Thoughts from/on Richmond, Virginia

Monday night, I was speaking to a fairly large audience at the University of Richmond. About the war. I focused quite a lot on ‘How did the country get into this quagmire in Iraq?’ and presented an answer that focused heavily on the fact that, imho, a small coterie of ideologues based in Don Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney’s offices had in essence “captured” the US nation’s foreign policy and taken or dragged the nation into the war.
Which is all good and true as far as it goes. I was glad, though, that a male student in the audience put up his hand and said he personally had not felt “dragged” or “taken” into the war but that he had supported it, based on the new kind of fear and vulnerability that he had experienced since 9/11.
Soon as he said that, I was glad he had added that important dimension to the picture. Because the fact remains true that a large majority of US citizens did support the decision to go to the war, at the time, even if many of those former supporters are now wondering what the heck it was they got us all into.
We in the antiwar movement need to speak centrally to those erstwhile war supporters.
That was why I was so glad that that student had stuck up his hand and contributed to the discussion. (Plus, imho, it probably takes a degree of guts and self-confidence for a young male to admit in a large public setting that he experiences or has experienced fear.)
I started to try to engage with him. I probably didn’t do the greatest of all possible jobs. I tried to make the point that fear, while quite understandable in the circs, is not of itself a great guide to action: we still need to call on our capacities for logic and reason. (The violence between Israelis and Palestinians comes to mind here.)
I also started to make the point that a situation of sort of near-existential fear is one that most of “the other 96 percent” of the world’s population are already much more familiar with, and have lived with for a while; and that in many cases it has informed the much more war-averse attitudes that you find in places other than the US…
Anyway, thanks again to that questioner for forcing me to start to deal with this issue more seriously. The “small coterie” has certainly been an important part of the story. But we do also need to deal with the huge reserve of popular support for the war that they were able to draw on…
Before the talk, I had a very friendly dinner with a small group of UR faculty and students. Being as how we were in Richmond, former capital of the Confederacy, I felt almost obliged to state at one point that “We Quakers were right about slavery and you will all soon see, I hope, that we are right about violence and war.” Except of course Quakers aren’t supposed to be prideful, so this is not a point that it’s particularly appropriate to word in just that way…