C. Bartlett,
Obviously ChuckO is not going to explain anything but I think you and I are coming to a consensus here. When you say that the strategy is "to stage exaggerated pacifist style protests," I think you are right on the mark. Even a pacifist protest is intended to provoke. Offhand, I can identify two tactics of the anarchists that worked in Seattle: pachinko balls and Starbucks. By that I mean that the surreptitious firing of pachinko balls with slingshots made the police go insane and look like fools (even though a couple anarchists were caught on camera shooting their slingshots). By "Starbucks" I mean the trashing of a Starbucks, and here we get into a more difficult area. Seattlites, although we go to Starbucks all the time, uniformly hate it. All across town, probably hundreds of times a day, the same conversation takes place. It starts with somebody who is either new to town or unfamiliar with the neighborhood:
"Hey, where can we get a latte?" the newcomer asks cheerfully.
The locals scratch their heads and then say, dejectedly: "Well, I guess we could go to the Starbucks around the corner." Of we trudge, feeling like pigs to the slaughter, although all the while the caffeine addiction centers in our brains are crying "Huzzah! Huzzah!." No matter how clean, pleasant and well-managed the Starbucks turns out to be, afterwards, one always feels polluted.
Thus when the rowdy kids and anarchists trashed a Starbucks on camera, Seattle cheered en masse - despite the fact that so many of us had probably been to that very Starbucks more than once. So long as they pick their targets carefully, people who take even destructive action can send the right message. But the line is very fine and once crossed the negative impact can be huge.
All told, I think the agitators in Seattle did great work in making the police go mad and making the letters "WTO" stand for controversy and danger in the minds of Americans. However, I think they lost the battle of post-demonstration spin almost immediately and the lynchpin issue was police tactics and conduct. The public in Seattle have, by and large, forgiven the police and that's really unfortunate. Next time there is a big demonstration in Seattle, things will start with the weight of sympathy tilted towards the police. The cops will show "new" tactics of massive riot lines and they will be wrongly credited if there's no violence and the protesters will be wrongly blamed if there is (the "logic" being that the police changed but the protesters are the same bad eggs as on N30).
peace,
boddi