On the twentieth anniversary of the Iraq War and the first anniversary of Russia’s war in Ukraine, my heart and mind tremble over what is building to be a potential war on China, a country of 1.4 billion people. This escalation of hubris, violence, imperialism, and insanity was far from what I thought possible when I flew to Washington, D.C., in September 2002, with my primal scream to stop the United States from going to war against Iraq, a nation of innocent people.
I went because I was working with gang members in Watts, a neighborhood in Los Angeles, after the uprising that followed the acquittal of four police officers in the 1991 beating of Rodney King. I learned that all the fathers of these young men had been in the Vietnam War. Because the mentality of war tends to spread like a virus through generations, Watts had become a war zone, where nearly 10,000 people had been killed in the previous twenty years—and no one talked about it. I flew to D.C. for all the innocent people who are the victims of U.S. aggression and war.
CODEPINK
In December 2022, more than seventy students participated in a student-led teach-in at American University in Washington, D.C., to discuss how militarism fuels the climate crisis. The event was led by CODEPINK intern Isabella Brooke.
A few of us—Medea Benjamin, Diane Wilson, and Starhawk—got together that fall of 2002 and announced “CODEPINK” in response to then-President George W. Bush frightening the American people with the “terrorism alert” codes of yellow, orange, and red. Ours was a call for peace, and CODEPINK grew to hundreds of thousands of activists, who joined with twelve to fourteen million people in the United States and around the world on February 15, 2003, to say no to war. And yet Bush and the other war criminals in his administration waged a war and destroyed a country.
The day Bush declared the “Shock and Awe” bombing campaign, we were in Iraq. After protesting every day outside the White House for five months, we went to Iraq to see it for ourselves. It was a country ravaged by sanctions, yet the people were welcoming, loving, and generous. We even watched a farce about Saddam Hussein at a theater in the middle of Baghdad.
“Why are you being so kind to us?” we asked. “Our country wants to bomb yours.” “You are not Bush, and we are not Saddam,” they answered. To watch a country be terrorized by just the thought of what “Shock and Awe” could do was heartbreaking. Yet nothing in our imaginations could have suspected what was about to befall Iraq.
When the bombing started, we went to the halls of Congress, our clothes ripped and dripping with fake blood, carrying what looked like dead babies in our hands, wailing. It was an effort to show the cost of the war U.S. lawmakers had voted for. This action was met with irritation, as no one wanted to be bothered with the reality of what they were actually doing.
Our next task was to stop the next war, as Iran was in the Bush Administration’s crosshairs, and to stop the violence that was tearing Iraq apart. For the next few years, we continued to disrupt Congressional hearings, Republican and Democratic presidential conventions, and any other type of event that would allow us to get close to those who controlled the levers of U.S. power.
Our most effective protest was the creation of Camp Casey outside Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas. Cindy Sheehan, the mother of an American soldier who died in the Iraq War, Casey Sheehan, had knocked on Bush’s door to ask why her son had died. Bush never answered. CODEPINK, Veterans for Peace, and Military Families Speak Out organized a camp to support Cindy, whom the news media had nicknamed Peace Mom, as she waited for a reply. At the end of that month, in August 2005, national polls shifted from a slim majority of Americans who supported the war to 65 percent who opposed it.
For the next two years, we rented a house in Washington, D.C., that could house thirty-two activists a night, where we worked to stop acts of war against Iran, to stop the war in Iraq, to end the use of torture by the U.S. government, and to limit the growth of the Pentagon’s budget. We kept the pressure on almost daily. Near the end of Bush’s term, in 2008, he negotiated an end to the war and a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq cities, with full removal of all troops by 2011.
Just when we thought we had a moment to breathe during the lame-duck period between the end of Bush’s term and the inauguration of President Barack Obama in early 2009, Israel turned its fury on Gaza with Operation Cast Lead. The military assault resulted in twenty-two days of bombardment in Gaza, killing almost 1,500 Palestinians, including hundreds of children. As Obama’s presidency began, we took more than 1,000 U.S. activists to witness what was happening in Gaza, and soon after joined the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement, an effort to end international support for Israel’s oppression of Palestinians.
After that, Obama called for an armed escalation in Afghanistan. In response, we organized a group of about ten people to go there and speak with women. We returned with 4,000 signatures from the women of Afghanistan, which I personally delivered to Obama, calling on him to end the troop surge he was planning.
Over the past twenty years, we have watched the Congressional-military-industrial complex expand and the empathy of U.S. citizens become weaponized as tools for more war.
It was during the Obama Administration, when the peace movement was essentially decimated by a “good war President” who ordered murder by drones, that I rethought what we were doing. I came to a realization: We are not going to end war until we end the war economy. War serves only the war economy, which is extractive, destructive, and oppressive, and is killing you, your community, and the planet.
I began to pivot part of CODEPINK’s work toward cultivating local peace economies—the giving, sharing, caring, thriving, relational, and regenerative way of managing the economy, without which none of us would be alive.
When Donald Trump was elected in 2016, we shifted most of our attention out of D.C. and into local communities, because we needed to rebuild the anti-war movement. We launched the Divest from the War Machine campaign, because cities, states, universities, and churches were all invested in weapons through their banks or pension funds. It became clear that we couldn’t prevent increases to the Pentagon’s budget without people first understanding how deeply war is embedded in our lives.
In the fog of war at the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we were immediately and constantly attacked because of our calls for diplomacy via our Peace In Ukraine coalition. Meanwhile, many other peace activists had called for more weapons, completely forgetting that weapons kill people and prolong wars. The war propaganda continues, and now, it is driving hatred toward China. Our response is the China Is Not Our Enemy campaign.
Over the past twenty years, we have watched the Congressional-military-industrial complex expand and the empathy of U.S. citizens become weaponized as tools for more war, aka more weapons, which leads directly to more death and the destruction of the planet. War is among the worst threats to the Earth’s climate, and our message all these years has been that War Is Not Green.
At CODEPINK, we continue to work with a growing coalition of peace groups globally, our numbers are growing, and the understanding of what we are up against is becoming increasingly clear. Cultivating peace, for the sake of our future survival on this planet, will take all of us raising our voices and being visible for peace. It will take all of us making daily decisions to support peace, choosing community over scarcity, support over competition, love over hatred, and forming robust peace economies to support life over death. We must stand for peace with a passion equal to those who use lies to profit from death and destruction. Join us. We’ll stop when the wars do.