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CALL TO ACTION FROM IRAQ
HOW WE CAN STOP THE US WAR ON IRAQ
Iraq Peace Team, Baghdad
27 March 2003
Many US Americans are working to end the war. Many seek to increase their resistance, to up the ante.
April 15 -- income tax day -- could not come at a more opportune time. Tax resistance, if perpetrated on a wide scale, could end the war.
Some US members of the Iraq Peace Team deliberately earn less than taxable income. Others refuse to pay part or all of our federal income tax.
We do this because roughly half of that tax is used to fund the US war machine. Instead of being used for health, housing, schooling and other humane services and infrastructure, US tax money is used to destroy life.
There are now 33 IPT members in Baghdad. We’re here for the duration of this US-taxpayer financed war. As we write, bombs fall nearby. Some of us are out in residential neighborhoods documenting yesterday’s bombings; others are visiting kids lying newly maimed in local hospitals.
Iraq is a country with a tenth of the US population. Compared to the US, its economy is miniscule. Thanks to sanctions, 80% of Iraqis depend on the government for their monthly food supply.
Half of Iraq’s population are either children or teenagers. They are too young to enlist in the military.
This is the “enemy” the US is now invading.
Resistance to the war is global. For us in Baghdad, this is extremely heartening. But because the stakes are so high, resistance back home must accelerate.
Tax resistance is the most direct way US citizens can avoid being complicit in this war. If all of us who have written our congressperson or taken to the streets also refuse to financially back the war, the war will end.
In solidarity,
The Iraq Peace Team, Baghdad
(For specific information on not being a warfunder, see nwtrcc.org)
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