“I was in Iraq in ’03, and what I saw there crushed me,” former U.S. Army sergeant Ash Woolson told thousands of people last Sunday afternoon from a makeshift stage at the edge of the security perimeter around Chicago’s McCormick Place Convention Center, where the NATO summit was being held.

As the international meeting was getting underway that day, thousands marched for peace through the city’s downtown. They were led by contingents of U.S. veterans like Woolson organized by Iraq Veterans Against the War, 40 of whom eventually mounted the ad hoc stage, where they brought the symbolic and tangible purpose of the week’s protests into sharp focus by attempting to publicly return their service medals, including their Global War on Terror awards.

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If 2011 was the year of the protester, 2012 may prove to be the year of nonviolence. What’s the difference? It’s as great as between yes and no. A crucial awakening that envelopes humanity’s collective struggle for justice, peace and democracy is happening; it is an awakening that clarifies the circumstances we embrace with a yes and those by which we respond with a vehement no. Like many I know, I often teeter between despair and hope–stuck in a kind of uncomfortable tension resembling Wendell Berry’s poetic instruction to “be joyful though you have considered all the facts” –grasping for some measure of sanity to make sense of all that is happening.

It is tempting to succumb to despair, what with the onslaught of major media coverage telling us all the bad news, dismissing the promising news, and ignoring the good news. Consider the challenges: the unraveling violence of the Egyptian revolution, the 5,000 killed in Syria, climate change and the instability and disasters brought by extreme weather patterns and an ill-equipped global populace with inadequate leadership, the threat of random violence and terrorist activity–Norway, Belgium, India, the US, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq–and state and cultural violence against immigrants, women, refugees, the poor, GLBTQ persons, and people of color. So where is the hope? Well, in 2011, the fires of our hope were stoked by the global protest movements–the Arab Spring, the Indignados, Occupy Wall Street–of millions of people rising up to say: كفاية …Basta…Enough!
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I am trying to get excited about Christmas—which is right around the corner (as though anyone needs a reminder), but I can get a bit “bah humbug.” Christmas music drives me nuts, I think most decorations are tacky, and all the manic shopping and false cheer turns my stomach.

I blame my parents, who never once took me to the mall to visit Santa Claus when I was young. I also never wrote the old man a “wish list.” So here I am, at 37, sitting down to write my very first letter to Santa Claus.

Dear Mr. Claus,

I hope this letter finds you and the missus well. I know you are known by many names—Kris Kringle, old Saint Nicholas, but I will call you by your American commercial name for the purpose of this letter.

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[Editor's. note: This is a transcript of a conversation between members of the Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers and Noam Chomsky, which took place on September 21, 2011. Each question was asked in Dari and translated by Hakim.]

Hakim: We are speaking from the highlands of Bamiyan in central Afghanistan, and we wanted to start off by thanking you sincerely for the guidance and wisdom that you have consistently given through your teaching and speeches in many places. We want to start off with a question from Faiz.

Faiz: In an article by Ahmed Rashid in the New York Times recently, he said that “after 10 years, it should be clear that the war in this region cannot be won purely by military force…. Pakistanis desperately need a new narrative… but where is the leadership to tell this story as it should be told? The military gets away with its antiquated thinking because nobody is offering an alternative, and without an alternative, nothing will improve for a long time.” Do you think there is any leadership in the world today that can propose an alternative non-military solution for Afghanistan, and if not, where or from whom would this leadership for an alternative non-military solution come from?

Noam Chomsky: I think it is well understood among the military leadership and also the political leadership in the United States and its allies, that they cannot achieve a military solution of the kind that they want. This is putting aside the question of whether that goal was ever justified; now, put that aside. Just in their terms, they know perfectly well they cannot achieve a military solution.

Is there an alternative political force that could work towards some sort of political settlement? Well, you know, that actually the major force that would be effective in bringing about that aim is popular opinion. The public is already very strongly opposed to the war and has been for a long time, but that has not translated itself into an active, committed, dedicated popular movement that is seeking to change policy. And that’s what has to be done here.

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The remaining US troops in Iraq are scheduled to leave by the end of this month. While there had been some talk about extending the December 31, 2011 deadline President Obama set early in his term, this was scuttled in October when the Iraqi government rebuffed the administration on two demands: that US troops be guaranteed immunity from prosecution and that the Pentagon be allowed to maintain bases in the country going forward.

While the US will retain a large embassy and two consulates in the country, with 4,000 to 5,000 contractors (down from a high of 180,000), this is a different outcome from the US government’s original expectation of permanently maintaining scores of military bases, including superbases, in the country designed to indefinitely anchor the US geo-political presence in the Middle East. While we may learn later that this long-term strategy, against all political obstacles, remains on track (including a plan for all that oil), the nearly nine-year-old occupation of Iraq is apparently coming to an end.

Except for the occasional newsflash about sporadic violence—and the recent spate of stories about the sheer tonnage of materiel that the US is shipping stateside as it readies its departure—we don’t hear much about Iraq these days. The action has moved on to Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen. But five years ago, things were very different. The military, political, and economic shockwaves from the US invasion in 2003 were roiling the country, the sectarian violence was mounting, and Iraq was awash in blood and inconsolable sorrow. The human wreckage—as well as the huge economic toll—defied comprehension (and the bloodless number-crunching that surfaced now and then).

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When Fiji’s brutally repressive military tried to detain an 80-year-old reverend with the Methodist Church this summer due to his involvement with politics, it caused quite a stir — not only because of his age or his former position as the military’s head chaplain, but also because he refused to let the soldiers take him to the barracks. “I told them, the only way to take me to camp now is bundle up my legs, tied up, and my hands, I will not go with you,” was how he described the incident to New Zealand press. “That is the only way, you carry me to the camp or you bring your gun and shoot me and you carry my dead body to the camp to show to the commander,” he said.

This kind of dissension from a former military official is not typical of the one group of Fijians that actually receives special treatment. Fiji’s strongman Commodore Voreqe (Frank) Bainimarama goes out of his way not to antagonize the military, which has intentionally trained more soldiers than it could handle in order to supply thousands of them to the British Army, American mercenary companies, and the U.N.’s peacekeeping operations in places like Iraq, Sinai, Lebanon, Sudan, and Somalia.

Lieutenant Colonel Ratu Tevita Mara — profiled in part one of this series as Fiji’s highest-ranking defector — has asked for the use of Fijian soldiers overseas to be stopped until democracy is restored, since he sees the practice as helping to keep Bainimarama in the military’s good graces. “He certainly rewards the military by sending them on peacekeeping duties overseas, and yes of course they get extra allowance, extra money for that,” Mara told me in a recent interview.

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The news hit me like an electric shock. Was this for real? I stared at the words on the TV screen in disbelief—President Obama Says All U.S. Troops in Iraq Will Be Home by the End of the Year. That meant that 41,000 troops will be leaving Iraq.

This welcome announcement was somewhat tempered when further reports revealed that on January 1, 2012, the State Department will command a hired army of about 5,500 security contractors, all to protect the largest U.S. diplomatic presence anywhere overseas. There will also apparently be a “significant C.I.A. presence,” according to the New York Times.

What was I to make of that?

Since the fall of 2003, my anti-war grandmother friends and I had been struggling, demonstrating, petitioning, organizing, yelling, marching, traveling with one singular objective—to end the illegal, immoral war and occupation in Iraq causing so much death and destruction. We later added ending the war in Afghanistan to our agenda. When we first hit the streets, we were a small minority and met with anger. Most Americans backed the war. CNN promoted it like it was the latest blockbuster action movie, and the public cheered as the news channel repeatedly showed the fires ignited by our bombs lighting up the Baghdad sky.

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Today, people in cities from New York to Hong Kong—in both directions—are responding to the longstanding call from the Spainish Indignados for a day of protest against rampant corruption, austerity, and the power of high finance over and against the needs of the vast majority of people. The call has been strengthened, heartened, and echoed in recent weeks by the occupation movement in the United States that began at Occupy Wall Street, on top of this whole year of revolutionary activity, starting in Tunisia. The news is so far highlighting images of protesters damaging property—windows broken, cars on fire—even while briefly noting that, in the vast majority of cases, the protests are entirely peaceful. Typical.

The really important question, though, is whether and how this outburst of outrage will turn into meaningful change in the structures of power. Coordinated, worldwide protests have happened before in recent years—February of 2003, against the war in Iraq, or even 350.org’s mobilization against inaction on climate change in October of 2009. What can the movement do to turn this passion and momentum into a strategy that will really undermine the foundations of the corporate elite’s power? Protests on the streets can only be a beginning. What will it take to make this system cost more to maintain than to transform?

The 792nd consecutive weekly vigil outside of Alliant Techsystems in Minneapolis in August.

As I mentioned in this space earlier, I was recently in Barcelona at the War Resisters International’s seminar on War Profiteering and Peace Movement Responses. It was a really interesting time to be a Yankee abroad. The streets in the city center filled up with protests against budget cuts each evening, and everyone at the meetings was talking about OccupyWallStreet in slightly awed and disbelieving tones—as though to say “even the U.S. of A. is getting with the program.”

I was repeatedly asked where I thought the Occupy Movement was headed, a question I cleverly avoided—“look, is that a tapas bar over there? How do you say, ‘more wine, please’ in Spanish?” It is a good question, but as Donald Rumsfeld used to say: “that’s above my pay grade.”

At the end of each long day participating in different seminar tracks (war and exploitation of natural resources, exposing the bad guys, new trends in war profiteering) and workshops on how to research the arms trade, use social media and campaign against drone warfare, we gathered in the city center for the Trobada, convened by the Center for Study of Justice and Peace (Centre d’Estudis per a la Pau JM Delàs). Lots of people turned out for these nightly events, the one at which I presented drew more than one hundred people on a Friday night (but no one in Barcelona eats dinner before 10 pm anyway).

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Responding to the accelerating challenges of our time—endless war, environmental destruction, and a financial system that works for fewer and fewer of us—a global movement for fundamental change is gaining momentum.

Quickened by the Arab Spring, the ongoing May 15 movement in Spain, the grassroots uprising in Greece, the student movement in Chile, the month-long occupation of the Wisconsin capitol earlier this year, and many other campaigns chronicled on this site, we are entering a period where the potential for sustained and urgent people-power to tackle the monumental problems facing the planet is growing.

“Sustained” is the watchword. While the one-day protest will continue to be an important tool in the social change toolbox, organizers are increasingly turning to multi-day, multi-week, and multi-month campaigns. They cast a vision of sustained action—and then see if people will say “yes” to it using the most powerful language they have at their disposal: their own bodies.

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