Salon is reporting that the February 15 peace protests may end up looking like Antiques Road Show in comparison to what’s planned for the day war breaks out in Iraq. Different organizations are planning to shut down financial districts, stage sit-ins in Congressional offices, and even disrupt the Air Force’s command and control center. The rationale is to make it as difficult as possible for the White House to carry out the war.

But Anti-Vietnam peace activist Paul Berman had this to say:

“At the time I did some of that myself and thought it was doing good, but now it’s apparent to me that all that stuff just fell into a trap laid by Richard Nixon,” he says. “That kind of stuff allowed Nixon to win in 1968 and again in 1972, and a Democratic president would surely have withdrawn sooner. And so in effect, although it’s painful to say so, I think that kind of stuff had the effect of prolonging the war. It played into Nixon’s hands. There were famous scenes where Nixon specifically ordered that his entourage drive through streets where he knew he’d be attacked by demonstrators because he wanted the right scenes to appear on TV. He presented it to the public: You had to choose between Richard Nixon or some long-haired marijuana-smoking lunatic communist. Guess what. The public chose Nixon.”

The protests I have seen so far in Atlanta have been small, sincere, peaceful, quaint, and encouraging. Like many others, I “honked for peace” as I drove past. I made out several families protesting together. I judged them to be a symbolic marker of much larger wells of opposition and hesitance to a Gulf War II, views expressed in the massive worldwide protests I saw on TV. They reminded “the rest of us” on our way home where we stood and what that meant.

If day-of US peace protests turn violent, that political capital will be spent. All CNN needs is one three-second clip of “some long-haired marijuana-smoking lunatic communist” doing something stupid and violent, and then to play it over and over and over. (In slow motion, no doubt.) Americans who are merely hesitant to go to war (and not in decided opposition) will find themselves with a new hesitation: this time about the peace movement. Given a choice between hesitant support of a White House at war and “some long-haired marijuana-smoking lunatic communist,” most will choose the White House. When Americans’ lives are on the line, they will easily side with President Cowboy over Hacky-Sack Hippy With a Violent Streak.

If you’re going to play politics, you may as well play to win. And to win in America, you have to carry the center. The down side of having such an enormous peace movement already (before the war has even started) is that there will inevitably be some bad eggs from the get-go. To counter this, the peace movement must do whatever it can beforehand to shut these folks out of the process, and then disavow them if and when they choose violence over peaceful protest. If the American public can see an easy division between the “good protesters” and the “bad protesters,” it won’t feel so forced to choose between a violent Bush and violent hippies. Why not give them a genuinely peaceful protest movement instead?

To quote a writer I don’t ordinarily put much stock in, “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” Disrupting military operations will not win the day. Winning over the hearts and minds of the American public will.