Marc Herman  Letter to the Editors  Dear Believer,  Dear
Believer,  Ten years ago a crowd estimated at between fifty
thousand and a quarter million people gathered in San Francisco
to protest plans to invade Iraq. The Believer was to debut a few
weeks after the protest and decided to cover it. By then the
invasion was in motion and the protest was moot. By most
publishing logic the story was a waste of space. In hindsight,
it’s turned out to mostly be a portrait of a failure, and that
was not the intention. The fact was inescapable, though: the
march had occurred under the assumption that it would not stop
the war.  “You have to pretend you’re a free person, even when
you’re not,” Jason Mark, one of the march’s organizers, says in
the 2003 story. He was trying to paraphrase the late Václav
Havel’s famous statement on heroism, but mangled the job, so it
comes out sounding like hopelessness. I’d been told the working
title of the magazine was the Optimist. This seemed, at the
time, optimistic, but in the end th