No Peace, No Justice

In the Vietnam War and again at the time of the Gulf War, different slogans have defined contending currents in the anti-war movement. That seems to be happening again today. While the differences are important and perhaps inevitable, they should not prevent the movement from mobilizing the broadest mass participation in united struggle against the warmakers.

For several years at the beginning of the Vietnam War, the issue was negotiations versus withdrawal. Peace groups that had until then been focused mainly on the issue of nuclear arms raised the slogan "Negotiations now," counterpoising it to a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam. As large coalitions began to form against the war, some of these groups sought to exclude the demand for withdrawal from the coalition demonstrations.

This struggle within the coalitions was ultimately resolved in the streets. The demand to "Bring the GIs home" became so immensely popular, and was so obviously the only way to end the war, that it became the dominant slogan. Especially as news began to filter out on how Henry Kissinger and others used the Paris peace talks to threaten the Vietnamese with nuclear weapons, the view that the movement here should support a role for the U.S. government in shaping Vietnam's future became discredited.

At the time of the Gulf War, the programmatic divide came over the issue of sanctions. The first demonstrations, which were organized by the precursor to today's International Action Center, called for no war against Iraq. Period.

A second coalition formed in December 1991, a month before the actual bombing started, that called for "Sanctions, not war." This slogan implied that Iraq had to be punished--by the U.S., but with UN cover, as it turned out. It also implied that sanctions are not a form of war.

There are very few today who call themselves part of the peace movement who would defend the sanctions on Iraq. After a decade in which five times as many Iraqis have died of sanctions than died of bombs, that slogan has withered away as it became obvious to all that sanctions are a vicious and brutal form of warfare targeting the most vulnerable members of society--the old, the infants, the sick.

The issue today seems to be whether or not to have confidence that "justice" for those killed in the Sept. 11 attacks can be had within the context of the existing international framework.

The demand for justice is usually coupled with an exhortation to hunt down and prosecute those responsible for the terror attacks. In the meantime, without waiting for the results of any investigation, the U.S. government is carrying out a monstrous war against Afghanistan that threatens literally millions of people with death by starvation and exposure this winter. This death sentence is being carried out on an innocent population long before the judicial niceties of evidence, a trial and a verdict.

If the U.S. government were capable of bringing mass murderers to justice, wouldn't the heads of the tobacco companies be in jail right now? They knowingly condemned millions of people in this country to a miserable death from smoking-related diseases. And what about all the police who have shot down unarmed people in the oppressed communities and been set free after departmental review?

Are socially conscious people supposed to suddenly have confidence that the authorities now investigating terrorism--organizations like the FBI, the CIA, and local police departments--can be trusted to dispense justice?

When it comes to activities abroad, the record is even more dismal. If there is any organization independent enough of Washington's pressure to bring mass murderers to justice, then why isn't Chile's Pinochet behind bars? Why is Haiti's Toto Constant alive and well in Queens, N.Y.? Why is Indonesia's General Suharto enjoying retirement? Why are Henry Kissinger, an architect of the Vietnam War, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, mastermind of the Afghan counter-revolution, still powers behind the throne in Washington?

The job of the anti-war movement is to stop the war. There will be no justice while bombs are raining down on Afghanistan. Justice for the victims of the terrible tragedy on Sept. 11 will come with a people's victory over the warmakers.