On the Newstand: TNR on the Anti-War Protestors

We are reaching a Kaplan overload here today. This time it is Lawrence Kaplan writing at TNR. Kaplan hung out with anti-war protestors this past weekend and reported on what is wrong. Most revealing to me is the fact that CISPES, a cold war relic, is still around! Here is what Kaplan has to say:

If you really want to end the Iraq war, a march sponsored by International answer (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism), with its catalogue of fringe causes and well-advertised sympathy for dictatorships, may not be the most persuasive vehicle. At the pre-march rally, one speaker drones on about Israeli "apartheid"; another, angry about something in the Philippines, shrieks in Tagalog. fuck bu[swastika]h; america: fighting terrorism since 1492--the crude placards and t-shirts tend to be the norm rather than the exception. Even some of the protesters recoil. As we sit on a bench watching teenagers prepare to carry a row of coffins draped with American flags--one is dropped, clumsily and obscenely, on its side--Nancy McMichael, a Washington, D.C., resident who protested the war in Vietnam, shows me that she has torn the event's official label in half. Her sticker, part of which formerly read, end colonial occupation: iraq, palestine, Haiti..., has been customized, leaving only the half that says, stop the war.

Fringe issues, however, dominate the day. Where the Vietnam antiwar movement focused directly on the war, with parts of it evolving over time into a broader indictment of "the system," today's march walks backward, addressing a litany of pet causes before it even gets to Iraq. The list of indictments--which can be sampled at the Palestine tent, the Counter-Military Recruitment tent (motto: "An Army of None"), and the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador booth (cispes is still at it!)--dilute the message, creating the feel of a comic-book convention rather than a popular movement. Roger Yates, a demonstrator from Martinsburg, West Virginia, becomes so frustrated with the protest's incoherence that he grabs a bullhorn, jumps on a newspaper vending machine, and beseeches the marchers to remember why they came in the first place. "One thousand different causes won't hurt Bush," he yells. "If we don't focus on Iraq, it'll be like we were never here!"

Kaplan goes on to mention that anti-war activists have a tendency to undercut "their own aims." They usually are more unpopular than the war they are protesting. He then tries to explain why the unpopular war in Iraq lacks broadbased opposition: no draft and no common culture.