The Road to Surfdom hits the nail on his head: dissent is a right, not a priviledge.
But the flipside of that claim is this: that freedom wouldn?t be worth a toss unless people like those who marched against a war with Iraq, and who argue against it and demand answers of those in power and who do not simply trust Bush or any other government merely to do what they like, such freedom would be meaningless unless dissenters of all types were willing to put up with all the insults and the accusations of treason and of being unpatriotic and actually get out in the streets to put that freedom to use.
Those who sling this accusation??you couldn?t protest if you lived in Iraq?–have the whole thing exactly backwards, or at the very least, haven?t thought it through.
Far from being the lucky recipients of a free society that allows them to protest, those who go out and protest are its guarantors, the only ones who put those freedoms to the test and make sure that they actually mean something. Without their willingness march, the much vaunted freedoms would be wistful abstractions, just as they were in Soviet Russia, a state that possessed one of the lovelier paper guarantees of democratic freedom.