1,000
Voila Moments to Stop the War
by
Naomi Klein
Dissident Voice
February 27, 2003
At
the Pentagon they call it the “Voila Moment.”
That’s when Iraqi soldiers
and civilians, with bombs raining down on Baghdad, suddenly scratch their heads
and say to themselves: “These bombs aren’t really meant to kill me and my
family, they are meant to free us from an evil dictator!” At that point, they
thank Uncle Sam, lower their weapons, abandon their posts, and rise up against
Saddam Hussein. Voila!
Or at least that’s how it is
supposed to work, according to the experts in “psychological operations” who
are already waging a fierce information war in Iraq. The “Voila Moment” made
its first foray into the language of war last Monday, when a New York Times
reporter quoted an unnamed senior U.S. military official using the term.
This peppering of military
jargon with bon mots could be Colin Powell’s latest plan to win over the French
on the Security Council. More likely it’s the product of the Bush
administration’s penchant for hiring advertising executives and flaky
management consultants as foreign policy advisors (doesn’t the “Voila Moment”
sounds suspiciously like the “Wow Factor”—sold to millions of corporate
executives as the key to building a powerful brand?)
Wherever it came from, the
Pentagon has “Voila” in its sights, and it is sparing no expense to hit its
target. Airborne transmitters are flying over Iraq broadcasting radio
propaganda. Iraqi business, military and political officials have been
bombarded with emails and phone calls urging them to see the light and switch
sides. Fighter planes have dropped more than 8-million leaflets informing Iraqi
soldiers that their lives will be spared if they walk away from their military
equipment. “It sends a direct message to the operator on the gun,” says Lt.
Gen. T. Michael Moseley, commander of allied air forces in the Persian Gulf.
According to the senior
military official quoted in The New York Times, Central Command will know it
has reached “Voila” when “we see a break with the leadership.” In other words,
the U.S. military is advocating nothing less than mass civil disobedience in
Iraq, a refusal to obey orders, or to participate in an unjust war. Will it
work? I’m skeptical. There was, after all, a Voila Moment during the last Gulf
War, when many Iraqis living near the Kuwaiti border believed U.S. promises
that they would be supported if they rose up against Hussein. It was followed
shortly after by a Screw You Moment, when the rebels watched U.S. forces
abandon them to be massacred by Hussein.
But all this Voila talk got
me thinking: the civil disobedience the U.S. military is hoping to provoke in
Iraq is exactly the sort of thing the anti-war movement needs to inspire in our
countries if we are really going to stop, or at least curtail, the pending
devastation in Iraq. What would it take for large numbers of people in the
U.S., the U.K, Italy, Canada—and any other country assisting with the war
effort—to truly break with our leaders and refuse to comply? Can we create
thousands of “Voila Moments” back home?
That is the question facing
the global anti-war movement as it plans its follow up to the spectacular
marches on February 15. During the Vietnam War, thousands of young Americans
decided to break with their leaders when their draft cards arrived. And it was
this willingness to go beyond protest and into active disobedience that slowly
eroded the domestic viability of the war.
What will today’s
conscientious objectors and military deserters look like? Well, all week in
Italy, activists have been blocking dozens of trains carrying U.S. weapons and
personnel on their way to a military base near Pisa, while Italian dockworkers
are refusing to load arms shipments. Last weekend, two U.S. military bases were
blockaded in Germany, as was the U.S. consulate in Montreal, and the air base
at RAF Fairford in Gloucester, England. On March 1, thousands of Irish
activists are expected to show up at Shannon airport, which, despite Irish
claims of neutrality, is being used by the U.S. military to refuel its planes
on route to Iraq.
In Chicago last week, more
than a hundred high-school students demonstrated outside the headquarters of
Leo Burnett, the advertising firm that designed the U.S. military’s hip,
youth-targeted “Army of One” campaign. The students claim that in under-funded
Latino and African-American high schools, the army recruiters far outnumber the
college scouts.
The most ambitious plan has
come from San Francisco where a coalition of anti-war groups is calling for an
emergency non-violent counter-“strike” the day after the war starts: “Don’t go
to work or school. Call in sick, walk out… We will impose real economic, social
and political costs and stop business as usual until the war stops.” It’s a
powerful idea: peace bombs exploding wherever profits are being made from the
war—gas stations, arms manufacturers, missile-happy TV stations. It might not
stop the war but it would show that there is a principled position between hawk
and hippy: a militant resistance for the protection of life.
For some, this escalation of
the war against war seems extreme: there should simply be more weekend marches,
bigger next time, so big they are impossible to ignore. Of course there should
be more marches, but it should also be clear by now that there is no protest
too big for our politicians to ignore. They know that public opinion in most of
the world is against the war. What our politicians are carefully assessing
before the bombs start falling, is whether the anti-war sentiment is “hard” or
“soft.” The question is not “do people care about war,” but how much do they
care? Is it a mild consumer preference against war, one that will evaporate by
the next election? Or is it something deeper and more lasting — a, shall we
say, Voila kind of care?
On one end of the caring
spectrum, Levi’s Europe has decided to cash in on the anti-war fad by releasing
a limited edition teddy bear with a peace symbol attached to its ear. You can
clutch and hug it while watching the scary terror alerts on CNN.
Or you could turn off CNN, refuse to be a soft and cuddly peacenik, get out there and stop the war.
Naomi
Klein is
a leading anti-sweatshop activist, and author of Fences and Windows:
Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate? (Picador,
2002) and No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies (Picador, 2000).