Buttressed by mass opposition to the war and unable to find real leadership from above, the Chicago group traveled to Iowa for caucus week, where they launched a civil disobedience campaign called “Seasons of Discontent: A Presidential Occupation Project”, or SODaPOP.

 

Throughout this election season, SODaPOP members will be in campaign offices making demands that no major candidate will likely agree to. In Des Moines, they asked candidates to support a complete withdrawal of troops from Iraq and Afghanistan within 100 days after they take office, as well as an end to sanctions on Iran and plans for military action against that country, and a commitment to fully fund the reconstruction of Iraq. The activists are refusing to leave the campaign offices until they receive some assurances. Fifteen were arrested in Iowa, and in the process they revealed the discomfort among so-called “anti-war” candidates with the anti-war movement.

 

These acts of civil disobedience express both hope and despair; they reject an unresponsive corporate democracy while appealing to its leaders for support. Jeff Leys reconciles this tension: “We have to use every non-violent lever at our disposal."We need to do this extra-legal work as an extension of the necessary work of participation.” Leys spent the week in Des Moines campaign offices and at the organization precinct.

 

After arrests at Guliani headquarters, another wave of protests hit the Clinton campaign, which literally shut the door on the debate. Four protesters risked arrest and tried to enter, but ended up protesting outside the locked office until it closed for the day. On New Year’s Eve, a sea of cameras crowded the doors of Huckabee campaign headquarters, where three more protesters inquired of the reverend: “Who would Jesus bomb?”

 

One of these protesters was Kathy Kelly, a tireless veteran of the peace movement. The day after her arrest at Huckabee headquarters, she appeared on C-SPAN from Des Moines, where the anchor went through her lengthy bio. She has been to Iraq dozens of times, and was in Baghdad during the initial “shock and awe” bombings 2003. “I was with children (in Iraq) who were so terrified they began to grind their teeth, morning, noon and night,” she says. A hostile Iraq war veteran called in to inquire as to whether she was from this planet, where we face Islamic radicalism. Kelly was calm: “When you hear children crying in pain, you have a different experience of the effect of bombs being dropped from 30,000 feet in the air.”

 

Kelly has served jail time for planting corn at a nuclear missile site in the 1980’s and more recently for her protest at Fort Benning, the infamous home of the formerly-named School of the Americas (a training school for members of the military in various Central American, Latin American, and Caribbean nations, notorious for training military personnel that went on to commit human rights abuses). She stands by her decades-long refusal to pay federal income taxes: “In my conscience I simply cannot contribute toward the arsenal that the U.S. has developed, stored, and used.” Kelly continues to lead, even if it means breaking the law, so that elected officials might follow: “When you take this kind of risk, you’re in a better position to ask lawmakers to themselves take a political risk.”

 

For months, members of the Chicago community have asked Senator Obama to take this risk – not just to end the war, but to change priorities. Says Kelly: “There’s such an opportunity for leadership amongst the Democrats to educate Americans about the consequences of this war, and about what could be done with the money that would be voted to fund ongoing wars.” They met up again with the campaign in Des Moines to ask for Obama’s support. The response from the office of a candidate running on his anti-war credentials revealed not just hostility, but a coordinated attempt to marginalize the anti-war message.

 

About a dozen protesters entered, wrapped in kaffiyas and carrying banners and pictures of Iraqis they’ve met in their travels. Obama’s people moved swiftly to remove members of the press, claiming that space had to be made for visitors at the front entrance, which was then promptly locked. A sign was posted, directing visitors to the back entrance away from the protest. The media soon faded from the ongoing scene inside. With the red, white and blue Obama “O” as his backdrop, John Tuzcu, a member of the Des Moines Catholic Worker, read from the Illinois candidate’s plan to leave tens of thousands of troops in Iraq through his first term.

 

The campaign staff quietly evacuated the main room, in protest of the protest. Brian Terrell, 51, read from Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech on Vietnam from April 1967, “Beyond Vietnam”: “A time comes when silence is betrayal!” Obama’s people whispered in each other’s ears, then directed the police to steer the protest out the side door.

 

Kelly saw firsthand Bill Clinton’s war on Iraq that destroyed the country’s infrastructure with protracted military and economic warfare. She organized dozens of delegations to the country, bringing medicine and medical supplies to Iraqi hospitals drained by the sanctions imposed by Britain and the United States. Her actions were in direct violation of US law, punishable by a $1 million fine and jail time.

The delegation members made it clear to Janet Reno’s office that they would go anyway. She was standing beside malnourished children in hospitals without electricity, clean water, or medicine. The infant mortality rate had doubled since sanctions began in 1990, and UNICEF concluded that the twelve-year war killed nearly 500,000 children under the age of five. Kelly watched as this story too was ushered silently out the side door.

 

With this awareness, Leys is giving equal scrutiny to the liberal field, concerned that campaigns of ‘change’ might result in more of the same. “The biggest danger is that Democrats are normalizing the idea of partial withdrawal, and disarming the anti-war movement to the idea of residual troop levels,” he says.

 

The SODaPOP organizers are pushing for withdrawal, not just from Iraq, but also from a failed strategy that diverts public funds for a highly militarized global presence. And Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who together have caved on numerous funding bills without strings attached, can no longer shrug and complain about lacking the votes. Leys argues they need to be winning those votes: “I’m talking about keep the Senate in session for 30 days. Make it abundantly clear who is keeping the war going, maybe that would shake loose a few moderate Republicans.”

 

The VCNV project is about citizens’ reclamation of the political process, and reclamation of funds better used for the common good. Leys sees the impact of the war effort on public services in Chicago: “The state government is on doomsday number three for mass transit funding. Fares might be doubled in the next few weeks, and the suburbs are already cutting their routes and services into the city.”

 

The slogging war brings its effects home, sparking a rise in civil resistance actions nationwide in the last year. In Olympia, WA the Port Militarization Resistance project held demonstrations in November to impede the shipment of military equipment from their city’s ports. Groups of college students linked arms in front of semi-trucks carrying tanks destined for Iraq. Riot police doused them repeatedly at point blank range with tear gas, but days later, more were back at the port. Eighty more protesters in orange jumpsuits were arrested on the Supreme Court steps in January, calling for the closure of the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay.

 

And though the SODaPOP campaign directs pressure upon leaders, it also seeks to build networks of resistance. Says Leys, “These actions are an invitation or challenge, or both, to the anti-war movement to intensify the opposition to this war.” To this end, the Voices website contains a network of local organizations carrying out civil resistance actions nationwide.

 

After each arrest, the campaign offices continued to hum, the semis delivered the tank to the port, and Guantanamo remained open. But each arrest makes it clear that Americans won’t accept these realities willingly. And Leys hopes that more voices will create a more powerful culture of protest. “We need to acknowledge that we haven’t done enough yet to build up anti-war sentiment and pressure Congress.” Robert Braam, one of the protesters arrested in Des Moines, called the discontented to action. “Only thing we did wrong? Stayed in the Wilderness too long. Only thing we did right? The day we stood up to fight!”

 

 

Learn more about Voices for Creative Nonviolence and find a local organization carrying out protest actions at their website; www.vcnv.org.