There's Something Happening Here
by William Rivers Pitt
Dissident Voice
January 20, 2003
Someone once said
that convictions are tested not when things are easy, or when circumstances do
not challenge the mettle of your beliefs. Convictions are tested when standing
on your principles causes inconvenience and pain. If you are able to withstand
the test with your convictions intact, you come away with a clearer knowledge
of your own strength.
There are
thousands and thousands of Americans today who can say their convictions passed
intact through a small but significant testing. They came by bus, by car, by
rail and by plane to the nation's capitol to shout down a push for war in Iraq.
Citizens from as far away as Alaska and Oklahoma made the trek, a sacrifice of
time and money that is noteworthy. Moreover, these people endured for an entire
day temperatures that lingered several degrees below freezing down on the Mall.
If you think
that is not a test, try it sometime. While standing and listening to several
hours of speeches, the cold crawls through your boots and up your legs, turning
your feet and toes into blocks of frozen wood. The muscle cramps begin once the
skin loses feeling. Your face becomes a chapped mask. Speaking is painful. The
skin of your hands reddens and cracks. Simple tasks like writing and shaking
hands become a misery, even with gloves on. The wind is always there. At the
end of it all, when your body has lost circulation and the pain truly becomes
all-encompassing, you are asked to walk from the Capitol steps to the Navy Pier
so you can do it all over again.
Anyone could
have bailed when it became too uncomfortable, but I did not see anyone taking
themselves away from the scene. The purpose behind the International ANSWER Coalition's
rally against looming war was far too important to walk away from. At stake is
nothing more or less than the future of this republic.
A war in Iraq,
pursued in the unilateralist fashion the Bush administration is slowly being
relegated to by disinterest and hostility from former coalition members, would
leave us isolated in a time of unprecedented danger. A pre-emptive strike would
set a precedent for other nations around the world, further destabilizing an
already rocky global situation. Thousands of American troops could be killed,
and tens of thousands more face the permanent disability from exposure to
chemicals, ill-tested vaccines and petroleum smoke that some 28% of veterans
from the last Gulf War currently endure.
A unilateral
attack without international support would assuredly bring more terrorism to
our shores. When those fires go out, they will have done more than extinguish
more innocent American lives. Those fires will burn to ash, finally and
irrevocably, the Constitution and Bill of Rights. We have seen the Bush
administration's rights-restricting reaction to the first attack. Further
attacks will motivate them to finish the job once and for all.
The war will not
be fought 'over there.' It will be right here, on your street and mine. It will
be fought with those constitutional protections so many of us have come to take
for granted right there on the firing line.
Some have argued
that the Bush administration does not truly mean to go to war in Iraq, that
this incredible buildup has been a diplomatic tool to pressure Saddam Hussein
into UN compliance. Done properly, this might have been a canny process. With
this administration, however, it is a game of Russian Roulette with five
bullets in the chamber. This is the administration that has told the world,
though its bungling of the North Korea situation, that the best way to deal
with America is to blackmail us with nuclear weapons. This is the
administrations whose utter disregard for diplomatic engagement has caused the
Israel/Palestine situation to worsen dramatically in the last two years.
When a nation
sends 150,000 troops into a region, along with all of the weapons of war, the
situation develops an inertia of its own. The administration may once have seen
this as a bluff. Now, they are faced with the reality that backing down will be
an embarrassing and expensive defeat.
Some frostbite
is a small price to pay for taking part in an action to see such a disaster
stopped in its tracks.
Counting the
pinked noses at this protest is, as ever, something of a subjective affair. The
organizers pegged the crowd at 500,000 people, but few in the media believed
that to be accurate. A more likely number falls between 200,000 and 300,000
people. Whatever the actual numbers may be, the crowd stood shoulder to
shoulder from 3rd street, in front of the Capitol building, all the way down
the Washington Mall to the Washington Monument. It was a sea of signs and faces
that, when on the march from the Capitol to the Navy Pier, stretched for
several miles.
D.C. police
chief Charles Ramsey said, "It's one of the biggest ones we've had,
certainly in recent times." U.S. Capitol Police chief Terrance Gainer
said, "I know everyone is skittish about saying a number, but this was
big. An impressive number." A C-SPAN cameraman I spoke to spent the entire
protest on the roof of a cargo truck just to the side of the stage. He told me
that he had covered dozens of protests in his time, and that the crowd on
Saturday was the biggest he had ever seen.
Combined with
the hundreds of thousands of protesters who came to Washington during the
relatively balmier late-October rally, the number of people who have gone out
of their way to say 'No' to Mr. Bush in downtown Washington is creeping slowly
towards one million strong. This, for a war that has not started yet. The crowds
on Saturday and in October had their share of fringe elements; the inevitable
free-Mumia-free-Peltier-super-socialist folks were loud and proud. What made
Saturday notable were the tens and tens of thousands of very average,
mainstream Americans who braved the distance and the elements to be there. The
rally became a referendum against so much of what the Bush administration has
done, from rights restrictions to economic malfeasance. God help the
administration if they get this one wrong.
The rally in Washington
coincided with massive gatherings all across the nation and the world. In San
Francisco, over 100,000 people marched. They were joined by huge protests in
Michigan, Oregon, Boston, Denver, Portland, Moscow, Paris, Tokyo, Hong Kong and
elsewhere. At one point during the Washington rally, I spoke with British
Labour Minister Jeremy Corbyn. He could not explain Tony Blair's slavish
adherence to Bush policy - noting at one point that a recent poll in Britain
showed that 97% of the people there think Blair is far too close to Bush - but
he was clear in one respect: The people of England do not support this action,
and the looming February 15th protests there promise to be enormous.
This was not
some isolated twitch to be dismissed. Saturday, January 18th was a day when a
good portion of America and the world stood in solidarity against a very bad
idea being promulgated by an American administration whose priorities are badly
out of joint. It bears notice, again, to point out that the war has not even started
yet. There is something happening here, and it is getting clearer by the day.
William Rivers Pitt is a teacher from Boston, MA. He is the
author of War On Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn’t Want You To Know (Context
Books, 2002) with Scott Ritter, and The Greatest Sedition is Silence
which will be published in May by Pluto Press.