ST. LOUIS, Mo. – The second national assembly of the nation’s largest anti-war coalition, United for Peace and Justice, turned a cold and rainy St. Louis into Moscow on the Mississippi over the weekend.

More than 400 progressives, representing the spectrum of left-wing political thought, met to carve out an agenda for coordinating protests against American foreign policy. The groups represented here ranged from hard-core Marxists to several organizations that asserted the attacks of September 11, 2001, were the result of a cunning collaboration between Israeli intelligence and the CIA to further American imperial ambitions.

United for Peace and Justice, or UFPJ, is an umbrella group that seeks to unite about 900 disparate organizations – from Academics for Peace to the Young Communist League USA – to focus on protesting every aspect of American foreign policy. Member groups sent delegates to St. Louis to vote on the size and nature of the year’s foreign policy protests.

While the focus of the assembly was on international issues, attendees voiced a good deal of outrage over most aspects of American domestic policy as well.

The consensus reached at this year’s conference, according to a spokesman, Bill Dobbs, is that UFPJ will expand its protest activity against the Iraq war and Israeli military operations in the Palestinian territories to include potential American military and covert action against Iran and Syria. Mr. Dobbs said many protests would also seek to heighten awareness of the costs of American military operations to local communities.

Whether UFPJ will be able to garner mainstream support and chip away at congressional support for the war and President Bush’s foreign policy is another question entirely. Despite a series of large global anti-war rallies sponsored by UPFJ in 2003, the national elections of 2002 and 2004 made clear that the anti-war platform – to say nothing of socialism itself – remains a difficult sell to the American public.

“I honestly cannot explain why Americans consistently embrace war and are now talking about expanding it,” the national coordinator of UFPJ, Leslie Cagan, said in an interview with The New York Sun.

Ms. Cagan is something of a legend in the modern far left, being a longtime, unapologetic communist who has remained one of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro’s most tireless supporters.

The UPFJ has maintained its connection to communism. A member of the Communist Party USA, Judith LeBlanc, spoke in St. Louis last weekend and serves on UPFJ’s board of administrators.

Those at the conference did not seem particularly concerned by the presence of a communist on the group’s board, or even aware that many Americans would perceive it as a problem. A member of the War Resisters League and an organizer for the Socialist Party USA, Thomas Good of Staten Island, said the communism that many UFPJ members advocate is simply “a purer form of socialism, dedicated to combating American imperialism.”

At the opening session of the conference, attendees were asked to “prioritize voices of youth, gender, and color” when making a statement or answering a question. They were also told to be aware of “power group status” and “socioeconomic hierarchy” when speaking, or, as it is called on the left, “self-facilitating.”

There were hundreds of pamphleteers passing out manifestos and statements of conscience. There were caucuses and plenaries, study groups, and 14 documentary films being shown on a continuous loop. Some of the films – which were not to be called “movies,” but rather “statements of video activism”- had the feel of a “My Left-Wing Vacation at the Anti-Globalization Riot: Miami 2003” home movie.

The plenaries were like 12-step meetings for people angry about the Iraq war. They didn’t reach a consensus on how the war might be wrapped up quickly, but the loudest cheers were for proposals to pay reparations to the Iraqi people and expand a program of “countering” military recruitment on high-school and college campuses by having peace and justice workers available to counsel potential recruits.

To provide some entertainment from recounting the horrors of free market capitalism, a woman named Tiye Giraud performed a protest song in an African dialect while shaking a gourd. She received a standing ovation. Later Saturday, Ms. Giraud and 15 other women did an interpretive dance called “Imagination and the Struggle for Peace.”

In the assembly’s exhibition hall, various groups peddled their wares. At one table, a woman sold handcrafted Palestinian Arab head scarves, or keffiyeh, to express solidarity with those affected by the so-called Israeli occupation of Palestine. Moreover, she had a television showing still images from the Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib prisons. The woman, who declined to give her name, said she stood in solidarity with all victims of “American imperialism” since she got back from a trip to Palestine with the International Solidarity Movement, a group dedicated to protesting Israel’s policy toward Palestine.

Another popular table was set up by groups that believe the September 11, 2001, attacks were the work of the American government.

For the current generation of left-wing activists, the terrorist attacks have usurped the assassination of President Kennedy as the symbol of federal malevolence. There is some debate, however, about precisely what the government might have gained from slaughtering more than 3,000 people that day, with fault lines developing between those who say it was pure war-lust and others who offer a corporate wealth interpretation, citing Halliburton, defense contractors, and a Washington-based private equity firm, the Carlisle Group, as key examples.

A member of the Northern California 9/11 Truth Alliance said she had concluded that American intelligence and the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence unit, jointly staged the attacks. She acknowledged that the assertion is controversial even among members of the September 11, 2001, revisionist community. She said some think the Mossad tried to warn the CIA that an attack was pending.