Unleashing Your Candlepower

It's the weekend, like any other weekend. Time to kick back, relax, and . . . protest.

Seemingly every weekend for the past months, one or another combination of events has served to focus global concern, outrage, and demands that the United States government not invade Iraq. In the United States and in a host of other countries, the outpouring of publicly displayed political sentiment outstrips any in memory.

Now, George Bush is threatening a timetable that may have Baghdad incinerated by next weekend. As with diplomacy, protest to prevent this invasion is in its endgame. But the larger anti-war movement -- the movement to thwart the Bush cabal's empire-building, map-redrawing, generations-long "War On Terror" -- is still in its infancy.

That truth does not make any less urgent this weekend's efforts to put sand in the war machine's gears or sugar in its oil-dependent gas tank. Beyond continuing to bombard the White House, Congress, and the United Nations with phone calls, faxes, and e-mails, efforts include Sunday's globally coordinated candlelight vigils; over 2,000 are known to be scheduled so far, beginning Saturday afternoon (U.S. time) in New Zealand and circling the planet one time zone at a time.

World cities will also once again see their plazas fill with scorn for George Bush. Meanwhile, an enormous e-mail campaign, launched by Australian anti-nuke icon Dr. Helen Caldicott and others, is beseeching the Pope to maintain a personal presence in Baghdad to prevent war. In the U.S., there's also ANSWER-sponsored protests Saturday in Washington (noon at the Washington Monument), San Francisco, Los Angeles, and other cities. On Monday, a civil disobedience campaign begins in New York (11 AM silent procession from St. Stephen's Church to the U.S. Mission to the U.N.), Washington, and elsewhere.

On Friday in San Francisco, a protest aimed at shutting down the Pacific Stock Exchange blocked traffic and streetcars for hours. By mid-morning, 70 protesters had been arrested, including the former president of the Pacific Stock Exchange and several prominent local religious leaders.

Such protests, in a sense, have already been enormously successful. The Bush team wanted to launch a unilateral, preemptive invasion of Iraq last fall. At the time, the political and media voices within the U.S. objecting to such a move were few and far between. It was the resurgence of a previously somnambulant peace movement, particularly in the days and weeks before October's Congressional vote on war, that put this debate in the public eye.

The phenomenal growth since then in global and domestic opposition, helped in large part by the Bush Administration's transparently false attempts to invent legal or moral authority for war, has been a major factor in twice forcing the U.S. to the UN Security Council, forcing it to watch as weapons inspectors launched a successful program with unexpectedly full Iraqi cooperation, and repeatedly delaying a U.S. invasion timetable.

George Bush never imagined that he would be facing the prospect of launching an invasion, financing a subsequent occupation, and defending against the inevitable blowback while being utterly isolated on the global stage. Public opposition has created that situation. With the notable exception of Tony Blair, in country after country democratically elected governments that would normally line up with the United States have been unwilling to go against the wishes of often 90 percent or more of their citizenry.

In France -- currently the object of much scorn among dittohead types -- Jacques Chirac is the most pro-U.S. leader in 50 years; even he has not been able to justify countenancing Bush's plans. Virtually every country that has signed off on the invasion has had to be bought, at further great cost to Bush's seemingly bottomless federal treasury; these "allies" have needed such payments precisely because they've needed the fig leaf of benefit to their own countries to justify the decision to their own publics.