March 9, 2006 | Read Time: 8 minutes
As the war in Iraq enters its fourth year, advocacy groups on both sides plan marches and other events
To mark the third anniversary of the United States military’s entry into Iraq, several advocacy groups have made plans for special
campaigns and events.
Many of those campaigns are extensions of activism the groups have engaged in since — and, in some cases, before — the first bombs were dropped on Baghdad on March 20, 2003.
Progress for America, a conservative group in Washington, has poured $500,000 or more into a campaign to broadcast an ad in Minnesota’s major metropolitan areas close to the date of the war’s anniversary, with an eye toward setting up advocacy affiliates in the state and elsewhere where elections have been close.
The aim, according to the Hotline, a Web page run by the National Journal newsmagazine, in Washington, is to change public opinion on the war before the November elections. The ad, narrated by veterans and active-duty military men from Minnesota, urges support for the troops and the war effort. Current polls show that more than half of Americans oppose continuing the U.S. military’s involvement in Iraq.
But the Progress for America campaign has generated some controversy. A Minneapolis television station declined to broadcast the ad because it portrays news-media coverage of events in Iraq as overly negative and because it says that soldiers are fighting the terrorist group Al Qaeda there. That assertion has long been disputed by news and official accounts.
Officials for the organization — including Brian McCabe, president of Progress for America and its related political group — did not return repeated phone calls from The Chronicle seeking comment on the ad campaign.
Low-Key Effort
Activist groups on the other side of the issue are taking a more spartan approach to getting their message out. Antiwar groups are summoning members to take part in letter-writing campaigns, marches, and sit-ins at offices of members of Congress.
Among the largest anniversary-related activities planned is a five-day march, beginning on March 14, from Mobile, Ala., to New Orleans. The “Veterans’ & Survivors’ March” has been organized by a handful of groups who hope to draw a link between the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — estimated at $245-billion to $400-billion, depending on who is doing the counting — and the federal government’s response to the devastation from Hurricane Katrina.
The group spearheading the march, Veterans for Peace, in St. Louis, plans to lead Iraq war veterans, survivors of the hurricane, and thousands of protesters along the Gulf Coast, where they will make stops in towns to talk to local people and the news media.
“Our goal is to draw parallels between failed, immoral policies here and those abroad,” says Michael T. McPhearson, who fought in the Iraq war and now serves as the executive director of Veterans for Peace. The group is using $50,000 to $70,000 — about 20 to 25 percent of its typical annual budget — to mount e-mail campaigns and organize events along the march route.
Veterans for Peace has also sent e-mail appeals to its 5,500 dues-paying members, as well as members of other sympathetic groups, to raise money and encourage them to visit Congressional offices to ask politicians to clarify their stances on the war.
“The American people have repeatedly spoken out against this war,” says Mr. McPhearson. “We see our role as advocates as amplifying that voice.”
Other antiwar groups have made plans to march against the United States’ continuing military involvement in Iraq, including U.S. Tour of Duty, a national group in Los Angeles that is helping to organize a march by Latino conscientious objectors and others from Tijuana, Mexico, to San Francisco.
The Campus Antiwar Network, in Washington, is organizing events on high-school and college campuses March 13 to 17 to demand an immediate pullout of troops in Iraq. And the National Campaign for Nonviolent Resistance, an activist group in Washington, is organizing a march on the Pentagon on March 20, in conjunction with other groups, to call for an end to the war.
Fund-Raising Difficulties
Meanwhile, some organizations that have not taken a yea-or-nay stance on the American military involvement in Iraq are commemorating the war’s anniversary — even as they suffer from growing pains. While organizations that have come out strongly against the war, such as MoveOn.org, or for it, such as Progress for America, have garnered new members and millions of dollars in donations in recent years, other organizations that take a more neutral stance have had a harder time.
One group, Veterans for Common Sense, in Washington, which monitors the federal government’s treatment of front-line troops and returning service members, will mark the anniversary of the war by sharpening its message to politicians and readers of its Web site, which has received more than 200,000 visitors within the past month. But the group will also be in the midst of realigning its management structure.
A nonpartisan, 14,000-member group that aims to infuse discussions of the war with a veteran’s perspective, Veterans for Common Sense plans to deliver a newsletter to President Bush about concerns returning service members have about post-traumatic stress, federal spending on Veterans Administration hospitals, and other issues. The group hopes to deliver the letter just before the war’s anniversary.
“One of our goals is to make that newsletter public, through our Web site, so people can see what issues Iraq War veterans are facing and what the government should be doing about them,” says Charles Sheehan-Miles, executive director of Veterans for Common Sense, and a veteran of the first Persian Gulf war.
He adds that the group, which advocates on Capitol Hill in favor of policies that benefit some of the 1.2 million service members who are in the war or have returned from Iraq and Afghanistan, will probably forgo any attempts to raise money during the campaign. Veterans for Common Sense has a $140,000 annual budget, most of it from small donations, with the help of grants from the Ford Foundation, in New York, and the Ploughshares Foundation, in Chicago. But for the group to survive, it is planning to merge with a larger veterans organization, which Mr. Sheehan-Miles declined to name.
“There is a very crowded field of nonprofit groups we work in,” says Mr. Sheehan-Miles. “Plus, our message is a bit more complex than the pro-war or antiwar sides. It hasn’t really made sense to do this kind of work side-by-side with other groups. We might be doing more for this anniversary, but for now we’re keeping a lower profile than we normally would while we merge.”
Mr. Sheehan-Miles’s sentiments are shared by Paul Rieckhoff, executive director of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, a two-year-old group in New York that works to inform the public about veterans’ issues. The group garners two-thirds of its $550,000 annual budget from donors who give $50 or less apiece. But Mr. Rieckhoff says the organization needs to change its fund-raising approach to survive.
“This is a surprisingly difficult area in which to raise money because the country is so polarized on the war right now,” Mr. Rieckhoff says. “Honestly, being nonpartisan really hurts us. We’d do a lot better if we said ‘Bush is great’ or ‘Bush is crap’ than we do now.”
Despite that, Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America will “make a big online push,” Mr. Rieckhoff says, to mark the third anniversary of the war in Iraq. “We want to remind people we’re still over there. People can get distracted,” he says.
Besides offering personal testimonials from veterans on its Web site, the organization will augment its war-anniversary fund-raising campaign by stepping up its efforts to place veterans on television news and interview shows, including those on CNN and Fox News, and in print publications.
Also, the group will increase the number of events it holds at colleges and universities. Speakers the group invites to discussion sessions “provide people on campuses with the viewpoints of eyewitnesses, people who have actually seen Iraq and know its stories firsthand,” says Mr. Rieckhoff.
By doing so, audiences are more likely to become aware of some of the perils soldiers face both while at war — such as equipment shortages — and when they return. One in four Army veterans who return home from Iraq suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, Mr. Rieckhoff says.
On the Sidelines
While a dozen or more groups have decided to take their ideological or pro-veterans battles out into the streets, onto campuses, or onto the airwaves, a few organizations have decided not to commemorate the third anniversary of the war at all.
MoveOn.org, the online liberal advocacy group whose membership grew from 500,000 in 2002 to more than three million last year, in large part because of widespread opposition to the war in Iraq, has decided not to build a campaign around the war’s anniversary.
Instead, the group, through donations from its political action committee, will concentrate on encouraging Democrats to develop a strategy for a withdrawal of troops from Iraq, says Eli Pariser, MoveOn.org’s executive director.
Move America Forward, a group in Sacramento that was formed in June 2004 to support the troops and their mission in Iraq, also has decided not to commemorate the war’s beginnings.
It plans to continue to promote its campaigns to send cookies and coffee to front-line troops and to raise money to send the family of a soldier killed in battle to Iraq to mourn with the dead soldier’s combat unit.
The organization also reports and gives updates on what it considers to be the military’s accomplishments on its Web site.
The group decided not to alter its fund-raising pitches to include a mention of the three-year anniversary of the war “because we want to be consistent about telling people what’s going on over there,” says John Ubaldi, director of communications at Move America Forward.
“If you watch the media, all you see are the bombings. There are good, important things happening in Iraq. We want people to see the whole dynamic of the situation there.”
