Anti-War Groups Plan Washington Rally

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Anti-war groups plan Washington rally
By Larry Margasak, Associated Press Writer

Published January 24, 2007 at Yahoo! News
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070124/ap_ ... _protest_1

Anti-war activists, unions and other national organizations promise a large protest rally Saturday against the Iraq war.

Groups say they have chartered hundreds of buses and expect thousands of people to descend on the National Mall for the demonstration west of the Capitol.

Organizers said Wednesday the protest is part of an effort that will include lobbying congressional offices next week and other rallies later across the country.

There previously have been two large demonstrations in New York City that rivaled Vietnam era protests in size. One was just before the invasion of Iraq in 2003; the other came on the eve of the 2004 Republican National Convention.

On Saturday, organizers hope to focus attention on Iraq more intensely than ever, given the growing public opposition to the war and congressional efforts to repudiate it.

"We have more tools today" to organize large protests, said former Rep. Tom Andrews, a Maine Democrat and an organizer of the rally. "We have an Internet culture, a network that can put information in people's hands."

Andrews said people who oppose the war made campaign contributions that helped elect a Democratic-run Congress in November.

That Congress has begun to speak forcefully. Democrats took the first step toward a wartime repudiation of President Bush on Wednesday when the Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted 12-9 for a nonbinding resolution declaring that the president's increased troop strength in Iraq is "not in the national interest."

The chief organizing group for the weekend rally is an anti-war coalition, United For Peace & Justice. The umbrella group has help from many of the National Organization for Women's 550 local chapters and dozens of union locals.

Scheduled speakers include members of Congress sponsoring anti-war measures; civil rights activist Jesse Jackson; veterans against the war; actors such as Danny Glover, Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon; and a voice from the anti-Vietnam past, Jane Fonda.

In that war, there were 58,000 U.S. military deaths, compared with the more than 3,000 so far in Iraq. During Vietnam, the White House and government offices often were targeted by protesters.

In May 1971, demonstrators attempted to cause massive traffic disruptions and marched on the Pentagon, the Justice Department and the Capitol. More than 7,000 people were arrested.

Nearly 200,000 people attended a demonstration in Washington the month before.

More than 250,000 protested on Nov. 15, 1969, in Washington; a large, parallel demonstration took place the same day in San Francisco.

Stephen Hess, a Brookings Institution senior fellow who worked in the West Wing of the White House in the Nixon administration, said the marches then "had a very strong anti-establishment sense to them."

"What we're apt to get in this nonhippie world is a much more middle-class look to it. And that's effective. Even in Vietnam, clearly the country turned against the war. But there was a sense these folks weren't truly patriotic," he said.

Hess said that he and other White House aides felt "we were barricaded in." He described the atmosphere as "almost sulfuric." But Hess said he is not aware that President Nixon let the protests influence his policy.

Helmut Sonnenfeldt, a guest scholar at Brookings and a National Security Council aide during the Nixon administration, said Nixon's motivation to end the war did not come from the protests.

"Nixon realized that something needed to be done to get through that because it got in the way of just about everything Nixon wanted to do on a variety of issues," he said.

"I can't say (the demonstrations) had an impact," Sonnenfeldt said. "The way Nixon handled it was to have secret contracts between (Henry) Kissinger and the North Vietnamese.

"There was plenty of discussion about the protects because there was a lot of noise. I actually went downstairs from my office (next to the White House) ... and brought a couple of people up periodically. We had pretty rational conversations."

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What I'm wondering is how much the mainstream press will cover this protest...it will be huge as the other ones were, but in the US things don't seem to exist unless they're on the TV. I think checking the cover of the Sunday papers and the TV news shows on Sunday will be very telling. Here's hoping. I wish I could be there, it will be amazine. I marched against the war back in 2003 on the eve of the US invasion, in Portland, Oregon, right through the downtown city streets. We didn't stop it from beginning, but making a statement like that can have a deep, good effect on a person's psyche....

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More Than Antiwar  
by Bob Herbert
 
Published on Monday, January 29, 2007 by the New York Times  
http://www.commondreams.org/views07/0129-22.htm

It was a few minutes after 11 a.m. when the scattered crowd began moving slowly toward the stage at the end of the Mall. The sky was a beautiful sunlit blue and the Capitol building, huge and white and majestic, offered the protesters an emotional backdrop that seemed almost close enough to touch.
“It’s so big,” said a woman from Milwaukee, who was there with her husband and two children. “It’s lovely. Makes you want to cry.”

You can say what you want about the people opposed to this wretched war in Iraq, try to stereotype them any way you can. But you couldn’t walk among them for more than a few minutes on Saturday without realizing that they love their country as much as anyone ever has. They love it enough to try to save it.

By 11:15 I thought there was a chance that the march against the war would be a bust. There just weren’t that many people moving toward the stage to join the rally that preceded the march. But the crowd kept building, slowly, steadily. It was a good-natured crowd. Everyone was bad-mouthing the Bush administration and the war, but everybody seemed to be smiling.

There were gray-haired women with digital cameras and young girls with braces. There were guys trying to look cool in knit caps and shades and balding baby boomers trading stories about Vietnam. And many ordinary families.

“Where’s Hillary?” someone asked.

That evoked laughter in the crowd. “She’s in Iowa running for president,” someone said.

When a woman asked, “What’s her position on the war?” a man standing next to her cracked, “She was for it before she was against it.”

More laughter.

The crowd kept building. There were people being pushed in wheelchairs and babies in strollers. There were elderly men and women, walking very slowly in some cases and holding hands.

The goal of the crowd was to get the attention of Congress and persuade it to move vigorously to reverse the Bush war policies. But the thought that kept returning as I watched the earnestly smiling faces, so many of them no longer young, was the way these protesters had somehow managed to keep the faith. They still believed, after all the years and all the lies, that they could make a difference. They still believed their government would listen to them and respond.

“I have to believe in this,” said Donna Norton of Petaluma, Calif. “I have a daughter in the reserves and a son-in-law on active duty. I feel very, very strongly about this.”

Betty and Peter Vinten-Johansen of East Lansing, Mich., said they felt obliged to march, believing that they could bolster the resolve of opponents of the war in Congress. Glancing toward the Capitol, Mr. Vinten-Johansen said, “Maybe we can strengthen their backbone a little bit.”

Even the celebrities who have been at this sort of thing for decades have managed to escape the debilitating embrace of cynicism. “How can you be cynical?” asked Tim Robbins, just before he mounted the stage to address the crowd, which by that time had grown to more than 100,000.

“This is inspiring,” he said. “It’s the real voice of the American people, and when you hear that collective voice protesting freely it reminds you of the greatness of our country. It gives you hope.”

When Jane Fonda said, “Silence is no longer an option,” she was doing more than expressing the outrage of the crowd over the carnage in Iraq and the president’s decision to escalate American involvement. She was implicitly re-asserting her belief in the effectiveness of citizen action.

Ms. Fonda is approaching 70 now and was at the march with her two grandchildren. It was very touching to watch her explain how she had declined to participate in antiwar marches for 34 years because she was afraid her notoriety would harm rather than help the effort.

The public is way out in front of the politicians on this issue. But the importance of Saturday’s march does not lie primarily in whether it hastens a turnaround of U.S. policy on the war. The fact that so many Americans were willing to travel from every region of the country to march against the war was a reaffirmation of the public’s commitment to our peaceful democratic processes.

It is in that unique and unflagging commitment, not in our terrifying military power, that the continued promise and greatness of America are to be found.