Tom Engelhardt: Right about Iraq, Written Out of the Story

[babylonsister]

http://www.thenation.com/blogs/notion?bid=15&pid=179372

Right about Iraq, Written Out of the Story
Tom Engelhardt

Among the missing-in-action of these last years are all those Americans who went out into the streets before the invasion of Iraq began, part of the largest global antiwar demonstrations ever mounted. Even a fine piece like Frank Rich's "The Ides of March 2003," his recent return to the countdown to war, leaves out that mass of people -- a distinct minority in the U.S., but already part of a global majority.

They carried a plethora of handmade signs, including "No blood for oil," "Contain Saddam -- and Bush," "Uproot Shrub," "Oil for Brains, We Don't Buy It, Liberate Florida," "The Bush administration is a material breach," "Pre-emptive war is terrorism," "W is not healthy for Iraqis and other living things," "Use our Might to Persuade, not Invade," "Give Peace a Chance, Give Inspections a Chance," "How did USA's oil get under Iraq's sand," "Peace is Patriotic," and thousands more. In their essential grasp of the situation, they were on target and they marched directly into the postwar period in vast numbers before seemingly disappearing from the scene and then being wiped from history.

It wasn't, as people now often claim, that almost everyone was gulled and manipulated into supporting this war by the Bush administration, that no one could have had any sense of what a disaster was in the making. Millions of Americans had a strong sense of what might be coming down the pike and many of them actively tried to stop it from happening. I certainly did and I found myself repeatedly in crowds of staggering size.

Women traced out pleas for peace naked on beaches, while in the Antarctic well bundled bodies formed similar peace signs in the snow. And almost everywhere on the planet hundreds of thousands, millions, marched. After the invasion was launched and we had broken Iraq like a Pottery Barn vase, Americans in startling numbers went to the effort of officially apologizing in photos at the Sorry Everyone website.

The demonstrations of that moment were impressive enough that my hometown paper, the New York Times, which loves to cover large demonstrations as if they were of no significance, had a fine front-page piece by Patrick Tyler claiming that we might be seeing the planet's other superpower out on the streets.

Here is a description I offered of an enormous demonstration in New York City four days after the shock-and-awe invasion was launched:

"Twenty to thirty minutes after the group I was with ended our march at Washington Square and dispersed, I called my son -- thanks to the glories of the cell phone -- and he told me he was stuck at the end of the march over 30 blocks north of us. And we hadn't even been near the front of the march. That's a lot of people and there were sizeable crowds of onlookers, cheering from the street side as well as people waving or offering V signs from windows all along the way. It was a remarkably upbeat experience. We were all, perhaps, stunned by the evidence of our existence. Many, many young people. Wonderful signs. Drums and music. Roaring waves of cheers at the end. I think we felt something like shock and awe -- of the genuine kind -- that we had not gone away, that we were not likely to go away."

And then, in a sense, we were gone. And yet, in another sense, we never left the scene.


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[orwell]

1. Very important post...

...thanks...k&r'd

[yurbud]

2. any time a lefty gets on TV with a regular pundit they should say, "Why do you still have this

guy on? Haven't you figured out he's just a shill? Is your next guest going to be Ronald McDonald when you talk about meat safety?"