I was in the Piazza Venezia in Rome on Feb. 15, when 3 million people took to the streets to demonstrate their opposition to the possible war.
That day, people in more than 600 cities simultaneously demonstrated. This was no "focus group," despite President Bush's description. This was a mass movement for peace. The march in Rome spanned an astonishing seven miles and wound past the Coliseum and other reminders of transient empires. There were all kinds of signs and banners floating on top of a dense river of people: "No to Bush's war, No to Saddam's dictatorship."
All the people I talked with said forcefully that they were not anti-American but were anti-Bush. They made a clear distinction between the American people and the Bush government. I saw a soccer team, a man dressed as a gladiator, and a sea of rainbow-colored flags lettered with a single word "PACE," or "peace" in Italian. A young girl painted the peace symbol on her face. Even local police officers and municipal officials marched, carrying the standards from their respective towns. I saw signs in English, "Not in My Name, Don't Attack Iraq," and the American Academy in Rome hung a banner saying the American community does not support war on Iraq.
An Italian university professor from Padua told me she was not a person who goes to demonstrations, and Padua is a six-hour train ride from Rome. "I felt an urgency about this." Like others there, she felt she had a stake in world policy and wanted a voice. In England, for example, which turned out about 1 million people for rallies in London, roughly 80 percent of the country is opposed to the war, even though Prime Minister Tony Blair has aligned himself with Bush's hawkish foreign policy. And on Italian television, one commentator asked why, if American motives were not about oil, were the people around Bush talking about war with Iraq from the moment they came into office -- months before Sept. 11?
America's leaders and journalists will make a big mistake if they dismiss these protests as simple anti-Americanism. When the first President Bush declared a new world order in l991 after the collapse of Soviet communism, he didn't make the leap to visualize its corollary -- new world citizenship. But the current President Bush has to deal with that reality. Instead of the binary thinking of a "for or against" position in regard to an Iraqi war, we would be more creative to think in terms of a new world citizenship in which people want and claim a voice in policies that will ultimately spill over into their own lives.
As one of the women in Italy told me, it is their future, too.
Judith Nies writes on American history and is the author of "Nine Women: Portraits from the American Radical Tradition" (University of California Press, 2002). This column was produced for the Progressive Media Project, which is run by The Progressive magazine, and distributed by the Tribune News Service.