New Orleans ? Veterans and war protesters marched past gutted houses and piles of rotting wood and debris Sunday, saying the slow pace of rebuilding the hurricane-ravaged city shows the price the country is paying for continuing to wage war in Iraq.

“A lot of people don’t have a grasp of what this war is costing us,” Vern Hall, a Vietnam War veteran from Minnesota, said as he walked by shuttered buildings with broken glass and precariously hanging metal.

“Here’s the actual cost of this,” he said, looking around. “Things are not getting done.”

The third anniversary of the U.S.-led war in Iraq drew tens of thousands of protesters to cities around the globe for a second day Sunday, with chants of “Stop the War” and calls for the withdrawal of troops.

Attendance at the demonstrations worldwide was lower than organizers had predicted, and far short of the millions who protested the initial invasion in March 2003 and the first anniversary in 2004.

In Portland, Ore., police estimated that 10,000 people turned out for a march through downtown.

Iraq war protesters gather in the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans. The third anniversary of the U.S.-led war in Iraq on Sunday drew tens of thousands of protesters in at least two dozen cities around the globe with many chanting Stop

“It is time now for you to take back your country,” said Steven DeFord at a pre-march rally. His son, Oregon National Guard Sgt. David Johnson, 37, was killed in Iraq by a roadside bomb in September 2004.

In New York, about 200 people marched down Fifth Avenue with signs including: “We the People Need to do More to End the War.” Seventeen people were arrested for disorderly conduct, police said.

While the protests largely focused on the deaths and destruction in Iraq, the march in Louisiana stressed the damage to the homefront as about 200 war veterans, hurricane survivors and others walked from Mobile, Ala., to a rally in New Orleans.

They said the military conflict had drained resources needed for rebuilding Gulf Coast cities devastated by hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Along with money, National Guard troops and equipment had been diverted to Iraq when they could have been aiding people who lost their homes, they said.

“We attacked a country who never did anything to us,” said Philadelphia resident Al Zappala, whose 30-year-old son was killed in Iraq in April 2004.

He said his civic-minded son enlisted after being impressed with the way National Guard troops aided a community near a flood-prone river in Pennsylvania with sand bags and other help.

The route Zappala and other marchers with Veterans For Peace followed Sunday took them directly past Jackson Barracks, the flooded-out headquarters of the Louisiana National Guard.

Veterans For Peace President David Cline, who joined the 140-mile march from Mobile to New Orleans, said the nation can’t have both “guns and butter,” a reference to President Lyndon Johnson’s statement that the country could fight the war in Vietnam and enjoy the good life at home.

“The reality is you get either A or B, you don’t get A and B,” he said.