The World Protests
 As Josh Marshall puts it, the worldwide antiwar protests this weekend are clearly a "big deal." Backed up by polls, the demonstrations show that a war in Iraq would be deeply unpopular, little less so in the U.S. than elsewhere. I didn't observe New York City's antiwar rally at the U.N. in person, but I was riding the Metro North to Connecticut yesterday afternoon and the Saturday trains were running full, packed with people returning from Manhattan with their handmade signs and other paraphernalia of democratic dissent.
I am under no illusions that the protesters have actually read Security Council Resolution 1441 or hold the slightest clue about the real issues of Iraqi disarmament. I am convinced that Iraq is a convenient symbolic umbrella for collecting all manner of miscellaneous anti-American sentiments, many quite justified, Kyoto et al. And it's easy to dismiss these protesters as the same kind of naive lefties who turned a blind eye to Stalin and the Gulag, to the Wall and the Stasi, because communism's ideals were so noble. In other words, I didn't see one sign proclaiming "Iraq is a totalitarian police state" or "Free the Iraqi 22 million."
Yet, I also wonder if my incomprehension is not similar to that of McNamara and Rostow, baffled that the Vietnam War aroused such passionate opposition when goddamit a whole stack of policy analyses showed that the war was right.
11:52:59 PM 
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