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She taps a reservoir of hope that inspections can still work
Voices: The antiwar switchboard
When the history of the current antiwar movement is written, the name Joan Blades will surely be among its pages.
She and her husband, Wes Boyd, are the founders of MoveOn.org, a website with a staff of six and more than 1.6 million members. On a daily basis, she is in a position to influence one of the antiwar movement's key lobbying constituencies - average Americans.
"Our approach [to opposing war] is very mainstream, sensible: Let's do the right thing," says Ms. Blades. "The right thing in my mind is to look for the diplomatic solution, to work with the world community. I think we will make the world a more dangerous place for ourselves and everyone else if we condone preemptive strikes."
She draws on her professional training to reach that conclusion. "I'm an attorney," she says, "so I think precedents are important."
That other countries could follow the US example troubles her - particularly when she reads in newspapers and political speeches that the government hasn't ruled out using nuclear weapons when defending the nation.
"Wars can spin out of control. No matter how powerful we are, we can't control all the forces at work in the Middle East," she says.
Blades, who remembers marching in a Vietnam War protest when she was 15, brought her website into the antiwar effort last August in order to help dispel the myth that most people supported the war.
"What makes MoveOn so powerful," she says, "is it gives very conventional ways of communicating with the world to these people who are very mainstream America."
MoveOn was started in the late 1990s, when the married duo - Silicon Valley entrepreneurs - thought Congress was spending too much time on the impeachment of President Bill Clinton.
Their role as chief networker for the antiwar movement was set in motion when they joined forces early last year with a 22-year-old New Yorker, Eli Pariser, who had successfully launched a petition of his own urging a peaceful response after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Blades doesn't like to think too much about what will happen if America goes to war. She says the website will still be an active part of the discussion, but she doesn't know how.
If that time comes, she says, "I will feel like we did everything humanly possible to communicate with our leadership [in Washington] in a responsible and clear fashion. And I am proud of that."
For now, she chooses to concentrate on exhausting all the diplomatic avenues available, "to see that inspections are still a successful solution. That's my goal."
An activist and historian counts the human toll of war
Voices: Champion of the little guy
Howard Zinn frames his opposition to a war with Iraq in terms of the casualties.
"I believe that people who die in wars, whether they are civilians or soldiers, are innocent," the historian and activist told an audience last week at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. "A lot of innocent people will die in this war."
Mr. Zinn's focus on the human toll of an attack is not surprising, given his interest in telling American history from the bottom up, from the view of the factory workers, women, and minorities - not the officials - who lived through it.
Politically, Zinn stands to the left of the left. His recent UMass talk, for example, was sponsored by the on-campus International Socialist Club. But his bestselling "A People's History of the United States," first published more than 20 years ago, is regularly assigned in college classes across the nation. That and a long tradition of activism ensure that his name is well-known among a significant segment of the antiwar movement.
Zinn starts from the perspective that wars never solve fundamental problems, "that war by its nature has unpredictable consequences. That the means of war are inevitably horrible and ends of war are always uncertain."
He is not dissuaded by the argument that more Iraqis could die if Saddam Hussein remains in power. "That is a permanent argument for any atrocity," he says. "The only way you can justify something which is obviously atrocious is by claiming that it will prevent something that is more atrocious."
Mr. Hussein is a tyrant and is tyrannizing his own people, Zinn says, "but that's true of many, many places in the world."
Zinn, a bombardier in World War II, who later became an antiwar activist, is not a pacifist. "I don't argue for an absolute stance against the use of violence or military action," he says. "But I place very rigorous barriers against military action."
He proposes, rather, a solution that he believes would reduce the dangers of terrorism against the US. He wants America to stop being a military superpower, to pull its forces out of countries all over the world, and not antagonize people.
He's probably among a small minority who think bombing Afghanis-tan was not the appropriate response to the Sept. 11 attacks. The US is no safer from terrorism, argues the professor emeritus from Boston University. Any thwarting of the terrorist network is offset by "the increased number of people hostile to the United States as a result of its policy."
To win the war on terror, he says, the US needs to get at the roots of that hostility. "If it doesn't do that, no military action ... is going to have any effect in diminishing terrorism."
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