On Friday, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a symbolic resolution opposing President George W. Bush's planned troop surge in Iraq.
For many House Democrats, the follow-up measure of choice will be an attempt to block the supplemental $93 billion that Bush has requested for the Department of Defense.
Since then, the ripple effect of this decision has made its way to Medford, where yesterday a group of protesters from Veterans for Peace occupied the Medford office of Representative Ed Markey (D-Mass.) in an attempt to pressure him to vote against the supplemental spending.
"The best and the only way to stop the war is to stop the funding," said protester and Vietnam-era veteran Nate Goldshlag of Arlington, Mass.
From 9 a.m. until the end of the day, the group - which was made up of about 20 people at its peak and later dipped to as low as a handful - sat in the waiting room of Markey's office.
Although they did not engage in many formal activities, they read the names of the U.S. soldiers who died during the war and rang a bell once for each of the over 3,000 people.
Goldshlag said that the group will return as many times as it takes to get Markey to sign a pledge to vote against the spending and to work to convince his colleagues to do the same.
Markey, who has supported ending the war, has not decided if he will sign the petition, saying that his vote will depend on the specifics of the spending bill. "If the supplemental budget request is just another blank check to continue the war in Iraq, I will vote against it," he said in a press release.
The members of Veterans for Peace are pressing for more decisiveness from Markey and will repeat their requests in a meeting with him today. "He's a pretty progressive voice, but we want him to take leadership in this, in stopping this funding, in saying that there is no way to stop the war except to stop the funding," Goldshlag said. "You cannot be against the war and vote [for] funds for the war."
But for Markey and many on the Tufts campus, the decision is not as clear as the members of Veterans for Peace see it to be.
"I have and will continue to direct my energies towards getting a majority vote in Congress that places meaningful conditions on the President's request which are concrete steps to [disengage] from Iraq, redeploy, and bring our troops home," Markey said in the press release.
What exactly the plan will be remains unclear, however, and is a source of disagreement among many opposed to the war.
On campus, the various groups supporting an end to the war have acknowledged this lack of consensus with last week's crystallization of the group Tufts Action for Peace (TAP).
TAP will be comprised of the Tufts Democrats, the Tufts Coalition Opposed to the War in Iraq (TCOWI), members of the peace and justice studies program and other interested faculty and students.
Although these groups have informally co-sponsored events in the past, Tufts Democrats President Kayt Norris said that the alliance had not become official until last week.
She said that the purpose of the group is to provide a forum in which all students opposed to the war, regardless of whether or not they agree on specific strategies, can participate.
"There's no set doctrine of the group," she said. "The core value that we hold in common is that we are opposed to the Iraq war and we want to find the solution to ending it, but we might vary in what we think the right solution is."
This Friday, TAP hopes to bring Representative Michael Capuano (D-Mass.) and peace activist Leslie Cagan to campus for a discussion. "The idea is to bring together an activist and a politician to kind of look at the issue from both sides," Norris said.
While the group is comprised of people with varying views, there is almost complete agreement that there should not be a troop surge.
"I think that the troop surge will be a complete disaster and only further the disastrous position that the [country] is in," graduate student and TAP member Dan DiMaggio said.
But because of the broad nature of the group, members are likely to face the same predicament as Markey.
"There's a difference between being opposed to the troop surge and thinking that cutting of funding for the surge is the appropriate way to stop the surge," Norris said.
She said there is a concern among some anti-war activists that the troops will be deployed even if there is not enough money to adequately protect them.
In either case, Norris said that the decision that legislators make will have important ramifications. "It sets a precedent in saying what role Congress has in making decisions in the Iraq war," she said.
While Congress debates these issues, the members of Veterans for Peace plan to continue to persist in their advocacy in Markey's office. They'll be there "as long as it takes," Goldshlag said.
