"What do you want?" "We want our freedom!!!"

I have this little annual ritual I've done since March 2003. I sit down with a stiff drink and watch "The Battle of Algiers." And every year it makes me a bit sadder when the French officers near the end congratulate each other on having killed all the leaders of the FLN, thus believing that they had killed the Algerian rebellion. The movie immediately fast-forwards 2 years, to the surreal nightmare of the last scene, when it is finally over for the French and the entire Algerian nation is on the streets and ready to drive them out. It is one of the most incredible scenes every filmed, because a riot scene is incredibly difficult to enact, and this last scene looks like a real riot. A massive haze of tear gas and gunsmoke washes over the Algerians, obscuring them. They become invisible, a looming presence behind the smoke. It becomes very quiet. A French officer, his nerves clearly gone, steps forward and shouts into the smoke:
"What do you want?
The camera lingers for several seconds on the blank white wall of gas and smoke. And then one voice, echoed immediately by a thousand others, screams:
"We want our freedom!!!"
And then the Algerians -- men, women, children -- come pouring out of the smoke and wade into the French.

I fear that the endgame in Iraq will be something very much like this. I fear it will make the iconic footaqe of the evacuation from the embassy roof in Saigon look benign by comparison.

More than 1000 at "history-making" DC war protest

A couple of years ago I was at the big anti-war demonstration in DC. By my estimation (and by splitting the difference between the numbers claimed by the organizers and the numbers claimed by the police), there were roughly 200,000 people there. I was proud that so many people, across all demographics, cared enough to spend a day marching. These days? Not so proud. The good people at United For Peace try really really really hard in their post-action blurb, but no amount of earnest Leftist fluff can hide the facts.

Reports are still coming in, but it is clear that March 19th -- and this whole week of anti-war action -- was historic.

On Wednesday, the atmosphere out in the streets of our nation's capital was exhilarating. More than 1,000 people -- students, grannies, veterans, and more -- engaged in more than a dozen bold, creative, inspiring actions in downtown DC that disrupted business as usual. The protests made those who profit from war, and those who enable it, stop and take notice.

"More than 1000 people" .... given United For Peace's tendency to double the actual number of boots on the ground, that means that somewhere just above 500 people showed up. After all that's happened in the last five years, the "historic" peace march in the nation's capital drew just above 500 people. This made me angry, and then I somehow just ... llet go of all my anger. Because I realized, in an ineffable Moment of Zen, that in time of crisis -- like, say, a disastrous war -- Americans don't protest. They go shopping! Or watch American Idol. But march? Nah.

Moral cowardice and stupified TeeVee-worship abound, and more and more I find myself believing that, as Sartre famously said about the French catastrophe in Algeria, "a country gets the war it deserves."