NEW YORK, March 20: US presidential hopeful Barack Obama on Thursday blamed the Iraq war for higher oil prices and skyrocketing debt as hundreds of anti-war protesters who were arrested on Wednesday sought bail.
Mr Obama tied the unpopular war to the slumping economy and then plight of the working-class. “When you’re spending over $50 to fill up your car because the price of oil is four times what it was before Iraq, you’re paying a price for this war,” Obama said.
“When Iraq is costing each household about $100 a month, you’re paying a price for this war”, he said at a meeting on Thursday in West Virginia. More than 160 people were arrested on Wednesday during anti-war demonstrations across the United States held to mark the fifth anniversary of the US led war in Iraq.
In San Francisco, where most arrests took place many protesters were arrested in front of the office of US Senator Dianne Feinstein. Many of those arrested were participating in an afternoon “die-in” — collapsing en masse to evoke deaths in Iraq — though a few actively scuffled with police.
Demonstrators gathered in the evening at Civic Centre Plaza to hear speeches and take an evening march to the Mission District. They carried signs with slogans such as “impeach” and chanted mantras like “money for health care, not warfare.”
Thirty members of the “Granny Peace Brigade”, with knitting in hand, gathered in New York’s Times Square to demand that troops be brought home: “It really breaks my heart to see young people coming back who have lost their limbs, they have lost so much. I just want to see peace.” said one protester.
There were 32 arrests outside the US Tax Collection Agency in Washington when activists hoping to shut down the IRS to highlight the cost of the war crossed police barricades.
An Iraqi war veteran Michael Prysner recorded his testimony against the war on a U Tube video saying “We were told we were fighting terrorism...The real terrorism was this occupation... I threw families onto the street in Iraq only to come home and see families thrown onto the street in this tragic and unnecessary foreclosure crisis... Our enemy is not 5,000 miles away: they are right here at home.”
Prysner joined the US Army at age 17 and in March 2003, he was deployed to northern Iraq. He remained there for 12 months. Bearing witness to the many crimes of the occupation, Prysner became a staunch opponent of the war, and in 2005 he began organising and speaking out against it. The four-day Winter Soldier event was organised by Iraq War Veterans Against the War.