Medea Benjamin has seen this movie before. Many more times than she ever wanted to.
The veteran peace activist and one-time Green Party Senate candidate, has been at the forefront of Bay Area anti-war efforts for decades, leading huge demonstrations against a multitude of U.S. military conflicts.
Benjamin, 67, who co-founded the women’s peace group CODEPINK in 2002, helped organize last weekend's march in San Francisco in response to the recent U.S. military drone attack that killed Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani. And she's likely to be a visible presence Thursday evening, when thousands of demonstrators throughout the Bay Area — and in other cities across the country — are expected to take to the streets in opposition to U.S. military conflict with Iran.
The anti-war movement, which grew formidable in the lead-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 — with the Bay Area serving as the base for major organizing efforts — is now having to rebuild itself largely from scratch, Benjamin said.
“I have memories of organizing large demonstrations even during the 1991 Gulf War. And then in the lead up to Iraq, we had massive numbers of people coming out in the Bay Area,” she said. “[But] we're just getting started now because the anti-war movement has really crumbled. And that goes back to the election of Barack Obama when people thought he was going to get us out of the wars, when there were other issues that took people's attention, like the financial crisis, and more recently, the climate crisis.”
She added, “And then there's also the fact that we've been in these wars now for almost 20 years, and it's hard to get people mobilized when it becomes sort of the norm to know that your country is at war.”
This strikes particularly true for younger Americans, who have grown up with U.S. military conflicts perpetually playing in the background, Benjamin noted.
“It’s like a low-grade infection that you learn to live with,” she said. "But it shouldn’t be that way.”
In spite of that, Benjamin was heartened by the significant turnout at last Saturday's actions, which she said were organized within 48 hours and drew thousands of people, old and young, who took to the streets in more than 80 cities across the country.
“San Francisco was among the biggest. We were really proud of the people of the Bay Area who came out in large numbers,” she said, noting solid representation from both the old guard and younger faces from new groups like the Democratic Socialists of America and About Face. “We feel like the only way we're going to be able to stop another war is if we really show a lot of public opposition, and quickly.”
Richard Becker, the western region coordinator of the Act Now to Stop War and End Racism – or ANSWER – Coalition, which helped organize Saturday's events, said he was pleasantly surprised by how quickly demonstrations spread across the country.
“In a way, we got a much bigger response this past Saturday than we did at the beginning of the Iraq anti-war movement of 2002-2003,” said Becker, 72, noting that early demonstrations back then were relatively small but mushroomed as the prospect of war grew closer.
Becker helped form ANSWER in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, initially organizing protests against the invasion of Afghanistan. The group has since been a key player in America's anti-war movement.
"So that was the beginning, really, of the [modern] anti-war movement,” he said, recalling the first protests he helped organize in October 2001, when the U.S. invaded Afghanistan. “And of course, that war has turned into an utter disaster. Iraq turned into an utter disaster."
The move to assassinate Soleimani and step up sanctions on Iran, Becker said, represents a disastrous continuation of U.S. policy in the Middle East and adds new urgency to anti-war efforts.
"I think that there is a very widespread sentiment against a new war,” he said. “So we will go forward now with organizing what we hope will be major anti-war protests, saying no new war in the Middle East and end this endless war.”
Both he and Benjamin said they truly believe that unlike during the run-up to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Americans today are overwhelmingly opposed to getting involved in a new conflict.
“We do have to reach out to people who are of different ideologies to say that this war is going to hurt everybody and that it's not a partisan issue,” Benjamin said.
Benjamin noted the frustration of finding herself, and the country, in a place similar to where it was nearly two decades ago — planning demonstrations and facing the threat of war with another Middle Eastern country.
“It's really discouraging, I mean, I feel like such a failure as somebody who's spent basically every day of my life since the 9/11 attacks trying to stop these wars,” she said. “We just have to keep doing this and find more creative ways, more effective ways to do this work, because obviously what we've done has not been enough.”
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