Monday, 17th of February, 2003

Well, it was huuuuuuuuuge. Something like 250,000 people crammed into the CBD. It wasn’t “walking for peace” so much as “standing for peace”. Ange, Dad and I stood on Elizabeth St, where the march “started” for over an hour and went about 20 metres before we decided to somehow get back into Hyde Park and hear some speeches. As we waited for some food we managed to hear Bob Brown and John Pilger, the last two speakers - they were certainly worth the wait. Many of the other speakers said nothing but the same old rhetoric you’d expect (the two Muslim speakers each spending about 1/3-1/2 their time talking about Israel/Palestine rather than about the war in question). But Bob Brown was his usual splendid self, and Pilger said some very worthy stuff which hadn’t been mentioned previously.

I was proud to have been there, almost dropping from the heat and humidity. Around the world the turnouts have been enormous, and it’s very gratifying - although to noone’s surprise, BushBlairHoward won’t be listening.

Mind you, Blair looked incredibly harried on the podium in last night’s news as he had his say… He was talking about the torture and killing Saddam’s regime has visited upon the Iraqi people. He forgot to mention, though, the terrible toll this war is going to take on those same people, and nor has any good argument been given that regime-change-through-war is the way to help those people. Blair also conveniently forgot the West’s sanctions, which have had a considerably greater effect on the Iraqi people than they have on the ruling regime.
Weapons of mass destruction is another question entirely - a completely different reason for declaring war. Bush’s line (pre-emptive strikes and so on) is clearly that Iraq poses a danger to the rest of the world - a patently absurd claim, in the face of the fact that (as ASIO tell us) Al-Qaeda will use the war to increase their influence - and not to mention the continued absence of evidence for “weapons of mass destruction”.

Pre-emptive strike or mercy-mission for the Iraqi people, the war-mongers are either misguided or hypocritical.

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