[ A look back at the history-making mobilization against the Iraq
War that turned ordinary people into a “second superpower” — one
we badly need today. ]
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20 YEARS AGO, THE WORLD SAID NO TO WAR  
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Phyllis Bennis
February 15, 2023
Institute for Policy Studies
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_ A look back at the history-making mobilization against the Iraq War
that turned ordinary people into a “second superpower” — one we
badly need today. _

Antiwar demonstrators protest against the looming Iraq War in New
York, February 15, 2003, (Still from Amir Amirani’s “We Are
Many,” used with permission.)

 

Twenty years ago — on February 15, 2003 — the world said no to
war. People rose up in almost 800 cities around the world in an
unprecedented movement for peace.

The world stood on the precipice of war. U.S. and U.K. warplanes and
warships — filled with soldiers and sailors and armed with the most
powerful weapons ever used in conventional warfare — were streaming
towards the Middle East, aimed at Iraq.

Anti-war mobilizations had been underway for more than a year as the
threat of war against Iraq took hold in Washington, even as the war in
Afghanistan had barely begun.

Opposition to the war in Afghanistan was difficult following the 9/11
terrorist attacks. Even though none of the hijackers were Afghans and
none lived in Afghanistan, most Americans saw the war as a legitimate
response — a view that would change over the next two decades, with
the vast majority saying the war wasn’t worth fighting when American
troops were withdrawn in 2021.

But Iraq was different from the beginning. There was always
opposition. And as the activist movement grew, its grounding in a
sympathetic public expanded too. By the time February 15, 2003 came
around — a year and five months after the 9/11 attacks —
condemnation of the looming war was broad and fierce.

Plans for February 15 had been international from the beginning,
starting with a call to mobilize against the war issued at the
European Social Forum in Florence in November 2002. With just a few
weeks of organizing, the first internet-based global protest erupted.

On that day, beginning early in the morning, demonstrators filled the
streets of capital cities and tiny villages around the world. The
protests followed the sun, from Australia and New Zealand and the
small Pacific islands, through the snowy steppes of North Asia and
down across Southeast Asia and the South Asian peninsula, across
Europe and down to the southern tip of Africa, then jumping the pond
first to Latin America and then finally, last of all, to the United
States.

Across the globe, the call came in scores of languages: “The world
says no to war!” and “Not in our name!” echoed from millions of
voices. The Guinness Book of World Records said between 12 and 14
million people came out that day — the largest protest in the
history of the world. The great British labor and peace activist,
former MP Tony Benn, described it to the million Londoners in the
streets that day as “the first global demonstration, and its first
cause is to prevent a war against Iraq.”

What a concept — a global protest against a war that had not yet
begun, with the goal to stop it.

STANDING AGAINST THE SCOURGE OF WAR

[Researchers in Antarctica make a peace sign in the snow to protest
the coming war in Iraq.]

The February 15 mobilization was so broad that even it reached
researchers in Antarctica. (Still from Amir Amirani’s “We Are
Many,” used with permission.)

It was an amazing moment — a movement that pushed governments around
the world to do the unthinkable: They resisted pressure from the
United States and the United Kingdom and said no to endorsing Bush’s
war.

The governmental opposition included the “Uncommitted Six” members
of the UN Security Council. Under ordinary circumstances,
U.S.-dependent and relatively weak countries like Angola, Cameroon,
Chile, Guinea, Mexico, and Pakistan could never have stood up to
Washington alone. But these were not ordinary circumstances.

With diplomatic support from “Old Europe,” including Germany and
France who for their own reasons opposed the war, the thousands
filling the streets of their capitals allowed the Six to resist fierce
pressure from Washington.

The U.S. threatened to kill a free-trade agreement seven years in the
making with Chile. (The trade agreement was quite terrible, but the
Chilean government was committed to it.) Washington threatened to
cancel U.S. aid, granted under the African Growth & Opportunity Act,
to Guinea and Cameroon. Mexico faced the potential end of negotiations
over immigration and the border. And yet all stood firm.

The day before the protests, February 14, the Security Council was
called into session once again, this time at the foreign minister
level, to hear the final reports of the two UN weapons inspectors for
Iraq.

Many had anticipated that their reports would somehow wiggle around
the truth — that they would say something Bush and Blair would grab
to try to legitimize their spurious claims of Iraq’s alleged weapons
of mass destruction. Or at least they might appear ambivalent enough
for the U.S. to use their reports to justify war.

But the inspectors refused to bend the truth, stating unequivocally
that no such weapons had been found.

Following their reports, French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin
responded with an extraordinary call, reminding the world that “the
United Nations must remain an instrument of peace, and not a tool for
war.” In that usually staid, formal, rule-bound chamber, his call
was answered with a roaring ovation beginning with Council staff and
quickly embracing the diplomats and foreign ministers themselves.

Enough governments said no that the United Nations was able to do what
its Charter requires, but what political pressure too often makes
impossible: stand against the scourge of war.

A NEW INTERNATIONALISM

On the morning of February 15, just hours before the massive New York
rally began outside the United Nations, the great actor-activist Harry
Belafonte and I accompanied South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu to
meet with then-Secretary-General Kofi Annan on behalf of the
protesters. We had to be escorted by police to cross what the NYPD had
designated its “frozen zone” — not in reference to the bitter 18
degree temperature or the biting wind whipping in from the East River,
but the forcibly deserted streets directly in front of UN
headquarters.

In the secretary-general’s office on the 38th floor, Bishop Tutu
opened the meeting. He looked at Kofi across the table and said, “We
are here today on behalf of those people marching in cities all around
the world. And we are here to tell you, that those people marching in
all those cities around the world, we claim the United Nations as our
own. We claim it in the name of our global mobilization for peace.”

It was an incredible moment. And while we weren’t able to prevent
the Iraq war, the global mobilization pulled governments and the
United Nations into a trajectory of resistance shaped and led by
global movements. We created what the _New York Times_ the next day
called “the second superpower.” It was a new kind of
internationalism.

Midway through the marathon New York rally, a brief _Associated
Press_ story came over the wires: “Rattled by an outpouring of
international anti-war sentiment, the United States and Britain began
reworking a draft resolution…. Diplomats, speaking on condition of
anonymity, said the final product may be a softer text that does not
explicitly call for war.” Faced with a global challenge to their
desperate struggle for UN and global legitimacy, Bush and Blair threw
in the towel.

Someone called in the text to those of us backstage. A quick debate:
Should we announce it? What if it wasn’t true? What did it mean? A
quick decision: Yes, the people have the right to know. Someone pushed
me back out onto the stage to read the text.

Half a million people or more, shivering in the cold, roared their
approval.

WE DIDN’T STOP THE WAR. BUT WE CHANGED HISTORY.

Our movement changed history, but we didn’t prevent the Iraq war.
While the AP story was true, it reflected the U.S.-U.K. decision to
ignore international law and the UN Charter and go to war in violation
of them both.

Still, the protests proved the war’s clear illegality and
demonstrated the isolation of the Bush administration’s policies —
and later helped prevent war in Iran in 2007 and the bombing of Syria
in 2013. And they inspired a generation of activists.

February 15 set the terms for what “global mobilizations” could
accomplish. Eight years later some Cairo activists, embarrassed at the
relatively small size of their protest on February 15, would go on to
help lead Egypt’s Arab Spring as it overthrew a U.S.-backed
dictator. Occupy protesters would be inspired by February 15 and its
internationalism. Spain’s _indignados_ and others protesting
austerity and inequality would see February 15 as a model of moving
from national to global protest.

In New York City on that singular afternoon, some of the speakers had
particular resonance for those shivering in the monumental crowd.

Harry Belafonte, veteran of so many of the progressive struggles of
the last three-quarters of a century, called out to the rising U.S.
mobilization against war and empire, reminding us that our movement
could change the world, and that the world was counting on us to do
so.

“The world has sat with tremendous anxiety, in great fear that we
did not exist,” he said. “But America is a vast and diverse
country, and we are part of the greater truth that makes our nation.
We stand for peace, for the truth of what is at the heart of the
American people. We _will_ make a difference — that is the message
that we send out to the world today.”

Belafonte was followed by his close friend and fellow activist-actor
Danny Glover, who spoke of earlier heroes, of Sojourner Truth and
Harriet Tubman, and of the great Paul Robeson on whose shoulders we
still stand. And then he shouted: “We stand here today because our
right to dissent, and our right to participate in a real democracy,
has been hijacked by those who call for war. We stand here at this
threshold of history, and we say to the world, ‘Not in Our Name’!
‘Not in Our Name!'”

The huge crowd, shivering in the icy wind, took up the cry, and “Not
in our Name!” echoed through the New York streets.

Our movement’s obligation as “the second superpower” remains.
February 15 inspired a generation. Now what we need is a strategy to
rebuild the breadth and intensity of that moment, to build broadly
enough to engage with power and to challenge once again the wars and
militarism, the poverty and inequality, the racism and xenophobia and
so much more oppression that still faces people around the world.

We have a lot of work to do.

_Phyllis Bennis directs the New Internationalism Project at the
Institute for Policy Studies. _

_As Washington’s first progressive multi-issue think tank, the
Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) has served as a policy and research
resource for visionary social justice movements for over five decades
— from the anti-war and civil rights movements in the 1960s to the
peace and global justice movements of the last decade. Some of the
greatest progressive minds of the 20th and 21st centuries have found a
home at IPS, starting with the organization’s founders, Richard
Barnet and Marcus Raskin. IPS scholars have included such luminaries
as Arthur Waskow, Gar Alperovitz, Saul Landau, Bob Moses, Rita Mae
Brown, Barbara Ehrenreich, Roger Wilkins and Orlando Letelier. Meet
the current members of our Board of Trustees.
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* Anti-War Movement
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* Iraq War
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* global action
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