One recent afternoon, roughly three hundred marchers were setting up camp in a small, dust-layered town in the Indian state of Uttarakhand, a two-weeks' walk northwest of Delhi. There were three or four Europeans among them, and the requisite bearded young Californian with a guitar, but the rest were Tibetans. Most of them had been born in India to refugee parents and were now in their twenties or early thirties; many of them were monks. They had been walking for fifty-three days, and had just covered the twenty-seven kilometers from the city of Rudrapur in one-hundred-degree heat, passing stubble fields, rubber plantations, mango orchards, smoke-belching furnaces, a family or two of lethargic monkeys, and a Tata car plant. The town had little in the way of sights or amenities, but a principal of a local school had agreed to let them use a large patch of gravel in the schoolyard, on which the Tibetans had assembled their canvas tents and laundry lines, a makeshift infirmary, and an impromptu kitchen. Except for a few who had escaped through the mountains at a young age, most of the marchers had never set foot in their homeland. The Olympic torch had already passed through Delhi on its way to China, when hundreds of young Tibetans had been arrested for unauthorized protests (including scaling the walls of the Chinese embassy, to the embarrassment of the Delhi police), and Delhi's always-delicate relationship with Beijing had been strained, yet this group was determined simply to walk across the border into Tibet. Read More

Here's a thesis to try out on friends: The anti-war movement, in its current form, is an unwitting complement to US government policy, not an opposition to it. It will enable a cowardly premature withdrawal of American troops from Iraq, an event that will be a horrendous betrayal of the Iraqis we promised to "liberate" and a complete failure of political imagination, and which both the Bush administration and the anti-war movement will claim as a victory. Read More