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Mark Shields is a nationally known columnist and commentator. |
Historic peace movement against U.S. war in Iraq
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- To call the current protests against the United States making war on Iraq -- which could on one raw February Saturday turn out in the city streets of dozens of countries some six million people -- "the largest demonstration since the Vietnam War" is both inaccurate and misleading.
It was 1967 before the protests against U.S. involvement in Vietnam got any real public traction. By then, the United States had been at war for over three years and 19,547 Americans had already lost their lives. Today's American protesters for peace seek, before the first bomb is dropped or the first child is orphaned, to stop their own country from going to war against Iraq.
Despite critics' efforts to paint the protesters as latter-day "Commie-symps" or part of some diabolical conspiracy, the demonstrations are not limited to America's predictably liberal zip codes in Cambridge, Berkeley and Madison.
No, opponents of the United States going to war rallied in such notorious hotbeds of social rest as Boise, Yakima and Little Rock. The protesters I have interviewed and talked to are the kind of Americans you would find chaperoning a junior-high dance or organizing a charity car wash. They are fathers holding their children on their shoulders, grandmothers holding their granddaughters' hands and veterans wearing their faded, and now too small, fatigue jackets.
The president remains determined and unmoved. When asked about remarkable turnout of citizens protesting his policy, Bush answered: "Size of protest, it's like deciding, well, I'm going to decide policy based upon a focus group.
The role of a leader is to decide policy based upon the security -- in this case, the security of the people." (For those readers not steeped in market jargon, "focus groups" are composed of a dozen or so individuals assembled around a table and quizzed by a pollster to learn what ordinary folks are looking for in shampoo conditioner or in a lieutenant governor.)
Seven hundred and fifty thousand people in London and a police-estimated crowd of more than 660,000 in Madrid -- part of Spain's biggest demonstration since the 1975 death of dictator Francisco Franco -- hardly qualify as focus groups.
A valuable political maxim teaches, "In every political campaign you will ever be in, there will always be somebody on your side that you wish devoutly was on the other side!" That was never more true than at the San Francisco peace rally when, in a fit of ugly bigotry, Rabbi Michael Lerner, a principled and relentless supporter of Palestinian rights, was banned from speaking. Lerner's offense -- that he supports Israel's right to exist -- made him unacceptable to one of the organizing groups, Act Now to Stop War and End Racism (ANSWER), which had veto power over any speaker. The eloquence of the protests were not found in the words of the generally undistinguished speakers but in the earnestness, the numbers and the resolve of the audience.
Let's be blunt. Those who argue most loudly for going to war are not personally going anywhere -- except perhaps to their club for a night-cap or to some semi-exclusive sunny spot to get away from an arctic February.
To argue that the United States will soon have 200,000 troops in the Persian Gulf and therefore the nation must go to war or risk losing face (with whom, we are not told) is indefensible. Remind me again: Just who were the presidential cowards who did not bomb the Soviet Union over Berlin or over Korea or over Cuba or over Czechoslovakia? Going to war because somehow you might be embarrassed if you didn't is insanity.
Those who say American democracy is in decline or that apathy is epidemic are wrong. These protesters for the most part are not simmering with resentment or burning with hate. But they are brimming with defiance. They are no focus group. They are on a serious mission to stop the United States' war against Iraq before that war is begun. It's a mission of life and death.
