Anti-War Protests Get Louder In Calif.
By Evelyn Nieves
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, October 14, 2002; Page A01
SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 13 -- In all the years he has spent on street corners, talking himself hoarse trying to convince the world that war is hell, Jeff Grubler has never been so popular.
Life has become one big anti-war rally. Last Wednesday, Grubler, a volunteer with the American Friends Service Committee, agreed to lead a rally of 200 students at the University of California, Berkeley. On Thursday, he joined 200 people on a march to the Federal Building here to protest the congressional resolution authorizing President Bush to attack Iraq. On Saturday, Grubler spent a good part of the day sifting through a mountain of e-mails about upcoming anti-war events. Today, he led a teach-in at Stanford University.
The prospects of a U.S. war on Iraq have prompted so many teach-ins, protests, marches and forums that he can't keep up. "In the Bay Area," said Grubler, a 34-year-old bartender who began working for the Service Committee about five years ago, "there are literally multiple events every day."
In the Bay Area, bastion of the most liberal Democrats in the country, speaking out against unilateral action on Iraq is like preaching the dangers of binge drinking at an Alcoholics Anonymous convention. Anti-war rallies on two consecutive weekends drew 10,000 people each, and hastily called protests draw several hundred. Unlike the rest of the country -- or even the rest of California -- activists here can boast that most of their elected representatives (10 of 13) heeded their thousands of phone calls and voted against the resolution on Iraq.
But the Bay Area is not, as some pundits would have it, "out there" alone.
It is simply the most obvious place, veteran peace organizers say, to see a burgeoning national anti-war movement that is gaining momentum by the day.
Peace groups believe they can still avert a war by convincing politicians that the majority of Americans oppose unilateral action against Iraq.
Most Americans -- about 61 percent, according to a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll -- support using force to remove Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, but anti-war activists contend that is true only when people are asked the question in the broadest terms. When voters in the Post-ABC poll were asked whether the United States should launch an attack over the opposition of its allies, for example, support dropped to 46 percent.
Most polls find that a majority of Americans believe the United Nations should be allowed to try diplomacy first.
Approval of the resolution on Iraq, though disheartening to groups that spent weeks organizing citizens to inundate members of Congress with thousands of phone calls and e-mails registering opposition to a war, was expected, peace organizers say. (Even before the final vote, anti-war groups planned national protests on Oct. 26 in San Francisco and the District, hoping for at least 100,000 participants.) In fact, the resolution has increased the anti-war effort, organizers say. Some say politicians who ignored the will of their constituents and voted to approve the resolution will face repercussions, such as more protests and sit-ins at their offices -- and possible retribution in the next election. But the greater effort will be in convincing Congress and the president that war is not the way to go, said Mary Lord, director of the national peace-building unit for the American Friends Service Committee.
"I think that the Democratic leadership made a mistake in thinking that voting for the war would get them off the headlines," Lord said. "Now there's going to be accelerated troop deployment. This issue is not going to go away."
The latest Pew Research Center survey, taken early this month, found that 88 percent of Americans are following the Iraq debate very or fairly closely.
No one can say what will happen to the peace movement if Bush does launch strikes on Iraq and the nation is plunged into a sustained war. But time-tested organizations such as the Service Committee, which is run by the nation's oldest pacifist institution, the Quakers, as well as groups that have sprung up in response to the threat of a U.S. invasion, talk in elated terms about how overwhelmed they are with the sheer number of people who want to join their effort, as well as the multiplying number of anti-war activities. They talk of a rising tide of student activism, of protesting by people who have never protested before and of an engagement on the issue that was absent prior to U.S. involvement in Vietnam.
The Institute for Policy Studies, a liberal Washington think tank, had compiled a list of more than 250 anti-war events planned throughout the country over the next two weeks, only to discover it had missed at least 150 others. "People are organizing at all levels," said Amy Quinn, co-director of the institute. "I'm hearing from the older generations that there was nowhere near this level of activism at this stage in the Vietnam War. I'm not surprised that people are coming out against the war. I am surprised at how organized and vocal people are."
Global Exchange, the San Francisco-based human rights organization that has been leading many of the anti-war efforts, created a Web site, www.unitedforpeace.org, just before Sept. 11 so that peace organizations could list their events. In the past month, as Bush began increasing his arguments to wage a war on Iraq, the list of anti-war events "in every state" has been growing by the day, said Andrea Buffa, a Global Exchange organizer. "Teach-ins, sit-ins, rallies, you name it -- I think that the nation is seeing a growing peace movement the likes of which we have not seen in a long time."
Not In Our Name, an anti-war group based in New York, has been receiving more than 25,000 hits and more than 1,000 e-mails a day from all over the world on its Web site, www.notinourname.org, said Miles Solay, an organizer with the Refuse and Resist Project, an arm of the organization. A call from Not In Our Name for national rallies on Oct. 6 led to more than 40 rallies involving more than 85,000 people, he said. Although those rallies had hoped to affect the outcome of the congressional resolution, Solay said, many more activities are planned. Not In Our Name is organizing the Oct. 26 rallies and others. "There will be lots of response to the no-surprise resolution," he said. "On the day the bombing begins, there will be organized protests across the country. There's a new student movement growing all over the country. Thousands of youth are organizing and getting involved. . . . We are coming together."
The American Friends Service Committee has launched an ambitious effort, organizing war protests by faith groups as well as student teach-ins, coalitions among anti-war organizations big and small, and citizen involvement in campaigns where candidates have expressed support for a U.S. attack, Lord said. "We'll be encouraging people to go to candidate meetings and campaign forums to tell them that this is not the way to get elected."
That also will mean more calls to more politicians, as well as more protests directed at political leaders. Alpesh Patel, who has been leading protests at the San Mateo, Calif., office of Rep. Tom Lantos, one of the first local Democrats to support the resolution on Iraq, said he has found that there is almost unanimous opposition to war in the district. "With the vote done, we are not done one bit," he said. "We will be back in front of Lantos's office. We want to make it abundantly clear that everybody in this district who speaks for anybody is opposed to Lantos's war."
Bill Ramsey, a coordinator for the Human Rights Action Service in St. Louis, who has been leading sit-ins at the district office of House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.) and the state Democratic Party headquarters, said those protests will continue and multiply. "There are hundreds of people here engaging in action they are initiating themselves," he said. "The kinds of responses we're getting are astounding us."
In San Francisco, groups are planning sit-ins at Sen. Dianne Feinstein's office to protest her vote for the resolution after the California Democrat expressed opposition to it a few weeks ago. Efforts to persuade her to oppose the resolution failed despite 11,000 calls that her office logged in the week before the vote, with only 150 of those calls supporting the resolution.
Even House Minority Whip Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who opposed the resolution (after receiving 12,000 calls from constituents in three weeks, with only 20 of those supporting the resolution), is getting calls complaining about Feinstein's vote. Brendan Daley, Pelosi's press secretary, said her office had received a few hundred angry calls regarding Feinstein's vote Friday morning.
Grubler, who had expected the resolution to pass, said he would probably participate in a few sit-ins in the next few weeks. He specializes in dressing up and performing skits, which explained why he was wearing orange coveralls, a hard hat and rubber boots last Thursday -- his weapons inspector outfit -- as he walked through downtown San Francisco to meet members of the Service Committee at a weekly peace vigil. He was hoping to squeeze in some street theater, but as usual these days, he had no time. "I am sleep-deprived," he said, sighing at the current state of affairs for peace activists.
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