Nancy Stratton, a retired elementary-school teacher from Enumclaw, was a college student during the Vietnam War but was never an anti-war demonstrator until Monday.
“I went through Vietnam and I didn’t do anything and I’ve felt guilty my entire life,” said Stratton, 59, as she stood in the drizzle with 400 or 500 other people who’d gathered at Westlake Park in downtown Seattle on the fourth anniversary of the start of the Iraq war.
“For me, it was a buildup over time,” she said of her opposition to the war. “But it’s so obvious — any educated person can see we’ve made a terrible mistake.”
While Stratton was a protest neophyte, fellow demonstrator Rob Moitoza, a 61-year-old carpenter and musician, is a veteran of Seattle’s anti-war movement.
“I’ve been to [almost] every protest … to try and stop this war,” said Moitoza, who said he was a radioman on a U.S. Navy destroyer but never saw action during the Vietnam War.
“Those kids are honorable people,” he said of U.S. soldiers fighting in Iraq, “but they’re being used as pawns by this administration, which only cares about money and power.”
The 3 p.m. Westlake rally was organized by the Troops Home Now Coalition, which brings together military veterans and high-school and college students.
A rally at the same time at the U.S. District Courthouse on Stewart Street was organized by a coalition of social-justice activists. Outside the courthouse, King County Executive Ron Sims invigorated the crowd of several hundred with an impassioned speech, saying the United States is great when it defeats hunger, illness and hatred.
“I want us to be a great nation once again … . We are a greater people when we wage peace, not war,” Sims said. He declared Monday “End the War Day” in King County.
Another speaker, Army veteran Joe Colgan, whose son Benjamin was killed in action in Iraq in 2003, said his son died a hero, but his death had nothing to do with promoting peace or democracy.
“From the start, it’s been an abuse of our troops by this administration,” Colgan said.
Protesters who gathered at the courthouse marched south along Fifth Avenue, merging with the Westlake protesters at Fifth Avenue and Pine Street.
From there, marchers circled Seattle City Hall — where a couple of hours earlier the Seattle City Council, which has no authority over international relations, had approved a resolution urging the president to bring the troops home. Demonstrators ended up in front of the Henry Jackson Federal Building at Second Avenue between Madison and Marion streets.
In all, at least 1,000 people marched through downtown Seattle on Monday, the second day of anti-war protests and marches across the country. On Sunday, roughly 3,000 people participated in marches and demonstrations here.
One man, who sat down in the middle of Second Avenue at Madison Street just as the intersection was being reopened to motorists Monday afternoon, was handcuffed and taken away by Seattle police officers. He was arrested on suspicion of pedestrian interference, said police spokesman Jeff Kappel, adding that there were “no significant incidents or problems of any kind” during Monday’s march.
Elsewhere, things weren’t so peaceful: On Sunday, a rally involving as many as 15,000 people in Portland ended with scuffles and police using pepper spray, The Associated Press reported. And while there was no such trouble at smaller demonstrations around the country on Monday, San Francisco police arrested 57 people who blocked a streetcar line in the heart of the financial district by lying in the street, draped in white sheets, to symbolize Iraq’s war dead.
Also on Monday, 44 people were arrested outside the New York Stock Exchange on disorderly-conduct charges, according to The AP.
In Seattle, the peaceful protests brought out an intergenerational crowd, with representatives from a variety of student, social-justice and religious organizations.
This was the second Iraq war event in as many days for Ruth Yarrow, 67, a Quaker with the University Friends Meeting. She also attended a Sunday evening peace service organized by the Church Council of Greater Seattle.
“We’re one of the historic peace churches. We believe that war is wrong,” she said.
Though Jason Farbman, a 29-year-old Seattleite who is a senior at Chicago’s DePaul University, is too young to remember the Vietnam War, he said “we’re seeing history totally repeat itself” with the war in Iraq. And he worries about a potential war with Iran.
“Talk about déjà vu — we’re now hearing the same rhetoric about Iran that we heard about Iraq,” he said.
Though a troop withdrawal wouldn’t result in “sunshine and lollipops overnight,” said Farbman’s friend, Liz Fawthrop, 20, it is “American foreign policy and the presence of American troops that continues to feed sectarian violence” in Iraq.
Both lamented the hundreds of billions of dollars that have so far been spent fighting the war, when education, health-care, affordable-housing and other social programs have suffered here at home.
“All these things are being robbed from us because we’re fighting a war no one wants,” said Fawthrop, a University of Washington student and a member of the Troops Home Now Coalition.
On the fourth anniversary of the beginning of the Iraq war, thousands participated in antiwar protests nationwide. This Seattle Times article provides coverage of the peaceful marches, with a focus on the Seattle leg. The authors included quotes from people who were marching, highlighting the marcher’s reasons for marching. Winston Churchill once famously said, “never let a good crisis go to waste”. After 9/11 and George Bush’s declaration of the War on Terror, American society descended into a culture of fearing terrorism. This overpowering fear led to society’s acceptance of reduced civil liberties and diminishing the prosperity of the First Amendment in the name of preventing terrorism[1]. Nonetheless, many found Bush’s Iraq war – and his willingness to sacrifice American lives and economic resources – unfounded, especially after the release of the Downing Street memo, which showed that the invasion of Iraq was more to pursue an economic agenda rather than combat terrorism and secure democracy[2]. The noted concerns regarding the effects of Iraq in this article were similar to those in other wars. In American history, war has put Americans at an economic disadvantage at the cost of American lives. War therefore takes away from the government’s ability to confront other pressing issues within the United States’ infrastructure. Further, the diversity reflected in this protest demonstrates that throughout the years, antiwar protest has become something that anyone- regardless of race, gender, creed – can contribute to. The fact that a pro-troop organization organized the marches also demonstrates a departure from the Vietnam era- no longer do antiwar protests target those fighting the war; rather, the protests take aim at the establishment which committed the troops in the first place. The article also demonstrates that war has enabled the government to delay the confrontation of domestic issues.