The September 11 attacks led to the largest coordinated anti-war protest in world history. On February 15, 2003, anywhere from 6 to 15 million people took to the streets around the globe to protest the war everyone knew was coming—overall that winter, an estimated 36 million people demonstrated. In the United States, as the national-security establishment vowed not to rest until Osama bin Laden was captured or killed, it became clear that the Afghanistan invasion had provided a helpful pretext to launch an offensive against a bigger target, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein.
After the destruction of the World Trade Center towers, there were only a small number of demonstrations against the incursion into Afghanistan. Public sentiment certainly did not align with protest. October 2001 polls showed that 88 percent of Americans supported the invasion. “The initial feeling for the first few weeks was consternation, rage, and befuddlement, which is not the mood in which to launch a successful anti-war movement,” says Todd Gitlin, a professor of journalism at the Columbia Journalism School.
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