Military Guide to Terrorism: The Face of Terrorism Today

Not since the Vietnam War has there been a "peace" movement as large and ubiquitous as the one against America's military action in Iraq. Beginning long before Operation Desert Storm itself, organizers mobilized tens and later hundreds of thousands of citizens to protest the Bush Administration's efforts to deal with the rogue Baghdad regime.

The slogans and pronouncements of these protesters, whose numbers have grown in the years since the war commenced, commonly identify Washington as the "axis of evil," and America as the world's foremost "terror state." Never having rallied against Saddam during his brutal repression of his own people, the anti war movement—in language borrowed from a bygone era of communist sloganeering—decries the U.S. as an imperialist aggressor ("No Blood for Oil") and refers to President Bush as a as a "Spoiled Fascist Cowboy," among other epithets.

The current anti-war movement has tried to gain traction by adopting the posture of what it regards as its great predecessor, the Movement of the 1960s. Thus, at one demonstration in New York City, NAACP chairman Julian Bond, himself an alumnus of the New Left, denounced America's "pursuit of empire, not world peace." Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies characterized the current conflict as a "war for empire and for oil." A Muslim American Society representative complained that Muslims are "being discriminated against" all over the United States, likening their treatment to the World War II-era internment of Japanese Americans. New York Civil Liberties Union Executive Director Donna Lieberman lamented "the Bush administration's undeclared war on our civil liberties."

This section of DiscoverTheNetworks examines the worldviews, agendas, and affiliations of the leftist organizations spearheading the contemporary anti-war movement. It explains, for example: (a) how large numbers of well-intentioned individuals who oppose the war are manipulated into supporting anti-American agendas by hard-core radical organizers from groups like the Young Communist League, the Workers World Party, and the Revolutionary Communist Party - all in the name of "peace"; (b) how today's anti-war groups portray themselves as pacifist and as human rights organizations, while their leaders often have ties to the communist dictatorships in North Korea, China, and Cuba and privately support the communist system that is responsible for millions of deaths; (c) how "anti-war" is frequently synonymous with "anti-American," since protesters have an ideological tunnel vision that prevents them from seeing abuses other than those allegedly committed by the U.S. or its ally Israel; and (d) how these anti-war activists tend to loathe capitalism, viewing it as the root of all evil in the world, and had temporarily parked themselves in the anti-globalization movement before the war in Iraq broke out.

Some articles in this section also explore the roots of the anti-war movement from a historical perspective, noting that in the 1930s the communist movement developed a strategy for weakening and subverting democratic societies. Abandoning its traditional tactic of openly declaring its revolutionary anti-Western goals, it now adjusted its agendas to accord with the values of the societies with which it was in temporary alliance. By appearing to advocate these ideals, the communists were able to gain acceptance from people who had no understanding of their actual objectives. This "popular front" technique remains alive and well today.