Does War Work? A Pacifist’s Answer
By Colman McCarthy
Those of us who are pacifists and who opposed the war against Iraq when it began and oppose it now as the killing goes on, are being told that America’s military might is effective. The beast of Baghdad has been captured. George W. Bush and the U.S. military are liberating the Iraqi people. War works.
Not so fast. No pacifist that I know—whether a pragmatic pacifist or a spiritual pacifist, the two kinds—doubted the immediate outcome of the onslaught that began last March. On one side was a well-financed highly modernized military on the offensive. On the other was an ill-equipped, poorly mechanized and often cowering military on the defensive.
It was Muhammad Ali in the ring against a 10-year-old schoolyard bully.
What we pacifists did doubt was the “last resort” argument put forth by the Bush war council, backed as it endlessly was by assertions that only warfare could free Iraq.
The celerity of Hussein’s fall sustains both the delusion that warmaking is neccesary and the myth that violence creates peace. A look at recent history refutes these claims and certifies that the force of nonviolence, when it is well organized, is effective and moral in ways that military violence never is. .
On April 1, 2001 in Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milosevic was arrested by Serbian police for his crimes while in office. He was brought down nonviolently—by students, workers and a disciplined resistance movement. No resister was killed by the Milosevic regime during the two years its military and police might slowly eroded. It was citizen power, not NATO. pilots bombing Serb civilians, that toppled the government. The tyrant is now on trial in the Hague getting due process.
On August 24, 1989 in Poland, the Soviet puppet regime of Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski fell. On that day it peacefully ceded power to a coalition government created by the Solidarity labor union that, for a decade, used nonviolence strategies to overthrow the Communist dictator. Few resisters were killed by the Jaruzelski regime in the nine years leading to its overthrow. The example of Poland’s nonviolence spread, with the Soviet Union’s collapse soon coming.
On October 5, 1988, Chile’s despotic Gen. Augusto Pinochet, once championed by Henry Kissinger, was driven from office after five years of strikes, boycotts and other forms of nonviolent resistance. A Chilean organizer, who led the demand for free elections, said: “We didn’t protest with arms. That gave us more power.”
On the morning of Feb. 26, 1986, a frightened Ferdinand Marcos, once a ruthless ruler of the Philippines and hailed by Jimmy Carter, became just another powerless dictator. He fled to exile in Hawaii. A three year nonviolent revolt—staged by nuns, students, merchants, workers--brought him down.
In South Africa, it wasn’t armed struggle that ended white supremacy and brought former prisoner Nelson Mandela to the presidency on May 10, 1994. It was the moral force of organized nonviolent resistance that made it impossible for the racist government to control the justice-demanding population.
Who would have forecasted in 1985 that these regimes, empowered with their weapons, torture chambers and death squads, would be taken out—and done so bloodlessly—by the effective power and moral force of non-cooperation It shouldn’t be confused with passive resistance. It is active resistance. “It’s not a semantic distinction,” cautions Peter Ackerman, co-author of “A Force More Powerful: Century of Nonviolent Conflict” (Palgrave, 2000). “ People in nonviolent struggles are not unarmed. They are simply not armed with violent weapons. But make no mistake, they have formidable resources that flow from the fabric of society.”
Would the methods used in Yugoslavia, Poland, Chile, the Philippines and South Africa toppled Donald Rumsfeld’s old friend Saddam Hussein and brought democracy to Iraq?. It’s now moot. Had the U.S. offered anti-Hussein dissidents financial and political support in 1991, as the Agency for International Development, the U.S. Institute for Peace and the National Endowment for Democracy helped Serb dissidents against Milosevic, results might have been different. Instead, they were abandoned and became easy prey for Hussein.
Rather than rapping pacifists as dreamers living in a fantasy world, U.S. militarists and war supporters need to confront their own dreaminess and fantasies. Since 1945, these countries have been bombed or militarily invaded by the U.S.: China, Korea, Guatemala, Indonesia, Cuba, Congo, Peru, Dominican Republic, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Grenada, Libya, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Panama, Iraq, Sudan, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia. Not once did a democratic government, respectful of human rights, occur as a direct result.
This habitual militarisme proves that Martin Luther King’s 1967 belief was correct: “The greatest purveyor of violence in the world today [is] my own government.”
Small wonder that much of the world agrees. Small wonder, too, the American peace movement continues to grow.
Colman McCarthy, a former columnist for The Washington Post, directs the Center for Teaching Peace in Washington. He is speaking Jan. 1, at 11 a.m., at the Englewood Methodist Church, Englewood, Fla.