Historians Reflect on the War in Iraq: A Roundtable

As with all papers and commentaries presented during its annual meeting, the Organization of American Historians disclaims responsibility for statements, whether of fact or of opinion, made by its panelists, moderators, and participants.

What follows is a transcription of the roundtable which took place Saturday, April 5 2003 at the 2003 OAH Annual Meeting in Memphis. The presentations are copyrighted by the individual presenter.

Kevin Gaines, University of Michigan

Copyright (©) 2003. Kevin Gaines. All rights reserved.

The failure of democracy that has led to this unjust, unpopular war has raised the stakes for American historians' interpretations of America's relation to the world. How could it be otherwise? The war has given my own research on African American dissenters during the civil rights era new and poignant resonances. Viewed in that context, the war represents, for me, the ultimate betrayal of the legacy of the civil rights movement. In coming to this realization, my thoughts have centered on the phenomenon of Colin Powell, and the relationship between race, and the rise of a militarized society, that threatens democracy and civil liberties.

During the late 1950s, some African American spokespersons feared that in finally achieving full citizenship, many black Americans would exchange their historical and cultural traditions for a mess of pottage, specifically, an identification with dominant American nationalism and militarism. It would seem that their fears have been confirmed by what has become of our democratic society, and Colin Powell's checkered career.

In 1959, the African American novelist Julian Mayfield rejected the widely held view that African American writers would enter the American mainstream as political and social integration advanced. To Mayfield, the more salient question was, just what is this mainstream that black writers were entering? While Mayfield supported the attainment of full and equal citizenship rights, he rejected the view of integration as " completely identifying the Negro with the American image—that great power face that the world knows and the Negro knows better…." For black Americans, democracy and the American dream had remained elusive, despite the determined pursuit of the dream by generations of blacks willing to fight in every war, and, as Mayfield put it, "regardless of the nature of the war."

At the dawn of the civil rights movement, Mayfield was not the only black public figure who wondered what impact integration would have on African Americans and the nation. Like Mayfield, W.E.B. DuBois and E. Franklin Frazier saw integration into a materialistic and repressive cold war American society as a potential threat to African American cultural traditions, including a history of democratic struggles. In effect, these critics posed the question of whether black struggles for equality would transform and democratize American society, or whether blacks themselves would be remade in the image of a stultifying, inequitable and militaristic America. All three took exception to an American foreign policy hostile to democratic national liberation movements in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. In 1959, Mayfield was pessimistic about the prospects for meaningful change. He foresaw "a tragic future…for the American Negro people." The minority status of blacks consigned them to political dependency and exclusion for the foreseeable future.

What are the prospects for democracy in a society in which the main, if not only, route to opportunity and mobility for poor and working-class people is the military? Mayfield's grim forecast has been upheld by subsequent events, which have been examined in many historical studies of race and racism. In one of the most recent and insightful of these works, The Problem of Race in the 21st century, Thomas Holt describes the highly contradictory nature of the politics of race in the U.S. during the 1990s. He offers the example of Colin Powell, widely touted as a credible presidential candidate for the Republican party, the very party whose electoral success has relied so heavily on racially coded rhetoric and policies hostile to civil rights. Holt analyses a U.S. political system within which historical narratives of race have distorted and undermined democratic processes. The presidential election of 2000 reminded us once again that a major Republican electoral strategy remains the suppression of the African American vote. President Bush and the GOP's contempt for democracy in the electoral process has enabled the government's single-minded rush to war in defiance of world opinion.

Because racial tensions and anxieties dominate our electoral politics and policy-making, we are desperate in our public life for reassuring symbols of racial progress. I think many conservatives' desire for guilt-free opposition to integration explains a substantial part of Colin Powell's appeal. How ironic, then, that Powell and the U.S. military are among the staunchest supporters of the University of Michigan's affirmative action admissions program. How ironic indeed that in a society in which racial segregation and economic uncertainty are increasing, the armed forces are our only truly integrated institution. We are living in a militarized society in which the only context in which the government can support racial integration—and with ambivalence, at best—is in the service of an undemocratic foreign policy dedicated to the imperial control over the people and resources of the Middle East.

As the open secret of race in our public life has been magnified by the surge in nationalism after the terror attacks of 2001, Colin Powell remains an enigmatic figure. It is largely because of his status as a racial success symbol that many have looked to him as the voice of reason within an administration given to secrecy, arrogance and messianic zealotry. For one commentator, Powell has submitted so abjectly to the adminstration's policy of pre-emptive force and its contempt for multilateralism that all he can do to salvage his integrity is resign. Powell's dilemma illustrates the contradictory, Orwellian function of race at this perilous moment, in which a mere image of integration tacitly legitimates radically undemocratic agendas. The presence of Powell (and the African American brigadier general Vincent Brooks) confers legitimacy on the government's militarization of society, its control over much of the American media, its assault on civil liberties, and its opposition to historical inquiry through new restrictions on government documents.

Every so often educators lament young people's ignorance of American history. Today, the nation and the world are suffering the consequences of our society's unawareness of the history of America's relationship to the world, and to the Middle East. Our government's cynical policies in the past toward Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan have helped create the very fundamentalisms that now threaten the security of the world. But instead of pursuing a pragmatic foreign policy breaking with the flawed policies of the past, the U.S. seeks retribution against not only these regimes it once supported, but against their citizens as well. Here at home, civil liberties are under assault, with mass detentions and closed immigration hearings targeting people of Middle Eastern and Asian descent. It is highly unlikely that a more informed American public would support this war or these egregious violations of civil liberties so strongly, or so willingly sacrifice its sons and daughters.

The destruction of democracy and human rights at home and abroad is the cruelest mockery of the sacrifices of countless Americans throughout our history in the civil rights movement, and in just and unjust wars alike. But if the Bush administration has put American democracy to flight, the writer Arundati Roy has characterized the antiwar gatherings of millions of people in hundreds of cities as "the biggest display of public morality ever seen." For Roy, these demonstrations are evidence of the strength of an American civil society that rivals the power of the Bush regime.

I hope so. I don't question the importance of our challenging this unpopular war in every way possible – as citizen-protesters and as educators. But several crucial questions remain:

Can this public morality be translated into politics? Can Americans learn from the French and hold their nose to vote for a flawed candidate in order to drive the Bush administration from power? Can this civil society sustain itself to revive rights so egregiously violated? And finally, what can historians do to pick up the pieces of American democracy?