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Antiwar groups change tactics: East Bay bracing for civil disobedience acts once invasion starts (Mike Adamick, March 19, 2003, San Mateo County Times)

In the hours following President Bush's ultimatum Monday to Saddam Hussein, local antiwar groups moved to shift their strategy from protest to resistance.

E-mails went out to supporters. Phone calls, too. In Oakland, groups affiliated with Direct Action to Stop the War met to complete plans for the day bombs start hitting Iraq.

In San Francisco, the organization stepped up nonviolent "role-playing scenarios" to prepare for acts of civil disobedience.

As the groups begin to mobilize, communities throughout the East Bay began bracing for war and the mass protests that promise to follow. If the local response to 1991's Operation Desert Storm is any indication, the Bay Area could face days of unrest in the event of war.

This time, however, the protests are expected to be larger, organizers said, because of intensified antiwar sentiment in the Bay Area and across the world.

"We're getting ready to see something we've never really seen before," said Leda Dederich, an organizer with the San Francisco-based Direct Action to Stop the War.

"We're planning to really stop the financial district, to really put our bodies on the line to stop the war machine," Dederich said.

The key element of civil disobedience, the reason it can succeed, is that where injustice exists in an otherwise decent society it is possible to shame an otherwise unwilling populace into fixing it. So, when the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. went to jail to protest segregation, it brought people of good conscience face to face with the monstrousness of the regime of unjust laws that plagued our society. The specter of punishing men like him was far more troublesome than the idea of dismantling the system.

The problem for these protestors is that there's no objective sense in which they're morally correct and subjectively the great majority of Americans disagree with them. The idea of sending them to prison for trying to disrupt the functioning of society is far more attractive than that of leaving Saddam in place. Let's hope that, like serious practitioners of civil disobedience in the past, they're willing to stay in prison until society changes its policy...in other words, forever.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 19, 2003 2:55 PM