
itself, conveniently ignoring any evidence that
countered its agenda. How was it not possible to have
seen that the North was a convenient tool for the
Soviets to bleed the US and that it represented one of
the
most repressive old-line communist dictatorships since
Stalin? What were we marching for three decades ago?
Certainly not for the right of North Vietnam to invade
neighboring Cambodia, killing tens of thousands of
civilians in a brutal war of submission. Nor did we
raucously protest so that two million Cambodians could
be exterminated under the Khmer Rouge. Not many of us
would have been so enthusiastic in Sproul Plaza had we
known that the North Vietnamese secret police would
imprison, torture, and kill tens of thousands of
political prisoners in a futile, but barbarous,
attempt to “cleanse” the country of western influence.
None of the tragedies that happened after the US
withdrawal from Southeast Asia should have come as a
surprise. But they did to those of
us in the antiwar movement because we had blinded
ourselves to any reality.
Will today’s current peace protestors eventually feel
as foolish as I do? I think even more so. Weapons of
mass destruction, a war declared on America by Islamic
extremists, and a leader in Saddam who rivals the most
thuggish dictators in recent history, changes the
entire equation.
Thirty years ago there was never a question of North
Vietnam attacking America or its civilians around the
globe. Our often-misguided peace demonstrations
inadvertently assisted the communists in brutally
reuniting the country. But today’s peaceniks, who seem
to be more interested in protecting Saddam than in
trying to prevent the massive loss of life on American
soil if terrorists get their hands on weapons of mass
destruction, are playing with much more dangerous
consequences. They are deluding themselves to the post
9.11 realities, and in so doing, their success would
put the country at considerable risk.
Saddam must be delirious with joy to think that not a
shot has been fired, and the same old suspects – Jesse
Jackson, Al Sharpton, and Ramsey Clark - are taking to
the streets and leading many impressionable and
idealistic young Americans in trying to stop a war
that is, unfortunately, a necessity. Such
demonstrations give Saddam the false
hope that peace sentiment on the street will weaken
the resolve of Western leaders, and the vacillation of
allies like Germany and France only rekindle the
shameful specter earlier European weakness when it
came to dealing with its own fascist dictators a
generation ago.
The loose collaboration of leftists, anti-war
activists, and anti-globalization proponents, must
wake up. There are fundamentalists
who would kill them without a second thought merely
because they are Westerners. Appeasement gets you
nowhere, as Europe learned from Hitler.
I looked at the recent television images of thousands,
almost in a party atmosphere, as they chanted their
rhyming protests against a possible war. Was I that
stupid? I hope not.
Gerald Posner is a Miami and
New York based journalist. His book, 'Why America
Slept,' an investigation into what led to 9/11, will
be published this fall.
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John D. Giorgis - [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Tonight I have a message for the brave and oppressed people of Iraq:
Your enemy is not surrounding your country — your enemy is ruling your
country. And the day he and his regime are removed from power will be
the day of your liberation." -George W. Bush 1/29/03
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