On February 15, 2003 organizers around the world staged what are believed to have been the largest coordinated protests for peace in world history (please see below).
From Wikipedia:
Millions of people protested in approximately 800 cities around the world. According to BBC News, between six and ten million people took part in protests in up to sixty countries over the weekend of the 15th and 16th; other estimates range from eight million to thirty million.
The biggest protests took place in Europe. The protest in Rome involved around 3 million people, and is listed in the 2004 Guinness Book of World Records as the largest anti-war rally in history. Opposition to the war was highest in the Middle East, although protests there were relatively small. Mainland China was the only major region not to see any protests, but small demonstrations attended mainly by foreign students were seen later.
It was all for naught.
February 2003 was a month before the actual invasion. It was the period when the window was closing on actually stopping the Bush Administration. I decided to take a look at the New York Times for that day, to try to remember what was going on.
All told there were 43 articles in the Times that day about Iraq. As I read online this morning, I distinctly remembered reading a hard copy of the paper that morning five years ago -- and trying to decide whether to make the 45 minute trip into the city to join the demonstration planned for UN plaza.
In retrospect, its fair to say the paper that day had some real gems.
The day before, on February 14, 2003, there had been a UN Security Council meeting – not the famous one when Powell laid out his fraudulent WMD case (that happened 10 days earlier) – but a follow-up meeting where a new report by the arms inspectors was presented.
Powell dismissed the report and called for invasion.
Mr. Powell set aside his prepared remarks, speaking spontaneously and throwing his personal prestige behind his assertion that Iraq had failed decisively to comply with Council's demand that it disarm.
Remember when Mr. Powell still had personal prestige? The account continues:
''We cannot allow this process to be endlessly strung out as Iraq is trying to do right now,'' Mr. Powell said. ''My friends, they cannot be allowed to get away with it again,'' he added, referring to Iraq's effort to hide illegal weapons.
Note how the reporter/editor put that – "referring to Iraq’s effort to hide illegal weapons" – with no qualification, no hedging. Then again, their star reporters had been funneling Bush Administration myths about WMD into print, leveraging "secret" sources, for months.
The reaction to Powell's plea from other countries?
Drawing a rare burst of applause from the audience in the Council chambers, Mr. de Villepin told Mr. Powell: ''In this temple of the United Nations, we are the guardians of an ideal, the guardians of conscience. This onerous responsibility and immense honor we have must lead us to give priority to disarmament through peace.''
But that was just the French, right?
American officials seemed surprised by the depth of the opposition on the Council to immediate military action. Even countries like Chile and Angola, whose support Washington believed to be locked in, said the more positive report by the chief inspectors made it premature to turn to force.
Hmm. Why was the US so out of step with other countries?
Part of the explanation, from another article that day:
After setting off considerable anxiety and a run on emergency supplies by formally putting the United States on high alert for a terrorist strike and urging Americans to equip their own home emergency kits, Mr. Ridge pulled way back today without going so far as to say, ''Never mind.''
This was a reference to the famous DHS call for all Americans who love their families to go out and buy duct-tape (the leading supplier of which later turned out to be a big GOP donor). The whole thing was a dry-run for the periodic panic-ratcheting that would define the following 18 months leading up to the 2004 election.
Another article shows that our stalwart Democratic leaders were having none of it pretty much on board:
Most of the Democratic presidential candidates, with the exception of Dr. Howard Dean of Vermont and the Rev. Al Sharpton of New York, argue that the administration has made a good case for war. In addition to Mr. Lieberman, Representative Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri and Senators John Edwards of North Carolina and John Kerry of Massachusetts have said that they found Secretary Powell's argument convincing and that the United States should move against Iraq even if the United Nations refuses to countenance an action.
While no one was worrying about the consequences (I can imagine Rumsfeld saying "we don't do death tolls"), at least there were warning bells ringing about the financial costs of the debacle to come, in an OpEd piece:
War in Iraq will not come cheap -- and neither will peace. The aftermath of a war can be even more costly than the war itself. No one knows what the ultimate price will be. Mitchell E. Daniels Jr., director of the Office of Management and Budget, says the conflict could cost $50 billion to $60 billion, less than half of what Lawrence B. Lindsey, the former chief economic adviser to the White House, estimated last fall. The cost of the war is not included in the budget President Bush submitted to Congress earlier this month.
[snip]
So what's the bottom line? The figures below show a range of possible costs in several areas, and simply adding up the columns would be misleading. (For readers who insist, the low range totals $127 billion, the high $682 billion.)
The authors should not have worried – nobody insisted on adding up the columns. The prospective cost of the adventure did come up in Congressional hearings 6 weeks later. (That was when Paul Wolfowitz explained how $50-$100 billion in Iraqi oil revenues would cover all the costs of reconstruction.)
The most striking article that day, though, was the truly remarkable Editorial (emphases mine):
As much as the feuding members of the United Nations Security Council might like Hans Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei to settle the question of war or peace with Iraq, these two mild-mannered civil servants can't make that fateful judgment. All they can do, which they did again yesterday, is to tell the Council how their inspection efforts are faring. So-so was the answer. It's up to the Council members -- especially the veto-wielding quintet of the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China -- to decide whether Iraq is disarming.
In our judgment, Iraq is not. The only way short of war to get Saddam Hussein to reverse course at this late hour is to make clear that the Security Council is united in its determination to disarm him and is now ready to call in the cavalry to get the job done. America and Britain are prepared to take that step. The time has come for the others to quit pretending that inspections alone are the solution.
The calvary?
Mr. Blix and Dr. ElBaradei cannot be left to play games of hide-and-seek. This is not like Washington's unproved assertions about an alliance between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. There is ample evidence that Iraq has produced highly toxic VX nerve gas and anthrax and has the capacity to produce a lot more. It has concealed these materials, lied about them, and more recently failed to account for them to the current inspectors. The Security Council doesn't need to sit through more months of inconclusive reports. It needs full and immediate Iraqi disarmament. It needs to say so, backed by the threat of military force.
Well there you have it. What was left to debate?
The invasion of Iraq would begin on March 20, just over four weeks later.