[Update: Macranger ought to have read my post all the way through before he linked to it. I don’t say what he seems to think I said.]

My impression is that yesterday’s antiwar protests got more news coverage than the big march around the White House in September 2005. And this is true in spite of the fact that the crowd showing up for the 2005 march was much bigger, estimated — conservatively — as between 100,000 and 200,000. From news stories (which, I realize, always lowball these things) it seems the turnout in Washington yesterday fell short of 100,000. Although nobody really knows.

More news coverage is not necessarily better news coverage. Take a look at the Washington Post story by Michael Ruane and Fredrick Kunkle:

A raucous and colorful multitude of protesters, led by some of the aging activists of the past, staged a series of rallies and a march on the Capitol yesterday to demand that the United States end its war in Iraq.

Under a blue sky with a pale midday moon, tens of thousands of people angry about the war and other policies of the Bush administration danced, sang, shouted and chanted their opposition.

They came from across the country and across the activist spectrum, with a wide array of grievances. Many seemed to be under 30, but there were others who said they had been at the famed war protests of the 1960s and ’70s.

Note especially —

Among the celebrities who appeared was Jane Fonda, the 69-year-old actress and activist who was criticized for sympathizing with the North Vietnamese during the Vietnam War. She told the crowd that this was the first time she had spoken at an antiwar rally in 34 years.

“I’ve been afraid that because of the lies that have been and continue to be spread about me and that war, that they would be used to hurt this new antiwar movement,” she told the crowd. “But silence is no longer an option.”

Dear Jane: Get a blog.

I didn’t watch television yesterday but I take it the television news was All About Jane. I don’t know that this hurt the cause — people still enflamed about Jane are likely to be Bush supporters, anyway — but I can’t see that it helped, either.

At the Agonist, Sean-Paul Kelly criticized Jane’s attendance and got slammed for it in comments. But I’m with Sean-Paul here. Public protests are about action in service to a cause. Whether Jane Fonda has a right to protest — of course she does — it not the point. Jane Fonda has a right to smear herself with molasses and sit on an anthill, but just because one has a right to do something doesn’t make it smart.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again — good public protests are good public relations. Protest movements of the past were effective when they called attention to an issue and gained public sympathy for it. And the secret to doing this is what I call the “bigger asshole” rule — protests work when they make the protestees look like bigger assholes than the protesters. Martin Luther King’s marches made white racists look like assholes. Gandhi made the whole bleeping British Empire look like assholes.

The Vietnam-era antiwar protesters, on the other hand, more often than not shot themselves in the foot by coming across as bigger assholes than Richard Nixon and other Powers That Were. Steve Gilliard has a good post up today reaffirming my opinion that the Vietnam antiwar movement did little or nothing to actually stop the war.

And, m’dears, the point is to stop the war. It is not about expressing yourself, feeling good about yourself, or even “speaking truth to power.” It is about stopping the war. Action that does not advance the cause of stopping the war is not worth doing.

In fact, I wonder if these “raucous and colorful” public displays might be trivializing a deadly serious issue.

I disagree with protest defenders that any street protest is better than no street protest. Believe me; no street protesting is preferable to stupid street protesting. I have seen this with my own eyes. And these days there are plenty of ways to speak out against the war than to carry oversized puppets down a street.

That said, based on this video, the protest in Washington yesterday seemed a perfectly respectable protest, although not notably different from other protests of recent years. Some politicians actually turned out for this one, which was not true in September 2005. This is progress.

IRAQ WAR PROTEST – JAN. 27, 2007

John at AMERICAblog had mostly positive comments, also.

But will public protests like this change any minds that haven’t already been changed by events? I don’t see how.

That said, I want to respond to this post by Rick Moran of Right Wing Nut House:

The May Day protest in Washington, D.C. sought to shut down the government. Some 50,000 hard core demonstrators would block the streets and intersections while putting up human barricades in front of federal offices. How exactly this would stop the war was kind of fuzzy. No matter. Nixon was ready with the army and National Guard and in the largest mass arrest in US history, clogged the jails of Washington with 10,000 kids.

Where are the clogged jails today? As I watch the demonstration on the mall today (much smaller than those in the past) I am thinking of the massive gulf between the self absorbed hodge podge of anti-globalist, pro-feminist, anti-capitalist, pro-abortion anti-war fruitcakes cheering on speakers lobbying for Palestinians, Katrina aid, and other causes not related to the war and the committed, determined bunch of kids who put their hides on the line, filling up the jails of dozens of cities, risking the billy clubs and tear gas of the police to stop what they saw as an unjust war.

The netnuts are fond of calling those of us who support the mission in Iraq chickenhawks. What do you call someone who sits on their ass in front of a keyboard, railing against the President, claiming that the United States is falling into a dictatorship, and writing about how awful this war is and yet refuses to practice the kinds of civil disobedience that their fathers and mothers used to actually bring the Viet Nam war to an end?

I call them what they are; rank cowards. There should be a million people on the mall today. Instead, there might be 50,000. Today’s antiwar left talks big but cowers in the corner. I have often written about how unserious the left is about what they believe. The reason is on the mall today. If they really thought that the United States was on the verge of becoming a dictatorship are you seriously trying to tell me that any patriotic American wouldn’t do everything in their power to prevent it rather than mouth idiotic platitudes and self serving bromides?

He as much as admits of the May Day (1971) protest, “How exactly this would stop the war was kind of fuzzy.” If I actually believed that getting myself arrested by blocking the door to the FBI building would help end the war, then I believe I would do it. But since I don’t see how such an arrest would make a damn bit of difference, except maybe get my glorious little self in the newspapers (and “no fly” lists), why would I do that? And why am I a “coward” for not doing it?

I haven’t yet smeared myself with molasses and sat on an anthill, either. Does that make me a coward? Or not crazy?

The other part of this post I want to respond to is his accusation that the antiwar left is “not serious.” He speaks of “the self absorbed hodge podge of anti-globalist, pro-feminist, anti-capitalist, pro-abortion anti-war fruitcakes cheering on speakers lobbying for Palestinians, Katrina aid, and other causes not related to the war,” and wonders why more of us don’t show up. Well, son, a lot of the reason more people don’t show up is in fact “the self absorbed hodge podge of anti-globalist, pro-feminist, anti-capitalist, pro-abortion anti-war fruitcakes cheering on speakers lobbying for Palestinians, Katrina aid, and other causes not related to the war.” It is damn frustrating for those of us serious about ending the war to spend the time and money to go somewhere for a protest and find our efforts diluted by the vocational protest crowd.

Moran is making the same error that Gary Kamiya made; he assumes that a “real” antiwar movement has to look and act just like the Vietnam-era antiwar movement. I say again, that movement failed. Why should we be emulating it today?

Moreover, claiming the left isn’t “serious” about ending the war because we’re not all engaging in pointless publicity stunts rather ignores what we are doing, and what we have accomplished. Remember the midterm elections?

Please, Rick Moran, get serious.

As for Mr. Moran’s question about people opposed to the war — “Where is everybody?” — I believe they’re here:

What David Brooks wrote in his New York Times column today:

The Democratic approach, as articulated by Senator Jim Webb — simply get out of Iraq “in short order” — is a howl of pain that takes no note of the long-term political and humanitarian consequences.

What Jim Webb actually said in his rebuttal to the SOTU (emphasis added):

The majority of the nation no longer supports the way this war is being fought; nor does the majority of our military. We need a new direction. Not one step back from the war against international terrorism. Not a precipitous withdrawal that ignores the possibility of further chaos. But an immediate shift toward strong regionally-based diplomacy, a policy that takes our soldiers off the streets of Iraq’s cities, and a formula that will in short order allow our combat forces to leave Iraq.

I know a lot of you don’t want to listen to any plan that doesn’t include a precipitous withdrawal, and I’ll get to that in a minute. But I want to bash David Brooks first. It’s been a while.

BrooksWorld is a place where critical thinking (along with accuracy) is in short supply. He spends the first half of his column whining that violence and disorder in Iraq are getting worse. Then he whines that Democrats are bad people because they don’t support the strategies that have allowed violence and disorder in Iraq to get worse.

“I for one have become disillusioned with dreams of transforming Iraqi society from the top down,” he says. “But it’s not too late to steer the situation in a less bad direction.” Coming from Brooks, that’s a big clue we’re looking at utter hopelessness. Then Brooks writes,

Increased American forces can do good — they are still, as David Ignatius says, the biggest militia on the block — provided they are directed toward realistic goals.

Ah yes, David Ignatius. How many ways has Ignatius been wrong on Iraq? I don’t know that numbers go that high. But here are some highlights of Ignatius’s Greatest Misses, compiled by Jeralyn of TalkLeft. Jeralyn concludes with some advice for Ignatius that we might also direct to Brooks. And a lot of other people who haven’t figured out when to STFU:

Don’t worry about what the Democrats might do. Try and figure out how you got it so spectacularly wrong first and explain to us why you did. Once you do that, then maybe we can talk.

Brooks admits that the Bush plan isn’t working —

The weakness of the Bush surge plan is that it relies on the Maliki government to somehow be above this vortex. But there are no impartial institutions in Iraq, ready to foster reconciliation. As ABC’s Jonathan Karl notes in The Weekly Standard, the Shiite finance ministries now close banks that may finance Sunni investments. The Saadrist health ministries dismiss Sunni doctors. The sectarian vortex is not fomented by extremists who are appendages to society. The vortex is through and through.

But Brooks has decided the way to straighten things out is by a “soft partition” of Iraq — dividing Iraq into separate sectarian sections to “restore order,” and then allowing the central government to “handle oil revenues and manage the currency, etc.” Exactly how that central government wouldn’t end up being dominated by Shiites, and exactly why those Shiites wouldn’t continue to make life hell for Sunnis, Brooks doesn’t say. He seems to think Iraqis are children who will settle down once they’re not sitting next to each other.

Upper-class white men have pretty much dominated the planet for the past couple of centuries or so; much longer, in some places. If you spend much time reading history, you’ll notice that those upper-class white men had a deep and largely misplaced faith in their own superiority of judgment. Their tendency to think well of themselves came from racism, sexism, and the fact that people born into privileged circumstances usually are sheltered from the consequences of their own mistakes. Thus, a whole lot of global history from 1800 to the current day consists of greedy delusional white male assholes mucking things up.

A large part of the crises we face in the world today — in Africa, the Middle East, Asia — can be traced back to The Day the White Man Came. Through the 19th and 20th centuries mostly European powers gained control of other nations, crushed their political and social infrastructures, stripped them of their resources, and left their people in abject poverty and political chaos.

Indeed, the nation of Iraq came into existence at the hands of Europeans, who re-drew the political borders of the Middle East as they fought World War I. “The borders were thus based on British imperial and commercial interests and the fortunes of war rather than being drawn along traditional frontiers or historic tribal or ethnic lines,” says this guy.

Juan Cole wrote in June 2002,

Such adventures as the Soviets in Afghanistan, the French in Algeria, and the British in the Gulf, Palestine and South Asia have unexpectedly given birth to demons for our 21st century world. Imperialism depended on dominating, humiliating and exploiting others, and on drawing artificial boundaries for European strategic purposes. The way out is not, as some are now saying, a new wave of Western imperialism. That is how we got here in the first place. It is the fashioning of a world of equals in which Muslims receive the same rights as others, to self-determination or enough autonomy to foster self-respect. Only when the age of colonialism is truly over can the postcolonial wars end.

Instead, we’ve got Brooks and Ignatius and others sitting in their leather chairs in their well-appointed offices and thinking that if we just keep tweaking, we’ll get those natives to settle down eventually.

Juan Cole pointed out yesterday, “It is odd that US media seem completely uninterested in how Bush’s State of the Union speech was received in Iraq, where half of it would be implemented.” Not odd at all; we still think of the populations of non-white places not as people we should work with, but as a problem to solve.

What’s rich about all this is that our country was founded after an overthrow of imperial rule. The indigenous populations of the Western Hemisphere were so decimated by war and disease that, in thirteen of the British colonies of North America, whites became the dominant and majority population. And lo, in the 18th century some of those whites felt that they were being jerked around and exploited by a far-away King, so they rebelled. As the colonies became a nation the former colonists adopted the mythos that Americans were better. Unlike the privileged dandies of Europe, Americans were tough and practical. Oh, and egalitarian, although how a people who kept slaves and marched the Cherokee to Oklahoma saw themselves as egalitarian is a testament to Man’s Capacity to Bullshit Himself. But we grew to love the Common Man, or so we thought, and to this day our political and business leaders just love to tell us how they rose from poverty and overcame hardship.

(If they can’t tell us they rose from poverty, then they tell us about the simple virtues of their immigrant grandparents. Barring that, they pretend Jesus helped them overcome alcoholism. They’ve got to overcome something.)

In American mythos European leaders were born in palaces, while our guys were born in log cabins. European leaders were a pack of inbred twits, while ours were street smart and hard working. They were Elmer Fudd; we were Bugs Bunny.

But the joke is that, somehow, we grew an aristocracy anyway. Our public intellectuals — i.e., Brooks and Ignatius — are twits. That they are respected for their insight just shows we ain’t livin’ in a meritocracy. And the President of the United States is the pure distillation of inbred classism and the arrogance of unearned privilege, albeit with an affected Texas accent.

Our government and its corporate backers treat the rest of the world and the poor of our own country with the same clueless arrogance we used to despise in Europeans. We aren’t Bugs Bunny any more.

I agree with Juan Cole — Only when the age of colonialism is truly over can the postcolonial wars end. And, applying that to Iraq, I think we need to extract ourselves in the least imperialist way possible.

And I think Webb (and Wesley Clark) is right that the first step to withdrawal is “an immediate shift toward strong regionally-based diplomacy.” Just leaving is, I think, another form of imperialist arrogance. We need to consult — and that means listen to, not dictate — with the people who are going to be left with the mess. That includes the nations bordering Iraq, including Syria and Iran, as well as the various factions within Iraq.

Of course we can’t allow ourselves to be bogged down in endless negotiations; withdrawal of U.S. combat troops from Iraq must begin as soon as possible. But if the U.S. started to show some genuine respect for the sovereign nations and people of the Middle East it would do both us and them a world of good.

As for Brooks and Ignatius and the Bushies and the neocons — buy them some Risk board games and let them enjoy their fantasies in a less harmful way.