April 2005

Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC.

Vermont Town Meetings Decide "End the War. Bring the Guard Home."

Ellen Kaye is a Brattleboro, VT peace and justice organizer. Joseph Gainza is the coordinator of AFSC's Vermont Program. To learn more about how to build on the efforts in Vermont in your community, please see www.iraqresolution.org and www.afscvt.org, 73 Main St., Box 19, Montpelier, VT, 05602-2944, 802/229-2340.

During the direct democracy ritual of Vermont's Town Meetings, on March 1, 2005, 52 of the 60 towns which discussed the question approved resolutions opposing the use of Vermont's National Guard in Iraq. Annual town meetings are the forum in which town budgets are approved or voted down, where members decide whether to spend money on a new snow plow, a new teaching position, or funding for the local battered women's shelter. This year, they were also the place where residents of 60 towns had the opportunity to engage in dialogue about the Iraq invasion, occupation, and Vermont's role in it.

The resolutions described how the US launched this war -- the deceptions, the disrespect for international opinion, the utter lack of a national emergency -- establishing a baseline of basic facts necessary in order to spur meaningful local, and we hope national, dialogue. According to Army Times, forty percent of US soldiers in Iraq are members of the National Guard and Reserves, so fostering a debate about the Guard's role is critical.

The resolutions called for three actions to be taken: the Vermont Legislature is asked to assess the impact of deployment of the National Guard on readiness to handle in-state emergencies and, more broadly, the impact on families, communities, employers and the very fabric of life in Vermont; Vermont's congressional delegation is called on to work toward restoring state powers over Guard deployments in cases of "wars of choice;" the final portion calls on the President to withdraw US forces from Iraq, consistent with the mandate of international humanitarian law. The voters of Burlington passed a resolution that called for troops to be withdrawn now.

International humanitarian law requires an occupying power to restore the health and welfare of the residents of the occupied state. The mention of this body of law has led some to think that the resolution advocated for a delay in the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq. Instead, it was intended to be a reminder of the US obligation to rebuild a country devastated by dictatorship, wars, sanctions, and a catastrophic occupation. Under international law, an occupying power is obligated to pay to rebuild the Iraqi infrastructure and provide medical care, adequate food, education, housing and other services to the Iraqi people. Instead, the US is privatizing Iraq in order to enrich US corporations such as Haliburton.

"Our resolutions began with those near to us and ended with the recognition that every life taken in war is a tragedy, every war a failure of the human spirit," said Ben Scotch, the original author of the resolution and a leader of the town meeting campaign. The Vermont Network on Iraq War Resolutions consists of individuals from many communities across Vermont, and organizations such as The American Friends Service Committee, The Green Mountain Veterans for Peace, the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, and the Vermont Chapter of Military Families Speak Out (MFSO). Scores of individuals worked throughout the state to get the resolution on the town "warning" (the agenda of articles to be voted on at Town Meeting), collecting signatures from at least 5% of the voters in their town. The convergence of traditional peace activists with veterans and military family members demonstrates that there is no contradiction between supporting soldiers and opposing the war.

The Vermont chapter of MFSO joined this effort with the recognition that it is military families and veterans who have the moral credibility to successfully communicate the reality on the ground in Iraq and the disillusionment that families and soldiers are feeling. "Our soldiers are not nameless and faceless, they are our family members, our neighbors, our coworkers, our first responders," says Nancy Brown, whose son was until recently stationed near Baghdad. Brown is the founder of the Vermont Chapter of MFSO. MFSO members helped expose how unfairly our troops, particularly the National Guard, have been treated, with less than adequate training and, in many cases, insufficient equipment.

In order to prepare for the Town Meetings, organizers throughout the state met with local fire departments, VFW posts, merchants, family members of deployed soldiers, and town meeting moderators to discuss the resolution and enlist support. A one-minute radio spot about the resolution, written by Bob Bady and Ellen Kaye, the originators of the campaign, and recorded by MFSO member Sherry Prindall, the mother of a deployed National Guardsman, aired on several commercial stations throughout Vermont. We believed that even if the resolution did not pass, this kind of outreach was worth the effort.

The strategy to hold our lawmakers' feet to the fire for their inertia on this war is deliberate. We want to pressure Congress and other elected officials to cut the purse strings for military operations in Iraq and bring the troops home.

The country is paying attention. At the United for Peace and Justice Coalition assembly in St. Louis, Missouri in February, delegates voted unanimously for a proposal to make a National Guard Campaign based on the Vermont model a key part of its program of action. The Governor of Montana is charging that deployments threaten his state's ability to fight fires during the upcoming fire season. And Virginia's governor, in a segment of Nightline focusing on our campaign, criticized the use of the Guard in Iraq.

The Vermont Town Meeting campaign has demonstrated that when people have an opportunity to discuss foreign policy issues face to face, we will, in overwhelming numbers, call on the national government to behave as a responsible member of the world community. It is by strengthening and broadening such grassroots organizing and dialogue that citizens will begin to reassert their sovereign right, and obligation, to shape government policies.

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