'I Was Just Waving It'
Best of the Web Today - October 28, 2003
By JAMES TARANTO
Is there a serious antiwar movement in America?
Salon's Michelle Goldberg, who is highly sympathetic to the antiwar
cause, has a devastating piece on this weekend's protest in Washington.
Here's the opening anecdote:
Allan Johnson, a high school English teacher and debate coach from
Fairfax, Va., held a sign saying "U.S. Troops Out of Iraq. Bring Them
Home Now!" at Saturday's "End the Occupation" rally in Washington.
In fact, though, Johnson isn't sure he wants to bring the troops home
now, or to end the American occupation of Iraq. At least, not yet.
"We've made a giant mess," said Johnson, a handsome man who wore
his long snowy hair in a ponytail and had a sparkling stud in one ear.
"I would hate for the Bush administration to halfway fix things and
then leave, and then blame the Iraqis if things go wrong. Once you go to
somebody's house and break all the windows, don't you owe them new
windows?"
Why, then, was he marching at an End the Occupation rally?
"I don't agree with all the people here, believe you me," he said.
But his own sign? He glanced at it, startled, and explained that someone
had handed it to him.
"I didn't even look at it," he said. "I was just waving it."
The group that sponsored the protest, International ANSWER, [aka
C*ANSWER] is evil, not clueless.
A front for the Stalinist Workers World Party, C*ANSWER is engaging in
outright sedition; Goldberg quotes from a C*ANSWER pamphlet:
"The anti-war movement here and around the world must give its
unconditional support to the Iraqi anti-colonial resistance"
--that would be the guerrillas and terrorists who've been blowing up
American servicemen, Iraqi civilians and international do-gooders.
If the peace-freaks who've taken to the street can't be taken seriously,
what about the antiwar tilt of the Democratic Party?
One suspects this is more the lurching of a dying beast than a serious
political program, and Goldberg has a telling quote:
There's no liberal message that separates the welfare of the Iraqi
people from that of the Bush administration.
In a New Republic article this week, Michael Crowley quotes Rep. Adam
Smith, D-Wash., complaining that his colleagues' Iraq stances are driven
by blind rage.
"In trying to pin them down, I say, 'At the end of the day, we have
to have a policy to cope with what to do now,'=A0" he told Crowley. "And
they say, 'Well, we're just *****.' They don't really even attempt
to argue the policy of it."
Those of us who've endured the various Democratic presidential debates
are left with the same impression.
It's hard to imagine any of the current presidential candidates, outside
the lunatic fringe (Al Sharpton and Dennis Kucinich), opposing the
liberation in Iraq if a Democrat were in the White House.
For the other candidates (with the partial exceptions of Joe Lieberman,
***** Gephardt and Carol Moseley Braun, who to varying degrees have
refused to join the cut-and-run crowd), the war seems to be beside the
point.
They want President Bush to lose, and if America loses in the process,
well, that's just collateral damage.
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