Don't forget

Updated My final weekly reminder of the protests against five years of war on Iraq, and more exactly of the blogswarm called for March 19. The total number of blogs committed to the March 19 blogswarm on Iraq is up to 250.

Although the big protests are sent for this week with the main rallies on Wednesday, some demonstrations have already happened over this weekend. This is a list of those I found after a brief news search, so I'm sure there are more.

- "Thousands" rallied in Portland, Oregon.
- Upwards of 2,000 marched in Hollywood.
- 600 turned out in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
- Some 300 attended a march and rally in Richmond, California, which combined a war protest with one against Chevron as a war profiteer and ended with civil disobedience, with 24 arrested.
- "Hundreds" took to the streets in Denver.
- Eureka, California also saw a weekend protest, a few dozen rallied on the Urbana-Champaign campus of the University of Illinois, and even Myrtle Beach, South Carolina had a group turn out.

The US, of course, was not the only place where voices were raised.

-The UK saw 30,000 or so protesting in London, England, and another 1,500 in Glasgow, Scotland.
- Over 1,000 marched in Brussels, Belgium.
- Protests of sizes ranging from a few dozen to 1,000 were seen in Stockholm and Gothenburg, Sweden; Oslo, Norway; Aalborg, Denmark; and Toronto, Montreal, and Ottawa, Canada.
- A Saturday rally kicked off a week of events in Aukland, New Zealand.

This comes as the claims of success for the escalation aka "surge" continue to evaporate, as even David Patraeus is forced to admit that

"no one" in the U.S. and Iraqi governments "feels that there has been sufficient progress by any means in the area of national reconciliation," or in the provision of basic public services,

even though providing an "opening" for such reconciliation was the supposed point of the escalation all along.

The fact remains: Five years is five years too many.

As always, this is not to be instead of anything else you do that day, but in addition to it.

Footnote: I will also include with each reminder links to my posts on the first, the second, and the fourth anniversary of the invasion in case you want to check them out. Lotus was on hiatus for all of 2006 and I was blogging very infrequently at another site during that time, so there is no third anniversary post.

Updated because I had to include this: Daisy's Dead Air noted a ceremony Sunday night in Greenville, SC attended by 65 people which featured 3,988 candles and roughly 750,000 strung beads to indicate US and Iraqi deaths in the war. She also has a link to a video about the event.