For Larry Syverson, the Iraq war is a very personal war.
Local resident Syverson is the father of four sons in the military, three of whom have toured Iraq collectively five times, with the eldest looking to return to the country early next year.
A member of the anti-war group Military Families Speak Out, Syverson treads the fine line of supporting his sons while calling for an end to the war for which they have fought.
“Continuing a war that was wrong to begin with will not make it right,” Syverson said to a crowd of about 100 local residents and students Tuesday night at the University Student Commons. “We’re not the solution; we are the problem. We’re gasoline on the fire that is raging on Iraq.”
Syverson was one of several Iraq war critics who spoke at the town-hall meeting, one of 60 such events taking place Tuesday around the United States. Americans Against Escalation in Iraq, a national network of anti-war groups, sponsored the gatherings.
As the days count down to Congress reconvening after Labor Day, the coalition is pressuring Republican legislators to buck President Bush’s policies and support Democrats in ending the war. At the meeting in the Commons, the spotlight was on Sen. John Warner, a five-term senator who carries significant clout on national security issues, to change the course in Iraq.
“John Warner is the single key person who can bring probably six to 10 senators with him, in addition to those who have already indicated they are ready to break with the president, and believe me, there are a lot of them who are considering,” said Robert Dreyfuss, an author and journalist who has written extensively about the war in Iraq and the war on terrorism for publications such as Rolling Stone and The Nation.
Dreyfuss and the other panelists commended Warner for calling last week for as few as 5,000 troops to withdraw from Iraq by Christmas. Ultimately, however, they all agreed, he needs to do more than make token gestures.
Jay Morehouse, a panelist whose son was wounded by a roadside bomb while serving in Iraq, said activists must push Warner “to put teeth into what he says.
“He’s like a Florida retiree trying to get into a cold pool: He gets in one foot at a time,” Morehouse said. “He has to be pushed into the deep end.”
The speakers shifted between discussion about Warner and other topics, such as the eagerly awaited security report Gen. David Petraeus, the top military commander in Iraq, is set to give to Congress in a few weeks. The guests shared a belief that the report, which will examine the situation in Iraq since Bush increased the number of troops by 30,000, has afforded many legislators an opportunity to deflect tough questions about the war.
Dreyfuss compared the Petraeus report with “putting lipstick on a pig,” saying it is not likely to provide any new, substantive insight into the Iraq campaign.
The current situation on the ground, Dreyfuss said, is that Iraq is in ruins. Because of the country’s devastated infrastructure, more than four million people are refugees inside and outside of Iraq, and more than half of the population is unemployed, he said.
Based on conversations he had with national security experts, Dreyfuss said, the United States could pull its forces out of Iraq in six to nine months at the earliest. Withdrawal at any point will pose challenges, though, given the sectarian fi ghting that persists across the country, he said.
“You can’t be looking at this with rose-colored glasses. If we left Iraq in the next six months, things could get catastrophically worse,” Dreyfuss said. “In other words, instead of 5,000 Iraqis dying every month, it could be 60,000. There could be genocidal levels of civil war there.”
The event ended on a somber note as a handful of attendants gathered at the Commons Plaza for a candlelight vigil, sponsored by MoveOn.org, an AAEI member organization.
Gatherers read what they called the “War Told Calendar,” a listing of all of the dates this year that U.S. troops died. They refrained from reading the troops’ names, instead replacing them with the cities and states the troops were from.
“People are dying, and they’re from all over the country,” said Andrea Miller, Richmond-area regional coordinator of MoveOn.org.
“What we all now are beginning to have in common is a commonality of death, for nothing.”