BLOOMINGTON - Marilyn Sutherland said she thought she retired her antiwar protest sign more than a decade ago, but she said she felt compelled to bring it out again. | Video

"Beware, the Bush propaganda machine is alive and well," the hand-lettered sign declared in red marker with letters drawn to appear as though they are written in blood.

She made it in a different decade to oppose a different President George Bush and a different war, the 1990-1991 Gulf War.

"It feels like a rerun," the retired registered nurse from Normal said Thursday evening, surveying a crowd of about 50 people who turned out outside the McLean County Museum of History in downtown Bloomington.

The rally was one of hundreds across the country Thursday night organized through the MoveOn.org Political Action Web site to opposed President Bush's new plan to increase the troop levels in Iraq. Local protesters urged people to contact members of Congress to oppose what they called escalation of the already unpopular war.

The crowd listened to a series of speakers denounce the war and chanted "No escalation."

While Sutherland said she was reminded of the Gulf War, a brief, widely popular war that drove Saddam Hussein's Iraqi forces out of occupied Kuwait, others remembered a different war, in Vietnam.

Victor Connor, a retired computer programmer/analyst and university professor from Normal, told the crowd more than 3,000 American troops have died and 20,000 have been wounded in the current war. But the human cost has been far higher, he said.

"We've killed over 200,000 Iraqis, wounded many thousands more, destroyed over 100,000 homes and businesses, destroyed their water supplies, their food supplies, their power plants, and a holy city," he said. "We polluted their country with highly radioactive depleted uranium and restrict their transportation and internal trade, which limits them from helping themselves."

He said the Bush administration's current claim that quitting Iraq would lead to chaos is the "same twisted logic" that President Lyndon Johnson used in the 1960s to keep fighting the Vietnam War.

He said Johnson could have pulled out in 1967, but the president said that would disrespect the memory of the 13,000 American soldiers killed in that war to that point.

"We finally pulled out in 1973 after 58,000 American soldiers were killed and over 3 million Vietnamese had been killed, mostly by our own troops," he said. "Did we learn anything? It appears not."

Before the rally, Pat Albertini said he went to the rally because he sees no reason to keep fighting.

"I don't want to see kids and grandkids die in a war that makes no sense," he said.

Dan and Naomi Liechty of Normal were there with their daughter, Hannah, 9, who was making a protest sign.

"We feel as parents it's important to teach her what we stand for," said Dan Liechty, an Illinois State University professor of social work. "This is at least something we can do."