A news analysis piece from the New York Times which argues that Saturday's demonstrations, their size and widespread sources, alter the terms of the Iraqi debate, at least in Europe, and thus, in the US.
NEWS ANALYSIS
Antiwar Marches Reveal Gulf Between Leaders and People
By ALAN COWELL
nytimes.com
LONDON, Feb. 16 — The drive toward war with Iraq has produced many divisions along the way — between the United States and Europe, and within Europe itself. But, on Saturday, as millions across this divided continent marched to demand peace, a further, sharp rift opened up — not across continents, but within nations, between ruler and ruled.
And in the process the political lines shifted from an almost legalistic argument at the United Nations about the evidence required to force Saddam Hussein's disarmament to a more visceral debate here about the justness of the war, and the moral legitimacy of those prepared to either fight or oppose it.
Significantly, the biggest demonstrations on Saturday were reported from those European nations whose governments sided with the United States against France and Germany in an open letter two weeks ago.
In Spain, the authorities reported a total of more than a million people marching in Madrid and Barcelona, with hundreds of thousands more protesting in other cities. So dense were the crowds in Madrid that they were unable to actually march. In Italy, the police said 600,000 people poured into Rome, and in London 750,000. The organizers of the rallies claimed much higher turnouts and even less partisan estimates put the number of marchers across Europe at between four and six million.
In London, as elsewhere, those numbers alone raised the question of whose voice expressed the true will of the people.
"One of the most repeated riffs of the protest was that they, not Tony Blair, speak for public opinion," said Andrew Rawnsley, a newspaper columnist, referring to the marchers who filled the capital on Saturday. "Ownership of `the People,' that misty mass which the self-styled `People's Prime Minister' used to call his own is now claimed by the Stop the War coalition."
But even while the demonstrators were making the claim, Prime Minister Blair at a major speech in Glasgow was re-drawing the lines of the argument, shifting it from the United Nations debate over the modalities of Iraq's disarmament to the loftier plane of a moral obligation.
The marchers, he said, had displayed "a right and entirely understandable hatred of war."
"It is moral purpose and I respect that," Mr. Blair said. "But the moral case against war has a moral answer: it is the moral case for removing Saddam. It is not the reason we act. That must be according to the U.N. mandate on weapons of mass destruction. But it is the reason, frankly, why if we do have to act, we should do so with a clear conscience.
"Ridding the world of Saddam would be an act of humanity," he told his Labor Party. "It is leaving him there that is in truth inhumane."
In effect, The Sunday Times of London said in an editorial, "Mr. Blair has effectively committed Britain to regime change in Iraq for the first time." More than that, though, many British analysts depicted the events of the past 48 hours as a watershed weekend for Mr. Blair as his destiny becomes increasingly tied to the campaign against Baghdad. A quick victory in Iraq, many argued, would provide massive vindication.
But "a disastrous campaign in Iraq would cost the prime minister dearly," said Matthew d'Ancona in the conservative Sunday Telegraph. "He would be seen to have pursued a personal crusade with calamitous consequences. His credibility would be forever tainted, his wings broken."
Such remarks are hardly surprising in light of Mr. Blair's own readiness to cast his commitment to the alliance with the Bush administration so clearly as a question of personal conviction — a sense of rightness and righteousness that, as the demonstrations showed and he himself acknowledged, he clearly does not share with the entire nation.
"I do not seek unpopularity as a badge of honor," he said in Glasgow. "But sometimes it is the price of leadership and the cost of conviction."
European leaders are to meet tomorrow for a summit at which Mr. Blair and Prime Minister José María Aznar of Spain — both pro-American — have urged the European leaders to maintain pressure on Saddam Hussein. The weekend's demonstrations have bolstered those who argue that Europe should seek to heal its deep division over Iraq by heeding the demands of the peace lobby.
"In cities across Europe, people were clearly showing that they did not want war," said Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt of Belgium. "I hope this will help the European Union to find a common position on Monday."
But in Britain — Washington's staunchest ally and by far the biggest non-American contributor to the military buildup on Iraq's borders — Mr. Blair and his lieutenants put a different spin on what was clearly intended by many protesters in London as a demand for the prime minister to distance himself from President Bush.
That could mean that Britain is readying a separate argument for war if the United Nations Security Council is unable to agree on a second resolution authorizing the use of force against Baghdad.
"A great moral choice has been put before us by the people on the march yesterday," John Reid, the Labor Party chairman, said on a Sunday morning talk show. "Let's face that moral choice. It is not a choice between peace and war. It is a choice between doing something and not doing anything.
"If you take the view that we should not do anything, you too have a moral responsibility, because by doing that you are sustaining the status quo under which there are people being murdered, tortured and dying and starving." |
