Attending an anti-war rally on March 19, I had profoundly mixed feelings.

The rally, from an organizer's standpoint, was a success: 5,000 people came out, in the rain, to hear speeches and music and march around town. The turnout was the largest for an anti-war rally in Seattle in the two years since the war began. Moreover, it was part of an international day of protests, in which over 700 protests took place in the United States alone.

And yet I couldn't shake the feeling that this was not the way to get our troops home. But the germ of an idea, of a way to be more effective, was present.

Rallies and demonstrations are not going to stop a war. As a barometer of the depth of public opinion, as a pep rally for activists, and as an incubator of oppositional culture, they still have their place. But if the ultimate goal of a movement is to change the public policy, we must conclude hat even the millions of people on the street before the invasion of Iraq in 2002 were not, in the end, effective.

Why weren't they effective? There are a lot of reasons, not the least of which being that the White House decision-makers had long previously made up their minds, making the entire run-up to the war an elaborate charade in which maximizing public support was a goal, but in the end not especially necessary. We have to wait until an election to speak our minds, by which point circumstances change. What George Bush called his "accountability moment " came only once in his presidential career; as it happens, he survived it, barely

He survived in part because the broad anti-war sentiment before the invasion dwindled significantly once the war began. Many of the more conservative and centrist opponents of an invasion felt that once war was underway, it was important to support the mission no matter how fraudulent or ill-conceived its roots. Another large segment felt disempowered--felt that nothing, not even millions of people in the streets, made any difference. And that nothing could make any difference in the future.

That's not quite true.

There is a route by which the Bush Administration can be pressured to set a timetable for withdrawing troops from Iraq, and the beginnings of it were on display in Seattle in Saturday's rally. Not in the bulk of the rally, a tedious mix of too-old protest music and alienating rhetoric. People that matter to the Bush Administration are not going to be swayed by speeches peppered with "fascist" this and "imperialist" that. That's the left at its self-referential worst.

But the White House does care, very much, when members of the military and of military families start speaking out.

The potential for a broad and effective anti-war movement was on greater display last Wednesday night at Town Hall, where three Iraq War veterans spoke out in a panel co-sponsored by the American Legion and by the Church Council of Greater Seattle. Of the three, one was pro-war, one was anti-war (former Navy Lt. John Oliveira, who also spoke at Saturday's rally), and one, former Marine Capt. Josh Rushing (featured in the movie Control Room), was somewhere in the middle. But the audience was almost entirely anti-war. And the audience came out of that event with a valuable perspective: Iraq, as seen through the eyes of the men and women fighting in that effort.

By far the most powerful speaker at Saturday's rally was a Pacific County woman, Lietta Ruger, who has a son-in-law and nephew about to serve their second tours of duty in Iraq. Hers is a military family; she is middle-aged, patriotic, and able to cast the risks and costs of Iraq in starkly personal terms. In a word, she has credibility, in a way that those of us without personal links to the struggle in Iraq do not.

Bush cannot fight this war with a military that doesn't want to fight, nor when politically if much of his own political base opposes him. That is the audience to whom an anti-war case must be made. So far, polls show that a majority of soldiers believe in their mission, but a substantial number do not--and even among supporters, morale is often low due to poor supplies, scandals like Abu Ghraib, and especially the nature of the conflict itself. If service members and particularly military families can be encouraged to speak out, the Bush Administration cannot ignore their voices.

And here, also, is a lesson for the rest of us: in order to not just vent but be effective, opposition to this war should be rooted in what is best for this country. Rather than being reflexively anti-military, anti-war activists should learn to understand and embrace why this war is bad news from the perspective of the men and women fighting it. Supporting our troops is no simply PC or a humane thing to do; it's also the best way to work for an end to this war.