On February 16, 2003, we put a half million people into the streets of New York. They denied our permit. We did it anyway. I passed a cop that day, talking with another cop, talking a little too loudly about how they had to respect our "rights," indicating by his tone he didn't like the notion.
London turned out more than a million, Rome 3 million, a total of 12 million the world over called bullshit on the war we knew was inevitable. We did this as a weapon of the weak, because nobody, nobody, seemed interested in listening to the evident common sense that we were on the verge of quagmire, and of crossing the line foursquare back over to the wrong side of history. CNN ran a few seconds of footage, and went on beating the war drum. Bush called us a "focus group." Nobody asked Russ Feingold to come on air to refute him.
I asked then, to any who would listen, as I have since asked supporters of candidates who continue to hem and haw around their war votes: Did any of these supposed "leaders" even remember the Tonkin Gulf? Could any of them actually parse events and motivations, consider who they were enabling, synthesize history to where it crystallized the gravity of their capitulation, Tonkin Gulf-plus-39?
Twelve million people did that. "Our" leadership ignored it, and us. They nullified the War Powers Act put in place to make sure Vietnams never happened again, and they didn't once examine the tragic cause and effect thereof. Those in "our" party who did, to a person, now sit in leadership positions in the Congress. All of those 12 million are more fit for high office in this country than any one of them who did. You don't get a pass on that. You get get disqualified from teaching junior high social studies for that.
Four thousand American corpses later, approaching a million Iraqi, countless crimes against humanity later, 935 lies later, a Constitution shredded in the interest of "wartime exigency" later, Bush took to a podium yesterday to echo his great successes, the benign City on a Hill being carved out of Mesopotamia for all our sacrifices, even as Iraq exploded, as his obfuscation unraveled, as shells fell on the Fort Apache that is the "Green Zone." Any responsible news network would have done a split-screen.
I could only think one word: Tet.
They wouldn't understand that either.