Protests are useless

There are too many protests these days. So many that nobody pays attention to them any more. The anti-war protests in the US achieve the opposite effect from what the participants intend.

George Bush uses the anti-war protests as a reason for war. He constantly defends the protesters' right to protest by saying that it is what makes us different than our enemies and that public demonstration against government policy is one of the benefits of democracy.

I hear soldiers in Iraq say the very same thing. They really do think they are defending the anti-war crowd's right to engage in civil disobedience.