Will Middle America Board the Peace Train?

Consider the difference between two anti-war demonstrations that took place last week in Washington:

On Wednesday, March 19, the night the war began, a half-dozen women in pink wearing gruesome war-victim makeup and mock bandages led a crowd of 200 protesters from DuPont Circle to the Kalorama home of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld about a mile away. They managed to stop rush-hour traffic en route, had a brief skirmish with police in which a young man was arrested, and presented a child-sized coffin made of Styrofoam to a two-story brick house across from the French ambassador's palatial residence.

"Donald Rumsfeld!" shouted Medea Benjamin. "Shame on you! You've got the blood of Iraqi civilians on your hands!"

A cry went up from the demonstrators. Some were already lying down, staging a die-in on the street. "Donald, come get this casket! How are you going to sleep at night knowing this war is immoral, unjust and illegal?" When the group turned to leave 45 minutes later, Benjamin propped up the Styrofoam coffin on the roof of a silver Impala parked in front of the house. It was Code Pink at its best -- vocal, theatrical and radical.

The following Saturday, after U.S. forces had shocked and awed Baghdad and the rest of the world with a brutal all-night pummeling, a more august group of speakers took turns at the podium in the chapel at American University to denounce Bush's doctrine of preemptive war and the imperialist posture implied therein. A Nobel Peace Prize winner, retired military officers, Vietnam veterans, former intelligence agents, scholars, celebrated leakers of Pentagon Papers -- one by one they laid out their arguments in the language and environment of the academy.

The audience of 250 or so, composed mostly of students, erupted into rowdy applause, especially when John Brown, the diplomat who tendered his resignation to the State Department last week over objections to the war, took the stage. But this time the C-SPAN cameras were rolling. And while protesters by the hundreds get arrested in San Francisco, and Code Pink keeps beating its drum, it is this movement, the one gaining momentum among the middleweights of the political and military establishment, that might finally get mainstream America on board the anti-war wagon.

It helps that this particular part of the antiwar movement has as its unofficial centerpiece a very official document: the National Security Strategy, released by the White House in September 2002.

Middle America -- indeed, Western civilization -- loves documents. Documents bear the stamp of legitimacy. They can be examined, referred to, brandished. They literally put issues in black and white. The National Security Strategy lays out the doctrine for preemptive war. Its summary contains this paragraph:

"We will cooperate with other nations to deny, contain, and curtail our enemies' efforts to acquire dangerous technologies. And, as a matter of common sense and self-defense, America will act against such emerging threats before they are fully formed. We cannot defend America and our friends by hoping for the best. So we must be prepared to defeat our enemies' plans, using the best intelligence and proceeding with deliberation. History will judge harshly those who saw this coming danger but failed to act. In the new world we have entered, the only path to peace and security is the path of action."

It was the emergence of this manifesto prescribing preemptive military action, one year after 9/11, that spurred Gulf War veterans Charles Sheehan-Miles, Erik Gustafson, Erin Cole and Dan Fahey to form Veterans For Common Sense (www.veteransforcommonsense.org), a primary organizer of the teach-in at American University. Two weeks ago VCS sent a letter to President Bush objecting to the war. It was signed by more than 1,000 veterans, among them two vice-admirals, a brigadier general and a handful of colonels.