Right After I Post This I Am Going To March Against War

The Orange County Register wrote about today's upcoming protest in a hopeful yet prescriptive manner. They were hopeful that the marches and demonstrations would be large, but also didn't want them to be full of "fringe" leftists. They should embrace the growing number of Americans who oppose the war and are not "knee-jerk" radicals. They go on to mention Cindy Sheehan and the military families that have been involved in anti-war protests as a distinct difference from the military-hating anti-Vietnam protests. Then they write ...

But Ms. Sheehan's statements have sometimes gone beyond understandable anger about the war to embrace a range of radical causes. We think that is a mistake. Ordinary Americans who love their country and don't see it as the source of most of the evil in the world but are upset about the Iraq war need to see a reflection of themselves, of a broader Middle America, in this weekend's events. Otherwise they are likely to dismiss the protests as the work of people who will leap at any opportunity to "blame America first."

Although they critique the protests of the Vietnam era, they ignore how effective those protests were at radicalizing thousands of "ordinary Americans" and ultimately ending a war that began with little if any American opposition. That should be the goal of today's protests. Not to try and make this idealized "ordinary American" comfortable, but to challenge her or him and make the connections that must be made. More and more people are realizing that as the most powerful nation in the world, the U.S. is to blame for much of the world's problems, especially when you consider what we could be doing to improve things with all of our wealth and power. What the protests should do is make clear that the "ordinary Americans" are not to blame, but only the tiny percentage who own both the Democrats and Republicans, and who fatten their wallets on warfare and plundering.

Then there is this from Tom Matzzie, the Washington Director of MoveOn.org who disagrees with the "Troops Out Now" message of this weekend's protests: "As political organizers, we think the best way to bring our folks home from Iraq is to create a political dynamic where Republicans are defecting from their leadership and Democrats are making Iraq a political liability for the Republicans." Again, that certainly is not what worked during the Vietnam era. It seems to me that all MoveOn.org wants to do is set itself up to take credit for some future exit plan that comes out of Congress or the White House. It will be growing protests in the streets, frustration with foreign policy, and demands like "troops out now" that will create the pressure from below to get any changes out of our elected officials. But the MoveOn folks will claim that there subtle political strategy and capitol hill connections made the difference. Nonsense! They're just a bunch of tools.