Quotes of the Day
On the first day of Gulf War II, shock and awe came to San Francisco. Antiwar protesters had long pledged that if bombs fell on Baghdad, they would unite to "stop business as usual" in America's major cities. Here's how they fared by the Bay: 40 intersections shut down by human blockades. Hay bales set on fire in the streets around the Transamerica Building. Police-car windows smashed all over town. A vomit-in by a small group at the base of the Federal Building to demonstrate that the war made them sick. 1,350 arrests — the highest one-day total in the history of the city — and a police plea for motorists to stay away from downtown. "Absolute anarchy," was how San Francisco assistant police chief Alex Fagan put it.
Anarchy, yes, but anarchy by design. An organization called Direct Action Against the War was loosely responsible for the San Francisco protests. Its leaders picked a time, sent e-mail to sympathetic groups as disparate as Food Not Bombs and the Lutheran Peace Fellowship and organized a 10-minute orientation at Justin Herman Plaza on the tenets of civil disobedience (and on the importance of preparing a sound bite if you are arrested near a camera crew). Then the groups scattered. Police couldn't follow the mob because the mob was everywhere and nowhere, working in tiny, constantly evolving cells. In their obstreperous diversity, the protesters had the run of the town.
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Business as usual was indeed halted last week in San Francisco, Chicago, New York and scores of other U.S. cities as well as on dozens of college and high school campuses. The business in Baghdad, however, was not halted, and as bombs continued to fall, America's antiwar movement found itself in a quandary. Larger than at any time since the Vietnam era, antiwar protests have grown massive thanks to e-mail links among groups joined in opposition to the war. But now that the war has begun, many groups within the antiwar coalition are finding that their affinity is slipping into ideological anarchy. "Frankly, we've been working all these months to prevent war," says Gordon Clark of Iraq Pledge of Resistance, "but we do not have the next plan. Some people want to try and achieve a troop pullout or push for the greatest amount of aid to Iraq. My dream is that this can be an ongoing campaign against the militaristic policies of the Bush Administration. We have to regroup and figure out what to do next."
Nothing slows down a mass movement like nuance. Many protest groups realized that the hunger for antiwar sentiment subsided the moment that U.S. troops were put in peril. "The mood changes," says Claire Gorfinkel, who co-chairs Interfaith Communities United for Justice and Peace, a Pasadena, Calif., coalition with a 1,000-member mailing list. At rallies and marches, Gorfinkel says, passersby are less willing to flash peace signs and honk car horns. "My hunch is that there will be a reassessment on a broad scale throughout society for a period of time, a pendulum swing, if you will."
Only two weeks ago, protesters at the University of Minnesota were screaming for the Bush Administration to avoid war. Today's message is "Support U.S. troops. Bring them home," says Ty Moore, 25, an organizer with a student coalition against war in Iraq. Groups now must walk the delicate line between protest and patriotism. They need to find a way to be antiwar without being perceived as anti
The international antiwar movement does not have the problems of division and delicacy that confront groups in the U.S. In Berlin, Paris and Cairo, protesters are united by pacifism and anti-Americanism. The war has only reaffirmed their views and intensified their fervor, and protests in Europe and the Middle East are likely to endure well into any possible American occupation of Iraq.
Disagreements within the U.S. antiwar movement aren't just over ideology but method. Swarming protests — like the San Francisco shutdown and the 200,000-person march that closed streets in New York City on Saturday — continued over the weekend, sometimes to the clucking disapproval of more focused dissenters. "If I actually had 10,000 people who would listen to what I said," Clark notes, "I would certainly do things differently than the way they turned out in San Francisco. The job of a civil resister is to provoke a response. Vomiting on the streets — it's very creative, it's very theatrical, but that's hardly the most positive and thoughtful image we can put out."
Margaret Lumsdaine, a Lutheran pastor and coordinator of the Military Globalization Project, thinks mass protests are misguided for a different reason. "How can we think we are actually going to overtake a mind-set of war by just waving some signs around?" she asks. "It seems to make sense not to block the streets for people going to work but to block the communications systems that are implementing this war." On Saturday Lumsdaine was one of two dozen people who planned to trespass onto the Vandenberg Air Force Base in Southern California, which acts as a weapons-guidance hub for the war. Base commanders threatened "deadly force" against anyone who set foot on the base, a warning that limited turnout. "People want to be part of an action that's very effective, but they also want to have minimal risk," says Lumsdaine. "You can't always have both."
What the hydra of the dissent movement needs most desperately is a single head. But with all the Democratic presidential candidates (except Howard Dean and Al Sharpton) backing the war, political leaders are hard to come by, as are mentors from the intellectual left. "People in the antiwar movement are making a giant, historic mistake," says Paul Berman, left-leaning author of Terror and Liberalism. "The argument for the war is one of solidarity with the oppressed. These ought to be the principles of the left. The people in the antiwar movement have fallen into confusion. They should be protesting Bush — but make sure that a genuine democracy rises in Iraq."
"It is very complex," echoes Lumsdaine. "That's what's hard about this war. People on the right and on the left both want to make it very simple, and it's not." She prays, however, to find a way to focus everyone's outrage. "This is an opportunity for the peace movement. And if we lose this opportunity, we're really pathetic."
- Josh Tyrangiel