{"id":1769,"date":"2018-12-21T00:45:12","date_gmt":"2018-12-21T00:45:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/modern-us-history\/?p=1769"},"modified":"2018-12-21T02:14:53","modified_gmt":"2018-12-21T02:14:53","slug":"marches-against-iraq","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/modern-us-history\/marches-against-iraq\/","title":{"rendered":"Marches against Iraq"},"content":{"rendered":"
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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.<\/p>\n

\u201cI went through Vietnam and I didn\u2019t do anything and I\u2019ve felt guilty my entire life,\u201d said Stratton, 59, as she stood in the drizzle with 400 or 500 other people who\u2019d gathered at Westlake Park in downtown Seattle on the fourth anniversary of the start of the Iraq war.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor me, it was a buildup over time,\u201d she said of her opposition to the war. \u201cBut it\u2019s so obvious \u2014 any educated person can see we\u2019ve made a terrible mistake.\u201d<\/p>\n

While Stratton was a protest neophyte, fellow demonstrator Rob Moitoza, a 61-year-old carpenter and musician, is a veteran of Seattle\u2019s anti-war movement.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve been to [almost] every protest \u2026 to try and stop this war,\u201d said Moitoza, who said he was a radioman on a U.S. Navy destroyer but never saw action during the Vietnam War.<\/p>\n

\u201cThose kids are honorable people,\u201d he said of U.S. soldiers fighting in Iraq, \u201cbut they\u2019re being used as pawns by this administration, which only cares about money and power.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cI want us to be a great nation once again \u2026 . We are a greater people when we wage peace, not war,\u201d Sims said. He declared Monday \u201cEnd the War Day\u201d in King County.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cFrom the start, it\u2019s been an abuse of our troops by this administration,\u201d Colgan said.<\/p>\n

Protesters who gathered at the courthouse marched south along Fifth Avenue, merging with the Westlake protesters at Fifth Avenue and Pine Street.<\/p>\n

From there, marchers circled Seattle City Hall \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cno significant incidents or problems of any kind\u201d during Monday\u2019s march.<\/p>\n

Elsewhere, things weren\u2019t 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\u2019s war dead.<\/p>\n

Also on Monday, 44 people were arrested outside the New York Stock Exchange on disorderly-conduct charges, according to The AP.<\/p>\n

In Seattle, the peaceful protests brought out an intergenerational crowd, with representatives from a variety of student, social-justice and religious organizations.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re one of the historic peace churches. We believe that war is wrong,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Though Jason Farbman, a 29-year-old Seattleite who is a senior at Chicago\u2019s DePaul University, is too young to remember the Vietnam War, he said \u201cwe\u2019re seeing history totally repeat itself\u201d with the war in Iraq. And he worries about a potential war with Iran.<\/p>\n

\u201cTalk about d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu \u2014 we\u2019re now hearing the same rhetoric about Iran that we heard about Iraq,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Though a troop withdrawal wouldn\u2019t result in \u201csunshine and lollipops overnight,\u201d said Farbman\u2019s friend, Liz Fawthrop, 20, it is \u201cAmerican foreign policy and the presence of American troops that continues to feed sectarian violence\u201d in Iraq.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll these things are being robbed from us because we\u2019re fighting a war no one wants,\u201d said Fawthrop, a University of Washington student and a member of the Troops Home Now Coalition.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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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.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0Winston Churchill once famously said, \u201cnever let a good crisis go to waste\u201d. After 9\/11 and George Bush\u2019s declaration of the War on Terror, American society descended into a culture of fearing terrorism. This overpowering fear led to society\u2019s acceptance of reduced civil liberties and diminishing the prosperity of the First Amendment in the name of preventing terrorism<\/span>[1]<\/a>. Nonetheless, many found Bush\u2019s Iraq\u00a0 war – and his willingness to sacrifice American lives and economic resources –\u00a0 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<\/span>[2]<\/a>.\u00a0<\/span>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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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[1]<\/a> Eland, Ivan. 2003. \u201cBush\u2019s Wars and the State of Civil Liberties.\u201d\u00a0Mediterranean Quarterly: A Journal of Global Issues<\/em>14 (iv): 158\u201375.<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> Eland, Ivan. \u201cBush\u2019s Wars and the State of Civil Liberties.\u201d\u00a0 158\u201375.<\/p>\n

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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. \u201cI went through Vietnam and I… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3914,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[182830],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1769","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-frances-taylor"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/modern-us-history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1769","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/modern-us-history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/modern-us-history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/modern-us-history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3914"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/modern-us-history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1769"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/modern-us-history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1769\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/modern-us-history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1769"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/modern-us-history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1769"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/modern-us-history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1769"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}