December 19, 2002
If a major war breaks out in Iraq, the first thing the Rev. Stuart Fitch plans to do is pray, sending love to everyone from Saddam Hussein to President Bush. Then he'll call his congregation to church for a service.
And then, perhaps, the 78-year-old Episcopalian will get himself arrested. "There will be plenty of people going to jail that day," said Fitch, who wears his pastoral collar beneath a powder-blue shirt. "I'm thinking about joining them."
While the Pentagon has spent the past year training troops, building facilities and stockpiling weapons to launch a war against Iraq, the peace movement has been using the buildup time to coordinate "emergency response plans" to disrupt domestic military activity, tie up commerce and get out its anti-war message.
Rally meeting places are posted, march routes set, protest signs painted, acts of nonviolent civil disobedience choreographed.
Activists in more than a dozen cities have announced where and when to meet on the first day of war - what they call "The Day Of." In Dallas, they plan speeches at City Hall; in San Francisco, they plan to block traffic in the business district; in St. Louis, they will hold a candlelight vigil downtown; in Seattle, they plan to march at the federal building. In New York City, organizers hope to crowd Times Square with protesters.
Some Bush administration supporters who believe war in Iraq will probably be necessary think the demonstrations could be harmful to U.S. interests. "They encourage the enemy," said Michael Ledeen, a foreign policy expert at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. "The Iraqis will look at it and say: 'Ah ha! The people are not with the American government on this.'" But Ledeen said he also wouldn't want to hamper anyone's right to free speech. "If people want to be stupid, they can be stupid," he said. "They're entitled."
The long buildup "is doing wonders for organizing," said Scott Lynch, a spokesman for Peace Action, the largest anti-war activism group in the United States, which claims 85,000 members in 100 chapters around the country.
The yearlong prep time has also brought a broad array of people to the movement, Lynch said. "Our community now entails a much more moderate and wider swath of America. It's not the fringe, and it's not the old lefties, and it's not the kids with purple hair and nose rings," he said.
The movement - which has brought thousands of people to the streets in recent protests - has grown broader and more sophisticated, said Michael Smith, an American studies professor at the University of California at Davis who studies activism in the United States.
University students and former anti-Vietnam War activists are a large part of the movement, but an incongruous coalition of business and corporate leaders, labor unions, minority advocacy groups, religious congregations, feminist organizations, environmentalists, high school students and veterans who fought in the Persian Gulf have been showing up at rallies around the country.
Twenty-three U.S. cities have passed anti-war resolutions, and groups ranging from the National Council of Churches to chapters of the Sierra Club and the National Organization for Women have issued anti-war statements.
"There are the usual suspects, but there's also a much larger variety of people we haven't seen involved before," said Jen Geiger, national program director of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom in Philadelphia.
Peace organizers also said new technology - e-mail distribution lists, Internet listserv Web sites, cellular telephones, pagers and other devices that help get the word out quickly - are helping their effort. There are telephone trees from Olympia, Wash., to Fayetteville, Ark., and e-mail lists at peace and justice centers around the country with thousands of names ready to be dispatched to demonstrations.
Bob Fitch, who has worked with anti-war organizations in the United States for more than 50 years, said the peace movement has never been better organized. "I would say it might be a significant surprise to the government to see how well we are organized," said Fitch, who is not related to Stuart Fitch. Bob Fitch works with the Santa Cruz Resource Center for Nonviolence.
Anti-war activists such as Mike Yarrow of Seattle say the long lead time has also allowed them to do some thoughtful planning. "We're trying to be creative about civil disobedience," Yarrow said. "A lot of us want to show our commitment to a peaceful world but don't want to aggravate people by making their drive home more difficult."
Plans are not limited to the United States. U.S. embassies and consulates from Oslo, Norway, to Auckland, New Zealand, have been targeted as sites for rallies and demonstrations if a major attack occurs.
"I think we will see the most significant outpouring of U.S. opposition to this government since the time of the Vietnam War," said Gordon Clark of Silver Spring, Md., a leading peace activist.
While most activists plan peaceful, mostly legal protests, some are laying plans to disrupt government operations. More than 5,000 people have signed pledges agreeing to engage in acts of nonviolent civil disobedience at federal buildings, congressional offices and military installations, according to the Iraq Peace Pledge organizers in Nyack, N.Y. Such disruptions would likely lead to arrests.
A loosely knit group of activists called the Military Globalization Project said it is preparing a "security zone occupation" at Vandenberg Air Force Base on the California coast, the site used by the Defense Department for all West Coast missile and space launches.
More Information on NGOs
More Information on Protests
More Information on Protests Against War on Iraq
More Information on Iraq Crisis
FAIR USE NOTICE: This page contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. Global Policy Forum distributes this material without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. We believe this constitutes a fair use of any such copyrighted material as provided for in 17 U.S.C § 107. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
