Antiwar demos

Three of The Blue Voice gang were on hand for the antiwar demonstrations in Washington Saturday, and they are posting their own first-hand accounts there.  Go check them out.

The rightwingers are doing what they can always be expected to do, trying to make the marches and rallies sound kooky and/or subversive.  If you think about it, they're almost forced to do that to defend the Iraq War now.  It's highly unpopular in the US.  It was started based on lies.  Except in the fantasy world of FOX News and OxyContin radio, it's a disaster.  The regime we eventually installed is a pro-Iranian, Shi'a, Muslim-fundamentalist one.  It's become the jihadists' chief recruitment sell.

And the Katrina disaster showed that the Bush administration has been completely neglecting critical elements of homeland security preparation while it created as big a disaster in Iraq as it did in New Orleans.

So how else can you defend Bush's war policies in Iraq but to trash the critics?

It's very clear from reports on the Washington event as well as others across the country - I've seen local reports from San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Des Moines, and St. Petersburg - that they attracted a diverse crowd with a clear message: Get US troops out of Iraq.

So why are some liberal sources going out of their way to help the prowar advocates trash the movement?  For instance, I was surprised to see Steve Gilliard's blog partner Jen highlighting a ilam piece and linking to a rightwing Libertarian Party caricature of antiwar rallies: The two anti-war messages 09/26/05.

Then Salon's lead article on the Washington march leads off this way: "Make levees, not war" by Jeff Horwitz 09/25/05.

Though Saturday was the first day a permit had been granted for an antiwar march past the White House since the Iraq war began, one could be forgiven for having low expectations for the event.

To begin with, the joint organizers, International ANSWER and United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ), feud so regularly that they had to sign a pact promising not to attack each other until the event was over.

Then there was ANSWER's rejection of message control -- its leadership demanded that each of its component organizations be allowed to protest issues besides the war. Starting at 9 a.m., therefore, the Palestinian boosters took over Farragut Square with their own signs and chants, while bands of anarchists, affordable housing advocates, and Hugo Chavez supporters staked out intersections around D.C.'s downtown.

All politics has a tendency to factionalism, and protest politics notoriously so.  The big story, which Horwitz gets to several paragraphs into the article, is that the Washington march drew 200,000 or more people there to protest the Iraq War.  Given the number of organizations sponsoring the event, that's well-nigh miraculous.

Now, if I were organizing an antiwar event, my own preference would be to have speakers ranging from liberals to conservatives with labor union reps featured in particular, with the messages focused on getting the US out of the Iraq War, and to have all the marchers carrying American flags.

But let's get real.  If you want a perfectly-scripted political event, go to one of Bush's Potemkin "public" appearances.  Any event like this one is going to have its share of rough edges.  But anyone who reads more (or less) into this than opposition to the Iraq War is really stretching.

Mark Engler makes an important observation in March Madness TomPaine.com 09/23/05:

No doubt, conservatives will try to conjure pictures of flag-burning hippies to make the anti-war movement look like a marginal fringe instead of a legitimate political force. But those who direct their energy to worrying about such backlash rather than organizing to build a better mobilization make two mistakes:

First, they miss the lesson of John Kerry, who showed that the right-wing machine will do its best to demonize all opposition, and that no amount of tepid moderation will deter them.

And, second,  they give too little credit to organizers in groups like UFPJ, Military Families Speak Out and Iraq Veterans Against the War, who rarely match the stereotypes. These groups demonstrate a sophisticated understanding of tactics—eschewing radical dogmatism, they are combining marching, religious services, lobbying and direct action in DC—and are asking for the broadest possible support this weekend.

The more support the movement gets, the greater the chances are that the marches and other actions will ignite wider swaths of anti-war public opinion. In turn, more members of Congress will feel heat not just from the national Mall, but also from voters in their home districts. For a peace movement just re-emerging from the shadows, this would be a worthy contribution.

So you have to wonder why Jeff Horwitz and Salon opened with the John Birch Society caricature and stuck the real point farther down in their story.  Notice even in the second paragraph quoted below, the general emphasis on linking Katrina and Iraq is introduced with a sneer at the organizers:

But yesterday's protesters beat the odds and pulled off what was certainly D.C.'s biggest antiwar demonstration since the Iraq occupation began. Organizers claimed as many as 250,000 demonstrators attended; though D.C. police estimates were more conservative, none pegged the crowd at below 100,000. By the time the rally convened at 11:30 a.m., scores of demonstrators filled the Ellipse, spilling onto the Mall, the streets around the White House, and the Washington Monument -- a hopeful sign that the effectiveness of the peace movement may have reached a turning point.

While the half-dozen UFPJ and ANSWER speakers held forth on incongruous topics ranging from discrimination against American Muslims to the illegitimacy of Bush's 2000 Florida victory, their two principal demands were an immediate withdrawal of American troops from Iraq and a new federal focus on the devastated Gulf Coast. "National security begins in New Orleans, homeland security begins at home," Jesse Jackson told the crowd. "Bring the troops home now."

Other speakers made the same Baghdad-New Orleans link, reminding the crowd that many Louisiana National Guardsmen were fighting abroad when the hurricane struck. Demonstrators waved signs bearing the phrase "Make levees, not war" in response. "I think that it's broadening the focus," Baptist Peace Fellowship demonstrator Tom Burkett said of the combined antiwar and disaster relief message. "Are we going to be a better country by spending another 200 billion [in Iraq] or spending it on the Gulf Coast?"

Maybe this is a case of a liberal writer demonstrating his "tough-mindedness" by being "counter-intuitive", i.e., pimping the prowar propaganda point.

I just wish that Republican writers and bloggers were afflicted with the same malady going the other direction.