Were John Ashcroft's minions observing my movements over the past few weeks, I would probably rate a file in the cabinet of some shadowy Homeland Security organization. First there was that Communist rally in Rome. Next came the student occupation of the university here, and then the afternoon spent marching with more than a hundred thousand others in one of London's largest-ever protests last Thursday.
Don't get me wrong: I was standing in the middle of Trafalgar Square amidst the thousands protesting the joint Iraq policy of the Bush and Blair administrations in, at least I told myself, the purely objective capacity of a journalist. But as I dutifully scribbled down a few notes I found myself increasingly drawn to the spirit of what was going on if not to its actual political message.
Call it moderate envy. When do those of my political ilk ever really get to let it all hang out, to chant slogans and wave banners and feel the noisy, self-assured camaraderie of those on the far sides of the political spectrum? My placards wouldn't scan nearly as well as the reductivist slogans floating through London, like the classic "Bush / Zionism / Blair is the real terrorist!"
They would be more along the lines of "Your simplistic arguments preclude real political discourse!" Not exactly an eye-catcher. Or they'd extol something everyone blithely agrees with but which, year after year, manages to slip through the grates of the legislative process: "Stronger primary school education in low-income communities!"
So sloganeering isn't really my thing. But while the 50 or so activist types who "occupied" University College London turned out quite a few memorable one-liners, including an unprintable but especially striking banner playing on the surname of our Commander-in-Chief, fact checking didn't seem to be on the top of their list. As one speaker put it, "Every day thousands of Iraqis are shot dead." I didn't interrupt; the earnestness factor was running a bit too high.
Indeed the protesters here were nothing if not sincere. Their ability to focus on a single issue, the purported mishandling of the Iraq war and what they saw as Tony Blair's slavish alliance with Bush, helped them to avoid the mélange of issues protesters in the U.S. are prone to yoke together.
And unlike the neo-hippies ("Dude, globalization is, like, so bad for the environment") who manage to dilute the message of recent U.S. protests, the marchers here were drawn from a true cross-section of British society. The elderly — including at least one lady pushing a walker — came out strong, along with students, their teachers, members of the Muslim community, professionals, and everyday, middle-class folks.
(On a side note, the number of vendors profiting from the sale of Marxist / socialist / anarchist propaganda was one of the happier ironies of the march. I repeatedly had to check the urge to yell "Property is theft, right?" and then run off with their wares.)
So what were the protesters so mad about? First of all, their anger was directed as much at their own Prime Minister for what they saw as a groveling complicity with U.S. policy as at the policy itself. The non-war issues they chose to highlight, like the U.S. administration's stance toward environmental treaties and its often hypocritical trade tariffs, revealed just how poor a job the Bush public relations team has done offsetting the charges of arrogance that continue to plague the administration in Europe.
Whether or not one agrees with the criticisms themselves, the fact that Bush has an image problem in the press and among the people here is undeniable. That this image is so commonly a caricature — witness the constant references to Bush as a "cowboy" — serves to show that a little nuanced diplomacy and, gasp, honesty about intentions rather than glib proclamations about "evil" nations could go a long way.
What I never fully understood about the protests was their stated goal of "ending the occupation in Iraq." As a phrase it has a nice ring. The very word occupation, after all, smacks of "imperialism," another favorite if misapplied term of the left. In fact, nothing could be worse for the average, law-abiding Iraqi than the destabilization that would result from ending the occupation and immediately pulling troops out of the country.
The United States and the United Kingdom invaded a nation and toppled its dictator for a variety of reasons, several of which, as we are now finding out (see Seymour Hersh's article in the Oct. 27th New Yorker), were not quite on the level. Regardless of the validity of those reasons, though, both nations have the strongest moral obligation to follow through with their promise of setting up a stable Iraqi government administered by Iraqis. Only the emptiest reasoning could lead to the conclusion that an immediate end to the "occupation" would be best for all parties.
That's the kind of thinking my type of protester might put on his banner. Not too exciting, not too partisan, but pretty well thought out. Too bad more political candidates don't fit that description.
Andrew Bosse is a junior. He is studying abroad this semester at University College of London.
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