Originally posted at TomDispatch.
Who even remembers the moment in mid-February 2003, almost 13 years ago, when
millions of people across this country and the planet turned out in an antiwar
moment unique in history? It was aimed at stopping a conflict that had yet to
begin. Those demonstrators, myself included, were trying to put pressure on
the administration of George W. Bush not to do what its top officials so visibly,
desperately wanted to do: invade Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, garrison it for
decades to come, and turn that country into an American gas station. None of
us were seers. We didn’t fully grasp what that invasion would set off,
nor did we imagine a future terror caliphate in Iraq and Syria, but we did know
that, if it was launched, some set of disasters was guaranteed; we knew beyond
a doubt that this would not end well.
We had an analysis of the disaster to come and you could glimpse it on the
handmade signs we carried to those vast demonstrations (some of which I recorded
at the time): “Remember when presidents were smart and bombs were dumb?”;
“Contain Saddam – and Bush”; “Use our might to persuade,
not invade”; “How did USA’s oil get under Iraq’s sand?”; “Pre-emptive
war is terrorism”; “We don’t buy it, liberate Florida”; and
so on. We felt in our bones that it was no business of Washington’s to
decide what Iraq should be by force of arms and that American imperial desires
in the Greater Middle East were suspect indeed. And we turned out to make that
point so impressively that, on the front page of the New York Times,
journalist Patrick Tyler referred
to us as the planet’s second superpower. (“The fracturing of
the Western alliance over Iraq and the huge antiwar demonstrations around the
world this weekend are reminders that there may still be two superpowers on
the planet: the United States and world public opinion.”)