US Peace Protest Affects Nothing

Thousands marched in an anti-war protest in Washington, DC on Saturday. United for Peace and Justice, a coalition group sponsoring the protest, dared for 100,000 protesters, but they didn’t achieve those numbers. In fact, they didn’t achieve much of anything. At best, it was a trip down memory lane for the over-50s in the crowd. The unhappy truth is street protests don’t matter unless the crowd is prepared to challenge the very existence of the government. It would have been much more effective to send a check to members of the House and Senate along with a letter demanding an end to the war.

There is a romantic view on the left that masses of people marching to demonstrate their dissatisfaction with government policy is an effective way to pressure said government. Deep down, they all want to storm the Tsar’s Winter Palace. The myth that peaceful protests brought an end to the American involvement in Vietnam is wishful thinking. Millions marched in 1967 and 1968, but the war for Americans went on until the Paris peace accords in 1973. Any action that takes in three elections can’t be said to have been very effective. Moreover, the American government knew that it was going to fail in Vietnam when the president told General Westmoreland that he couldn’t have an increase from 560,000 troops. After that, the war went on while American policy makers tried to find a political solution to the situation that would not yield to military efforts. Their deliberations took no account of the protests.

The parallels between 1967 and 2007 as far as protests go are few. For one thing, there is an opposition to the war throughout the country today that is far deeper than the opposition was in 1967 and 1968. A new Congress has been elected largely on the basis of that dissatisfaction. Even as the protesters were assembling, members of the Senate were preparing to vote on a resolution calling the escalation in Iraq-Nam “not in the national interest.”

Those who love to organize these events will say that the protests bring diverse groups together so that they can build relationships that will continue to fight, or some such nonsense. Most protesters from 1968 will admit that it was a great way to meet girls. Same with CND rallies in the 1980s. Who knows how many flings and long-term relationships were born on Saturday afternoon?

Far more effective would have been the formation of political action committees funded by those who went to the protests instead. The intention would be to ensure that every member of congress who voted for the war from here on faced a primary challenge in 2008. Nothing pressures a legislator in an elective democracy more than the threat of losing his or her job. Then again, these are the same peace activists who failed to stop the war four years ago. Their consistency is hardly a virtue.

© Copyright 2007 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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