Well, Where is the Anti-War Movement?
Tags: Kooks, liberal lies.
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An Instapundit reader asks:
Notice how there was no “antiwar” movement during the ‘90’s, even though we were at war the entire time in Iraq, Haiti, Kosovo, a dab here and there in Afghanistan and Sudan. Then, after 9/11, it was the “Next Vietnam” with a passionate “antiwar” movement with the NYT’s full treasonous participation, just like the good old days. And now, even though the daily death count has matched the highest daily rate we ever saw in Iraq, there is no “antiwar” movement or daily casualty count in all the newspapers. It’s like the “antiwar” movement can be turned off and on like a switch, depending on which party is in the White House.
Well, where are you guys? Where the “no blood for oil” demonstrations? The attempts to put Obama up on war crimes charges? The “Obama lied, people died” posters? Come now – or is being “anti-war” really just a matter of being “anti-GOP”?
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18 Responses to “Well, Where is the Anti-War Movement?”
Caucus of Corruption
An anti-war movement that was correct with respect to all the human, economic, and geopolitical costs of the war in Iraq (while its proponents were horribly wrong) is, hesitantly, pleased that we are on a path to troop drawdowns in Iraq and that Iraqis are taking over general security roles.
Answer your question?
Winnowhead, we are in a position to draw our troops out of Iraq because of the success of the surge, which the anti-war movement and most congressional Dems (if you’ll pardon the redundancy) opposed. The opponents of the war in Iraq were themselves horribly wrong about the war being “for oil”, and about Bush “lying” about WMD’s, conveniently forgetting that the Clinton administration also thought that Saddam’s government had them.
Mark, having said that, let me also say that we probably won’t hear “No blood for oil” about Afghanistan, because Afghanistan has no oil to speak of, nor “Obama lied” because there’s no WMD controversy.
On the other hand, the anti-war movement chided us with “Saddam never attacked us”, but never bothered to notice that “Milosevic never attacked us” while Mr. Bill was sending our Air Force over there to bomb Serbia. While the UK was the one country besides the US doing the heavy lifting in both wars, only in Iraq did the anti-war movement say anything about us being “unilateral”. (Did you know that the US had fewer allies, and provided a larger percentage of the troops, in Korea than in Iraq?) While a few anti-war people said that Dubya should send Barbara and Jenna to Iraq, no one that I can remember called for Mr. Bill to have Chelsea enlist in the Air Force, during the bombing of Serbia. (No matter what else happens, I sincerely hope that Sasha and Malia Obama are spared from such crassness.)
Of course, some will say that our intervention in Serbia and Kosovo was justified for humanitarian reasons, that Milosevic, Karadzic and others were committing “genocide”. If so, let them count the number of Kosovars and Croats killed by Milosevic, etc., and the number of Kurds and Shiites killed by Saddam, and then tell us which pile of dead bodies is bigger.
bigfoot,
No, there’s an oil angle for Afghanistan – its absurdly stupid, but that didn’t stop the so-called anti-war movement from using it – the reason we’re in Afghanistan, goes the anti-war movement circa 2002, is because we want to build an oil pipeline across it. And even without that, the fact that US military forces under the command of President Obama have killed innocent civilians – that it was an unfortunate incident of war didn’t stop the anti-war movement from calling President Bush a war criminal, so where are the charges against Obama? And as for the “Obama lied, people died” meme, Obama promised to have out out of Iraq a lot sooner than he expects…and he also is hesitant about actually closing Gitmo, and we know how the anti-war movement says that Gitmo convinces people to join the terrorists…so, “Obama lied, people died”.
But we really know the truth of the matter – the so-called anti-war movement isn’t anti-war, just anti-GOP…with this caveat: if Obama’s policies threaten the left’s hold on power, they’ll spring to life with opposition to Obama’s criminal war in Afghanistan.
winnow,
BS.
Bigfoot,
Arguable at best. The only solution in Iraq is a political one; while the “surge” may have improved the security situation somewhat, the reconciliations going on politically at the time were at least as significant.
But that’s somewhat besides the point, because arguing with someone who is making the point that the actual cost of the war is many orders of magnitude over what was claimed by the hawks, by quoting an escalation policy that happened almost 5 years after the fact, is arguing apples vs oranges.
And I’ll trump your “consensus” that Hussein had WMDs with plenty of insiders at the time who challenged the notion, and raise you an obscene amount of innuendo that Iraq was erroneously tied to 9/11 and al Qaeda.
They were humanitarian wars, and they were sold to us as such. Hussein’s Kurdish body count, that happened over a decade before the invasion under the other Bush, is again an apples vs. oranges comparison. We didn’t intervene in Iraq to stop an ongoing genocide; we used a decade-old one as after-the-fact justification.
I think that the lack of an anti-war movement during the Obama Administration comes from the fact that both of the wars he’s fighting were inherited, originated by his predecessor.
Furthermore, he is withdrawing from Iraq, and he is actually doing the job in Afghanistan (a little war that went by the wayside when Bush invaded Iraq, something that many who were against to the Iraq War, including myself, disagreed with). There’s a reason he got the support of Colin Powell…
h t t p ://www.nnomy.org/joomla/
h t t p ://www.davidswanson.org/node/1945
h t t p ://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/nov05election/detail?blogid=14&entry_id=43676
I could post a hundred more…
Come now – or is being “anti-war” really just a matter of being “anti-GOP”?
Enough with the rhetorical questions…
Obama does his Bush impression
You beat me to it. I just finished rebutting that exact moronic claim over at my regular haunt.
Soooo, where is the media, covering all the non-existent protests? I’ve yet to see any coverage of any gatherings, and we had a major holiday that the left uses for its war protests–Memorial Day. Where were they?
It’s as if we’re not at war at all anymore…
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OK, that about sums up one of the major Lib talking points.
you should have fixed what we broke when you had the chance so it’s really YOUR fault
you should have fixed what we broke when you had the chance so it’s really YOUR fault
you should have fixed what we broke when you had the chance so it’s really YOUR fault
you should have fixed what we broke when you had the chance so it’s really YOUR fault
you should have fixed what we broke when you had the chance so it’s really YOUR fault
you should have fixed what we broke when you had the chance so it’s really YOUR fault
That’s the second.
Obama told the RRL what he had to tell them to get into office, and then he had a good look at the same info Bush had been working from and realized that as much as his personal inclination was to stop fighting, and as much as his uber-radical base was counting on him to do so, at some time in the future the information he was seeing would be declassified and it would be clear to the world that he had ignored this intelligence to appease some political supporters and indulge a personal bias, putting the nation at risk—a very poor legacy for a man whose overweening ego and ambition make him expect to go down in history as the man who singlehandedly remade a republic. Now that he knows what Bush knew, he also knows he has no choice but to fight this war.
And Sergei is right when he says: “It’s like the “antiwar” movement can be turned off and on like a switch, depending on which party is in the White House.” The leaders of the so-called anti war movement are not so much anti-war as aware they can use this volatile topic to inflame and energize the over-emotional and gullible, and they are pragmatic enough to know that it is a weapon to be used only against the opposition.
Amazona,
I agree, being anti-war myself, I am appalled at how quickly the movement got no press after 2007 when the so called anti war Pelosi and co. got into power. We still have demonstrations, send mailers, contact our Congresspersons, and shout from the rooftops but we get less publicity than the TEA parties.
We are opposed to the current occupation of Iraq, we are opposed to the continued involvement in Afghanastan, we want our milatary to be used to defend our country. We don’t hate the men and women of our milatary; we don’t want them used by either side as pawns in political games.
And we are sick of the so called free press taking sides! Report what we say and do, report what they say and do and let the people decide. The New York Times is as responsible for the Iraq invasion as those that planned and approved it.
winnowhead says: July 18th, 2009 at 12:12 am
yep agree.
speaking as a gulf 1 vet, the iraq invasion was not a righteous war.
there were no nukes.
there never was.
wow, rana, using your twisted logic, Nixon should not have been subject to protest for the Vietnam war he inherited from Johnson, that Johnson inherited from Kennedy.
Wow, anything to protect the Obamateur.
Uh, duh, orrin (sorry for the redundancy). We never SAID there were nukes in Iraq, you hosebib.
No one said there were nukes in Iraq.
What was said, and proved, was that Sadaam was trying to develop a nuclear program, and there were differing opinions on how close he was, but unanimous agreement that if he were to be successful it would be a disaster.
But yeah, you right, never was no nukes
tiredoflibbs-
I think that they were more pissed about Nixon ordering bombings of Cambodia.
Where is the humanity in Obama lobbing missles into Pakistan an allied country and killing innocent women and children?
Obama is a war monger!
Obama has blood on his hands!
Impeach Obama the baby killer!
I was quoting Mark. One way you can tell that is by the fact that the phrase was a block quotation. Another is the way I immediately provided a counterexample.
How is our involvement in Afghanistan not self-defense?
Nice try.
By the way, there wasn’t a nuclear program, either.