'I Was
Just Waving It'
Is there a serious antiwar movement in America?
Salon's Michelle Goldberg, who is highly sympathetic to the antiwar cause, has a
devastating piece on this weekend's protest in Washington. Here's the opening
anecdote:
Allan Johnson, a high school English teacher and debate coach from Fairfax, Va., held a sign saying "U.S. Troops Out of Iraq. Bring Them Home Now!" at Saturday's "End the Occupation" rally in Washington. In fact, though, Johnson isn't sure he wants to bring the troops home now, or to end the American occupation of Iraq. At least, not yet.
"We've made a giant mess," said Johnson, a handsome man who wore his long snowy hair in a ponytail and had a sparkling stud in one ear. "I would hate for the Bush administration to halfway fix things and then leave, and then blame the Iraqis if things go wrong. Once you go to somebody's house and break all the windows, don't you owe them new windows?"
Why, then, was he marching at an End the Occupation rally? "I don't agree with all the people here, believe you me," he said. But his own sign? He glanced at it, startled, and explained that someone had handed it to him. "I didn't even look at it," he said. "I was just waving it."
The group that sponsored the protest, International Answer, is evil, not clueless. A front for the Stalinist Workers World Party, Answer is engaging in outright sedition; Goldberg quotes from an Answer pamphlet: "The anti-war movement here and around the world must give its unconditional support to the Iraqi anti-colonial resistance"--that would be the guerrillas and terrorists who've been blowing up American servicemen, Iraqi civilians and international do-gooders.
If the peace-freaks who've taken to the street can't be taken seriously, what about the antiwar tilt of the Democratic Party? One suspects this is more the lurching of a dying beast than a serious political program, and Goldberg has a telling quote:
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."
Those of us who've endured the various Democratic presidential debates are left with the same impression. It's hard to imagine any of the current presidential candidates, outside the lunatic fringe (Al Sharpton and Dennis Kucinich), opposing the liberation in Iraq if a Democrat were in the White House. For the other candidates (with the partial exceptions of Joe Lieberman, Dick Gephardt and Carol Moseley Braun, who to varying degrees have refused to join the cut-and-run crowd), the war seems to be beside the point. They want President Bush to lose, and if America loses in the process, well, that's just collateral damage.
________________________________
Changes to your subscription (unsubs, nomail, digest) can be made by going to http://sandboxmail.net/mailman/listinfo/sndbox_sandboxmail.net
