I was actually part of that. They had synchronized protests in countless cities across the globe. It was a no-brainer. The war reeked, and the manufactured consent on the cable news and other major media channels was palpable. The WMD argument was sufficiently debunked before the war started and the pivot to "We're doing it to bring freedom to the Iraqi people" is so ridiculous I was lucky I wasn't drinking milk the first time I heard it on the "news." It would have been a little harder to sell the truth...-that we wanted to secure Iraq's oil supply and free more of it up to the open market to make sure our gas bills are cheaper, and also establish a stronger military presence in the region to interact with Iran if need be. When you put it like that, it's a lot harder to justify spending trillions of dollars and killing hundreds of thousands of people. We even fucked that up, and removed the counterweight to Iran in the region, escalating their influence in the region beyond their wildest dreams. On a side note, people and speakers at anti-war rallies are embarrassing. Their reasoning and rhetoric are just awful, -at least the speakers I heard. There were a lot of good reasons to oppose that war...didn't hear any of them articulated at the protest.
Wait a minute, those all sound like much better justifications of the war than what we got.that we wanted to secure Iraq's oil supply and free more of it up to the open market to make sure our gas bills are cheaper, and also establish a stronger military presence in the region to interact with Iran if need be. When you put it like that, it's a lot harder to justify spending trillions of dollars and killing hundreds of thousands of people.
More rational, but harder to rally people around. If you tell people that they've been hurt and need to retaliate, that's very different from, "Let's beat up this country for money!"
I actually supported the invasion of Afghanistan. Taliban doesn't want to hand over Bin Laden? Alright, fuck you and get ready for us to come in and take him (although even here, I've read some damning claims that we could have gotten them to hand him over...not sure completely though, this is still a little murky to me). I'm not a pacifist, and I'm all for going after people and orgs that have attacked and declared war on us (where it makes sense to do so). But the Iraq war had nothing to do with 911 and zero to do with terrorists...except for all of the terrorists we created there and invited there, where it is now a fully operational arena for some of the worst groups on the globe which it was not under Saddam's authoritarian fist. God the Bush administration was a complete foreign policy clusterfuck.
Right! But they were rallied around retaliatory war. Not cold-blooded "this makes economic sense" war.
Case in point: A few years ago my college took a poll of the student body on the issue of converting to a semester scheduling system. The majority of students voted against it, only to have the administration come out and say that we will be making the change. These type of things happen all the time, on every level, and something needs to change about it.