Playing To The Crowd

During a hostage crisis, the families of captives will do anything and everything they can to get their loved ones safely home. So in that sense it wasn't surprising last week when relatives of the three Italian security contractors being held by insurgents in Iraq followed their captors' instructions — and organized a march against the war. The families said the demonstration was simply "for peace" and not aimed at pressuring Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi to withdraw Italy's nearly 3,000 troops from Iraq, as the insurgents had specifically demanded. But the net effect was the same, and so many Italians stayed...