An eye-opening report in the current Middle East Quarterly on the ugly and perfidious underbelly of the "peace movement."
Confessions of an Anti-Sanctions Activist
by Charles M. Brown
Middle East Quarterly
Summer 2003
On May 22, 2003, the United Nations (U.N.) lifted the sanctions regime it had imposed on Iraq twelve years earlier. The end of the economic embargo invites a review of the "peace" activism that was aimed at bringing down the Iraq sanctions while Saddam Hussein ruled. Anti-sanctions groups sought to relieve the suffering of the Iraqi people. In fact, they became—whether wittingly or unwittingly—mouthpieces for Saddam in the United States. I should know: I have the dubious distinction of having been one of them.
My own interest in Iraq goes back to Desert Storm, when as a nineteen-year-old Army reservist fresh out of a semi-rural high school, I was very nearly deployed to Saudi Arabia as a medic. This aroused my curiosity about Iraq. After I did some work in several homeless shelters run by Catholic Worker activists, I gravitated toward their allied movement against sanctions. For three years I was dedicated to the anti-sanctions cause. I traveled to Iraq in 1998 in order to see sanctions firsthand, and upon my return to the United States, I made two national speaking tours on the college activist circuit, in 1998 and 1999. (At the time, I was completing my undergraduate degree in Middle East studies at Western Washington University.)
I intended to use the knowledge I acquired in my academic work to aid my "real" job as an anti-sanctions activist. But I got derailed when I realized that in order to return to Iraq with the group I represented—the Chicago-based "Voices in the Wilderness"—I and other group members could not speak publicly about issues that would embarrass the Iraqi regime. These included its horrendous human rights record, its involvement with weapons of mass destruction, and the dictatorial nature of the regime. We were allowed to speak only of one thing: the deprivations suffered by ordinary Iraqis under the sanctions regime.
This one-dimensional depiction of life in Saddam's Iraq was pure Baath propaganda, and I (as well as other group members) knew it. As I came to see this as a complicity and collaboration with one of the most abusive dictatorships in the world, I tried to get the rest of my group to acknowledge that our close relationship with the regime damaged our credibility. I failed to persuade them, so I quit. Unfortunately, it seems that my former colleagues have regarded this decision as a kind of political "defection," and it has cost me several friendships, which were apparently contingent on my continued willingness to toe the (Baathist) line.
Since then, I have returned to university with the objective of becoming a professional historian of Baathist Iraq. I am no longer a political activist, and it will likely be some time before I assume that role again, if I ever do. In this article, I wish to look back at this rather peculiar aspect of the American peace movement and offer an honest and firsthand account of how it worked from the inside.
Every word of this man's story begs to be excerpted, but this post is getting too long, so I'll leave you with that teaser and this memorable paragraph:
What did we know about Iraq? Hardly anything. Stephen Zunes, a "progressive" activist academic, once acknowledged that "peace activists largely share with most Americans a profound ignorance of the Middle East, Islam, and the Arab world."[6] This was certainly true for our group, but we didn't give it much thought. We saw ourselves as people of action, not reflection. Did we really need to learn the intricacies of Iraqi history and politics and plumb the broader political and economic issues? Who wanted to sit in the library when there were prayer vigils to organize? We opted to march, fast, and hold our signs. Here was a new cause, in need of champions, and that's just what we were. Iraqi sanctions had to go!
Need I say . . . read the whole thing?
