In just the space of a weekend since the assassination of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani, the rhetoric on Iran from President Donald Trump’s administration has seriously escalated. Trump boasted about $2 trillion in recent military spending and the prospect of bombing Iranian culture sites (a potential war crime in violation of international law), prompting House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) to announce a war powers resolution designed to put a 30-day time limit on any further “military hostilities” with Iran.
As the president and his allies seem dead set on launching the third U.S. war in the Middle East in this young century, people all across the country are also gearing up for what has the potential to be our nation’s latest anti-war movement.
According to the New York Daily News, hundreds came out to protest in New York City’s Times Square just days after the area hosted its annual New Year’s Eve festivities. The director of Code Pink told the New York Times that 80 demonstrations took place across the country over the weekend in places like Washington, Philadelphia, and Seattle. I was among those who took to the streets this weekend at a protest Friday night outside of Democratic New York senator Chuck Schumer’s New York City home.
So how can these mass expressions of public resistance evolve into a new anti-war movement? There are two key examples in relatively recent history that we can draw from to help us understand.
First and foremost among these was the anti-war movement organized against the U.S. invasion of Vietnam. Through the 1960s and ’70s, the U.S. was engaged in an invasion of the southeast Asian nation in order to fight a war against communism (really a proxy war against the Soviet Union) in line with the the Truman Doctrine, which had also motivated involvement in the Korean War.
The movement that arose in response was a broad coalition of organizations. Asian-American groups like the Bay Area Asian Coalition Against War (BAACAW) brought an anti-imperialist sensibility to discussions about bringing U.S. troops home, arguing that the war amounted to the U.S. imposing on the Vietnamese people’s right to self-determination.
Black organizers were a major force in the Vietnam-era anti-war movement. Civil rights and black power groups like the Student Nonviolent Coordination Committee (SNCC) denounced the conflict, viewing it as yet another act of U.S. aggression. The SNCC’s Atlanta Project organized a protest outside a local draft office in 1966. By 1968, an organization called the National Black Anti-War Anti-Draft Union (NBAWADU) had formed, part of community efforts to set up draft counseling centers designed to help black men avoid conscription into military service.
Another major plank of Vietnam resistance came from student groups like Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), which organized a massive march on Washington in 1965 and spent the next several years organizing against the war, helping to “name the system” that produced the conflict. By 1969, SDS was fracturing, and a faction known as the Weatherman or Weather Underground later turned more militant, intending to “bring the war home” to weaken U.S. imperialism through bombings on U.S. military facilities, government buildings, and banks. This fracture came as the broader anti-war movement was softening to make more room for people averse to the risks of injury or arrest to join the protests.
The Vietnam anti-war movement sought to push public opinion further and further against the war, normalizing opposition to it — a major feat in an era when it was practically sacrilege to question U.S. military efforts, especially those intended as attempts to stop communism. Eventually, the movement helped push Congress to action.
A secondary anti-war movement to consider not for its success but for its apparent failure is the one that arose in response to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Many of the same threads that tied together the Vietnam-era movement are visible in the response to this war launched by President George W. Bush on false pretenses. We saw massive marches and, by 2006, Pew Research Center polling found that public sentiment had turned against the war.
But the anti-war movement regarding Iraq has not had the success the movement during Vietnam did. Some say this is because the lack of a draft kept the war from reaching into homes across the country and pulling away sons to send to war. Others say the lack of a sustained movement is the result of ideological differences between the people fighting on the other side or of a general national weariness with the war there and the one in Afghanistan (which began in 2001).
Iraqi children born during the year of the invasion will turn 18 next year, and the U.S. occupation of Iraq continues, as over 5,000 U.S. troops remain in the country. (Iraq’s parliament is seeking to end the U.S. presence in Iraq amid fears that a U.S. war with Iran would be waged largely in Iraq). That number is in addition to tens of thousands more spread across other nearby countries — 14,000 in Afghanistan on the other side of Iran, 13,000 in Qatar just across the Persian Gulf, and 13,000 in Kuwait, one of the countries where some of the 3,000 troops mobilized this weekend will be sent.
Like the wars against communism in the last century, the so-called “war on terror” is not limited to hostilities with a single nation or organization. Many have argued it is instead an expansive war machine that seeks to protect U.S. access to oil while creating a justification to keep spending money on the machine itself.
Thanks to the work of National Action/Research on the Military-Industrial Complex (NARMIC), protesters during the Vietnam era could see the numbers on how defense companies cashed in on the war effort, which was echoed last week as defense-company stocks soared in the wake of Soleimani’s killing.
The left in the United States is as organized today as it’s perhaps ever been. The broad rejection of President Trump has fomented a broad resistance movement that has varying levels of dedication and varying methods of direct action and is seemingly perfectly poised to foster a vigorous anti-war movement if Trump continues to intervene in Iran.
If that happens, the lessons of previous anti-war movements will be indispensable to organizers. I was reminded of this at the protest outside of Schumer’s house on Friday night, where the most popular chant seemed to echo both the Vietnam- and Iraq-era sentiment: “Fight the rich! Not their wars!”
Want more from Teen Vogue? Check this out: 6 Legendary Vietnam-Era Anti-War Movement Protests Everyone Should Know
