Foreign Policy In Focus

It is eerily fitting that George McGovern's passing occurred in the final heat of a furious election campaign, precariously balanced between Republocrats and Democlicans, two corporately owned political parties.

The corporate media can try to fan the public pulse with staged debates and meaningless news of polls and money raised. But it's apparent that on issues from corporate welfare to labor rights, from the vast military-industry complex, to the rape of the Earth, there's merely, at best, a dime's worth of difference between the two parties.

George McGovern's failed 1972 presidential bid was significant because it was born on the wings of a vast grassroots conspiracy of campaigners. Long before the Internet emerged, these assiduous organizers phoned, canvassed, went door to door, and ran slates of delegates to the Democratic convention. It was the last gasp of an attempt to reclaim the Democratic Party for women, youth, gays, blacks, liberals, and other progressive Americans.

This push for real democracy started in 1968 with Eugene McCarthy's candidacy to end the war in Vietnam. It suffered severe blows at Mayor Richard J. Daley's Chicago Democratic convention in the form of ugly police brutality against students and youth protesting the war in Vietnam and the fixing of convention rules to favor the party bosses.

With renewed determination, the New Democratic Coalition was formed across America in 1968. It aimed to change the rules of the party and capture the 1972 nomination for a peace candidate who would finally end the war in Vietnam and address civil rights, poverty, human rights, and true national security — the liberal progressive agenda.

When George McGovern announced his candidacy, he promised to address our issues. He also pledged to reform the rules of the nominating process, which had utterly failed to reflect the support that Eugene McCarthy had garnered in the primaries leading up to the 1968 Chicago convention.

I went up and down my block in Massapequa, Long Island, as part of an army of canvassers to ensure that those who supported us voted in the Democratic primary. The establishment media rarely reported on our work. They predicted that Edmund Muskie would be the nominee. What a great surprise when our elected delegates showed up at the Miami Convention in 1972 with youth, women, blacks, Latinos, gays — a broad swath of progressive America — to nominate George McGovern!

The energy was electric as movie stars mingled with peace activists, civil rights workers, women's libbers, the gay community, and activists of every other shade and stripe. By capturing the nomination we thought we'd proved that the political process worked.

What an awful letdown, then, to see how the establishment fought back. The mainstream media never wrote about McGovern's forward looking platform for peace and prosperity and hounded him for choosing Senator Thomas Eagleton of Missouri to run as his running mate who was later discovered to have been hospitalized for a bipolar episode many years earlier. Although McGovern replaced Eagleton with Sargent Shriver, the press was relentlessly opposed to his platform and never reported on his WWII fighter pilot record, his outstanding values, or his creative ideas for ending poverty in America and ending the Vietnam War. They tarred him as a "hippie", tainted by his supporters. He won only Massachusetts and Washington, DC.

The establishment has guarded against a true people's choice like this ever since. We've never had another nominating process conducted as openly and democratically as the one that nominated George McGovern. Today, events are carefully staged-managed, designed not to upset corporate sponsors, and filtered through the corporate media, with Americans left in the dark.

McGovern's nomination was a shining moment for a democratic political process and also, sadly, a signal to the enemies of democracy to close ranks and do everything in their power to never allow it to happen again.

Alice Slater is a founder of Abolition 2000, working for a treaty to ban nuclear weapons. www.abolition2000.org

Though a supporter of Israel's right to exist, George McGovern also became an outspoken opponent of its human rights abuses.

Though former senator and 1972 Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern, who died Sunday at age 90, was best known for his opposition to the Vietnam War and his efforts in fighting world hunger, he also made a mark regarding U.S. Middle East policy.

Like many liberals of his generation, he had a strong attachment to Israel as the national homeland for the Jewish people returning to the lands of their forefathers to escape centuries of oppression. It was only later in his Senate career, in 1975, when asked by Foreign Relationship chairman J. William Fulbright to chair the Middle East subcommittee, did he learn about the plight of the Palestinians. He became a strong supporter of a two-state solution at a time when the Democratic Party was on record opposing Palestinian statehood and emerged as an outspoken opponent of Israeli human rights abuses and other violations of international law while maintaining his steadfast support for Israel’s right to exist in peace and security. 

He emphasized that, as a friend of Israel, he was obliged to do what a real friend must do when they see someone behaving in ways that are both immoral and threaten their own self-interest:  tell them to stop.

His support for international law and self-determination was rooted in his taking part in the war on fascism. In his foreword to my most recent book, which analyzes the Moroccan occupation of Western Sahara, he noted how that experience helped teach him that the right of self-determination “is one of the most fundamental rights of all” and that “no government should get away with denying that right by invading, occupying and annexing another national and oppressing its people.” He faulted successive administrations of both parties for failing to uphold such fundamental principles of international law.

His interest in Middle Eastern affairs led him to become president of the Middle East Policy Council in 1991, a non-profit group based in Washington addressing political, economic and security issues in the region impacting the United States. In a 1993 interview I did with him for The Progressive magazine which took place while we were both visiting Damascus, he observed, “What I'm picking up now in my travels is a feeling that… a new form of imperialism is now operating in the Middle East. We may not have any colonies as did previous Western powers, but there is a belief that many of the ruling regimes are somehow tied in to the West in a way that does not enhance the well-being of the ordinary citizen. I think we're headed for trouble if that perception prevails, particularly since there is a lot of truth behind it.”

He presciently added, “These Arab regimes are going to have to become more sensitive to the problems of their own people. This is what this Muslim extremism is all about: It's a kind of desperate move by people who do not know how to get the attention of the ruling regimes any other way but to shake them up with extremist, radical, and sometimes violent methods.”

McGovern later became an outspoken critic of the Iraq War, comparing it to the tragedy of Vietnam.  In 2006, he wrote Out of Iraq: A Practical Plan for Withdrawal Now, which helped a number of Democrats who had been too timid to speak out against the war previously to become bolder. In a Washington Post op-ed in January 2008, McGovern – arguing that “Nixon was bad [but] these guys are worse” – called for the impeachment of President Bush and Vice-president Cheney over their violations of the U.S. constitution and of national and international law, and their repeated lies to the American people.  Speaker of the House and Democratic Congressional leader Nancy Pelosi, however, dismissed such calls for impeachment as “off the table.”

McGovern also expressed concern about the bipartisan threats of war against Iran and the hypocrisy in U.S. nonproliferation policy. In 2006, George and I wrote an op-ed for the San Jose Mercury News criticizing the Bush administration for signing a nuclear cooperation agreement with India.  We argued, “How can we have any credibility in trying to block Iran's nuclear program, which is still many years away from weapons capability, when we are supporting the nuclear program of a neighboring country which has already developed a dangerous nuclear arsenal? Maintaining such flagrant double-standards regarding nuclear proliferation is simply not worthy of a country which asserts the right to global leadership.”

It is disappointing to see so many of today’s otherwise liberal Democrats taking belligerent stances towards Iran and allying with Israel’s right-wing government by defending its occupation policies and other violations of international humanitarian law. 

It is important to realize that McGovern – despite representing an under-populated state in the Great Plains – became such a prominent voice in foreign policy not just because of his many qualities, but because there were movements that magnified that voice. Ultimately, then, it is up to us to make possible the emergence of political leaders who will challenge both the Republicans and the Democratic establishment on the Middle East, as McGovern did on Southeast Asia.