Protesters – and teachers

IF RONALD REAGAN'S mantra was "peace through strength," President George W. Bush's is "peace through mass destruction": a naked contradiction that has been, unfortunately, readily snapped up by 70 percent of Americans. Although they've lost the global opinion wars, Bush and his deadly posse have so far won the battle for America's hearts and minds. But as the bodies pile up, U.S. pro-war sentiment has slipped a bit – suggesting a vital moment of opportunity to expand the antiwar sentiment.

While halting the carnage is the antiwar movement's most immediate concern, progressives also need to focus and coalesce their energies for the longer war ahead – the struggle over hearts and minds, to impact both the upcoming presidential and congressional elections and American views regarding future U.S. invasions of sovereign nations. While fighting today's madness, we must lay the intellectual and ideological groundwork for the opinion wars to come. Fortunately, the facts are on our side.

How many of the people who tell the pollsters they support the war really know the well-documented realities, both present and past, of U.S. interventionism, which has been anything but peaceful or democratic? How many know of the undisputed data showing U.S. economic sanctions have caused more than half a million Iraqi deaths over the past decade? Or that Defense Department documents show the United States – before the war – destroyed much of Iraq's water system, knowing this would kill innocent civilians?

Fighting ignorance and misinformation is the most important war at home – at least as important as any protest. We need nothing less than a permanent national political-education campaign representing a broad coalition of progressive/left concerns: a grassroots movement that can connect with a disaffected, alienated populace.

More fundamentally, the left must create new avenues of communication that go beyond existing alternative print and online sources, which so often preach to the converted. Like the unfolding battle for Baghdad, this intellectual struggle must be waged house to house, street corner to street corner. We need to make direct contact with supporters of war (especially the 40 percent whom polls say are lukewarm), through concise, well-researched, and accessible leaflets, tabling, coordinated public information campaigns, town hall-style educational forums, public teach-ins on mass transit and in other public locales, and on and on.

We also need an antiwar war room of sorts that can mobilize rapid response to the Bush administration's potent media spin – confronting the daily expressions of pro-war ideology through aggressive counter-media campaigns.

Who would run such an effort, and how would it work? Institutions such as the Green Party, the New Party, the Labor Party, antiwar groups like International ANSWER and Move-On, progressive union locals, and progressive media and foundations should develop a national coalition to pool some of their intellectual and financial resources around multifaceted political education campaigns. Working with local institutions (such as churches) across the country, this team could produce an array of materials, such as educational flyers, talking points, and background information for teach-ins, opinion editorials, letters to the editor, and occasional paid advertisements.

Protests, too, are perfect opportunities to educate onlookers with handouts – yet usually the only flyers we see advertise the next protest, or trumpet left-wing causes with a shrill moralism and little information.

The key is to devise strategic, grassroots awareness campaigns emphasizing direct contact with "mainstream" Americans – in schools, workplaces, meeting halls, and on the streets. This is already done sporadically; what's needed is a more coherent, specific response to the prevailing ideology dispensed by government officials and mainstream media.

The unmitigated disaster of the Bush administration and its post-9/11 transformation of U.S. politics – normalizing previously unacceptable notions of preemptive force and attacks on civil liberties – requires a massive coordinated response that can be linked to simultaneously unseating the president and reshaping opinions about U.S. might and right, as implemented abroad and at home.

Award-winning journalist Christopher D. Cook writes widely for the alternative press. He has worked as city editor for the Bay Guardian.