Students and community members gathered in White Plaza on Thursday, March 4th to protest both the ideology and funding of the past year’s invasion of Iraq by the Bush administration. At Stanford and schools around the world, student groups held coordinated rallies entitled “Books Not Bombs II” to follow 2003’s protest of looming war, highlighting the negative effects of military intervention and the need to channel resources to domestic issues instead.

The protest dominated White Plaza by mid-morning. Though the speeches did not commence until noon, booths provided activities, petitions, information, and sales. The primary event planners, the Stanford Community for Peace and Justice, distributed green armbands as symbol of peace. A pie-eating contest hosted by Sigma Nu and Kappa Kappa Gamma raised funds for the Boys and Girls Club, Midnight Breakfast passed out tickets, and the Concert Network sold passes to a punk rock show.

Enthusiasm and determination marked the majority of participants, and many toted signs and encouraged discussion. The crowd was full but not packed, comprised partially of travelers between classes. Official support came from many groups through the collaborative Coalition for Students Against War, which includes the Hellenic Association, the Greens, American Indian Organization, NAACP, Students for Fair Trade, Catholic Social Action, MEChA, Asian American Students Association, Black and Queer at Stanford, Muslim Students Awareness, Pilipino American Student Union, Querillas, SCPJ, Resistance Art and Social Protest, Labor Action Coalition, Environmental Action, and Youth Communist League, to name about half of the membership.

Advertisements for the rally and SCPJ’s website list motives for opposition to both this war and general violence and injustice. As of February 29th, 2004, the body count of those Iraqi casualties identified by their full or partial name numbered 692, with total estimates between 8,000 and 11,000 dead and thousands more injured. Human rights advocates allege unfair treatment by the United States of both prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and those of Middle Eastern, South Asian, or North African descent as a result of the Patriot Act.

Books Not Bombs organizers wish to see public money from taxes spent on public education before war, and the Coalition cites escalating Pentagon expenditures as an impediment to meeting standards established in 2001 by Bush’s No Child Left Behind. The failure of schools, especially in inner cities and poorer areas, often correlates with higher incarceration rates among youth. The flyer for the centralized rally efforts of the National Youth & Student Peace Coalition points out that, “there’s always enough money for building weapons of mass destruction and for locking up young people, but there’s somehow never enough for education.”

Mariachi Cardenal de Stanford opened, followed by Marc Bamuthi Joseph, an adamant spoken word artist and winner of San Francisco’s Poetry Grand Slam. His performance, claiming that “we the people - do not feel any safer” with “cats still pimping Christ” and “reliving the Crusades one thousand years later,” elicited cheers and affirmations. Janitorial staff member Doroteo Garcia blamed refusals to increase worker pay and benefits on a struggling economy, and Senior Sofia Lee led forcefully with a megaphone, calling for crowd support by chanting.

2003 Graduate Kuusela Halo attributed the perils of the Philippines to U.S. imperialism. Professor Philip Zimbardo explored the psychology of what he sees as Bush’s fear tactics.

Attacks on Bush heightened with choruses of “Bush and Condi, sittin’ in a tree: K-I-L-L-I-N-G!” Condoleeza Rice, Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, has been a member of the Stanford community via the Hoover Institute since 1981, served as provost for six years, and is now tenured in Stanford’s political science department. She is also the target of much anti-war criticism, especially since she was a vocal proponent of the supposition that Saddam Hussein was harboring WMD.

Anger at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, from which eight Fellows aid Bush on the Defense Policy Board, continued the sentiments of last year’s rally. SCPJ was then in the midst of waging a campaign to separate the conservative think tank from Stanford, which they claim is wrong in lending “an aura of academic credibility” to a group of scholars hired with attention to their political beliefs. They see the association of the two respectable institutions as violating “academic freedom,” and an AlternaFund is in place in hopes that donors will set aside planned financial gifts until Stanford renounces a supposedly “conservatively biased” institution.

Students marched past the main quad to Hoover Tower, shaking fists and chanting, “Whose war? Hoover’s War!” Alternative classes taught after the rally addressed notoriously liberal perspectives on current global affairs. A candlelight vigil ended the day’s events.

On the eve of war in March 2003, last year’s rally saw heated opposition to U.S. intervention and questioned the existence of WMD and the legitimacy of preemptive attack. The rally was a “student strike,” for which 24 professors canceled class and attendance numbered roughly 1000. This year’s attendance was down, and Daily writers Courtney Brigham and Caroline Ciccone, in a March 5, 2004 Editorial, asked “what exactly” the rally was protesting, since the war has already occurred. Activists’ efforts now focus more on electing Kerry in 2004 instead of Bush.