Protest: They thought the global peace movement was all over. It isn't now...

A few years ago Mary Bull was a corporate executive earning $150,000 (£95,000) a year. Last Friday, she was one of a group of masked women, called the Mourning Mothers, who wrapped dolls symbolising dead Iraqi babies in a giant Union Jack and handed them to the British consulate in San Francisco in protest against the looming military showdown with Saddam Hussein.

The awakening of Ms Bull's political consciousness has been a gradual process from campaigning against the ruination of northern California's redwood forests to becoming a fully fledged activist against corporate globalisation. Most recently, she has diverted her energy into the campaign to prevent a war in the Middle East and spends most of her time organising a grassroots organisation called Direct Action to Stop the War.

"The public is not going to roll over and play dead any more," she says. "We're awake, and planning to let everyone know it."

Her own awakening, she says, has been mirrored by hundreds of thousands of others across the United States and millions across the Western world who have been shaken out of their humdrum daily lives by indignation at the threat of an unprovoked US invasion of Iraq. "We're talking soccer mums and matronly housewives," said Ms Bull.

"Almost everyone involved is new to activism. When 50 people opposed to the war turned out last October to close down the federal building in San Francisco, none of them had been involved in civil disobedience before. We trained them the night before, and then they went ahead."

Lack of energy is clearly not a problem for the burgeoning anti-war movement. Starting in October, wave after wave of protest has attracted ever larger crowds on to the streets. During the weekend of 15-16 February about 10 million people turned out globally to protest against the push for war, with principal events in London and New York.

Street demonstrations are only one aspect of a multi-faceted protest movement. One day last week, tens of thousands of people bombarded the switchboard of the White House and other US government offices with protest calls and e-mails, an initiative known as the Virtual March on Washington, which halted much business in the capital.

On Monday night, more than 700 theatre groups in 42 countries led co-ordinated readings of the Aristophanes anti-war comedy Lysistrata. Later, in an initiative called Books not Bombs, high school and college students across the United States walked out of their classrooms. In Italy, hundreds of protesters have just spent a week blocking trains carrying US weapons and personnel on their way to a military base outside Pisa and Italian dockers have staged work stoppages rather than load arms shipments destined for the Gulf. There have been repeated demonstrations at Shannon airport in Ireland, used as a refuelling stop for American military planes, and last Saturday 10 people were arrested for breaching an airport fence.

Nine activists recently had to be pulled off the gates of a US military building in Rotterdam. There were further protests outside two American bases in Germany and at RAF Fairford, Gloucestershire. Perhaps most strikingly, dozens of activists have volunteered themselves as "human shields" against the allies' bombs in Iraq.

In Hollywood there is Artists United To Win Without War, a collection of celebrity actors and directors who miss no opportunity to wear their politics on their designer sleeves. In New York, we now have Musicians United To Win Without War, spanning genres from the rapper Jay Z to Sheryl Crow.

And this is before the first shot has been fired, or first bomb dropped. Once hostilities break out, protesters in San Francisco have ambitious plans to try to bring their city to a total standstill through an informal system of boycotts and absenteeism from work and school. In France and Italy, unions are also talking about staging general strikes. Groups such as Britain's Stop the War Coalition would aim to stage a worldwide day of protest on the Saturday after the outbreak of war, in the hope of equalling or even eclipsing the February turn-out.

The energy of the anti-war movement is one thing, results quite another. Has any of this exuberance and new-found political consciousness actually changed anything? President George Bush, for one, has responded to public sentiment against his war plans by sounding even more determined to go ahead with them. So does that mean the anti-war movement is failing?

Norman Mailer, the celebrated chronicler of America's notable anti-war movement in the Vietnam era, dismissed the new generation of protesters as pampered no-nothings without the necessary fire in their bellies. "Look at all those protesters, those young professionals pushed into the side streets by the police in the New York march," he told one gathering in Los Angeles. "They all got bored and took out their cell phones. Probably on the phone with their brokers! No war for oil! Ha!"

Michael Lerner, a liberal rabbi and peace activist from San Francisco, lamented that the anti-war movement had been unable to overcome Americans' sense of fear "manipulated by militarists and political opportunists to lead ordinarily decent people to the conclusion that we can only be safe by wiping out others".

But Stephen Zunes, a political science professor who has become one of the movement's leading academic voices, said: "Without the anti-war movement, the war would have started some time ago." Among the achievements, he sees, was forcing the United States and Britain to go through the United Nations, rather than attempting to act alone, and creating an international atmosphere of dissent that has encouraged powers such as France and Germany to stay the anti-war course. He also believed the movement had emboldened the Turkish parliament, which last weekend narrowly rejected stationing American troops on its soil.

"The stronger the anti-war movement is, the more foreign governments will speak out," Professor Zunes argued. "If countries are nervous of being accused of being anti-American, they can now say, look, America itself is divided."

The effect on President Bush and his inner circle should also not be underestimated said Professor Zunes.

"They may profess not to care but there are segments of this society that may indeed have an impact," he added.

Certain things about this movement seem to distinguish it from past protests. One is its remarkable diversity, even in the United States. Not just the usual left-liberal suspects with their tie-dyes and political correct slogans, but Spanish-speaking bus drivers, public health workers, suburban mothers and their children, blue-collar production line workers, lawyers and Republican-voting executives.

There has been an unprecedented unity of religious voices, thanks to the establishment of interfaith councils in cities across the United States and the statements of countless church leaders, including the Pope. Also unprecedented is the participation of the big labour unions, who were notoriously quiet during the Vietnam War and generally supported the defence establishment during the Cold War, in part because of the job opportunities it afforded to its membership.

Now economic conditions are pushing the unions into an anti-war stance, including a formal statement from the executive council of the AFL-CIO – the US equivalent of the TUC – last week. Tens of billions of dollars spent in Iraq will compromise the American economy, the argument runs, and strangle the labour market.

Perhaps most important of all in the growth of the movement has been the role played by the internet. It has been invaluable in sharing information. With a growing constituency in the United States becoming convinced the American media is not giving an honest or complete picture, people have turned to alternative sources online, notably the European press, including this newspaper.

In the United States, where the erosion of public participation in the political process has been particularly acute in recent years, the anti-war movement has had all sorts of unforeseeable liberating effects. Neighbours in ritzy Los Angeles residential areas are suddenly talking to each other for the first time, and in many cases organising.

Whole websites and political organisations have sprung up, based on the simple proposition that people want a place to share their views with other like-minded citizens.