Abstract

Tom Andrews

The article focuses on the antiwar movement's role in protesting the Iraq War. The brutal destruction of Falluja, Iraq, in order to "save" it and a recently published report that hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children are suffering from acute malnutrition--an affliction that has doubled since the U.S. invasion--are just two of the many compelling reasons that stopping the President George W. Bush Administration's war in Iraq is a moral imperative. The leadership required to meet this imperative will not come from Democrats in Congress. It will come from a focused, determined and relentless antiwar movement. Exit polls showed that Americans are deeply divided on Bush's war. Now is the time for this movement to mount vigorous opposition to the Administration's request for as much as an additional $75 billion for the Iraq war, and to the nomination of an Attorney General who believes that the torture exposed at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq is perfectly legal and that treaties like the Geneva Convention are "obsolete." Perhaps most important, there is an opportunity to forge working partnerships with veterans of the Iraq war and their families as well as reservists, National Guardsmen and -women and the families of the victims of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, who reject the idea that the war in Iraq is making anyone safer from terrorism.