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The personal aspect of international political solidarity is not just the stuff of nostalgic anecdote. In the late 1980s, the Central American resistance was constantly among us here in the United States in physical form. While Daniel Oretega and Rosario Murillo worked the Hollywood liberal circuit, the sanctuary movement sheltered militants and sympathizers in churches across the country and defied federal efforts to seize them. Labor organizers from El Salvador traveled across North America from local to friendly local. I can remember being at a picnic of a union local striking a door factory in Springfield, Ore., southeast of Eugene, where a man from a radical labor coalition in El Salvador got a cordial reception from the strikers and their families as they swapped stories of their respective battles.
The other day I found in a box of old papers in my garage a directory to "sister cities" -- towns in the United States that had paired with beleaguered towns in Nicaragua, regularly exchanging delegations.
The directory was as thick as a medium-sized telephone book. There were hundreds of such pairings, and many were the individual pairing they led to. People's Express, the "backpackers' airline," as it used to be called, would shuttle demure sisters in the struggle from Vermont or the Pacific Northwest to Miami, for onward passage to Managua and a rendezvous with some valiant son of Sandinho or oppressed Nica sister, liberated by North American inversion from the oppressions of Latin patriarchy.
While many soldiers deployed in Iraq have been compelled to serve double tours of duty, today there is no draft, a prime factor in stocking the Vietnam antiwar movement. Its absence is certainly a major factor in the weakness of this antiwar movement. But even without a draft in the Reagan years, there was a very lively anti-intervention culture.
It looked as though just such a vibrant left antiwar movement was flaring into life in 2003. But many of its troops have veered into 9/11 kookdom, shifted to whining about global warming or now vest all hopes in a Democratic presidency after 2008. The bulk of the antiwar movement has become subservient to the Democratic Party and to the agenda of its prime candidates for the presidency in 2008, with Hillary Clinton in the lead.
To describe the antiwar movement in its effective form is really to mention a few good efforts -- the anti-recruitment campaigns, the tours by those who have lost children in Iraq -- or three or four brave souls -- Cindy Sheehan, who single-handedly reanimated the antiwar movement and now vows to run against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi unless the latter stops blocking impeachment proceedings, or the radical Catholic Kathy Kelly, or Medea Benjamin and her "Code Pink" activists, who have occupied Clinton's office and ambushed her on YouTube.
A simple question: Has the end of America's war on Iraq been brought closer by the recapture of the U.S. Congress by the Democrats in November 2006? The answer is that when it comes to the actual war, which has led to the bloody disintegration of Iraqi society, the deaths of some 3,000 Iraqis a month, the death and mutilation of U.S. soldiers every day, nothing at all has happened since the Democrats rode to victory in November courtesy of popular revulsion in America against the war.
I don't think there is much of an independent left in America today. If there were, then Lawrence McGuire's observation about the lack of solidarity with the Iraqi resistance wouldn't be so obviously on the mark. The American people are largely against the war, to the huge embarrassment and distress of the Republican and Democratic leadership. So does it matter that there's not much of an antiwar movement? Very much so. It's how the left down the years has learned its internationalist ABC's.
© Creators Syndicate
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