How little they learn
21 years ago, Washington proved it learned nothing from Vietnam, just like the ongoing genocide in Gaza—which faces a crucial test tomorrow—proves it learned nothing from Iraq
The morning of March 20, 2003 will forever be indelibly seared into my memory.
There is some poetry on Sunday’s deadline falling just days after the 21st anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. Did Washington learn anything from its generations of mistakes, lies, and millions of preventable deaths?
Pepper spray on a Thursday morning
I had come up the peninsula the night before, and more or less camped with a dozen Stanford students in the shell of a house under construction in the hills overlooking downtown San Francisco. At dawn, we descended in a small troop to join 20,000 other Bay Area residents who had prepared over the preceding months to mobilize nonviolent resistance the morning following any public reports of an invasion.
Our affinity group had taken on the project of holding an intersection in SoMa, the South of Market district. A former industrial neighborhood southeast of downtown, it was accessible by several highway exits and on ramps—one of which we basically planned to block from vehicular traffic using nothing but our bodies and some art.
As if a pre-dawn urban hike and facing angry commuters were not enough, I got pepper sprayed by an irate driver. The sun had yet to clear the tops of the buildings. After holding our ground long enough for anyone who thought about entering the city to turn around and go home, we spent the day running between different locations across the city in response to radio requests for support.
Most of the time, I served as one among many bodies in a “soft” blockade (lacking any hardware or means of affixing ourselves to a given location) occupying one or another street. A few times, I changed hats to record the names and emergency contacts of people risking arrest, in order to ensure that our grassroots legal network could find them in jail and get them the representation they deserved.
It was a wild day.
Ditching class
The invasion of Iraq coincided with the spring of my third year of law school at Stanford. I’d spent my first year focused on antitrust law, before the 9/11 attacks forced me in my second year to confront the reality of a constitutional crisis that would come to define my later career.
In early 2003, I was in my third and final year of school, working as a Teaching Assistance for a Constitutional Law course taught by luminary Lawrence Lessig (for whom I have a deep admiration, and to whom I owe an enormous intellectual debt) while preparing to graduate. Law school obviously required a lot of attention, but by the time of the invasion, I had already been dedicating most of my time for several months to organizing local resistance to it.
A student strike, walkout, and teach-in, followed by any number of smaller actions, gave the antiwar community at Stanford a chance to build momentum well before the call to action on March 20. Over the few weeks following it, we organized a cluster of local groups and mobilized 5,000 activists to shut down a Lockheed Martin facility in Santa Clara for a day.
The period left such a lasting impression that I’ve gone on to continue organizing local resistance to militarism and human rights abuses in each of the cities in which I’ve lived ever since then.
We aimed in 2003 to pull the plug on what was ultimately a corporate invasion justified by lies told by officials dutifully re-printed by obedient journalists.
It is dejecting to witness that pattern recur across history.
Groundhog day
The very same set of factors enabled the deaths of millions across Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam. A generation later, the very same pattern led a million—or more—Iraqis to early graves.
In the years following the occupation of Iraq, it became clear that claims about imagined weapons of mass destruction were ultimately a fabrication. Realizing they had been duped by Washington into publishing what amounted to propaganda, apologetic newspaper editors claimed to have come to Jesus, and recovered the independence that they had compromised during the years when they perceived national security as a value paramount to their mission to ensure public transparency.
A generation later, they seem to have learned nothing from their previous apologies. The ongoing suppression of Seymour Hersh’s exposé about the Biden administration‘s role in the covert bombing of the Nordstream pipeline in 2022—charitably described by the New York Times as “a mystery”—offers one apt example.
Progress?
One might point to recent reports about a potential plea bargain for Australian publisher Julian Assange as an example of editors demonstrating their formidable influence on an unfortunately rare occasion. Dozens of them recently wrote in defense of Assange, recognizing how prosecuting publishers for revealing government secrets threatens press freedom.
It is gratifying to see someone in Washington pay heed to basic reason, rather than blindly pursue what has become a bipartisan assault on the public’s right to know about crimes and coverups committed by our military.
Sadly, those crimes are legion. And they have spanned the world, from Chile to Japan and back again. Without independent reporting, how can we possibly hold accountable the officials—and institutions—responsible?
Another area of seeming progress emerges in a shift over the past week in Washington’s diplomatic posture. After having vetoed multiple U.N. resolutions aiming to encourage a ceasefire in Gaza, Washington last week appeared to change its stance by introducing its own resolution supporting a ceasefire.
On the one hand, the new resolution did indicate an important public shift away from Biden’s previous policy of disturbing deference to Netanyahu’s genocidal massacre in Gaza. But it could also be fairly described as a ruse, a way for Biden to save face by seeking plausible deniability from whatever further madness is to come from Tel Aviv, which—with every passing day—demonstrates Biden’s weakness, as well as the institutionally diminishing power of the presidency, and more broadly, Pax Americana.
A day of reckoning
The world has watched with continuing horror as Israel has reduced most of Gaza to rubble, as Biden bleats concerns about human rights while ironically continuing to support Netanyahu’s murderous policies. But over the past few weeks, perhaps spurred by organizing in primary states threatening Biden’s re-election, something in Washington has shifted. As reported by Haaretz:
“Amid congressional pressure last month, President Joe Biden issued a national security memorandum requiring recipients of U.S. military assistance to commit to abide by international law while using U.S. weapons. Such beneficiaries would also have to pledge to facilitate and not obstruct the delivery of humanitarian aid.”
As a result:
“Secretary of State Antony Blinken…has until Sunday to approve Israel's stance…or the United States will immediately suspend weapons transfers to its close ally.”
There is some poetry on Sunday’s deadline falling just days after the 21st anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. Did Washington learn anything from its generations of mistakes, lies, and millions of preventable deaths?
We will gain one indication tomorrow, when Biden & Blinken either approve continued weapons transfers to Israel, or instead deny them.
Netanyahu has already all but dared them to deny further transfers, pledging to proceed with a projected ground assault on Rafah alone, if necessary. Even though human rights have not yet compelled Biden’s concerns, one hopes that his self-respect—or political self-preservation—might prove persuasive instead.
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