Some wars become signposts for history. Our high school history books tell us that the Revolutionary War created the United States, and the Civil War was fought to undo the original sin of slavery. The First World War illustrated the failure of European imperial politics; the Second World War anointed the United States as the leader of the free world and the underwriter for global security. Beyond these four prominent examples, most Americans would have trouble remembering or explaining many of America’s numerous other wars. How many Americans remember that the United States victory in the 1898 Spanish-American War led to a 3-year war of occupation in the Philippines and then a longer military conflict known as the Moro Rebellion, which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in that country? How many are aware that the US government has invaded various Caribbean nations, such as Cuba (five times) and the Dominican Republic (four times)?
It is for that reason that a book like Our Grief is not a Cry for War: The Movement to Stop the War on Terror by Jeremy Varon is so important. Already, Americans are starting to forget the long and complicated military action known as the War on Terror, which includes the occupation of both Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as smaller armed conflicts around the world. The noted television personality and commentator Bill Maher noted the irony of the outcry over the Afghanistan withdrawal. Most people had simply forgotten that the United States was still an occupying force in that country.
Our Grief is not a Cry for War pushes in the opposite direction. It forces us to remember the War on Terror and to think about the people who spent a significant part of their lives organizing against the war. This thoroughly researched and well-written history gives us a blow-by-blow narrative about the rise and fall of antiwar activism in the United States from the days after 9/11 to the Iraq withdrawal, which began in 2007 and lasted for years.
Varon’s book has a very intuitive approach. It starts with the response of the progressive Left to 9/11, then transitions to the forthcoming invasion of Iraq in 2002. The narrative then focuses in detail on the arguments made against the 2003 Iraq invasion and the constant mobilization against that war during the rest of the Bush administration. The book ends in the early Obama era, when the new Democratic administration began to withdraw troops in a piecemeal fashion.
The most important message that the book conveys is futility, which might be expected given the nature of peace activism. A theme that emerges in various chapters is that the larger public and the political leadership simply did not heed, or even recognize, the efforts or messages of antiwar activists. Chapter 10 addresses George W. Bush’s re-election in 2004. Flustered by his popularity, a common retort was “Sorry, we tried.” Despite years of organizing mass demonstrations that asserted that the Bush administration misled the American public, Bush was handily re-elected.
Later chapters address another issue: exhaustion. Even though the public did eventually come to agree with the antiwar movement, they did so slowly, and it was not clear that the public turned because of the demonstrations. Rather, the costs of war were high, and other issues, such as the Great Recession of 2008, competed with the war for public attention.
Varon’s book will likely become one of the standard references on the social history of antiwar activism, and deservedly so. His story of the movement’s emergence after 9/11 and its demobilization during the Obama administration is deftly written, amply documented, and of lasting value to American historians and social scientists who study activism.
Even though this is an important book, some of its narrative can be critiqued. Here, I’ll focus on one issue: understanding the influence of the antiwar movement on public opinion and shifts in policy. There are some sections of the book that suggest that mobilizing around sympathetic legislators and policymakers was crucial in starting to slow down the war, such as the passages in chapter 12 that address the rise of legislative antiwar groups.
My own view of this is different. In general, peace movements have great difficulty in trying to persuade the public to oppose a war. Legislators simply cannot or will not move until the public goes first, and the appearance of activist groups does not alter this basic calculus. A standard argument in political psychology is that wars encourage people to support political leaders—the famed “rallying around the flag effect.” Later researchers have expanded on this argument. Economists Chris Coyne and Abigail Hall argue in Manufacturing Militarism: U.S. Government Propaganda in the War on Terror (2021) that public opinion often follows a predictable pattern. There is an initial wave of excitement for a military campaign, then a gradual erosion of support over the course of a few years.
Polling in the Iraq War shows a similar pattern. Pew Research reports that about 70% of survey respondents said invading Iraq was the right decision, which declined to 43% by 2008 and stayed at that level for years (e.g., see Carrol Doherty and Jocelyn Kiley’s March 2023 piece for the Pew Research Centre, “A Look Back at How Fear and False Beliefs Bolstered U.S. Public Support for War in Iraq”). This timing is important to note. The peak of antiwar mobilization, as measured by things like crowd-size estimates, seems to be between 2003 and 2005, when “The World Says No to War” mobilization defined the movement. Still, after the crowds diminished, the war’s popularity continued to fall, indicating that the decline was occurring independently of activism.
I would also add a small cautionary note in terms of understanding the nature of the US intervention in Iraq and how it relates to the antiwar movement. Often, writers may take popular narratives about state policy for granted. In this case, there are points in the text where Varon points to a sharp shift between the Bush and Obama administrations, when the picture is more complex. Indeed, Obama had long been a critic of the Iraq War. It is also true that it was the Bush administration that, under pressure, initiated the US-Iraq Status of Forces Agreement in 2008 and that the Obama administration pressured the Iraqi government to retain some forces for many years. Furthermore, Obama vastly expanded the war in Afghanistan while gradually curtailing the war in Iraq. As Varon’s book notes, Democrats themselves were divided over how fast to withdraw from Iraq. The conclusion I take from this complex landscape is that the antiwar movement was best understood as one participant in a complicated coalition of actors allied with the Democratic Party, who were responding to a quickly changing and sometimes contradictory policy landscape.
I critique Our Grief Is Not a Cry for War on some important interpretive points, but readers interested in early twenty-first-century American politics will find this book to be highly valuable and well worth reading. There are very few scholarly sources that will provide in-depth analyses of the two key antiwar coalitions, United for Peace and Justice and International ANSWER. Other strong points of the book include discussions of how peace activists brought their argument to Iraq and a thorough review of what the nascent antiwar movement did in the very first days after 9/11. I hope that this book will help scholars and the broader public remember the War on Terror and its impacts on American society.
