were my remarks to several hundred activists and supporters
participating in a die-in in downtown San Francisco at noon today,
March 19, 2008, on the fifth anniversary of the launching of shock and
awe in Iraq. All those blocking traffic-surprisingly, for a couple of
hours, before we were all arrested-were handcuffed, booked and released
some hours later for a later court date. I chose to paraphrase, in
part, a statement to the court I had heard my older son Robert make in
Colorado thirty years ago this spring, when we were on trial for
blocking the railroad tracks leading to the Rocky Flats Nuclear
Production Plant in 1978.]
this fifth anniversary of an ongoing American crime against the peace,
it is well to remember the 40th anniversary-four days ago, this last
Sunday-of an American war crime in a hamlet named My Lai. On March 16, 1968, American soldiers-as
brave as any fighting now in Iraq-obeyed blatantly illegal orders to
gun down 504 Vietnamese civilians, nearly all women, children and
infants.
scale of a thousand. The best estimate of the number of civilians
killed in this war, as of last year, is 1.2 million. Not all of those,
by any means, have been killed by Americans. Many have been murdered by
Iraqis; but American airpower has killed a very high proportion of
those civilians, along with indiscriminate ground fire; and it was an
American decision that unleashed this slaughter five years ago. 1.2
million people. That corresponds to a My Lai a day, every day, for six
and a half years. That’s longer than this war has yet lasted, but not
nearly as long as it will probably last.
The
Republican candidate for president has projected an occupation of fifty
to a hundred years. That could very well prove to be realistic. Of the
two Democratic candidates, neither one has been willing to commit-even
to an intention-to have every American soldier out of Iraq by the end
of her or his first term: five years from now. That is unacceptable.
But that situation will not change unless the American people demand
that it change. We must demand that our representatives in Congress-as
Representative Barbara Lee and others have proposed in resolutions that
have not reached the floor for a vote- cut off the funding for any
American presence in Iraq, including enduring bases, except for purpose
of withdrawal over a period of months. We must demand that a candidate
who wants our support and our votes commit to that same goal.
people lying in the street here [as I began these remarks, people had
begun lying down in a die-in in the middle of the intersection of
Market and Montgomery Streets in downtown San Francisco, in front of
the office of Senator Diane Feinstein] symbolize both the nearly four
thousand American dead and the more than a million Iraqis who have died
in the war. But they also express, with our bodies, our lives, that
this war is continuing, as it began, without our consent.
lying here- obstructing for moments or hours business as usual-fifty of
us, a hundred, a thousand across the country, do not have the power to
end this war. But we are trying to show that we as a people-if we have
the will and determination-do have that power: the power to change
ourselves and history. We as a people have the power to end this war.
And that is what we must do.
{At
this point my wife Patricia and I joined more than sixty others stopping traffic by lying in the intersection, awaiting arrest.]