WASHINGTON, DC — Remember Carlo Giuliani? Cast your mind back to July 2001 and the chaos of the protests at the G8 Summit in Genoa, Italy.

Giuliani was shot down by an Italian cop at the height of the anarchic protests in Genoa — a street battle that only upped the ante of earlier clashes between anti-globalization protesters and authorities in confrontations that stretched from the World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting in Seattle to the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland (see " Escalating Violence, " Editorial, July 26, 2001). Even Giuliani’s checkered past as an anti-authoritarian hooligan didn’t mar his death’s symbolic power. Millions of people live on the edge of poverty in globalization’s wake, but the 23-year-old Italian anarchist was the protest movement’s first martyr — a young, doomed face that summed up worldwide frustration.

In a parallel universe, a world in which the 9/11 terrorist attacks never happened, Giuliani’s picture by now might have emblazoned T-shirts. The photographs of his prone and bleeding body on a Genoa street could have galvanized a generation in the same way that the photos of a woman grieving over student Jeffrey Miller’s body at the 1970 Kent State protests further electrified US anti-Vietnam protests, or images of German student Benno Ohnesorg (shot dead in a West Berlin protest in 1967) kicked off a decade of violent leftist politics that culminated in the terrorism of the Baader-Meinhof Gang.

But Al Qaeda’s suicide attack did happen, leaving thousands dead in New York and hundreds of other casualties in Washington, DC, and Pennsylvania. The terrorists also shattered any number of illusions, and the ripples from that tragic day have redefined global politics and economics. But the 9/11 attacks’ most immediate effect, particularly in the United States, was to suck the energy and fury from the emerging global-justice movement.

September 11’s effect on the global-justice movement was instantaneous and profound. Organizers had planned to bring Genoa-style protests to the streets of Washington, DC, in September 2001, to protest the annual meeting of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. Before the 9/11 attacks, there were predictions that 100,000 people or more would take to the streets of Washington to protest the two institutions seen as the primary symbols of globalization. After the attacks, the IMF and World Bank canceled their meetings, and fewer than 10,000 people turned up to march in a more generic fashion against imminent war in Afghanistan.

The looming imminence of a US-led attack on Iraq has filled up the streets again — and in even greater numbers than before. Yet the outrage about issues such as poverty, predatory capitalism, and a global trading system stacked against the Third World has been lost in the sharply focused attack on the Bush administration’s rush to war. The street battles that made Giuliani into a martyr have also disappeared for the moment, put aside with the understanding that a peace movement can’t be rooted in violence and property destruction. The highly successful worldwide mass antiwar mobilization of February 15 may have had its roots in the global-justice movement, but those marches didn’t focus on its core issues.

Yet one of the unintended ironies of the imminent Iraq attack is that it has also disheartened ardent globalizers. The dark cloud that hung over this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, was not cast by global-justice protesters — though thousands did gather there to protest, with another 150,000 convening at an anti-globalization " World Social Forum " meeting in Brazil — but rather by the imminent war on Iraq. The specter of war dominated the world’s pre-eminent globalization gathering, creating a notably downbeat air for the businessmen and politicians who normally gather to discuss the inexorable march of globalization.

As Howard Stringer, president of Sony Corporation of America, mused aloud to a reporter for the Chicago Tribune at this year’s Davos gathering: " At a time of economic downturn and an impending war, how do you separate the demonstrators outside from the hostility inside? The demonstrators have become peculiarly redundant. "

The US drive to war with Iraq has done something that Carlo Giuliani probably never dreamed was possible: it has forged an agreement between the proselytizers of globalization and those who are dedicated to fighting its injustices and inequities. Neither wants to see an Iraq war.