Simon Butler was a 25-year-old activist who helped organise the mass mobilisations in Sydney in February and March 2003 against the invasion of Iraq. He was also a leader of the socialist youth group Resistance and the student anti-war movement Books Not Bombs, which Resistance initiated.
The movement against the war in Iraq saw the largest protests in history, with up to 30 million people around the world demonstrating over the same weekend. Green Left Weekly’s Peter Boyle spoke to Butler about why the movement failed to stop the war.
Much analysis of the Iraq anti-war movement deals with its declining numbers in Australia and to a lesser degree in the US and Britain. To what extent is it true that people felt there was no point in continuing to protest after their democratic governments had ignored them? Could that have been avoided if there had been more leadership from institutions in the anti-war and labour movements?
It’s definitely true in Australia that there was a wave of depression that hit the whole movement. Perhaps there was a breaking of illusions about the nature of our democracy. The majority of people opposed the war but it still happened anyway. The biggest protest in Australia’s history took place and the politicians ignored it.
They took a big gamble in ignoring it, but it was a successful gamble as far as they were concerned, because too many people were dwelling under the illusion that if they showed in such mass numbers that they were opposed to the war then the government would be compelled to listen.
There’s two ways you could respond to that. One is that you could decide that protests don’t work. But I think a more healthy way is to realise that these governments say they rule on our behalf, but they actually rule on behalf of the interests of the elites, of the super-rich.
The governments respond to one thing only and that’s pressure. The pressure on the Australian government was released very quickly. I remember Arundhati Roy at the time commented that too many people thought by simply protesting all around the world on a weekend would be enough to stop the drive to war.
But the drive to war was based on grabbing a massive prize, huge oil reserves, and also that the countries in the region would realise that the US is prepared to obliterate them if they step out of line.
In the US and Britain the movement continued for much longer. But in Australia the Labor Party still had a lot of influence over the labour movement, and switched almost immediately to “now that war has started we have to support our troops.” As if sending troops to a war they had nothing to do with, was supporting them. The movement’s line was that we could support the troops by keeping them at home.
This certainly has contributed to what has become a cliche in the media, which is that Iraq showed that protests don’t work. But compare the movement against the Iraq war to Vietnam, there are some striking differences.
One, the Iraq war big protests took place before the war had started whereas in the Vietnam war the movement took 10 years or longer to build up the forces to contribute to the end of that war. The Iraq war movement, because it didn’t sustain itself, meant that pressure never really built up on the Australian government.
One lesson you could take from that is that if you’re going to take on the massive task of stopping war, which WikiLeaks is determined to wage, then there’s no shortcuts, no quick fixes. It’s going to take mass mobilisation of people over a sustained period of time to change the balance of forces enough to prevail.
To what extent do you think racist and Islamophobic propaganda made it harder for a movement to build up as the war dragged on for a decade?
Most people, according to opinion polls for many years in Australia, have said they oppose the war in Afghanistan, but this sentiment hasn’t led to big protests, an impassioned response. That has coincided with a wave of ceaseless demonisation of Islam, encouraging suspicion of Muslims. Every time there’s a protest by Muslims in Australia, the community is accused of being violent or not respecting democratic norms in Australia, usually when they’re exercising democracy.
It has a big impact. It’s about dehumanising the victims of Western imperialism. That same process that led to the Iraq war is already happening with Iran. Iran today has sanctions which are very similar to those that were imposed on Iraq.
Before the Iraq invasion, sanctions on that country caused more than half a million deaths of children aged under five. Now similar sanctions are being placed on Iran, on the grounds that Iran is now the biggest threat.
They’re almost taking it from the same playbook. The same arguments are being used about why we have to isolate Iran, be prepared to go to war with Iran. There’s a consistent approach with what they did with Iraq to prepare people to think it is inevitable. It’s matched with the discourse that this is a war for freedom, against terror. Whereas in truth it’s a war for plunder and power, which they are determined to do if they can get away with it.
There is a legacy of the Iraq war protests which we shouldn’t underplay. It did cause a genuine concern among the elites who were very worried about the movement, how rapidly it grew, the widespread opposition, the fact they were the biggest protests in history. They know they can’t be so cavalier anymore.
How does it relate to attacks on WikiLeaks?
WikiLeaks exposed the narrative of humane Western intervention for the lie that it is. The response to WikiLeaks has been to personalise it, to dwell on [Julian] Assange’s character and his perceived imperfections and also to suggest that WikiLeaks says nothing new.
There’s no coverage of the cables anymore, nor the Syria files or the Global Intelligence files. The mainstream media has abandoned reporting on anything WikiLeaks releases. All the coverage of WikiLeaks today in the mainstream media is about sex assault allegations on Assange and his asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy.
The Iraq and Afghanistan wars were highly managed media events with journalists embedded with invading armed forces, and a total lockdown on information. To what extent has this been a success for imperialists to manage the war in a way they didn’t succeed in Vietnam?
It has been a success. There were, even in Iraq, many unembedded journalists doing terrific work but they had a much smaller audience than what was being beamed into people’s living rooms every night.
The phenomenon of embedded journalists, who are proud of the fact that the information they receive is vetted by the army before it gets to their viewers, is a big concern. The success of that model of “churnalism”, so-called journalism, only reinforces the need for the alternative to be created by people themselves, for people’s journalism, for scientific journalism.
There is no way we can hope for self-reform of media institutions, which are becoming more concentrated. There are fewer options among the mainstream press than ever before and this trend will continue.
They are huge corporations and their general outlook is shared with the other major corporations that run our society. There’s very little change we can expect from the mainstream media.
Those journalists aren’t told what to say, they don’t need to be told. It’s pretty self-explanatory that if you report things out of the range of what is considered acceptable, you simply won’t advance, you won’t get a new contract. It doesn’t have to be a conspiracy, it’s simply the rolling momentum of self-interest which keeps them in check.
So it’s been a success for the elites that they’ve gained a certain amount of social acceptance for embedded, patriotic journalists. But there’s been a counter to that in the rise of alternative media and the proliferation of new media sources on the web. It isn’t as strong as it needs to be, but WikiLeaks is an inspiration for others to take up the mantle and say that perhaps we can create some new media too.
Related story: PHOTOS & STORY: When students protested for ‘Books not Bombs’
Related story: PHOTOS: When half a million marched in Sydney against war
