Inside protest headquarters, up a flight of stairs from a discount tire shop on New York Avenue, a recent coordinating meeting veered toward chaos.

The 70 activists, who had plenty of ideas but no apparent leader, got bogged down in making a decision about whether the group had the power to make decisions. People needed to lean in to hear one another over the din made by a drummer warming up in another room. Someone confessed he'd made 150 copies of an important proposal but forgotten to bring them, and a baseball cap made its way around the circle -- the evening's main attempt at fundraising...

"We just go with the flow," antiwar activist Jose J. Rodriguez of Alexandria announced in the middle of the two-hour meeting, undaunted. "We're like water going downhill. They can't stop us."