1/28/07: Just
weeks after Bush announced his escalation of the Iraq war, massive numbers of people
came out to protest to demand the war stop on January 27. The rally in Washington, DC
brought people from 40 states, with crowd estimates ranging from tens of
thousands (by the mainstream news media) to hundreds of thousands. In Los Angeles and San
Francisco thousands came out to protest, and rallies
were held in cities and towns across the country.
Saturday’s
protests came at a crucial moment. The
Bush regime has announced an escalation of the Iraq
on Jan. 10, with over 21,500 more troops heading to Iraq,
new fighting breaking out in Baghdad, and
threats and military build-up towards attacking Iran. In so doing, the Bush regime has completely
ignored the sentiments of the majority of the American people, and openly said
that Congress cannot do anything to stop the escalation. This is a regime bent on endless war to
dominate the Middle East and the world.
The escalation
also makes this a crucial time for people to act to stop this war. As the anger of millions boils to the surface
and increasing divisions over the Iraq war open up inside Congress
and the military, what people do can make all the difference. In this context, Saturday’s protests and what
people do when they get home can be the start of making the Bush regime have to
deal with a determined movement to end the war instead of an all too passive
populace.
Now is not the
time to be begging Congress for slow incremental stops towards some eventual
phased withdrawal. Now is the time for
millions of people to get out and demand an end to the war immediately. And the sentiment in the crowd at Saturday’s
protest was overwhelmingly that now is not the time to go back home and beg for
Congress to take care of things, but to take responsibility for bringing
forward a movement that demands this war end and does not stop until that
happens.
At the Los Angeles rally, a statement from
UC – Santa Barbara students calling for a student strike Feb. 15 in protest of
the war received raucous applause.
Students were at the rallies in larger numbers than usual, and expressed
a sentiment that it’s time for resistance to step forward on the college
campuses and challenge the rest of society, and a feeling of responsibility to
make that happen.
Veterans and
active duty soldiers came out in larger numbers than previous protests, indicating
the growing dissension in the military to this unjust war and the increasing
willingness to risk their futures to stop it.
A contingent in military uniform marched representing the Appeal for
Redress, a petition signed by over 1,000 active duty soldiers
demanding an end to the war. Lt. Ehren
Watada, the first officer to refuse to fight in Iraq who is facing 7 years in prison at a trial
beginning Feb. 5th, was an inspiration to many at the protest, and
his father and mother spoke at the Washington, DC and 
San
Francisco rallies. The New York Times quoted Jack Teller, who
served as a marine in the Iraq war, as saying about his army jacket, “I don’t
like wearing the jacket because it reminds me that I participated in an immoral
and illegal war, but it’s important to make a political statement.”
The demand of
impeaching the Bush administration was present 
everywhere, from chants,
banners, signs, to speakers on the stage. Most of the protesters felt that the whole
direction the Bush administration is taking the world has to be derailed, and
this can only come through removing them from office. Given all that Bush has said recently about
going ahead with the escalation of the war no matter what, impeachment is by no
means a “distraction” from ending the war, but integrally bound up with doing
so.
Clearly the
sentiment of the vast majority of protesters is way ahead of either the
Democratic Party or many of the protest organizers.
The question
now is where will Saturday’s outpouring go?
Will the hundreds of thousands who came out be organized to go
out and challenge
the rest of society and build the kind of resistance needed to end this war and
drive out this criminal regime? Or will
they be corralled back into asking Congress to make gradual changes towards
some kind of phased withdrawal? As the
carnage in Iraq heightens,
and the threat of a war on Iran
looms dangerously on the horizon, it is incumbent on all of us to move heaven
and earth to stop this disastrous direction. Anything else at this crucial moment would be unconscionable.
End the War
Now!
Impeach Bush
for War Crimes!
Video of “Impeach Bush” Chants:
Video of Speakers (more to come):
Several
celebrities and politicians attended the rallies. Actors Jane Fonda, Sean Penn, Susan Sarandon,
and Tim Robbins all came to the rally in DC. For Jane Fonda, it was the first anti-war
protest she had attended since the Vietnam war, and she told the crowd, “silence
is no longer an option”. Cindy Sheehan and Ron Kovic, author of Born on the Fourth of July, spoke at the Los Angeles rally. Politicians
who spoke in DC included Representatives John Conyers, Dennis Kucinich, Maxine
Waters, and Salt Lake
City Mayor Rocky Anderson, who sparked controversy last year when he
joined thousands of people protesting Bush’s visit to Salt Lake City and called Bush a “dishonest,
war-mongering, human-rights-violating president”.
Mayor Rocky Anderson of Salt Lake City, Utah:
First Hand Account of the DC Protest from a World Can’t Wait Organizer:
…Coming down from New York with World Can’t Wait, we had a different plan.
Instead of just showing up at the national mall to wander through the
crowds and catch-up with old friends, we rolled deep to spread the
plain-fact message that so long as Bush remains in office, the war will
continue and expand. Impeachment is the means to check Bush’s so-far
unchallenged power and decisively repudiate the torture, secrecy and
war-without-end. We only expected to bring a couple of buses, but the
demand was so overwhelming that we ended up bringing down five. Once in
DC, we met up by 4th and Madison with scores of other activists to get
out the Call, put impeachment on the table and “organize the
unorganized.”
I
spent the whole day leafleting the throngs. In the thick of it, I never
got a sense of the crowd’s relative size. It was big. Protest sponsor United for Peace & Justice
claims 200,000, DC police 150,000.
…Yeah, the country has
caught up with the rest of the world in recognizing that this war is a
fiasco. It hasn’t caught up in understanding what is at stake. It’s not
a “mistake.” It’s a strategy of global domination on some very ugly
terms. I mean, nobody likes to lose a war – but the issue is “whose war is it?” Maybe that’s why it took a representative of the British
antiwar movement to make the call for impeachment from the stage. “We
don’t have the power to impeach our Prime Minister, but you have the
ability to impeach your president.” The crowd sure roared for that
non-official slogan of the march. Thousands of orange World Can’t Wait
placards kept that message in the crowd – but just like the impending
conflict in Iran, I didn’t hear too much about it from the stage…
…One thing I have to report. The average person I spoke with was far
angrier, impatient and interested in removing Bush from office than
what I heard on the stage. This isn’t always true, but it was on
January 27. I talked to scores of people and handed out thousands of
impeachment flyers.
Click here to read the full account.
Pictures from Torture + Silence = Complicity contingent
Pictures from San Francisco March:
Report from the Los Angeles Protest:
(Photos from LA IndyMedia)
About 3,000 people marched, rallied and braved the rain in Los Angeles to demand an
end to the war NOW in an anti-war protest endorsed by over 100 organizations. The day before, the LA Times had run an
article mainly about the coming protest in Washington,
D.C. but within it (and in the title)
mentioned the protest in Los Angeles,
and gave the details of time, place and 2 main speakers. Radio news and interviews ran several spots
before and after the protest about D.C. and LA and other cities. Several people said they first heard about a
big march happening in D.C. and then went on the internet to find out if there
was one in L.A. People of all nationalities and ages came
out, a lot of activists, but some for the first time. One older couple said they had never
demonstrated before, but with the troop escalation, “This is not what we voted
for, so we felt we needed to be here to express our anger.”
|
 Cindy Sheehan & Ron Kovic
|
Iraqi war veterans had a powerful contingent leading the
march, as well as military families against the war and Vietnam
veterans. Cindy Sheehan and Ron Kovic
were in the front of that contingent.
Some of the biggest cheers (and chants of “Strike”) came when a World Can’t
Wait student organizer from Occidental
College, welcomed to the
stage by Cindy Sheehan, read the statement from UC Santa Barbara students and
faculty calling for a student strike against the war on February 15.
The statement electrified the crowd, especially the youth
who were there. Many of them ran up to
the World Can’t Wait organizer after she read the statement and wanted to know
how they can also organize a strike at their school. A whole group from UC Riverside wants to
organize a strike there. We heard from
an older activist from Santa Monica that over 100 students at Crossroads High
School in Santa Monica had walked out the day before (Friday, 1/26) because of
the troop escalation. He only knew about this because the students
had invited him to speak.
World Can’t Wait organized a contingent wearing orange jumpsuits
(to represent detainees being tortured in Guantanamo Bay)
under the slogan, “Stop the War Now – Impeach Bush for War Crimes!”,
distributed close to 10,000 copies of the Call to Drive Out the Bush Regime,
and sold Bush Crimes Commission DVD’s.
It stood out that people were not looking only for information but also
looking for a way to act to drive out the Bush regime.
While the majority of the crowd consisted of people who
regularly go to protests, there was a significant section of people who came
who either have not protested before or only come to major protests, who are
very angry at the troop escalation especially when millions voted against the
war. Newer people included professionals,
educators, and business people. Others
mentioned they are very concerned about a US
attack on Iran and then a
whole conflagration in the Middle East. Several people said “Bush is a lunatic,”
trying to figure out why this is all happening.
A big concern of people was “How do we get more people – where are the
people?” and “Where are the students?”
Among the youth and students attending, there seems to be some shifting
sentiments cutting against the cynicism and paralysis.
Report from Austin, TX protest
From World Can’t Wait organizers in Texas:
A coalition of individuals
and representatives from various organizations held a statewide anti-war rally
in Austin as a solidarity event for those unable
to travel to Washington, DC for the national event organized by
United For Peace & Justice. Sponsors
and organizers included U of Texas Campus Antiwar Movement to End the
Occupation, Texans for Peace, Veterans for Peace, International Socialist
Organization, Palestine Solidarity Committee, World Can’t Wait, CodePink, Green
Party of Texas, Jim Hightower, American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee,
Tejanos for Truth, Instruments for Peace, Third Coast
Activist Resource
Center, and many more.
World Can’t Wait
representatives from Austin, Houston,
and San Antonio
attended the march, keeping World Can’t Wait a visible presence throughout the
event.
Protesters gathered at City Hall Plaza to hear music (provided by members of
Instruments for Peace) and speakers (including Dr. Douglas Reber, co-chair of
the Texas Green Party) and then marched on Congress Avenue through downtown Austin to converge at the
Texas Capitol. A highlight of the event
was a short speech by Hadi Jawad of the Crawford Peace House, who gave an
extremely engaging and provocative speech which he concluded by leading the
crowd in the chant: “The world can’t wait – drive out the Bush regime!”
Estimates of the event’s
attendance range from 500 to 1,000 people. It was a marked increase over past anti-war
rallies, and was very much in keeping with the nationwide sentiment that the
anti-war, anti-Bush sentiment is gaining in popularity and intensity. The protest was attended by young and old,
grandparents, children in strollers, veterans, students, and everyone in
between.
