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.
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DuVall, Jack
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