For Recruiters, Antiwar Protests Raise Perils on the Home Front (Military Recruiters Under Attack)
New York Times ^ | 2/21/05 | DAMIEN CAVE

Posted on 02/21/2005 6:46:29 AM PST by nj26

EAST ORANGE, N.J. - The five United States Army recruiters who work from a storefront office here arrived on the morning of Feb. 5 to discover that a plate-glass window above the main entrance had been shattered, along with a window in the Navy office next door.

By noon, about 35 protesters were marching out front with antiwar placards, condemning the American invasion of Iraq and the recruiters' efforts to enlist new soldiers.

The group's leader, Lawrence Hamm, a New Jersey civil rights activist, said the protesters had nothing to do with the broken windows, and he condemned any violence against the recruiters. The police have not found any evidence of a political motive.

But for the men on the other side of the broken glass, and recruiters throughout the New York area, the vandalism here underscored what they say are the risks of signing up young people for the military during a war that has polarized the American public.

The shattering of windows here followed two similar incidents in New York City and a third in the Midwest that week. On Jan. 31, authorities said, recruiters at a station near the Flatiron section of Manhattan reported that a door had been cracked, and that anarchist symbols had been scrawled in red paint on the building.

That same day, before dawn, the police arrested a 19-year-old Manhattan College junior who they said threw a burning rag into an Army recruiting station that was closed for the night in the Parkchester section of the Bronx, and jammed the door locks with powerful glue. He was caught carrying a handwritten note declaring that a "wave of violence" would occur throughout the Northeast on Jan. 31, aimed at the "military industrial complex" in response to American military actions, the police said.

A day later in Toledo, Ohio, a bucket of manure was thrown at the window of a recruiting station that housed all four branches of the military, the police said, and antiwar obscenities were scrawled on a nearby wall.

Since the beginning of 2003, there have also been more than a dozen other often violent incidents aimed at military recruiters or property throughout the country, according to the police, recruiters and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In a few cases, vehicles have been set on fire; in others, blood has been thrown through windows. Spokespeople for the armed services have downplayed the incidents even as some recruiters have increased security at their stations.

Douglas Smith, a spokesman for the Army Recruiting Command at Fort Knox, Ky., said that no recruiters had been hurt and that most of the nation's nearly 1,700 Army recruiting stations had not been harmed or attacked.

"We're aware that there are some instances of damage to stations, and we're keeping an eye on this," he said. "But it is not something that has us overly concerned."

Several recruiters in the field, however, said that they remained on edge. On Jan. 20, the day of President Bush's inaugural, several hundred students at Seattle Central Community College surrounded two Army recruiters on campus, shouting insults and hurling water bottles until the recruiters were escorted away by campus security. The protest was covered by The Army Times, and several recruiters said that they feared such situations might become more common.

Sgt. First Class William C. Howard, a recruiter here in East Orange, said that the antiwar sentiment seemed to have grown more aggressive. Though recruiters are still frequently thanked for their service, he said, the insults, dirty looks and other signs of discontent seem to be increasing.

"Within last year, the whole security issue has become more of a concern with me," he said. "I've had people throwing objects at me when I was driving by. I've had people who as soon as they see me on the street, they cross to the other side. Those situations never occurred before, and it makes me wonder how far is this all going to go."

The vandalism so far has ranged from broken windows and antiwar graffiti or Nazi symbols to attempted arson with Molotov cocktails, like one tossed into an Army station in Vestal, N.Y., near Binghamton, on April 9, 2003.

Some of the most costly vandalism has been aimed at vehicles: three cars used by recruiters in Silver Spring, Md., were set on fire during the first week of December, according to military officials; and on March 28, 2003, in Montgomery, Ala., vandals painted antiwar graffiti on five Navy vehicles, and set a large Navy truck ablaze.

The police in Montgomery, East Orange and several other communities affected by the defacement and destruction said that the vandalism did not seem to be part of a coordinated national plan. In a few cases, there have been arrests. Brendan Walsh, 20, described by the police as an antiwar activist, pleaded guilty to the Vestal vandalism in 2003 and was sentenced on Feb. 11 to five years in federal prison.

David Segal, who grew up in Litchfield, Conn., and was listed as a government major by Manhattan College in the Bronx before his arrest, was found by the police near the damaged Parkchester station immediately after the incident. He was wearing rubber gloves, according to the complaint filed in the case, and carrying a backpack with glue and maps locating the recruiting station. He was charged with destroying government property and released on Feb. 1 after posting $15,000 in cash bail. Manhattan College says he is no longer enrolled.

Attempts to reach Mr. Segal in Litchfield were unsuccessful, and his lawyer did not return several calls.

A spokesman for the F.B.I. in New York, James Margolin, said the agency was trying to determine whether Mr. Segal had accomplices. He said that the agency was not aware of any related incidents that occurred outside the New York area on Jan. 31, as the handwritten note suggested, and that there was no evidence of an ongoing effort aimed at recruiters or recruiting stations.

Nonetheless, in response to the vandalism and other incidents, several Army station commanders in the New York area said that they had increased security, mainly by requiring that all recruiters travel in pairs. In a two-year-old effort to make stations safer, the Air Force Recruiting Service has also begun nationwide security upgrades, adding measures like caller ID and darker blinds on station windows. Senior Master Sgt. Ellen Schirmer, a spokeswoman for the Air Force Recruiting Service's headquarters in San Antonio, Tex., said that 76 of New York State's 79 Air Force recruiting locations had completed the upgrade.

Some recruiters said the extra precautions were necessary to ensure safety in and out of the office.

Staff Sgt. Amedeo Trotta, commander of the Army recruiting station in Vestal, said that in addition to the Molotov cocktail attack, he was threatened last year by a man with a two-by-four while talking to recruiters near Ithaca College. A recruiter in his office, he said, was also sucker-punched while pumping gas about eight months ago.

"Our own people are trying to fight us," he said. "And there's nothing we can do about what they're complaining about."

Many recruiters said that they were accustomed to dissent, and that the vandalism did not surprise them. "You will always have a certain percentage of people who will want to show their displeasure with policies in a way that is outside the political system," said Maj. Dave Griesmer, a spokesman for the Marine Corps Recruiting Command in Quantico, Va. "It's no different than it might be if people were unhappy with a business or other organization."

But for some of the men and women working to refill the military ranks, the broken glass, the epithets and fires remain difficult to fathom.

"We feel like we're doing something for the people, like we're doing something good," said Staff Sgt. Stephen E. Williams, the station commander in East Orange. "It's hard to understand why they would target us."

BILL MOYERS: It's important who owns the press, as we've just seen and heard...but it's also important who decides what is news.

Why wasn't it news last weekend when more than 100,000 people turned out in 11 cities across the country to protest the occupation of Iraq...Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, Orlando, Salt Lake City, New Orleans, Jonesborough, Tennessee. but if you blinked while watching the national news, you wouldn't have known it was a story. We found less than two minutes of scattered mentions on television, and not even the Associated Press reported on other demonstrations in smaller cities.

Here in Manhattan, thousands of people took to the streets in a steady rain -- but the national coverage was even damper than the weather. THE NEW YORK TIMES didn't even run a story at all. and local television coverage was sparse.

40 years ago opposition to war was a big story.

You couldn't miss what happened that October day in 1967 when more than 50,000 protesters moved en masse from the Lincoln memorial across the Potomac river to the Pentagon...calling on their government to end the war in Vietnam...

This photograph by Bernie Boston of the WASHINGTON STAR circled the globe...to become one of the most enduring images of the era...

But this one, too, speaks volumes... Secretary of Defense Robert Mcnamara peering out of his window at thousands upon thousands of his fellow americans who just wanted to stop the killing.

Among them was sixteen-year old Maurice Isserman, a high school student making his first visit to the nation's capitol. By the end of the day he and other marchers would be tear-gassed and dragged away. 700 would be arrested.

Isserman, forty years later, is a historian teaching at Hamilton college. In the CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION last week I came across his essay reminiscing on that day. press reports, he remind us, disparaged the protesters...despite their solemn rendition of the Star Spangled Banner which they sang, "Wide-open, high notes and all."" Despite the Secretary of Defense, above them, breaking down and weeping.

Isserman reminds us that only five months before the Pentagon protest, Mcnamara, one of the war's architects and defenders, had sent the White House a confidential memo outlining his 'growing doubts' about american involvement in Vietnam.

The march on the Pentagon was a watershed, Maurice Isserman writes, turning dissent into resistance.

But the war went on for another seven years...altogether almost sixty thousand American soldiers died...and millions of Vietnamese...and America still lost, fleeing the country and leaving Vietnam to the Vietnamese.

In Iraq the war also goes on...despite the protests...despite public sentiment that has turned against it...despite almost four thousand soldiers killed...another 28,000 wounded...and God knows how many iraqi civilians dead or injured...and the war goes on.

Look at this story in the WASHINGTON POST. It appeared last weekend as those marchers took to the streets.

Reporter Joshua Partlow told of an American unit fighting in a southwest corner of Baghdad...a once middle class neighborhood now in ruins... you can hear an audio report from Partlow at our website on pbs.org.

One officer told him: "People are killed here every day, and you don't hear about it. people are kidnapped here every day, and you don't hear about it."

The unit has lost 20 of their comrades during their 14 months at war...the soldiers, Partlow writes, are tired, bitter and skeptical.

One of them told the journalist: "I don't think this place is worth another soldier's life."

Here at home, if you were watching the Sunday talk shows, you wouldn't know anyone was paying attention to either the soldiers or the protesters. The talk was all about politics, fires and Iran.

And if anyone in high office was weeping over yet another war with no end in sight...we'll have to wait until they write their books to know it.

The protest last weekend came almost exactly five years after Congress had backed the President's rush to war. Five years later the Capitol and the country alike seem once again to have their fingers in their ears.

In Philadelphia one puzzled protester looked around and wondered aloud why there's not more outrage...as the war machine rolls on.

Does it matter if we protest ?

September 21, 2007

http://www.socialistworker.org/2007-2/645/645_05_Protest.shtml

ERIC RUDER looks at the role of protests in a movement to stop a U.S. war.

BEFORE THE U.S. war on Iraq began, George W. Bush compared the immense global protests on February 15, 2003--with some 10 million people taking to the streets on five continents--to a public opinion “focus group.”

Bush ridiculed the idea that the demonstrations should have any effect on his war policy, and he launched the invasion a few weeks later.

But since 2003, the idea that antiwar protests don’t matter has spread far beyond the Bush White House. Today, it is even echoed by people in, or sympathetic to, the antiwar movement.

In 2004, for example, liberal journalist Matt Taibbi wrote that “marching, as we have seen in the last few years, has been rendered basically useless. Before the war, Washington and New York saw the largest protests this country has seen since the ’60s--and this not only did not stop the war, it didn’t even motivate the opposition political party to nominate an antiwar candidate.”

Bush’s re-election in 2004--combined with the fact that the war only seems to drag on--has served to reinforce the view in some antiwar circles that the movement must find tactics that will work and abandon ineffective national mobilizations. Such demonstrations may make participants “feel good,” goes the argument, but they don’t have much to do with ending the war.

The conclusion that “protests don’t work” is, however, ....mistaken.

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FOR ONE thing, the idea that today’s antiwar movement has really tried protest on a mass scale is wrong. Measured against the movement to stop the U.S. war on Vietnam, the antiwar movement today is still in its infancy, in terms of both size and militancy.

Take the Vietnam Moratorium Days in 1969. On October 15, some 10 million people took part in local actions from coast to coast. In large cities, there were rallies of tens of thousands; on campuses, students wore peace armbands; and in a number of smaller towns, people read names of the war dead.

A month later on November 15, Washington, D.C., was the site of the largest demonstration in U.S. history to that point--with somewhere between 500,000 and 750,000 antiwar protesters jammed around the Washington Monument for speeches that lasted throughout the day.

The media reported that Richard Nixon paid the protesters no attention whatsoever, and spent the afternoon watching college football. But the true story was different. As history books later revealed, Nixon was frantic about the size of the 1969 mobilizations.

“The demonstrators had been more successful than they realized, pushing Nixon and his National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger away from plans to greatly escalate the war, possibly even to the point of using nuclear weapons, and back toward their ‘Vietnamization’ strategy of propping up the Saigon regime,” author Gerald Nicosia wrote in Home to War: A History of the Vietnam Veterans’ Movement.

Nicosia adds that another accomplishment of the 1969 demonstrations, “though no one knew it at the time, was the revival of the Vietnam veterans’ movement.”

The Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) had been founded two years earlier, but by 1969 had become inactive. The task of mobilizing for the Moratorium Days changed that.

“Within a few months, VVAW had several hundred new members,” writes Nicosia. “Many of them came directly out of VA hospitals, bringing with them word of the terrible conditions that Vietnam veterans were experiencing in those places.”

By early 1970, the level of protest climbed even higher in response to the U.S. invasion of Cambodia, which sparked a student strike. Police and the National Guard were called out to confront student protesters, leading to the killing of students at Kent State in Ohio and Jackson State in Mississippi in May 1970--which in turn fed the fires of antiwar outrage.

In all, some 8 million students participated in the strikes; just in May, some 1,350 colleges were affected. “Faculty and administrators joined students in active dissent, and 536 campuses were shut down completely, 51 for the rest of the academic year,” Tom Wells wrote in The War Within: America’s Battle Over Vietnam.

The scale of the protests prodded McGeorge Bundy, one of the war’s principal architects, to declare that “not only must there be no new incursion of Americans across the Cambodian border, but nothing that feels like that to the American public must happen again, on the President’s say so alone.”

In 2007, public opinion against the war on Iraq may run even higher than sentiment against the Vietnam War did in 1970--certainly George Bush’s approval rating is lower than Richard Nixon’s that year. This is encouraging considering the absence of high-profile protests like those of 1970.

But the tide of antiwar public opinion is having less direct impact on government policy today, and that’s a result of the fact that the sentiment isn’t backed up by any organized expression.

The problem isn’t that mass protests don’t work, but that today’s antiwar movement hasn’t risen to the challenge of mobilizing antiwar sentiment into mass protests.

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THE ISSUE of protest shouldn’t be looked at narrowly. If the question is whether mass protests on their own change government policy and end wars, then the answer is no.

Large marches and demonstrations--even militant ones that include civil disobedience--aren’t sufficient, in and of themselves, to force the U.S. to abandon its foreign policy aims. This is certainly the case today with the occupation of Iraq, since there is more at stake for the U.S. in Iraq--with its huge oil supplies and location at the strategic heart of the Middle East--than there was in Vietnam.

But instead of measuring the power of mass marches in isolation, what’s needed is to understand what role mass protests play in building a movement capable of ending a U.S. war.

Three necessary elements came together--with each one bolstering and reinforcing the others--to end the U.S. war on Vietnam.

The Vietnamese resistance kept the U.S. from imposing its will, but couldn’t expel the U.S. on its own. The rise of resistance among U.S. soldiers undermined the effectiveness of the U.S. military as a fighting force, but GI organizing didn’t happen in a vacuum. The antiwar movement in the U.S. shook up American society, but it didn’t have the power to stop the war machine.

Together, however, these three forces combined to compel the U.S. ruling establishment to conclude that only further ruin of its military and turmoil within U.S. society would result from continuing the war on Vietnam.

So national antiwar mobilizations are a necessary part of a movement that can end the war, even if they don’t have a direct impact on war policy themselves.

A large national protest that attracts new as well as experienced activists helps people in the antiwar movement overcome feelings of isolation they may experience in their own cities and towns. It also strengthens local organizations that mobilize for the protest--and these groups in turn benefit from the politicization of individuals who return home invigorated to continue the struggle. And of course, the larger such mobilizations, the greater the impact they can have on shaping mass public opinion.

This last point is one of the most important ways that a strong civilian antiwar movement can assist in the development of GI resistance--another crucial ingredient in the antiwar struggle.

For one, well-publicized and -orchestrated mobilizations can serve as the first point of contact between recent veterans and the antiwar movement. At the January 27 mobilization in Washington this year, Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) recruited a dozen new members. And recent veterans provide the best direct links to finding active-duty military personnel who are willing and ready to organize.

What’s more, it’s impossible to imagine a GI revolt without broad rejection of the war among the public. Soldiers aren’t likely to oppose a war that their mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters and neighbors support.

During the Vietnam era, the peak of the GI revolt followed years of domestic protest, the growing radicalization of the student antiwar movement and the obvious futility of the war effort itself in the face of the Vietnamese resistance.

Many opponents of the Iraq war feel an understandable frustration as Bush’s surge grinds on with such limited opposition. Unfortunately, though, this has boiled down in some cases into exhortations to “put your body on the line”--in order to carry out a civil disobedience action the politicians can’t ignore.

But civil disobedience, even when it involves hundreds of people, can be ignored in the absence of a confident, growing and sustained mass movement.

This is what distinguishes the Vietnam era from today. “Every year from 1967 to 1971, a major march occurred in the District, including four of the biggest antiwar demonstrations in American history [to that point],” according to a Washington Post retrospective on the period.

Mass demonstrations don’t end wars on their own, but they are an essential part of a larger struggle that can.

Thus, the challenge facing the antiwar movement, given the weakness of the forces involved at the moment, is to combine large national mobilizations with a focus on strengthening the local, grassroots base of the movement.

This means careful attention to building local chapters of Iraq Veterans Against the War, campus antiwar coalitions and citywide antiwar networks.

These forces need to collaborate on reaching out to military bases, GIs and vets at VA hospitals, unions, civil rights organizations of all sorts--in short, all the potential allies who together can raise the cost to the U.S. establishment of prosecuting its immoral and brutal war on the Iraqi people.

http://www.socialistworker.org/2007-2/645/645_05_Protest.shtml