[Needtoknow] With Weapons of the Will: How to topple Saddam Husse in—nonviolently.

[James O'Keefe]

I found this article ("With Weapons of the Will: How to topple Saddam Hussein—
nonviolently") from a reference to it in Wayne Woodlief's August 29th column in 
the Boston Herald ("Nation not ready to bomb Baghdad" - 
http://www2.bostonherald.com/news/columnists/wayne08292002.htm).

Peter Ackerman wrote "Strategic Nonviolent Conflict: The Dynamics of People 
Power in the Twentieth Century" with Christopher Kruegler.  It is the best 
analysis of strategic nonviolent action I have read and well worth a reading by 
Greens.  You can find a copy at:

new at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-
/0275939162/qid=1031242562/sr=12-3/002-8545077-1330423?v=glance&s=books

used at Alibris: http://www.alibris.com/search/search.cfm?
qwork=6375241&ptit=Strategic%20Nonviolent%20Conflict%3A%20The%20Dynamics%20of%
20People%20Power%20in%20the%20Twentieth%20Century&pauth=Ackerman%2C%
20Peter&pisbn=&pbest=19%2E94&pbestnew=1000000%
2E00&pqty=1&pqtynew=0&matches=1&qsort=r

Another source on nonviolent direct action is Training for Change 
(http://www.trainingforchange.org/).  I highly recommend George Lakey's 
article "Nonviolent Action as the Sword That Heals".  You can read it at; 
http://www.trainingforchange.org/reports/2001/sword-that-heals.html.  You can 
find more articles on nonviolent strategy at 
http://www.trainingforchange.org/reports/index.html.  Finally, Training for 
Change is working on a curriculum for a Nonviolent Peaceforce.  See "Human 
Shields, Third-Party Nonviolent Intervention & Training" at
http://www.trainingforchange.org/reports/2002/human-shields.html

Any way here is the article:

http://www.sojo.net/magazine/index.cfm/action/sojourners/issue/soj0209/article/0
20910.html

With Weapons of the Will
How to topple Saddam Hussein—nonviolently.
by Peter Ackerman and Jack DuVall
Sojourners Magazine, September-October 2002 (Vol. 31, No. 5, pp. 20-23)

Saddam Hussein has brutalized and repressed the Iraqi people for more than 20 
years and more recently has sought to acquire weapons of mass destruction that 
would never be useful to him inside Iraq. So President Bush is right to call 
him an international threat. Given these realities, anyone who opposes U.S. 
military action to dethrone him has a responsibility to suggest how he might 
otherwise be ushered out the backdoor of Baghdad. Fortunately there is an 
answer: civilian-based, nonviolent resistance by the Iraqi people, developed 
and applied in accordance with a strategy to undermine Saddam's basis of power.

Unfortunately, when this suggestion is made publicly, hard-nosed policymakers 
and most commentators dismiss the idea out of hand, saying that nonviolence 
won't work against a tyrant as pathological as Saddam. That is because they 
don't know how to distinguish between what has popularly been regarded 
as "nonviolence" and the strategic nonviolent action that has hammered 
authoritarian regimes to the point of defenestrating dictators and liberating 
people from many forms of subjugation.

The reality is that history-making nonviolent resistance is not usually 
undertaken as an act of moral display; it does not typically begin by putting 
flowers in gun barrels and it does not end when protesters disperse to go home. 
It involves the use of a panoply of forceful sanctions—strikes, boycotts, civil 
disobedience, disrupting the functions of government, even nonviolent sabotage—
in accordance with a strategy for undermining an oppressor's pillars of 
support. It is not about making a point, it's about taking power.

Another misconception about nonviolent resistance that policymakers and the 
media entertain is that there is some sort of inverse relationship between the 
degree of severity of a regime's repressive instincts and the likelihood of a 
civilian-based movement's success in overturning it. Three cases come to mind 
in illustrating that repression is not typically the decisive factor in the 
dynamics of these struggles.

First, during World War II the Danes gradually developed a broad popular 
nonviolent resistance to their German occupiers and—through actions such as 
cultural protests in the beginning and later general strikes—managed both to 
create the space in which to operate and to impose substantial costs on the 
Nazi regime for its decision to occupy the country. Even though the Germans 
were capable of more severe repression in Denmark than they chose to apply, the 
point is that there was a transactional relationship between the Germans and 
the Danes, and the Danes discovered that fact—and from that they derived the 
leverage to press their resistance.

An authoritarian ruler or military occupier wants certain services or benefits 
from the population, and those benefits can be withheld, albeit at a cost to 
those resisting. Ratcheting up repression does not necessarily work as a 
strategy to quell resisters, since when repression increases, more people are 
antagonized and join the resistance, and business as usual for the regime or 
occupier becomes even more costly to maintain. It's essential to understand 
that unless a regime wants to murder the entire population, its ability 
repressively to compel a population's compliance is not infinitely elastic.

This was illustrated in another case during World War II: the nonviolent public 
resistance of the Rosenstrasse wives in February-March 1943. Reacting to the 
internment of their Jewish husbands, hundreds of these non-Jewish wives and 
other civilians who supported them started daily sit-ins in front of the 
building at Rosenstrasse 2-4 where their husbands had been taken initially 
(many were soon shipped to the camps). SS soldiers shot into the air over their 
heads, shut down the nearest streetcar station, and tried to frighten them off, 
but they kept coming, their ranks swelling to a thousand. The Nazis were faced 
with a dilemma: To stop the protest, they could drag these women away and 
arrest them, or brutalize them in the streets—but the regime was concerned that 
that would inflame other Berliners, who would surely hear about what had 
happened. In a week Goebbels decided it was easier just to give them their 
husbands back, and he did so, transporting many back from the camps; 1,700 were 
set free.

Nonviolent resistance often confounds the assumption that the next degree of 
repressive pressure will somehow neutralize further resistance, because 
conflicts in which strategic nonviolent action is applied are not necessarily 
contests of physical force in all of their phases. The Nazis could have ended 
the Rosenstrasse protest on its first day, but they did not—they realized it 
was not really a physical problem. There was a political context: Killing Jews 
was one thing, but killing or even injuring non-Jewish German citizens, 
especially women, was quite another—it would tarnish their image (which is to 
say, potentially jeopardize the legitimacy of their domestic rule) at a 
vulnerable time, right after the German defeat at Stalingrad. The lesson: Their 
latitude for decision making was not automatically enlarged by their capacity 
for repression.

Another case that illustrates the importance of this question of legitimacy is 
that of Chile. No one doubted the willingness of Pinochet's regime, in the 
1970s and early 1980s, to use terror as an instrument of repression in order to 
assure the regime's control: Disappearances, brutal killings of dissidents, and 
arbitrary arrests had silenced most dissenters. But once that silence was 
broken in 1983 in a way that the regime could not immediately suppress—through 
a one-day nationwide slow-down, followed by a nighttime city-wide banging of 
pots and pans in Santiago—the regime was no longer able to re-establish the 
same degree of fear in the population, and mammoth monthly protests were soon 
under way.

After it was clear that a broad cross-section of the population opposed the 
regime, Pinochet felt compelled to reassert its legitimacy, and so he went 
ahead with a scheduled referendum on his continued rule which, thanks to 
internationally supported poll watching and extraordinary grass roots 
organizing, he lost. Then his impulse to crack down was blocked when his senior 
military chiefs made it clear that they would refuse his orders to do so. What 
had happened? A seemingly innocuous protest had compromised the regime's 
ability to rule by intimidation, allowing the democratic opposition to organize 
and eventually capture a higher legitimacy, splitting the ranks of the 
dictator's supporters.

WHILE IT MAY well be true that Saddam's rule has been as brutal as that of any 
dictator since Stalin, he is not, unlike the Russian tyrant, supported by an 
entrenched party system that can claim a higher ideological purpose. His hold 
on power is even more reliant on personal loyalties and their reinforcement by 
material rewards and mortal penalties. As such, the frequent reports of his 
repression should be seen not only as a sign of his brutality, but as evidence 
of the disaffection that his capricious, personal style continues to breed: He 
would not have to crack down if there were no one who might be disloyal.

If a military invading force attempts to shoot its way to Saddam, it must 
necessarily shoot first at all those military and security units deployed 
around him—and, if they are threatened with death, they will shoot back. Thus 
the horrendous fighting in or around Baghdad that we know the Joint Chiefs has 
advised the president would be extremely costly in the event of U.S. military 
invasion.

But if instead a campaign against Saddam began with civilian-based incidents of 
disruption that were dispersed around the country and that did not offer 
convenient targets to shoot at, any attempt to crack down would have to depend 
on the outermost, least reliable members of Saddam's repressive apparatus. If 
the resistance made it clear to police and soldiers that they were not viewed 
as the enemy, and even if resisters were at first only a nuisance—mosquitoes 
that could not all be swatted—the realization that Saddam was being opposed 
openly would begin almost immediately to lessen the fear of engaging in 
further, more systematic acts of resistance. As opposition became more serious 
or visible, this would offer to dissenting elements within the regime a place 
to which to defect, once events reached a crescendo.

A few years ago, in the holy city of Karbala, when tens of thousands of Muslims 
gathered for an annual religious occasion, the regime sent in troops because it 
feared disorder or an uprising. But they were so badly outnumbered by the 
civilians who came that they were effectively encircled—a graphic display of 
the limitations on Saddam's repressive apparatus if it were constrained to 
respond to incidents in all directions from Baghdad.

Earlier this year, a leading nonviolent Iraqi oppositionist expressed 
exasperation that the Bush administration appeared to be considering every 
possible military strategy for regime change without realizing "that 22 million 
Iraqis detest Saddam Hussein" and that they represent an enormous potential 
resource in ungluing critical levers of his control. At a recent conference on 
the future of democracy, another Iraqi oppositionist stood up and reminded 
other, more skeptical Iraqis in the room that Saddam's regime cannot function 
without oil revenues, and there is a limited number of civilian oil workers 
who, if they were to abandon their jobs, could create a crisis by themselves. 
If Saddam starts shooting oil workers or workers at electrical utility 
installations, how would that keep the oil fields running or the power flowing 
to his palaces and prisons? 

AT THE MOMENT a nonviolent movement begins, most observers think that success 
is impossible, because most people can only see the costs of resisting instead 
of the costs that resisters can impose on those who maintain the existing 
system. The oppressive rulers who have been brought down by nonviolent 
movements—whether they were generals in Latin America, Ferdinand Marcos in the 
Philippines, or Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia—did not tolerate a degree of 
dissent or refrain from murdering all opponents because they were softer 
adversaries than Stalin would have been or Saddam is now. These were all 
dictatorial regimes, meaning that openness was tolerated only as necessary to 
maintain the facade of internal or external legitimacy, or because suppressing 
it would have been too costly. And the Raj in India was not the exception that 
proves the rule, unless you think that the massacre at Amritsar or the killings 
at Dharasana were merely unfortunate lapses in English manners.

The reflexive assumption that nonviolent action has structural limitations 
related to a regime's character is in part the product of three generations of 
stereotyping this strategy as a moral preference or a form of ethical behavior. 
Most preachers of "nonviolence"—by insisting that nonviolent action triumphs 
when the opponent witnesses the suffering or hears resisters' messages and is 
persuaded to relent—have unwittingly reinforced the belief that power cannot be 
taken from rulers who are willing to use superior military force. That isn't 
the way nonviolent resistance has usually worked.

Regimes have been overthrown that had no compunction about brutalizing their 
opponents and denying them the right to speak their minds. How? By first 
demonstrating that opposition is possible, peeling away the regime's residual 
public and outside support, quashing its legitimacy, driving up the costs of 
maintaining control, and overextending its repressive apparatus. Strategic 
nonviolent action is not about being nice to your oppressor, much less having 
to rely on his niceness. It's about dissolving the foundations of his power and 
forcing him out. It is possible in Iraq.

Peter Ackerman and Jack DuVall are co-authors of A Force More Powerful: A 
Century of Nonviolent Conflict, the companion book to the PBS documentary of 
the same name, of which DuVall was executive producer. Ackerman is chair of the 
board of overseers of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts 
University and DuVall is director of the International Center on Nonviolent 
Conflict.