Tens of thousands protest possible war with Iraq
Posted on 01/19/2003 3:42:45 AM PST by MeekOneGOP
Tens of thousands protest possible war with Iraq
Rallies held Saturday in Washington, across U.S. and around the world
01/19/2003
WASHINGTON - They came by the tens of thousands Saturday, with the same message: No war against Iraq.
Some carried it on printed placards or brightly colored banners or scrawled by hand on pieces of old cardboard. Others shouted it or chanted it. Some sang.
They came from the Northeast, the South, the Midwest, the Southwest - from Maine and Kentucky and Michigan and Texas - all demanding that President Bush not go to war.
"Came all the way from Texas to take him back," said one of the signs carried by Mike Hassibi, an Austin real estate developer.
The president should "retire to his ranch, where he belongs," Mr. Hassibi said. "The policy is for them to take over the countries that have oil in that region. It is oil and control of the world."
Organizers of the rally and the 2-mile march from the Capitol to the Navy Yard, home to the Navy's top admiral, said the crowd had swelled to more than 200,000 - larger than the last major anti-war protest in the capital in October.
Rallies to continue
 Protesters carry caricatures of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld (left), President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney during a peace rally in Portland, Ore., on Saturday. (AP)
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"The Bush administration is on its way toward war," said ANSWER spokesman Brian Becker, adding that he hoped the rallies would convince Americans that an attack is "not a noble, just cause."
Saturday's anti-war rally in Washington and another in San Francisco were the anchors for dozens of smaller demonstrations throughout the country, including in Houston and Austin.
Worldwide, there were many others in major cities from London to Cairo to Tokyo. In Moscow, Russians marched outside the U.S. embassy, chanting "Yankee, go home."
In Washington, demonstrators gathered on the National Mall on the west side of the Capitol on a sunny-but-cold day, with temperatures rising only into the mid 20s. Many carried creative, if sometimes vulgar, signs denouncing Mr. Bush and saying the focus on Iraq is about oil, not weapons of mass destruction.
For more than three hours, the crowd milled patiently on the mall, listening to speeches from several dozen anti-war activists, including the Rev. Jesse Jackson and Ron Kovic, the paralyzed Vietnam War veteran whose autobiography, Born on the Fourth of July, was made into an Academy Award-winning movie starring Tom Cruise.
"Iraq is no threat to the U.S.," Mr. Jackson declared during an impromptu news conference, dismissing Mr. Bush's war talk as "bellicose rhetoric that gives big headlines."
Mr. Bush was out of town, spending the weekend as he often does at Camp David, the presidential retreat in Maryland's Catoctin Mountains. But before he left, White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said, the president welcomed the free speech protected by the U.S. Constitution.
"We are a democracy, and people in the United States, unlike Iraq, are free to protest and to make their case known," Mr. Fleischer said. "That's a time-honored part of American tradition, and the president fully understands it. It's a strength of our democracy."
Bill Maxwell, a construction manager who made the 25-hour bus trip up from Dallas with other members of the Dallas Peace Center, said he didn't really expect the Bush administration to listen to Saturday's demonstrators.
But, he said, "We want people to stand up and speak."
All ages present
 Washington Metropolitan police officers stand guard as pro-war demonstrators protest in the background Saturday. (AP)
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"If I'm not here today, then I'm complicit in murder," said Matt Gatto, a 24-year-old college student from Albany, N.Y.
"It's OK to pursue people who did the terrorist attacks against us, as we would criminals, like a murderer," he said. "But we don't drop a bomb on a murderer's house. We go and we catch the murderer, and we put him in jail. That's OK, but aerial bombing with F-16s - I just don't think it's right."
Other demonstrators raised similar questions about the president's war on terrorism, which he is now contemplating extending to Iraq. Saddam Hussein is harboring chemical and biological weapons and is determined to develop a nuclear bomb, Mr. Bush says, and must be disarmed, through war if necessary.
"We are headed toward war, and we don't need it," said Pat Buck, who at age 78 has become actively opposed to war.
"This is about the only thing I can do to show how I feel about the whole shape of the country today," she said after exiting one of 11 buses from Maine.
On the long weekend that marks the birth of Martin Luther King Jr., Ms. Buck recalled that at the beginning of the Vietnam War, the slain civil-rights leader had argued that "war is wrong because they are taking all the blacks into the service."
She recalled thinking, "Who does Martin Luther King think he is?
"So, I've come a long way," she said.
Carlos Marentes, who runs the Farm Workers Center in El Paso, said he is also concerned about the likelihood that a disproportional number of wartime casualties will be among minorities, as well as the money a war would drain from urgent domestic programs.
"In a war, we are the ones paying," he said. "There are more serious problems that this administration should be taking care of, especially the poverty that affects our communities."
Perrie Spaulding-Allen of Louisville, Ky., worries about those problems, too, and more.
"I don't want to see innocent people dying," she said. "I don't really see any reason for why there should be war."
Her brother-in-law, William Caswell, a civilian physicist who worked for the Navy, was a passenger on the hijacked American Airlines jet that was rammed into the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001. But she doesn't believe a war with Iraq has "anything to do with 9-11."
She said she agrees with Mr. Maxwell that the anti-war protests won't matter to Mr. Bush.
"He's going to do what he wants to do anyway," she said. "But it matters to me. It makes me feel like I'm doing something."
E-mail bhillman@dallasnews.com
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 A camera and listening post along the border. El Paso was the first border town to have a military post established. |
Gotta go, Bertha. The DNC wants me at a protest in SF, pronto....
What a pity you're on the wrong side of it, Carlos.
Can you appreciate the irony inherent in this statement? HA!
He oughta know about getting big headlines!
Never mind, I know the answer to my questions.
Leni
And that, my friends, is what it's all about.
These feel-good, lame-brained, bleeding heart types drive me nuts! They refuse to consider the possibility that Sadamn might just have weapons of mass destruction, that he might just use them against us, Israel or Britain, and that he might just be supporting global terror. Oh well. Ignorance is bliss, I guess.
So what if it is? Better we than the Islamofascists control the world!
(Of course the "Liberal" taliban doesn't agree. Their meritricious sociopathic leaders intend to gain control of the Islamofascists, and the fools who follow them don't understand anything, can't think for themselves, and merely parrot what their leaders tell them.
A fool is more dangerous than a scoundrel.
Had it not been for the fools who allowed Hitler to come to power, World War II and the Nazi Holocaust would never have happened.)
These protests are organized by the socialistic left. Iraq is only a convienient mechanism to advance their anti-capitalistic and anti-american agenda. What is truly amazing is that so many on the right, example: the LewRockwell wing of the libertarian party, buy into this BS.http://sp-usa.org/
http://socialist.org/base.html
Washington Metropolitan police officers
stand guard as pro-war demonstrators
protest in the background Saturday.
Not surprising that this protest was organized by the Communist Party USA. They have the best "rent a mob" machinery going. They don't get funding from the Soviet Union anymore, it's true. But then, when you've got backing from Hollywood . . .
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. WB Yeats, The Second Coming
These feel-good, lame-brained, bleeding heart types drive me nuts! They refuse to consider the possibility that Sadamn might just have weapons of mass destruction, that he might just use them against us, Israel or Britain, and that he might just be supporting global terror. Oh well. Ignorance is bliss, I guess.Yes. You might want to see the article linked in post #15...
The "no war for oil" mantra is the same as the "if it saves the life of just one child" mantra. It's a calculated way to appeal to the easily manipulated emotions of the great mass of uninformed political imbeciles in the American electorate, nothing more.
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