WILPF Action Alerts

Make Peace a Reality Postcards Actions flood Congress with postcards on urging action on key issues.

Alerts from our Save the Water campaign.

EYE on Congress is an active, continuing project of Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. The goal is to educate voters and politicians on peace issues and the war economy and their connection to social spending by keeping ourselves and our neighbors informed on key issues and making our views known to elected officials and to the public at large.

Half Hour for Haiti Action Alerts

Haitians often invoke the proverb “men anpil, chay pa lou”: many hands make the load light. Haiti’s human rights problems are severe, but experience shows that collective efforts by Americans and others in powerful countries can make a real difference. Our grassroots mobilizations have pried open prison doors for several political prisoners, including Fr. Gerard Jean-Juste in January 2005, and four others in April 2006. A mobilization in July 2005 led the UN to admit civilian deaths had occurred during its operations and to promise an investigation. Knowing that people in powerful countries support them provides hope to political prisoners and confidence to grassroots organizers in Haiti.

Recent Alerts:

Alert-From FCNL-Invest in Peace Action

There is a need for a dramatic increase in spending on the civilian instruments of national security - diplomacy, strategic communications, foreign assistance, civic action, and economic reconstruction and development."

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates speaking at Kansas State University, 11/26/07

The failure of the U.S.'s unilateral military engagement in Iraq has fueled a growing understanding within the military that the U.S. needs diplomatic tools to help prevent war. But Congress has not yet invested in tools that can lead to a lasting peace.

Your representative can make an investment this year in building peace by supporting the Reconstruction and Stabilization Civilian Management Act (H.R. 1084). Instead of sending the military to countries teetering on the brink of war or emerging from conflict, the U.S. could send civilian experts who specialize in training police, running hospitals and schools, improving farm production, and other specialties. These trained civilians would help governments strengthen the public institutions that meet people's basic needs and give them confidence in their government's ability to protect and support them.

From FCNL-Take Action on Diplomacy

The House of Representatives voted Wednesday to require the president to begin withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq within 30 days and set a goal for withdrawal of most combat troops by the end of 2008. The bill would also ban the use of torture in interrogations, direct the administration to seek regional stability in conversation with Iraq's neighbors, and prohibit the U.S. from building permanent military installations in Iraq. But the bill, which provides $50 billion in additional funding for war, will never become law because President Bush will veto it and Congress does not have enough votes to override the president's veto.

Webb letter on Iran

Some Democratic lawmakers have questioned whether a new Bush administration request for $88 million to fit "bunker-busting" bombs to B-2 stealth bombers was part of preparations for an attack on Iran.

A Bush administration summary said the request was needed for "development of a Massive Ordnance Penetrator for the B-2 aircraft in response to an urgent operational need from theater commanders," but gave no details. The Massive Ordnance Penetrator is a conventional bomb designed to destroy hardened or deeply buried targets.

"My assumption is that it is Iran, because you wouldn't use them in Iraq, and I don't know where you would use them in Afghanistan; it doesn't have any weapons facilities underground that we know of," said Rep. Jim Moran, a Virginia Democrat who is on the House Appropriations Committee and intends to argue against the request.

header nav