Fred wrote:
> The protesters are not protesting against the troops. Their protests
> are against the administration. If there hadn't been protesters during
> the Vietnam war, it might have pointlessly continued with the loss of
> another 58K troop lives (not administration lives).

I recently reread in the famous Hanoi Jane incident in Snopes:
http://www.snopes.com/military/fonda.htm (worthwhile BTW), which in part
says:

"The right to freedom of speech is one of our most cherished rights. It is
also a double-edged sword: the same right that allows us to
criticize our government's policies without fear of reprisal also protects
those who endorse and promote racism, anti-semitism, ethnic hatred and other
socially divisive positions.

Rarely is this dichotomy so evident as when a democratic nation engages in
war, and the protection of civil liberties clashes head-on with the
exigencies of a war effort. Protesting a government's involvement in a war
without also interfering in the prosecution of that war is a difficult (if
not impossible) feat, a situation that has sometimes led the government to
curtail the freedom of speech, such as when the U.S. Sedition Act (passed
during World War I) made criminals of those who would "willfully utter,
print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive
language about the form of government of the United States." Under this law,
peacefully urging citizens to resist the draft or simply drawing an
editorial cartoon critical of the government became illegal. (The Sedition
Act was later overturned.)

The most prominent example of a clash between private citizen protest and
governmental military policy in recent history occurred in July 1972, when
actress Jane Fonda arrived in Hanoi, North Vietnam, and began a two-week
tour of the country conducted by uniformed military hosts. ..."

A more current example:

A 'Human Shield' Returns From Iraq, Work Undone

By ROBERT TOMSHO
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

MILWAUKEE -- After getting arrested at a local antiwar protest on Wednesday,
Ryan Clancy went home and turned on CNN, dreading what he would see. "The
government is going to bomb some of the people I just met, and I am
powerless to do anything about it," thought the lanky 26-year-old, who
recently spent several weeks in Iraq serving as a so-called human shield .

The human-shield campaign was founded in London late this past year on the
premise that Westerners' presence at key sites in Iraq might deter U.S.
bombing and save civilian lives. Its primary organizer, Ken Nichols O'Keefe,
is a disgruntled Gulf War veteran who settled in the Netherlands after
renouncing his U.S. citizenship. With little advance planning but much
publicity, Mr. O'Keefe assembled about 75 would-be shields -- including
retirees, photographers and computer technicians, mostly from Europe and the
U.S. -- and headed for Baghdad in late January in a bus.

In the 1991 Gulf War, the Iraqi government forced foreign hostages to serve
as human shields . This time, Iraqi officials had no direct role in planning
the shields' volunteer campaign. It did, however, welcome them, along with
other peace activists, supplying entry visas, hotel rooms and food.

In Iraq, Mr. Clancy, a substitute teacher and owner of a small music-supply
business, would learn how seemingly humanitarian causes can become
casualties of war. Soon after arriving in Baghdad, he and some other shields
were invited to what was described as a peace conference. Mr. Clancy left
the gathering as soon as he determined it was a pro-government rally. Still,
he was stunned to see himself on Iraqi government television that night. "It
was portrayed that these human shields were supporting Saddam," he says.

> I fought in Korea too. I also give all of my support to our troops.
> So what??

So if you protest in public here and your face ends up on Iraqi TV and it
gives the people fighting our troops a lift, are you really giving the
troops ALL of your support?  Are there other ways that one can keep their
moral positions and not (unwittingly-unintentionally) give support to just a
different violent solution?

Constraints are often the breeding ground for creativity.  Now I must be off
to think of how I can continue to support our troops and the Iraqi people.

Mark W.

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