By Tom Plate

Before hardly anyone in Washington or the mass media realize it, a spring of protest may bloom on the West Coast that will remind people of the bad old days of Vietnam.

A week and a half ago, tens of thousands participated in an anti-war protest in Los Angeles, and on Saturday, San Francisco took a turn in the protest spotlight. Anti-war rallies were also to be held in Orange County, California, near the Richard Nixon Presidential Library, and in Washington, D.C.

The demographics of these events are telling. Showing up these days: Not just the usual kooky cadres of semi-professional protest junkies, anti-globalization crusaders and whacked-out conspiracy theorists, but protesters from the solid middle class as well. This means it's time for Washington to start worrying.

So should the U.S. media. They have been slow to pick up on the story — as decades ago when the establishment media was late to comprehend the dimensions of the tumult and generational divisiveness prompted by the Vietnam War.

The missing story is that a rapidly growing number of centrist Americans oppose the Bush administration's unilateral threats against Iraq and its bizarre approach to North Korea. They also oppose its domestic law-enforcement and intelligence methods for combating terrorism.

Perhaps reconstituted memory as much as hard analysis is involved here. West Coasters, noting the recent arrests and clandestine imprisonments of Iranians and Muslims, recall the awful internment of Japanese-Americans six decades ago that still haunts our past. We recall that in 1942, the government routed 120,000 Japanese out of their homes and stashed them in detention camps — even though the majority were solid American citizens or legal permanent residents. The fear then was that some were working for Tokyo as spies, so forget the procedural protections of the Fifth Amendment and due process.

Back to the future? In Southern California, with its huge Iranian population, today's "Middle Eastern types" are starting to resemble yesteryear's interned Japanese. In December, the government lured males 16 or older in Southern California on visas from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Sudan and Syria to Immigration and Naturalization Service offices for visa checks. Thousands came voluntarily, though it is presumed that no self-respecting terrorist with an IQ over 50 showed up. So the government got only the cooperative guys — who, for their honesty, were cuffed on the spot, allegedly for technical visa violations; in reality, they face further interrogations and many remain in jail, held in secret, closed to the news media.

This is precisely the approach taken by regimes that have little in common with the United States — such as Iraq and North Korea. A regulation that allows "confinement of the person, by secretly hurrying him to jail," wrote Alexander Hamilton in Federalist Paper No. 84, is a "dangerous engine of arbitrary government." It's clear 9/11 uprooted America in more ways than one.

If the government believes constitutionally questionable measures are necessary for national security, it should lay its reasons on the table.

Let's debate the issue. But the horror of 9/11 has allowed President Bush to move in a direction that someday he, not to mention history, may well regret.

Probably, though, Bush will not turn into the second coming of Lyndon Johnson. For starters, any war against Iraq or North Korea will probably not go on interminably, as did Vietnam. Another factor is that Vietnam prompted the widespread draft of young men, whereas today volunteers make up the U.S. military. This is a big difference.

Also, while the U.S. establishment media have been slow to saddle up on this story, this can't last for long. A good story is a good story, and many U.S. media executives well recall what happened during Vietnam; many of them were in the streets protesting — or dodging the draft.

Finally, it is on the West Coast where challenges to U.S. establishment thinking or conventional American wisdom often originate.

The internment of the Japanese in World War II was so obviously un-American, at least viewed in retrospect, that no one wants to see a repeat. So the protests will get larger and louder. Perhaps it will turn out that the innocent Japanese who six decades ago lost their freedom and dignity did not suffer in vain.

Tom Plate, a columnist with The Honolulu Advertiser, is a professor at UCLA. Reach him at tplate@ucla.edu. He also has a spot on the Web.