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« Wreck on the Highway | Main | The Gore Mine » March 18, 2007"No More Noble Missions""Puppies for Peace" was my favorite hand-scrawled sign among those held by the 100-150 antiwar protesters who marched through downtown Nashville Saturday. It was carried by a man with a dog on a leash. The dog's true feelings about the Iraq war are unknown - the dog wasn't carrying a sign. I stumbled across the protest I was headed downtown and stopped for a minute to snap a few pictures and record 45 seconds of video as they passed by.
Folks, John Lennon was a songwriter and singer, not an expert in international relations. "All You Need is Love" was a pop song, not a dissertation on the most effective ways a nation can respond to attacks by hostile foreign forces. I don't doubt the sincerity of the Nashville anti-war protesters, but I do lament the naivete of someone thinking that "All You Need is Love" to stop Islamist jihadists bent on killing us. Let's be rational. I'm pretty sure there were at least a few pacifist John Lennon fans in the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. That didn't stop the killers from flying the jets into the towers.
Nobility is why America spent hundreds of millions of dollars using its Navy to deliver emergency food and medical assistance to the people of Indonesia after the tsunami even though that part of Indonesia is rife with Islamist radicalism. Nobility is why the first nation on the scene after most any natural disaster anywhere in the world is America. Without America's noble missions, the rest of the world would sink into a new Dark Ages.
Michael Fumento took better pictures at the D.C. protest, and files this report. "Thousands march to Pentagon to protest Iraq war" was the typical headline about the rally in Washington on St. Patrick's day. Well, I got there just after the march ended and I'd put it at hardly more than a thousand. Indeed, I was able to photograph the whole crowd - without benefit of a wide angle lens. There were even numerous buses indicating they had imported New Yorkers for the celebration. ... As to the participants, they were exactly what you'd expect: aging hippies, representatives of all sorts of Communist organizations, 9/11 conspiracy theorists, illegal immigration supporters, Islamist extremists, and sufferers of Bush Derangement Syndrome. Boy, were they suffering! But don't take my word for it. Check out my photoset and see for yourself that four years into the war there's still no such thing as a true Iraq protest movement.  The Tennessean, past whose building the Nashville protestors marched banging pots and pans, estimated the number of Nashville antiwar protesters at about 75 people, though it looked more like 150 to me.
Click photos for larger versions. Video shot with 1.3-megapixel LG CU500 cellphone camera. Posted in War on Terror
Comments
Well, goodness. It was cold out there. The least you could have done was offer to buy me a cup of hot chocolate. All you need is love! I guess I'm in a difficult place. I really was in favour of this war when we first went in. I'm still in favour of mounting a strong defence against terrorism. But I would like to see us become less of a presence in Iraq, because I think the longer we're there the greater a tactical mistake it becomes. We're a concentration of force. Guerilla fighters and terrrorists can very easily decimate a martial concentration, as has been proven time and again. The thing is, I'm leery at being lumped in with the kind of well-intentioned but impossibly idealistic people like the protesters in the story. I'm not anti-war at all. I'm just hoping for a type of resolution to the Iraq stage of the WOT. As far as the protesters, I wonder if they realise just how much their fringiness actually hurts the cause of ending the war. I'm sure there are a lot of more mild folks like me who just want Iraq to be done with for now but are just leery enough of the looniness to keep their mouths shut. Posted by: Katherine Coble at March 18, 2007 9:16 AMThanks for the link, Bill. I've updated my blog to point out that AP reported there were 10,000 to 20,000 people there rather than the perhaps 1,000 I saw and captured in a photograph. Either most of the fruits and nuts wore invisibility cloaks or the AP lies as much about Iraq here as it does in Iraq. Posted by: Michael Fumento at March 18, 2007 11:19 AMSharon, I seem to remember you advocating very strongly for action in Darfur. Isn't love all they need there, too? Posted by: Katherine Coble at March 18, 2007 2:13 PMLet me guess, you just took pictures, and you didn't actually talk to any of the protesters. Instead you spent your time using your brilliant wisdom to decipher all they thought and believed by their picket signs. What's the point of freedom of speach if you don't really engage anybody with it? There they were, those rotten war protesters, making themselves available to you, and just scoffed. How very Fox News. Posted by: Kevin at March 18, 2007 3:48 PMKat, Sharon, Didn't realize you were in the crowd - plus I was in a hurry to get somewhere - otherwise I would have brought you some hot chocolate. Looks like Warren Duzak up at the head of the parade had some, or some java. Kevin - I wrote about the messages on the protestors' signs. That was the whole focus of the post. "Puppies for Peace," "All You Need is Love," etc. And I wrote about the event in context with the main event in D.C. I don't doubt the sincerity of the protestors, Kevin. I said that in my post. You called them "rotten," not I. I know some of the people in that crowd. Sharon, for one. And Warren Duzak, a great guy I used to work with at the Tennessean years ago. Neither of them is rotten. Both of them sincerely believe what they believe. I happen to disagree with them, but I don't - and didn't - scoff at them. I did scoff at the notion that the Beatles had the answer to everything, that "All You Need is Love" will stop killers, and that all we have to do is "give peace a chance," and the jihadis will stop trying to kill us. Posted by: Bill Hobbs at March 18, 2007 8:01 PMBill, We'll do a rain check on that hot coco. Obviously, deciphering sarcasm isn't your strong point. Posted by: Kevin at March 19, 2007 8:45 AMCut the protestors some slack, Bill -- it isn't easy to express complex sentiments in the space of a posterboard sign. Most people probably have at least somewhat conflicted feelings about the war in Iraq, whether those feelings ultimately aggregate to a position for or against, but effective protest requires that the group's position be clear and straightforward. That means, typically, that it be memorable, even chant-able. Their signs got you to blog about them. At one level, anyway, that's effective protest. Posted by: Kate O' at March 19, 2007 9:34 AMPost a comment
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