It was a bad week for ends and means.
Globally, the truly worst-case scenarios (say, a massive terrorist counterattack) never materialized. Instead, we had the peace movements other nightmare scenario: all seemingly going well. Anti-warriors kept bracing for the worst excesses of shock and awe; instead, we were bombarded with sanitized, carefully edited images of an antiseptic war that seemed to be working. Iraqs government was disintegrating; civilians didnt die in great numbers (at least on-screen). Bathed in the light of Saddams apparent end, last months great anti-war roar was reduced to some global whining about those irrelevant means.
The peace movement didnt just go away, however: Demonstrations circled the world, with 200,000300,000 people in New York and 2,200 arrests in San Francisco. Unfortunately, Februarys huge turnout of millions of protesters around the globe became not just irrelevant but a reverse benchmark. Because bombs were falling and protests were smaller, invasion opponents (and their silly insistence on law and evidence) no longer mattered. It was as if leaders, and their network stenographers, were breathing relieved sighs; the public could be ignored, after all.
Locally, there was more truth to this than protesters cared to admit. They sputtered with deserved fury at the plainly unconstitutional tactics of Seattle police, but, truthfully, the police didnt have much to break up.
While activists in a number of U.S. cities shut down their main business districts, in Seattle part of the outrage over police tactics was that they were pointlessly provocative when demonstrators werent going anywhere (figuratively) anyway.
Last week, when the local faithful did gather, it was to hear the same tired speeches and the usual music from ancient movements, and for lots of pointless milling about. Good people, boring show. At the hour of crisis, local organizers seemingly ditched the creative approaches that had worked bestthe neighborhood marches, the diversity, the vitalityand went with memorized march-speech-denounce formats. It was mostly dispiriting and unimaginative and wasnt about to shut any wars down.
Seattle police performed their Stupid PostWorld Trade Organization Tricks anyway, in large part because they could: The public, by and large, wouldnt mind (as WTO taught us). It was a blatant violation of all those rights our soldiers were, in fanciful theory, fighting for.
In this way, police tactics were an eerie, polite echo of what the U.S. was simultaneously doing in Iraq: using raw force, because they could and they wanted to. This seems to be Americas millennial zeitgeist: the hell with rulesmight makes right.
In the longer term, people who cling to antiquated notions of free speech or self-
determination or who take umbrage at having their rights or freedoms trampled will smolder with resentment. Among the peaceniks, no problem: Theyre, well, peaceable. But were also talking about nations, and about 1.2 billion enraged adherents of the worlds second-largest religion, not all of whom are renowned humanitarians. This invasion is sowing seeds for countless acts of vengeance.
Bushs empire builders consider this invasion merely an opening battle in a much longer war for global dominance. The world does, too. The Muslim world, in fact, thinks it started a long time ago.
The local peace movement could learn something about goals and tactics herenot the amorality, but the focus on power and the long term. Dont just leave the message-sending to the police. Its not enough to be solely a morally correct minority voice. Ditch the scripts; bring out enough people to fill 10 plazas; consider how to changenot just protestpublic policy; and for goodness sake, show the same creativity and resourcefulness thats allowed opposition to blossom the last six months. Demonstrate something.
Start by showing that there are practical as well as moral alternatives to bullying and by vowing to get Bush and the lunatics hes hired out of power in 2004. And lets learn some new songs.
