[Peace-discuss] Neocon triumph

[C. G. Estabrook]

[The upmarket New York Sun assesses the antiwar movement.  --CGE]

	End of a Movement
	BY ELI LAKE
	October 24, 2007
	URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/65135

The People. United. Can in fact be defeated. Well not exactly, but this 
must be what America's anti-war movement is thinking as Congress and the 
president iron out the funding for the war with no danger of the 
Democrats attaching a withdrawal date to the bill. The Dems don't have 
the votes.

It's enough to deflate the spirits of our nation's most hardened 
pacifists. Take Medea Benjamin, the leader of Code Pink, an association 
of mainly senior citizen women who dress up and shout slogans at 
Congressional war hearings. In an interview in the current issue of 
Mother Jones, Ms. Benjamin said that she doubted that the troops would 
be withdrawn even within a year's time. "Well, I think it's kind of 
silly to talk about it because it's just not going to happen," she said. 
Code Pink now is hoping to end the war by the end of 2008.

It's an extraordinary statement for the leader of an organization that 
produced a YouTube ad last month featuring women in pink jockey outfits 
riding Democratic leaders of Congress like they were horses. The 
narrator tells the viewer: "With your help we can dominate Congress with 
peacemakers and finally end this illegal, immoral and unconstitutional 
occupation." Apparently the plan for peacemaker domination has run into 
some snags.

As the Hill newspaper reported on October 19, the legislative 
representative of American Against Escalation in Iraq, John Bruhns, a 
former Army Sergeant who participated in the 2003 invasion, has left the 
organization. "I feel I've done all I can," he told the newspaper. "I 
can't continue to attack members of Congress to pass legislation that 
isn't going to get passed."

Mr. Bruhns had worked on something the anti-war movement called "Iraq 
Summer," an initiative aimed at getting 50 Republicans to break with the 
president on the war. That goal seemed plausible in July when the former 
chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, John Warner, was 
threatening to vote with Democrats on withdrawal dates. But in September 
Mr. Warner said that arguing for some troops to come home by Christmas 
barely changed the ayes and nays in the senate.

The anti-war movement has not even managed to get any of the big three 
Democrats running for president to embrace their goal of an immediate 
withdrawal. Gone are John Edwards' rhetorical excesses of the spring, 
promising not to leave even Marines to guard the new American embassy in 
Baghdad.

Today Mr. Edwards, like Senators Obama and Clinton, concede that in 
their administration there will still be some troops in Iraq in 2009, 
probably between 50,000 and 70,000. Also, the Democratic party's 
professional agitators must know that Mrs. Clinton will sprout wings and 
talons and screech for the blood of every Iranian terrorist as soon as 
she receives her party's nomination, faster than you can say, "Sistah 
Souljah."

The peaceniks need only blame themselves for their failures. They are 
asking Americans to believe not that the war was a blunder, so much that 
the war was a sin; that the decapitators and car bombers of innocents 
are a resistance; that the army seeking to prevent ethnic cleansing 
today is in fact responsible for it. [That is what the "peaceniks" are 
saying, and they're right.  --CGE]

In 2006, writing about how the antiwar movement was conducting its own 
diplomacy in London and Amman to meet members of the "Sunni Resistance," 
anti-war writer Robert Dreyfuss summed up the moral equivalency that 
afflicts so many in his quarter.

"Who are the good guys and who are the bad guys in Iraq?" he asked. "Are 
the good guys the U.S. troops fighting to impose American hegemony in 
the Gulf? Are the good guys the American forces who have installed a 
murderous Shiite theocracy in Baghdad? Are the good guys the Marines who 
murdered children and babies in Haditha in cold blood?"

Leaving aside the deficient moral reasoning of the case the protestors 
make, their story of the war also makes for terrible politics. Most 
Americans do want to end a war they believe America is losing, but they 
don't suffer from the delusion that Iraqis would be better off if the 
Shiite and Sunni death cults took power after our soldiers left.

It is a prospect the activists for now would rather not broach. Kevin 
Martin of Peace Action in Mother Jones said it wasn't even for the 
"peace community" to come up with a contingency plan to prevent 
competitive genocide after a withdrawal. "In my organization and the 
umpteen antiwar coalitions that I am in, this is in no way a priority 
that we think about or talk about," he said.

Later on he added, "We are not responsible for dreaming up a perfect 
world. We are responsible for trying to end the damn war and putting the 
political pressure on our government, which is extremely difficult when 
you have a feeble Congress and a dictator president."

He is right that his current struggle is "extremely difficult." It is 
extremely difficult to expect most Americans to believe that their 
president is a dictator and that their soldiers are no different than 
terrorists. The fact that Congress is not buying this pack of lies 
however is evidence not of the legislature's feebleness, but of the 
nation's strength.

elake at nysun.com

October 24, 2007 Edition