Hundreds of thousands of people protested in cities across the country on Saturday, January 27 against Bushs escalation of the war in Iraq and to demand that the troops be brought home now. Anti-war activists dubbed this a peace surge against Bushs escalation of the war.
The largest of the demonstrations was in Washington, D.C., where a raucous and colorful multitude of protesters danced, sang, chanted and shouted their opposition in front of the Capitol (Washington Post, 1/28/07). While most estimates put the crowd in D.C. at 100-150,000, organizers for United for Peace and Justice claimed up to 500,000 attended. There were also smaller demonstrations in dozens of cities and towns across the country, including rallies of several thousand in Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.
Significantly, there was a small contingent of active-duty soldiers at the protest in Washington, representing the growing opposition to the war among the rank-and-file of the U.S. military. Recently, over 1,000 active-duty soldiers handed in a petition known as Appeal for Redress to Congress calling for an end to the war. Jonathan Hutto, one of the founders of the group, told the crowd: We come here today to speak out against this war, an imperialist war, a war for profit, not for people, a war for death, not for people, a war against the working class, not for justice.
At the protest in Seattle, Lt. Ehren Watada, the first commissioned officer to refuse to deploy to Iraq, spoke. Watada, who faces a court-martial on February 5, received a rousing ovation.
In addition, there were sizable contingents of Iraq Veterans Against the War and Military Families Speak Out. Garrett Reppenhagen told the D.C. crowd that IVAW has quadrupled in size in the past year, as more troops and vets speak out against the war.
The protests were timed to coincide with the opening of the new Congress, now with a new Democratic majority in power. Over two-thirds of Americans oppose Bushs surge. Many of the protesters carried banners or signs calling on Congress to cut off funding for the war and bring the troops home now. A recent poll found 61% of Americans want Congress to block funding for the surge (CNN, 1/19-1/21/07).
Democrats Under Pressure
Despite this massive public opposition, Democratic and Republican politicians in Congress are refusing to take decisive action and cut off funding for the surge let alone cutting off funding for the entire war. Instead they have limited themselves to non-binding resolutions against the surge. Once again, the bulk of the Democrats in Congress are acting as enablers of the policies of the Bush administration, paralyzed by fear of assuming political responsibility for the defeat in Iraq.
Nevertheless, several of the most left-wing Democratic politicians spoke at the rally, including Maxine Waters, John Conyers, and Dennis Kucinich. This reflects the pressure from below on the political establishment. But not a single leading Democrat was anywhere to be found at the rally.
While these left-leaning Democrats harshly criticize the war, the reality is that the Democratic Party is totally complicit in the war, having voted to authorize Bush to go to war and continually voting to spend hundreds of billions more to fight it.
If antiwar Democrats like Kucinich want to consistently struggle against the war, they should leave the Democratic Party and work to build an independent antiwar, pro-worker political alternative to the two parties of big business and war.
Instead, fearing that the growing anger at the polices of the Democratic Party will lead to antiwar activists breaking from the Democrats, the role of these Democratic politicians at the protest was unfortunately to try and channel the antiwar movement back into the Democratic Party. Regardless of their intentions, this will only serve to dampen opposition and help to limit the demands of activists to what is acceptable to the Democratic Party leadership and its corporate backers, as occurred during the 2004 presidential elections when Kucinich and others backed the pro-war John Kerry.
The antiwar movement will be most effective by being independent of the Democratic Party. We should use the political debate and discussion that is already beginning around the 2008 presidential elections to mobilize around the call for an immediate end to the occupation by building the strongest possible independent anti-war challenge for the 2008 presidential elections. Such a campaign would expose the true nature of the Democratic Party and the stranglehold that Corporate America currently has over the U.S. political system, and uncompromisingly mobilize protests against the war.
While the protests on January 27 were very important, they only tapped into a small portion of the existing anti-war sentiment. There is an enormous potential to build the antiwar movement. Activists now need to seize this opportunity to establish anti-war groups in their schools, communities, and workplaces and build for the local demonstrations called on the 4th anniversary of the war the week of March 17-24.
Continued mass demonstrations are extremely important in that they can draw in new forces and help the movement feel its strength, but activists also need to discuss tactics that can take the movement forward. In Seattle, Socialist Alternative is working with Youth Against War and Racism to organize a student walkout on April 18 against the war and against military recruitment in schools. Bold, mass actions like student walkouts can help convince other sectors of society to take action against the war.
Socialist Alternative and January 27
Socialist Alternative members from across the country attended the January 27 protests. We sold hundreds of copies of our newspaper, Justice, as well as dozens of Fight the Rich, Not Their Wars t-shirts. In Seattle, our leaflets for the student walkout on April 18 got an excellent response from young people at the rally, with many enthusiastically signing up to get involved in building it, agreeing to take stacks of leaflets to help spread the word at their school, donate money, etc.
Socialist Alternative will be energetically building for the 4th anniversary protests in March, striving to build a democratic, mass anti-war movement based among youth and working-class communities. We recognize, however, that as long as capitalism persists, war is inevitable, as corporations and their governments compete over resources and markets. In his State of the Union, Bush announced, to bipartisan applause, that he wants to add 92,000 troops to the U.S. military over the next 5 years, to rebuild the strength of the U.S. military in preparation for future conflicts to defend the interests of U.S. corporations. Socialist Alternative opposes a world of growing poverty and endless war. We fight for a socialist world in which ordinary people democratically control the resources of society in the interests of humanity, rather than a world dominated by a tiny elite who are always willing to sacrifice the lives of ordinary working people in their endless quest for more profits.