I've been an anti-imperialist, anti-war activist all my life. During the first Vietnam Moratorium, when I was about nine, I went with my mom to plant crosses on a local hill to represent our losses in the war. Around the same time I took a train across the country to lobby my congressmen and senators to oppose the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty -- which we saw as a way of locking in the US's numerical and technological advantage in nuclear arms, and thereby of making a US first strike on the Soviet Union more likely.
I still see ABM systems as an essentially offensive, not defensive, weapons system.
In middle school I joined an American Friends Service Committee youth group. We helped counsel returning Vietnam vets (along with doing social justice support work, like visiting migrant worker camps and promoting the UFW's grape and lettuce boycotts).
I went to civics class in sixth grade and boldly proclaimed "I am a pacifist." Gandhi and King were my heroes. I supported Allende's via chilena al socialismo.
More on the flip...
I dropped the pacifism in eighth grade. Maybe watching troopers from four different Florida police departments beat the living tar out of a man who had come to town to protest the 1972 Republican convention -- and who happened to be staying out of my house -- helped me realize that sometimes people really do have good reasons to want to fight back against oppression.
When the Sandinistas overthrew the brutal kleptocracy of the Somozas in 1979, even though all I knew about the country at the time was what I read in the papers, I accepted that a violent revolution could be one way to bring about positive social change. When Reagan came to office promising to reverse the Sandinista Revolution and to prevent similar revolutions from taking hold in other Central American countries, I worked to oppose him.
But I was an anti-war activist. I knew how to use anti-war rhetoric against imperialist wars, how to argue against the cost to innocent civilians overseas and the cost to the American treasury. Why should we bomb [dikes in Vietnam] [health clinics in Nicaragua] [an airport in Grenada] when our schools are crumbling here at home, there's an epidemic of homelessness, and addictive drugs are destroying our communities?
I didn't know that rhetoric's long tradition in American politics, that it went back at least as far as Mark Twain's and the first anti-imperialists' bitter rejection of McKinley's war in the Philippines, but I knew the rhetoric worked to challenge a president's power to wage overseas war.
I used it, because I wanted to stop those wars.
But here's the thing. I wasn't really anti-war in the 1980s. I supported the FSLN in Nicaragua and the FMLN in El Salvador. I wanted them to win, and to this day I am happy with the way those two movements succeeded in bringing down torture states in their respective countries and replacing them with functioning democracies. If they had succeeded in going the further step of creating socialist states, I would have been ok with that as well.
I did oppose the Iraq War, because it was a straight out imperialist war, fought for no other reason than to expand the power of the US in the Middle East and throughout the world. Though I never liked the Iraqi dictatorship the US overthrew in Iraq and I grieve today for the ongoing suffering of the Iraqi people, I am not uncomfortable with the fact the US lost that war.
The world would be a far darker place today if Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld had succeeded in their military adventure.
But I do not reflexively oppose the war in Afghanistan. In the first place, we actually have a legitimate reason to be there -- a sneak attack was launched on our country from theirs. Afghanistan is not, at core, an imperialist war, but rather it is in fact a defensive one.
Second, I would be very uncomfortable if the Taliban were to restore themselves to their former power. While they will undoubtedly have a role in whatever political compromises emerge out of the current conflict, allowing them to return to unchecked power would be an unmitigated disaster. Just as I will fight as hard as I can to prevent Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck to come to power in the United States, I must support efforts overseas to prevent similarly closed-minded and repressive political forces from exercising dictatorial power over their societies.
I would not support this war if we had not been attacked, nor if the people who attacked us were no longer still at large. But when I assess the president's strategy and approach to the Afghan War, there is nothing in it I can find objection to.
This is not an imperialist war.