June 2005: Phase II of the Anti-War Movement
by Medea Benjamin

For the history books, mark down June 2005 as the moment
the US movement against the occupation of Iraq got its
second wind. In June, the US public became solidly
anti-war, Bush's approval rating took a nose dive, and
a significant number of Congresspeople started to call
for an exit strategy. This marks a seismic shift from
just one month ago, when Congress overwhelmingly passed
another $82 billion for war-with only 44 members of
the House and not one Senator dissenting.

The continued violence in Iraq, the daily deaths of
US soldiers, and the non-stop drain of financial
resources has finally moved the anti-war sentiment from
a much-maligned minority position to a mainstream one. A
Gallup poll June 6-8 found that 6 in 10 Americans
advocated a partial or full withdrawal of U.S. troops
from Iraq and for the first time, a majority said they
would be upset with the president if he decided to
send more troops. An Associated Press poll showed only
41% approved of Bush's handling of Iraq. With such
negative perceptions of the war and 2006 midterm
elections approaching, an increasing number of elected
officials have finally started to listen to the public
and push for an exit strategy.

Thursday, June 16 was a snapshot of just how much
the ground has shifted. The day started off with a press
conference of strange bedfellows announcing the first
bi-partisan Congressional resolution calling for an exit
strategy. Appearing together before the press were two
liberal Democrats-Dennis Kucinich from Ohio and Neil
Abercrombie from Hawaii-with Republican libertarian Ron
Paul from Texas and even more astonishing, conservative
Republican Walter Jones from North Carolina-the very
same congressman who pushed the House cafeterias to
scrap "French fries"from the menu and serve up "freedom
fries."

Their new resolution, with a counterpart in the
Senate introduced by Russ Feingold, calls on George Bush
to announce a withdrawal timetable by the end of the
year and start bringing American troops home by October
1, 2006. It has no end date for full withdrawal, and
has a longer timeline for initiating the pull-out than
many of us would have liked, but it's as far as the
Republicans were willing to go and it's certainly a
step in the right direction. Rep. Kucinich called it
"the beginning of the end of the war in Iraq."

Giving Rep. Kucinich's remark more punch is the fact
that on the very same day, Congresswoman Maxine Waters
from California announced the formation of a new
Congressional Caucus succinctly labeled the "Out of
Iraq" Caucus, with 41 members already signed on. "We can
no longer keep quiet waiting for our Party to speak out
against this war," she said in herpress release. "The
American people are expecting us to provide leadership
to end this war and bring our troops home." The Caucus
plans to coordinate Congressional anti-war activities,
including legislative strategies, press events, liaison
with national peace groups, and support for families and
veterans against the war.

Thursday also marked a step forward for House
Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who represents the solidly
anti-war district of San Francisco but has refused to
take leadership against the war. On Thursday
she introduced an amendment to the 2006 defense spending
measure that would require Bush to report to Congress
within 30 days on his criteria for bringing troops home.
While defeated, it got an impressive 200 votes.

But the real hero of the day was Rep. John Conyers
Jr.,the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary
Committee, who made history on Thursday by holding a
hearing on the scandalous Downing Street memo and then
hand-delivering to the White House over 560,000
signatures of American citizens demanding answers to
critical questions raised by the memo.

The Republicans forced Rep. Conyers to hold the hearing
in a cramped basement room, and much of the mainstream
press either ignored or belittled his efforts. But Rep.
Conyers has tapped a wellspring of support from an angry
public that sees the Downing Street memo as the smoking
gun proving that the Bush administration was
determined to go to war back in July 2002 and "fixed"
the intelligence to fit the policy.

The witnesses at the hearing included
constitutional lawyer John C. Bonifaz, who said that if
the documents were proven to be true, the president may
have violated a federal law against misleading Congress,
and his actions would be grounds for impeachment. Cindy
Sheehan, whose son Casey was killed in Iraq, said the
memo confirmed that "the leadership of this country
rushed us into an illegal invasion of another sovereign
country on prefabricated and cherry-picked
intelligence." She chided Congress for handing
its responsibility to declare war over to the president,
and said that a full investigation into the Downing
Street Memo would be a "good beginning for Congress to
redeem itself for abandoning the Constitution and
the American people."

Two dozen Congresspeople showed up at various times
during the hearing to show their support. Afterwards,
Conyers and seven other representatives hand-delivered
two huge stacks of petitions to the White House, and
then joined a spirited rally organized by Code Pink
and Progressive Democrats of American on behalf of the
coalition AfterDowningStreet.com.

Before an enthusiastic crowd of about 800 people,
Rep. Conyers and the other representatives vowed to
continue to push for the truth, for accountability and
for an end to the war.

It was quite a day, and all of us left with a
renewed sense of possibilities and responsibilities. The
peace movement, demoralized after the unsuccessful
efforts to both stop the war and get George Bush out of
office, must lift itself out of the doldrums and into
the streets and the corridors of power. We must push our
representatives to sign on to the new legislation, keep
demanding an investigation into the Downing Street
Memo, and pressure the media to cover these new
developments in a serious, respectful way. We should
march in July 4 parades with the "Bring the Troops Home"
message, reinvigorate our local vigils, step up
the counter-recruitment efforts that are making it so
difficult for the military to get enough new soldiers
for this war. And the next big anti-war mobilization
scheduled for September 24 in Washington DC,coupled
with lobbying on September 26, must be huge.

We've got new momentum. Now let's ride the wave.

Medea Benjamin (medea@globalexchange.org),cofounder of
CODEPINKand Global Exchange,is co-editor of the new
book Stop the Next War Now.