The driving force of the earlier anti-war rallies was the war in Iraq, not Afghanistan. While the Af-Pak fight has lost considerable public support, the first war had broader support, as it targeted the actual 9/11 villains and their cohorts. The protests against the wars got fueled mainly by our presence in Iraq, and peaked when Bush put the surge strategy into place. The success of that strategy and the Status of Forces Agreement that moved American troops out of the cities and into support roles has removed most of the objections to Iraq, and for good reason — why protest a war that’s all but over? Ed is right. Combat deaths in the summer of 2008 were less than 1/3 of what they’d been in 2007. The surge had worked and everyone, including the kooks with the Hitler signs at anti-war rallies, knew it. Ideologically, the left lost the argument over Iraq. The war wasn’t endless or doomed to fail. The surge wasn’t insanity. It worked. Candidate Obama was repeatedly asked if he’d been wrong to oppose the surge and always dodged the answer. But he knew, and his supporters knew, that had we followed his counsel, i.e. cut and run, we really would have witnessed failure.
So now President Obama’s Afghanistan plan is a carbon copy of Bush’s Iraq strategy. Why is the left silent or close to it? Because they know it can work. The anti-war movement didn’t defeat Bush, he defeated them. They didn’t change his mind, he changed their minds. In fact, he defeated them so completely that they are now content to sit quietly and hope his plan and his hand-picked general can get it done once more without him.
