During a phone call on a warm day in August 2002, the two of us came to an unmistakable conclusion: This bastard is going to take us into war with Iraq! The "bastard," of course, was then President George W. Bush, who was in the midst of an aggressive propaganda campaign about the alleged danger posed by Saddam Hussein's weapons program.
A key reason so many young people in the 1960s threw themselves into the fight against US military involvement in Vietnam was that the civil rights movement had recently demonstrated the power of mass action. As Students for a Democratic Society's founding manifesto in 1962 put it, 'the Southern struggle against racial bigotry...compelled most of us from silence to activism.'
