Wrapping up a week of over 600 protest actions to mark three years since the United States invaded Iraq, activists here say that antiwar sentiment has become the dominant perspective in the U.S. and leaves the war "without legitimacy."
Joining thousands of others around the world, antiwar protesters in the United States took to the streets from Mar. 15 to 22, calling for the U.S. government to immediately withdraw its troops from Iraq.
In Europe, large demonstrations were held in London and Rome, as well as numerous other cities. Although there was no mass action in the U.S. this year, antiwar groups in all 50 states held hundreds of events, including marches, rallies, vigils and non-violent civil disobedience actions.
"The most important thing coming out from this week is that the activities happened all across the U.S.," Hany Khalil of United for Peace and Justice, one of the largest antiwar groups here, told IPS. "It reflects that the peace movement really has been mainstreamed."
Anti-war demonstrations in the United States have drawn fewer participants than just before the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003, but the wide range of local activities "is far more important than one giant demonstration," Phyllis Bennis of the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies said at an antiwar conference Monday.
The nationwide events are "an example of an ongoing opposition to a war that the American people, more than the U.S. administration, and even more than the Congress, understand has no legitimacy left," she said.
Despite small variations in national polls, their overall trend and the week of actions indicate that antiwar sentiment "is now the majority opinion," Khalil told IPS, pointing to a CBS poll released Mar. 13 which found that 59 percent of the U.S. public want to begin withdrawing the 140,000 U.S. troops now in Iraq.
But as the majority opinion builds towards stronger opposition to the war, "the challenges of converting that opinion into political power persists," Kahlil continued.
"Not nearly as many of our elected officials as needed are speaking out against the war," he said. "They are way behind the antiwar sentiment of this country."
Speaking at an event in New York sponsored by the Working Families Party (WFP), a third political party in New York State, U.S. Congressman José Serrano said the biggest problem the country faces "is the inability, or the lack of desire based on fear and certain behavioral patterns" that "adheres a lot of citizens from speaking out against this war."
Opposing the war has been portrayed by the George W. Bush administration as "un-American," but "I think it is our duty," he said.
Citing the renowned civil rights and political activist Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. who spoke out against the Vietnam War at a rally in New York in April 1967, Iraq veteran Geoffrey Millard said "a time comes when silence is betrayal," and that time has "now come for the U.S. in relation to the war in Iraq."
Millard served in Iraq for 13 months. "I just happened to be a dumb 17-year-old kid who only needed his mom’s permission to go to the war," he said at a town hall meeting in New York Tuesday, adding that it ended up being the biggest mistake of his life.
Dr. Entisar Mohammad Ariabi, who traveled to the U.S. from Baghdad, told the meeting, "As a mother and a pharmacist working at the hospital, I see every day innocent people dying and getting injured."
Since many of the roads are blocked by U.S. troops, "Most injured people that arrive to the hospital are already dead," she said.
"Three years of this occupation and we still do not have democracy," Ariabi went on. "What we have is bombings of hospitals, schools, roads, bridges, and killings of civilians."
Since the Iraq invasion, more than 150,000 Iraqi civilians are estimated to have been killed, and some figures point to 200,000. More than 2,000 U.S. soldiers have died, and some 15,000 have been wounded, according to the latest figures reported by the U.S. Defense Department.
"The idea that the U.S. was even going to try to build a real democracy in Iraq was absurd," Rahul Mahajan, a teacher at New York University, and an author and freelance journalist who reported from the besieged city of Fallujah in April 2004, told IPS.
"But the least I expected was that a high-tech economic superpower such as the U.S. would not fail so miserably to reconstruct Iraqi infrastructure," he said. Today, "Iraqis are actually worse off than before the war, in terms off infrastructure, access to electricity and water."
Activists also targeted military recruiting centres. "Stop the U.S. war machine, from the Bronx to Iraq to the Philippines, we call for an end to Washington’s war on the poor," chanted about a hundred youth who rallied before the Bronx Military Recruiting Center, which has been there since World War II.
"I have more in common with poor Iraqis than I do with anyone in the U.S. government," said Jeanette Caceres, of the ANSWER coalition, because the Iraqi people have been oppressed, "just like the people from the Bronx and Harlem community have been for hundreds of years here in America."
These communities are among the poorest and most crime-burdened in the U.S., she said, and cutbacks in domestic funding to finance the occupation hit working-class populations the hardest.
"Money for jobs and education, not for war and occupation," read the banners lifted into the air as speaker after speaker raged against having to "carry the burden of a crisis-stricken homeland."
So far, more than 300 billion dollars has been appropriated by the U.S. Congress to fund military operations and reconstruction in Iraq. But a study released earlier this year by the Nobel Prize-winning Columbia University Professor Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard budget expert Linda Blimes suggests that the real cost of the war is more likely somewhere between one and two trillion dollars.
According to Cities for Progress, a project of the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), the money spent on operations in Iraq could have been used to build 2.7 million affordable housing units, provide 60 million higher education scholarships and 40 million Head Start slots for one year.
"As a taxpayer, I am embarrassed that my money is going toward helping kill people," Andrew Phillips, a 34-year-old property manager who is expecting his first child any day, told IPS.
Joining a vigil here to remember the U.S. and Iraqi lives lost since the invasion, he said, "I at least put my name on the record to state that the U.S. invasion in Iraq does not have my support."
And for others who might feel that the continued occupation of Iraq is not right, "Maybe by seeing us protesting they will speak up at work, call their congressman, or pick up a sign and get active too," Phillips continued.
The next major New York event planned by UFPJ and other groups against the war is set for Apr. 29.
