Fitting Predictable Historical Pattern, Anti-War Activists Who Warned About Militarized Response to 9/11 Were Demonized and Blacklisted

At the May 26, 2026, Rage Against the War Machine rally, Joe Kent, a former top counterterrorism adviser and CIA paramilitary officer, denounced the war on Iran as a war driven by Israel and rooted in lies, along with other speakers like former Fox News host Tucker Carlson who had at one time supported Donald Trump and the MAGA movement.

The Rage Against the Machine rally was indicative of the growing disaffection with the War on Terror among wide swaths of the public and of a major shift in the Republican Party, which a quarter century earlier had been at the forefront in supporting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Jeremy Varon’s Our Grief Is Not a Cry for War: The Movement to Stop the War on Terror provides the first comprehensive history of the movement to oppose the War on Terror, which he shows was rooted initially on the political left.

Varon is a history professor at The New School in New York City who has written previous books on the Weather Underground and on Jewish students in post-war Germany.

While many today would view them as prophetic, the people who spoke out against a militarized response to 9/11 in the aftermath of the attacks were voices in the wilderness at the time who were blacklisted and smeared.

On September 13, 91% of Americans approved George W. Bush’s response to 9/11, with 77% supporting military action; a week later a Pew Research poll had 82% of the public favoring “robust military action, including ground troops.” Just 9% opposed a war.^[1]

Even traditionally anti-war publications like The Nation published articles supporting the war in Afghanistan, which renowned Princeton University Professor Richard Falk said “qualifies in my understanding as the first truly just [U.S.] war since World War II.”^[2]

The Nation writer Katha Pollitt lit into protesters after attending a peace rally by suggesting that they presented “no credible alternative to war…Osama bin Laden is not likely to mail himself to the International Criminal Court.”^[3]

Varon notes that Falk and Pollitt’s thinking offered a window into why opposition to the Afghan War was so small at first—even among veterans of the anti-Vietnam War movement and anti-nuclear weapons and Central America solidarity campaigns of the 1980s.

Unlike the Vietcong or Sandinistas, few people had any sympathy for the Taliban or Iraqi or other Middle-Eastern resistance movements and travel to the region on solidarity missions was hazardous and potentially deadly. The jingoistic climate following the 9/11 attacks and collective trauma in the face of those attacks was also salient.

Immediately after 9/11, only a few organizations advocated for a non-violent approach. Among them was the War Resisters League, which issued a statement on the night of 9/11 that expressed sympathy for the victims of 9/11 but noted that American militarism had caused “millions of deaths” from Vietnam to Iraq, and that U.S. support for “armed resistance to the Soviets in Afghanistan had resulted in “the victory of the Taliban and the creation of Osama bin Laden.” The War Resisters League went on to call for the U.S. to seek “alternatives to violence” in responding to the attacks “in a spirit of reconciliation not revenge.”^[4]

This viewpoint was similar to one advanced by MIT linguist Noam Chomsky, an intellectual hero of the 1960s New Left movement who was branded on the right as a “treacherous intellectual” and “the Ayatollah of anti-American hate.”^[5]

Andrew Sullivan, in the once liberal New Republic, called Susan Sontag, who had published an essay in The New Yorker comparing 9/11 to atrocities committed by the U.S., an “ally of evil.”

Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter complained that “the same people urging us not to blame the victim in rape cases are now saying that Uncle Sam wore a short skirt and asked for it.”^[6]

This kind of attitude was synonymous with what Varon calls a “surging patriotism” that helped poison the political climate.

The post 9/11 climate was not too dissimilar to that during World War I, when Woodrow Wilson’s propaganda campaign whipped up anti-German hysteria after Germany was blamed for attacking the Lusitania ship, and to the climate after Pearl Harbor, when the lone person to vote against war in Congress, Jeannette Rankin, was called “Japanette Rankin” and accused of disloyalty.^[7]

The only legislator to vote against the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) signed into law on September 18, 2001, was Barbara Lee (D-CA), who was flooded with emails calling her a “traitor, coward and communist.”^[8] The AUMF provided justification for endless bombing and wars throughout the Middle East for the next quarter century.

One of Lee’s few institutional allies in Washington was the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), a left-wing think tank that issued a statement titled “Justice, Not Vengeance,” which insisted that a military response to 9/11 would “spark a cycle of escalating violence, the loss of innocent lives, and new acts of terrorism.”^[9]

Bay Area radicals Bob Wing and Max Elbaum wrote a similar statement warning that the War on Terror would parallel the Cold War in reaching into every aspect of economic, social, political and cultural life and could easily spin out of control, leading to a human disaster.^[10]

Unfortunately, this latter prediction has come to pass, though at the time Wing and Elbaum were well outside the mainstream of public opinion.

Media coverage of the early protests against the Afghan War was highly negative. The New York Times published an article characteristically titled “Protesters in Washington Urge Peace With Terrorists,” which quoted former President Bill Clinton saying that al-Qaeda would not permit the right to protest enjoyed in America.^[11]

In the Los Angeles Times, Marc Cooper wrote that an anti-war gathering seemed to him a “robotic rent-a-demonstration,” with speakers suggesting that “America somehow invited 9/11.”^[12]

Liza Featherstone in The Nation, meanwhile, warned of the takeover of the anti-war movement by what she called the “far left.” The anti-war ANSWER Coalition functioned in her telling as a “front group assembled by the International Action Center (IAC), in turn a front for the Workers World Party, which is justly reviled for supporting [Serbia’s] Slobodan Milosevic, among other gruesome dictators.”^[13]

Founded on September 14, 2001, ANSWER stood for Act Now to Stop War and End Racism. Rooted in the old socialist left, it was co-founded by Brian Becker, a long-time activist who was suspended from high school for supporting Muhammad Ali’s fight against the draft.^[14]

The International Action Center (IAC) is a New York-based organization co-founded by former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, who was at one time a lawyer for Slobodan Milošević and Saddam Hussein and had strongly opposed the U.S. bombing of Serbia, Panama and Iraq, and wrote a powerful book condemning the 1991 Persian Gulf War after visiting Iraq.^[15]

The Catholic Worker Movement, which saw action in the service of justice as being at the heart of Christ’s teachings, was another important anti-war group that organized a walk for healing and peace from the Pentagon to New York City in which 9/11 family members participated.^[16]

Kathy Kelly, who had gone on a hunger strike to protest murderous U.S. sanctions in Iraq after the 1^st Persian Gulf War, was part of a small group of Catholic Worker activists who went to Peshawar, Pakistan, to connect with the Afghan victims of U.S. bombing. Later, Kelly also met with victims of U.S. bombings in Iraq.

Kelly was joined in Peshawar by Medea Benjamin, a rebellious Jewish girl from Long Island who had organized classmates against the Vietnam War in high school and traveled the globe promoting human rights and economic justice after co-founding Global Exchange in 1988.^[17]

Benjamin and Kelly were especially saddened by their encounter with a 13-year-old girl—the same age as one of Medea’s daughters—whose mother had been killed by a U.S. bomb. In November 2002, Medea co-founded CodePink, which helped organize protests against the Iraq War.^[18]

In October 2002, as the build-up to the Iraq War was taking place, ANSWER organized a demonstration in Washington that attracted more than 100,000 people—the largest protest in U.S. history before a war had started (the Vietnam War protests only became large two years after the major escalation of the war by the Johnson administration).

Disappointingly, Democratic Party leaders in the progressive wing, like Bernie Sanders and Barbara Lee, were no shows to the protest, prompting Becker to call the party “gutless.” The only congressional member who attended was Georgia Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney.^[19]

Todd Gitlin, a former head of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the 1960s campus anti-war group, was among those to criticize ANSWER’s opposition to Iraq sanctions, claiming that “the moment cries out for a smart, extensive, inclusive popular movement.”

Journalist David Corn claimed, like Liza Featherstone, that ANSWER speakers were “often really Workers World Party members, duping fellow protesters in age-old communist fashion.”^[20]

This attitude harked back to that of Cold War liberals who took pains to distance themselves from the radical left and helped prevent the coalition building between liberals and radicals that was needed to effectively challenge the corporate interests driving the War on Terror.

The anti-war movement reached its zenith on February 15, 2003, where between 15 and 30 million people demonstrated worldwide against the build-up to war in Iraq.

In New York, the marquee speakers for a huge protest were drawn from the Black freedom movement and included Martin Luther King III, Al Sharpton, Angela Davis, NAACP Chairman Julian Bond and actors Danny Glover and Harry Belafonte who proclaimed that, unlike the nation’s leaders, “we stand for peace…were my friend Dr. King alive today he would smile because we will make a difference.”^[21]

Varon notes that most of the protesters were highly educated and came from the left end of the ideological spectrum.^[22] Researchers Michael Heaney and Fabio Rojas polled thousands of demonstrators between 2004 and 2006 and found that 40% described themselves as Democrats, 39% had no party affiliation, and 20% backed third parties; fewer than 2% were Republicans.^[23]

As the war dragged on, one of the most poignant protests was led by Cindy Sheehan, whose son Casey was killed serving with the U.S. military in Iraq. Sheehan and Gold Star Families for Peace along with CodePink set up an encampment outside George W. Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas, that attracted hundreds of visitors and wide media attention.^[24]

Some of these visitors were members of Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW), which held hearings to broadcast U.S. war crimes that were modeled after the Winter Soldier hearings set up by Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) in the early 1970s.^[25]

Despite the large number of protests and discrediting of the official pretexts for the war, Congress continued to fund military appropriations for Iraq.

Legislators feared that they would be denounced as unpatriotic if they withdrew support. They were also tied to the military-industrial-Wall Street-oil industry complex that profited from the War on Terror and expansion of the U.S. military presence in the Middle East.

At the end of the book, Varon makes clear that the partisan nature of the anti-war movement and its failure to embrace a systemic critique of U.S. capitalism and imperialism ensured that the movement did not endure.

In 2008, many people channeled their activist energies into electing Barack Obama, who promised to be a candidate of change but had a hidden CIA background and perpetuated the War on Terror, albeit in a less heavy-handed manner than Bush.^[26]

Obama’s status as the first African-American president, combined with his favoring more covert approaches to military intervention, was a pivotal factor resulting in the implosion of the anti-war movement during his presidency.

The retreat of many on the left—some of whom embraced the Russia-Gate hoax and Ukraine War in the late 2010s and supported war-mongering Democratic Party politicians like Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris—helped to create a political vacuum for anti-war organizing that was filled by the right.

Many principled anti-war people now see right-wing politicians like Thomas Massie and Rand Paul as more authentic champions of their cause than any left-wing counterparts because Massie and Paul have been most consistent in opposing endless wars over the last decade. Democratic Party progressives like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, by contrast, largely only oppose wars started by Republicans and favor the ones advanced by Democrats, like Ukraine, Libya and Syria.

Overall, Varon’s book provides a good history of the movement against the War on Terror in its first decade, which, it is hoped, will provide material for history textbooks that traditionally leave out anti-war voices.

One shortcoming is Varon’s failure to discuss the 9/11 Truth Movement and how the contempt displayed toward it by dominant elements in the anti-war movement may have set back the latter’s cause since many Americans were skeptical about the credibility of the government narrative surrounding 9/11—for good reason as a wealth of new research makes clear—and could have been drawn into the movement against the War on Terror.^[27]

The irony that anti-war activists who faced public shaming and blacklisting would engage in the same practices against those branded as “conspiracy theorists” is worth pointing out as a cautionary lesson for progressive activists who should try to educate people about the pattern of covert false-flag operations in U.S. history and how they are used to build public support for war.

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1. 
   

   Jeremy Varon, Our Grief Is Not a Cry for War: The Movement to Stop the War on Terror (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2025), 29. ↑

   
   
2. 
   

   Ibid., 46. Gradually Falk, who is well known in anti-war circles for his activism and writing against the Vietnam War and Israeli mistreatment of Palestinians and the Gaza holocaust, came around to an anti-war position on Afghanistan. ↑

   
   
3. 
   

   Varon, Our Grief Is Not a Cry for War, 47. ↑

   
   
4. 
   

   Varon, Our Grief Is Not a Cry for War, 7. The War Resisters League statement is excellent except in its assumption that bin Laden was the culprit behind 9/11, which it could not have definitively known so soon after the attacks. ↑

   
   
5. 
   

   Ibid., 21, 24. The negative statements about Chomsky came from David Horowitz, a former editor of Ramparts magazine who turned into an arch-conservative in the 1980s and came to specialize in attacking the left viciously. ↑

   
   
6. 
   

   Varon, Our Grief Is Not a Cry for War, 23. Varon discusses an incident where Fox News host Bill O’Reilly pulled the microphone from guest Sam Husseini after telling him “if you’re gonna justify [9/11] with past atrocities, I’m gonna pull [the] plug on you.” ↑

   
   
7. 
   

   Comparisons can further be made with the post-World War II Red Scare and Korean War when dissenters were sometimes physically attacked. ↑

   
   
8. 
   

   Varon, Our Grief Is Not a Cry for War, 39. ↑

   
   
9. 
   

   Idem. The IPS statement was endorsed by progressive icons like Rosa Parks, Ossie Davis, Barbara Ehrenreich and Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. ↑

   
   
10. 
    

    Varon, Our Grief Is Not a Cry for War, 43. Wing had been active in the Berkeley anti-Vietnam War protest movement and Elbaum had become a self-described revolutionary while a student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. ↑

    
    
11. 
    

    Varon, Our Grief Is Not a Cry for War, 67, 78. ↑

    
    
12. 
    

    Ibid., 67. ↑

    
    
13. 
    

    Idem. ↑

    
    
14. 
    

    Ibid., 69. ANSWER was associated with the Party for Socialism and Liberation. United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ) was another major organizer of antiwar protests in the 2000s and 2010s. It was headed by long-time activist Leslie Cagan. ↑

    
    
15. 
    

    Varon, Our Grief Is Not a Cry for War, 69. ↑

    
    
16. 
    

    Ibid., 83. ↑

    
    
17. 
    

    Ibid., 87. ↑

    
    
18. 
    

    Ibid., 121. Jodie Evans was also a co-founder of CodePink. She had started her activist career in the early 1970s when she was working as a maid in a Las Vegas hotel while still a teenager and helped to organize other maids to fight for a living wage. Subsequently, she served on the staff of California Governor Jerry Brown. ↑

    
    
19. 
    

    Varon, Our Grief Is Not a Cry for War, 128, 129. ↑

    
    
20. 
    

    Ibid., 129. The Nation writer Alexander Cockburn labeled Gitlin, Corn and liberals like them “the anti-anti-war movement.” Corn was later a leading purveyor of the Russia Gate hoax that helped mobilize liberal opinion in support of the deadly war in Ukraine and proxy war on Russia. ↑

    
    
21. 
    

    Varon, Our Grief Is Not a Cry for War, 159. ↑

    
    
22. 
    

    Ibid., 167. ↑

    
    
23. 
    

    Ibid., 335. ↑

    
    
24. 
    

    Ibid., 302, 303. ↑

    
    
25. 
    

    Ibid., 343. ↑

    
    
26. 
    

    See Jeremy Kuzmarov, Obama’s Unending Wars: Fronting the Foreign Policy of the Permanent Warfare State (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2019). ↑

    
    
27. 
    

    Varon’s failure to engage with revelations of the 9/11 Truth Movement and scholarship on 9/11 is characteristic of the U.S. academy today. See David A. Hughes, “9/11 Truth and the Silence of the IR Discipline,” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 45, 2 (May 2000), 55-82. The shaming and blacklisting of 9/11 truthers set the groundwork for similar treatment on the left of what can be termed COVID-19 truthers who challenged the official government narrative on COVID-19. ↑

    
    

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