The reality is that this government sent those soldiers that they are honoring with this holiday, sent them to a war against the will of the majority of the people both in the United States and in Iraq, that they lied and we can say now without any question that they lied about why they were sending those soldiers, that they ordered them to unleash the full might of the most powerful military machine in history against a people that had committed no crime nor posed any threat to our friends or family, that they gutted our schools, our communities, our healthcare services to pay for the war, that they laid waste to a beautiful, proud country and that when the war wasn't going well or going as they planned, they kept throwing bodies and more bodies and more bodies into the grinder. And in it's wake, it left every single person who is touched by that war destroyed and abandoned with no hope while the vultures on Wall Street cashed in. This is the real history of the war and what will -- for the time being anyway -- be etched into the calendars in the United States as a national day of honor, we know that it will be something very different for Iraq. It will be the day that they'll remember as a day of fear, as a day of pain, as a day that began a new nightmare -- one that would take the lives of over 1.3 million people, there would be 5 million homeless, 4 million orphans, a day when a foreign miltary invaded their soil in a war of aggression and would not leave and remained there for years to raid their homes, torture their parents and children, shred their identity and patrol their streets. That day, March 19, 2003, will forever be ingrained into the conscience of the Iraqi people not as a day to honor the US military but as the day when they saw its true face.
-- March Forward co-founder Mike Prysner's speech. Last week, Omar Ali (Liberation) notes A.N.S.W.E.R.'s San Francisco chapter held a teach-in the afternoon of March 25th at the First Unitarian Chuch on Franklin. Prysner deliver his speech at that event.