USA National Council of Churches says NO to Iraq war

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Dear MoveOn member,

We hope you're having a relaxing and peaceful holiday. Unfortunately, with the 
New Year coming, we
must prepare to respond to elements of the Bush administration as they crank up 
their push for
war.  In anticipation, we're planning the next stage of our "Let the 
Inspections Work" campaign. 
Thanks for all your support in making this possible.

We now have collected more than $400,000 in donations for our ad campaign, of 
which about $130,000
has been used on two full page New York Times ads and a USA Today ad.  You can 
see these ads on
our home page at MoveOn.org.

Two weeks ago we announced a follow-on radio campaign, and we've received 
hundreds of radio
scripts from members.  Thanks so much to those of you who took the time to 
create and rate these
scripts. You can see all this incredible work at: 
http://www.actionforum.com/forum/index.html?forum_id=251
  
We've recorded the top rated ad, written by Betsey Binet of Los Angeles, and 
we'll be running it
during the week of January 6th in Washington D.C., on local news-radio 
stations.  Here's the ad,
in RealAudio format (a 178K download):  http://www.moveon.org/radio/bell48kps.rm
  
We decided to run a 30 second radio ad rather than a 60 second ad, to be able 
to run it more
often.  So this is an abbreviated version of Betsey's ad, but very effective, 
we think.  Thanks,
Betsey. And thanks everyone for the great submissions.

The ad campaign will ramp up in January.  We've just begun. Stay tuned.

Perhaps the biggest impact of our work is that our efforts have helped catalyze 
other mainstream
coalition efforts.  For example, we are founding members of the Win Without War 
coalition, which
has received a tremendous amount of media coverage, including a recent piece in 
Salon.  Here's an
excerpt:

  THE ANTIWAR MOVEMENT GOES MAINSTREAM
  Salon.com / December 12, 2002
  http://www.salon.com/politics/feature/2002/12/12/peace
  by Michelle Goldberg
  
"The Win Without War coalition includes the National Council of Churches, NOW, 
NAACP, the Sierra
Club, MoveOn, Working Assets, Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities, 
Physicians for Social
Responsibly and Veterans for Common Sense. Taken together, these groups 
represent a vast swath of
America -- the National Council of Churches alone indirectly represents 50 
million congregants --
and they aim to channel their millions of members into antiwar activism.
  
"The broad-based support for Win Without War's message is evident in the 
fundraising to
disseminate it. MoveOn, an online progressive organization that formed to fight 
President
Clinton's
impeachment, solicited donations on its Web site to pay for the New York Times 
ad, which cost
$40,000. In less than a week, it had raised $370,000. 

Of course, the American public has always been very skeptical about the Bush 
administration's
obsession with Iraq.  Efforts by elements of the administration to sell this 
war are simply not
working.  A recent poll by the LA Times shows a remarkable erosion of public 
support, highlighting
that "Only 26% said they were willing to support war if the United States acted 
alone."
(See the complete USA Today article below.)

Opposition to war in Iraq is broad and mainstream.  There is good news for the 
coming New Year: 
the American people do not support a uni-lateral, pre-emptive war.

We will not stand idly by.  Thanks for all you do.
And Happy New Year,

-Wes Boyd
 President, MoveOn.org
 December 26, 2002
 
P.S. To sign the "Let the Inspections Work" petition go to:  
http://www.moveon.org/winwithoutwar/
     
Contributions to support our efforts can be made at  
http://www.moveon.org/support.html



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