Anti-war folks must present alternative

Mike Lauterbach -- Reader´s Advocate

Now that the war has begun, folks like me who opposed it now find themselves stuck with only a single, narrow path between a rock and a hard place.

The rock is the perception that a person who opposes the war means being unpatriotic and refusing to support the troops. So far, most anti-war spokespeople have done a good job of separating those issues and pointing out that dissent is at the center of democracy.

But unfortunately our crowd has not avoided the hard place nearly as well. That hard place is one where the movement loses too much credibility to be viable-one where the alternatives to war presented make the war look like the best thing since sliced bread.

Believe it or not, that's not too hard. All it takes is a movement shouting that no war is ever justifiable and that if we only had peace (whatever that is) everything would be OK.

But an anti-war following based on these principles can only include the people who believe the U.S. should have let the Nazis take Europe and the people who have already forgotten who they were.

If the anti-war movement fails (and, in a sense, it already has), it will be because of the millions who mouth these slogans without thinking about them.

But there is a center path that avoids both of these pitfalls. That path, however, requires former protesters to shift gears and accept some difficult realities:

(1) The fight to prevent the war is over. Unless Hussein manages by some act of god to hold out for six months or a year, no amount of public outcry will lead to a withdrawal. The fight to be fought is over future foreign policy.

(2) Protesters alone will not decide the fate of this war or the future of Iraq. The Vietnam War protests, even though they were by far the largest and longest continuous protests our nation has ever seen, still took five years to work (even assuming that they caused the withdrawals).

If the anti-war movement is to be successful, it must instead push a consistent doctrine that works within the system and is based on reality, not a fantasy return to the 60s.

That doctrine should have as its centerpiece an emphasis on diplomacy in foreign policy, an aggressive push to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and a renewed commitment to civil rights at home.

It is not enough to simply oppose the war, and it is even worse to oppose it only with shouted slogans.

We must agree on a concrete alternative. Indeed, if we can't agree on an alternative better than than the Bush Administration, that's exactly what we'll get.

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Mike Lauterbach can be reached at [email protected]