Lessons from the movement to stop the ‘war on terror’

This article Lessons from the movement to stop the ‘war on terror’ was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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As I read Jeremy Varon’s new book “Our Grief is Not a Cry for War: The Movement to Stop the War on Terror,”I wanted to scream: We were right! 

The peace movement predicted and forewarned the cataclysm that followed the opening salvos of the “global war on terror.” We foresaw the decades of war, the lives lost, the trillions wasted, the blowback and consequences that are still ballooning outward decades later. 

It is not enough to be right, of course. It didn’t save the lives of the 46,319 civilians that independent agencies guesstimate were killed in Afghanistan under “Operation Enduring Freedom.” It won’t bring back the estimated 600,000 Iraqis killed just in the first four years of “Operation Iraqi Freedom.” Being right doesn’t restore the obliterated infrastructures of those two nations, or restore to life the roughly 7,000 U.S. military personnel killed in those two wars. And, sadly, being right does not return $8 trillion in direct and indirect war costs to U.S. coffers. 

But, being right is not nothing, either. “Our Grief is Not a Cry for War” is at turns inspiring, harrowing and funny. Did you know that the peace group Code Pink would have been called “Hot Pink,” but the domain name was already claimed by a porn company? You do now! 

Weaving together the voices and reflections of hundreds of activists and distilling 24 years of history, Varon’s book is ambitious in scope and scale as it grapples with a deeply un-American hypothesis: That this effort had value, meaning and impact even though it did not result in “winning.” 

As Varon writes at the very end of the book, “the perpetration of grave injustices such as those the War on Terror entailed raises questions of who spoke up against them and why. Those protesting the War on Terror, I believe, have a deserving place in the annals of conscientious American dissent, as they sought to create a more peaceable and moral world. Telling their collective story is to honor their commitment, from which future movements may learn.”

Varon, a professor of history of the New School University, relates in crisp and copious detail how the people of the United States responded to the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks with sorrow, action and clarity: saying we did not want to see this crime perverted into a call for war. Millions of people around the world worked to prevent the bombardment of Afghanistan in October 2001 and the “Shock and Awe” invasion in Iraq in March 2003. And we kept right on working, on every conceivable front, ever since. 

This book is not a feel-good nostalgia project. “Our Grief is Not a Cry for War” is detailed, critical and fully cognizant of the myriad of ways the movement failed. It highlights the contradictions and weaknesses of the political marriages of convenience, the compromises across sectarian divides hastily hashed out, and the lack of clarity that bedeviled the movement. In reality, it was many movements that knotted themselves into something somewhat unified and coherent for a relatively short period of time. 

Varon teases out all these strategic differences and turf battles. The sectarian left — organizations like ANSWER, Not in Our Name and World Can’t Wait — are here. Without picking sides, or casting aspersions, Varon points out how these rivalries and political differences confused the public, wasted resources and consumed precious time. As one activist quipped to Varon, “we spent half our time fighting the war and half our time fighting each other.” 

Varon also had to contend with the competing visions of what the movement was and who led it: Was it a peace movement or an antiwar movement? Were the resisters trying to stop one war or two? Were they trying to turn the United States communist or socialist? Or was the plan to usher in a new era of internationalism, peace and anarchy? 

The answer is of course a little bit of all of that. And that is difficult. But so is writing a book about the national antiwar movement that started on Sept. 11, 2001 but really has its roots much further back and wasn’t limited to the U.S. In answering the question “why do they hate us?” Varon has to discuss half a century (or more) of U.S. foreign policy and its blowback to help the reader understand why the dramatic attack on a random Tuesday in 2001 didn’t come out of nowhere. It’s a masterfully concise section, a clear road map to further study for anyone who wants it. 

Complicating Varon’s task for surveying the antiwar movement is the vastness of the U.S. and ways that resisting war in small towns and rural communities looks really different than it did in big cities like New York and San Francisco. The sectarian squabbles weren’t a factor, for one. 

The distorted dystopia of the Trump White House and his unmerry band of hate-mongering kakistocrats (a 17th century word once again in vogue — from the Greek for “worst” and “rule” — that means a collection of terrible and incompetent rulers) looms so large these days that war criminals like the Bushes, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney can take on a sepia-toned gravitas in the rearview. 

Can we be forgiven for missing them, just a tiny little bit? Varon says no! He renders the relentless drum beat of war and vengeance from the White House and the Pentagon during the Bush years in all its horror. He reminds us of the banality of evil too, reprising the twisted rhetoric of truthiness and canned word salad of “with us or against us,” “we don’t do body counts” and waterboarding as a “no brainer.” Varon quotes a Bush staffer as saying “we are an empire, we create reality!” That sounds like it could have been said yesterday by White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, doesn’t it? 

He doesn’t spare the Obama White House either, with its failed promise to close Guantanamo, surge in the war in Afghanistan, and the almost routine use of weaponized drones in targeted (and not so targeted) killings around the world. Amid this escalation of Bush-era policies, Obama’s warm personality and soaring rhetoric did little to restore the U.S. to the moral high ground.

Friendships are stronger than battleships

Varon had to keep all these balls in the air, and he pulled it off. He succeeds because he isn’t an objective historian. Varon is a student of history — particularly the history of resistance — and also an ardent participant, a brilliant strategist and a beautiful writer with genuine affection for many of his “subjects.” This warmth and admiration comes through on almost every page. And with it, Varon conveys that the real strength of the peace movement — the movement that was here before 9/11 and continues up to this very day — is friendship. 

At its heart, the book tells the story of the power of relationships to make meaning, to create culture and to be resistance — even when that seems small and ineffective. Reading this history reminded me that non-hierarchical, relationship-based, people-centered movements were a just response to this terrible epoch. Our organizing itself was the antidote to the top-down, “with us or against us” logic of war-making. 

The War Resisters League, with its roots in conscientious objection to the “Great War” more than 100 years ago, provided early framing of a pacifist response to the 9/11 attacks. Long-time WRL staff David McReynolds penned a prescient statement in Manhattan as the ash still fell thick through lower Manhattan. The WRL offices were also the “activist Kinkos” and a hub for activist meetings, banner making and intergenerational education. 

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Veterans for Peace, founded in 1975, embraced and mentored the new generations of military personnel called to oppose the war. Voices in the Wilderness was fasting at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations on 9/11 and was perfectly positioned to offer ground-level support to people who lost loved ones that day. Along with Code Pink, Voices facilitated delegations to Afghanistan and seeded the establishment of 9/11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows. The Black Radical Congress helped initiate Black Voices for Peace and Hip Hop Against Fascist War, ensuring a political home for Black resisters. 

South Asians, Muslims and Arabs living in the U.S. turned religious and cultural networks into nodes of solidarity and mutual aid, creating a platform for those most impacted by growing Islamophobia, which — in typical American fashion — lumped together everyone who “looks Arab” into one hated/feared minority. 

Over and over again, in Varon’s telling, shoulders of comfort and listening ears catalyzed new ventures and new ways of resisting. 

The world says no to war

Varon taps into the excitement of organizing and his account of the worldwide protests on Feb. 15, 2003 is a fast-paced delight. He captures the exhilaration, exhaustion and extant hope of the organizers and participants in sweeping panorama and delicate detail. Phyllis Bennis shakes with the opportunity to “be present at a moment that is changing the world.” In more than 800 cities and towns throughout the world, an estimated 12 to 14 million people marched under the banner of the “world says no to war.” 

There are moving vignettes like the staff at McMurdo Center on Ross Island, Antarctica, fired for their subzero protest as part of the day of action. They were spurred to action by an offhand line in a Nation essay that imagined that the “protests would reach Antarctica.” They did not want to disappoint. 

Varon renders brief but beautiful portraits of the organizers, including Leslie Cagan, the long-time New York activist who took on leadership of United for Peace and Justice. He writes that she is motivated by “common sense decency and desire to see people resist and thrive in the face of oppression.” 

But, for all the magic and momentum of Feb. 15, Varon tells us what we already know: the “other” global super power (as New York Times reporter Patrick Tyler dubbed “world public opinion” two days after the protests) did not stop the war before it started. And in explaining why, he turns to scholarship from social scientists who tabulated who showed up and who didn’t. For the sheer volume of people, it remained a single day of action. 

The movement’s challenge was to convert antiwar opinion into policy change. Starhawk, the writer and activist, remarked that “what finally may contain the war-mongers is the possibility that the people will be ungovernable — if the government continues to disregard its will.” We were not ungovernable. 

Keep doing the work

I feel small, helpless and heartbroken right now most of the time, and I am not alone. And into this wallow comes Varon’s book to give me a hearty shake on the shoulder, a firm cluck on the chin. “Pull yourself together and keep doing the work,” the book tells us. I read this whole book on the verge of tears, remembering the intensity of that time, remembering all the friends and family members who are still alive in these pages, who have passed on. My own father and uncle — Phil and Dan Berrigan — are here, Sister Anne Montgomery, organization builder Damu Smith, and 9/11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows visionary Rita Lasar are here too. 

Those of us out in the streets these days have our work cut out for us too. The times demand that we resist fascism, protect our immigrant neighbors, stand up for our trans kids, keep our hope alive, safeguard what shreds of democracy are left, staunch the IDF bloodletting and destruction in Gaza and the West Bank, stop the genocide, keep track of the lies and keep telling the truth. 

We might not win, we might get hurt, arrested, trampled, ziptied, pepper-sprayed. We might feel like failures. We might second guess our strategy or realize that we don’t have a coherent strategy. We might bemoan the lack of a principled Democratic party response. We might have given up on the Democrats a long time ago. 

As we navigate all of this, we need to be reminded of our history and the power that comes with it. Jeremy Varon’s new book gives us those reminders: We have history and lessons we have learned along the way. We have the power to resist wars and fascism, to be ungovernable, to be creative and connected across borders, to mentor, inspire, motivate and care for one another. We can take this whole book out into the streets. See you there!

This article Lessons from the movement to stop the ‘war on terror’ was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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Source: https://wagingnonviolence.org/2025/11/lessons-from-movement-to-stop-war-on-terror/