Stop the Next War Now (2 page)

Amy (who within minutes would be arrested herself) asked each of us how we felt about being arrested. Maxine said she felt it was the least she could do. I said I felt happier than I’d felt in years. Susan said her happiness went beyond happiness to joy. None of us could live with ourselves if we sat by and did nothing while a country filled with children, a lot of them disabled, homeless, hungry, was blown to bits using money we need in the United States to build hospitals, housing, and schools.

The arrest went smoothly. I thought the police were considerate, humane. Some of us tried to help them do their job by sticking our arms out in front of us, but the handcuffs go behind, not in front. We sang in the paddy wagons, we sang later in the holding cells. We recited poetry to each other and told stories from our lives. And all the while, there was this sweetness. Even though the floor of the cell was cold, where some of us had to sit, and even though the toilet wouldn’t flush. I found Fannie Lou Hamer’s voice coming out of my throat and led our cell in singing “This Little Light of Mine.”

I realized that at the root of the peace cradling me were not only Einstein and other ancestors who told us the truth, but especially Martin Luther King. I had followed him faithfully since I was in my teens; his fearless, persistent struggle against injustice mesmerized me. Perfect love casts out fear. That is what he had. And that is, ultimately, what the sea of pink symbolized. We were women and children who loved ourselves in the form of Iraqi women and children because we knew that to love ourselves as humans means to love ourselves as all humans. We understood that whatever we did to stop war, we did it not for the “other” but for a collective us.

The heart enjoys experiencing the liberating feeling of compassion; it actually expands and glows, as if beaming its own sun upon the world. That is the warmth our cooling emotional world so desperately needs to preserve its humanity. It is this savoring of the ecstatic nature of impersonal love that lets the peacemakers of the world do our job. It is this love whose inevitable companion is not only peace, but happiness and, as Susan said, joy.

Author’s note
: I wrote this essay as a thank-you to Medea Benjamin, who asked if I would write an op-ed piece about a codepink-led protest on March 8, 2003. It was submitted to numerous newspapers, including the
New York Times
, but it was never published until now.

PREFACE

CODEPINK started around a picnic table when a group of wild, passionate, and peace-loving women began laughing uncontrollably at George Bush’s color-coded security system—code yellow, code orange, code red. We knew that the terrorist attack of 9/11 was no laughing matter. Many of us had had friends killed in the attack. But the government’s advice to buy duct tape and plastic sheeting in the event of a code orange alert had us in stitches. Should we put the duct tape over our mouths or the mouths of the terrorists? And who gets wrapped in plastic sheeting—us or them?

When the laughter subsided, we grew somber. We agreed that the terrorist attack of 9/11 should be treated as a crime against humanity, not a call for war. We grieved over the innocent Afghans killed in the post-9/11 invasion. We talked with dread about a possible war in Iraq. And then we started dreaming and scheming about what we, as women, could do to stop the spiral of violence.

Gentle Nina Utne from
Utne
magazine imagined thousands of circles of ordinary women gathering around kitchen tables, defining for themselves what real security meant. Radical Texas fisherwoman Diane Wilson saw anarchic clusters of unreasonable women hurling their naked bodies into the war machine. Medea envisioned a global uprising of women—Americans and Saudis, Muslims and Jews—linking arms and demanding that men stop the killing. Visionary astrologist Caroline Casey imagined a gathering of wise women calling for a code hot pink alert to save the earth. Jodie, picking up on the pink, dreamed of a pink tent city outside the White House, with women singing and dancing and growing so powerful that George Bush could no longer take us to war.

The imagination and creativity of many women, woven together, became CODEPINK: Women for Peace. Determined to stop the invasion of Iraq, we threw our hearts and souls into that effort. We held a four-month peace vigil outside the White House during the coldest winter in Washington in many years; we organized massive rallies; we staged sit-ins in congressional offices and “wake-up calls” at their homes; we lobbied members of the UN Security Council. We draped forty-foot pink slips (in the shape of women’s lingerie) off rooftops to call for the firing of the armchair warriors. We brought pink badges of courage to the lonely truth tellers who advocated peace. And in February 2003, before the invasion was a certainty, we organized a fifteen-person delegation to Iraq.

Our experience in Iraq was overwhelming. We found intelligent, gracious, hospitable people eager to invite us into their homes to share their food, their lives, their dreams, and their fears. While the U.S. press was churning out stories about the Iraqi threat, we saw a regime economically and militarily crippled by sanctions and a people terrified by the most powerful country in the world—our own.

On one of our last nights in Baghdad, secretary of state Colin Powell addressed the United Nations. We were at the Ministry of Information in a room packed with journalists from around the world. Many of them had been in Iraq for months, closely following the efforts of the weapons inspectors. They scoffed at Powell’s unsubstantiated claims about Iraq’s weapons. “With such thin evidence,” a BBC reporter reassured us, “the U.S. can’t possibly go to war.” We went to bed relieved.

The next morning we awoke to the news that after Powell’s speech, George Bush had addressed the nation. He said Saddam Hussein posed a danger that “reaches across the world” and that it was time to take action. “The game is over,” he declared. Everyone in Iraq knew exactly what that meant: war.

The woman taking care of our room buried her head in our chests, crying, and then looked to the sky. “How do I protect my children?” she asked. As we walked to the hotel lobby, the fear was palpable. The workers were grimly taping up the windows. Outside we heard the soldering of metal as other workers installed a generator. In the markets, people were stocking up on supplies.

Jodie began to sob, her head swimming with thoughts of bombs falling on these people we had come to love. “Nothing we’ve done has worked. What do we do now?” Jodie asked. “We expose the truth to the American public,” Medea replied, “and we build a movement capable of stopping the next war.”

That’s how we kept going, 24/7, through the insanity of the war and the occupation of Iraq. The educating and organizing and mobilizing are weaving a network strong enough to stop the next war. We caught a glimpse of that network on February 15, 2003, when an estimated twelve million people poured into the streets of more than six hundred cities and small towns, from the United States to Brazil, from South Africa to Moscow. For one shining moment, the liberal and the conservative, the religious and the agnostic, the young and the old, raised their voices together to declare: The World Says No to War.

The Bush administration ignored what the
New York Times
called the second superpower—world opinion—and the 2004 presidential election marked another setback to the global call for peace. But in our efforts to prevent war and defeat Bush, we initiated a new era of civic engagement on a scale never seen before. People began to feel part of a massive, powerful, and profound movement. Rather than succumb to despair at our failure to stop the war machine or overthrow the administration that so callously took us to war, now is the time to absorb the lessons learned, gather new insights, refortify ourselves, and move forward.

This book is our attempt to do just that. In it, you will find an amazing bouquet of voices—activists, journalists, soldiers, scholars, elected officials. Part 1, “A Passion for Peace,” starts with the self, the singular voice of dissent, and continues from there to contemplate the humanity we share with others and the movement we must build and the culture we must shape to reflect peace.

Barbara Ehrenreich suggests supporting feminism as a strategy to counter fundamentalist terrorism, while playwright-actress Eve Ensler extols the “vagina warriors” for pioneering a paradigm that is not about conquering but collaborating, not about invading but inviting. Lifelong activist Leslie Cagan offers firsthand insights into building an effective peace movement. And writers such as Nobel Prize winner Shirin Ebadi offer insights from a global perspective.

In part 2, “A Challenge to the Support Structure of War and Violence,” the essayists examine the constructs that keep us in a perpetual warlike state of mind and economy—these include the media, our use of natural resources, the way we elect our leaders, and the weapons we build—and explore how we can reshape a world based on a peaceful community model. Veteran reporter Helen Thomas reflects on how we might transform the media so that they truly educate the public. U.S. representative Cynthia McKinney paints our movement as a continuum in the successful battles our ancestors waged to free the slaves and gain women’s rights. Nobel laureate Jody Williams lays out the components of a successful international campaign. Arianna Huffington offers ideas for overcoming our nation’s addiction to oil. And inspiring us for the long road ahead, muralist Juana Alicia encourages us to bring art and beauty into our peace work.

While most of our authors are from the United States, since we are primarily focusing on violence inflicted on and by our nation, you will also hear peacemakers from Colombia, Ireland, Iran, Israel, Pakistan, Palestine, Serbia, Sri Lanka, and Uganda. What comes across so strikingly in their reflections is the need to humanize “the other,” to reach out to “the enemy,” to find common ground.

That is a lesson we learned from an Iraqi border guard during the regime of Saddam Hussein. When our group was passing through customs at the Jordanian-Iraqi border, a guard took Medea’s passport and looked at her last name. “Benjamin,” he muttered. “Isn’t that Jewish?” Medea turned ashen, knowing the enmity between Iraq and Israel. The guard kept her passport and disappeared, leaving Medea to conjure up thoughts of being kidnapped and beheaded by Saddam’s henchmen.

A half hour later he returned, huffing and puffing. “Here,” he said, putting a dog-eared notebook in her hand. “I’ve been teaching myself Hebrew and I just ran home to get my notebook. I’d appreciate it if you’d check my grammar.” Relieved and amazed, we asked why he was studying Hebrew. “During the war with Iran, I taught myself Farsi and now that Jews and Muslims are at war, I’ve been teaching myself Hebrew. We should learn to communicate with those we are taught to see as enemies,” he said, smiling.

It is, indeed, our responsibility as global citizens to learn to communicate with those we are taught to see as enemies. For it is only when we understand each other, love each other, and think of every man and woman as our brother and sister that we will finally be on our way to ending war.

—M

EDEA

B

ENJAMIN AND

J

ODIE

E

VANS

INTRODUCTION

ARUNDHATI ROY

In January 2003, thousands of us from across the world gathered in Porto Alegre in Brazil and declared—reiterated—that “Another World Is Possible.” A few thousand miles north, in Washington, George W. Bush and his aides were thinking the same thing.

Our project was the World Social Forum. Theirs—to further what many call the Project for the New American Century.

In the great cities of Europe and America, where a few years ago these things would only have been whispered, now people are openly talking about the good side of imperialism and the need for a strong empire to police an unruly world. The new missionaries want order at the cost of justice. Discipline at the cost of dignity. And ascendancy at any price. Occasionally some of us are invited to “debate” the issue on “neutral” platforms provided by the corporate media. Debating imperialism is a bit like debating the pros and cons of rape. What can we say? That we really miss it?

In any case, New Imperialism is already upon us. It’s a remodeled, streamlined version of what we once knew. For the first time in history, a single empire with an arsenal of weapons that could obliterate the world in an afternoon has complete, unipolar, economic and military hegemony. It uses different weapons to break open different markets. There isn’t a country on God’s earth that is not caught in the crosshairs of the American cruise missile and the IMF checkbook. Argentina’s the model if you want to be the poster boy of neoliberal capitalism, Iraq if you’re the black sheep.

Poor countries that are geopolitically of strategic value to the empire, or that have a “market” of any size, or infrastructure that can be privatized, or, God forbid, natural resources of value—oil, gold, diamonds, cobalt, coal— must do as they’re told, or become military targets. Those with the greatest reserves of natural wealth are most at risk. Unless they surrender their resources willingly to the corporate machine, civil unrest will be fomented, or war will be waged. In this new Age of Empire, when nothing is as it appears to be, executives of concerned companies are allowed to influence foreign-policy decisions. The Center for Public Integrity in Washington found that nine out of the thirty members of the Defense Policy Board of the U.S. government were connected to companies that were awarded defense contracts for $76 billion between 2001 and 2002. George Shultz, former U.S. secretary of state, was chairman of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. He is also on the board of directors of the Bechtel Group. When asked about a conflict of interest in the case of a war in Iraq, he said, “I don’t know that Bechtel would particularly benefit from it. But if there’s work to be done, Bechtel is the type of company that could do it. But nobody looks at it as something you benefit from.” After the war, Bechtel signed a $680 million contract for reconstruction in Iraq.