UNITED STATES: Anti-war coalitions demand 'Bring the troops home now!'

August 27, 2003
Issue 

BY DOUG LORIMER

"Susan Schuman's son writes home from Iraq complaining of poor living conditions, skimpy water rations and dozens of daily attacks on US troops that go unreported. The mother of a Massachusetts National Guardsman stationed in Iraq since March, Schuman has joined others — long-time pacifists, military veterans and parents with children on extended deployments — in a campaign to bring them home."

These were the opening sentences of an Associated Press report of the August 13 Washington press conference at which the new Bring the Troops Home Now campaign was launched.

The AP report was carried by a number of mainstream US media outlets, including the ABC News web site and many metropolitan daily newspapers such as the Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, Atlanta Journal Constitution and New York's Newsday.

The Bring the Troops Home Now campaign was initiated by Military Families Speak Out (MFSO), an organisation of about 600 families with members serving in the US military, Veterans for Peace (VFP), active duty personnel, reservists and others opposed to the war in Iraq and galvanised to action by US President George Bush's July 2 challenge to armed Iraqis resisting the US occupation to "Bring 'em on".

The following day's edition of the US military's Stars and Stripes daily (sold only at overseas US military bases) also carried a report of the Bring the Troops Home Now campaign press conference.

"They wanted their message to be clear: it's possible to support the troops and not support the war they're fighting. They said that the Bush camp lied about the reasons for going to war, has misled the media about what's happening on the ground and has kept troops in the dark about their mission and how long they'll be there", the report began.

Campaign member Stan Goff, "a 26-year Army veteran and former special forces member, was particularly scathing of the administration and its motivations", the Stars and Stripes report noted. "These are rich men in expensive suits conducting statecraft not to protect the US, but to protect the profits of [construction contractors] Halliburton and Bechtel", it quoted Goff, whose son is a vehicle mechanic with the 82nd Airborne, recently sent in to replace the 3rd Infantry Division.

Support for October 25

"Bring the troops home now!" is the central demand that will be raised at the October 25 "March on the Pentagon" being organised by the Act Now to Stop the War and End Racism (ANSWER) coalition.

ANSWER was formed in the days after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York's World Trade Center. It organised the first national demonstration in the US against war and racism following 9/11 — on September 29, 2001 — which brought 25,000 people into the streets of Washington and 15,000 in San Francisco.

ANSWER initiated the first international day of action against the war in Iraq — January 18, 2003 — during which several million people around the world took part in simultaneous anti-war demonstrations, including 500,000 in Washington.

More than 1700 organisations and individuals have endorsed the October 25 march, including the Not in Our Name Project (NION), VFP and, on July 28, the San Francisco Labor Council.

The broader anti-war organisation, the United for Peace and Justice Coalition (UPJC) — which also includes VFP, the NION and the MFSO among its affiliates and initiated the February 15 international day of action, which mobilised more than 12 million people worldwide, including 500,000 outside the UN headquarters in New York — has so far not endorsed the October 25 protest action.

The UPJC is concentrating its efforts on a day of action on August 27 to lobby members of Congress to support a "genuine investigation into whether the Bush administration misled the public with claims that Iraq was an imminent threat to the US".

However, the UPJC has also added the demand "Bring the troops home now!" to its campaign literature.

Hany Khalil, the Iraq campaign coordinator for the UPJC and a member of the collective that produces the national anti-war publication War Times, said that the political climate for anti-war campaigning had substantially turned around since early May.

"After the invasion, people understandably were discouraged for a while, and the level of public protest naturally fell off", he told Robert Jensen, a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin, for an article published in the August 17 Hindu, India's third most circulated daily. "Now people are seeing that Bush isn't invulnerable, that we have a chance to end the occupation if the global anti-war movement works together."

War support drops

Opinion polls show that support for the Bush administration's war on Iraq peaked in April and has been eroding ever since. A public opinion poll conducted by the Scripps Howard News Service and Ohio University over two weeks ending August 12, for example, found a broad drop in public support for US involvement in Iraq over a similar survey taken in early May, shortly after Bush declared an end to major military operations there.

Participants in the latest poll were asked: "As you know, the United States sent troops into Iraq to force it to disarm its weapons of mass destruction. Are you absolutely certain, pretty certain or not certain that this was the correct thing to do?" Thirty-two percent said they were "absolutely certain", 21% were "pretty certain" and 42% were "not certain". (Five per cent were undecided.)

In May, 41% were "absolutely certain", 25% "pretty certain", 31% "not certain" and 3% undecided about the troop commitment.

Reporting the results of the poll on August 13, journalist Thomas Hargrove and Professor Guido Stempel, wrote: "The latest poll found that women and all racial and ethnic minorities generally express the greatest reservations about the war and the military occupation that followed. The only group that showed overwhelming confidence in the Iraqi operations has been self-described 'strong Republicans'...

"The poll found a further decline in confidence that 'Iraq had weapons of mass destruction immediately before the United States began the war'. Twenty-seven percent said they are 'absolutely certain' Saddam Hussein had access to such weapons, down from 32 percent in May."

From Green Left Weekly, August 27, 2003.
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