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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Thousands turn out in Washington to protest a war in Iraq. What they were for wasn't quite so clear.
Oct 27, 2002 | Kaffiyehs, the checked Palestinian head scarves, were selling for $15 each at the massive antiwar rally in Washington on Saturday, and they were selling well. College radicals in Che Guevara T-shirts draped them over their heads, soignie women wore them over their shoulders like pashminas, and topless girls with "Got Oil?" stickers pasted over their nipples wrapped them around their faces like revolutionaries.
It was a rally rich with spectacle and passion where radical cant competed with political substance. There were indie-rock cheerleaders jumping around crying, "Liberate! Smash the state!" and huge banners with messages like, "Defeat U.S. Imperialism: Defend Afghanistan and Iraq for Class War Against the Imperialism War." But there were plenty of committed, articulate people like Mark Arend, a programmer for Microsoft, who stood with his 13-year-old son and hoisted a sign built like a spiral notebook, each page turning to reveal a new antiwar message. He had so many reasons for opposing invasion he couldn't choose just one. "I don't have a lot of time -- I have a job and a family," he says. "But this is bugging me so much it's like a midlife crisis. I listen to the news and I have to do something."
There was even an ex-Marine, who finished his service in April after returning from Afghanistan. That was a necessary war, he said -- but this isn't. "This is a war for all the wrong reasons," he said. "Iraq has no links to al-Qaida. For the last 11 years, [the government] has been trying their damnedest to find one. Now suddenly they have some irrefutable evidence?" This was his first peace protest, and he said, "This is part of the reason I joined the military. People in this country have a right to demonstrate."
Certainly, the demonstration proved that opposition to the war on Iraq is broad and deep in America, though the mainstream media did a shamefully inadequate job of reporting on it. A small New York Times article merely said there were "thousands" of demonstrators, adding, "Fewer people attended than organizers had hoped for."
That's misleading -- while the group that called the rally, the ANSWER coalition, probably exaggerated by saying that 200,000 people turned out, the crowd was indeed massive, at least in the tens of thousands. And the D.C. Metro Police chief suggested to the Washington Post that it might have been the biggest antiwar protest since the Vietnam era. Add that to the estimated 42,000 people who marched in San Francisco, the 2,000 who converged on Donald Rumsfeld's house in New Mexico, and the thousands of other people who protested nationwide, in Europe, Mexico and Japan, and it's clear that the new peace movement has a demonstrable momentum.
What it doesn't appear to have is a powerful affirmative message to match its scathing critique of American foreign policy. If war isn't the answer, what is? "No Justice, No Peace, U.S. Out of the Middle East" doesn't cut it, unless we intend to abandon the Kurds to Saddam. "Israel out of U.S. Congress," a slogan scrawled on one sign and echoed by many marchers, is similarly insufficient, unless you believe that "our foreign policy is not made here, it is made in Israel," as Ali Azam, a protester from Binghamton, N.Y., patiently explained.
Of course, no protest speaks with one voice, and this one surely represented a broader range of opinions than the fringe radicals behind ANSWER. The basic message of Oct. 26 was simple opposition to the war on Iraq.
But it was hard to find a coherent ethical worldview to back that position up, save for a kind of masochistic isolationism. At its worst, the lack of a clear message gave way to moral emptiness, demonstrated in sickening exchanges between the handful of pro-war Iraqi dissidents who held their own rally near the Washington Monument and the antiwar marchers who responded to their tales of murder, torture and oppression with glib slogans and, occasionally, outright mockery.
