In retrospect, the anti-war movement to oppose American policy in Iraq had actually been launched on an international scale within weeks of the attack on 9/11, long before the lead-up to the Iraq war itself. This anti-war movement was a product of the same forces and organizations that had assembled to riot against the World Trade Organization in Seattle and against the World Bank in Prague and to promote the anti-capitalist agendas of the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre. It was spurred not so much by the actual events – either the attacks of 9/11 or the war against Saddam Hussein, as by the opportunities these events afforded to a radical movement whose permanent agenda was opposition to America and its perceived global “domination.”
This agenda was summarized by the leading intellectual of the movement, Noam Chomsky, in a book titled, Hegemony or Survival. The title was itself a calculated echo of Rosa Luxemburg’s apocalyptic claim that the world faced a choice between “socialism or barbarism,” which had been issued almost a century earlier. Chomsky’s book was an attempt to make the identical case in contemporary terms.
America’s pre-eminent global position, Chomsky argued, is a threat to world survival. This was because America supported a doctrine of aggressive war, wanted to extrude weapons into space, had obstructed the international control of weapons of mass destruction and undermined the Kyoto protocol, which was the “world’s” effort to protect itself from extinction through global warming.
Against this “nightmare” future, Chomsky went on, a world “rights” movement had arisen. “The solidarity movements that developed in mainstream America in the 1980s, concerning Central America in particular, broke new ground in the history of imperialism; never before had substantial numbers of people from the imperial society gone to live with the victims of vicious attack to help them and offer them some measure of protection. The international solidarity organizations that evolved from these roots now function very effectively in many parts of the world,…”
What Chomsky was describing in these passages was a 21st Century version of the “international civil war” between capitalists and socialists that Marx and Lenin had proclaimed in an earlier epoch: “One can discern two trajectories in current history: one aiming toward hegemony, acting rationally within a lunatic doctrinal framework as it threatens survival; the other dedicated to the belief that ‘another world is possible,’ in the words that animate the World Social Forum,..” This was the real vision that inspired the anti-war movement that developed between 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq.
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