The Consequence of Being Right

by DemFromCT

While it wasn't page one (in the Vietnam era, there were times the protest news would be put next to the union news, near the obits), the WaPo had an interesting coverage piece of the DC march.

Like McNamara [an Iraq war vet], many marching in Washington's streets yesterday have opposed the war in Iraq from the beginning. The protest drew a broad cross section of young and old, veteran activists and first-timers. But of more than 50 marchers interviewed, nearly all said their convictions deepened, not changed, as the war progressed. What they shared was the belief that their suspicions about President Bush and the war had been right all along.

So there was a quiet, often angry determination in the crowd, with little of the jovial street theater that marks much political protest. Most placards did not simply call to bring troops home. At turns they labeled Bush a liar, a traitor, a fascist, a coward and a war criminal worthy of impeachment. Some asked plaintively, "Where's the outrage?"

"I'm very angry," said Amy Campbell-Pitts, 28, of Nashville, whose husband, Jason, is an Army medic. A veteran of Afghanistan, he just left on a deployment to Iraq, kept in uniform under a stop-loss program limiting when volunteers can quit the military. "Send my husband home," read the placard she carried.

Soldiers and families of soldiers were highlighted throughout, with only a small mention of the polarizing Cindy Sheehan. While she may be a lightning rod, she's not the only military mom involved, and she needen't even have been mentioned to convey the flavor of broad agreement amongst the military families present. They may not repesent majority opinion within the military, but they are entitled to be heard and do represent, with their fellow marchers majority opinion in this country.

Yesterday, I cited the Democracy Corps focus group re Bush's unpopularity. But another piece of that summary deals with iraq:

As documented in virtually every poll released over the last several months, public support for the war in Iraq has been flagging for some time, driven by increasing American casualties and the lack of any sense of progress. However, prior to Katrina, we saw a startling trend – as support for the war decreased, support for a withdrawal of troops also decreased. A growing number of Americans seemed to be resigned to the belief that while the war may have been started under false pretenses and conducted without any real plan for building a stable, democratic Iraq, we were obligated to ‘stay the course’ or ‘finish what we started.’ But these focus groups, as well as a number of post-Katrina polls, suggest the balance has now shifted.

More:

The events surrounding Katrina highlighted two themes for voters. One of them – the realization that we have millions of Americans living in poverty, children without basic nutrition or medical care, elderly who face a monthly choice between food, heat, and medicine, and uninsured families one setback away from financial disaster – was present in conversations on Iraq before Katrina, but the suffering of Katrina’s victims and the long road ahead for the hundreds of thousands displaced by the storm really brought it into focus. Now, voters believe we must take care of those at home first, and if that means reducing funding or troop levels in Iraq, so be it. There is still little appetite for an immediate withdrawal, particularly among the men, but strong support across all groups to shift resources from saving the rest of the world to taking care of America’s increasingly urgent needs.

As Froomkin noted several days ago, Bush is now in the position of trying to marginalize the majority of the country, both in terms of the Iraq war and his own image of incompetence. The harder he tries, the harder his task. It's one thing to watch Bush and his gang  attack other people, but when Bush apologists attack you and yours, you don't take to that well, especially when you know you're right... and in the majority.

Does that public opinion translate into a change in Iraq policy? Not yet in any obvious way, any more than marches alone will, or even the objections of the Saudis. But taken as a whole, this is a policy that cannot be sustained. And delaying the large marches until a consensus can be reached (spend the money here, not there) and until military families join in makes the Nixon playbook (demonize the protestors) that much harder to steal from this time around.

Comments

[DemFromCT]

interestingly, Tim the russert had dowd, Brooks and friedman on. no one can read them now, so he read their columns on Tv (like LaGuardia reading the funnies on the radio during the newspaper strike in NYC).

Friedman has given up on Bush.

The president is planning to rely on "spending cuts" instead to pay for rebuilding New Orleans. Yeah, right - and if you believe that, I have some beachfront property in Biloxi I'd like to sell you. The underlying message of all these stories is that the Bush team sees no reason to change course in response to Katrina.

I beg to differ. Katrina deprived the Bush team of the energy source that propelled it forward for the last four years: 9/11 and the halo over the presidency that came with it. The events of 9/11 created a deference in the U.S. public, and media, for the administration, which exploited it to the hilt to push an uncompassionate conservative agenda on tax cuts and runaway spending, on which it never could have gotten elected. That deference is over.

[obietom]

Like so many others, I can personally relate to that feeling of "knew this all along." I think this is part of what the Right is responding to when they sling the accusations of the left wanting the US to fail so that it will prove us to be right or some such nonsense.

There was a pretty good post on dKos a while ago that dealt with this dynamic: basically, 'You think we're happy? Try embarrassed and dismayed...'

I actually think an inner part of me hoped I was wrong about Iraq--you just hate to see so many lives and resources so thoroughly wasted for corporate gains alone--I think as much as I was extremely skeptical, part of me wanted to believe in good faith that we wouldn't just go to war on a financial whim or whathaveyou. Afterall, I was wrong about Afghanistan, in thinking that they were too premature in going in (when was it Richard Clark who said that we did too little too late?)--yet, turns out they were wrong about Afghanistan too, since everyone can agree that we diverted resources too soon.

[DemFromCT]

Hmmm... from AP.

Support for U.S. troops fighting abroad mixed with anger toward anti-war demonstrators at home as hundreds of people, far fewer than organizers had expected, rallied Sunday on the National Mall just a day after a massive protest against the war in Iraq. ...

About 400 people gathered near a stage on an eastern segment of the mall, a large patchwork American flag serving as a backdrop. Amid banners and signs proclaiming support for U.S. troops, several speakers hailed the effort to bring democracy to Iraq and Afghanistan and denounced those who protest it.
...
Organizers of Sunday's demonstration acknowledged that their rally would be much smaller than the anti-war protest but had hoped that as many as 20,000 people would turn out.

[coral]

Juan Cole has just come out for withdrawal. The tide has turned.

http://www.juancole.com/2005/09/why-we-have-to-get-troops-out-of-iraq.html

[janinsanfran]

Just wanted to say, I went to the San Francisco version of the march, as I always do, not with any great enthusiasm, but out of a sense of duty. My antiwar work is elsewhere; some of it even has been useful I think.

Afterward I posted a very small number of pictures -- the few that seemed interesting out of the chaos of a San Francisco march. I now realize that 3 of the 5 carry the theme the WaPo identified here: deepening conviction that Bush lied, is the figurehead for a wrong turning of the country, and we knew it all along. It wasn't so much like that before the war -- more "give peace a chance" messages.

[Redshift]

I marched in DC, and I thought the Post coverage was pretty much on the mark. The energy of the gathering was very different from the pre-war marches, much closer to grim determination. The result, perhaps, of so many more rounds of the Bush Administration turning out to be even worse than you'd imagined, no matter how bad you thought they were.