A group of around 50 protesters marched silently down State Street Wednesday in a symbolic memorial of the casualties from the war in Afghanistan, demonstrating their opposition to President Obama’s call Tuesday for the deployment of 30,000 more U.S.troops to Afghanistan.
Organized by several Madison-area anti-war groups, the protest was a response to Obama’s speech outlining a new military strategy in Afghanistan based on the troop surge beginning within the next month.
“We’re very disappointed in what President Obama announced last night,” said Meg Skinner, a Madison resident who voted for Obama and protested the war in Vietnam. “It’s just more of the same that we’ve been marching against for years.”
The March of the Dead drew mostly non-student protesters, many of whom covered their faces with masks and hung signs bearing the names of troops and civilians killed in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq from their necks.
Led by a masked Obama and former President George W. Bush adorned in garb indicating war criminal status, the protesters stopped traffic in their march to the Capitol Square while carrying posters with images of mangled bodies and fallen Wisconsin soldiers.
Protesters also carried signs, such as “War: America’s #1 Business,” and coffins labeled “U.S. soldier” and “Iraqi child.”
“We’re mourning those who have been killed in Afghanistan and Pakistan and Iraq and all those who are going to be killed now as a result of Obama’s decision,” said Madison resident David Williams, one of the event organizers. “I think that for people who had high hopes (in Obama), it’s the death of their hopes.”
The group voiced its opposition outside the Madison offices of U.S. Sen. Herb Kohl, D-Wis., and U.S. Rep. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., asking the politicians to push for immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces and to join Sen. Russ Feingold in blocking Obama’s request for $30 billion in appropriations to finance the escalation.
In a statement distributed to the protesters, Baldwin said she initially supported the war in Afghanistan but thinks Obama’s new strategy abandons the war’s original purpose of bringing justice to the 9/11 terrorists.
“I cannot endorse a military surge in Afghanistan and Pakistan,” Baldwin said in the statement. “It’s time for our troops to come home.”
Meanwhile Kohl, who has a strong record of support for Afghanistan and Iraq war financing, shared his belief that immediate withdrawal from Afghanistan would cause instability in the region.
“We should give [Obama’s] new strategy an opportunity to work, but be clear that this is not an open-ended commitment if the Afghan people and government fail to do their part,” Kohl said in his statement, eliciting “Health care, not warfare” chants from protesters.
University of Wisconsin senior Matt Roman, one of a handful of students who protested, said he has been consistently disappointed with the lack of student involvement in protest movements and anti-war organizations on campus.
Roman, who was active in the Campus Antiwar Network, helped organize students on campus to protest Halliburton’s recruitment efforts at UW in 2007 and said this was the one of the best protests since.
