Mugger: Setting Saturday Straight: A French-free family passes through Saddam's million-person march.

As fortune would have it, the anti-Bush protests last Saturday were not confined to the east side of Manhattan. The kids and I were leaving the Virgin Megastore (corporate!) at Times Square, after purchasing The Alamo, Magnum Force and High Noon, when we walked smack into a motley parade of perhaps 500 layabouts who were singing John Lennon songs as they proceeded north.

My younger son was confused by the ubiquitous and idiotic "No Blood for Oil" signs—although not the pictures of Bush with a Hitler mustache—and so a cursory history lesson was in order on the cab ride home. He didn’t quite understand that the French have a larger monetary stake in Iraq than the U.S., but setting the record straight is a parent’s duty. The American flag pin on my leather jacket lapel caused one of the attention-starved hippies to hiss, "Go watch Fox News, scum!"

Immediately, Herr Ponytail!

I couldn’t begin to explain to the boys what the placard reading "Keep Iraq Free!" meant, since that has to be among the most puzzling slogans of the past generation. "Free" from what? Liberation? The end of random executions, mutilations and rapes? Lost in the stream of thrill-seekers with the kids hanging on to my coat, for a split-second, I imagined spying a sign reading, "Punch Dominique de Villepin in the Kisser!" but of course that was just a mirage. Now that our household is Evian and Perrier-free, that’d be a nifty banner to hang from our 12th floor window, but I don’t suppose such truthful expressions of the First Amendment are in abundance here in New York City, where nearly 3000 people perished just 17 months ago.

Now, to give the rabble their due, it was a frigid afternoon to spend outside, and as The Hours is still a box-office hit, I guess there was nothing better to do. To suggest that the thousands of protesters in the city on Saturday all move to Vermont or California is a little mean-spirited, but where’s the modern-day Tom Hayden to organize the lemmings, maybe give a seminar or two on just exactly what they were protesting? Maybe then the fools who carried the aforementioned "Keep Iraq Free!" banners wouldn’t appear like extras in a straight-to-cable movie directed by George Clooney.

Make no mistake about it: The current torrent of rallies are largely a substitution for the outrage over the 2000 presidential election. Even as Bush placated the Beltway establishment by appearing before the sacred United Nations, as well as receiving congressional authorization for military action in Iraq, it was clear his administration was planning for the war that will take place within a month. And although scattered, if large, protests took place last fall, there wasn’t the same hatred and virulence that was displayed on Saturday.

But the Republican Party’s unexpected victories last November—taking back the Senate, increasing its House majority and retaining, against all odds, a majority of governorships—erased the constant bleat that Bush had no mandate and was an illegitimate president. A new rallying cry for Democrats, Greens, vegans and socialists had to be invented; otherwise how in the world would the "uncurious" Texan cowboy be defeated in 2004?

Ironically, Bush’s bold and moral foreign policy could easily make him a one-term president, just as the courageous Tony Blair might soon be spending his days fox-hunting rather than delivering brilliant speeches in London. It bears repeating, every week if necessary, that the United States is likely to be engaged in wars for the next decade. The simpletons on the left believe that Bush is simply avenging Saddam’s assassination attempt against his father and that, plus a bounty of oil, is what the conflict is all about.

Back in the late 90s, the Times’ William Safire predicted that Bill Clinton’s aversion to military conflict and terrorism—remember that he didn’t even visit the first Trade Center bombing site in 1993—would leave his successor with perilous global crises. And just last Friday, the Washington Post’s Charles Krauthammer echoed Safire’s prescient observations. He said: "This is not the Apocalypse. But it is excellent preparation for it. You don’t get to a place like this overnight. It takes at least, oh, a decade. We are now paying the wages of the 1990s, our holiday from history. During that decade, every major challenge to America was deferred. The chief aim of the Clinton administration was to make sure that nothing terrible happened on its watch. Accordingly, every can was kicked down the road."

Anyone who believes that regime change in Iraq is a one-off adventure has fewer brain cells than even Sens. Barbara Boxer and Patty Murray. Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia and Syria are just a few countries that’ll make headlines in years to come. It wouldn’t be surprising, even if the toppling of Saddam proceeds smoothly, that by 2004 a war-weary nation will turn, God help us, to a Democrat in the general election.

Naturally, there was a wide disparity between the organizers and the police concerning just how many people showed up at the UN jamboree, but I’m willing to split the difference between the former’s claim of half a million and the NYPD’s modest number of 100,000. Sunday’s New York columnists differed as well on the Meaning of it All. The Daily News’ Michael Daly, while justifiably ridiculing the government’s earlier suggestion of buying duct tape to fend off chemical annihilation, recounted a sobering anecdote of collective amnesia among the assembled New Yorkers.

He wrote: "Engine 8 was returning to the firehouse from a run, and yesterday afternoon that meant turning down a block of E. 53rd St. that was packed with protesters. The roof lights were flashing, but the protesters did not budge. The driver hit the horn, and the protesters responded with shouts. Some were so dim as to imagine the firefighters were seeking to disperse them.

"‘They’re trying to break up the crowd!’ a woman shouted. A squad of police officers stepped in and the protesters grudgingly stepped out of the way. A young man in a green fleece jacket then hurled an epithet at these firefighters from a house that lost 10 men at the World Trade Center.

"‘Fascists!’

"... The firefighters peered out of the cab, among them one you recognized from an immortal photograph taken that terrible day at the twin towers... After the south tower collapsed, this firefighter had been among those who came upon Fire Chaplain Mychal Judge. The firefighter was helping to carry the lifeless priest from the smoldering ruins when a photographer snapped what would be called the modern Pieta. Seventeen months later, this same firefighter sat in the engine cab, his tan fire-retardant hood framing his face as he gazed blankly out at these shouting protesters...

"‘They were calling us fascists,’ he said."

Newsday’s Jimmy Breslin, also on Feb. 16, must’ve swallowed a bunch of get-happy pills before typing his assessment of the demonstration. The sour geriatric was ebullient over the throngs who carried signs "against war, and against George W. Bush, who, for the first time, was being heralded as a man who lost the popular vote in this country by 500,000." Say what? As I recall, Bush’s "loss" was the main topic of his opposition until Sept. 11.

Breslin’s take: "On streets of beauty, the warm people inched along or stood and chanted and laughed against a war and for peace and their warmth made the winter temperature irrelevant. They were summer people in winter clothes. They were the largest and happiest crowd seen in this city maybe ever, outside of a war’s end in 1945. There were fathers with children on their shoulders. There were mothers holding their young. There were kids walking alongside their parents. There were religious people everywhere. And so many were young. Young students, young married, young in a city that belonged to the dreams and love and laughter of youth. Do you want a life with thrills, years of exhilaration? Come to New York."

If Hardball’s Chris Matthews wanted to climb out of the cable-ratings cellar, he’d be smart to pit Breslin against the conservative columnist Mark Steyn, who writes for Canada’s National Post, the UK’s Telegraph and Spectator and any other publication that’ll re-cycle his stylish prose. Last Saturday in the Telegraph, Steyn said: "I was in Montreal last week, which has the largest Iraqi population in North America. I’ve yet to meet one who isn’t waiting eagerly for the day the liberation of their homeland begins. Then they can go back to the surviving members of their families and not have to live in a country where it’s winter 10 months a year."

After refuting the specious claim that Saddam’s been "contained" for the last decade by stating a fact that the "give peace a chance" crowd closes their eyes to, that the dictator funds Palestinian suicide bombers, Steyn gets to the point that’s lost on his frivolous American counterparts like Maureen Dowd. "Marching for ‘peace,’" he writes, "means marching against the Iraqi people: it’s the equivalent of turning them away as, to their shame, many free nations in the 1930s turned away refugees from Germany." Steyn had the grace not to name FDR in this context.

He concludes: "Today’s demo is good for Saddam, but bad for the Iraqi people, and the Palestinian people, and the British people. One day, not long from now, when Iraq is free, they will despise those who marched to keep them in hell."

A college buddy of mine, now living in Japan, was glued to the tube over the weekend and sent this email: "Saw some demonstrations in NYC, England, the Axis of Weasel, Brazil and Italy, followed by one in Baghdad (as if they were the same thing). The media here seems to be spinning the immense opposition to the war. There was also a polite demonstration in Hiroshima and a street show in Nagasaki, and much was made of eight Japanese idiots at Narita Airport who are apparently going to Iraq. Bon voyage!"

Suddenly, the Times Favors Washington Over Baghdad

Someone, your guess is as good as mine, woke up at the New York Times. Perhaps feeling heat from its competitor the Washington Post—which has been resolute, almost daily, in calling for an end to the UN Security Council charade—a Times editorial last Saturday at last demonstrated a glimmer of reality. That’s no small feat, considering that the morally suspect broadsheet has until now presented more obstruction to the Bush administration that the hapless Tom Daschle.

The edit concluded: "There is ample evidence that Iraq has produced highly toxic VX nerve gas and anthrax and has the capacity to produce a lot more. It has concealed these materials, lied about them, and more recently failed to account for them to the current inspectors. The Security Council doesn’t need to sit through more months of inconclusive reports. It needs full and immediate Iraqi disarmament. It needs to say so, backed by the threat of military force."

The Post’s Sunday editorial was more forceful, saying: "The Iraqi dictator granted a cease-fire 12 years ago on the condition that he disarm; he did not do so, despite repeated orders from the Security Council. Last November he was given a ‘final opportunity,’ which he also rejected. In any such standoff, a moment finally arrives when those who would preserve global order must act, or abandon that order. This is that moment." The day before, the Post editorialist’s last sentence read: "Even if others lose their nerve, the United States must ensure that this time the dictator suffers the ‘serious consequences’ that are due."

Typically, the Times’ modern Hedda Hopper, Maureen Dowd, was beyond the pale, even for her, on Feb. 16. In a column datelined "United Nations," she wrote: "The dashing French diplomat dashed around the U.N. like a rock star. His Excellency Dominique Galouzeau de Villepin, as the elegantly tailored leader of the Euro-whiners is known here, had a huge cordon sanitaire of security guards and aides, even to go to the men’s room. France’s foreign minister, a published poet, strode past the now unsheathed tapestry of ‘Guernica,’ chased by a polyglot gaggle of reporters desperate to know two things: How did he feel about being warmly applauded by the peacenik spectators and even some of the press in the Security Council—where applause is never heard—after he filleted Colin Powell? And is the rumor true that he visits a tanning salon whenever he comes to New York."

Dowd spends the rest of the column denigrating "Rummy," the "Bush team’s locker room taunts" and Henry Kissinger. She muses: "With or without the fussy Frenchies, we’re going to war. For this White House, pulling back when all our forces are poised for battle would be, to use the Bush family’s least favorite word, wimpy."

Left unsaid, of course, is the fact that it’s Howell Raines who’s "wimpy" for not demoting this washed-up harpy to the Times’ society pages.

In contrast, Dowd’s colleague Thomas Friedman at least takes his work seriously. In his column on Feb. 9, he wrote: "The French position is utterly incoherent... If France were serious about its own position, it would join the U.S. in setting a deadline for Iraq to comply, and backing it up with a second resolution authorizing force if Iraq does not. And France would send its prime minister to Iraq to tell that directly to Saddam."

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