It's an uphill climb.

The challenge facing this incipient peace movement is whether it can evolve into a potent force -- as did opposition to the Vietnam War -- or whether it will remain a sideshow with little impact on how the United States wages its battle against terrorism.

The Bay Area's war protesters in the late '60s and early '70s had advantages. Theirs was a widely unpopular war, fought far from home (without homeland terrorism) for reasons unpersuasive to many Americans. The draft was in full swing, and growing weekly death counts were frightening.

Today's anti-war fervor comes at the end of an era when activism had faded. For much of the 1990s, the Bay Area was synonymous in the national imagination not with protest but with an obsession with stock options, million-dollar homes, BMWs and upscale restaurants. Young people streamed to the Bay Area not to challenge the power elite but aspiring to become part of it.

Since Sept. 11, a new generation of anti-war activists has begun to reconnect with the Bay Area's past. Rallies, marches and teach-ins resemble protests against U.S. policies regarding Vietnam, El Salvador, the Gulf War, South Africa and elsewhere.

While familiar, the new protests have a distinctive flavor. Giant puppets of President George W. Bush were displayed at a large march in San Francisco's Mission District last weekend. And at a lunchtime rally at the University of California at Berkeley on Monday, several non-Muslim demonstrators sported kaffiyehs, a traditional Arab headdress.

Chants have been updated. In 1970, students protesting the secret U.S. air war against Cambodia yelled, "On Strike, Shut It Down" as they tried to close universities. Last week, Berkeley students shouted, "Join Us, Take a Stand, Stop the Bombing in Afghanistan." (And a small group of counter-protesters, shouting "USA! USA! USA!" held signs proclaiming, "Terrorize Terrorism!")

For the anti-war protests to become more than just a cry from the heart -- or a soapbox for complaints against U.S. policies abroad -- today's peace movement will have to come up with more than slogans.

A fundamental problem is that the protesters have been unable to generate a clear alternative to the Bush administration's anti-terrorism strategy. It's one thing to decry the bombing of Afghan citizens. It's quite another to come up with a realistic strategy to stop another murderous attack by bin Laden or his cronies.

At one Berkeley rally, an emblematic moment occurred when a counter- demonstrator confronted an anti-war protester.

"No one wants this war," she said. "Sometimes violence is unavoidable. What is your solution?''

There was no response.

Just what is the protesters' strategy?

There isn't one.

Adding to the confusion is that progressives are themselves divided. Many believe the United States has no choice but to chase down Osama bin Laden and his terrorist collaborators. Others think that by doing so the United States is playing into his hands. And some don't know what to think.

Two days after the attack, Alice Walker, author of "The Color Purple" and other books, argued before a packed crowd at the Berkeley Community Theater that the answer is love and compassion, rooted in Buddhist principles.

Kevin Danaher, co-founder of San Francisco-based Global Exchange says "tough love" is needed.

"I'm all for heart, but these guys are killers, they are mass murders, they can't be ignored," says Danaher. This is not an anti-war movement, he says, but a fight for "global justice."

"If you're going to get these guys, you need something more sophisticated than just bombing and killing," he says. "I don't want them dead. I want them alive. I want them on the stand. And I want whoever aided or abetted them behind bars."

Another obstacle to building an effective opposition is that often the new protests have turned into fuzzy forums for complaints about every conceivable misdeed. At the Berkeley rally, for example, one student dressed in a black cape declared, "Terrorism didn't start on Sept. 11 -- it started the day Christopher Columbus set foot on American soil."

Few protesters have embraced the new mood of patriotism that has surfaced even in some radical strongholds of the Bay Area. That will make it tougher to win over the 9 out of 10 Americans who support the war. Protesters wearing kaffiyehs risk inciting the same "love it or leave i" hostility Vietnam War protesters faced a generation ago. Arguing that dissent is itself patriotic is a hard sell when people's nerves are at the breaking point.

For the growing but scattered movement to morph into a full-fledged social and political force will also depend on events beyond its control.

Will there be large number of U.S. casualties? Will there be more terrorist attacks? Will there be a draft? How long will the war go on? Will it evolve into a wider war? Will it drain the nation's financial reserves? Will other interest groups and constituencies rise up against it?

For now, the budding peace movement has shown surprising vitality. Alice Hamburg, a 95-year-old peace activist from Berkeley, says people have responded more quickly than at the beginning stages of the Vietnam War.

"You can't expect that within a week people will come flocking to the peace movement," says Hamburg, whose autobiography, "Grassroots: From Prairie to Politics," will be published later this month. "That is too much to expect. It is a slow process."

But as the conflict deepens, as it is sure to do, the peace movement will have to engage in some fancy footwork. It will need a clear message, a well- defined purpose and a compelling answer to combatting terrorism without dropping bombs. Recycling Vietnam-era rhetoric won't work.

"The way this war is going to touch people is different," says Charles Wollenberg, chairman of the Social Sciences Department at Vista Community College in Berkeley. "The fact that there was this terrible attack on U.S. soil justifies it in a way the Vietnam War never could be."

©2001 San Francisco Chronicle

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