"We will redeem the soul of this nation," said a woman standing near the Washington Monument, next to a field of crosses that had been planted in the grass to commemorate the nearly 2,000 American soldiers killed so far in the Iraq war.

She was holding a candle, and she was surrounded by other women like her, mothers who had lost their kids to an American war of choice that they, like a majority of Americans, now view as a mistake. It was evening, and somewhere in the dusk Joan Baez was making her way across the grand lawns in front of the White House and toward the vigil, to sing with the mothers. The next day, September 24, a huge antiwar march was to move through the nation's capital, demanding that troops be brought home from Iraq (another sentiment now shared by a majority of Americans, according to recent polling). Tonight, however, was meant to be solemn and reflective. I stood on the lawn with the mothers and their supporters, the warm evening filled with candlelight and nervous expectation—all of us had traveled to D.C. because we sensed that if something big was going to happen the time was now.

The next morning, the day of the march, the air was different. Nervous anticipation had been replaced by frenzied chaos. It was becoming clear that this was going to be an enormous protest; all morning long, thousands of people had been streaming into the capital carrying signs ("Make Levees Not War," "How Many Lives Per Gallon?") and the area around the start of the march was now packed with people—standing, sitting, chanting, banging drums, shouting into bullhorns about cowardly Democrats, hanging from lamp posts dressed in all black, perched atop ornamental columns demanding action, now! What was unclear, given how thick the area had suddenly become with various liberal agendas (Native Americans against drilling in Alaska, young women against death in Iraq and in the womb), was whether the plan to keep the march focused on an antiwar message would work.

The energy for a big march had come largely from the mother of a dead soldier, Cindy Sheehan, whose summer protest outside of President Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas, reinvigorated an antiwar movement that had seemed listless, disillusioned, and ineffectual since Bush's reelection. The total number of antiwar mothers of dead soldiers, however, does not add up to a mass movement, and thus for the march on Washington all lefties had been invited—provided they stuck to the antiwar script.

I planted myself in the center of the action, the intersection where the march was to kick off, and watched in dismay as the script was promptly abandoned. The narcissism of the vocally oppressed was once again plunging the left into embarrassing confusion. Every group, it seemed, felt its gripe deserved to be at the front of the line of dissent, and if that meant elbowing the most effective antiwar advocates—families of dead soldiers, Iraq war veterans—out of the way, well, many were not above getting tough for their cause. As a result, the march began with anarchists, antiIMFers, and Free This-and-Thaters taking the lead, while those who were actually meant to be in the lead (Jesse Jackson, Cindy Sheehan, Al Sharpton, Joan Baez, Cornel West, Gold Star Families for Peace, Iraq Veterans Against the War, etc.) were forced to attempt an unplanned detour to outflank the limelight stealers.

Seeing this, a man in a yellow suit stepped off a sidewalk near me and walked into the crowd, shouting at whomever would listen: "This is why the Republicans are in the White House—because they don't have a march that goes in two different directions!"

Fortunately for the march, the mainstream media, when it focused on the march at all, focused mainly on the size of the protest and not on the conflicting messages and counterproductive jockeying for position. And the size of the protest was certainly impressive.

Organizers had hoped for 100,000 people. They got that, and probably closer to 150,000, making it the largest anti-war demonstration in the nation's capital since the Iraq war began. That meant that for the first time since the war started, a country that knows itself by its visuals now had a visual to go along with the sense of changing public opinion on Iraq: An image of a flood of people, young and old, from civilian families to parents of soldiers to veterans, filling the capital in opposition to one of Bush's signature policies. Companion marches occurring in several other European and American cities—including Seattle, where several thousand people turned out for a large rally at Westlake Plaza—only broadened the sense among those paying attention that something big had happened.

"That was a monster march," Lynn Bradach, a Gold Star mom from Portland whom I had followed to the protest, said to me afterward.

But not far beneath the expressions of pride at the outcome in D.C. was the question, What next? It seemed unclear, even to the protesters, whether what had happened represented the last great spasm of a summer of anti-Bush anger that began with Sheehan's protest and grew with Bush's failures during Hurricane Katrina, or whether it was the beginning of a sustained, coherent effort to end the war.

If it is to be the latter, antiwar advocates face two major hurdles. The first is the tendency of groups on the left toward self-defeating selfishness, an unhelpful myopia about the relative importance of their pet causes that keeps them from joining together on a broad message like "end the war" without feeling the need to tack on: "against women's rights," or "against the Palestinians," or "against the environment." The second hurdle is the antiwar movement's lack of a positive program beyond "Bring the troops home now." Even if the antiwar forces can all learn to stay on message, and even if they can find new ways to gain media attention (like the arrest of Sheehan, Bradach, and hundreds of others for staging a sit-in outside the White House two days after the march), there is likely an upper limit to how much support the antiwar movement can draw without a more nuanced proposal than "Bring the troops home now."

"Pulling Out Now = Iraq Civil War," read one of the counter-protest signs in D.C. And as one counter-protester at the march, expanding on the theme, told the Associated Press, "If you bring them home now, who's going to be responsible for all the atrocities that are fixing to happen over there? Cindy Sheehan?" Many Americans, even as they sour on the war, are wondering the same thing.

On the other hand, there is a clear utility in antiwar protesters staking out a position on the Iraq war that is so far left it almost circles round and joins hands with the isolationists on the far right. A "troops home now" position creates such a wide gulf between the dominant groupings of opinion of Iraq—essentially, "Stay the course" or "End the War Pretty Soon"—that an opportunity emerges for the leader who is willing to step in and talk about internationalizing responsibility for global trouble-spots like Iraq, and decreasing America's dependence on Middle East oil. A leader who talks, in other words, like a Democrat.