Protesting the war to come

SANTA CRUZ, Calif. -- If a major war breaks out in Iraq, the first thing the Rev. Stuart Fitch plans to do is pray, sending love to everyone from Saddam Hussein to President Bush. Then he'll call his congregation to church for a service.

And then, perhaps, the 78-year-old Episcopalian clergyman will get himself arrested.

"There will be plenty of people going to jail that day," said Fitch, who wears his stiff pastoral collar beneath a powder-blue shirt. "I'm thinking about joining them."

While the Pentagon has spent the past year training troops, building facilities and stockpiling weapons to launch a war against Iraq, the peace movement has been using the buildup time to coordinate "emergency response plans" to disrupt domestic military activity, tie up commerce and get out their anti-war message.

Rally meeting places are posted, march routes set, protest signs painted, acts of nonviolent civil disobedience choreographed.

Activists in more than a dozen cities have announced where and when to meet on the first day of war -- what they call "The Day Of." In Dallas, they plan speeches at City Hall; in San Francisco, they plan to block traffic in the business district; in St. Louis they will hold a candlelight vigil downtown; in Seattle they plan to march at the federal building. In New York City, organizers hope to crowd Times Square with protesters.

Encouraging the enemy

Some Bush administration supporters who believe war in Iraq will probably be necessary, think the demonstrations could be harmful to U.S. interests.

"They encourage the enemy," said Michael Ledeen, a foreign policy expert at Washington-based American Enterprise Institute. "The Iraqis will look at it and say, 'Aha! The people are not with the American government on this."'

But Ledeen said he also wouldn't want to hamper anyone's right to free speech. "If people want to be stupid, they can be stupid," he said. "They're entitled."

The long buildup to the war "is doing wonders for organizing," according to Scott Lynch, a spokesman for Peace Action, the largest anti-war activism group in the United States, which claims 85,000 members in 100 chapters around the country.

The yearlong prep time has also brought a broad array of people to the movement, Lynch said. "Our community now entails a much more moderate and wider swath of America. It's not the fringe and it's not the old lefties and it's not the kids with purple hair and nose rings," he said.

The movement -- which has already brought thousands of people to the streets in recent protests -- has grown broader and more sophisticated, said UC Davis American studies professor Michael Smith, who studies activism in the United States.

University students and former anti-Vietnam War activists are a large part of the movement, but an incongruous coalition of business and corporate leaders, labor unions, minority advocacy groups, religious congregations, feminist organizations, environmentalists, high school students and veterans who fought in the Persian Gulf have been showing up at rallies around the country.

Twenty-three U.S. cities have passed anti-war resolutions, and groups ranging from the National Council of Churches to chapters of the Sierra Club and the National Organization for Women have issued anti-war statements.

High-tech organization

Peace organizers also said new technology -- e-mail distribution lists, Internet listserv Web sites, cellular telephones, pagers and other devices that help get the word out quickly -- are helping their effort. There are telephone trees from Olympia, Wash., to Fayetteville, Ark., and e-mail lists at peace and justice centers around the country with thousands of names ready to be dispatched to demonstrations.

Bob Fitch, who has worked with anti-war organizations in the United States for more than 50 years, said the peace movement has never been better organized.

"I would say it might be a significant surprise to the government to see how well we are organized," said Fitch, who currently works with the Santa Cruz Resource Center for Nonviolence.

Anti-war activists such as Mike Yarrow of Seattle say the long lead time has also allowed them to do some thoughtful planning.

"We're trying to be creative about civil disobedience," Yarrow said. "A lot of us want to show our commitment to a peaceful world but don't want to aggravate people by making their drive home more difficult."