"Our Work's Just Starting"
News: Anti-war demonstrators march in Washington. But will the Democrats take a stand?
September 26, 2005
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WASHINGTON, DC — Sobbing, the young woman asked if she could have the picture of her brother. His photo was one of the more than 1,900 portraits of American soldiers killed in Iraq, each printed on a piece of 8 1/2" x 11" paper and tied together with string that wound its way through the hundreds of thousands of antiwar demonstrators. Momentarily stunned, one of the women holding the string searched briefly for the picture, pulled it off and handed it to the young woman. Standing still, clutching her brother's picture, she was lost in the passing crowd as the faces, suspended, floated on by.
Further down the string was Erika Nakis, whose 19-year-old son, Nathan, was killed in a vehicle accident in Mosul, about four hours north of Baghdad. He was a member of the Oregon National Guard. "He never supported the war. He joined to help people, not kill people," she said. "He'd been in school one month before he was called up."
Nakis said she had opposed the war from the beginning, but was moved to demonstrate only after she saw Cindy Sheehan take up residence in front of George Bush's ranch earlier this summer, demanding an explanation from the president for the loss of her son Casey, a member of the first Cavalry Division who died fighting in Baghdad in April 2004. At first, she said, she and her family had worried about how others would reaction to their speaking out, and how the media would portray them. "We didn't want the wrong message getting out," Nakis said, referring to the attacks on Cindy Sheehan, some of which have portrayed her as traitor soiling the memory of her son. "But now it's time to get involved. I don't want to see any more boys coming back dead."
Military familieshave so far been the backbone of the popular antiwar movement, with Sheehan as their most public face. Hundreds came to Washington for the demo.
The photo caption at the top of this Salon.com story doesn't identify the man directly to the left of Joan Baez. He is Fernando Suarez del Solar, who visited Iraq in December 2003 to meet with bereaved Iraqi families and to visit the spot outside Diwaniya, two hours of south of Baghdad, where his son, Jesus, had died during the invasion when he stepped on an unexploded US bomb.
Del Solar also visited Sadr City, a Baghdad neighborhood where locals told him and other military families that an uprising was inevitable if the US military were to remain in the area. Five months later, one of the soldiers killed in the fighting that broke out in Sadr City was Casey Sheehan.
If Bush won't talk to Cindy Sheehan, other politicians will. In a speech to a gathering of progressives at the University of DC on Sunday, she excoriated DNC chair Howard Dean and New York Senators Hillary Clinton and Charles Schumer, all of whom she met last with week, for refusing to call for a pullout. "If you want, we can walk slower so you can catch up with us," she joked, addressing Schumer in absentia.
In my nearly 10 years as a journalist, I've never asked anybody that cliché question: "How are you feeling?" But with Sheehan it seemed appropriate. "This weekend was huge—it was amazing," she said. "But our work's just starting."
For the first time, the antiwar movement has a face and a real strategy. Think of it as a pre-exit exit strategy. "We're forcing the Democrats to take a stand," Sheehan said. Given that a recent congressional hearing on withdrawal options failed to draw the leadership of either party, that may take some doing.
It was easy to leave Washington this weekend with a sense of optimism about the direction the anti-war movement and the general discourse is taking. The demo, by whoever's count (the DC police say 150,000, some organizers have said as many as half a million), was very large.
Counter-demonstrators, this time, were few and ineffective. I stopped for a few minutes to speak with Ted Shpak, a Vietnam vet from New Hampshire, who advocated turning Iraq into a parking lot to eradicate "the terrorists." "You have to kill a lot of civilians, but then that's war," he said. "We're fighting them there, but we'd be dealing with them in the streets here if if we weren't. They just don't like Americans."
But even he admitted to some hesitation. "We're trying to make a democracy out of that place, but I'm ont sure we're ever going to do that. So maybe we shouldn't be there."
Whatever uplift I got from the demo lasted until Sunday evening, when I spoke by phone with an Iraqi colleague in Baghdad. I asked her if anyone there had paid attention to news coverage of the demonstrations. "The war has already happened," was all she said. "It's too late."
David Enders is a freelance journalist and a frequent contributor to MotherJones.com. He has spent much of the past two years reporting from Iraq. His first book, Baghdad Bulletin, is available from University of Michigan Press.
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