The Daily Grasshopper

Well, I never did make it to 52nd Street and Second in time to meet the Irish-American contingent from New York, under their banner "We will serve neither Bush nor Mobil." I never saw them after that, either. The demonstration in New York City was enormous - I've never seen anything remotely like it.

The NYPD was not at all prepared for the sheer size of the crowd that descended on mid-town Manhattan Saturday. That much is clear. Here's an article from today's New York Times that pretty accurately reflects what many demonstrators were saying after the event on Saturday:

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/17/nyregion/17RALL.html

Here's the gist of the article:

"Tens of thousands of people gathered peacefully on Saturday, filling 23 blocks of official, fully permitted, rally-ready blocks on First Avenue beginning near the United Nations headquarters to protest a war against Iraq.

But tens of thousands more never made it, thronging Second and Third Avenues in what some described as a vain and baffling attempt to reach the protest that people had bundled up, ridden buses or skipped brunch to attend. Of about 15 would-be demonstrators interviewed yesterday across the city, only 3 said they had succeeded in reaching First Avenue.

The pedestrian traffic jam led to accusations yesterday that the police were unprepared, aggressive or even threatening, plunging through crowds on horseback or suddenly sealing off sidewalks. Organizers of the rally seized on those reports, saying that officers mistreated people that they took into custody and unnecessarily militarized the event."

I was one of the people "thronging Second and Third Avenues." I got off the train at Grand Central Station, and headed straight for the rally site. It became apparent, within just a few blocks, however, that the police were not going to be letting a critical mass of people assemble. They were pretty clearly redirecting people away from the rally, which was moved to 52nd and 1st Ave. at the last minute. I wound up on 2nd Ave., and met police blockades at every cross street going toward 1st Ave.

On the other hand, there were so many people in the same boat as me that we held an illegal march on 2nd Avenue. We literally took over the street. For blocks, there was nothing but signs, banners, and tens of thousands of people. The same thing happened on 3rd Avenue. So, despite the fact that a federal judge had refused to allow a permit to march in Manhattan, we did anyway. At first, the police tried to keep people on the sidewalks, but their refusal to let people access the rally, combined with the crush of what had to be at least half a million of us, soon made it impossible for them to prevent a massive street march. I was on 2nd Avenue near the front when people took the street over, and the whoop that went up, accompanied by cries of "Whose streets? Our streets!" was exhilirating. We headed north.

As the 50s became the 60s, however, and the police showed no sign of allowing people to get over to 1st Avenue, tempers grew short. At one point, some friends and I decided we would challenge one of the barricades, and see if we could get down to 1st Ave. I walked up to the blue wooden sawhorse barricade and started to push it aside. Immediately, a stern-looking cop named Callahan was right in front of me, glaring and pushing the barricade back. I guess he hadn't read the Irish Echo op-ed. The crowd, excited by the possibility of a breach (and a confrontation), quickly started chanting "Let us through" and crowding the barricade. Callahan turned to his colleagues, pointed at me, and said, "No matter what happens, he's going in." Meaning I was going to be spending President's Day in the pokey in New York if anything happened. Without significant backup (there was a kid next to me who looked like he was about three years away from his first shave urging me to "bum rush the cops"), and no one to bail me out, I decided to let cooler heads prevail, and left. A few blocks up, at around 69th, we were allowed to cross down to 1st Ave.

The scene there was impressive: although people were confined by police barricades into "protest pens," there were blocks and blocks of people raising their voices against the war. Mind you that in the run-up to the event, New York was placed on heightened alert for terror, the NYPD announced that there would be no porta-potties available, 1,000 troops surrounded the U.N., rumors were planted on the internet that the protest was called off, we were denied a permit to march, and some of the coldest temperatures of the year were being predicted. And it turned out to be the biggest anti-war demonstration since Vietnam - and this war hasn't (officially) begun yet.

The impact of the demonstrations is being felt around the world. Whether the ripples carry all the way to the Pentagon and the White House remains to be seen. According to an article in today's Boston Globe about National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice's appearance on "Meet the Press" yesterday, "Millions of people around the world protested a possible war in Iraq on Saturday, but Rice said that the Bush administration was unmoved."

Of course, Condi Rice didn't get to be National Security Adviser (or get a Chevron supertanker named after her) by being the kind of person who blinks in the face of adversity. But her denial of the protest's influence rings false in light of some other recent developments. There's another "analysis" piece in the New York Times today, called "A New Power In the Streets," that pretty accurately lays out how the stakes have been raised for Bush & Blair:

"War, like politics, is affected by psychology and momentum. The strong surge in momentum the Bush administration felt after Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's Feb. 5 presentation to the Security Council on the case for war has been undermined by at least four converging negatives."

The article's author, Patrick Tyler, explains the four negatives as being 1) the rift between the U.S. and its traditional allies, Germany and France; 2) the enormous antiwar sentiment in Europe; 3) a failure by Colin Powell to produce credible evidence of the Iraqi threat; and 4) the Feb. 14 report by Hans Blix, chief U.N. weapons inspector, indicating that progress was being made in Iraq.

Although I agree with virtually all of Tyler's analysis, I think there's an even greater "negative," one that might not only undermine the case for war in the immediate future, but could also do permanent damage to the system that allows the Western industrialized countries to dominate the global economy.

Last week, I prematurely wrote that a "gentlemen's agreement" existed between Washington and the Europeans that prevented them from talking honestly about why Iraq is being targeted now, after many years of containment (see "It's About Oil. For the French and Russians, Too." http://www.netway.com/~pkeaney/021103elftotal.html). I wrote that "the gentlemen, the Europeans and the Americans, leave the real spoils of this war off the table. They talk instead about "a moral approach" (French President Chirac) or "building a coalition in the event that military operations are necessary" (U.S. General Tommy Franks)."

And now, less than a week later, we see that Max Boot of the Council on Foreign Relations has opined in the New York Times that French and Russian "Iraq policies seem driven at least in part by oil companies that were granted lucrative concessions by Saddam Hussein."

An editorial in last Thursday's Boston Globe had this little pre-Valentine's Day message for the French President: "Chirac may be trying to enhance France's role in the world, preserve French commercial ties with Saddam, and keep open the possibility that the French oil company TotalFinaElf will eventually be able to sign and implement the lucrative oil exploitation contracts promised to it by Saddam."

And yesterday, on the Sunday Morning Talk shows, U.S. Senator and former presidential candidate John McCain, publicly lowered the boom by claiming that France's oil interests in Iraq were driving their opposition to war.

Today's New York Times and Boston Globe are free of any mention of McCain's remarks, but you can find very similar sentiments on his website, as part of an address he made to the Senate last week:

"France has unashamedly pursued a concerted policy to dismantle the UN sanctions regime, placing its commercial interests above international law, world peace and the political ideals of Western civilization. Remember them? Liberte, egalite, fraternite. It withdrew from enforcing the "no-fly zones" and did not participate in Operation Desert Fox to punish Iraq for expelling UNSCOM. France abstained from Security Council Resolution 1284, which created a weakened UNMOVIC successor to UNSCOM, because it knew that Saddam Hussein would otherwise refuse to steer lucrative Iraqi contracts under the oil-for-food program to Paris. France was among the first countries to violate the U.N. ban on air travel into Iraq after Saddam signaled that future oil-for-food contracts were contingent on making sanctions-busting commercial flights. Today, the French foreign minister, who voted for Resolution 1441 and warned of the serious consequences Iraqi defiance would entail, says that "Nothing justifies military action" against Iraq. And President Chirac, who once approved the sale to Iraq of a nuclear reactor knowing that in a country floating on a sea of oil it could have only one real purpose, today says he sees no irrefutable proof of Iraq's WMD program."

You can read more here: http://mccain.senate.gov/iraqcontainment.htm

Something incredible is happening. Because the undeveloped oil fields in Iraq represent one of the world's most significant material treasures ("a sea of oil"), there's an increasing chance that we will see just how far competing nations (or more accurately, the U.S. and the European bloc of trading nations) will go to gain control over it. The bargain that has allowed the industrialized countries to pursue their overseas ambitions more or less unhindered by moral concerns - and often jointly - is being tested, perhaps to the breaking point, by the rapid depletion of resources, primarily oil.

There are important meetings being held today to determine the fate of Iraq. One is a meeting of 22 Arab nations in Cairo. They are expected to issue condemnations of any country that assists in the planned war on Iraq. The other is a meeting of European leaders. The full effects of the marches and rallies have yet to be felt, but, as the Times notes in an article entitled "Blair, Increasingly Alone, Clings to Stance":

"With the marches on Saturday, though, Mr. Blair and the other pro-Bush European leaders were forced into a recognition that they are already fighting a two-front war, one in international diplomacy and one for the support of their own people.

The continent has not seen protests on that scale in memory. The crowds were so vast in Barcelona and Madrid that they jammed the streets and were unable to march. Protest organizers usually exaggerate numbers, but from official accounts alone at least three million people marched across Europe. Other nonpartisan accounts put the total at between four and six million. Even in Italy, which has sought to qualify its support for the United States, at least 600,000 people and possibly many more thronged Rome.

The breadth and magnitude of the demonstrations opened a rift between ruler and the ruled, convincing many that street protest had overtaken conventional democracy in expressing the popular will.

"The real question is not about intervention," said John Game, 38, a doctoral student at London University, gesturing to the crowd around him as he marched Saturday. "It's about why Tony Blair is not listening to the people of Britain. That's not democracy; this is what democracy looks like." Among the demonstrators' posters were some that read, "Regime change begins at home."

Faced with this kind of opposition at home, it's entirely possible that European heads of state will "out" U.S. oil interests in Iraq the same way that the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and Senator McCain all did to the French late last week. I know I'll be watching for it, and watching to see if it gets reported here.

Tyler's analysis ends like this:

"For the moment, an exceptional phenomenon has appeared on the streets of world cities. It may not be as profound as the people's revolutions across Eastern Europe in 1989 or in Europe's class struggles of 1848, but politicians and leaders are unlikely to ignore it. The Arab states' declaration in Cairo seems proof of that."

You can read the whole article here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/17/international/middleeast/17ASSE.html

It was an "exceptional phenomenon," all right - and continues to be. You may have read the headlines in today's paper about NATO agreeing to send military aid to Turkey: "NATO SETTLES RIFT OVER AID TO TURKS IN CASE OF A WAR," blares the front page of the New York Times. Only by reading the entire article do you find out that the only way they were able to reach an agreement was by excluding the French. "The dispute was resolved when it was agreed to have the military staff of the NATO Defense Planning Council, which does not include France, make plans for Turkey's defense." France apparently went along with the deal, as did the Germans and Belgians.

So, if this little late-night arrangement is any indication, it's likely that the Europeans will eventually close ranks and join the U.S./U.K.-led war on Iraq. But maybe not. And if the protests this weekend played any role in increasing the chances that some European diplomat will stand up this afternoon and start pointing to the connections between U.S. oil interests and U.S. foreign policy, as McCain so hypocritically did to France over the weekend, then it will all have been worth it.