John writes:

> hear hear!!!
>  In my Melbourne (oz), similar sized march. We have emailed our PM, but we
>  need to find a way to inundate hime with genuine, real voting people signed
>  messages that we dont want to go without UN sanction.

The peace marches, which in many cases were the largest ever held in various 
capitols, and certainly the largest in a generation, and which are already 
being dismissed by Bush administration aides as irrelevant, are quite likely 
not going to prove to be irrelevant. I believe that it's clear that their 
size and broad base has significantly rattled people in Washington and London 
-- and may well have permanently knocked the props out from underneath Tony 
Blair. If that's so, then that becomes a sea change in and of itself.

I've enclosed a bit from a story entitled, "Blair, increasingly alone, clings 
to stance," taken from this evening's NY Times:

=======================================

With the marches yesterday, 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 
yesterday. "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."

That was a remarkable turnabout for a prime minister who once prided himself 
on touching the pulse of the nation in moments of crisis.

"One of the most repeated riffs of the protest was that they, not Tony Blair, 
speak for public opinion," said Andrew Rawnsley, a columnist, referring to 
the marchers who filled the capital yesterday. "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."

Those sentiments have left Mr. Blair little option but to change script and 
invoke the moral issues. In Glasgow, for instance, Mr. Blair said the peace 
marchers had displayed "a right and entirely understandable hatred of war. It 
is moral purpose, and I respect that. 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."

Unless he persuades his European adversaries to agree to a second United 
Nations resolution authorizing force, however, Mr. Blair will find it 
difficult to carry dissidents within his own party and government into a "go 
it alone" war at America's side, according to Mr. Rawnsley.

At tomorrow's summit meeting, moreover, the huge weekend demonstrations seem 
likely to play into the existing rifts. They will enable leaders like Jacques 
Chirac of France and Gerhard Schröder of Germany to argue that their antiwar 
sentiments have received a mandate from the streets, while leaving Mr. Blair 
and José María Aznar of Spain seeming to swim against Europe's tide.

========================================

Wirt Atmar

* To join/leave the list, search archives, change list settings, *
* etc., please visit http://raven.utc.edu/archives/hp3000-l.html *