#1 - Immediate, complete, unconditional US withdrawal from Iraq (including private contractors)

withdraw all US troops immediately and end the US air war;
discontinue funds for new troop deployment;
redirect funds toward an orderly withdrawal of troops;
renounce establishment of permanent bases;
renounce control of Iraqi oil;
fund Iraqi-led reconstruction of Iraq;
open negotiations with all factions in Iraq;
Increase diplomatic efforts regionally, including support for a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict.
No expansion of the military war into Iran.  Use diplomacy and negotiation to deal with conflicts with Iran, not bombing or other overt or covert military attacks.

US presence creates resistance fighters
More than 60% of Iraqis approve of attacking US-led forces and almost 80% of Iraqis believe that the US military presence is provoking more conflict than it is preventing. New groups & new recruits join resistance every day as occupation is prolonged. Recent US increase in troops to Baghdad failed to quell violence, accompanied by increased mortality. An average of 163 daily attacks by insurgents and militia was recorded in May 2007 – roughly twice the average 1 year earlier, while attacks in Baghdad increased from 28.9 to 50.7 attacks per day, despite the “surge”.

Military control is illusory and temporary
Increases in US troops impose temporary control but generate resentment & ensure insurgency will re-appear when US troops leave. Estimated figures on US-trained Iraqi troops trained are not reliable, many are turn out to be insurgents, others are just looking for paid work and don’t have skills or desire necessary to engage in military actions. Iraqi troops under US direction will still face all the same problems that US troops face – no reason to believe they’ll be able to impose US will as a proxy.

Numbers are not the answer
If 140,000 U.S. troops have failed to defeat the insurgents, halt sectarian violence or create an Iraqi military able to restore security, what reason is there to suppose some smaller number will achieve these ends?

US presence creates jihadism
Pentagon acknowledges jihadists not present before US invaded; since US present, jihadism has grown to 5-10% Majority of foreign fighters are not former terrorists and instead became radicalized by the war itself. Anti-US jihadism increased globally by the State Dept.'s own statistics, anti-US sentiment has risen dramatically. National Intelligence Council states: "Iraq has replaced Afghanistan as the training ground for the next generation of 'professionalized' terrorists."

#2 - Full health benefits for returning veterans

How we treat our returning veterans is a measure of our respect for them

Some troop surveys in Iraq have shown that 20 percent of Army soldiers have signs and symptoms of post-traumatic stress, which can cause flashbacks of traumatic combat experiences and other severe reactions. About 35% of soldiers are seeking some kind of mental health treatment a year after returning home under a program that screens returning troops for physical and mental health, officials have said.
Ninety-nine U.S. soldiers killed themselves last year, the highest rate of suicide in the Army in 26 years, a new report says. More than one out of four soldiers who committed suicide did so while serving in Iraq or Afghanistan, according to a Pentagon report. Iraq was the most common deployment location for U.S. soldiers who either attempted suicide or committed suicide. Nearly a third of the soldiers who committed suicide did so while serving in Iraq or Afghanistan.
As of August 2007, 26,953 U.S. soldiers have been wounded; 1274 of them from New York State. They are both physically and emotionally injured as a result of their participation in an illegal war and occupation of Iraq. We are in danger of becoming a country who views its' young men and women as dispensable. This is not a "holy" war; it is not even a war for the protection of U.S. citizens. It is a war of aggression that is being waged for corporate interests. We don't have to wait for a second My Lai Massacre to stop buying the government propaganda and lies. The longer the troops are there, doing stop loss extended tours that never end the more tired, frazzled, weary and distraught they will be and the more everyone gets hurt; some permanently, some fatally, some unseen ways that will last a life time.

#3 - Reparations to the Iraqi people

We have destroyed Iraq

The US government has through neglect or design, destroyed both the physical and cultural infrastructure of Iraq. Museums full of 7000 year-old texts were allowed to be destroyed, while military and hired mercenaries protected oil wells and refineries; Iraqi people have no water and receive on average only 5.6 hours of electricity per day in major areas such as Baghdad; schools and hospitals have been destroyed; children cannot attend the few remaining schools for fear of being killed; the majority of Iraqi scientists, intellectuals and doctors have fled the country. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis are dead, over 2 million are displaced with another 2 million becoming refugees in other countries.

The US has a moral and legal responsibility to help reconstruct Iraq. The US should provide funding and diplomatic support and technical support if necessary. Our presence is devastating the Iraqi economy – joblessness has skyrocketed while the largest US construction project (US embassy) employs NO Iraqis. US private contractors are doing jobs Iraqis should be doing, without accomplishing much reconstruction. We know that the Iraqi infrastructure has gotten worse under US occupation in part because only a small proportion of the money allotted to reconstruction has been spent to do so, while U.S. companies like Halliburton and Bechtel make millions. Iraqis are capable of rebuilding their own country; they did it after first Gulf War.

The US has illegally occupied another nation for almost 5 years -- and has utterly destroyed that nation, top to bottom, yet demands that Iraq give 2/3 of their oil resources to internationals. Everything we do, all protests and actions to stop the occupation, need to put forth that basic position: the occupation is illegal and immoral -- and deadly. The US has no right -- legal or moral -- to occupy Iraq.

#4 - Money for jobs, education and healthcare, not occupation and warfare

Our own country and its citizens are being neglected

Here at home the billions of dollars spent on arming Middle Eastern countries and the hundreds of billions being spent on waging war in Iraq and Afghanistan take resources away from providing for the human needs of the people of our country. For example, the Bush administration is about to ask Congress for an additional fifty billion dollars to fund the Iraq war. This request would be added to a $460 billion defense budget and $147 billion in supplemental war funding. In contrast, during the two years since the devastation and human suffering caused by Hurricane Katrina our government has only made $96 billion available for Hurricane recovery along the entire Gulf Coast.

With Congress’ recent vote for an additional $100 billion more in war spending, the total spent or allocated for the Iraq War alone rises to nearly half a TRILLION dollars. The cost to taxpayers of New York now totals $40.9 billion. In Representative James Walsh’s district (all of Onondaga & Wayne counties and portions of Cayuga and Monroe counties) alone, $134 billion tax dollars have been taken away from our communities’ needs to pay for war. That translates into:
115,665 Children who could have been provided with healthcare –or-
7,635 units of affordable housing that could have been built –or-
94 elementary schools that could have been built
(source - http://nationalpriorities.org/database )

Suggested general points to make

We support military resisters who oppose this war. We are patriotic Americans who love our country. We support our troops and are in no way against the troops. We specifically support military resisters.



Costs of the war:
- Human: US deaths/casualties, Iraqi deaths/casualties, more than 2 million Iraqis displaced
- Economic: US & Iraqi infrastructure (economic costs)
- Moral: civil liberties, torture
Public Opinion
- US elections & polls show majority support troops out
- Iraqi officials and public want US out
- Global public opinion wants US out
- US troops want out (Zogby Poll)
Security & Democracy
- Iraq has become terrorist training ground, many resistance fighters have joined and been radicalized by the US occupation of Iraq.
- Globally: terrorist incidents have dramatically increased globally by the State Dept.’s own statistics; anti-US sentiment has risen dramatically
- Democracy, freedom or self-determination cannot exist under a foreign military occupation, ending the occupation is a necessary pre-requisite

The following are a lists of myths and SPC’s response to them. Some of the details may be slightly outdated now, but reading them may be helpful to you if you are asked similar questions by the press and/or counter protesters.

MYTHS

1. US withdrawal will plunge Iraq further into violence & Chaos.
US forces are part of the problem not the solution
US military actions are responsible for most of the Iraqi killed and wounded since the invasion (there is specific info on this in IPS report from 2005)
US has still failed to reconstruct basic infrastructure (electricity, hospitals, schools, water) that provides for day to day health and safety
The armed resistance is a direct result of the U.S. presence, many new groups and new recruits have joined the resistance as the occupation is prolonged
Sectarian divisions are not being lessened by US presence – sectarian violence has increased
Iraqis themselves do not believe it. In a State Department poll published in September, huge majorities say the US is directly responsible for the violence. The upsurge of bloodshed in Baghdad seems to confirm the Iraqis' view…The much-publicized US effort to bring troops to Baghdad to quell sectarian killing has accompanied a period of increased mortality in the city. (ALTERNET)

2. More troops and/or more advisors are better, more “realistic” options than withdrawal.
No convincing proof that modest increments in troop strength will change the security situation. One would need 300,000 or more troops to have a chance of pacifying Iraq, and that is neither politically feasible nor logistically possible. With moderate increases the US might achieve temporary control of certain areas, but when US troops leave, local resistance fighters and sectarian forces just reappear.
This argument suggests that the war wasn't wrong, just badly managed – doesn’t acknowledge that we got into this war based on lies, no clear mission to bring “democracy”, no clear logic for how it would decrease “terrorism”, no clear threat to US security being addressed (no WMD’s, no AlQaeda or 9-11 links, etc). We can’t expect to have a realistic and effective strategy if we can’t be honest about why we’re there and how we got there.
Despite three years of serious attempts, the US training programs are bogged down by the sectarian violence itself, or by incompetence all round. No one who has looked at this carefully believes that training Iraqis is a near-term solution. It's a useful ruse as an exit strategy, blaming the victims for violence and failure. (ALTERNET).

3. But hasn’t the US brought freedom and democracy to Iraq? Don’t the elections show this?
Iraqis weren’t allowed to have a referendum on US presence (exit polls indicated that more than two-thirds of the Shi’ites wanted U.S. forces out of Iraq either immediately or once the elected government is in place)
Election and constitutional process is US-designed, little input from Iraqis
powers of new Iraqi government are limited – don’t have any control over US actions in their nation, still over 100 laws put in place by former U.S. administrator Paul Bremer that effect economy, agriculture, etc. that were not approved by any Iraqi official or body
The violence is about Sunni-Shia mutual loathing…This is the emerging "moral clarity" of the right wing, that we gave it our best, we handed the tools of freedom to Iraqis, and they'd rather kill each other. That there was longstanding antagonism, stemming from decades of Sunni Arab domination and repression, is well known. But the truly horrifying scale of violence we see now took many months to brew, and is built on the violence begun by the US military and the lack of economic stability, political participation, etc., that the occupation wrought. Equally as important, sectarian killing found its political justification in the constitution fashioned by US advisers that essentially split the country into three factions, giving them a very solid set of incentives to go to war with each other. (ALTERNET)


4. Won’t getting out of Iraq bring an increase in terrorism? Or “if we don’t fight them in Iraq, won’t we have to fight them at home?”
Majority of foreign fighters are not former terrorists and instead became radicalized by the war itself. The CIA-affiliated National Intelligence Council declares that “Iraq has replaced Afghanistan as the training ground for the next generation of ‘professionalized’ terrorists.”
Data collected by the State Department and the National Counterterrorism Center confirms this analysis. The number of “significant” terrorist attacks in 2004 reached 655, three times the previous record of 175 in 2003. Terrorist incidents inside Iraq also increased by a factor of nine—from 22 attacks in 2003 to 198 in 2004.
By most estimates, including the Pentagon's, foreign fighters make up a small fraction of violent actors in Iraq -- perhaps 10 percent overall (based on identifying people arrested as fighters). Overall the violence is due to three forces: US military, Iraqi Sunni Arab insurgents, and Shia militia, with minor parts played by Kurdish peshmerga in Kirkuk and the foreign bad boys. (ALTERNET)
The main antagonists are Iraqis, and they will remain there to fight it out. That does not mean we have not created many "terrorists" who would do us harm, as US intelligence agencies assert, but killing them in Iraq is not a plausible option. It's too difficult; aggressive counterinsurgency creates more fighters the longer we stay and harder we try; and they might not be there. (ALTERNET)

5. Won’t announcing a withdrawal undermine and demoralize U.S. troops?
The best way to support the troops is to get them out of a situation where they are killing and being killed for no good reason.
The majority of troops want to come home – lack of clear mission, lack of support and equipment

6. Won't setting a timetable for withdrawal allow resistance fighters to “wait it out”?
Setting a time and date for withdrawal to start will likely decrease much of the strength of the resistance. The resistance is comprised of more than 40 different groups-many of them are united only by the U.S. presence and occupation. By removing their chief recruiting tool, the occupation, most will be weakened.
Foreign fighters, numbering no more than a few thousand, and a handful of hard core Baathist groups will remain but as they are increasingly isolated, more and more Iraqis will turn against them, limiting their strength and power.

7. Don’t we have to trust the “experts” to do what’s right? The Democrats will get us out now that their in Congress.
ISG report has dominated media discussion of Iraq, its “phased withdrawal” and lack of timeline is marginalizing those arguing for immediate withdrawal.
History shows congress only moves as far as we push them.
Despite an electoral mandate for peace in the 1968 election, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger embarked on a gradual withdrawal, which took four years and allowed them to continue the attack. While they tarried, another 20,000 Americans were killed and 100,000 wounded, three Asian nations were devastated and some 1 million to 2 million people perished. Kissinger, that blundering national security adviser, remains a "realist" icon, whose insights are avidly sought in our present crisis. (Eisenberg op-ed)
From the Pentagon, we're hearing about a "surge" in troop numbers before reductions can occur, and critics who style themselves as "realists" speak of a "phased withdrawal...During three years of occupation, the situation in Iraq has continued to roll downhill. If 140,000 U.S. troops have failed to defeat the insurgents, halt sectarian violence or create an Iraqi military able to restore security, what reason is there to suppose some smaller number will achieve these ends? Senate Democrats are moving with a vague plan to pull back some unspecified cohort of US troops in four to six months. Their rationale, as articulated by new chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Carl Levin, is the looming departure of that first increment will jolt the Iraqi government into effectiveness. But evidence suggests the Iraqi government is paralyzed by factions and has no greater ability to implement an American agenda than Americans. And this approach does not address the ways US activities have antagonized the populace, deepened divisions and damaged the economy. (Eisenberg op-ed)

8. No reliable analysts, regional experts or military insiders support immediate withdrawal.
Retired general William Odom, who was the head of the National Security Agency under President Ronald Reagan, supports troop withdrawal from Iraq, as do former CIA director John Deutsch and conservative Boston University military historian Andrew J. Bacevich (Washington Post, 8/21/05). Former Democratic presidential candidate and Sen. George McGovern and former State Department official William Polk have co-authored a recent book, Out of Iraq: A Practical Plan for Withdrawal Now. Historian Howard Zinn and Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg are just two of the many progressive experts who have consistently opposed the presence of U.S. troops (FAIR report)