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Thursday, Jul 9, 2009
With war underway, and a Bush victory a possibility, the antiwar movement appears to be in denial about its future influence.
Mar 23, 2003 | Saturday's peace protest in Manhattan was so jubilant, you'd never know there was a war going on. On one of the most gorgeous days of the year, an estimated 100,000 to 200,000 people flooded Broadway, marching from Times Square to Greenwich Village in one of the largest antiwar protests in America since the war's start. The demonstration was one of many across the globe -- hundreds of thousands took to the streets in London, 90,000 in Paris, 10,000 in Naples and 15,000 in Calcutta. But while recent protests abroad have been marked by militancy -- with people throwing stones, fake blood and, in Athens, Molotov cocktails at American embassies -- the march in New York was overwhelmingly peaceful and strangely cheery. For all the rhetoric of atrocity, it felt like a street party.
"I always feel so energized after I go to these," said a 30-year-old artist who goes by the name Machine. Lithe and statuesque, Machine was wearing sequined hot pants, fishnet stockings, shiny platform heels and a huge feathered headdress. His sign said, "Baby, I am the bomb." Around him were drag queen nuns and two people wearing stars-and-stripes-patterned suits and dancing on stilts. A dozen women in red, white and blue bobbed wigs with matching skin-tight outfits and huge missile-shaped strap-on dildoes fanned out to the street, flouncing and dancing as they sang "Show me the way to the next little war," to the tune of Kurt Weill's "Alabama Song."
There's often a contradiction at protests between a crowd's elation and its somber message, but it seemed particularly stark on Saturday. Despite the efforts of the world's broadest antiwar movement, war had begun. Bombs rained on Baghdad, and everyone in attendance seemed convinced that many Iraqi civilians would be slaughtered.
So why were so many dancing in the streets?
"I guess it's just the good energy here," said 24-year-old Temima Fruchter. "Plus it's really nice out. And there's instruments. And Muppets." (A few people were carrying Muppet dolls. Their symbolic relationship to geopolitics was unclear.)
"There's a certain joy inherent in freedom of speech," said Rene Stephens, a 22-year-old who works at Citizens Campaign for the Environment. "I don't think it dilutes our message."
That depends on what the message is. One that resonated throughout the crowd was a refusal to be cowed by those who claim that dissent during wartime is treasonous -- and it's easy to see how that kind of defiance is giddy-making. There also was the usual rage about the direction that George Bush has taken the country, a rage that, in some ways, exists independent of the war in Iraq or its outcome.
If that overweening fury toward Bush can be harnessed after the war ends, the protesters believe, it could be a powerful force for checking the president's far-right domestic agenda and unilateral foreign policy. "It's not going to be easy, but we can still try to contain the Bush administration," said Tanaquil Taubes, a Manhattan psychiatrist whose sign said, "Honor Our Soldiers but Impeach Bush." "A lot of people here are afraid of what America is becoming."
Yet with the war underway, whatever anti-Bush momentum has been gained on the ground will likely dissipate if Iraqis welcome American troops as liberators. And in these very initial stages, that's exactly what's happened. The Guardian, a liberal British paper, quoted a sobbing man in Safwan, "You're late. What took you so long? God help you become victorious. I want to say hello to Bush, to shake his hand. We came out of the grave."
United Press International quoted an American pastor who went to Iraq as a human shield and left as a hawk. Iraqis, he said, "told me they would commit suicide if American bombing didn't start. They were willing to see their homes demolished to gain their freedom from Saddam's bloody tyranny. They convinced me that Saddam was a monster the likes of which the world had not seen since Stalin and Hitler ... Their tales of slow torture and killing made me ill."
Of course, the war has just begun, and the potential for greater horror is still high. The shocking and awing of Baghdad looks harrowing on TV; Turkey's incursion into the North has frightening implications for the Kurds; and American forces have yet to encounter Saddam loyalists thought to be dug in in Baghdad.
But if at the end of the war Iraqis believe that the chaos and suffering of the war was worth it, progressives will have to figure out a way to maintain a protest movement that can both celebrate the liberation of Iraq and fight Bush's domestic and diplomatic policies.
