End of a Movement

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 Benjamin said that she doubted that the troops would be withdrawn even within a year's time.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.

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@nysun.com