![Peace demonstration in Rome against the Iraq War on Feb. 15, 2003. (Photo/via Wikimedia Commons)](http://mnpprodpublic.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/1280px-Peace_demonstration_in_Rome_feb_15_2003_16x9-690x388.jpg)
“No to the War In Iraq.” This slogan was the rallying cry for what historians have recorded as the largest protest to ever take place in human history. A decade ago, millions of people across hundreds of cities across the world protested the invasion of Iraq. The Feb. 15, 2003 event was recorded as the largest anti-war demonstration in history.
The coordinated day of protests were not just taking place in the U.S. on that day but spread out across the globe, with protesters uniting against an imminent invasion of Iraq. Millions of people protested in approximately 800 cities around the world. It was estimated by BBC News that 15 million people took part in protests in up to 60 countries over that weekend — other estimates range from eight million to 30 million.
A day to remember
“I was among the anti-war contingent that swarmed Manhattan’s midtown on Feb. 15, 2003, a wintry Saturday. We spread across miles of city blocks, trundling past abandoned police barricades as we tried to inch toward the United Nations, where 10 days earlier then Secretary of State Colin Powell had presented what we now know was illusory intelligence about Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction. The multitudes in New York were diverse and legion,” wrote Ishaan Tharoor in a Time magazine piece that was published last week asking “Why Was the Biggest Protest in World History Ignored?”
Tharoor was present at the protests along with a diverse group of others. “There were anarchists and military veterans, vociferous students (I was then a freshman in college) and a motley cast of greying peaceniks — many, including one grandmother memorably puttering along in a wheelchair, had opposed American involvement in Vietnam. And there were myriad others: a band of preppy suburbanites with banners announcing themselves — “Soccer Moms Against the War” —musicians, street artists and workaday New Yorkers. My uncle, a doctor with medical practices in both the U.K. and India, had flown in for the demonstration and was just another face in a vast crowd.”
The biggest protests took place in Europe, with a single protest in Rome drawing around 3 million people alone, making it into the 2004 Guinness Book of World Records as the largest anti-war rally in history.
Opposition to the war was also high in the Middle East, although protests there were relatively small. Mainland China was the only major region not to see any protests.
In America, the largest protests took place in the nation’s largest cities including Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York City, but there were also smaller rallies in towns across the United States. Some protests were met with violence, in Colorado Springs, for example, where 4,000 protesters were dispersed with pepper spray, tear gas, tazers and batons. More than 30 people were arrested on failure to disperse and other charges, and at least two protesters had to have hospital treatment.
“The overwhelming feeling on New York’s streets, despite the grimness of the NYPD and the bite of that February afternoon, was one of unity and hope. Word was seeping in about the scale of the demonstrations elsewhere and it was hard not to bask in our sense of collective purpose,” Tharoor said.
Silver Lining sought amid disappointment
But sadly, the historic event didn’t stop the war. Time magazine relays the story of Moroccan-American novelist Laila Lalami, who was pregnant at the time of the demonstrations. The Californian walked a mile with fellow protesters down Hollywood Boulevard. “I thought — hundreds of thousands of people across the U.S. are making their voices heard. Surely they can’t be ignored,” Lalami said, “But they were.”
This sense of disappointment isn’t unique to the U.S. — it has been noted across the globe as well. “People feel very disappointed by it but the only way you could say it failed is if people now said the Iraq War was right and Tony Blair was right after all,” Lindsey German, convener of the Stop the War Coalition in the U.K. told the Guardian last week.
“And there it was. We failed. Slightly more than a month later, the U.S. was shocking and awing its way through Iraqi cities and Saddam Hussein’s defenses and bedding in — though it didn’t know it yet — for a near decade-long occupation,” Tharoor said.
The war has claimed the lives of more than 100,000 Iraqis and nearly 5,000 U.S. and coalition soldiers. The U.S. has spent almost a trillion dollars on the endeavor.
The lingering feeling of disenchantment over the protests’ failure lives on. “A decade later, it’s hard to understand why the display of people power on Feb. 15 proved so ineffectual. The gun-slinging righteousness of post-9/11 America has given way to a more humble West, burdened by unwinnable wars, financial crises and a semi-permanent funk of political dysfunction.
However, German sees a glimmer of hope when she is asked to summarize the legacy and impact of the protests, which ultimately did not stop the war in Iraq from happening.
“OK, we didn’t stop that war but we kept that anti-war opinion together,” German said, and she believes that the anti-war movement had a lasting impact on what we now know about the war.
German contends that without the protest there would have been less of the scrutiny that exposed the sham of “weapons of mass destruction,” and it inspired people to be more critical of politicians and war in general.
“It makes it much, much harder for them now to do it again. Look at what Cameron says now over Mali or Syria or Libya – ‘It’s not going to be like Iraq,’” German points out.
Tharoor, too, sees that while its ultimate end goals of stopping the violence and bloodshed of war were not achieved, the protests had an impact as “the explosion of social media in recent years has enabled previously obscure episodes of dissent to reach and reshape the global conversation. Protests matter again. Public spaces — from Cairo’s Tahrir Square to Madrid’s Puerta del Sol to New York’s tiny Zuccotti Park — became sites of a renewed democratic vitality. Yet the mass anti-austerity protests that have rocked Europe or even the largest actions of Occupy Wall Street have not been able to match the scale of what took place on Feb. 15, 2003.”
While the day of the protests will live on in history, hopefully the aims of the protests will enjoy a similar fate.