The similarities and differences between the lead up to the 2003 Iraq war and today’s increasingly loud drumbeat for an attack on Iran are striking. These key differences have not altered the rhetoric for war and the ominous similarities have not given pause to those in charge of US policy. In 2003, we went to war under the supposition that Iraq had Weapons of Mass Destruction. Today, 16 US intelligence agencies have reported that Iran has neither nuclear weapons nor a nuclear weapons program. In 2003, the government manufactured a link between 9/11 and Iraq. Today, they link Iran to the resistance in Iraq that they call ‘terrorism’. In 2003, Bush stated that our involvement in Iraq would be clean, short, and beneficial to the people of Iraq. Today, the government argues that the world will be made safer if we attack Iran.
We know, however, that this was not true in 2003 and that it will not be true for 2008. Every war has involved the massacre and mistreatment of innocent civilians, yet each time such massacres are presented as aberrations. The people of the United States need to know and remember that the wholesale slaughter of refugees in Nogeunri in south Korea, My Lai in Vietnam, of Palestinian refugees at Sabra and Shatilla in Lebanon, and the daily murders of innocent civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan are not aberrations—they are facts of war. And so when you authorize a government to go to war on your behalf because you have been placed in a mentality of fear and of what-ifs, you are consenting to the sacrifice of the other, often non-white people in that land, to stave off a manufactured threat based on fundamentally flawed presumptions.
We stood against the war in 2003, as generations before us stood against the Korean war 60 years ago. We stand against possible war today and we will continue to stand with all of you every time there is a threat of invasion and war. Peace treaty in Korea! US out the Middle East! 투쟁!
{extended}