We'll Stop When Wars Do: As the perpetual war machine churns on, CODEPINK won't stop fighting for an 'economy of peace.'.

• Author: Evans, Jodie

On the twentieth anniversary of the Iraq War and the first anniversary of Russia's war in Ukraine, my heart and mind tremble over what is building to be a potential war on China, a country of 1.4 billion people. This escalation of hubris, violence, imperialism, and insanity was far from what I thought possible when I flew to Washington, D.C., in September 2002, with my primal scream to stop the United States from going to war against Iraq, a nation of innocent people.

I went because I was working with gang members in Watts, a neighborhood in Los Angeles, after the uprising that followed the acquittal of four police officers in the 1991 beating of Rodney King. I learned that all the fathers of these young men had been in the Vietnam War. Because the mentality of war tends to spread like a virus through generations, Watts had become a war zone, where nearly 10,000 people had been killed in the previous twenty years--and no one talked about it. I flew to D.C. for all the innocent people who are the victims of U.S. aggression and war. A few of us -- Medea Benjamin, Diane Wilson, and Starhawk -- got together that fall of 2002 and announced "CODEPINK" in response to then-President George W Bush frightening the American people with the "terrorism alert" codes of yellow, orange, and red. Ours was a call for peace, and CODEPINK grew to hundreds of thousands of activists, who joined with twelve to fourteen million people in the United States and around the world on February 15, 2003, to say no to war. And yet Bush and the other war criminals in his administration waged a war and destroyed a country.

The day Bush declared the "Shock and Awe" bombing campaign, we were in Iraq. After protesting every day outside the White House for five months, we went to Iraq to see it for ourselves. It was a country ravaged by sanctions, yet the people were welcoming, loving, and generous. We even watched a farce about Saddam Hussein at a theater in the middle of Baghdad.

"Why are you being so kind to us?" we asked. "Our country wants to bomb yours." "You are not Bush, and we are not Saddam," they answered. To watch a country be terrorized by just the thought of what "Shock and Awe" could do was heartbreaking. Yet nothing in our imaginations could have suspected what was about to befall Iraq.

When the bombing started, we went to the halls of Congress, our clothes ripped and dripping with fake blood, carrying what looked like dead babies in our hands, wailing. It was...