How the Post-9/11 Antiwar Movement Was Erased From History!

[G_j]

http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/02/03/how-post-911-antiwar-movement-was-erased-history

Published on
Wednesday, February 03, 2016
by
TomDispatch

How the Post-9/11 Antiwar Movement Was Erased From History
by
Tom Engelhardt


Who even remembers the moment in mid-February 2003, almost 13 years ago, when millions of people across this country and the planet turned out in an antiwar moment unique in history? It was aimed at stopping a conflict that had yet to begin. Those demonstrators, myself included, were trying to put pressure on the administration of George W. Bush not to do what its top officials so visibly, desperately wanted to do: invade Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, garrison it for decades to come, and turn that country into an American gas station. None of us were seers. We didn’t fully grasp what that invasion would set off, nor did we imagine a future terror caliphate in Iraq and Syria, but we did know that, if it was launched, some set of disasters was guaranteed; we knew beyond a doubt that this would not end well.

We had an analysis of the disaster to come and you could glimpse it on the handmade signs we carried to those vast demonstrations (some of which I recorded at the time): “Remember when presidents were smart and bombs were dumb?”; “Contain Saddam -- and Bush”; “Use our might to persuade, not invade”; “How did USA's oil get under Iraq's sand?”; “Pre-emptive war is terrorism"; “We don’t buy it, liberate Florida”; and so on. We felt in our bones that it was no business of Washington’s to decide what Iraq should be by force of arms and that American imperial desires in the Greater Middle East were suspect indeed. And we turned out to make that point so impressively that, on the front page of the New York Times, journalist Patrick Tyler referred to us as the planet’s second superpower. (“The fracturing of the Western alliance over Iraq and the huge antiwar demonstrations around the world this weekend are reminders that there may still be two superpowers on the planet: the United States and world public opinion.”)

"At a time when Americans should have been in the streets saying hell no, we better not go, the Bush administration and then the Obama administration were repeating the same militarized mistakes endlessly, while turning the Greater Middle East into a charnel house of failure. "

Of course, this vast upsurge of global opposition would prove to be right on the mark, while all the brilliant policymakers and pundits in Washington who beat the drums loudly for war were desperately wrong. And yet the invasion did happen and, in its disastrous wake, we, not they, were wiped out of history. None of us would be consulted when the retrospectives began. No one would want to hear from those who had been right about the invasion (only officials and “experts” who had been dismally wrong). In the process that pre-war movement of ours would essentially be erased from history.

...more..

[Rex]

1. The media really separated itself from the people and proved to be a great tool for government

and profit. They never came back and won't, people are not important enough to make that kind of difference anymore. Especially without new coverage...plus the media can change the outcome of a federal election...something all the money in the world cannot do.

[arcane1]

2. "Erased"? Hell, we were never written into history in the first place :(

[G_j]

3. agreed

we were completely ignored right from the beginning.

[Amaya]

4. I was there in New York 2003

I remember how cold it was. I marched in Washington and New York many times after that!
As time went on I have become less and less political. The game is rigged and I don't want to play anymore.

[Nay]

5. I and 5 of my friends were there that day. The whole Mall was full, from

top to bottom, and all the side streets were full for several blocks, too. The cops were bored but OK to us.

I was stunned to see how the crowd size was underestimated by hundreds of thousands in the media that night. When you compare the crowd size estimate to OTHER marches held there in the past, it was obvious there were at least 500,000 people marching that day.

[G_j]

6. The Day The World Said No To War

Febuary 15. 2003,

Roughly 10 million to 15 million people (estimates vary widely) assembled and marched in more than 600 cities: as many as 3 million flooded the streets of Rome; more than a million massed in London and Barcelona; an estimated 200,000 rallied in San Francisco and New York City. From Auckland to Vancouver — and everywhere in between — tens of thousands came out, joining their voices in one simple, global message: no to the Iraq war.

http://www.ips-dc.org/february_15_2003_the_day_the_world_said_no_to_war/