We must always be aware of the price exacted by civilian casualties--for example, the nine Afghan children killed two weeks ago by a NATO strike.
The key to ending war is never to stop communicating such experiences, such facts, such realities, Muriel told us, and handing out legible and convincing literature as well. "We need to make war real to people," she said.
On February 15, 2003, the day a month before the initial attack, when ten million people all over the world said no to Bush, he answered that power is greater than any nation-state and proceeded to end or destroy the lives of countless human beings throughout the Middle East as well as Europe and the United States. Iraq is still in rubbles, despite rebuilding efforts by the likes of Halliburton and friends.
Jeffrey Laurenti, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation now affiliated with the United Nations, told the roomful of sad, angry attendees about the more than three million Iraqis still displaced eight years after the start of Bush's war. The government has taken no responsibility for this hapless, tragic group that includes Christians who had lived in Iraq since ancient times.
How many times has this country violated the UN Charter and international law--"Mars is a fickle god of war," he said. "We can't count on his favor."
"The twenty-first century has inoculated the world against the United States." Or, as Imam Faisal put it so eloquently two weeks ago, "We lose sight of how people see us."
The UN supported the drive to invade Afghanistan after 9/11 to expel al Qaeda from there, a plan Bush had abandoned less than twenty-four hours after that catastrophe. Former White House operative Richard Clarke wrote of how in the immediate wake of 9/11 Bush asked him how attention couold be refocused to Iraq. That became Clarke's mission, absurdly.
The Iraq invasion sowed outrage throughout the Muslim world. The jaws of our own allies dropped, as did their support for the United States, by two figures ranging from 10 to 98 percent, said Laurenti. Bush dismissed the 2003 rallies as "public opinion" [what is that worth in a land that claims to be a democracy?--ed.], adding his careless reaction "Let them hate us as long as they fear us."
And so the real "coalition of the willing" joined us during the Gulf War rather than the Iraq war, which lost outside support quickly. World opinion descended still farther when Bush was re-elected [re-selected?] in 2004.
If there was a window to that disaster, it was the strong reaction against it in 2008, when Obama flattened the WASP war hero McCain in the 2008 election.
The Iraq war is not yet over; however, Bush was obliged to sign an agreement, the "Status of Forces agreement," to withdraw all troops from Iraq by December 2011, except for a few embassy guards. In August 2010 the "fifty-thousand mark" was reached. But centrist and right-wing voices now doubt that Iraq can do without us and speak of leaving behind ten thousand, in the wake of 4500 US troops dead and one million Iraqis killed.
"Let this be the last rally against the Iraq war," said Laurenti--a war whose cost is $150 billion per year, or $1 million per soldier, a sum that could instead create twenty jobs paying $50,000 a year per employee.
Our military budget has doubled in the previous ten years. Now it is cause for great hope that the government plans to slow down this rate of increase. If we count with these expenditures the interest we are paying on debts and the actually money being spent on the wars, the total approaches $1 trillion per year, a devastating revelation.
The head of the Bucks County Coalition of Peace Action, Bill Deckhart, began his talk asking whether such a thing as a peace economy can exist and added the irony that the only recent president to have lowered the military budget was the right-wing Richard Nixon. He reiterated Muriel's encouragement to disperse literature on the truth about our circumstances and the devastating statistics and cost in human capital.
The solution is up to "we the people," and we won't stop working until we have peace, Deckhart concluded.
Added Sharleen Leahey, a guitarist and folk singer who had regaled the group with her music throughout the rally, Pete Seeger, now 91, still sings for peace. This pioneer peace crusader and songwriter never stops.
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