What’s an anti-war activist to do after war breaks out?

Judging from the peace movement in the eight months since the invasion of Iraq, there seem to be three options: Admit defeat, find a new cause or keep up the fight.

Thousands of people in England chose the latter option when they filled the streets of London last week on the occasion of President Bush’s state visit. The day after a banquet and a 41-gun salute for Bush at Buckingham Palace, demonstrators marched to drumbeats, whistles and shouts past Parliament and Downing Street to Trafalgar Square, where they tore down a 40-foot effigy of the president. Protest organizers said 150,000 people participated; police estimated 100,000.

“We’ve been inundated. We’ve been booking coaches to come from all over the country,” said Andrew Burgis, a spokesman for the Stop the War Coalition in London, in the days before the demonstrations began.

As the rare presence of the Iraq triggerman spurred foreign activists to stage the widely covered demonstrations, their counterparts in Bush country were probably watching from the sidelines with longing. Last spring, after diplomacy evaporated, bombs fell on Baghdad, Iraq, and Saddam Hussein’s statue toppled, the stricken American peace movement, once wide and vigorous, spiraled into a despondency from which it’s only now, with the challenge of the 2004 election on the horizon, beginning to recover.

“That televised destruction — it was a very potent image,” JoAnne Bauer said of the onset of war last March. “Compared to that, I felt minuscule. I felt like, what am I doing? It was very disillusioning.”

The Hartford, Conn., resident spoke last week at the close of a meeting of the Connecticut Coalition for Peace and Justice. In the spare setting of a Quaker meeting house in West Hartford, about 20 core members gather in the pews on Monday nights to discuss news developments — legal attacks on Greenpeace, reports of Iraqi and American death counts, Congressional action on the energy bill — and to coordinate the group’s peace agenda, which includes weekly demonstrations.

Despite the unflagging efforts of core activists to keep the fires of public protest burning, there’s no avoiding the fact that the anti-war movement failed. War happened in Iraq. It was, by definition, a crippling blow to the peace movement.

“I think it’s moribund. It’s on life support,” said Todd Gitlin, a professor of sociology and journalism at Columbia University and author of “Letters to a Young Activist.”