I remember the day clearly. It was January 16, 1991. I was at work in a small non- governmental organization, and everyone was gathered around the television, watching the US military invade Iraq. For weeks, the propaganda machine had been in full swing. Stories had circulated about Kuwaiti babies left to die in incubators by the Iraqi Army. Racist jokes and pictures had appeared daily on the fax machine, sent by those who called themselves patriots. Saddam Hussein’s face had even shown up on specialty toilet paper.

Interestingly, nothing ever showed up about the real human rights violations—such as gassing thousands of Iraqi Kurds (whether you subscribe to the Iraqis or the Iranians doing it). But maybe Bush the First was still a little too closely tied to the sale of those chemicals for it to be a safe game.

Watching the television screen, the nausea in my stomach grew in proportion to the rhetoric about protecting Kuwaiti human rights. With condemnation, I turned to my colleagues and said, “Right, and this has nothing to do with oil.”

At this NGO, we were all linked together by our common work toward the rights of people with disabilities, but at that moment, I watched our commonality dissintegrate as people shot back with, “What about those babies Saddam left to die? He’s evil and we have to stop him.”

At that moment I felt incredibly alone. And the feeling grew over the days. Repeatedly I would vent my outrage at the US invasion to friends with whom I had shared common political beliefs and, unbelievingly, listen to them endorse Desert Storm. Almost everyone I knew supported the US invasion of Iraq. Some began to question my patriotism—the line saved for those who care to question.

All across my community yellow ribbons began appearing. On doors, trees, cars, desks, people’s lapels. The news quickly degenerated from any real information to a nightly public relations game. Missiles were shown exploding over Baghdad, but nothing about the damage wreaked or the lives lost. Instead, we were inundated with heart-warming stories of the young Army wife with a newborn baby waiting for her husband to come home, standing alongside her fence with a sea of yellow ribbons flapping in the breeze.

Within a week, Kuwaiti human rights were never mentioned again. Instead, we were told of Iraq ’s vast oil reserves and how Saddam kept his citizens poor by not responsibly developing the goldmine he was sitting on.

I didn’t know what to do. One thing became clear though: No matter how much I might protest the war, my money was being used to finance it. I was paying for people’s death. At that moment I decided I would not give the US government any more of my consent. As long as I wasn’t able—under the then current tax laws—to direct my money to programs I could support, like universal health care, education, and environmental and public health protections, I would no longer file with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Simple—if not a bit naïve.

When I made that decision I had no idea others had done the same, nor that there was a national organization with international ties of thousands who had made the same choice. And today, 13 years later, although I may have done it a little differently, I would make the same choice again, just like thousands before me.

Americans have a long tradition of withholding their taxes to the military. The most famous was Henry David Thoreau when he spent the night in a Massachusetts jail for protesting the Mexican-American war by refusing to pay his taxes. Over a century later, singer Joan Baez made the news in 1964 when she announced she would withhold 60% of her income tax—the amount earmarked for the Vietnam War campaign. She was joined by Professor Noam Chomsky, feminist Gloria Steinham, and some 500,000 other Americans, most of whom were resisting a newly imposed federal phone bill tax to cover huge expenditures for the war. The tax is still in effect.

Every one of those individuals has a unique story about their decision, yet all came to the singularly compelling truth: If you want peace, stop paying for war. This is the motto of the War Tax Resisters League, an organization whose members have refused all or part of their federal taxes since its inception some 60 plus years ago.

Believing war to be a crime against humanity, War Resisters was founded in London in 1921, when World War I was raging across Europe and the Ottoman Empire. Since then affiliates have formed in 32 countries on every continent, including the mostly Muslim countries of Chad and Turkey. The United States affiliate was organized in 1923 by men and women who had opposed WWI, many of whom had been jailed for refusing military service.

In the 70 years since the formation of these groups, the world’s wars have become much more complex, and globally dangerous; yet the rhetoric behind them remains the same. Liberation has been used by colonizing nations as an excuse to take over others’ lands and resources for eons. Ergo Iraq.

When the British raised the Union Jack in Baghdad in 1917, their promises were much the same as the Americans’ today. “Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies but as liberators,” proclaimed Gen. Stanley Maude, the then commander of the British forces.

Then, as today, what fuels a nation’s military potential is participation by the general public, either willingly or unwillingly. What is different about today’s American military is its size and power. The United States spends more on its armed forces than do the next 24 highest-spending countries combined, which include (in order of expenditure) China, Russia, Japan, the United Kingdom, France, Saudi Arabia, Israel and Iran. In fact, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, which maintains figures for worldwide military spending, the US accounted for half the world’s spending in 2003 (the latest figures available). And this was before the war on Iraq.

American missiles now have a global reach, and with American military bases being part of the New Iraq Deal, America ’s military presence in the Middle East is an assurance to the region’s instability. Combined with its influence at the International Monetary Fund and its missionary zeal to further so-called democratic values, the United States is currently an empire of arrogance. Non-cooperative nations now risk either monetary or military strikes from a giant military.

The cost of maintaining the world’s largest army is not cheap, although the US government would like you to think so. According to the Unified Budget for 2005, only 18 cents of every tax dollar are spent on the military, while 41 are spent on Social Security and Medicare. Sounds like a country whose citizens are well-cared for, doesn’t it? In actuality, the government is spending nearly half its budget (or $935 billion) on past and present military expenses*, while homeless people sleep on the streets and the number of children without adequate health care continues to rise.

Which explains former Secretary of State Alexander Haig’s comments after New York’s 1982 million-plus protest against nuclear arms—“Let them march all they want, as long as they continue to pay their taxes.”

Americans are beginning to get it. Prior to last year’s tax day, Joan Baez and friends were again in the news when they issued “An Appeal to Conscience,” calling upon a citizen’s “moral duty to speak out against, and avoid cooperation with” the US war on Iraq through “refusal to pay taxes used to finance unjust wars, along with refusal by soldiers to fight in them,” calling it an “effective form of citizen non-cooperation.” Further, they publicly declared their “encouragement of, and willingness to lend support to, those persons of conscience who choose to take this step.”

How many took them up on it? According to Ruth Benn, head of the US National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee, once the unprecedented global demonstrations failed to stop the US invasion, Americans began to question what else they could do. Once the Appeal was issued, the organization received more Web site hits and more phone calls.

But, as Benn notes, war tax resistance can feel like a big step. And in the current culture of fear, further generated by the Patriot Act which stripped away many privacy rights, many may be afraid to take that step.

Yet war tax resistance runs the gamut—from not paying the federal phone bill tax, established as a war tax during the Vietnam War, to living below the taxable income level, to not paying income taxes and redirecting the money to groups whose values one supports.

Today there are as many as 8,000 war tax resisters in the United States, says Benn, though it is difficult to estimate. Those numbers rise and fall according to current issues. The number of resisters swelled during the 1980s in opposition to the nuclear arms race, as it did during the Vietnam era.

For many, the decision to resist is a process; it takes time. Consider Benn’s journey. She became active with the peace movement in 1979 in Western Massachusetts when the hot issue was President Carter’s institution of draft registration of 18-year-old males. While tabling her local post office with information, she knew, as a woman, she would never have to face registering. War tax resistance was a step she could take to put herself on the line in a similar way.

“I have resisted at some level since that time: phone tax or living below taxable level for some years, and since 1987 I have been an income tax resister, pretty much 100%. I file and refuse to pay the IRS. I redirect the money to war relief, local social service, peace and justice groups. Once I had some money taken from a bank account for one year, but mostly I just get a lot of letters from the IRS. I work freelance now.

“Especially in these days it’s a very good feeling to be a war tax resister, despite what the consequences may be in the future,” says Benn.

The US is unique from many countries in that we file taxes rather than have them removed prior to receiving a paycheck. This gives us the opportunity to make Alexander Haig and the rest of the neo-conservatives quake in their military issue boots, and to show the rest of the world a different side of America.

*These figures are taken from the 2005 Tax Piechart. Published annually by the War Resisters League, it is an analysis of the US Federal Unified Budget. Current military spending adds together money allocated for the Dept. of Defense plus the military portion from other parts of the budget. For example, spending on nuclear weapons (without their delivery systems) amounts to about 1% of the total budget. Past military represents veterans’ benefits plus 80% of the interest on the debt in proportion to the amount of debt incurred by military operations.

For more information, contact the War Resisters League.

Karen Button is a freelance writer and activist from Alaska. She can be reached at moonmagick@wildmail.com