Every day we face a constant stream of government lies. Illegal and immoral use of military force. Defiance of international law and global public opinion. Ravenous hunger for oil, and US wars to feed it. Kidnapping and torture. Rampant Islamophobia and anti-immigrant hysteria. Repression of dissent and demonization of dissenters. Killing of women and children excused as mere “collateral damage.” An “opposition party” whose leadership flinches from effective opposition. 

And we have been here before. Jeremy Varon’s new book, Our Grief Is Not a Cry for War, provides the details in its deep-dive history of the movement to stop the post-9/11 “War on Terror.” Beyond getting the story of this huge popular movement (“the world’s second superpower”) on the record, the book gives us a timely reminder that the challenges faced by peace advocates in the first decade of the 21st century still bedevil us. 

US politics today are different from 20 years ago. But it is impossible to finish Varon’s book without a bolt of déjà vu. The US invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq have ended, but the murderous approach to the world refined under the “War on Terror” still prevails. The Trump 2.0 strategy to maintain US global dominance diverges from the course pursued by Bush, Obama, and Biden. But the practice of deploying lies, Islamophobia, torture, and lethal force to make sure US capital remains free to exploit peoples throughout the world has been carried over from one administration to the next. Obama’s deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes even admits the continuity in the pages of the New York Times:

An endless, costly, and jingoistic war on terror plowed the ground for a populist like Donald Trump to wrest control of the Republican Party from discredited elites. The machinery of the war on terror has become the foundation for Mr. Trump’s own security state — from ICE operations to the complex night raid that removed Mr. Maduro.

The biggest lesson from this déjà vu moment is this: Today’s anti-MAGA movement must resist every one of Washington’s might-makes-right policies and fight for an entirely different relationship between this country and the rest of the world. Only making serious headway in this effort will reduce the harms Washington is wreaking on vulnerable populations across the globe and make it possible for us to defeat US-style fascism at home. 

Anatomy of the world’s second superpower

Our Grief Is Not a Cry for Warbases its recounting on extensive primary sources and in-depth interviews with a wide range of anti-“War on Terror” activists. (Full disclosure: I am one of the individuals interviewed and quoted in the volume.) What emerges is a picture of a truly mass movement. Pre-existing peace groups grew and new organizations formed. People of all backgrounds got involved; their motivations and ideologies varied and often changed over time. New leaders emerged. The movement employed a wide spectrum of tactics, from vigils and large peaceful marches to civil disobedience, electoral engagement, and lobbying Congress. Coalitions formed. Tensions existed and sometimes erupted between different formations. At times broad unity in action was achieved and at other times it was not. It was a challenging time on an emotional as well as a political level, and the portraits of individual activists included in the book provide a window into the human texture of the antiwar upsurge with all its stress, pain, and determination. 

The book gives rich detail about the organizing done among veterans and military families and the extensive efforts of faith-based organizations. Groups such as the Iraq Peace Team traveled to Iraq and Afghanistan to provide humanitarian aid and try to be a physical obstacle to the US dropping bombs. Our Grief recounts in depth the role of, and conflicts between, the left-initiated coalitions, United for Peace and Justice  (UFPJ) and ANSWER, which sponsored the movement’s largest demonstrations. The origins and important contributions of other prominent formations including Not in Our Name, Code Pink, and September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows get their due. 

Though Our Grief points out the significance of antiwar sentiment spreading in labor and in Black, Latino, and Arab American communities, it doesn’t cover the organizing done in those sectors with the same level of detail. The AFL-CIO coming out against the invasion of Iraq gets a mention, but the organizing done by US Labor Against the War, which was largely responsible for that achievement, does not. The book credits Black Voices for Peace, the Black Radical Congress, and the Latino Peace Pilgrimage for important work, but leaves the reader hungry for more detailed coverage of their organizing.

The book discusses the racism and Islamophobia faced by Arabs and Muslims who spoke out against the war, and the conflicts over how (and in some cases, if) Palestine solidarity should be integrated into the movement’s demands and work. But with the Gaza genocide thrusting Palestine solidarity to the forefront of the global fight for peace and against all forms of colonialism, readers could wish more had been offered.

…relying on militarism abroad leads to using military-type means to solve social and political problems at home with similarly disastrous results.

The millions-strong protest on February 15, 2003 opposing a US attack on Iraq—“the day the world said no to war”—was the largest single expression of the antiwar movement’s strength. Fittingly, the chapter about the organizing that produced this milestone protest and its aftermath anchors the book. Though the volume is mainly about activism and protest in the US, in this and other places it reminds us that this was an international movement. 

Likewise, the book consistently foregrounds the fact that the main victims of the US “War on Terror” were Iraqis, Afghans, and other peoples in the Middle East and beyond. The sentiment that every human life on the planet is equally valuable permeates the volume; it is underscored in its final paragraph, a quote from Voices in the Wilderness co-founder Kathy Kelly (whose informal motto is “If you smell burning flesh, you better get to where the fire is”):

We’re supposed to do what everyone is supposed to do: live as full humans, as best we can, in a world whose destiny we can never predict, and whose astonishingly precious inhabitants can never be given enough justice, time, or love.

Posing questions of strategy

Sometimes explicitly, more often between the lines, Varon’s book highlights important considerations for building a left strategy rooted in “an injury to one is an injury to all” internationalism. It points to the need to deepen the felt connections between domestic and international issues, and the practical relationship between protest and electoral work.

Building organizations whose main focus is fighting for peace, solidarity, and a changed US foreign policy is essential. But the movement exercised its maximum political clout when groups and individuals that focused on domestic issues embraced opposition to the “War on Terror.” That embrace by trade unions, racial and gender justice organizations, and groups focused on local issues proved difficult to sustain in practice beyond high-tide protest moments. The same challenge persists today. 

Moral witness and “speaking truth to power” moved large numbers into the anti–War on Terror camp. But translating public sentiment into concrete policy changes mandated efforts to directly affect the institutions (mainly Congress and the Presidency) where policy decisions are made. Short of a revolutionary or near-revolutionary situation, both moral witness and the messiness of electoral engagement will and must be components of any truly mass movement. Navigating the tensions between them—forging a synergy in which the overall impact is greater than the sum of these two component parts—is as much of a challenge today as it was in 2004 or 2008. 

A radical core to build for the long term

A chauvinistic version of patriotism (“we-are-inherently-the-good-guys” thinking) pervades US society. The architects of the War on Terror took full advantage of that to rally the public behind their invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and various kill-alleged-terrorists–anywhere operations. When George Bush proclaimed “Mission Accomplished” shortly after the invasion of Iraq, the massive public opposition that had preceded the attack faded. And as long as claims that the US was “winning” could be credibly maintained, majority support held even as the scale of the civilian toll from bombs and torture (Abu Ghraib) was widely exposed. Only when the US got “bogged down,” US casualties mounted, and nothing like “victory” could be proclaimed did the popular consensus shift to viewing the Iraq war as a “mistake” (but not, for most, the crime that it actually was). 

There is a bitter lesson here. Beyond urgent mobilizations aimed at preventing or opposing each particular US war, a sustained effort is needed to broaden public understanding that political problems cannot be solved by military force. Moreover, relying on militarism abroad leads to using military-type means to solve social and political problems at home with similarly disastrous results. 

The thesis that the US is inherently the good guy in international affairs is a myth propped up by racist tropes and rewrites of history, designed to hide the way US militarism benefits defense contractors, transnational corporations, and the billionaire class while workers and the poor have more in common with the victims of US wars than with the warmakers. With the Trump–ordered occupation of US cities by Marines, ICE, and National Guard troops, and the President calling for a half-trillion dollar increase in the military budget while cutting or freezing funds for childcare, SNAP, housing, and scientific and medical research, this is more literally true than ever. 

Trump is a war president

The long-term educational work of popularizing these connections requires a core that is clear-eyed about the fundamentally exploitative nature of US capitalism. Today, both cohering such a core and building the broadest possible movement against US wars is urgent. Yes, under Trump 2.0 the US is shifting its strategy for global domination. Per the new National Security Strategy: longstanding alliances, soft power, and reliance on multi-lateral institutions to undergird a “rules based world order” (where Washington can break the rules at will) is out. Dividing the globe into spheres of influence of a few great powers, tightening Washington’s grip on the Western Hemisphere (plus Greenland), and naked promotion of white Christian nationalism is in. The US is to remain top dog: controlling the oil-rich Middle East via an alliance with Israel and police-state Arab regimes, and threatening and using overwhelming military force and economic bullying to lord it over former allies and all potential enemies alike in the rest of the world. 

“War on Terror” methods—terming anyone who does something the administration doesn’t like “a terrorist,” extra-judicial killings, torture (now outsourced to Salvadoran prisons), etc.—are integral to this strategy’s implementation. This is true of Trump 2.0’s domestic policy as well: the initial legal framework and much of the apparatus of today’s militarized repression dates from the post-9/11 moment. For example, the 2001 PATRIOT Act enhanced government tools for suppressing dissent, and enabled increased surveillance and detention for Muslims in the US. The Immigration and Naturalization Service became ICE when it and 21 other agencies were folded into the new cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security in 2002. 

Today, as in the immediate years after 9/11, administration policies are being met with resistance. Yet the fights for peace, for international solidarity, and against US foreign policy are not yet as thoroughly integrated into the opposition to MAGA as they need to be given that the domestic and foreign policies of Trump 2.0 are two prongs of the same might-makes-right system. 

Fortunately the ingredients are present to change this. 

Thousands of new fighters for a different world have been forged in the last two years’ upsurge against the Gaza genocide, bringing fresh doses of urgency and courage along with them. They are flanked by earlier generations of activists who bring lessons from the 1960s movement against the Vietnam War, the 1970s upsurge for nuclear disarmament, and the 1980s anti-apartheid and Central America solidarity movements, and the anti–“War on Terror” battles recounted in Our Grief Is Not a Cry for War. The immediate outpouring of widespread opposition to Trump’s kidnapping of Maduro (and the naked we-will-take-anything-we-want rhetoric that accompanies it) shows that much of the public is not buying this round of “Mission Accomplished” jingoism. It is also heartening to see that large organizations whose main focus is on “domestic” issues, including the AFL-CIO, were quick to take a stand against the current aggression against Venezuela.  

Together, these strands are capable of developing a perspective and practice of internationalism that addresses the realities of today’s interconnected and seriously endangered world and is able to build a base among the working classes and oppressed peoples whose actions are the key to transformative change.Email