By
Sunsara Taylor, 3/14/07
Officials
said Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other members of the leadership had decided to
strip from a major military spending bill a requirement for Bush to gain
approval from Congress before moving against Iran…The measure provides nearly
$100 billion to pay for fighting in two wars, and includes more money than the
president requested for operations in Afghanistan and what Democrats called
training and equipment shortages.-AP, March 13, 2007
For
all the criticism on the left, Democratic strategists say they are counting on
most of the antiwar lawmakers to realize that this current spending bill is the
best they can get.-NYTimes, March 14
You
could close your eyes and pretend it isn’t happening.
Pretend
that the new Democratic Congress — after four years of torture, mass murder
and war crimes against the people of Iraq
— didn’t just promise the War-Criminal-In-Chief that they would do nothing to
stop a new and even more dangerous war against Iran.
Pretend
that these same Democrats — who have sold you out so many times and at the
cost of so many lives — didn’t just promise to give the president more
money than he even asked for to fight his current wars!
Pretend
that somehow history — and the people of the Middle East
— will forgive you for meeting this news with passivity, silence or at best
“protest as usual.”
Or
you could open your eyes and confront the nightmares engulfing millions of
people in the Middle East and endangering
people around the world that only people living in this country can bring to
a halt.
You
can get on a bus, hop on a train, purchase an airline ticket, or pile into a
van and get your butt to Washington
DC on March 17 to march across
the bridge and encircle the Pentagon, before the eyes of the world!
Forty
years ago, a generation who refused to accept an unjust and murderous war on Vietnam
descended on the Pentagon. They looked
out at the villages being razed, the children burning alive by napalm, and the
blood that would be on their hands if they didn’t bring this to a halt and they
declared it was time to go “from protest to resistance.”
Now,
at a time when the Bush regime, with the silence and complicity of the
Democrats, are escalating their assault on Iraq
and aggressively preparing a new war against Iran, it is wrong not to be at the
Pentagon.
It
is wrong to hide behind the lie and excuse that “protest doesn’t make a
difference.” It is wrong to despair
because “they”re not listening to us.”
And it is wrong to dismiss the real danger of a new war against Iran simply because Bush is having so much
trouble in Iraq.
The
problem has never been that “protest doesn’t work.” The problem is that there haven’t been nearly
enough protests and they haven’t been nearly demanding enough.
The
campuses across the country have not yet been shut down in massive student
strikes demanding an immediate end to the war.
The Oscars weren’t filled with movie stars and directors giving heart to
millions around the world by demanding impeachment right now. The anti-war vets — while way ahead of most
of the movement and of where the Vietnam vets were at this far into the war
then — haven’t yet staged their equivalent of the Winter Soldiers testimonials
about the war crimes they witnessed or Dewey Canyon protest where the Vietnam
Vets threw back their medals. We haven’t
yet seen this war’s Daniel Ellsberg — someone willing to risk 150 years in
prison or more to disclose and disrupt the administration’s ability to lie
their way into more war. Hundreds of
thousands haven’t yet, in the words of Cindy Sheehan, “turn[ed] off your TV and
carri[ied] a sign or a banner and descend[ed] on the White House as oppressed
peasants descending on the castle of the lord of the realm with pitchforks and
torches?”
These
are things I know we are more than capable of!
The problem is not that millions don’t hate the Bush program, the
problem is that that anger has not been transformed into active, ongoing,
determined resistance — not to merely express our unhappiness — but to bring
all this to a halt. That has to begin to
change on March 17.
In
a time of legalized torture, of expanding war, of war crimes and of crimes
against humanity — all of us are accountable!
Let’s
just be honest: none of us can claim in good conscience we”ve done all that we
can and none of us should sleep soundly at night until we do.
Protest
and resistance and refusal to go along are needed MOST when those in power
“aren’t listening.”
Too
many people are in denial about the growing likelihood of a us attack on Iran as
detailed by Seymour Hersh and others. As
Larry Everest, has recently written, “The U.S.’s quagmire in Iraq has weakened the U.S.
influence, fueled the spread of Islamist trends, and bolstered Iran’s regional
influence. All this has made the
situation in the Middle East even more unacceptable to the U.S. imperialists, and the Bush regime has
resolved on a course to become even more aggressive in reversing all this —
with the escalation of the war in Iraq
and now the serious threats against Iran. And meanwhile the Democrats have proved
incapable and unwilling to stop Bush’s troop ‘surge’ to Iraq and have mounted no significant opposition
at all — and in some cases significant support — to the real threats to
launch a U.S. attack against
Iran.”
Right
now, it is more clear than ever that there “will be no savior from the
Democratic Party.”
It
is more clear than ever that the war on Iraq is not going to stop until we
act in ways that make it stop. It is
more clear than ever that a war in Iran will not be prevented unless
we act in ways that prevent it. And it
is more clear than ever that Bush won’t stop unless we drive him out.
It
is time to march on the Pentagon. It is
time for us to go from protest to society-wide resistance.