Notes on the March

I marched on State Street on March 17th, marched against war with an enthusiastic crowd, many young, many more my age or older, Vietnam-era folks, who have deep and lasting memories of another failed war, another lying Administration that widened war on false pretenses. Many of the same people, myself included, marched back in 2003, when President Bush, Dick Cheney, Hillary Clinton, and a compliant, lazy national press were beating the drums for the invasion of Iraq. We marched as Shock & Awe unfolded on Fox and CNN, and retired generals gushed about the supreme firepower of the United States military. Predictably, the US rolled over Saddam’s pathetic forces, our tanks rumbling largely unimpeded all the way to Baghdad. We found no weapons of mass destruction, of course, no chemical stores, no missiles pointed at Washington or Tel Aviv. Saddam never posed a threat to the United States – and millions of protestors around the world knew it. We knew that Iraq was a third-rate military power at best, even as Bush and Cheney were comparing Saddam to Hitler. Pure fear tactics, a shell game.

Now that we’re mired in a civil war, the talking heads and Administration mouthpieces tell us that we cannot up and leave; disaster will result, enormous bloodshed, the US will lose all credibility (as if we have any left to lose), our vital national interests will be irreparably damaged. The same false choices were offered during the Vietnam conflict, but lo and behold, none of those horrible predictions came true. Yes, the Communists overran the south and forced the US to evacuate, and unleashed a flood of refugees, but today the US has nearly normal relations with Vietnam; we sell the Vietnamese Coca-Cola and iPods and GAP jeans and financial services and god knows what else. Vietnam is not a threat to its neighbors.

What the anti-war protestors knew in 2003 the majority of Americans know now – that on the basis of trumped-up intelligence and fear-mongering, the US invaded and occupied a sovereign nation that posed no military threat to our country. We knew the Invasion would not be a cake walk, and that Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld were wrong; we knew that Iraqi children would not throw flowers at the feet of American soldiers; we knew that age-old sectarian hatreds, bottled for decades by oppression and suppression, would erupt.

Millions of us knew that history was about to repeat; our political leaders refused to listen, and now, we are doomed to suffer the consequences of their vanity and ignorance.