Dennis O'Neil of New York City is a member of the coordinating committee of the Bring Them Home Now! campaign.  He also was an anti-war activist "back in the Vietnam War days" and says he worked a lot then with Vietnam Veterans Against the War.  He explained that, "When this thing started to pull together people who knew me from then asked me to come in and sort of help build and ballast this campaign."  Bring Them Home Now! launched on Aug. 13, 2003 and is jointly sponsored by Iraq Veterans Against the War, Veterans for Peace, Military Families Speak Out and a couple of other groups.

Dennis O'Neil:
People ask us about the slogan and especially about the "now" a lot.  And one thing they say is well it'll take forever to get them out of there.  They say how can we get them out?  And there are a couple of answers to that.  One is boats and planes--same way as we got them in.  But the other thing is a friend of mine who's a veteran points out if you told the troops in Iraq you don't have to be here anymore.  You can cross whatever border you want and leave, in three days there would be not one troop left in the country.  So it can be done.

The other thing that people say--and it's a serious concern--they say well if we leave now won't there be civil war, won't there be a mess, aren't we abdicating our responsibilities there?  And the answer to that is it is a mess right now, there is a civil war right now and that is never going to change as long as there are U.S. troops there.  We made a giant mess.  That now we can fix it up is kind of white man burden's thinking: these people are too primitive, and we screwed it up, but now we'll get it right.  That's not going to happen.  As long as U.S. troops are there people don't like being occupied and they'll continue resisting and they'll continue fighting.

Now the final thing is when we say bring them out now, we are not saying that we have no further responsibility to Iraq.  We owe them.  We've trashed their country.  And so our movement, the immediate objective is to get the troops out, to stop them getting killed, to stop them getting wounded, to stop them killing Iraqis, to stop them wounding Iraqis, and to stop the damage that they're going to be coming home with as a result of what they've geen through.  When we win that we have another struggle, and it will be a hard one to get people to face up to what we've done and to do it.  In some ways that'll be harder to win that this one, but we will continue to fight on that.

Question: You say "when we win that?"  Does that imply that you're an optimist?

I am an optimist.  I mean when we started this campaign 2 1/2 years ago, we started pulling it together from a handful of people after Bush said "Bring 'em on."  Veterans were so outraged, and military families who have kids over there were so angry.  We built this campaign, and we were a very small thing then and it was laughable.  I mean how can you say that.

The last New York Times/CBS poll, which was less than a week ago, says that 52% of the American people now favor immediate withdrawal from Iraq, which is what we're calling for.  Immediate withdrawal.  When people start to see the effect of Katrina and now Rita on the economy, on the amount of rebuilding that has to be done here, the fact that we are pouring $1 1/2 billion every single week down a rathole with nothing to show for it but more dead people, more hostility to the U.S. throughout the Middle East and around the world, when those resources are deeply needed here to reconstruct the country, that 52% is going to go up.
 

Copyright © 2005  Eric M. Appleman/Democracy in Action.