Rebecca Gordon
It’s time to end America’s long march to disaster It’s been almost 20 years since 9/11, but military victory is more elusive than ever as the cost of endless war becomes increasingly unsustainable
I
t was the end of October 2001. Two friends, Max Elbaum and Bob Wing, had just dropped by. (Yes, children, believe it or not, people used to drop in on each other, maskless, once upon a time.) They had come to hang out with my partner Jan Adams and me. Among other things, Max wanted to get some instructions from fellow-runner Jan about taping his foot to ease the pain of plantar fasciitis. But it soon became clear that he and Bob had a bigger agenda for the evening. They were eager to recruit us for a new project. And so began War Times/ Tiempo de Guerras, a free, bilingual, antiwar tabloid that, at its height, distributed 100,000 copies every six weeks to more than 700 antiwar organisations around the
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country. It was already clear to the four of us that night – as it was to millions around the world – that the terrorist attacks of September 11 would provide the pretext for a major new projection of US military power globally, opening the way to a new era of “all-war-all-the-time.” War Times was a project of its moment (although the name would still be apt today, given that those wars have never ended). It would be superseded in a few years by the explosive growth of the Internet and the 24-hour news cycle. Still, it represented an early effort to fill the space where a peace movement would eventually develop. We were certainly right that the United States had entered a period of all-war-all-the-time. It’s probably
hard for people born since 9/11 to imagine how much – and how little – things changed after September 2001. By the end of that month, this country had already launched a “war” on an enemy that then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told us was “not
