Right now, though, there's no liberal message that separates the welfare of the Iraqi people from that of the Bush administration. In a New Republic article this week, Michael Crowley quotes Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., complaining that his colleagues' Iraq stances are driven by blind rage. "In trying to pin them down, I say, 'At the end of the day, we have to have a policy to cope with what to do now,'" he told Crowley. "And they say, 'Well, we're just pissed off.' They don't really even attempt to argue the policy of it."

What Smith says about other congressmen is even more true of many of their constituents. At Saturday's rally, people from across the country came together to protest a war that's already happened and argue for a solution that many of them, if pressed, believe is both unrealistic and potentially catastrophic.

Because the rally was smaller that those preceding the war, there was a larger ratio of would-be communist revolutionaries, Zionist conspiracy mongers and skinny teenage anarchists with black bandannas covering their faces. Someone flew an Iraqi flag, the version Saddam instituted in 1991, which added the words "Allahu Akbar" to the three green stars at its center. At one point, a dapper, avuncular white-haired man in a nice camel coat sidled up to me and said in a thick European accent, "So, what are we going to do about the Zionists?"

"I don't know," I said. "What do you think?"

"I think we should oppose them. I think that Malaysian guy hit the nail on the head," he said, referring to Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, who recently said that Jews rule the world by proxy.

Yet the majority of the demonstrators were not Judeophobes or Baathist stooges. They were people who'd opposed the war all along, who felt betrayed and marginalized by their government and the media's failure to take their concerns seriously, and who wanted a new American foreign policy. For many of them, "end the occupation" was a kind of shorthand. They didn't take it literally. But the people who called the protest did.

Unlike many Democrats, ANSWER isn't confused about where it stands on Iraq. According to an ANSWER pamphlet, "Counter-revolution & Resistance in Iraq," "The anti-war movement here and around the world must give its unconditional support to the Iraqi anti-colonial resistance." The group, whose prodigious organizing ability allowed it to lead much of the antiwar movement, is organizing "Bring the Troops Home Now" committees across the country to circulate petitions demanding the immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq.

ANSWER is clear that it doesn't want U.N. troops to replace Americans. According to an ANSWER newspaper that volunteers were distributing at the rally, "The ANSWER Coalition promotes the demand, 'Bring the troops home now, end the occupation of Iraq.' Some other groups call instead for turning the Occupation Authority over to the United Nations ... The Iraqis have shown they want no foreign, imperial forces to become the arbiters of their political and economic process ... Given the U.N.'s record in Iraq the last 13 years, why would the Iraqi people agree that this same UN should be the institution to serve as the guarantor in a transition to renewed sovereign control?"

Despite their differing loyalties, Military Families has also come out against an international presence in Iraq. At Saturday's rally Susan Shuman, whose son has been in Iraq since March, told the crowd, "We are very clear that the occupation of Iraq is the problem and not the solution. It is the problem for the people of Iraq who continue to be in harm's way, it is the problem for our troops who continue to die on a daily basis ... It cannot be solved by replacing American troops with Japanese troops, with troops from Turkey, Latvia or Spain. Don't deploy them, don't extend them, don't replace them. Bring them home now!"

The crowd erupted in chants of, "Bring them home! Bring them home!"

Sharpton sounded a similar note, slamming Democrats who disagree. "Let's be clear," he said. "There are some that are trying to act as though you can be against the war but for gradual withdrawal. If you're against the war, you want the war stopped now, and the only way to stop it is to end it right now."

And then what? After all, there is a near consensus among experts that, if America suddenly abandoned Iraq, civil war would ensue. Most Iraqis want to see America repair their utilities and fund the building of a new government infrastructure. Yet in conceiving of Iraq exclusively as Bush's venal adventure, Saturday's antiwar speakers, like many Democrats and progressives, left no affirmative role for liberals in resurrecting that broken country.

"I wasn't for it in the first place, so I don't feel I have a responsibility," Matt Hundley, a 21-year-old from West Virginia, says of the war and its aftermath.

Most demonstrators weren't so overtly callous. Some saw America as the source of all instability in Iraq, and thus couldn't imagine its troops bringing anything but travail to the Iraqi people. Protestor Laura Beauvais, a professor of business at the University of Rhode Island, was against appropriating $87 billion to Iraq. When asked what Americans owe the Iraqi people, she said, "We owe them help getting basic things like schools and healthcare." But how to provide that, without spending American money? "How you do that is beyond someone like me. It doesn't have to be through more troops, and giving money to corporations," she said.

Toward the end of the march, Richard Whelan, a third-generation military veteran with a son in the Air Force, stood with a sign saying, "Bush's War Time Sacrifices: My Child. Your Child. Our $. Our Future." A real-estate salesman from Maine with steel gray hair and a wise, lined face, he was among the small minority of protestors who had thought out the implications of his proposed solution. He would be happy to see $87 billion of American money channeled through the U.N., he said, and wished for a "phased withdrawal -- an announcement that we were going to phase out and the U.N. was going to phase in."

At the same time, he wanted American Iraq policy to be overseen by the State Department, not the Pentagon, and he said the Peace Corps should have a role in the nation's rebuilding. "I can see many Americans over there," he said. "They may die over there, but they would die for a just cause."

Whelan was joined by Eric Lazarus, owner of a New York City software company. The conversation turned to the wisdom of the protest's call for an abrupt American pullout, and Lazarus said, "It may sound like an irresponsible thing to say, 'Bring the troops home now,' but it's an attempt to get the dialogue started. Look, the U.S. isn't going to pull out. It's not a part of the national debate."

He had hit on one of the key dynamics shaping both Democratic and leftist demands on Iraq -- the sense that since progressives have so little power, it doesn't much matter what they call for. That's why Johnson, who was surprised by the sentiments on his own sign, could say, when asked what he wants to see done in Iraq, "We should announce to the world that we're going to commit to using our power for good." Pressed further, he said, "I voted for Nader, so I'm not a realist."

It's becoming an abominable cliché to mention George Orwell when discussing the debate over Iraq, but a quote of his from "The Lion and the Unicorn" seemed particularly apt on Saturday. "The mentality of the English left-wing intelligentsia can be studied in half a dozen weekly and monthly papers," he wrote. "The immediately striking thing about all these papers is their generally negative querulous attitude, their complete lack at all times of any constructive suggestion. There is little in them except the irresponsible carping of people who have never been and never expect to be in a position of power."

Or, as Packer says, the cry "End the occupation" is "an expression of impotence, an inability to make distinctions. In this case, impotence and omnipotence are two sides of the same coin. You can think anything because it won't matter. That frees people up to not think about Iraq."

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