by Jo Freeman

Remnants of the once vast anti-war movement rallied in front of the White House on March 19 in the eighth annual protest of the 2003 military invasion of Iraq, while five thousand miles away US and British vessels launched a missile invasion of Libya in order to create a UN-sanctioned no-fly zone.

Roughly a thousand people gathered around a stage in the middle of Lafayette Park to hear speakers denounce war on the first sunny Saturday of the year. It was a Sixties crowd, in both senses of the word. One man’s sign bragged that he had been "Protesting Stupid Wars and Nukes since 1967." Compared to most of the people at the rally, he was a late-comer.

A hundred feet away, on the edge of Pennsylvania Avenue, two dozen youthful-looking demonstrators denounced Libyan dictator Col. Muammar Quadaffi. Waving the flag adopted by the newly proclaimed Libyan Republic, most of their signs and shouts were in Arabic, but their sentiment was clear. A separate group, waiving Syrian flags, denounced its ruling family. "Syria is not a family business" said one sign in English. 

On Pennsylvania Ave. itself, half a dozen people declared that "9/11 was an inside job," while another half dozen wanted the world to know that "we salute our troops" and "God Bless America." One man walked around with a Palestinian flag, another had a large banner on wheels that said something about corruption in Canada and still another carried two signs objecting to the existence of Israel. He said he came every Saturday.

On the other side of Lafayette Park, greeting those who entered from the North, were a dozen people from PETA. They were unhappy that the State Department’s evacuation of US nationals from Japan does not include "companion animals."

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