War Protests - Then and Now

Note - I started this post before Hurricane Katrina while Cindy Sheehan still dominated the news.

There is a strong desire to recreate the 60s in today's anti-war protests (actually to recreate the period from 1967-1973 when the war protests were at their peak). Many of the same leaders are weighing in. For example, Joan Biez has been singing at Camp Casey.

Since the Viet Nam War ended, every conflict that the US enters into is examined to see if it will become another Viet Nam (or a "quagmire" which is used interchangeably). This has become a knee-jerk response for all conflicts. The bombing attacks on Kosovo were described as a quagmire after a month. Journalists started questioning if the initial attack on Iraq was turning into a quagmire two weeks into it, just days before Baghdad fell.

The infamous Powell Strategy was supposed to be the antidote to the Viet Nam Syndrome (VNS). The VNS proposes that Americans do not have the fortitude for a long bloody conflict. Accordingly, we will not attack a country unless it is with such overwhelming force that the conflict was short and casualties were negligible. It also calls for an "exit strategy" meaning that an international force will move in to handle the messy part after we are done.

This in turn feeds the war protesters. One of their original complaints was that Bush did not have an exit strategy for Iraq. The fact that Bush's exit strategy which consists of creating a stable government and a trained army that can keep the piece resembles Nixon's exit strategy from Viet Nam further enrages them.

There are a lot of differences between the current protests and the ones from the 1960s. Some are in the nature of the war, some are in the nature of the protests.

A big one is with the age of the protestors. The current face of the movement, Cindy Sheehan, is old enough to have marched in Viet Nam protests. In the 1960s it was a given that war was something that older people did, possibly for financial gain. The slogan, "Don't trust anyone over 30" was common. There was also the general feeling that war was not natural to human nature. If we could just get everyone to stop fighting for a while, war would never happen again. Think of John Lennon's song "Imagine."

A lot of the anti-war movement was self-interest. The first protesters were draft-age men. An early slogan was "Hell no, I won't go." To the protesters, the cause was insufficient. Communism scared the over-30 generation but many in the under-30 crowd embraced it. At worst, it seemed that South Viet Nam was as corrupt as North Viet Nam. Many protesters felt that the Vietnamese would be better off under the communists. The domino theory (that the fall of Viet Nam would encourage communist revolutionaries elsewhere until everyone was communist except for the NATO alliance) was dismissed as paranoid.

Another difference was that the protesters were originally apolitical. One of the biggest protests in 1968 was against the Democratic Party national convention. This degenerated into a "police riot" with policemen clubbing civilians seemingly at random.

The anti-war movement took place at the same time that the civil rights movement was at its height and overlapped with the women's movement. These movements fed on each other and gave a general feeling that society was about to undergo a fundamental shift. As soon as the hippies were in charge, peace and toleration would reign.

By the 1972 election the war had gone from being "Johnson's War" to being "Nixon's War". The left wing of the Democratic Party courted the various movements and nominated a candidate, George McGovern, who swore that his first official action would be to recall the troops.

He lost by a historic landslide. Not only were the protesters he represented in the minority but he also ran an historically incompetent campaign. In addition, support for the war had grown as a reaction to the protests.

Jump forward three decades. What has changed?

The protesters haven't. Many of them are the same people who protested in the 1960s and 1970s. The focus of the protests has moved from the campus to symbolic locations. Students are no longer afraid of the draft (despite MTV trying to scare them). Every soldier volunteered. Some may not have realized what they were signing up for but none of them were taken involuntarily.

The protesters are very political. All of them are left-wing and hate Bush intensely. Many object to anything he does reflexively. Some of the original protest organizations such as Not In My Name have a strong anti-American bias and oppose any war that the US engages in. Ironically, some of the people who protested the invasion of Afghanistan were protesting the Taliban's treatment of women in 1999 and 2000.

This also leads them to sympathize with anyone who opposes Bush. Michael Moore called Baathists "freedom fighters". Cindy Sheehan uses that term to describe the foreign terrorists who kill more Iraqis than Americans. To these people, Bush is the ultimate source of evil. Unlike the 1960s and Communism, there is no little domestic interest in Islam. While t-shirts of Che are still found you do not see (many) Americans wearing Saddam or Osama shirts.

We have learned a couple of things since the Viet Nam protests. Hardly anyone in a position of power thinks that Iraq would be better off if we pulled out immediately. This was not true during Viet Nam. By the early 1980s many former protesters admitted that would not have protested in favor of North Viet Nam if they had known how brutal the fall of Saigon would be.

We also know that the other side is listening. I doubt that the Vet Nam protesters ever considered that the VCs knew about the protests and were holding on until internal pressure forced the US to withdraw from the war. Now we have Osama quoting Michael Moore.

It is now a week into September as I finish this post. Cindy Sheehan packed up her protest and started a bus tour. The press has forgotten her. As of this date, the August anti-war protest has all the importance of the 2001 shark attacks. A poll showed that Cindy failed to influence most Americans and the ones she did influence are evenly split - as any now support the war because of her as oppose it.

So there is no real anti-war movement. There is just a short-lived news story and a lot of anti-Bush sentiment.