Why Active Participation In Protests…..

Iraq’s protesters
Necessary and valid case for withdrawal

Last update: September 29, 2005

Perhaps it was a little unfair of organizers of last Saturday’s anti-war march in Washington to blame President Bush for being out of town. From 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. that day the president was tending to his latest hurricane-oriented photo-ops — at Air Force bases in Colorado Springs and San Antonio and at an Austin, Texas, emergency operations center, as Rita roiled up the Mississippi Valley. “I’m really here to let the folks in Texas know,” Bush said in Austin, “that the federal government knows we have a responsibility to support you in the mission of saving lives, first and foremost, and then help to rebuild their lives.”
The protesters in Washington and many cities across the nation were saying almost the same thing: It’s time to save the lives of GIs in Iraq, rather than keep letting them be churned up by an unwinnable war. And what energy the United States needs to pour into rebuilding lives needs to take place here, along and up the Gulf Coast. Iraq should begin relying on itself to do the same.
Whether it can isn’t a question the protesters were concerned with. At this stage in the war, they have a right not to be. The war is in its third year. More than 1,900 American soldiers have been killed. Not only has there been no progress toward creating a stable Iraq, to say nothing of creating a democratic Iraq; there’s been slow, certain degradation toward civil war. Even other leaders in the Middle East (like the Saudi foreign minister last week) are warning of a full-blown disintegration of Iraq.
With no equal rights for women, no provisions for religious pluralism (Islamic law reigns supreme) and no buy-in from the nation’s Sunnis, the proposed constitution the Iraqi assembly has written makes a mockery of the democratic ideals President Bush envisioned for the country. Yet Bush hails the constitution as “an historic milestone.” Shamelessly, he compares it to this country’s Constitution when it did not recognize women’s right to vote while sanctioning slavery, as if America’s defunct standards of bigotry of 200 years ago are good enough for Iraq. Are Iraqis not better off with a constitution, even an imperfect one, than with Saddam? Of course they are. But the starting point of that imperfect constitution should at least be a high standard to aspire to, rather than a surrender to existing prejudices. That may not be possible in Iraq, but only because the idea of imposing a western-style constitution on a Mideastern culture with no sense of constitutional law was catastrophically flawed from the start.
With or without a new constitution, therefore, Iraq’s march backward seems no less assured than it has been, with or without its democratically elected prime minister. Democracy in name makes no difference when the elected have no power.
The American occupation is now mayhem’s uninvited guest. Military operations like those against Tal Afar or Samarra are mounted again and again to rid some towns of insurgents. As soon as the operations are over, insurgents return. “We’ve taken Samarra four times, and we’ve lost it four times,” an intelligence officer told Time magazine last week. “We need a new strategy.”
The protesters were providing it: Time to leave. Immediate withdrawal would not be wise militarily or politically. But neither would extending the occupation indefinitely. A withdrawal based on a deadline and subject to conditional extensions is the best way out. It would be fairest to soldiers, giving their mission, finally, an end-point. It would be fairest to Iraqis, giving them time to prepare for the inevitable. It would also be fairest to America’s needs, which are urgently domestic. Taxpayers will have to rebuild Louisiana’s delta. They should not have to rebuild Iraq at the same time {I Part with Author here, we All are Responsible for the Death and Destruction Caused and should Pay for those Actions}.
The shame of it is that much of the disintegration and destruction of Iraq happened after Saddam’s fall, as a consequence of a botched American occupation that never figured out how to handle the country post-Saddam. Protesters had an idea why. For all the shrillness of their signs and their demands (“Bush lies,” “worst president ever,” “impeach Bush”) the writing on their placards only echoes the writing on Iraq’s walls, which Bush, to this day, refuses to read.

Army Reports Worst Recruiting in Decades
By ROBERT BURNS, AP
WASHINGTON (Sept. 30) – The Army closed the books Friday on one of the leanest recruiting years since it became an all-volunteer service, missing its enlistment target by the widest margin since 1979 and raising questions about its plans for growth.

Post Thoughts

Many in Congress believe the Army needs to get bigger – perhaps by 50,000 soldiers over its current 1 million – in order to meet its overseas commitments, including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Army is on a path to add 30,000 soldiers, but that will be hard to achieve if recruiters cannot persuade more to join.
Officials insist the slump is not a crisis, although they predict that 2006 will as tough as 2005, if not tougher.
“Combined with a good economy and continued negative news from the Middle East, that means recruiting in fiscal year 2006 will be challenging,” Lt. Col. Bryan Hilferty, an Army spokesman, said Friday.
Michael O’Hanlon, a defense analyst at the Brookings Institution think tank, said the recruiting shortfall this year does not matter greatly – for now.
“The bad news is that any shortfall shows how hard it would be to increase the Army’s size by 50,000 or more as many of us think appropriate,” O’Hanlon said. “We appear to have waited too long to try.”
The Army has not published official figures yet, but it apparently finished the 12-month counting period with about 73,000 recruits. Its goal was 80,000. A gap of 7,000 enlistees would be the largest – in absolute number as well as in percentage terms – since 1979.
The Army National Guard and the Army Reserve, which are smaller than the regular Army, had even worse results.
The active-duty Army had not missed its target since 1999, when it was 6,290 recruits short; in 1998 it fell short by 801, and in 1995 it was off by 33. Prior to that the last shortfall was in 1979 when the Army missed by 17,054 during a period when the Army was much bigger and its recruiting goals were double today’s.
The Army became an all-volunteer service in 1974.
Army officials knew at the outset that 2005 would be a tough year to snag new recruits. By May it was obvious that after four consecutive months of coming up short there was little chance of meeting the full-year goal.
A summertime surge of signups offered some hope the slump might be ending. Hilferty, the Army spokesman, said that despite the difficulties, recruiters were going full speed as the end of fiscal year 2005 arrived Friday.
“We have met the active Army’s monthly recruiting goals since June, and we expect to meet it for September, which sends us into fiscal year 2006 on a winning streak,” Hilferty said. He also noted that the Army has met its re-enlistment goals, even among units that have been deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The outlook for reaching 80,000 recruits in 2006 is dimmed by several factors, including:
The daily reports of American deaths in Iraq and the uncertain nature of the struggle against the insurgency have put a damper on young people’s enthusiasm for joining the military, according to opinion surveys.
The Army has a smaller-then-usual reservoir of enlistees as it begins the new recruiting year on Saturday. This pool comes from what the Army calls its delayed-entry program in which recruits commit to join the Army and then ship to boot camp months later.
Normally that pool is large enough at the start of the recruiting year to fill at least one-quarter of the Army’s full-year need. As the new fiscal year begins Saturday, the figure apparently has dwindled to between 5 percent and 10 percent, although the official number has not been released. Gen. Peter Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, has said it would be the smallest in history.
Charles Moskos, a military sociologist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., said in an interview that the Army would attract more recruits if it could offer shorter enlistments than the current three-year norm.
As it stands, the Army faces a tough challenge for the foreseeable future.
“The future looks even grimmer. Recruiting is going to get harder and harder,” Moskos said.
09/30/05 14:18 EDT

The Relevance of Marching
By David Swanson
David Corn, www.davidcorn.com, published an article today on his site and on www.tompaine.com arguing that last weekend’s march on Washington to end the war was a waste of time and money and energy and won’t help end the war. I disagree, but think Corn makes some useful points.
Corn’s arguments include:
1-these marches always result in debates over how many people showed up
2-not enough people showed up
3-there’s nothing novel about marching anymore
4-more people watched “Desperate House Wives” than marched
5-the marchers are all from blue states, so the Republicans don’t care
6-only one national march in the past 20 years has accomplished anything
7-we’d be better off targeting vulnerable Senators and Members of Congress
1.-Yes, there are always debates over how many people showed up. Some among those organizing this march made proposals that I supported but which were not accepted or acted on, to either carefully estimate the crowd as the march began and passed through a marked off area, or to acquire a good enough satellite photo to estimate crowd size. But the media coverage – lousy and insufficient as it was – did not focus on the crowd size as much as organizers and activists have. Most of the stories in the corporate media communicated that there was a huge, diverse march of people from all over the country who wanted to end the war. If there’s also debate over the crowd size, what’s so bad about that? The issue is at least in the news, and those in search of harder numbers can refer to opinion polls, which all now support the anti-war movement.
2.-Corn says a million people would have meant something. But it would not have meant eliminating the debate over what the right number was. And it will not happen without smaller marches first and recognition of what they achieve. It certainly won’t happen if we write off marching as an outdated tool, the way the Bushies write off the labor movement.
3.-How many people really believe that the marches against the Vietnam War worked primarily because they were novel? In fact, was there anything novel then about marching? What works about marching, I think, is mostly not dependent on it being novel. For one thing, it puts an issue into the media and reaches more people. While a majority of Americans currently oppose the war, only a tiny minority knows that. Most people who oppose the war believe falsely that they hold a minority opinion. A march helps people learn that a mainstream opinion is mainstream. Each person at the march is understood to represent many more people who could not take off work, travel, physically march that distance, or risk arrest. And each person goes home and tells many other people about the inspiring experience of the march. The internet and activist networks are now a-fire with proposals and initiatives and hope. The bus tours and lobby visits and local protests and congressional hearings that preceded the march did not produce this.
Local energy is higher now, not depleted by the national march or any of the regional marches that took place the same day. This is not a zero-sum game. It’s closer to the reverse. The more we do, the more people come in with more energy to do more. And it’s not just Americans who are excited. National marches in DC excite people around the world, build alliances with them, and restore some credibility to our country in the eyes of others. What generated excitement this past weekend, though, was not just the march, but also the civil disobedience at the White House on Monday. On that day 384 people accepted arrest to demand that the war end now. They sacrificed, and that moved people. And we know the exact count (384) because the police know how many arrests were made. There was also a ton of lobbying done by hundreds of people, some of it very aggressively, on Monday; and that was useful, but it did not accomplish the same things the march did.
4.-Of course, more people watched television. Many people work long hours and can’t do much else. But of those supporting the war, all but a few hundred watch television. Of those opposing it, all but a few hundred thousand watch television. That’s the difference. And this argument seems to be one that Corn has invented. I haven’t seen it in the corporate media coverage of the march. Why invent arguments for the other side?
5.-The marchers were not all from blue states. Who said they were? And the supporters of the war in Congress are not all Republicans. In fact, Corn later asks why New Yorkers didn’t stay home and challenge their Democratic senators. Well, because they came to DC to do so, by marching and then by meeting with them. In the process, they built solidarity with others and helped build the movement.
6.-Most marches don’t result in immediate total victory. There is a dangerous tendency to expect that and then grow frustrated. But many of us never thought they would. We see marches as part of an ongoing movement. In this case, the march was combined with lobbying and civil disobedience and various other meetings and strategy sessions. I’d have thought this was a step in the direction Corn favored, but instead he didn’t mention it at all.
The idea that only one march in the past 20 years has had a noticeable effect is bizarre. Most marches I’ve been part of have resulted in positive change. The marches against this war have very likely helped prevent it being more of a slaughter than it’s been. A few years back, ACORN and others organized a march on the Department of Health and Human Services, protesting their new policy of eliminating the minimum wage for workfare jobs. Within 8 hours, the White House reversed that policy. Numerous other marches at the Capitol and White House, even under Bush, have immediately resulted in improvements in horrible legislation, if only very rarely reversals of plans.
7.-I agree that we should target vulnerable senators and House members, both Republicans and Democrats. In fact, there have been discussions about this among the organizers of the recent national march. But the MeetWithTheMothers.org campaign, among other groups, was doing this in the weeks leading up to the march, and it did some good, but no one noticed. No one even bothered to write dismissive articles about it. It did not, I expect, do as much to bring in new people as this march did. We need both types of actions if we are going to have an effective movement. For upcoming plans, watch www.afterdowningstreet.org.

September 2005, Volume 13 Nr. 10, Issue 178
What Noble Cause? Vietnam Combat Veteran
Not Welcome at Vietnam War Memorial
Jozef Hand-Boniakowski
I joined seven Vermont bus loads of concerned United States citizens in converging on the nation’s capital, Washington D.C. on Saturday, September 24, 2005. We endured twenty-two hours on a bus which afforded little opportunity for sleep and twelve hours on our feet in solidarity with the multitude protesting George W. Bush’s illegal war on Iraq. It was a tiring day, made so in large part by standing in place for two-and-a-half hours at the corner of Constitution Avenue and K Streets as the feeder marches converged on the rally site nearby. Wave after wave of people streamed by as we awaited our turn to step off into the march. We were standing at the corner where Camp Casey was established and the Veterans For Peace were gathering. More than one-quarter-million people had come to Mordor to say, “Stop the war! We’ve had enough”. I joined hundreds and hundreds of Veterans For Peace (VFP), Military Families Speak Out, Iraq Veterans Against the War, and the Gold Star Mothers for Peace in being the lead contingent of the march. We marched three-and-a-half miles through the streets of D.C. passing the institutions and their immense buildings that make war profitable. We passed in front of the White House where we expressed the people’s growing displeasure with this regime. In no uncertain terms we let the occupant of the People’s House know that impeachment is in the wind.
One of my veteran brothers from Vermont, a Vietnam combat veteran burdened with PTSD and unable to stay in one place for very long headed off to pay his respects at the Vietnam War Memorial. Upon arriving at the Vietnam Memorial he held his VFP flag with both hands and gazed at the black granite wall. Tears filled his eyes as he looked at the myriad of names while holding the dove-on-helmet VFP flag in his hands. No sooner had the tears flowed then he was ordered to put the flag down. Not being easily intimidated this former G.I. questioned the D.C. authority on the rationale for having to remove his flag. He was then told he had to leave or be arrested. This Vietnam combat veteran who was sent to kill others in Vietnam under the pretense of protecting the American way of life was now being threatened with incarceration for practicing it!
The U.S. system inculcates obedience to the State. It indoctrinates children from a very early age in the schools to parrot the Pledge of Allegiance. The words of the National Anthem sung at sporting events state that we are “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” However, the free are not those confined to paying their respects to fallen comrades within the narrow parameters as defined by the State. Telling my Vietnam combat veteran friend how he can mourn is not living in the land of the free. His resistance, however, is testament to our still being in the home of brave.
The Noble Cause of the People
George W. Bush says that one’s service to one’s country is a “noble cause”, with the sacrifice of one’s life being the highest offering. But why is one’s service to one’s country not noble enough to merit being able to pay homage to the war dead in one’s own chosen way? Why is dying in Bush’s war, the so-called noble cause, not worthy of visibility as the dead return home under secrecy and the cover of darkness? Why are the dead of Bush’s “noble cause” hidden from view the way that the executioner’s face is always well hidden? Bush’s “noble cause” perversely requires that the United States and Iraqi dead and maimed be hidden from public view. Why do the United States people allow this administration to callously use the dead for their own political purposes? How many names will there be on the yet-to-be-built Iraq war memorial? How many names on the Afghanistan war memorial? The future Iran war memorial? The future Syria war memorial? The next and ad-infinitum war memorial? Can the United States of America exist without waging some war, some place in the world, all of the time? Has perpetual war become a defining parameter of the United States? Is war a necessary component for neo-liberalism’s survival? Someday, the peoples of the world will put up a memorial to the fallen victims of United States imperialism. How many acres and acres of marble walls would that take? How many tens-of-millions of names would there be on this wall? How many native American names? How many African American names? How many Southeast Asian names? How many Central and South American names? How many names from Hiroshima, Nagasaki, My Lai, Fallujah, etc.?
Wrong Person Arrested
Cindy Sheehan, the Gold Star Mother for Peace, along with her sister and 370 others were arrested at the White House on Monday, September 26, 2005. After being refused a meeting with George W. Bush, Cindy Sheehan and others sat in front of the White House refusing to move until George W. Bush came out to met with them. George wasn’t coming out. They were arrested. Cindy wrote of her arrest on her website, www.afterdowningstreet.org,
We all know by now why George won’t meet with parents of the soldiers he has killed who disagree with him. First of all, he hates it when people disagree with him. I am not so sure he hates it as much as he is in denial that it even happens….he is a coward who arrogantly refuses to meet with the people who pay his salary… [The] reason why he won’t talk to us is that he knows there is no Noble Cause for the invasion and continued occupation of Iraq. It is a question that has no true answer.
Cindy Sheehan gets arrested for as she puts it, the “tragic and needless deaths of tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis and Americans (both in Iraq and here in America) who would be alive if it weren’t for the criminals who reside in and work in the White House”. A Vietnam War veteran gets threatened with arrest for crying at the Vietnam Wall with a Veterans For Peace flag in his hands. Shame on you George. You have brought the United States of America to a new low. Your noble cause is not the noble cause of the people, which is to end the war and have you removed from office.
A Crawford, Colorado man as he was being arrested at the White House said it was “an honor to be arrested with this group of people.” The crowd chanted, “Arrest Bush”. Yes, indeed, do arrest Bush. The tears of my Vietnam combat veteran friend and comrade, the arrest of Cindy Sheehan, and the collective exhaustion of the 300,000 plus gathered in Washington D.C. on September 24, 2005 will not be for naught. The time is approaching when their noble cause will be realized as the thugs and criminals in the White House are removed. The world’s second super-power, the People, are in the process of making certain this happens shortly. Impeach George W. Bush.
© 2005 Jozef Hand-Boniakowski