by Askia Muhammad
White House Correspondent

WASHINGTON (FinalCall.com)--Anti-war activists promise to march in unprecedented numbers on Washington Oct. 26 in opposition to the much-talked about U.S. attack on Iraq.

Led by former Attorney General Ramsey Clark, the Washington demonstration and a companion protest in San Francisco are set to protest the chorus of calls within the Bush administration to take action�even unilateral action�to remove Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

"The war against Iraq has been going on for 12 years," said Mr. Clark, who served in the Johnson administration during the escalation of the Vietnam War. "It�s been killing scores of people every day, thousands some days, every day for 12 years.

"The claim that Iraq is a threat is a complete fraud. I don�t think they believe it for a minute," said Mr. Clark, referring to the stated grounds for seeking a "regime change" in Baghdad. Any U.S. military action would be "the gravest mistake" of any president in his lifetime, he said.

Members of a broad, multi-racial, multi-religious, multi-cultural coalition agree.

"Black people have a stake and an interest in opposing this war!" said Damu Smith, founder of Black Voices for Peace. There is a disproportionate number of Blacks in the U.S. armed forces who are a part of the wars that are already being fought, he said.

"Thomas Jefferson said it right when he was wrestling with the evils of slavery," said Muslim activist Mahdi Bray, executive director of the Muslim American Society Freedom Foundation. "He said: �I tremble for my nation when I think that God is just.� And I tremble for my nation today as I stand here as a Muslim, as an American, when I hear the drumbeat for war."

The proposed war has no legitimacy within the Christian tradition of a so-called "just war," according to a Catholic bishop from Detroit. "I find myself returning to what Pope John Paul II, the Bishop of Rome proclaimed in 1991. Shortly after the Persian Gulf War ended, he said: �Never again war! No! Never again war, which destroys the lives of innocent people, teaches how to kill, and throws into upheaval even the lives of those that do the killing, and leaves behind a trail of anger and resentment and hatred, thus making it all the more difficult to find a just solution of the very problems that provoked the war,�" said Thomas Gumbleton, auxiliary bishop from the Catholic Diocese of Detroit.

Bishop Gumbleton said there are a number of conditions that must be clearly fulfilled in order to justify people going to war according to Christian tradition.

"The very first one: is it a just cause?" he said. "Never is it permitted according to this tradition that you wage war of aggression. You must be under attack. There is no such thing in this tradition as pre-emptive war, which is what our leaders are telling us we must do."

There is one other condition, he suggested. "Any war that we wage within the tradition of �just war� must be an action of last resort. We have to have exhausted every other means, we have to make every effort to negotiate, to find solutions by bargaining, by talking, by inter-acting with people."

The Iraqi government has offered to negotiate the return of arms inspectors so long as their return is linked to an end to UN-imposed sanctions against Baghdad. The Bush administration rejects those offers as "delay tactics."

"Our daily threats against Iraq are unprecedented in history," Mr. Clark argued. "These threats are a crime against peace. A crime against peace is the most serious of all crimes because without it there�s no war."

Sadly, he continued, "the debate we hear in the United States is not whether we attack Iraq, but when? And how? The answer must be never!"