The Idea Log is a new column by Chris Mooney. It will appear on TAP Online every Tuesday.
After attending last Saturday's 7,500 person peace march in downtown Washington, D.C., sponsored by "International A.N.S.W.E.R." (Act Now to Stop War & End Racism), I was left with a rather odd conclusion: The protesters hadn't watched enough CNN. I mean, I'm sure they were glued to the news on September 11th like all the rest of us, watching the trade towers collapse again and again, and hearing some U.S. foreign policy luminaries, like Lawrence Eagleburger, call for sweeping retribution. But after September 12th or 13th, the demonstrators, many of them students, appear to have switched off. One of the countless protest signs I saw -- and one of the few sarcastic ones -- read "Rush In, Think Later." This is precisely what the Bush administration has not done, though it's hard to say the same of certain peaceniks.
Such is the paradox of a preemptive peace march, a protest that critiques the logic of revenge before retributive action has even been attempted. Sure, there are situations where one should protest something before it happens -- but the thing being protested should at least be a likely outcome. That's not true in this case. Whatever military response the Bush administration and its allies may be planning, we are certainly not talking about any Vietnam-style napalming of innocents. Indeed, the United States is already providing aid to Afghan refugees. Yet because today's peace movement has taken to the streets so prematurely, it is forced to rely on dubious presumptions about the American psyche and how it will respond, murderously, to future events.
Granted, from a peacenik perspective, it's indisputable that shortly after the World Trade Center attacks, quite a lot of Americans were sounding alarmingly bloodthirsty. One of the most disturbing, but least criticized, screeds came from Time magazine's Lance Morrow, who wrote, in a column titled "The Case for Rage and Retribution," that we ought to "explore the rich reciprocal possibilities of the fatwa."
But no one, not Morrow or any other commentator who embarrassed himself with unchecked rage, was operating with a full deck that awful week. After all, much of America wasn't even sleeping at night. Since then, however, it has clearly dawned on the Bush administration that the goal of defeating international terrorism cannot possibly be furthered by bombing the hell out of starving Afghans. This realization could be observed in the careful tones of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld Sunday morning on Meet the Press:
MR. RUSSERT: The president said that Osama bin Laden is wanted dead or alive. Do we have a preference?
SEC'Y RUMSFELD: Well, you know, I don't think about this so much as retaliation or retribution or even justice. I think about it as -- I think back to real wars, the goal is victory. The goal is to be able to have dealt with the problems that exist--in this case, the terrorist networks and the countries that harbor them--in a way that we have won; that in fact they are no longer free to go out and terrorize the world.
It's worth contrasting Rumsfeld's caution with the International Answer protesters' repeated, hyperbolic denunciations of this nation's new "racist war." Put aside the fact that there is no military action yet to protest, and little reason to suppose that knee-jerk cries for revenge will drive U.S. policy. The notion that U.S. military action, when it comes, will be somehow "racist" is absurd. The protesters seem to have conflated isolated instances of hate crimes against Arab and Muslim Americans with the Bush administration's "war on terrorism" -- this despite the fact that Bush has repeatedly denounced such violence and emphasized that we should not think of our current conflict as one between Islam and "the West."
But then, we shouldn't expect much charity toward the president from protesters capable of airing slogans like "The Real Terrorist Works in the White House." I consider George W. Bush a dim bulb, even an impostor -- and certainly oppose many aspects of his foreign policy -- but calling him a terrorist is a truly vile form of moral equivalency. Yet it frequently fit the tone of the protests, where I watched some organizers label those who disagreed with them undercover government agents, and one 21-year-old told me, in his pacifism, that we shouldn't have fought Hitler.
Devout word watchers may have noted that journalists and others have taken to using "enormity" to describe the events of September 11th, as though it were the only word in the language capable of conveying the true, unique horror of that day. By contrast, to the peace protesters, everything is now a form of "terrorism," from U.S. sanctions on Iraq to the layoffs of workers ("economic terrorism"). Almost the only thing the protesters didn't widely denounce, amid a plethora of IMF/World Bank grievances, was radical Muslim fundamentalism. Indeed, it seemed as though the only time Osama bin Laden came up at all was when protesters were observing that the CIA helped train him. So it's no surprise that politically, at least, they shared some of his explicit objectives: "It's U.S. Troop Proximity to Mecca & Medina, Stupid!" "U.S. Out of the Middle East!"
But I still keep coming back to that sign, "Rush In, Think Later." I think about its holder, and try to imagine what was running through his or her mind. (I should have just asked, but it didn't occur to me at the moment.) Protests themselves may take weeks to organize, but protest signs take just minutes to draw up. There must have been something instinctive and deep-seated behind that slogan, for its creator to be able to twist reality so starkly, rushing in to protest U.S. haste long after our government showed caution. Dare one suggest -- without cramming stars and stripes down anyone's throat -- that it is the blindly held creed of anti-Americanism?
