The Iraq war and those anti-war movement reposts

 At the start of the week I reposted a string of anti-war articles I’d written from the summer of 2002 to the late autumn early winter of 2003 to my article index on the site.  These are part of the large archive which has just about every article I’ve written since 1991 that is over on the struggle site.

 At the start of the week I reposted a string of anti-war articles I’d written from the summer of 2002 to the late autumn early winter of 2003 to my article index on the site.  These are part of the large archive which has just about every article I’ve written since 1991 that is over on the struggle site.

 I’ve loads more to go, I’ll try and move them over in batches over the next couple of months.  It’s quite odd reading old articles as generally if they are a few years back I’ve more or less forgotten the process of writing them and thus is like reading someone else’s material.  These one like a few of the other batches have some fairly intense memories connected with them.  Apart from the anti-war activity of that period with 3 friends I was trying to renovate a house in the winter of 2002/3 which meant spending two nights and every weekend we were not going to Shannon painting, knocking holes in walls, building shelves and trying to sort out the garden.

It’s one of a few periods I sometimes ‘what if’ about.  There was a sense in the period from the mass tresspass of October 8th 2002 to the attempted mass direct action of March 1st 2003 that we could make a difference if we just pushed a little harder.  Particularly in January and February when the mainstream anti-war movement mushroomed, what if they had been just a little more radical, what if the SWP had been a little smarter, what if we had taken greater risks or simply been more prepared on October 8th, January 18th or March 1st.

Since then I’ve met many people whose lives the war has destroyed or greatly disrupted, mostly those who served in the US Army or Marines and at least some of whom must have flown through Shannon.  I randomly ended up at a ‘Winter Solider’ hearing in Gainsville, Florida a little over a year ago today.

Iraq vets against the war
Iraq vets against the war in Gainsville

There is something incomprehensible about the human cost of that war and its sheer pointlessness.  I can remember each of the six vets pictured above speaking about their experiences.  There are now a documented 98,000 Iraqi civilian death from that war, estimates of the actual death toll (because no body is actually counting) run up to 1.3 million.  More surprizing on the US side we know of the 4,200+ military deaths but did you know over 100,000 vets are claiming disability.

WORDS Andrew Flood (Follow Andrew on Twitter )