War on the Cheap

The Washington Post's Harold Meyerson posits an interesting theory as to why BushCorp™ is flailing so badly on the Iraq war: no anti-war movement to demonize a la Nixon in the '72 election:

In a series of polls taken in November and December of 1969, the Gallup Organization found that 49 percent of Americans favored a withdrawal of U.S. forces and 78 percent believed that the Nixon administration's rate of withdrawal was "too slow." But there was one other crucial finding: 77 percent disapproved of the antiwar demonstrations, which were then at their height.

That disapproval was key to Nixon's political strategy. He didn't so much defend the war as attack its critics, making common cause with what he termed the "silent majority" against a mainstream movement with a large, raucous and sometimes senseless fringe. When Nixon won reelection in a landslide, it was clear that the strategy had worked -- and it has been fundamental Republican strategy ever since. Though the public sides with the Democrats on more key issues than it does with Republicans, it's Republicans who have won more elections, in good measure because the GOP has raised its ad hominem attacks on Democrats' character and patriotism to a science.

Which is why, however perverse this may sound, the absence of an antiwar movement is proving to be a huge political problem for the Bush administration, and why the Republicans are reduced to trying to turn Dick Durbin, who criticized our policies at Guantanamo Bay, into some enemy of the people. The administration has no one to demonize. With nobody blocking the troop trains, military recruitment is collapsing of its own accord. With nobody in the streets, the occupation is being judged on its own merits.

Unable to distract people from his own performance, Bush is tanking in the polls. And with congressional Democrats at least partly muting their opposition to an open-ended occupation, it's Bush's fellow Republicans -- most prominently, North Carolina's Walter Jones -- who are now calling our policy into question. [Emphasis mine-CK]

The question this raises for me is this: Why no anti-war movement?

First, progressives have learned a Viet Nam era lesson, if you're against war, or against THIS war, criticize the leadership, not the soldier. The way many on the left treated individual soldiers returning home from Viet Nam was a national disgrace almost equal to that of the leadership which sent them there in the first place.

So the current progressive message is this: Support our troops, don't send them to die in unnecessary and misguided wars.

Another, and to my mind, major reason for the lack of an anti-war movement is that, for the vast number of American families this war has been fought with virtually no personal sacrifice.

It's being financed by borrowing which puts the financial burden on the backs of our children and our children's children. And it's being fought by a volunteer army made largely of those from the poorer classes who see the military as a rare opportunity to rise out of poverty, something the private sector no longer provides.

BushCorp™, to no-one's chagrin, is now hoist on its own petard. Whether through astounding ignorance or arrogance, or from a (quite realistic) fear that the American public would never support war on (what we've discovered are) quite flimsy grounds, BushCorp™ never disclosed the need for, or requested the assistance of ordinary Americans in bearing the costs of Iraq.

No steel was diverted from industry to support the war effort, causing public shortages. No taxes were raised to pay for it. And most importantly no middle or upper class sons or daughters were required to put body and soul at risk in a questionable cause.

It is said one gets what one pays for.

BushCorp™ has tried to do war on the cheap, and is now paying the price.